TCWGRF 29

This is merely a hypothesis taking place for fun inside Samuel’s mind, as he sat before his office desk with his eyes gently closed.

Vincent’s son is alive.

Parents who do not want to raise their own child are not common, so one must assume he was sent away for some unavoidable reason.

No matter how similar Sector 26, where he lived, was to the outside, being raised as a citizen of the city and being treated as an orphan on the outside were stories of completely different dimensions.

Since quite a number of comrades had betrayed the rebels and become dropouts, the rebel leader needed a competent person who would never betray him and would fight in his stead from within the city.

Might the son, born just in time, have served as an excellent hostage and a token, allowing the two comrades to be together forever until the day the city was erased from history?

Be it through the sewers or whatever, Vincent was a man well-versed in the city’s affairs, so he would have chosen one of several routes and used the safest path possible. And the leader, while claiming to take on the responsibility of raising his son, might have thrown him into a camp teeming with orphans of a similar age, one that was not particularly dangerous, in order to thoroughly conceal their pact and Vincent’s existence.

The Vincent couple in the city would have been curious about their son’s well-being, and the rebel leader had a responsibility to answer to them.

A man who did not trust even the comrades he had selected himself, who added surveillance upon surveillance while touring the camps, would not believe someone’s report at face value.

He would have visited at least once a year to check for himself and observe how he was growing. Only with that much assurance would Vincent be able to rest easy that his son, entrusted to the outside, was safe.

The date the two men promised must have been one that was not easily forgotten. For example, like someone’s birthday.

Perhaps Vincent did not receive the news the rebel leader should have sent long ago, on time.

He had always exchanged information on his son’s situation and intelligence on the city after the birthday, but the expected news did not arrive, or he noticed something was different from usual and used every means to press for information, but nothing came back.

Growing anxious, Vincent would have asked to meet his son in person, but the leader would not have allowed it. Because without him, the city’s intelligence network would undoubtedly collapse.

At the same time, he could not lose Vincent’s trust or the spies he had painstakingly cultivated all at once, so he would have tried to appease him somehow.

Distrust is not built overnight. He must have tried to meet his son several times over the years, and especially as his wife fell gravely ill, his skepticism and rebelliousness would have grown.

With only sporadic news, he would have always wondered if he was truly well, and if he knew even a little about the situation on the outside, he would have spent every day in anxiety and worry. Considering the shabby state of the rebel side, would he have even received a proper photograph?

However, that promised day with the rebel leader, the day the city would fall and the rebels would be victorious, was not a result that could be brought about no matter how diligently Vincent carried out his mission.

In the meantime, his wife was dying, and he himself grew old and worn out. His son became an adult without him ever seeing his face to know how he had grown. Thanks to that, perhaps his patience for the greater cause—for the rebels, for his comrades, for their noble sacrifice—ran out at some point.

This was not simply the rogue deviation of an individual rebel who had infiltrated under the name of Vincent. It was more accurate to call it a division in the rebels, who had been thought to be solidly united for decades, a crisis close to self-destruction.

Now, from this point on, departing from hypothesis, this is an even more crude and impoverished, baseless imagination.

Even if Vincent, having arrived at the camp, asks for his son’s whereabouts, the son he so desperately wanted to meet is not there. Because, quite coincidentally, he is not outside, but somewhere in this city.

It could have been an accident, or it could have been the rebel leader’s mistake. Whatever the cause, if that is the case, Vincent has no choice but to return to the city with a disappointed heart.

And, just in time, the only one who knows his son’s whereabouts is the Superintendent General. Then he would use what he knows to enter into negotiations, or he would struggle desperately to at least hear whether he is alive or dead.

‘How much can I get right?’

Samuel, having finished his satisfying imaginings in the silence, opened his eyes. Before him, Sarah, who had just completed the task her superior had ordered, had arrived. Judging by her quite flushed expression, it seemed she had brought back results exceeding his expectations.

“Well, how did it go?”

Leaning forward over the desk, the Superintendent General, who had propped his chin on his hand with a leisurely air, asked his adjutant.

“…What you predicted was correct, Superintendent General.”

“Is that so?”

As if it were an obvious result, his red lips stretched into a thin line, waiting for the words that would follow.

“I looked into it, and while there were records of both the death certificate and cremation, the actual body was never received.”

In the city, there was no land to bury bodies, so any corpses that appeared were always disposed of by incineration. When a person died, a death certificate was filed, and the body was taken to the crematorium to be turned into a handful of ashes. All other methods were illegal.

Therefore, the fact that the body was not received meant one of two things. Either they disposed of the body themselves. Or the person became dead only on paper.

“When I pressed him, using the excuse that the documents were not detailed, the crematorium keeper confessed that he had heard Vincent’s pitiful story and processed it as if it were cremated.”

“A pitiful story?”

“It seems he begged him, saying he wanted to hold onto the body, that he would send it on its way himself after a few days.”

Surely, no matter how cruel he was, would he have chopped up his own son’s rotting corpse into small pieces and flushed it down the sewer?

“And the doctor who registered the birth at the time was already dead, but the midwife who delivered the baby was still alive. She said she remembered the day the baby was born in that house precisely because it was her daughter’s birthday.”

“So the date?”

“The date is…. Hoo.”

With the excitement of discovering a new clue that could turn the tide of the deadlocked situation, Sarah took a deep breath to steady her increasingly rapid speech. Then, in a much calmer tone, she delivered the news her superior must have been longing for.

“December 14th, a week earlier than the documents state.”

“Anything else.”

“She said it was a long time ago, so she didn’t remember any other characteristics, but she was certain that the baby had a distinct mole on its left ankle. She said it was fascinating because it was in the same spot and had the same shape as the mother’s.”

“That’s very interesting.”

With the thrill of his assumptions, which he had thought were only absurd, turning out to be spot on, Samuel could not suppress the smile leaking from the corners of his mouth.

But, it was too early to pop the champagne. The task he had assigned to Walter was not yet finished. In order to wait until the very, very end and savor it all at once, he covered his mouth with a gloved hand and forced the smile away.

Luck was on Samuel’s side, so the rest was a matter of time. If he was not alive, then the body would suffice, and if the body could not be found, he just had to create a plausible one.

He praised himself for his decision to follow his intuition, thinking it was a good thing he had kept that young man, whom he had initially considered a variable, alive in many ways, and that it was fortunate he had not killed him in the basement like the others.

“Ah-eut, ah, heu.”

“Fingers are easy for you now, I see?”

By now, sleeping with the Superintendent General was no different from a daily routine for Isaac. Still, he could endure it if he thought of it as paying the price for two lives, his own and Asher’s.

He always returned to the official residence after the sun had set and went through a long, persistent process of excretion.

The lovemaking that took place on the bed, which exuded an extreme sense of cleanliness, sometimes felt like a butchering, carried out without hesitation with a sharp blade on a giant cutting board, or like a human sacrifice to ward off impurities.

Some days it ended with one or two ejaculations, and other days it did not stop even after staying up all night. Whether he was conscious or not did not matter. Even if Isaac passed out, the other man would act as he pleased until he was satisfied.

Perhaps it was better to lose consciousness early on. It was harder on days like today, when he deliberately prodded his rear to break it in, or taught and evaluated him on what to do one by one.

He desperately wanted to get it over with quickly and go back to lie down on the small bed in his room, but as always, things did not go his way. All decision-making power belonged to the other man, not him, and all he had to do was submissively obey as the Superintendent General wished, just like now.

Failing to answer in time or saying he did not want to would only earn him merciless violence for displeasing him.

“Ha, it’s, it’s good.”

“How praiseworthy.”

The space, which had been kept meticulously clean and orderly by the adjutant and various staff, was easily soiled and destroyed by its owner. He urged him, without any hesitation, to wet the sheets, the blanket, and the shiny floor with bodily fluids like saliva, sweat, tears, and semen.

Since a group of people would surely rush in while the Superintendent General was showering and restore everything to its original state as if nothing had happened, Isaac, too, gradually began to participate in the act of excretion without inhibition.

Otherwise, he would be made to neither live nor die by the thousands of ways he had spoken of to dismember a person, or even Asher would be put in danger.

“Spread your legs. So it’s easy to pound into you.”

“Haeu…”

“That’s right.”

Shame was one of the most useless things in the face of survival. The shackle, which had been with him every moment since it was fastened to his ankle, made him painfully aware that he was livestock staying here, that there was no way to escape on his own unless his owner released him.

The realization of his powerlessness quickly turned into submission to reality, making him spread his legs wide as the other man instructed and hold the backs of his thighs firmly with his hands to keep them in place. In a moment, a harpoon that had been bobbing and staring at him for a while would begin to trace a path from the outskirts to the very peak.

“Ah-eugh.”

The moment the firmly swollen tip pierced through in an instant and drew a trajectory inside his inner walls. This moment alone, he could never get used to, no matter how much he struggled.

His whole body tensed up without him realizing, and even though he tried not to cry, tears burst forth. Behind him, the heartbeats of two people became entangled, making him easily lose himself and simply get swept away as the other man desired.

“Look at me. Isaac.”

Even his consciousness and his gaze could not be free from the man before him. He wanted to just shut his eyes tight like a dead person and endure it, he wanted to just give up his body and be swept away. But even that was not allowed.

He was afraid that he, too, might be making an ecstatic expression, that he might look like a whore crazy for a man’s cock, just like the horrible scene he had witnessed one day in the past.

“Yes. Put your arms around me.”

He felt like he had stepped into an uncontrollable mire and was slowly being submerged from below, his breath being cut off, but when he clumsily wrapped his arms around his neck as he was told, he was able to breathe a little.