Part 4
My heart could not decide if it wanted to race or stop fully as the bus was doing in order to pick up more passengers.
Breathe.
The bus was more crowded than I assumed it would be due to it not being a weekday and all, but I guess even in smaller cities people go around and have fun. They didn't consider the risk of being inside a vehicle that would blow up and kill them all due to a sudden terrorist attack; not everyone is like Akane.
Looking at the window I watched both the inside and outside of the car for movement while the back door released a bickering couple who would probably get closer if they realized they averted a disaster if I failed to stop the bomber and the front door welcomed anyone who would walk in join those who died in the first timeline and were still at risk in this one.
Of those waiting for a bus I saw some making room for a soon-to-be passenger and the moment I heard the door close I knew there was no coming back.
Breathe.
I recognized the only person who got in the bus within milliseconds despite the trucker hat, jeans jacket and hiker backpack (which I could only assume was her definition of discrete disguise) because it was the one who hated me the most. Lang Shou seemed considerably more than just slightly distressed when she saw me looking at her while dressed in drag. I too was shaken up inside as it was the usual whenever I saw her, which I hadn’t in a while.
Her right eye twitched.
“Pervert!”
She said in Cantonese, and if I knew her it was probably only to scan if there were any speakers of the language in the bus; if that was the case, they’d probably just start screaming or tackle me. Yes, because of that and not because I was cross-dressing on a bus.
Nothing happened, so I did the obvious.
“Pervert!” I replied to her enthusiastically as if the word was a greeting, and then thought about what addendum in Japanese I’d have to put together with that to make it convincing enough. “It’s nice to see you again, Lang Shou.”
While her face was clearly a painting of annoyance, the fact she sit down by my side when there were other free places in the bus finished the job of reassuring the passengers that we were the right sort of acquaintances.
Even though we were not.
“…how did you know?”
“I have my sources. You seem to be everyone else’s.”
On usual situations I would not be so harsh with her but I was seriously ticked off by the result of her actions.
“There’s nothing wrong with what I do, just means to an end.”
Irresponsible brat.
“I hope you meant Death Drive’s, because your plan only led to him passing away.”
“Wouldn’t expect less of you.” Did my best to keep myself from showing emotions when she said that, can’t tell if I succeeded. “But I guess he was pretty useless, failing like that despite being a little more than mildly famous.”
“You really don’t know anything about this business: an assassin’s job is to be concealed, so whenever someone’s name is out there for people like you to hear it means he might be a good killer but a lousy professional.”
Scorn was shining clear as day on her face.
“You’d know, wouldn’t you? Murderer.”
“…”
There wasn’t much I could say in reply to that.
“What’s the matter, murderer? Is it bad that I call you that, murderer?”
“…stop.”
“Or what, will you kill me too?”
“…”
“Oh, the little murderer got depressed, boo hoo.” It was not a very big step, from tomboy to bully. “Don’t give me those sad puppy eyes. Even now, you still look like a Shih Tzu dog.”
Oh, this sure brings back memories: so that’s where I got the nickname from, then. Not that I’ll ever correct the mistake, would be kind of embarrassing after all. I’ll remain using the ‘Shin-tsu, out of two of the same kanji’ excuse. Better than letting it be known so Kouma can refer to me as ‘Puppy-kun’.
I had more urgent topics to address, too.
“So at the end of the day you’d kill yourself to divert the paramedics’ attention but not explode now that you’re here with me? When you could hurt me and me alone?”
“Hurt you? By killing you? Even now you try to trick me, you lying demon? I know very well that would be bliss, especially compared to what you did to me. You don’t deserve that: I’ll take it out on the ones near you until you are a walking pile of nerves surrounded by corpses you watched growing cold. I will break your mind and heart and I won’t lay a finger on you to kill because I want you to do it yourself to atone for what you did. It will never be enough, the suffering. Whatever you build, I’ll crush it. Forever and always, until you finish what you started and kill me or decide to suicide. Just be aware of this: as long as I am alive you don’t get to live a happy life after what you’ve done, and I’ll make sure of that.”
That was when I approached her, hugged her tight and released hot breath down her neck to make her shiver, with a superior level of success than I expected to achieve. It was obvious to me she was almost melting as experience dictated. Good to know some things never change.
I held her hand and rested my forehead against hers, looking the girl in the eyes.
“Lang Shou, I am sorry. I can’t take back what I did and God knows I would if I could but you need to realize you won’t gain anything from doing this. This isn’t you, so stop while you can. Please. I don’t want you to suffer a second longer.” My hands ran down her backpack but still delivered the pressure to her body like I wanted them to. Her shivers were strong enough to make me wonder if I had done something to give her a seizure. “I care about you. Either go back to China to your parents or stay here with me; things are never going to be the same, but I can give you a place you can call ‘home’. I am still your friend.”
Furious, she pushed me away, slapped me and got up but didn’t leave before delivering a dramatic one-liner.
“I hate you.”
Not surprised: it was the second time I heard that one on that day and she made sure to say it in Japanese before storming off the bus the moment it stopped, but at the very least I did not end up receiving the mother of all beatings from a visually warped version of her in dreamland. Either way, I already had gotten what I needed to.
Personally, I hated pickpocketing. It wasn’t as thrilling as some might assume it could be, because it was more a case of ‘either you know the trick or not’; no room for cunning talk or similar when it comes to the actual thing, just before and after and it kind of beat the point of going unnoticed. It was no fun but as any adult can tell you, life is not always doing what you like to do.
So I stole both the bomb and the detonator from her backpack and now I had to disassemble the bomb before she could realize I did it because she could notice they were missing and try to meet me on the next stop.
Frankly, that was the easier part of the day: Lang Shou was an amateur whose only talent seemed to be getting into trouble still. Her bomb was pretty crude looking (which helped me because anyone who saw it would dismiss it as a toy and not panic) and was built quite poorly on top of that. The detonator was short distance-only and unrelated to the bomb, which would go off around two stops from where she dropped, so one possibility is that she would have tried to blow somewhere else up just in case if I hadn’t been a dirty thief and taken both the red herring detonator and the silly-looking bomb. I have to grant her that she did better than usual in that particular aspect but I could only guess whether it was because she wanted to go down along with everyone or the limit of her design and engineering skills: for all I knew she could have mixed two projects she got in books up.
Upon the realization I wasn’t even followed back home I felt lie I could no longer hide my disappointment and let the post-traumatic stress kick in. I wanted to feel despair and rage and get the overwhelming, exhilarating depression out of my mind even if
it meant crying and throwing up for days until I got hallucinations due to the deprivation of water and nutrients. I needed to scream at the heart of the world because I could tell I had it in me.
It never came despite the copious amounts of build-up.
Like every single thing that ever happened, the events of that day were ‘proven’ anti-climatic and dull when the hindsight bias was applied; the Historian’s Fallacy made everything obvious and absolutely ridiculous to say the least, and to pinpoint the truth by hypothesizing after the results were known was nearly impossible because most things aside, the simple presence of time travel in a case blurs the lines between cause and effect beyond recognition. Still, one could say that above ‘good’ or ‘bad’, Kouma did ‘right’: the definition of the latter being up to debate. Now, Lang Shou…
...she killed me inside a little more.
It was like a bad joke; to think someone so incapable and inexperienced was willing to try and cause so much damage to so many over nothing, or at the very least nothing that had to do anything with them.
It was a bad joke because it was the exact same with me.
The news reports a week from that day were still all about how a high school girl from a small-to-medium sized town saved her teacher’s life using only a mobile phone with internet access and a handbag’s contents, and it didn’t take them long to dig her up and realize she was the same child prodigy who won some art prizes a few years ago. Instant sub-celebrity; blogs spawned; people would talk to her whenever she walked down the street.
The biggest hospital in the nearby city, where Reikoku-sensei was immediately admitted to and is being kept until she wakes up from her comatose state, even offered Kouma a fully paid scholarship on a college above average and future internship may she choose Medicine as her career. I immediately assumed she was going to accept it for all the wrong reasons, and I could not blame her for that because I could easily see myself doing the same.
That maiden was too a knight and she was 『Ryo’s』.