TCWGRF 17

His vision was pitch-dark, and his fingertips were limp, unable to muster any strength.

When he first opened his eyes in the darkness, he thought he was dead. It wasn’t unheard of for someone’s internal organs to rupture and cause instant death from a single kick.

However, the pain that soon followed and the body being dragged somewhere by both arms sadly tried to prove that he was still alive.

Gasp, haah. Because of the damp black cloth that kept sticking to his face, Isaac gasped for air like a fish that didn’t know how to breathe on land.

Even in his flickering consciousness, he could feel the presence of someone walking ahead, the sticky humidity, and the musty, dark smell of mold. Even the sweltering midsummer weather couldn’t compare to this place. It was similar, perhaps, to the unpleasantness of the sewer he had used to sneak into the city.

He could intuit, without any kind guidance, that he was being dragged to the infamous place called the ‘Basement.’

“Gasp, haah, gasp…”

Countless dizzying, winding staircases, a narrow and gloomy hallway, the black cloth placed over his head so he couldn’t tell where he was going, his bound arms, the relentlessly cold air.

“Sa-save, …me.”

After realizing he was being dragged to a place where it was said to be better to die, a place where countless people had died after suffering all sorts of horrific tortures, Isaac whimpered pleas to be saved and cried sorrowfully.

Screeeak, he was thrown into a room where a rusty hinge screeched loudly, and tied to a chair. There was no wasted motion in the action.

Once the door slammed shut again and the footsteps of those who had led him here faded away, he was left to tremble in fear as it gripped his entire body.

Will that person with a face like an angel cut me to pieces now? How slowly will I die? Will I be able to endure it? Will it ever end? What happened to Vincent? Was he caught like me? Please, I hope that didn’t happen because of me.

But even after waiting for a long while, there was no sound of a door opening or of stiff footsteps. Only a heavy, dreary silence continued. Only then did Isaac have a little room to observe his surroundings.

Since the black cloth over his head was still there, there was not a single bit of light anywhere.

With his vision blocked, his other senses awakened with even greater sensitivity. In a corner of his mind, he endlessly imagined the brutal future that would unfold after that door opened once more, but he tried his best to ignore it and somehow accept the situation he was in.

The cold metal chair rattled as if a piece of it was missing, but no matter how violently he shook his body, the chair legs didn’t move, so it seemed to be fixed to the floor.

His arms, twisted behind him, were tied to the chair back along with his torso. A thick rope was wound around and around several times, constricting Isaac’s upper body like a snake coiling to suffocate its prey.

If there was any part of him that was free, it was his legs. Thanks to that, he could move his hips a little, and he could flail them as much as possible to check if there was anything at their reach. It couldn’t change the situation, but it was enough to harbor a little hope.

“I-is anyone there?”

But that, too, was brief. Even though it felt like at least several dozen hours had passed, no one came to this room. There was no one to take off the cloth on his head or warn him of what was to come, no salvation, no torture. There was only him, bound to a chair alone.

“Please… Is there really, no one?”

Though he was starving, anxious, and knew nothing, sleep still washed over him. He would doze off, wake up, and look for someone with a cracked voice, his mouth agape. Although he knew from experience that no answer would come, Isaac desperately wanted to hear the voice of a living person.

It didn’t matter if that person was a devil or an angel. A devil would bring an end to this life bound here, and an angel would bring salvation. They would grant him liberation in some form.

“…!”

When what felt like an eternity had passed, footsteps echoed from outside. Even in his fading consciousness, Isaac’s ears caught the faint sound.

It was not the sound of a thief whose life depended on stealth, nor was it Vincent’s, who had played the role of his savior countless times in his imagination. There was no mistaking the owner of those steps—thump, thump—which were rhythmic and even confident.

Screak, the door opened and closed, and the being he had been waiting for, in many senses of the word, entered. The person offered no friendly greetings or impressions upon facing a prisoner.

Click, the sound of a light turning on, and fsssh, the sound of a cigarette being lit. A short inhale and an exhale twice as long. The sound of the ember creating acrid smoke and turning to ash, crackle-crackle, followed in succession.

Only after having completely smoked one cigarette did the person pull off the black cloth Isaac was wearing and toss it carelessly onto the floor.

What lit the room was a small light bulb, just enough to distinguish a face and perceive the surrounding objects. Still, it had been a long time since he had seen light directly, so even the tiny light made his eyeballs sting and tears stream down his face.

The room was small. A door, a small sink next to it, and gray walls without a single common sharp tool were all that surrounded the prisoner. Should he say it was large for a coffin to greet death in advance?

In his blurred vision, the figure of a blond man taking off his jacket and hat, hanging them on a coat rack, and rolling up the sleeves of his suspender-held shirt came into view. It was as if he were preparing to begin the main task.

In this case, he was the butcher who flayed hides and tamed wild hunks of meat, and Isaac was the piglet on the chopping block, not yet finished breathing.

“…I’m, I’m not, a rebel, …I’m not.”

The final plea burst from his parched, dry throat, which had not had a sip of water. It was an answer he had repeated countless times in his imagination over the past hours.

There was no reply from the man before him, who was surely the Chief of Public Security, Samuel. He merely leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, silently staring this way.

“I’m, I’m really not.”

Taking the silence as an opportunity to protest, Isaac rattled on about his circumstances that no one had asked about. What he wanted to say was clear. I am not a rebel. Vincent is just a partner I first met in the Neighborhood Watch, and he has nothing to do with the infiltration of the archives.

“Then, what were you looking for in there?”

A flat, emotionless voice echoed from across the room. Thinking that the person was showing interest in his explanation, Isaac’s words, though stumbling, became more urgent.

“A per-person, I was looking for a person. There’s, there’s a person I, want to find.”

“……”

“I wanted to know, I had to know, if he’s dead, or alive.”

He couldn’t say who he was looking for, or that the person’s name was ‘Ashel.’ It would be a huge problem if that child, too, was implicated with the rebels and brought here.

“Vincent, he doesn’t know anything. I, I alone…”

The person, who had been watching with a bored expression, seemed to become interested as soon as Isaac mentioned the name ‘Vincent,’ and pushed himself off the wall to come right up to him. Then, he grabbed the chin of the prisoner, which was gradually drooping from exhaustion, and made him look up. The person’s lips drew a sinister arc.

“…Go on. What was that?”

“I said I’m n-not a rebel…”

“Not that.”

“Vincent.”

“Right. That bastard Vincent.”

“He doesn’t know, anything. That person…”

“Hah.”

He was only telling the truth. As if it wasn’t the answer he’d expected, an annoyed sigh escaped the Chief of Public Security’s lips. He let go of the chin he was holding so carelessly that Isaac’s limp head dropped down with a thud.

Thump, thump, the sound of the person’s footsteps turning and moving away was steeped in agitation. Did something happen while I was locked up in here? Was Vincent also caught like me, suffering unjustly and forced to say something?

The Chief of Public Security’s next words turned Isaac’s mind, which had been filled with rambling questions, completely blank.

“…Could you really not have known that your partner was the ‘head’ of the rebels?”

Samuel’s plan was perfect, as always.

A plan that could uncover the full extent of the rebels who had been rooted in the city for a long time with minimal movement.

From his perspective, the core of the rebels was not the leader on the outside, but the ‘head’ inside the city.

It was a very simple logic. A being crouching under one’s feet was harder to see than one drawing attention from afar. If there was something to hide, it would be hidden there, in that place where pitch-black shadows formed a pool.

Among the Neighborhood Watch, Samuel estimated the number of rebels to be around five, including the two who had died earlier and ‘Joshua.’ He was certain that among them was someone who would lead him to the ‘head,’ but the individual named ‘Vincent’ was not on his radar at all.

He was just one of the real citizens selected to supplement the naturalness that the secretly planted officers lacked.

A man desperately looking for a new job because he needed money to send his wife to a doctor. A perfect citizen with nothing unusual in his records, from birth to the past few decades, testified to by his neighbors, the officer in charge of the area, and the ration distributor. A desperately poor head of household who had no choice but to choose the city and his family, even when tempted by the rebels.

He was anxious about his partner’s suspicious movements. He was also a ‘typical citizen’ with a strong sense of civic duty, to the point that he had come to find Sarah several times, avoiding the eyes of the other members, to say, ‘He seemed to have a lot of questions about the archives,’ and who couldn’t even trust the partner he spent most of the day with.

Was that why? While Samuel was keeping a close eye on the young man named ‘Joshua,’ Vincent slowly, and very easily, slipped out of the Public Security Bureau’s sight.

Who would have guessed that an elderly man who struggled even to go up and down the stairs while limping, a loyal citizen of the city, would dare to sacrifice several lives to steal a single ‘blueprint’ and run away?

“You moved together to divert my attention, and you’re telling me you didn’t know?”

“No, no. I…”

The person showed no interest at all in his comrades trapped in the basement, information about the gates, the fate of the spy he had sent, or the high-level information they had gathered over decades of infiltrating the Public Security Bureau.

In truth, his comrades and the spy were already cold corpses, so there was no need to save or kill them. He might have judged that the city’s top-secret information they had collected became useless the moment it was discovered, or he might not have even considered the possibility of being able to do anything in the Public Security Bureau on his own.

‘…But why on earth.’

What he stole was an artifact of the city over a hundred years old. What’s more, even Samuel, the Chief of Public Security, did not know that it still remained and was being stored in the Public Security Bureau.

An early blueprint of the city, not particularly useful now. A useless legacy that only a very few knew about, and conversely, one that most people didn’t even remember, making it unnecessary to even look for.

The man named Vincent knew precisely that this artifact was tucked away in a warehouse at the end of the west wing on the 3rd floor of the Public Security Bureau, and he kept Samuel’s attention fixed on the archives on the east side, the complete opposite of the warehouse. It felt like everything was in the palm of his hand.

He casually exited the building with the dust-covered blueprint. Not even the guard posts boasting ironclad security, the machine guns, the numerous eyes, the high walls, or the wire fences could stop him.

No, it would be more accurate to say that he didn’t even need to reach them. Because he had escaped by opening a small manhole cover on the floor that no one paid attention to.

What had the Public Security Bureau personnel been doing until then?

They were in the middle of suppressing a few of the Neighborhood Watch members who had volunteered for cleaning and had started a commotion. They bought a suitable amount of time before taking the poison they had prepared and taking their own lives, just like the rebels before them.

If Sarah, who found the series of events suspicious, hadn’t ordered a search of the entire Public Security Bureau, the fact that someone had broken into the warehouse and the traces of the manhole cover in the secluded area being opened would have never been discovered.

But in a situation where the Chief of Public Security was absent, a mere adjutant could not unilaterally order a search of the city’s sewer system. It could easily become a problem where an internal disturbance caused an uproar throughout the entire city.

“Haha, and all this time, I was in the basement, knowing nothing…”

Samuel, who grasped the whole story from the adjutant’s report after she had belatedly rushed to the basement through a troublesome and complicated process, found it difficult to hide his boiling frustration. It was a complete defeat, or rather, it was more accurate to say he had been thoroughly played.

Only the ‘head’ of the rebels could pull off such a thing. He had made a move himself.

The opponent had thoroughly disguised himself, waiting while dangling fresh bait, and the new Chief of Public Security, overconfident in his victory, had taken that bait without hesitation. The skilled fisherman was the other side, and he had been the foolish fish. A hollow laugh escaped him at the thought of having completely surrendered the upper hand.

“I really, don’t know, what Vincent did…!”

Smack, Samuel’s hand violently struck the prisoner’s cheek as he kept making excuses. His head whipped to the side, and his parched lips split in several places, blood trickling down the corner of his mouth.

The beating did not end with one blow. Smack, and whip. An equal amount of pain was delivered to the opposite side. Soon, a sniffling sound began, along with a slight trembling of his shoulders.

“…There’s nothing useful inside the archives.”

“……”

“It’s just trash that’s been waiting for disposal for at least 20 years.”

Samuel had no regard for the young man’s complexion. While calmly stating the facts, he simply tilted his head and placed a cigarette on his lips.

“There’s no way a person who’s the ‘head’ of the rebels, no. A man who has been disguised as a citizen in the city for decades, wouldn’t know that, is there.”

“…!”

“It seems strange even to you, doesn’t it? Hah hah.”

His pronunciation was slightly slurred due to the cigarette in his mouth, but perhaps because of that, the laugh he added afterward felt all the more dreary.

“Sob…”

It was impossible to know whether the young man was crying because of his own bleak future, the present pain, or the betrayal. There was no need to know. So, fsssh, he took out a damp match from the matchbox, cupped his large hand around it so the flame wouldn’t go out, and concentrated on transferring it to the cigarette.

A fingernail-sized flame briefly illuminated his cold face before dying out. Haaah, the smoke that had swept through his lungs began to fill the small room with its acrid smell.

“So you can’t say you don’t know either, right?”

“……”

“Because until I get the answer I want, you won’t be able to die easily.”

Even though he hadn’t known him for long, Vincent was the most mature and trustworthy person Isaac had ever met.

The man who, while tapping his uncomfortable knee, would quicken his pace so as not to be a burden to his partner. The man whose attitude didn’t change, both when he didn’t know Isaac’s circumstances and when he did. The man who had even shared a secret that could get him killed if others found out and had offered to help, despite the risk. He could never have deceived him.

Even now, he could hear Vincent’s sheepish laugh as he said he was grateful to be paired with a middle-aged man like him. He could also hear his voice, buoyant with hope, saying that he would be able to send his wife to the doctor next month, and the sound of him sniffling and secretly wiping his nose as he remembered his departed colleagues.