As the world stretched out countless branches like that giant tree, so too would the homes of the tiny creatures beneath it stretch endlessly, with no end in sight.
They say there have always been those who stubbornly raised a different voice, even as everyone was swept along in pursuit of a single calling. Nothing grows forever, they said, and the time would come when it grew smaller again.
When the giant tree finally stopped growing, they opened their mouths once more. Look, they said. This is that very time.
So just as we worship the eagle god who circles the sun, you must continue to worship newborn babies and sparrows.
Must something be worshiped only when “god” follows its name? When everyone serves what is great, is there some rule that forbids serving what is small?
Look at it another way. Don’t those small things cry louder than I do and breathe air higher up? They’re hidden from view by the shadows now, but the thing that floated up there looked less than a handspan tall. Wasn’t it truly smaller even than a nursing infant?
Though I am no god, I dare say that I acknowledge your voice.
—From Alaine’s drunken speech before the Mitigor warriors held hostage ──────────────────
Glenn firmly shook his head from side to side. It was the most appropriate response he could manage as he alternated his gaze between the corpse sprawled at his feet and the young agent glaring at it in outrage.
The corpse’s waist was caught across the threshold, leaving only the lower half jutting out of the room. Glenn had taken cover pressed tightly against the wall outside the door. He therefore had no way to see what condition the upper body was in, or what wounds had been left upon it.
Considering how unusually brief the scream had been when they climbed the stairs a moment ago, the victim’s windpipe had apparently been severed in a single strike. If they had been stabbed repeatedly or struck in the back of the head with a blunt weapon, the person could not have died so quietly.
Perhaps a crossbow bolt had pierced the victim’s skull. Or perhaps the story he had heard from his predecessor while taking over the mission—about the target’s “strange ability”—was true after all.
A seasoned leader, Glenn studied the face of the young agent standing across the entrance.
He knew all too well that the agent’s long-standing flaw was a vigorous temper capable of robbing him of his reason. What Glenn had not known was that the agent had been secretly engaged to the comrade who was now a corpse before his eyes.
Nor did he know the tragic story that the two had promised to retire together after completing this mission.
In the end, the young agent could no longer restrain his anger and dashed into the room. He must have intended to avenge his comrade and fiancé, but all he ultimately accomplished was keeping their promise to retire together.
This scream, too, was not very long.
There were now two corpses sprawled before Glenn. He inwardly lamented that the upper bodies of both corpses lying side by side—and presumably bearing the wounds—were hidden inside the room.
At that very moment, a voice came from within the room, asking exactly what he had been calculating in his head.
“How long until the next unit gets here?”
Glenn furrowed his brow. It was not because he imagined the voice had pierced straight through his thoughts with its impeccable timing.
According to the advance information, the target was supposed to be a middle-aged man around his own age. But the voice he heard was unexpectedly young. It was younger than the owners of the four legs at his feet—young enough that the speaker might even be a boy who had only just passed through puberty.
Before Glenn could choose what to say, the target did not give him even the brief pause he needed to decide whether to answer at all.
“You’d better answer quickly, Glenn.”
The target knew his name. Even as one unexpected event after another far exceeded the bounds of what he had anticipated, Glenn calmly decided to cast out some bait to draw more information from him. Unexpected things happened often enough in this line of work.
“Why are you so curious about that, Sagu? Whether the next unit arrives or I enter this room first, the outcome will be the same, won’t it?”
“There’s no need to try so hard to hide your identity, Glenn Huerim. If you’ve made a rough guess about who I am, calling me Geuneul would be less awkward than calling me Sagu.”
At this point, no one could have blamed Glenn even if he lost his composure. No one among the agents, or even among the current senior officials, knew where he came from.
“If you’ve figured out that I’m the sole descendant of the Mitigor, couldn’t you use that remarkable ability of yours to predict when the next unit will arrive?”
Glenn had never once forgotten the will of his ancestors, carved deep into his bones. Not even after he had undergone a brutal initiation ceremony and risen to his current position under the pretext of erasing his past and being born anew. The fact that proof of it was the inverted triangle tattoo on his left arm was another closely guarded secret he had confessed to no one.
“Hard to say. Cold-blooded killers who take other people’s lives without even knowing why aren’t eager to hand over their information. The only thing I managed to learn was that every one of them has at least one hostage being held to ensure they have no choice but to obey orders.”
It was the kind of work that made sense. Under the OLM system, which placed rationality above all else, it meant secretly erasing evidence of irrationality.
Hugh and Milia, lying side by side before his eyes, had decided to flee to Perem after retirement to escape pursuit. Glenn himself had not hesitated to eliminate targets that included four daughters of a noble family and even a newborn, because his wife was being held hostage.
Whenever he committed such atrocities, Glenn—though naturally right-handed—held his weapon only in his left hand and struck only with his left. His right hand always had to remain free to cover the tattoo on his left arm.
“I abandoned the spirit of the Mitigor and killed even an infant. The fact that you were one of the people who created this OLM system in the first place, and that you’re now in danger of being executed by the very system you created—that all of it is irrelevant to me. I’m simply carrying out my mission.”
Glenn deliberately took the drastic step of revealing the organization’s intelligence capabilities without holding anything back. He thought laying his cards on the table would provoke a meaningful reaction. But all he received was a chiding tone.
“Don’t pretend to be so resolute. What do you have left, exactly? Even the hostage who drove you forward—even your beloved wife—is dead and gone. And now, surely a shallow fear of being hunted for betraying the organization isn’t what keeps you moving. With everyone you might have atoned to dead and gone, is all that remains mere habit?”
Glenn closed his ears for a moment and steadied his breathing. Though painful memories surged toward him on towering waves, he summoned astonishing concentration and focused solely on finding a way to close the overwhelming information gap between himself and the target. But that remarkable focus fell apart without resistance at the voice that followed.
“I’d enjoy talking with you longer, but I’m afraid I don’t have much time left.”
Another voice came from inside the room. Unlike the one before it, this time Glenn could be certain. It was the voice of a young boy who had not even fully passed through puberty.
The boy casually intercepted the words the original target should have spoken and said them in his place. Only then did Glenn begin to understand why Pithea Dimos, the predecessor on this mission, had testified that the target was “a white-haired old man.”
At the time, there had been far more testimony identifying the target as a middle-aged man, so Pithea Dimos’s claim had been dismissed—along with the stories about the target’s strange ability—as nothing more than the senile ravings of an old man nearing retirement.
“Apparently you can control your age at will, too. So why are you talking about how much time you have left, as though an ordinary person like me should care?”
“Impressive. No matter how hard I prod your sore spots, you calmly pick out only the sharpest questions. Whether I confirm or deny anything, or even remain completely silent, you’ll be able to extract enough information from it, won’t you?”
The target’s voice had grown even thinner and shriller. Moreover, as though struggling to move a tender tongue and baby teeth into proper pronunciation, he spoke much more slowly than before. Yet the words rolling from that halting mouth were as mature as an old man’s.
“And so, my wise Seventh. Choosing you last was surely the final right decision I made in my life.”
Chosen last? Faced with such an out-of-nowhere statement, there was no way Glenn could easily move either his lips or his feet. As he hesitated, numerous footsteps sounded from the floor below. It had to be the late-arriving second wave.
The target seemed to notice them as well. A sound came from inside the room, apparently urging Glenn to hurry in, but it was hardly something that could be called speech.
“Waaah, waaah.”
Now that the target had grown young enough to make such a milk-scented sound, could he still use the mysterious ability that had so horribly murdered Hugh and Milia?
Glenn made his decision swiftly. He boldly stepped over the agent’s corpse caught on the threshold and hurled himself into the room.
In Glenn’s hand was a heavy blunt weapon capable of easily crushing the life out of a grown adult. With the target now so helplessly young, it might have seemed an opportunity beyond compare.
But Glenn did not see it that way. He came to a limp halt, as though he had seen something that made any further action impossible. Then he spoke softly.
“This is insane.”
It was unmistakably a human baby. But sparse feathers had sprouted around its armpits.
Glenn lowered his head and looked at his left arm. Since taking up slaughter as his profession, this was the first time he had faced the simple inverted-triangle symbol tattooed on his forearm so directly.
The triangle’s three vertices each represented a “baby,” an “adult,” and a “sparrow,” the vessel inhabited by the spirit after death. The three sides connecting them signified endless reincarnation. This strange being, both baby and bird, therefore possessed no fewer than two of the values the Mitigor held dear.
With that creature looking up at him and smiling brightly, wasn’t there only one choice?
Glenn adjusted his grip on the blunt weapon and slowly turned around. He readied himself to face the adults who would soon come rushing in. Keeping his gaze fixed ahead, he let a single heavy sentence—weighted with as much gravity as the weight settled into his legs—drift over his shoulder.
“Grow up as quickly as you can. You must have as many things to tell your Seventh as there are branches on Galleria.”
The winged baby did not stop its meaningful cries. Belatedly, the sound scattered against the sturdy back of the man who was trying to uphold the spirit of his ancestors.