Chapter Eighty-Two: Rescuing the Hostage

Okamoto Kazuki was dead.

His body was a mangled ruin, no longer even recognizably human, though he had probably felt little pain. Li Daoran’s punch from behind had given him no chance to react at all. It was as if a sledgehammer had smashed into his chest; he was hurled through the air and slammed into a giant tree. Without the protection of armor, a body of flesh and blood could never endure such force. It was like being struck by a speeding heavy truck. He had been pulped on impact, his original form obliterated.

A wave of nausea rose in Li Daoran’s throat. Those who had witnessed the scene of a traffic accident might have described it better, but he forced the instinctive revulsion down.

Clutching the armor Okamoto Kazuki had taken off, he jumped into the deep pit and began washing it.

He washed it with extraordinary care and thoroughness, not neglecting even the narrowest seam. The inside especially he rinsed again and again, scrubbing hard, over and over.

The force in his hands was so great that the armor grew hot, and a faint mist of steam began to rise from it.

“Angry?” Natasha asked.

“No,” Li Daoran answered in a muffled voice.

“You are angry,” Natasha said with certainty.

“I’m not!” Li Daoran suddenly snapped, flinging the armor aside and shouting, then silently bent down, picked it up again, and resumed cleaning it.

“Why are you angry?” Natasha continued, deliberately stirring his emotions.

Li Daoran did not answer.

“Didn’t Okamoto Kazuki deserve to die?” Natasha asked in return.

“He did.” Li Daoran had not forgotten Okamoto Kazuki’s cruelty.

“No. No one deserves to die. It’s only that he posed a danger to you, so he had to die, Daoran,” Natasha said gently.

“He killed people. He deserved to die,” Li Daoran said bitterly.

“You killed people too, Daoran.”

“But the people he killed were innocent students, students with no power to resist.”

“Killing does not distinguish between professions, nor between motives, Daoran. When you killed him, he had no room to resist you either.”

“What exactly are you trying to say?” The violence surging in Li Daoran’s chest was becoming harder to suppress.

“If you kill, then you kill. There is no need to keep turning it over in your heart. You only need to know that what you did was right. Don’t cling to impractical heroism any longer, Daoran. You live in a time of chaos, not on that tranquil blue world of peace and song.

“We do not need you to become some hero of Daoran’s world. Ideally, we would like you to be ruthless and decisive. And yet we also hope you keep the heart of an innocent child, because only then will you not drag that blue world into destruction.”

“But you even deceived me,” Li Daoran said sullenly.

“We didn’t deceive you,” David cut in suddenly. “We never once told you not to kill him.”

“It feels like you’ve all been humoring me like a child. So that innocent heart, huh? In other words, you just want me to stay a kid.” Li Daoran kept rubbing at the battle armor as he spoke.

“Don’t you think you do look rather like a child right now, Daoran?” Chen Ming said with a laugh.

Li Daoran fell silent.

All at once, he felt absurdly immature. He had already killed the man, and yet here he was sulking alone. Wasn’t he, in fact, just waiting for Chen Ming and the others to comfort him?

Waiting for them to tell him he had done the right thing.

Instead, this group had thrown the responsibility right back at him, making it seem as though he himself had insisted on killing Okamoto Kazuki.

“You did very well,” Charles said. “If you had known beforehand that you were going to kill him, you might easily have revealed a flaw. Only if even you believed you were going to let him go would he truly fall for it.”

“Fine, fine, you’re all right.” Li Daoran made a show of sounding relaxed, even chopping the air with one hand. “Don’t worry. It’s only one dead man. I’m not that fragile. I just think he was disgusting, so unless I wash this armor clean, I really won’t dare wear it. Once I’ve scrubbed it spotless, I’ll go kill eighty or a hundred more for you and show you what it means to slaughter without blinking. Hah!”

“You really do understand how to perform for a live audience, Daoran,” David said, laughing loudly.

“Looks like you already know what needs to be done next,” Chen Ming said with a smile as well.

If Li Daoran could work it out for himself, that was best of all. Quite a few excellent soldiers met their true end the moment they first spilled blood. Chen Ming had seen many such people. They had come in as the finest prospects in the army, but once they went to the battlefield and killed someone, their minds broke. Many veteran soldiers suffered from the same postwar psychological wounds. That had been exactly what Chen Ming and the others feared.

Fortunately, after being talked through it, Li Daoran had found his own way out. That was already the best possible outcome.

“Obviously. If I still didn’t get it now, I’d really be an idiot. All I have to do is put on this shit-yellow armor and go in there on a killing spree. At the very least, I’ve read the Three Kingdoms, all right? I may not know the Thirty-Six Stratagems by heart, but I’ve heard them often enough. That’s the quality of a modern college student,” Li Daoran declared grandly.

“Then tell me,” Chen Ming said mercilessly exposing him, “which of the Thirty-Six Stratagems would this be?”

Li Daoran climbed out onto dry ground, opened the exoskeleton armor he was wearing, and sprang into Okamoto Kazuki’s armor.

“This doesn’t match at all. I can’t fit into it. We’re finished, finished. Your plan’s no good. The moment I saw Okamoto Kazuki’s stubby little build, I should’ve guessed. Wearing this is going to be torture,” Li Daoran complained.

The armor was completely the wrong size. From the outside it looked more or less similar to his own, but the internal frame was the problem. The shoulder exoskeleton, for instance, only came down to his upper arms. To get himself inside at all, he had to curl up tightly, folding his whole body together before he could barely manage to sit in it.

Still curled up, Li Daoran sealed the armor and staggered a few crooked steps, muttering, “Good thing I practiced yoga. My bones are soft. Otherwise I’d never have squeezed into this thing.”

After that he hid his own blue-green armor away. At first he moved slowly, but before long he was able to run. It had to be said that Li Daoran’s ability to adapt and learn was truly first-rate. Perhaps that was one of the reasons he had been chosen.

A streak of gold shot toward the research institute.

When it drew near, the soldiers at the institute saw their captain’s armor returning and all breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed their captain had won. One after another, they stepped out from the crowd to welcome their superior. In the Phil Empire, ranks were sharply defined. If they failed to come out and show respect at such a moment, it would count as a breach of military discipline. At the very least they would receive a harsh dressing-down. And for someone like Okamoto Kazuki, a man of low birth, such displays of deference mattered all the more. They were among the few scraps of dignity and vanity he possessed.

The soldiers stood in a row, holstering their guns at their waists, like troops awaiting inspection from a general.

Li Daoran had not expected things to go so smoothly. He had been wondering how he would get through the human wall and make them put away their weapons to avoid unnecessary casualties, but he had never imagined that the military etiquette of the Phil Empire would do him such a tremendous favor.

Not one of these soldiers knew that the one returning was no longer their captain.

Nor had it ever occurred to them that their captain would remove his own armor, because no one abandons his weapon in the middle of a war unless he is surrendering.

So when Li Daoran cut them down with the high-energy dagger while they were saluting him, they did not even make the reflexive motion of drawing their guns. Even as they died, they could not understand why their captain was killing them, and yet they lacked even the instinct, let alone the courage, to resist.

Everything went more smoothly than Li Daoran had imagined. These soldiers offered no resistance at all, and the clean, efficient slaughter only made the people inside the research institute more terrified and numb. This dreadful demon was even murdering his own subordinates.