The Crown Prince Who Raises Alt Characters

#Chapter 338 Boss Quan (19) - The True Body and the Clone Even after seeing Qiana get pulled into the giant fragment crystal the instant she touched it, as if being absorbed into it, Quan showed no particular sign of unease. And that didn't change even when he saw the group approaching from the other end of the corridor. He simply stared blankly, puff, puff, blowing smoke rings and watching them. Perhaps because he looked so unhurried, it was the other side that spoke up first. "My, my. Anyone watching would think you were waiting for someone at a meeting spot." A cheerful, friendly voice that instinctively made the listener feel goodwill and vitality. Quan turned his gaze toward the one who'd produced that voice ─ the Management Bureau's Director. "I was waiting for you, sure. Though the problem was you came later than I expected." "I never made an appointment, though?" "You left security wide open just so I'd come bite, didn't you. An unspoken agreement is still an appointment." "That remark just now sounded exactly like a criminal's logic. Like, 'You seduced me first!' That kind of vibe." "Can't deny that I'm a criminal." Quan admitted it without any hesitation. And then, with no warning at all, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he drew a pistol from inside his coat and fired. Bang! Clang! Two kinds of noise rang out. One was the sound of the pistol firing, and the other was the sound of the agent beside the Director blocking it with the shield in her hand. "What amazing marksmanship. Drawing and aiming precisely for my forehead like that. But you know what? Apparently professionals don't actually favor headshots all that much. Something about the skull's curve making the bullet prone to deflecting." "Let me tell you something important. Sometimes in this world, style matters more than efficiency." The conversation that followed was so leisurely it was hard to believe an exchange of gunfire had just taken place moments before. This much could still be chalked up to the two of them simply having odd personalities, but what was stranger still was the reaction of the agents the Director had brought along. Eight of them, in number. Their ages, their genders, even the weapons in their hands all differed, but there was one single thing that was identical: their expressions. A blankness as if their souls had been drained out of them. They lacked any liveliness to the point of evoking dolls or machines rather than mere seasoned soldiers, and because of that, the Director smiling brightly among them looked all the more grotesque. Quan could tell exactly what they were. The Enforcement Unit, one of the Management Bureau's two major armed forces. If the Security Unit, the other armed force, specialized in many-on-many combat through standardization and group tactics, the Enforcement Unit was a small elite group that resolved incidents solo, just as the original Anomaly Slayer once had. And yet, the sight of them all staring at Quan with dead eyes and blank faces was far too eerie to be the Bureau's proud aces. "It's not too late, even now. Mr. Quan. If you formally join the Management Bureau, I'll overlook all the crimes you've committed so far." "At my age, playing dolls just wouldn't do much for my dignity. I'll pass." "Is that so. That's a real shame." Was that the final signal? The eight dolls kicked off the ground all at once. There was no battle cry, no sound of footsteps. Only the tearing crack of air and a bloodthirsty spiritual pressure swept through the room as if carving it out. The man with the metal bat, leading the charge, swung it down from above. And at the very same moment, as if to cut off Quan's escape route, an agent wielding a katana silently slipped into his blind spot and thrust the blade at his throat. A combination attack that perfectly covered each other's openings, truly like a single body moving as one. In response, Quan instead pushed his upper body forward even more boldly, right toward the agent swinging the katana. The bat struck down where Quan's lower body had been just a moment before, and the blade grazed past right beside his neck, slicing off his coat collar, but Quan leaned his body against the katana agent's right upper arm and fired both pistols at the bat agent. Bang-bang-bang!! Bullets bursting out at point-blank range. But the man with the bat was a monster too. The bat, already back in front of his body, deflected the bullets as if it were nothing, while the katana agent pulled away from Quan so as not to become a shield, and as if crossing paths with that, another wave of agents' attacks rushed in at Quan. Bullets densely engraved with all kinds of incantation script on their surface, a black curse so concentrated it held physical force, even a throwing knife painted black so it wouldn't even reflect light. Faced with the absurdity of monsters, each capable of single-handedly crushing an ordinary small-to-mid-sized organization, swarming him as a group, Quan's response was extremely simple. Dodge well, block well, shoot well. That's it. It was a theory that would make any expert furious, asking if he was being made a fool of, but if it could actually be pulled off in reality, then it was no longer mere armchair theory. Clang! The incantation-engraved bullet collided with a bullet fired as if to intercept it, and its trajectory twisted off course. The physically-charged curse had to be absorbed by the katana agent, who'd had her foot stomped on by Quan and had her retreat forcibly cut short, becoming a shield and taking the hit, while the throwing knife was blocked by the body of a pistol. The agents tried to continue their next attack without delay, but at that moment the bat agent, who had been attempting to charge in, had his head snap violently to the side, his body staggering. It wasn't a direct hit — a bullet fired at the wall had ricocheted and struck him square in the temple. Controlling the trajectory of a bullet ricocheting off terrain like a game of billiards is normally treated as an unrealistic tactic, but Quan ran rampant among the agents as if ignoring that common sense entirely. A head was pierced through. A heart was pierced through. A thigh was pierced through. At its worst, an entire limb was blown clean off. About one minute after the battle began. Any member of the Management Bureau who saw the scene unfolding at this site would have doubted their own eyes without exception. Because there, aside from somewhat labored breathing and clothes tattered here and there, stood Quan, having subdued every single agent without so much as a single wound. Amid the eight fallen agents, Quan aimed his gun at the Director, who now stood alone. And before the Director could even get a word out, he pulled the trigger without hesitation. ─Bang!! *** There were people in despair. There were people in agony. Watching them, I felt for them. I wanted to help. 「Oh, ■■■■. Please, save this nation.」 So I answered the royal family's call for me. I fought for the people, threw myself onto the battlefield more recklessly than anyone, gave to the weak, and staked my life for my comrades. And then I was betrayed. The fame I had achieved had, before I knew it, become the royal family's. My devotion had, at some point, transformed into hypocrisy. My achievements had, at some point, come to be known as a con artist's schemes. 「You know that incident that happened in the capital last time? Turns out it was really the prince's doing, but that swindler went around bragging it was his own work!」 「He handed out food in some mountain village, but apparently it was rotten and everyone who ate it got sick!」 「I heard he leaked our own side's information to the enemy to sacrifice them, then staged the whole thing later to pretend he was the one saving everyone.」 Rumors spread. Words echoed. Baseless rumors circulated endlessly. I protested that it wasn't true. ─What came back was contempt, telling me not to spew excuses. I took hold of people and calmly tried to persuade them. ─While I convinced one, hundreds more were taken in by a new lie. I broke down the lies with logic and showed physical proof. ─But people never even tried to properly listen or look in the first place. And then I realized. Humans are, by nature, that kind of being. Truth doesn't matter to them at all; they just want sensational entertainment. A hero's pain or anguish is a matter of complete indifference to them. It's not me who's hurting or suffering, so why should I care about that? They condemn irresponsibly, mock irresponsibly, and when held accountable for it, they hide behind the shield of majority public opinion. So they all need to be killed. No, killing isn't even enough. They must be tormented, and tormented, and tormented. In a world where the lies and baseless rumors they love so much become the truth. May they themselves suffer for all eternity from the lies they themselves created. So, hurry, quickly─ "…Shut up." Qiana forcibly cut off the stream of thoughts that had been continuing. And as if to affirm herself, she spoke as though spitting the words out through gritted teeth. "What is this, going on about royalty and heroes and revenge out of nowhere. Don't shove weird stuff into my head." This memory isn't hers. This experience isn't hers. This emotion isn't hers. With every repetition of that thought, Qiana's existence grew more solid. Beautiful silver hair and silver-gray eyes. An appearance so intensely artificial it seemed deliberately carved by someone, and yet beautiful with no trace of the uncanny valley. And the more firmly she affirmed her sense of self, the more the surrounding scenery began to crumble, as if in inverse proportion. The burning royal palace, the final screaming moments of the traitors — all of it dried up and crumbled away like sand. And what appeared behind the collapsed scenery was a massive cavity made of blood and flesh. The ground rose and fell, radiating a lukewarm body heat. Beyond the walls, blue and blackish-red blood vessels flickered into view and vanished, over and over. The ceiling pulsed at regular intervals, as if it were a beating heart. "What is this." Qiana clicked her tongue at the sight, as if disgusted. What irritated her most of all was that this sight felt intensely familiar to her. As if she had returned to her homeland. Irritation surged just from the comparison she'd conjured up herself, and Qiana strode forward down the path without even realizing how heavy her footsteps had become. Through the translucent pink walls, it wasn't just blood vessels that were visible — new scenes kept surfacing and vanishing, over and over. A scene of a woman in a red mask with a torn mouth, grabbing a person's mouth top and bottom and tearing it open the same way. A scene of a water ghost dwelling in a reservoir, seizing the ankle of a drowning victim and dragging them down to drown them. A scene of a grotesque yokai, its form as if human and centipede had been mixed together, devouring a hiker alive. There was despair with no possible escape, trapped in an isolated place. There was anguish over not knowing what was true amid mutually contradictory, malicious instructions. There was terror at having no choice but to watch one's own existence being replaced by something else. The anomalies that mainly inflicted physical harm had vivid, sharply colored footage and violent activity, while the conceptual, logic-based anomalies had comparatively dull, muted colors and quieter movements — but even so, the footage never stopped. Through intuitive sensation rather than logic, Qiana understood. This place, this very existence itself, was both the starting point and the destination of all anomalies. Every anomaly was ultimately this being's clone, its flesh and blood, its child, and its very self, all at once. Qiana knew exactly what to call such a thing. "─A god. The god of anomalies. The god of this world. Loathing humanity, hating humanity, and having sealed itself away in a dream just so that even the fading of that loathing and hatred would never be permitted — our parent." A voice came from behind her, as if speaking Qiana's own thoughts in her place. Qiana spun around reflexively and soon caught her breath. Beautiful silver hair, silver-gray eyes gleaming seductively. A finely crafted appearance meant to lower those around it into lowering their guard, to make predation all the easier. "…Queen." At Qiana's words, Queen, who wore Qiana's exact same face, curled up the corner of her mouth. "It's quite amusing that you call me that. You're a 'Queen' too, aren't you." "I don't care about wordplay like that." Qiana said, openly baring her wariness. "Did you drag me here?" "'Dragged you in' is a somewhat inaccurate way to put it. This isn't a physical space to begin with. It's merely a visualization of the image you felt toward our parent, put into an easy-to-understand form. If anything, it's closer to a nightmare." Unlike the past, when the boundary between dream and reality could be broken down freely, Queen explained that things didn't work that way anymore now. "This too is all the work of a stray cat who snuck into someone else's house without permission. Such a nuisance, really." Qiana frowned. Because in every single remark the other made, she could sense that Queen knew far more than she herself did. It wasn't as if the fact that Qiana herself only held a portion of the fragments, and thus hadn't inherited all of the 'original's' knowledge, had nothing to do with it — but it felt like there was a more fundamental reason than that. But as if refusing to give Qiana the chance to ponder that, Queen held out one hand. It was a gesture as if offering a handshake, but Qiana instinctively put distance between them. Queen giggled. "Why are you so on guard? Weren't you here to absorb me?" She had meant to absorb her. A mass of power and information, sealed away by the Management Bureau, with no self or consciousness of its own. But not anymore. The fragments Qiana held amounted to, at most, a little over a tenth. Since the operation had been carried out with some fragments deliberately left behind in order to catch the Bureau off guard, the Queen before her eyes didn't hold all of the remaining fragments either. But even accounting for that, it was still more than eighty percent. If the opponent had no will of its own, that would be one thing, but with a clear self present, the risk of being absorbed herself, rather than absorbing, was far higher. "Ah, that? Doesn't matter. I'll let myself be absorbed quietly." And Queen laughed, dismissing Qiana's concern as if it were nothing at all. "I told you. You and I are both Queen in the end. There's nothing more ridiculous than the right hand and the left hand competing over which one's stronger, is there? In the end, they're both just parts of the same body." Something like the upper hand had no meaning. The continuation of her own self held no interest either. "I just need to be able to torment and punish humans." That she wished for nothing but that — so Queen sang. A figure who calmly cast aside even herself for a greater cause… put that way, it might sound admirable, but to Qiana's eyes, this wasn't anything so noble. Not only was the thing she wanted badly enough to go this far merely 'tormenting humans,' but there was a more fundamental issue with the will behind it. If Queen herself harbored some immense grudge against humanity, if there were a vengeance she wanted to accomplish even at the cost of discarding herself, that would be one thing — but this wasn't that. It was simply all there was, and nothing more. Just following, as is, the will of the parent, the True Body, the one who had given birth to her. Disgusted by that, ashamed that she herself had once been the same way, Qiana roughly slapped Queen's hand away. "I don't need that. No, even if I were to have it, I'd gain it by my own strength — I won't take it like this." Queen looked at her own hand, knocked away, with a strange expression. "Is that so? But that man you're with is similar to me too, you know?" "What?" Unable to make sense of the sudden remark, Qiana furrowed her brow. Toward that Qiana, Queen — Or perhaps...The god that lay beyond Queen, spoke. "─That man too is nothing but a clone with a True Body of his own elsewhere."