Chapter 192
Chapter 192
Tail Feathers (1)
As I was beating the knights with great enthusiasm, the sun began to set. Kairus beat down the knights who had once surrendered and then rekindled their will to resist, striking them in a jazz rhythm.
After that truly swing-like time came to an end, Kairus was able to secure the tail feathers.
“Make sure you recuperate well. I didn’t turn you into a cripple.”
Kairus tossed a dry word of consolation to Gemini. He wouldn’t become a cripple.
But the current state of his battered face seemed to testify to the harsh time he had endured.
“You should say thank you, right?”
“Th… thank you.”
Violence subdues a person, and fear keeps that submission in place. Gemini had completely lost his hostility.
‘In just a moment.’
Gemini’s gaze briefly swept over the battlefield where Kairus and Dorothy had fought just moments ago, and his body trembled in fear.
The destruction had ended, but its traces remained. Just as a wound left a scar even after it healed.
If he had been caught up in that, not only Gemini but everyone present here would have been crushed to pieces without even managing to resist.
‘He was just playing around.’
The dozens of knights who had desperately tried to block Kairus’s charge in order to seize an opportunity for a counterattack—whatever the case, they had thought they were at least having something resembling a fight with Kairus.
But Kairus had merely been playing along to their rhythm.
“I guess I was the only one who was serious?” wasn’t quite the right phrase for a time like this, yet it also felt fitting.
“Take care, all of you. I hope we never see each other again.”
With those final words, Kairus rose into the air with the sound of turbines, then shot away with a thunderous roar. Gemini and the other knights could only stare blankly up at the sky.
“This is tricky.”
Having obtained the item he had aimed for, Kairus experimented with various things in the sky, using the output of Veil of Plumed Mist.
The translucent plate, which could change shape according to his will, could prove to be a great help.
But for now…
“Just flying around is more helpful?!”
It was simpler to make use of only the propulsion force generated by Veil of Plumed Mist. His method of flight up until now could be expressed in a single sentence.
[Emit pushing force and fly through the sky.]
It was that intuitive.
However, when he tried to make use of the tail feathers, that intuitive flight began to require judgment and understanding. And…
‘There was a training method related to it in the Training Compendium.’
Among the methods for cultivating Moonwalk, there had been a way recorded that utilized the tail feathers.
‘Flying a kite.’
The training method was simple. In this situation, he stopped the flight of Veil of Plumed Mist.
Then, using the plate generated by the tail feathers, he glided.
“It’s not breaking the sound barrier, though.”
Still, by rough estimation, he was gliding at a speed exceeding 200 kilometers per hour.
“Ugh… ah?!”
At the moment I realized it, Kairus was swept up in the airflow drifting through the empty sky and plunged straight down. The sound of turbines roared out, and as he fell, he barely managed to stop himself.
“Th-this thing’s going to kill me.”
It felt as though every hair on his body was standing on end. But he couldn’t stop here.
‘I have to refine the shape.’
If he could achieve efficient gliding, he would be able to overcome the one factor that consumed the largest portion of output in his flight using Veil of Plumed Mist.
‘Gravity.’
The ground pulled at Kairus. And a considerable portion of Veil of Plumed Mist’s output was being spent resisting the force with which the earth dragged him down.
If he could properly utilize the tail feathers, that consumption would decrease dramatically.
“I have to succeed, no matter what.”
Through extensive experience, he had to determine what shape to refine the tail feathers into under which circumstances, and repeat it countless times until he could execute it almost on the level of instinct.
The flight continued. How the air flowing along the tail feathers functioned, which forms of air wandering through this empty sky were dangerous, and which could be used to his advantage.
“You’re back?”
After repeating his practice, Kairus arrived at Bennett City and returned to his office, which was called the Nest.
“Ah! My snacks!”
Without hesitation, Kairus drank water and devoured the snacks Nora had stocked on the shelf. Sugar and water coursed through his exhausted body.
Rather than a meal, it felt like shoveling coal into a locomotive.
“You won’t be seeing much of me for a while.”
At Kairus’s declaration, Irena quietly looked at him.
“What are you trying to do now?”
“Training.”
Upon hearing his answer, Irena let out an exasperated sigh.
“I had a feeling this would happen from the moment we got that book.”
The Training Compendium was a book that contained all kinds of training methods. Kairus hadn’t secured it just to quietly store it on a bookshelf.
“You’ve got plenty to do as well, don’t you?”
“That’s true.”
Kairus was making use of the Training Compendium, but the same went for Irena. She, too, had plenty of training methods she wanted to try.
“So unni and oppa are both going to be busy for a while? You’re not planning to stir up trouble, right?”
Having overcome the sorrow of all her snacks disappearing, Nora asked Kairus and Irena as if to confirm.
“Right.”
For the time being, he had no intention of causing any incidents. Kairus planned to spend his time becoming accustomed to using the tail feathers and attempting what was recorded in the Training Compendium.
“Then maybe I can step away for a bit too.”
“And why would you?”
At Kairus’s question, Nora answered.
“Additional procedure and training. The boss suggested it.”
At those words, Kairus looked at Nora.
“You’re an agent. That means Lunaseeker’s procedure has already been completed.”
At Kairus’s remark, Nora wiggled her index finger as she replied.
“Completion and perfection are different.”
Kairus, who had completed Swift Blade, understood exactly what that meant.
“Clean it up once, stabilize it… and add a few things.”
It was already a successful procedure. Even if they made additional adjustments, it wasn’t as though Nora would suddenly gag and die.
“It doesn’t sound like that’s all, though.”
At Kairus’s remark, Nora replied with a smile she hadn’t worn in a while—clearly feigned.
“That’s right. My lover’s waiting for me. He’s the second son of a conglomerate family in the Republic, and we were childhood friends who went to school together.”
There was no way the second son of a conglomerate family would have attended the same school as Nora. If he were truly from such a family, he would have gone to a private academy where tuition cost tens of millions of drem per semester.
No—more than that, as someone trained from the start as a Lunaseeker agent, there was no way she would have attended school in the first place.
It was nonsense. In other words, don’t ask because she couldn’t tell.
“Sure. I hope when you come back, there’s new life growing in your belly.”
Since Nora had spouted nonsense, Kairus responded with nonsense of his own.
“Impossible. We truly love each other, but we’re the same gender. We’re planning to adopt.”
Having escalated the absurdity even further, Nora finished her farewell and left the office.
“She never lets a single word slide.”
After muttering toward the closed door, Kairus took a deep breath.
“You take care too.”
“Same to you.”
Kairus and Irena exchanged a brief farewell as well. Then Kairus rose into the sky once more.
Until he was satisfied, there would be almost no time spent stopping his flight and setting foot on the ground.
‘If it’s come to this, I’ll see it through to the end.’
After that, the amount of time Kairus’s feet touched the ground did not exceed two hours a day. This continued until he was satisfied.
And in Bennett City, a newly settled tumor was slowly growing like a virulent poison burrowing into the bloodstream.
“Three hundred seventy-eighth experiment.”
Inside the basement, Melvin Istovan continued his research.
Powders. Sugar-coated pills. Troches. Effervescent tablets. Intravenous injections. Arterial injections. Intramuscular injections. Suppositories. IV fluids.
Drugs of every form were being administered into the human body in every method and dosage imaginable. The person in a coma could not resist and continued to receive the substances invading their body.
The blasphemous experiments were being conducted on the homeless who overflowed throughout the city.
A long steel needle stabbed beneath the eyelid and drove in, crushing the frontal lobe. Using a chisel and hammer was basic literacy for an archaeologist, so it wasn’t difficult.
Sex, age, weight and height, the presence or absence of chronic illness, blood type… countless data points accumulated over time as information, stacking neatly inside Melvin’s notebook.
“It’s possible. Not the result I wanted, but still.”
A body that had fallen into a trance state could not resist psychotropic drugs.
Amid extreme fatigue, as the brain absorbed countless drugs, the needle of the gramophone playing in the basement tormented the record, spitting out the Wedding March.
He succeeded in implanting a very simple command into the mind.
Music and action. Upon hearing a specific song, the subject would fall into frenzy, hallucination, and terror, attacking everything around them.
For now, this level of achievement was all he had. But like wine aging, the blood that had flowed across this basement floor was certainly maturing diligently toward some kind of result.
“As long as there’s a result, that’s enough. Heh, yes. A result.”
Melvin wasn’t expecting to be satisfied in a single step. What mattered was that there was something to show to others.
How many madmen were there in this city?
And among them, how many had fled while being chased by public authority after researching the human body through methods that crossed the line?
Mad people were like magnets—they attracted other mad people.
Among them, Melvin could be called an especially powerful magnet that drew in the truly insane.
‘I know which ones will take interest.’
Melvin had already achieved a certain degree of success as an architect. He had succeeded in building his own network. Among them was one who had slit open a living person’s abdomen just to check the condition of fresher intestines.
There was a nurse who found the sight of drugged children beautiful and injected more drugs than necessary.
There was a psychologist who had wagged his three-inch tongue until a father came to believe he himself had been raped as a child.
“Shining people.”
They ran purely toward their own desires. Without hypocrisy or lies, unafraid of the public gaze. People who shone in truly beautiful colors in order to seize what they wanted.
Well, that was how they looked through Melvin’s eyes.
What he sought to demonstrate through countless experiments was possibility.
That something like this might be possible. That if proper measures were taken with someone in a trance state, they might be controllable.
It was a simple achievement, but whether that achievement existed or not—
would determine whether Melvin could draw these shining people to him or not.
“So.”
Melvin gently stroked the cheek of the person sleeping as though dead, as if he found them lovely. This was the product he had created.
Something that others could also find convincing.
“The beginning of all great things is insignificant. Yes, but in the end…”
Great things reveal their greatness.
The automobile was like that. Vaccines were like that. Awkward inventions that looked unimpressive and whose usefulness was doubtful.
Through the hands of the talented who could read the possibility within them, they finally revealed their true form.
It was not that one carved a sculpture from marble, but that the sculpture had always been trapped inside the marble.
In overwhelming elation, Melvin wrote letters as if intoxicated.
It had to proceed in secrecy. His attempts were not free from public criticism.
He did not yet possess the power and authority to silence that criticism. But…
“Soon, everyone will know.”
Melvin Istovan, the great museum director standing tall in Bennett City!
Though his research had already strayed far from archaeology, such things no longer mattered to Melvin.
In the end, all of this was a process by which someone who truly understood archaeological value would come to embrace the great footsteps of humanity.