by SOW
Lud spoke with a matter-of-fact voice while he stared at Marlene.
“Hitting me on the side of my heart near the base of the lung is also good. Blood collects in the lungs and it’s difficult to breathe. That’s an ugly way to go. It might not be bad to crush my genitals too.”
Lud was usually not a smooth talker but he instructed Marlene fluently, without faltering. Perhaps Lud had envisioned this before. An awful death best suited him. He had to have an awful death, and being covered in mud and tossed in a ditch was the kind of death that suited him. So he could rattle off the best ways to die, one after another.
“I don’t need you to tell me how to do it...” But Marlene’s hands were trembling and Lud understood.
She had never killed anyone before.
He couldn’t say exactly what part of her or her behavior made him think this, but she didn’t have what Lud would describe as the stench of dirty work. Lud thought this was the perfect solution. She needed to kill a monster like Lud to fulfill her desire for revenge. Then, she could return to her old life. She still had a life to return to. If the price was Lud Langart’s life, then it was cheap.
Marlene shook with frustration but kept the gun trained on Lud. She was frozen with her finger on the trigger, like a young mouse being stared down by a snake. Lud could hear her breathing.
“It’s too late... I’m not going back. I’m a terrorist! I can never go back to my old life...”
“It’s okay.” Lud spoke gently.
“If I kill someone... How could I face the children? I’d be deceiving them, you know?”
Lud knew. The same children that Marlene had earlier called her cover, her props. Lud knew how much she cherished the children. When Milly hurled insults at Lud, Marlene would bow her head and quietly insist that Milly wasn’t a bad child, and Lud could see how much she cared.
“I’ve... betrayed them...” Marlene went on.
Lud thought that Marlene was feeling the same way he had. He wasn’t aware of it himself before, but the moment that he lost everything, he understood. The place he had slipped into in order to hide his true cruel and cold-blooded self, was in fact what he wanted most of all.
“Don’t worry, kids are perceptive. No matter how much I tried to pretend otherwise, Milly realized I was evil, didn’t she? You’ll be fine. Even deceiving God is easier than trying to pull one over on a kid.”
Maybe He just wasn’t looking, but God had yet to aim a lightning bolt at Lud.
“Those kids have lived happily with the Marlene they know—the kind and beautiful sister, who’s just incredibly bad at making tea.” Lud smiled a little.
“Bad at making tea? What, that can’t be true...” Marlene was clearly insulted.
“It’s true. You need to use very hot water, just on the verge of bubbling over, and steam the tea until the tea leaves open. You’re too impatient. The tea you serve is almost a declaration of war.”
Lud decided that he might as well tell her before she killed him. Marlene’s face grew red but her thoughts were on something else.
“... Still, all of this... Alec won’t forgive me...”
Alec. He might have been a lover, a family member, another character from the tragedy of war, but his existence must have given her the resolve to seek revenge against Wiltia.
“I doubt we’re going to the same place, but I can ask Death to tell Alec not to be mad at you.”
Lud realized as soon as he said it that this was a terrible joke.
Marlene raised the gun and aimed at Lud’s forehead. The distance was short from where she stood. Marlene could easily kill him.
She pulled the trigger. The shot echoed through the room.
“WAAAAAAAAA!”
Marlene let the gun slip from her hand and began sobbing like a child.
Her sadness, her rage, and her frustration were mixed together in her tearful sobs.
The bullet hadn’t hit Lud, but it put a hole in the wall behind him.
“You’re human after all, Marlene,” Lud said quietly.
He didn’t mean it sarcastically. She had refused to become a murderer. She stopped herself before she crossed that line and was twisted by her righteous cause. How much stronger than him must she be, Lud wondered.
“Just shut up! Always with that damn sullen face of yours! You’re telling me you never accepted my invitations because the tea tasted bad? Even if you weren’t from Wiltia, I’d hate you!”
Even her words had become childish. But Lud had a warm look on his face. She had told him that she hated him, but for some reason Lud was happy. Before he could respond, the door opened and the people who entered cut him off.
“What are you doing, Marlene?”
There were three men, and two were holding the assault rifles hidden in the chapel.
They were Marlene’s comrades, members of the Pelfe Liberation League. But the third man in front had the scent of someone who earned his living killing other people.
“M-Mr. Dolchev...”
Marlene’s voice shock as she said his name.
“Pleased to meet you, Silver Wolf. Even in my country, your name is well known. It is an honor to meet one of the top ten Hunter Unit pilots of Wiltia.”
The man called Dolchev looked so hard and forbidding that Lud suspected peeling off his skin would reveal nothing but icy steel.
“You’re the one who’s been teaching terror to these civilians?”
“All I’ve done is give the oppressed a way to regain their freedom.”
“You’re one to talk.”
Lud guessed that Dolchev was a spy and had provided weapons and fighting instructions to the Pelfe Liberation League. The instigator who implanted fangs into the mouths of herbivores.
Dolchev now turned to Marlene. “I left this up to you because you insisted that you wanted to torture him yourself.”
He shrugged, but seemed unsurprised. Even a marionette controlled by a street puppeteer would behave more naturally than Dolchev just now. This man hadn’t had any expectations from the start. He had no faith in the Pelfe Liberation League.
“That’s not it, Mr. Dolchev! I thought we could use him like thi—”
Marlene tried to justify herself, but Dolchev silenced her with a slap of his outstretched palm.
“I don’t have time for this. I need to make the final adjustments to the T-3 II. You two, put this wolf down.”
Dolchev left the room. Marlene had fallen to the floor. Her cheek was already swollen, and blood dripped from a cut on her mouth.
“I’ll do it! Let me kill him! It would be the highlight of my life!”
“You idiot, I let you kill the last one. My gun is dying to shoot off some fireworks.”
The two men began arguing like children bickering over who would go first in a game of marbles.
“Hey, big bad wolf! You can’t get out of here! So go on, howl! We might even consider killing you quickly.”
Because they feared death, men sought to control it. To have control over someone else’s life gave them joy, as if they had become God. Men often take great pleasure in doing to other people what they find most awful.
However, Lud sat in silence, biding his time.
“Well, say something, go on!”
The men each hit Lud in the face with the butts of their rifles.
“... You’re the one who tied me to this chair?” Lud asked.
“Yeah, and? Do your hands hurt? I’m sooo sorry!”
He looked at his companion and began to laugh.
“I just have a piece of advice for you,” Lud offered. “When you’re restraining someone, you want to tie them at the thumbs, not the wrists.”
Lud raised both his hands. He held a loose rope.
“Huh?!”
The two men gasped in surprise.
They had certainly tied Lud up securely, enough even to cut off his circulation.
There was no way that a bundle of straw or logs they had tied up would fall apart. But, w
ith the method they used, it wasn’t possible to securely tie up a person. Unlike wood and straw, people can tell that a rope is loose.
One aimed his gun toward Lud in a panic, but Lud stabbed him where the bones of his fingers met the inner arm that held the weapon. His hand opened and Lud snatched the gun. He knocked the man out with a slug to his cheek. Not really necessary, but satisfying payback. Then Lud pushed the gun against the scrawny thigh of the other man and pulled the trigger.
This was known as a human silencer. Firing a gun while it was pressed against a person’s body let the body act as a soundproof barrier, covering the noise of the gun. Without any sound leaving the room, Lud robbed both men of their ability to fight.
“Gyah—!”
Lud drove his elbow into the man’s chest and knocked him unconscious.
“Huh?!”
When Marlene finally raised her voice at what she had seen, it was already over. Lud’s brilliant technique was like the wind. Before he was stamped with the name “Silver Wolf,” he was taught this method of hand-to-hand combat as a Hunter Unit pilot.
Whether they called themselves guerrillas or terrorists, they were still amateurs after all.
Lud had only waited until Dolchev was too far away to hear the shots.
“Lud... You were able break loose from the beginning?”
“No... but when you drew his attention, I was able to get the ropes off.”
Lud only had a few seconds to spare, and while it was easy to deceive civilians-turned-terrorists, fooling a professional soldier was much harder.
“... Um... That stuff about asking me to kill you... Were you serious?”
“I meant it. I’m not clever enough to fake that.”
When Lud was trained as a spy, he learned the techniques of how to deceive people, but after what happened in Lapchuricka, he could no longer use them. That was part of the reason he was driven out of Special Forces and became a Hunter Unit pilot.
“If I was that good an actor,” Lud went on, “I would have learned how to smile for my customers.”
Lud slightly twisted the sides of his mouth and made sort of a smile.
“You’re an idiot... If you died, you couldn’t run the bakery anymore.”
“That’s right... But if I had wrestled you into submission, made you out to be the bad guy, and stood over you in triumph, I couldn’t return to the bakery anyway.”
Lud had things he wanted to do. He had a reason to keep on living. But if she was going to fall into the same world he once had, and writhe in agony, it didn’t matter whether he died or not.
“And if I did that, Milly would definitely never want to eat my bread. That would... be awful.”
“You...”
Marlene looked close to tears, unsure what to say.
“Do you know what apple bread is?” she asked finally.
“Apple bread? You mean apple danish? Bread that’s made by kneading butter into thinly stretched pieces of dough that you then lay on top of each other...”
“I think that’s it,” Marlene nodded. “Milly said that she loves it. I don’t remember when but I heard her say that once.”
“Really?!”
Lud raised his voice in delight. If he offered Milly her favorite type of bread, maybe she would forget her principles and eat it.
“Apples... the sweetly-boiled ones that you use in apple pies, right? Instead of really sweet apples, making it with tart ones might taste better. I need to hurry and see the farmer...”
With a look of excitement on his face, Lud worked out how to make his apple danish. His face wasn’t that of a Hunter Unit pilot, nor was it the face of a Special Forces spy who specialized in sneaky, underhanded missions; it was simply the face of a rural baker.
“I’ve got to try this right away! If I can make it fragrant, that will arouse her appetite even further. I could try using a bit of liqueur... Yeah.”
Lud appeared to have put his thoughts in some kind of order. He nodded and looked at Marlene.
“Hey Marlene, the Pelfe Liberation League and this guy, Dolchev, are they planning something?”
“I think it’s a raid on Baelz Mine. The second mine that’s being dug experimentally... It sounds like they found a vein of Rezanite.”
Rezanite emitted a blood red glow and as an enduring metal, it couldn’t corrode or be destroyed. One theory was that it came from the mineralized hearts of ancient dragons.
“I get it. Destroying that would be a heavy blow to Wiltia.”
In old times, Rezanite had only been used for decorative ornaments, but recently a scientist, referred to as a “sorcerer,” discovered a use for the metal that no one expected—as the fundamental element of the Hunter Unit’s hearts, the Rezanium Reactor.
The war was over. But new weapons and new strategies were being developed in preparation for the next war, and the one after that. The Hunter Units were being improved and Rezanite lay at the core of this development. Wiltia needed plenty of it.
“If their plan is carried out, the mine wouldn’t be the only thing destroyed...”
Organbaelz was a mining town. If the main industry in the town disappeared, the flow of goods and people into the town would also vanish. It would be a death sentence for the town.
“My shop would go under... and what about the children of the orphanage?” Lud asked.
The children weren’t the terrorist’s accomplices, but they would either be sent to different orphanages, or worse, become street urchins, wandering about the streets of the town. Even though there was finally a possibility that Milly would eat Lud’s bread, everything would be ruined.
“Marlene... I’m sorry but I’m going to stop them.”
“You’ll stop them as a soldier, you mean? To save your country from danger, is that it?”
Marlene averted her eyes as she questioned him.
“No, I’m not a soldier anymore. I’m just a baker and I have to stop their malicious interference with my business,” Lud replied.
“Really? I see...”
Lud’s answer appeared to be the one Marlene wanted.
“In that case... As a sister, I want to protect this town and the children in this church!”
Marlene smiled, with her swollen cheeks and puffy, red eyes. Lud had never seen her really smile before, and it was the most charming smile he had ever seen.
Chapter 5: The Siege of Baelz Mine
When Lud and Marlene left the room, they discovered that Dolchev and the others were already headed towards the mine and only a few soldiers remained at the church. The soldiers already lacked combat proficiency, and on top of that, they didn’t realize that Lud had escaped, so it took him less than ten minutes to knock them all unconscious.
“This should do it... Here we go.”
Lud tied the soldiers up and made sure they would not be able to break free as he had. Amateurs like these, who had been bested without firing a single shot, wouldn’t be able to slip out even if they spent all night floundering around to get free.
“Lud!”
Marlene appeared with her face pale.
“What happened?! The children...”
Lud’s mind was never far from the children of the church. Lud was certain that they had been gathered up and put to sleep by some inhalant.
“No, everyone is alright but... Milly’s not here,” Marlene told him.
“......!”
Milly should have been locked in the storage room out back with all the other children, but when Marlene went to check, she was missing.
“She was taken? They wanted her as a hostage, I bet.”
Then a worse possibility came to Lud’s mind—Milly would be used as a meat shield during the attack on the mine. Even among trained soldiers, there weren’t many who could shoot a child without hesitation.
But, that’s odd... why take just one of them?
There were only guards at the mine, not a full-blown security force. Even without a hostage, it should be easy for Dolch
ev and his team to get in.
“We have to hurry! I have a bad feeling about this,” Lud said to Marlene, feeling something sinister and beyond his imagination.
Lud wanted to catch up to Dolchev’s group as soon as possible, but they had no way of getting there. According to Marlene, Dolchev had prepared a trailer for their infantry. It was hopeless to try and catch them on foot.
“Maaaassstttteeeer...”
Lud heard a familiar voice calling to him. Sven was driving Lud’s dilapidated truck over the rough, broken road straight toward him. Sven waved her hand happily.
“Master, are you all right?”
Sven got out of the truck and ran to Lud with a look of relief on her face. Lud could see that somehow she knew what was going on here.
Seeing Lud’s bullet wound, Sven nearly screamed.
“Master! You’ve been hurt!”
“Oh, this is ok...”
Lud had been shot by a small caliber gun, so it wasn’t a serious wound. He had already pulled out the bullet, but blood seeped from beneath the cloth he had used as a bandage. Although Lud had knocked out all the remaining soldiers in the church without using a gun, there had been no problem. But the waitress who cared for nothing as much as Lud’s well-being was unconvinced.
“Oh, let me look at it...”
Sven was close to tears as she checked Lud’s wound. Marlene’s figure came into view.
“You vile... You did this to Master!”
“Eek?!”
Sven leapt at Marlene. “You’ve really done it now, you whore!”
Her face looked like a wild beast baring its fangs, and she brandished her arm as if to stab Marlene with her sword-like hand.
“Sven, stop!”
“Master! This woman deceived you! And she seduced Jacob’s grandfather!”
Sven’s rage was even fiercer than she had earlier directed toward Milly.
It was a miracle that Marlene didn’t faint from fear.
“Stop it, Sven! I know everything already!”
Lud wrapped his arms around Sven’s back to try and stop her.
“Fwahuh?! M-Maste...” Sven’s rage faded instantly and her face turned bright red as she crumpled in Lud’s arms as though her strength had drained away.