Chapter 54 Countermeasures

The Room 3 neighbor had given a number, but it was so outlandish that Ma En's shock was tinged with disbelief. Or — was it actually shock? Was he only performing the appearance of shock? He sensed that what he should have felt was not what he actually felt. Underneath the surface reaction, something closer to so that's how it is had settled into place — as though some past situation had just received its explanation, and the number itself, enormous as it was, didn't truly frighten him.

No — he couldn't say there was no fear at all.

It's more like... thoughtfulness?

Ma En noticed he'd slipped into analyzing his own mental state again — the old habit branded into him like muscle memory. Then again, a month wasn't long enough to undo what years had built. Habits weren't dismantled by a change of conviction. He didn't find this surprising; if anything, recognizing it eased the tension that had been climbing in his body.

He tugged at his tie. Was it the thoroughness of his immersion in daily life? He felt that his thinking and his instincts had gone slightly dull over these past weeks.

"How did you arrive at that number?" he asked, after a moment's thought. By all accounts, the man across the hall was a recluse who might not leave his apartment once a month. Establishing a figure that approached half of Bunkyo District's resident population wasn't something you did with a casual survey. Did the man have the time for that kind of investigation? The capacity? The resources?

Ma En knew almost nothing about this neighbor's circumstances. Did he have a job? If so, what? If not, his parents might cover living expenses, but where would operating funds come from? Who did he interact with? How much had his mental state eroded his reasoning? His thinking skewed heavily toward the bleak and the nihilistic; working backward from his earlier performance to assess the reliability of his claims about the ghost story, the credibility wasn't high.

Truthfully, any normal person — even one charitable enough to sit and listen — would never believe a word of this. Was Ma En just humoring the man, or did some part of him actually think these claims were worth taking seriously?

He caught himself: he was inclined to believe. More than inclined.

Because I spent years chasing the bizarre? Even after a month of trying to come back to normal, is the old compulsion still steering me from underneath?

If so, this version of me has no rationality at all — just a man clawing against the current, desperate not to return to ordinary life.

Maybe the past version of himself had been too focused to notice how painful it all was. Looking back now, every single day of that life felt forced — as though he'd been dragging himself through it under compulsion.

Was that really a good way to live? Past-him would have said yes without hesitation. Present-him couldn't see it that way at all.

He pushed his glasses up.

"I have my own channels." The neighbor seemed to have steadied slightly; his speech was fluid again. But the hallway was quiet enough that Ma En could hear, without trying, the wet sound from behind the door — what he'd first taken for dripping water now sounded more like something damp dragging itself across the floor.

The longer he listened, the harder it was to ignore.

"What do you do for a living?" He asked the question while tracking that wet, scraping sound. What had started as a drip was becoming something else — something moist moving against a solid surface.

"Detective." The neighbor named a profession that didn't quite fit the ordinary spectrum.

Ma En had heard that private detectives were common enough in Japan — not just finding missing persons or snapping surveillance photos, but taking on work that arguably belonged to the police. It was difficult to imagine something equivalent in the homeland. The implication, to Ma En, had always been that the Japanese criminal-investigation system and police apparatus had significant structural deficiencies. Logically: wasn't it precisely because the government was insufficient that this profession had room to grow?

Japanese law enforcement lacked investigative capability; the government lacked both the credibility and the apparatus to control and contain information.

Under the Red Party's single-party system, this kind of thing simply didn't happen. Was it the two-party structure that weakened the government's grip? Unable to solve cases, and unable even to regulate private parties solving cases on their behalf — that was the polar opposite of the Red Party's approach.

In a country like this, the slightest tremor could be amplified by human hands into something destabilizing. From that angle, the "100,000" the neighbor had mentioned would carry far more weight here than it ever could in the homeland.

Which meant: supernatural elements or not, whether this was entirely human-caused or something else, caution was essential. Forget 100,000 — even a few hundred or a few thousand, if provoked into reckless action, would create a catastrophe. And anyone caught up in it, even if they survived, would certainly be sacrificed as a scapegoat.

"A detective? Hard to imagine — I heard you don't go out much." Ma En said this even as his thoughts turned.

"For... for certain reasons..." The voice behind the crack grew halting, clearly bothered by this line of questioning.

Even if the man really was a detective, could he truly have investigated his way to a figure of "100,000"? Ma En doubted it. An ordinary detective couldn't manage that — not in years of work. The number was probably inflated by his psychological state, a mind inclined toward dread inflating its estimates. To the man himself, the figure might feel absolutely certain, but it likely rested on intuition more than evidence.

Given the neighbor's condition, Ma En chose not to challenge the number directly.

"If — and I'm saying if — these people really are monsters in disguise, as you claim... when they die, do they revert to their true form?" He steered the conversation in a different direction.

"No. Only... only a human corpse is left... hee hee hee... hhhh..." The voice behind the crack went strange again, laced with sharp, splintering emotion — half laughter, half mockery.

Ma En had the distinct sense that this question had struck something raw. He didn't know which nerve, exactly, but the man was acutely sensitive to the phrase human corpse.

Ma En's eyes went flat and still — like dead water. He found himself wondering, without wanting to: had the man behind this door killed someone? Perhaps not deliberately. Perhaps he'd been provoked, or deluded — convinced someone was a monster, killed them, and then found himself staring at a human body. No evidence supported this; it was pure instinct. And he wasn't going to push further now — the man's reactions were already volatile.

He took out a cigarette, lit it with unhurried hands, drew a few drags, and adopted a tone pitched halfway between gravity and sympathy:

"Human corpses. That's a serious problem. If all 100,000 are monsters, then killing them is one thing. But if what's left behind is 100,000 human corpses... that won't fly anywhere. Someone will be held responsible. This isn't wartime — and even in wartime, massacring 100,000 civilians in a single city is no small matter."

"They're not civilians — they're monsters!" The voice behind the crack was urgent, furious.

"Who knows?"

"I know! And now you know too!"

"You know. I know. But who else? Does the government know? Do ordinary people know? All they'd see is 100,000 human bodies and someone who has to answer for them." Ma En looked steadily into the darkness behind the crack. He couldn't see anything inside, but he knew his gaze — the quality of it — would be perfectly visible to the man on the other side.

Ragged breathing from behind the door. Ma En felt no tension. He suspected the man understood these consequences perfectly well. Even if "100,000" was a fabrication of his troubled mind, even if "they're all monsters" was a kind of psychotic projection, the fact remained that what they'd leave behind were human bodies — and that fact alone was enough to paralyze anyone. Enough to keep a man locked in his room.

This neighbor called himself a detective. When lucid, his reasoning fell within normal bounds. When he wasn't lucid — he might be genuinely dangerous. Ma En thought this, and took another long drag.

"You don't believe me?" The breathing behind the crack had steadied, and the question came exactly as Ma En expected.

"No — I believe you." Ma En lied without a flicker of hesitation, without the slightest psychological cost. "But from where I'm standing, the fact that these monsters leave only human corpses when they die actually makes things simpler. I'd prefer to treat them as human. That's more manageable.

"You may not know this, but for ordinary people, a group of 100,000 might sound terrifying. But as long as they're human, any group has fractures. And I have some experience with dismantling organizations of this scale.

"These 100,000 are spread across Bunkyo District, embedded in every social stratum — correct? But inciting class resentment, manufacturing ethnic friction, playing personal obligations against material interests, severing social bonds — none of these methods are unfamiliar to me. And I can guarantee you: whether this is a cult or something else, as long as they're human, there will be government people embedded among them. As long as they're human, using human methods to dismantle a group of a mere 100,000 isn't particularly difficult."

The voice behind the crack went silent. For what seemed like the first time, the man was genuinely taken aback by something Ma En had said. But after a moment, he spoke again — stubborn, unwavering:

"...But they are not human. Even if they live like humans, even if they seem to have all the conflicts humans have — those conflicts are camouflage. Window dressing. The moment the order comes, they'll shed every pretense and attack like men with nothing to lose."

"Then the question becomes —" Ma En smiled thinly. He raised his cigarette hand, letting the smoke drift across his face and veil it. "Who gives the order?"

"...You see? You've forgotten, haven't you, Ma En-san?" The voice behind the crack let out a clear, mocking laugh. "Matsuzaemon. Ma En-san — do you still remember that name?"

Ma En's smile locked in place.

The sense of control he'd held through the entire conversation — the feeling of leading, of steering — shifted. He didn't recognize the name. But as before, the name, the man who'd spoken it, this hallway — all of it was saturated with an overwhelming familiarity. As though he really had stood in this corridor before, and something exactly like this had already happened.

"...Friend — how long have you been watching me?" He filed the name Matsuzaemon away and redirected.

"Not long... since you... first moved in." The voice behind the crack had gone unsteady again. That wet, creeping sound Ma En had been tracking — the one that had started at floor level — had climbed the walls and reached the ceiling, and now seemed to be spreading deeper into the room. It had a strange quality of motion, organic and slow, but it never sounded farther away from the door.

"Why? Do you watch every tenant who moves into Room 4?"

"Not... not all of them. Ma En-san, you're special. Do you... do you still remember... shlp... Kami — Kamishima Kousuke?" The voice was fracturing now, laced with a wet, popping sound — like a membrane tearing, like fluid bursting from a blister.

"Kamishima Kousuke — of course I remember." Ma En nodded.

"I... I'm a — glrp — detective. I know him." The voice behind the crack had become almost impossible to parse. Ma En strained to catch each word.

"So you don't say these things to every Room 4 tenant?"

"To ordinary people — what would — be the point... they can't... their thinking would — collapse into panic they couldn't —"

"You think I'm not ordinary?"

"Perhaps..."

"But even if I've lost my memory — have you said these things to me before?"

"That's because — as an individual — you had no value."

"And now?"

"Now — I hope — as an individual — you'll have — greater value."

The door slammed shut.

It happened so suddenly that Ma En had no chance to stop it. It didn't feel like rejection — more like the man was hiding from something. Recoiling from something that had entered his range of awareness. Ma En frowned but could only stand.

He was about to step forward and knock when he heard a door open behind him.

He turned.

Hirota Masami was stepping out of Room 6, handbag in hand.