"I agree with him. Why should I?"
"Pu... Puhahahahat! I knew the two of you would say that!"
"W-Why not?! You said you have a lot of Coins! Can't you give us at least a little?!"
This was exactly why I could never like the people of Geumho Station.
They treated someone else's pure goodwill as if it were their natural right.
Why should we be happy to hand over our Coins to people who did nothing but get in our way while we were earning them?
"Of course we won't share. What do we gain from that?"
"W-We'll die! I said we'll pay you back!"
"Every bastard here killed at least one person in the first Scenario, didn't they? Then what, did the people you killed not want to live?"
"..."
"While we were out earning Coins and bringing back food, what exactly did you do for us? You didn't help us in any way, so why are you acting like our Coins were yours to begin with, demanding we hand them over?"
Was all of this really because of Cheon Inho's agitation?
Really?
I thought otherwise.
Agitation wasn't a skill that could absolutely control another person's mind.
If it were, then maybe not me or Dokja, but he could have easily shaken someone like Yoo Sangah or Lee Hyunsung and turned them against us.
This only dragged out what was already in their nature.
So this situation wasn't something we created. It was something they made themselves.
Laziness and arrogance—the belief that they could do nothing and simply cling to others when trouble arose, and things would somehow work out.
That was simply their nature.
"I-If you hadn't sold food in the first place!"
"Did anyone force you to buy it? No one forced you. You were happy enough to buy it then, so why are you blaming us now? I remember you were one of the people who gladly bought it too."
Back then, it was, "Thank you for selling us food."
Now it was, "We ran out of Coins because of you, so take responsibility."
Should I just... turn this place into a complete mess?
"Y-You... hand over the Coins already!"
"Kill them! Kill them and take their Coins!"
They couldn't win with logic, so these idiots were trying to take it by force instead.
Had they already forgotten what I was capable of?
Even if they had, we were the ones who had openly gone out and hunted mole crickets.
They would pay the price for trying to survive without making any effort to do so.
[Just swing once.]
[... If it's a request, then sure.]
"Die, you bastard!"
"Ha! You want Coins that badly? Fine, I'll give them to you. Come take them!"
Whoosh—
Fwoom—
I grabbed the thug charging at the very front by the collar and hurled him through the air.
As if to prove my judgment right, I felt almost no resistance at all.
Just look at that stupid expression.
That blank face of someone who didn't even understand why this was happening to him.
Fwoooooosh—
Crack!
Crunch!
Screeech!
"Kyaaaaak!"
"Uaaaaaagh!!"
The people standing where the man I threw landed burst apart on the spot.
A red carpet made of nothing but blood spread out before me.
It wasn't even a one-sided slaughter anymore. It was something far more visceral.
Maybe it was fear, but the people who witnessed it stumbled back as the agitation broke.
Some of them had lost all strength in their legs and collapsed where they stood, crawling away in terror.
[The Constellations of the Absolute Evil alignment praise your brutality.]
[100 Coins have been sponsored.]
[The Constellations of the Absolute Good alignment condemn your brutality.]
I lightly ignored the Constellations who had already forgotten what I'd just said and were trying to split everyone into sides again.
[Wasn't that a bit much?]
[I threw him at the surviving thugs. They're all gangster bastards. The one I threw and the ones who burst apart.]
[Really? Then I'll step in now, so stay still.]
"How pathetic... Do you all really believe this situation... became like this because of us?"
In truth, they knew too.
That the ones who had really created and controlled this situation were Cheon Inho and his group.
They were only coming at us because that side had more people, and most of them were thugs, so they looked scary. We looked easier to push around.
"You're only doing this because you're afraid of them."
Dokja pressed exactly where it hurt, because she already knew it too.
"But why do you think they were stronger than you and had more Coins? Because they're thugs? Don't be ridiculous."
"C-Come to think of it, how did Mr. Cheon Inho get that many Coins...?"
"Haha, don't you all know? He sold various things, and also—"
Twitch.
Dokja signaled to me.
I didn't need to use a skill to understand this.
I knew exactly what I had to do.
"I just killed people, and a huge amount of Coins came pouring in. On top of that, I got sponsorship from Constellations with an Absolute Evil disposition too."
"W-What are you... saying?"
"You idiots. If you have brains, think. The Cheoldupa bastards—other than the first time we came here, have they ever died even once?"
"And they came back even stronger."
[The Constellation 'Secretive Plotter' nods at your powers of deduction.]
"Those bastards said it earlier. That if they killed us, 'Coins' would come out. So how exactly did they know that 'killing people gives Coins'?"
Actually, that argument could be refuted pretty easily.
They could say they learned it in the first Scenario, when they killed people to survive.
That they simply hadn't done it again since then.
And since they had in fact tried to kill us, there wasn't much anyone could say against that.
Well, humans were so simple that once suspicion took root, they tended to believe only that. I didn't know if they'd buy it or not.
"Choose. Keep being exploited by those bastards to the bitter end, and then deal with me."
"Or if you still have even a shred of pride left, fight with your own hands!"
Our words, and the reaction of the people who heard them, made it clear whose grasp Geumho Station was really in now.
The one who rose through agitation was being ruined by our agitation.
Though of course, the difference was that ours happened to be facts.
Was this what they called a neat full-circle ending?
***
"Y-Yeah! Yeah, damn it!"
"You sons of bitches!!!"
"Y-You bastards...!!"
He moved exactly the way I wanted him to.
So precisely it was chilling, as if he had climbed inside my head.
Other people might have found that unpleasant instead.
But for some reason, far from unpleasant, it made my heart pound.
As if the person who understood me better than anyone else was trusting me and following my lead even in a situation like this...
"Kkeuaaak!"
"S-Save me!"
"Then you shouldn't have touched us in the first place!!!"
He had grabbed two thugs, one in each hand, and was swinging them around wildly like gauntlets.
Two thugs being swung around, and other thugs getting smashed by those two thugs... it looked like something out of a 90s American cartoon.
[The Constellation 'Prisoner of the Golden Headband' snickers, saying your brother is no less of a lunatic.]
[The Constellation 'Dark Sentinel' has taken an interest in your brother.]
"... He's mine."
[The Constellation 'Demon-like Judge of Fire' trembles, saying your eyes are dead.]
Comments (0)
Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register