Chapter 73
"...Phew."
"I... I understand how you feel, chief mourner, but smoking isn't allowed indoors..."
"Yes... I'll just hold it in my hand. I won't light it, so please try to understand..."
"Understood..."
It was morning when the funeral began, and now it was around 11 p.m.
Though I'd borrowed it, when had I last worn a suit? If I remembered correctly, I hadn't had any particular reason to wear one, so it must have been ten years ago.
I had no memory of doing anything important in my true form during that time. Probably.
'...I thought I'd be used to it since this wasn't my first time.'
I wasn't. If anything, it was harder precisely because it wasn't my first time.
From the suit wrapped around me to the epaulet fastened around my arm, every moment brought back memories of ten years ago, driving me insane.
-Crinkle
"...Phew."
I placed the cigarette that had crumbled in my hand on the ashtray.
The ashtray was already piled high with crushed cigarettes.
Not a single one had been lit.
"...Chief mourner. If it's really too hard, you can step outside for a while. We hardly get any mourners... and if anyone does come, we'll take good care of them."
"...No. I'm fine."
"You look like you're having a really hard time..."
"The deceased hated seeing me smoke when she was alive. So at least while the funeral is going on..."
"...Excuse me."
As expected, hardly any mourners had come for the old woman. A few people who called themselves her friends had shown up, but they were all quite elderly. There were probably quite a few who wanted to come but couldn't.
She had been clinging to life despite wanting to die. Her husband and children had all been taken by the Abyss Ones, and she had been making a living from the property she had left.
My relationship with her was nothing special. Had it been about four years since I started living in that house? After I began working as Alice, I wandered from place to place, unable to settle anywhere, until I found that house—a comfortable place to live.
For one thing, there was no floor above me, so no one could complain if I smoked on the terrace. Except maybe the next-door neighbor.
The landlords I'd had before hated it when I smoked in the house, but this old woman had merely nagged me about my health and how a young bachelor who picked up habits like that already would never be able to get married later. I had redone the wallpaper with my own money anyway.
At some point, I had practically started using it as my own home. I'd paid the old woman a fairly generous amount, of course, but she hadn't complained much. If anything, she seemed to have found it convenient.
And now it was really my home. Legally. Technically, it was still a little ambiguous, but that was more or less the situation.
"...Ha, seriously."
I understood. She had no family, and the people she called friends were all elderly people with one foot in the grave. Leaving an inheritance to a young man she had been close to—one with no family of his own, essentially treating him like a son—wasn't hard to understand.
...It was just... heavy.
The weight of someone I knew dying was this heavy.
No matter how many times I experienced it, I never got used to it. If anything, it grew heavier every time.
'...A profession where death is routine.'
It was ridiculous that I wasn't used to death despite working as a magical girl.
In a world where we lived alongside Abyss Ones, people died in places where I couldn't be dispatched, and people also died in places where I had been dispatched because I hadn't managed to stop it in time.
Even in countries across the sea, completely beyond my reach, people were dying at this very moment.
And yet, now that someone close to me had died, making a spectacle of my grief was hypocritical and contradictory.
'...What do you want me to do?'
People—especially people living as part of society—were naturally hypocritical and contradictory. Why was I beating myself up and spouting such an obvious fact?
"...I'm sorry, but could you bring me some water? My head hurts right now..."
"Yes, just a moment... Here you are."
"Thank you..."
Apparently, sitting here for more than a dozen hours from morning until night had caused fatigue to build up in my brain. Just when I'd thought I was doing a little better lately, everything was in chaos again.
I forced the medicine down with the water. I really was destined to be unable to live without medication. What a disgrace to make of myself in front of the deceased.
'...My phone.'
I turned on the cellphone I'd deliberately switched off to give the medicine time to take effect.
What caught my eye then was dozens of messages from Mia.
[Mr. Sejin...? You're really okay, right? Wouldn't it be better if I came to help too? I, I suddenly ended up receiving a piece of real estate too, so at least I could bring condolence money...]
"...Why do you never fail to meet my expectations?"
It was exactly the reaction I'd expected.
I'd told Mia in advance that since the old woman had no family, I would be the chief mourner, and that the funeral would be shortened and end tomorrow morning, so she shouldn't come.
I'd sent her only that information by message and then turned off my phone, so I hadn't seen her reply... but it was just as I'd expected.
'...If she came, she'd be a hundred percent nuisance.'
First of all, I didn't like the idea of someone so young coming to a place like this.
A funeral hall was heavy with its very atmosphere and carried the scent of death. Even if there were no mourners on my side and all that reached me was the smell of incense, I could hear people crying from elsewhere, so it wasn't a pleasant place for anyone to stay, regardless of Mia's age.
Especially not for someone with a bright personality like Mia's.
And second, knowing Mia's personality, if she came, she would definitely insist on helping too, saying that she had inherited something as well and had a duty to do this, that she couldn't leave everything to Mr. Sejin. It was obvious.
I would rather she didn't. The old woman might have wanted one more person to come and pray for her soul, but I was already putting her through this much trouble. I hoped she would forgive me this much selfishness.
And finally, the third reason.
-Swoosh
-Hollow-eyed
...I didn't want someone close to me to see me looking like this.
It was no wonder the staff had been watching me uneasily since earlier. From their perspective, it must have been difficult to look at even after seeing all kinds of people while working at a funeral home: a man who looked not even twenty, had come as the chief mourner, seemed foul-tempered, leaned against the wall alone, and did nothing but break cigarettes.
-Snicker
It was better now, at least. I only looked under twenty; I was actually twenty-seven.
-Crinkle
"...Haa."
I'd been sighing nonstop for a while, but there was nothing I could do. This was simply the kind of place it was.
That didn't mean I could call Tokkaengi out and have a conversation, either. I felt like I wouldn't be able to endure it if that thing were in front of me right now. It knew that too, so it was hiding itself completely, making sure I couldn't even hear it breathing.
-Blink...
...At any rate, my eyes kept closing.
-Sway
This won't do. If I fell asleep here, it would be a hundred percent nightmare.
It wasn't even dawn yet. Had I gotten this exhausted just from watching old ladies come by and wail about once an hour before leaving? I was someone who normally stayed up all night gaming, someone who couldn't sleep even when he wanted to because of insomnia. And now sleep was coming when I didn't even want it?
-Grind
I had to hold out. If it got really bad, I could leave things with the staff for a while, go to a nearby sauna and pour some hot water over myself... then come back...
-Slide
...Ah.
I can't... hold out...
* * *
That period was probably when the funeral industry was booming more than at any other point in the twenty-first century.
Every day, the news reported how many people had died where, announced what the situation was in one country or another, and showed a society that still had no idea how to deal with the magical girls who had suddenly appeared.
The day that was always on the news, but that I had never expected—or rather, never allowed myself to expect—to happen in our home, came to our home too.
"I... Chief mourner. I'm sorry, but... is there perhaps another guardian? Maybe a relative who lives nearby..."
"...I'm sorry."
"N-no, please excuse me. Um... if you have trouble handling any later procedures or paperwork by yourself, please let us know. We'll help as much as we can."
"...Thank you."
It was a time when an industry that shouldn't have been booming was booming. In fact, it wasn't an industry for which one even used the term boom, but there was no other way to describe that period.
These days, there was a hypothesis that Abyss Ones didn't indiscriminately massacre humans to procure negative emotions, but back then, that was complete bullshit.
The Abyss were supernatural beings, at least from Earth's perspective, invading hundreds or thousands of dimensions besides Earth. Did anyone really think that beings invading so many dimensions wouldn't have accumulated some expertise? It wasn't uncommon to confirm that some of them possessed intelligence equal to or greater than that of humans.
The Abyss... showed no mercy during the initial stage of an invasion.
They drove fear of the Abyss deep into the roots of that dimension's inhabitants, then milked it for all it was worth until the mascots followed, magical girls were born, and those magical girls began fighting back against the Abyss Ones.
Then, once the magical girls had established themselves and the dimension had grown accustomed to the Abyss, they used it as a hunting ground to continuously harvest negative emotions.
If a dimension was destroyed because it couldn't even withstand that initial invasion, they judged that it had never been worth using as a hunting ground in the first place and eradicated it down to the roots.
That was the hunting method of the Abyss Ones that the mascots had figured out so far.
So far, the dimensions that had entered the hunting-ground stage had met only two possible fates.
They either gradually weakened and eventually perished while being used as hunting grounds, or barely repelled the Abyss each time it invaded and lived on as something sucked dry through a straw.
Independence from the Abyss? Liberation? There were no such cases. Creating even one such case was one of the mascots' missions, after all.
"Oppa? Are you okay?"
"...I'm fine. Serin, go inside and get some sleep. I'll stay here."
"...But, Oppa. Then now..."
No. Please. Don't open your mouth.
Please.
Please.
"Are we the only family we have?"
"..."
It was the moment I thought it was a good thing I'd taken my medicine before going to sleep.
If I hadn't taken my medicine, I would have had to rent another suit that had been dirtied.