The instant a bullet whistled past his ear, he absentmindedly scratched at the spot.
It hadn’t torn his skin, and he didn’t even feel pain.
The bullet had sliced through empty air, taking only a few strands of hair with it.
The heat generated by its spin cooled almost immediately, like metal pellets flying off after welding, and the cut hair was so little he could barely even notice it.
In truth, it was so insignificant it would have been fine to brush it off as nothing more than a child tossing a pebble.
—But... how did you do that?
Bill wasn’t interested in the fact that she had almost hit him.
What surprised him was that she had actually pulled the trigger at him.
This wasn’t just a matter of personal relationships.
What shocked him was that she had done something he had thought impossible.
The very premise of Nikke as a being different from himself had begun to wobble.
NIMPH exists in a Nikke’s brain.
And it stores memories and habits, helping a Nikke preserve her identity and continue living as herself.
It was even a reliable insurance policy for Nikkes who fought on the battlefield: as long as the upper half of the body was intact, they could survive even if everything below it was damaged, and keep living their previous life.
But that was only one of NIMPH’s uses.
For Nikkes, prolonging life and not losing themselves was important, but for ordinary people, NIMPH meant something completely different.
The function they valued most was simple: control of Nikkes.
Nikkes were stronger than humans.
Nikkes were combat weapons created to surpass the limits of the human species.
Even on the battlefield where they were still fighting Raptures, without them the word war itself would lose its meaning.
No matter how well they were treated, there was no way they could be free of complaints.
That was just how soldiers were.
And now their treatment was nothing more than that of consumables.
They fought in place of humans, and died in place of humans.
It would have been strange if they hadn’t rebelled long ago.
But what kept them in check was NIMPH.
If they attempted an action that would harm a human, NIMPH’s control would activate and forcibly stop it.
A limit placed by the weak human side upon the stronger Nikkes.
It was almost like magic, something that instantly reversed the positions of strong and weak.
But every rule had exceptions.
Just as “eternity” only applied to the concept that nothing is truly eternal, NIMPH’s control also varied depending on the individual’s capabilities.
There had never been a clear standard, but Bill already knew one Nikke who had escaped that control to a considerable degree.
Crow.
The leader of Exotic, who watched over the Outer Rim, and a Nikke with a philosophy unlike anyone else’s.
Before becoming a Nikke, she had been a member of Enters Heaven who committed terrorism as a matter of course, so her danger hardly needed explaining.
After becoming a Nikke, the achievement Crow had carried out of her own will was...
hitting a person in the abdomen with a bullet.
She hadn’t pressed the gun to someone’s stomach and fired.
Bill couldn’t say his memory was perfect, but Crow had once said that even pointing a gun at a person made her brain feel pressure.
If that was true, then even she, despite how easily she killed people, still couldn’t directly shoot a human.
If she could have, the Commander back then would have been shot in the head or heart and died instantly without even a chance to recover.
All the Nikkes protecting the Commander had been injured, and there was no reason to use an indirect shot—something so hard to aim—when killing the Commander from far away.
In other words, only after reaching the contradictory conclusion of killing someone while not assigning meaning to that act could a Nikke finally harm a human.
Even Crow, with her extreme tendencies, had no choice but to attack by using an indirect shot. So how had Eunhwa been able to aim for his head?
“Eunhwa. Let me ask you something.”
“I’ll allow it.”
“What do you think I am?”
“What?”
Eunhwa didn’t immediately understand what the man in front of her had just said.
After a moment, she replayed it in her mind... what did he think she saw when she looked at him? That was what he’d said.
Wasn’t that the kind of thing people only said between lovers?
Of course, Eunhwa had never liked anyone or been confessed to, but she had picked up enough from watching dramas to think that much.
Eunhwa looked at the place her gun was aimed.
The bullet’s trajectory was clearly set near his head, but even if she pulled the trigger, it would only cut through empty air.
In the first place, she had fired the previous shot precisely because she knew it wouldn’t hit.
And yet, that man was talking nonsense as if he had just been shot in the head.
“Oh, no. That’s not what I mean. More like... first think about why you came here in the first place.”
“Ah.”
Only then did Eunhwa remember why she was here.
The scene from a little while ago, when Anis had slammed into his head.
That had absolutely not been a mistake.
Anis had carried out that action of her own will, and even with a blow strong enough to dig up the ground, he hadn’t been hurt—instead, he had criticized the woman who hit him.
He had far too much composure to be someone who’d just been struck.
There had to be some secret to it.
And soon enough, an opportunity came.
After Bill said he was going to take a call and left with Rapi, she began acting on her own as well.
She trailed him without even letting Rapi notice, but he spotted the tail even while on the phone.
All she’d done, as a mistake, was step lightly on the sand and make a sound.
It was such a tiny noise that only an animal with sensitive hearing would have noticed it, but Bill had reacted to it.
After that, everything was clear.
She had no choice but to approach because of his threat, and then Bill said something strange, and she lost her own composure too.
That was all.
Eunhwa clearly remembered the entire sequence.
“What are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t say something that ridiculous...”
Eunhwa tried to raise her voice, calling it nonsense, but Bill reached out and stopped her.
Then he looked away from Eunhwa and stared up at the sky as if bothered.
“I really don’t know. I woke up a year ago, near the Nikke statue in the Ark. And... this is the third time I’ve told this story already.”
“The third time?”
Of course, the first was the Counters with him, the second was her, and now this was the third.
That meant...
—No way...
There was no need to ask him anything more.
In Eunhwa’s mind, Ingrid’s face surfaced.
Before Absolute left for this place.
Her explanation that had made no sense at the time, and that faint smile she had worn.
There was no mistake about what that expression had meant.
Eunhwa couldn’t hold back her laughter.
She had been dancing on a board Ingrid had already set up.
“So this was what you meant by ‘I’ll handle it myself’...”
“Well? I haven’t talked to Ingrid since yesterday, so I wouldn’t know.”
And yet, she could understand Ingrid too.
A human who surpassed a Nikke was an enormous irregularity, one that could even be compared to a Heretic.
The reason she had kept it from her was to respect him and give him the choice of whether to reveal the secret.
But... she probably never imagined she’d be exposed for such an absurd reason.
“Haah...”
She let out a long sigh.
She hadn’t reached the core of it, but this was still close enough for now.
How could she know what even she didn’t understand?
At the very least, figuring out why Ingrid had acted the way she did was a gain.
With that, Eunhwa comforted herself and turned away.
It was time to go back.
Rapi was already watching her from behind, and if she returned too late, the others would start to suspect her.
Eunhwa said simply, “I’m going back,” and took a step.
But her second step never touched the ground.
Bill had grabbed her arm and pulled her back.
“Wait. You still haven’t explained that.”
“That?”
“Why you could fire a gun right past my head.”
Eunhwa closed her mouth as if she had just realized something, then clicked her tongue softly.
She had forgotten that.
Not for an hour, not even for thirty minutes—just thirty seconds ago she had been thinking about it.
It wasn’t something she had deliberately tried to forget, and no matter how you looked at it, that was far too short a time to forget.
The only plausible reason was... something intense had invaded her head and pushed that memory away.
And in fact, Eunhwa had heard that “something” directly.
Lost in that thought, the earlier question had slipped her mind.
“Hold on. There’s someone over there who looks kind of lonely, and it’s bothering me.”
After asking Eunhwa for a one-sided excuse, Bill raised his right hand and crooked his fingers toward the hidden Rapi.
As soon as Rapi confirmed the signal, she kicked off the ground and ran straight toward Bill and Eunhwa as if she’d been waiting for it.
Bill had thought it would take about ten seconds to cover the distance, but she arrived in less than five.
She must have been bothered by the conversation with Eunhwa too.
“You called, Commander.”
“Yeah. You can answer after catching your breath, so take it slow. You saw it too, right? Did you have any thoughts about why Anis hit my head, or why Eunhwa could fire a shot right past it?”
Rapi didn’t need much time to think.
After witnessing those two scenes, she had spent the whole time either monitoring Raptures or watching him talk with Eunhwa.
With nothing to distract her, she had more than enough time to organize her thoughts.
In fact, she had already reached a conclusion and had simply been waiting for him to ask.
“I considered several possibilities, but... would it be all right if I state the conclusion first?”
“Go ahead.”
There was no reason to refuse an offer that started with the answer.
Even the people involved hadn’t been able to come up with a theory explaining the behavior.
“It was probably because... they all judged that their actions would not harm the Commander.”
It was an unexpectedly plain, simple reason.
But the more he thought about it, the more fitting it seemed.
In fact, Anis’s strike had caused no damage at all beyond getting dirt in his mouth.
The bullet Eunhwa fired had only barely grazed his hair, and even if it had actually hit his forehead, it probably would have ended with nothing more than a slight scratch on the skin.
They could not perform actions that harmed a human.
But if, while “firing a gun,” their own perception of the act was only that of lightly pushing a finger against someone’s forehead...
Then NIMPH would judge it as an action that caused no harm.
“That’s boring... I thought there’d be something bigger.”
“I-I’m sorry...”
“No, no. You don’t need to apologize.”
Seeing Rapi shrink her shoulders, Bill let out a short sigh and gently patted her shoulder.
Then he turned his wrist and glanced at the time.
“It’s... about ten minutes later than I expected.”
When he had said he’d step away for a moment, he had meant it quite literally.
He had planned to give Andersen a half-notice, then head straight down the cliff and into the power plant.
But Eunhwa’s intrusion, and the way the scattered pieces of the puzzle finally fit together, had stolen a little more time than expected.
He had tried not to drag things out as much as possible, but it seemed fate didn’t like that very much.
“Should we really go now? There are a lot of places we still need to check.”
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