Chapter 234
“I will tell you a story. It might be of help.”
The Ascetic pushed aside his empty El Valentine glass and ordered a new drink.
“Bartender, a glass of catharsis.”
Catharsis, huh…
I had never made or tasted it myself, but it was quite a famous cocktail.
『Catharsis (κάθαρσις)
“A fact many get wrong is that catharsis is not pleasure or joy. It is the eruption and purification through pity and fear in a tragedy. This drink is the same.”
Classic, potent, and a refreshing touch within the heaviness.』
As I relayed the order, Sey immediately began cocktail mixing.
After placing a large piece of ice in a standard rock glass and chilling the glass by stirring it with a bar spoon, he poured a shot and a half of overproof rum, which boasted an ABV of over 75%.
Next, he poured about a third of that amount, half a shot, of a brilliant liqueur with a wood-like brown hue.
I couldn’t remember exactly, but it was probably some almond-flavored liqueur or something. Smelling it myself, I wondered how on earth it was supposed to be almond-scented when it seemed closer to cherry.
Finally, half a shot of artificial lime juice.
Without any unusual or flashy techniques, simply layering these three flavors completed it.
Pursuing a deep flavor within a seemingly simple process was very fitting for a classic cocktail.
As for me, it didn’t seem like an easy drink to master due to its alcohol content…
“Here is the catharsis you ordered.”
The Ascetic took a sniff past his screaming mask, then boldly gulped down the strong liquor that neared 50 degrees, swallowing it down his throat.
“Not bad. It’s sweet, refreshing, and hot, so it’s clean. It suits the taste.”
What did it suit?
The Ascetic then abruptly began his story.
“I saw a man and a woman. They took the form of the most terrible monsters in a hell where people ate people. The lovers danced in their ugly forms, sharing their love until the very end.”
* * *
There was a man.
The circumstances of how he ended up in the Quarantine Zone were so incredibly unfair that he couldn’t come to his senses for a long time even after being quarantined.
It wasn’t the same room, nor the room next door.
He was loaded up inhumanely like cargo or an animal and quarantined on the city’s outskirts, merely for using the same floor of a condominium as the infected.
It sounded like nonsense, but such occurrences were common at the time.
It was an unlucky time when Mayor Crane died, and the Dusk Administration, having fallen into panic and paralysis, was handling all matters related to the End Pandemic with extreme measures.
Luck. Being unlucky was the man’s fault.
To survive in this utterly unkind world, one needed at least luck, but the man didn’t have it.
Furthermore, his other mistakes were failing to recognize his own misfortune and appealing to human compassion for help.
People find it hard to live without the help of others. However, those who were quarantined late, like the man, were in a position where they could receive no one’s help.
Who would the other survivors in the Quarantine Zone trust to accept the newly quarantined? Food was scarce, and people were overflowing.
There was no one who would let untrustworthy newcomers, who might be infected, into their own fences.
The naive man, not knowing this, was dragged away by the human butchers who offered to help him.
They were those who felt that the supplies dropped regularly by the city and the food remaining in the Quarantine Zone were insufficient, and fished to obtain fresh meat.
The man met someone in the same situation at the slaughterhouse, and together they barely managed to escape the crisis of being eaten.
Strictly speaking, the man didn’t really do anything.
Because while he took on the role of drawing attention and picking the lock, his colleague practically slaughtered all the cannibals using a rib bone ripped from a butchered corpse.
The colleague was a woman.
She was a strong and beautiful female warrior. The man fell so completely for her fatal charm that he confessed his feelings immediately, but it was a long shot.
The woman kicked away the man’s feelings coldly, but instead took him to the survivor group she belonged to.
It took time to adapt. As a rolling stone, the man received a lot of insults.
Even so, he didn’t give up and continued to court the woman, but he was insulted even more because of it.
superior. Just watching the woman occasionally give a fleeting smile whenever he did something ridiculous was enough. He could live on that alone.
However, it wasn’t long before the group collapsed.
If asked for the reason, it was once again an unavoidable issue of timing.
The executive gave up on the management and control of the Quarantine Zone.
It was an expected outcome.
The city had kept the quarantined alive while waiting for the development of a cure or vaccine to end the pandemic, but at some point, it became confirmed that such a thing could not be created, that the quarantined could not be returned to the city, and therefore, there was no reason to go out of its way to keep the quarantined alive.
The supplies, which had been the minimum measure to prevent chaos, disappeared, and madness and chaos boiled over.
cultists, cannibals, looters, the infected who were transforming more and more bizarrely, unidentified outsiders with guns…
In a Hell where one couldn’t see an inch ahead, the man was separated from the woman.
Time passed, and the man became someone far removed from innocence.
Betrayed by people he trusted, he resorted to stealing things and killing people just for a single meal.
Now he had truly adapted to this world.
Around that time, a rumor spread.
It was a rumor about a certain building.
The owner of the building was a rich person. At least in the Quarantine Zone, he was the foremost rich person.
The rich people lesser than him had all already died, and the rich people greater than him had long since spent their money to somehow escape the Quarantine Zone.
By the standards of megacorps and chaebols, he might have been a mediocre rich person, but here, that rich person was an existence no different from a god.
Rumors had long been rampant that the rich person’s building, guarded by turrets and security robots, had so much food it was rotting and overflowing. It was likely a fact, not a rumor.
Because the rich person would occasionally host provocative death survival events using that food as prizes. Many worked hard to perform tricks just to eat the feed the rich person scattered for his own amusement.
The newly spread rumor was that the rich person had died. The reason was unknown: from old age, or from being infected, or perhaps murder.
The result was more important than that.
The temptation was that, since the rich person was dead, the building now had no master, and the numerous food supplies and the building’s luxurious self-generating system would be waiting for a new master.
The man tried not to pay attention. He had the experience he had tirelessly built up so as not to throw his life away over a mere rumor.
That was until he heard the news from a trader that the woman had entered the building in question.
It was the first piece of information about the woman he had heard since they separated.
Whether he threw his life away falling for a rumor, or threw his life away falling for a woman, there was little difference. It was an equally foolish thing to do.
However, from the moment the man fell for the woman, he had never once forgotten her.
The woman might have forgotten the man, but the man could not forget the woman. To a man, a first love is always like that.
The emptiness that always lingered in his heart, the lost half of his soul…
It was a love that had never been reciprocated, and a love highly likely to remain unreciprocated in the future, but it didn’t matter. Love is originally like that. What can you do when its very essence is foolish?
In the end, after much deliberation, the man also headed for the building.
It was truly a crazy thing to do, but it was fine because it was already a crazy world.
The chances of dying were higher than surviving, but the Quarantine Zone was that kind of place anyway.
The Quarantine Zone is hell.
And the building was the Hell of Hells, a human gu poison, or a tomb, that wasn’t easy to escape once you set foot in it.
The turrets, robots, drones, the Killer AI running amok, traps, traps, and more traps installed by the dead rich person while he was alive… The rich person must have certainly been a paranoid individual.
And there were the infected.
The looters who had swarmed in like a horde of moths had all been infected in this building, growling and panting like dogs as they bared their teeth.
It was the form of the mutated infected frequently seen these days. Because they didn’t die immediately and ran wild like that, the fatality rate was said to have lowered, but only their bodies were alive; their minds were as good as dead.
To avoid ending up in the same state, the man was extremely careful and cautious, killing and killing again the things that were already dead.
He pushed through the pandemonium and crawled his way up, without a doubt in his mind that the woman he knew would surely reach the building top where the rich person’s legacy was said to be.
Was it luck or skill, or some harmony of fate? He somehow miraculously accomplished what so many people had failed to do.
After arduous hardships and adversity, where climbing a single floor was like climbing a mountain, he finally arrived.
The building top was a desolate place. What did the rich person think in the final moments of his life?
Through the glass windows there, the free world beyond the quarantine barrier, Dusk City - the city that had abandoned them - was all too clearly visible, looking as if it could be reached by stretching out a hand, but in reality, unreachable by any means.
And there was the corpse of the old man who had died with his eyes open in front of that sweet panoramic view.
The building’s Administrator System, which had been rife with rumors, had long since broken down.
The canned goods and meal-packs that were said to be piled up like mountains were nowhere to be found, as if the old man had eaten them all before he died.
He had gone through all that trouble to get here, but there was no treasure.
Even so, the man smiled.
There wasn’t much, but perhaps the world was fair after all.
Instead, the person he was looking for was there.
The woman was there, alive in this reality, looking just as he remembered her.
For the man, that was enough.