City is what people call a concrete jungle.
Small and large incidents, the cold indifference of strangers, exhaust fumes from cars, and the hot wind trapped between buildings all slowly wear down a person's body and mind.
Living here without thinking is like wandering through a jungle without realizing you're stranded.
That's why, sometimes, we need to soothe our exhausted bodies and minds.
We leave the concrete jungle behind and head somewhere free.
A mountain full of green trees and cool streams was nice, and so was a beach with soft sand and the sound of gentle waves.
Vacation. You could call it a getaway, too.
For people worn out by society, it was a necessary form of healing.
Not long after being discharged, and with a string of recent incidents behind me, I suggested a vacation.
Since he also owed Eto, Hitokawa reluctantly agreed.
That said...
"I distinctly said we were going on vacation."
"Shut up. Just getting here was pushing it."
Leading Eto by the hand, the place we ended up at wasn't a natural forest, and it wasn't a beach either.
It was a water park you could reach by taking the train near our house and riding about ten stops.
It was a fairly famous water park in the area, with plenty to do, but the unease still wouldn't go away.
Looking at the sign with the cheerful dolphin character leaping across it, I said, "I wanted the ocean. I wanted to run wild in the vast sea, not in some cramped city. We even bought Eto a cute swimsuit for the occasion, and I got a new camera to keep the memories!"
"You haven't forgotten whose money you used to buy that camera, have you!? You bought some absurdly high-end model!! Sure, I was the one who lent you my card as thanks for helping out in that last fight, but did you really have to spend it so recklessly!? The bonus we got for taking down the Artist is gone!"
So, because the budget had gone sideways, we had no choice but to settle for the nearby water park. Still, I had my own complaints.
"Idiot. You don't get it. Kids grow up before you know it. You don't get many chances to look at them like this! Why would I preserve Eto's childhood memories on some cheap, low-quality camera?!"
"What are you bragging about, you daughter-obsessed freak?!"
"Um... could you two stop fighting and go inside? Everyone's staring at us."
Eto tugged on my hand and Hitokawa's sleeve, stepping in to mediate.
Just as she said, the customers who had come to the water park were all sneaking glances at our little comedy routine.
"And I like water parks too! There are water slides, a wave pool, and it feels just like an amusement park!"
Eto said with a bright expression, as if trying to show that the water park was fine too.
Seeing that, Hitokawa and I, our excitement finally cooling, looked at each other.
"The fact that Eto is the most mature one here means we probably need to reflect on ourselves a little."
"Hah. I raised a fine daughter."
"Yeah, yeah. Good for you."
In the end, we agreed to be satisfied with the water park for now and headed through the front gate.
Men are creatures who keep a boy's heart no matter how old they get.
I realized that the saying my mother used to make really did apply to me too.
It was definitely a water park we'd brought Eto to so she could have fun, and she definitely was having fun... but I was enjoying myself just as much, my tension rising to ridiculous levels.
"Yee-haw!!"
"Dad, you're so cool!"
"How did you get up there!? Teach me too!!"
"Hey!! Don't mess around, it's dangerous!!"
Surfing on a swim board in the wave pool and getting scolded by the lifeguard was basically a given.
I shoved Hitokawa into the waterfall pool, only for the crashing water to strip his swimsuit off, and in revenge Hitokawa German-suplexed me into the pool.
Then Eto got excited and kicked Hitokawa, which ended with all three of us getting dumped into the water anyway.
It was fun.
It felt like we'd gone back to childhood, and it was nice to forget, for a little while, the reality where life and death stood opposed to each other.
I wished days like this could go on forever, but... it was a fleeting dream.
We were just animals in the jungle stopping by the water to drink before heading back in.
So for today, let's forget everything. Let's wet our parched hearts at the water's edge.
So that it can become the driving force that keeps us going.
For that, we should play hard, eat with everything we've got, and take plenty of photos to keep as memories... ah.
"Hey, Hitokawa. Come to think of it, where's my camera?"
After the three of us had that poolside crash-and-splash incident, I asked Hitokawa as we came back out of the water.
I'd definitely left it with him when I went to buy drinks, hadn't I?
But Hitokawa looked at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about.
"What? I gave it back to you right after you came back from buying drinks. You said you were going to go ride the water slide, remember? Your hands were full at the time, so I put it on the table next to us."
Come to think of it, I think I did hear something like that.
The problem was that Eto had started coughing while she was drinking, and while I was checking on her, I completely forgot Hitokawa saying he'd left the camera there.
Then where was the camera...?
We looked at the table we'd just been using.
It was gone.
The tabletop was completely empty.
Our faces all went pale in an instant as we realized what had happened.
"It's goneeeee!! The camera I bought for 880,000 yen!!"
"What!? 880,000!? You said you bought it for 900,000 before!! Where the hell did this bastard skim off 20,000 yen!?"
"We can argue about that later! First we need to find the camera! I'm going to the lost-and-found!"
"Damn it! I'll search the area! Just wait till I find it!"
"Then I'll try to track it by Dad's scent! It might have been washed away since there's so much water here, but it's better than doing nothing!"
And so the three of us split up and started searching for the missing camera.
I pinned my hopes on the possibility that whoever found it had taken it to lost and found, so I headed straight there, but it was a waste of time.
I asked the staff, but they said no camera had been turned in today.
After that pointless errand, I left the center with zombie-like steps.
It was a camera I'd bargained down by 20,000 yen using every bit of my verbal skill! And I'd lost it like an idiot!
Cursing myself, I slammed my head against the outer wall. Probably because they were careful about children falling, the wall was made of a cushiony material. It was just soft. Nothing else.
I kept thudding against it for a while. Then someone suddenly spoke to me.
"Is this the camera you were looking for?"
"Huh?"
I turned toward the voice, and there it was: the camera I'd been desperately searching for.
"Oh! Thank you! I was so upset thinking I'd lost it..."
My grateful voice gradually faded as I took the camera.
It was because of the woman who handed it to me.
A woman in a revealing black bikini covered by a white shirt. Long black hair. A neatly curved jawline.
I know this face. I know this voice!
"You...! You...!"
My stiff mouth wouldn't form the words properly, so she simply lifted the sunglasses that had been hiding her face and revealed the answer herself.
With an outrageously innocent expression, she grinned at me and said, "Long time no see, Koma-kun~♡"
"Why are you here, Shinaoto Minami!?"
It was Minami herself, the woman who had made me, Eto, and Hitokawa suffer like hell a few months ago.
What a disaster. A remnant of that psychotic group that casually dismembered people and dressed them up like works of art was standing right in front of me.
The terrifying thing about this woman was how outrageous and incomprehensible her behavior patterns were. She was the kind of person who wouldn't seem strange even if she dumped poison into this pool right now.
If Eto or Hitokawa were here, they could subdue her immediately, but since they weren't, I'd have to handle this somehow on my own...!
"Don't look so scared~. I quit that line of work. I'm just living a carefree life now, and happened to run into you~."
"Carefree, my ass. You do know you're wanted, right?"
It was bad enough that a wanted criminal should be hiding, and yet she was boldly coming to a water park for fun. I was honestly stunned.
"I'm enjoying a carefree life on the run~."
"I can arrest you right here and hand you over to the police."
"Oh? Would you? I don't really want to be hostile toward you~. But if you're going to try to catch me, then I'll have to get serious too~."
Minami's eyes sharpened. She made it very clear that if I came at her, she would fight back.
That made me tense up naturally too.
"What are you planning to do?"
"I'll collapse like some pitiful tragic heroine and scream. Then I'll point at you and yell that you're a pervert. You'll say I'm a wanted criminal, but people don't memorize wanted posters one by one. In the end, your voice will be drowned out, and people who believe the words of a helpless woman will rush over to grab you. Then I just slip away~."
"Damn that presumption of guilt!!"
For some reason, the way this woman said it made it sound like it would actually happen, which made it even scarier. If that happened, it would be hard for me to lay a hand on her. What was I supposed to do?
"Just pretend you didn't see me~. People go through all kinds of injustice every day without even realizing it~."
"Even so, it's a little much to just ignore a psycho who kills people."
"That sounds like a brave citizen award to me~. I'll even congratulate you myself. Yay~!"
Clap clap clap!
Minami started clapping as if I'd done something admirable. I had no idea what she was trying to do.
As I looked her up and down, searching for some opening, my gaze stopped at her thigh.
There was a scar on the inside of it, about the size of a cheek, and it looked old enough that no life remained in it.
It wasn't a wound from being bitten by a Ghoul or anything like that. The shape was too clean.
Rather than a Ghoul injury, it looked like she had carved it out herself with a knife or something similar.
Looking at that scar, I remembered the strange phenomenon that had happened to Eto during the fight with the Artist.
Eto, who had been badly injured, had recovered as if she'd eaten human flesh. At the place where Eto had collapsed, there had only been one person who could have provided human flesh.
"You fed that to Eto?"
Minami, noticing that my gaze had settled on the scar on her thigh, answered.
"Ah, this? Pretty much. She looked like she didn't even have the strength to chew, so I cut it off and fed it to her myself~."
"Why?"
Minami was an unreadable woman, but I knew she wasn't the type to have enough kindness to save someone who was dying.
Then why?
Why did she save Eto?
"Hmm... why was it, I wonder?"
Minami tilted her head.
Not like she was refusing to tell me, but like she genuinely didn't know herself.
"At first I was just going to leave. The boss was fighting, but I didn't have any attachment to the company anymore. But Eto grabbed my ankle. I don't know if she recognized me or if it was just unconscious... but after that, for some reason, I couldn't just walk away."
"So you carved off your own flesh to save Eto? You, of all people?"
"Isn't that strange? I think so too~. Maybe even I had a tiny speck of what you called 'human feeling' left in me, Koma-kun~."
"..."
I fell silent.
I'd expected it, but hearing the fact from the person herself left me with complicated feelings.
"...You're still a damn bastard, and I can't just ignore what you've done. But..."
Minami was someone I hated, but I still had to say what needed to be said.
As a parent. As a human being.
"Thank you for saving Eto."
"..."
This time, Minami fell silent.
Her eyes went wide, as if it were the first time in her life she'd ever heard someone thank her.
How long did she stay like that? Before long, she let out a snort of laughter.
"You really are strange. That's why I like you. I was even thinking I might become Eto's new mom."
"Stop. Please."
I begged in the most desperate voice I'd used in a long time.
Minami as Eto's new mom? Just imagining it made my knees go weak. The whole household would be drenched in bloodshed.
"Then I'll be going. Looks like Eto's caught your scent and is coming this way."
"Hey, wait!"
As Minami waved and turned to leave, I tried to stop her.
Whatever had changed inside Minami, she was still far too dangerous to leave alone.
But she waved me off and blocked my attempt. Then she smiled faintly.
"Don't worry~. I don't kill people anymore. Ordinary civilians, anyway~."
"What?"
"Hey, Koma-kun. You said it yourself, didn't you? Humans have empathy, so when they see someone else become unhappy, they feel sad too. Then what about someone who isn't even worth empathizing with?"
The smile Minami wore then was less grotesque than before, but it still carried something that made my skin crawl.
"What are you talking about?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. They're not worth empathizing with. A final-boss-level villain. Someone who drives a lot of people into despair. If you tore open that person's guts and made them scream, wouldn't a lot of people be happy?"
There she goes again, talking about happiness.
But something was different. I didn't understand the meaning of her words, but the happiness she was talking about had a different nuance now.
"A final-boss-level villain? What's that supposed to mean?"
"You know as well as I do that my parents ran a cult. That's why they noticed, and that's why they were wiped out. From a madman's point of view, the world looks different. They probably wanted to shut that useless mouth of theirs."
"Say something I can actually understand! You've been spouting nonsense this whole time!"
Frustrated, I shouted, and in response her voice lost all emotion.
"I'm going to make the one who created the 'cage' unhappy. Then this time, a lot of people will really be happy."
"...A cage?"
What was that? Some kind of code word?
As I tried to decode her riddle-like words, she turned away and said to me, "Oh, right. I got bored earlier, so I dunked a kid in the water and took pictures with that camera~? If you don't want your parents suspecting you, you'd better delete those photos~."
"What the hell did you do, you insane bitch!?!?!?!!!"
Don't put some grotesque photo like that into the memory card meant for family memories!!
Cursing Minami out, I checked the camera's memory.
"...Huh?"
But there was no photo of a kid falling into the water. Instead, I stared in shock at one of the pictures and looked back at Minami.
However, her figure was already nowhere to be found. She'd run off already.
What the hell was that woman...?
As I heard Eto and Hitokawa calling from a distance to ask if I'd found the camera, I looked at the photos again.
"Her photography skills are annoyingly good."
What had been captured there was the three of us—me, Eto, and Hitokawa—playing in the water with happy expressions on our faces.