Chương 14: Hero or Butcher?

USHIWAKA did not stop. Landing dead center on an enemy vessel, he swept his plasma blade through the surrounding soldiers as if mowing down common weeds. Shrieks. Death rattles. Amid the downpour of fresh blood, USHIWAKA's matte-black armor repelled the crimson spray, gleaming with an eerie, predatory luster. The nightmare truly began after that. A Minamoto soldier, isolated and pinned down by a fierce Taira counterattack, desperately called out to the android for salvation.

"L-Lord Yoshitsune! Save u—!" CRACK! A dull, sickening impact echoed across the water. USHIWAKA had unleashed a thruster-accelerated kick, sending the very soldier begging for his life flying through the air. The man soared like a broken ragdoll before plunging into the churning sea.

"Wait... what?" I couldn't believe my own eyes. He just kicked him. An ally? [In the way.] USHIWAKA's cold, mechanical voice drifted over the wind. [Do not stand in the line of fire. You disrupt my calculations.] He didn't waste a single millisecond looking down at the drowning man. Instead, using a nearby Minamoto skiff as nothing more than a springboard, he stomped down with a localized gravity wave to accelerate his next leap.

With a violent splintering shriek, the small boat shattered into tinder, throwing the remaining Minamoto soldiers mercilessly into the freezing currents.

"What the hell are you doing?!" I screamed at the top of my lungs, entirely forgetting my own safety.

"They're on your side! Aren't you supposed to be fighting to save them?!" [Gennai, status report,] USHIWAKA commanded over the comms, treating my frantic shouts as nothing more than background static. [Current enemy eradication rate: 18%. Slow. Inefficient.... Increasing gravitational output. I will crush them along with their vessels.] [Whoa, whoa, hold on a second, USHIWAKA!] Gennai's voice finally cracked with panic. [If you redline the output now, you're gonna overheat! Besides, our own guys are tangled up in that mess!] [Irrelevant. The victory condition is the total eradication of the Taira. No other variables will be considered.] USHIWAKA soared into the sky. With him at the epicenter, a gravitational field manifested, powerful enough to visibly distort the fabric of space. The sea swelled upward. Undifferentiated by friend or foe, the surrounding fleet was dragged toward him, sucked inward like debris spiraling into a localized black hole.

Ships violently collided, imploding into clouds of splintered timber. And at the center of it all, the black android simply continued to swing his blade, a perfectly clockwork executioner.

"... No," I muttered, fighting back the bile rising in my throat. Images of the Yoshitsune I had read about in the Gikeiki and The Tale of the Heike flashed through my mind. Yes, the historical Yoshitsune was a military genius. He completely shattered his enemies with erratic, unpredictable tactics. But he was never... a cold, unfeeling machine. He was supposed to be hot-headed, reckless, and fiercely loyal to his men.

What about the legends of him weeping openly, completely unconcerned with his dignity as a commander, when his loyal retainers Benkei and Sato Tsugunobu died in battle? The thing in the sky right now had no soul. It was a glitched program, blindly executing a single command fed into it by Naonaosu Yora: [Victory]. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Don't you dare call that thing a hero of Japan.

"Hey, apprentice strategist!" The bearded commander beside me grabbed my shoulder, his face completely bloodless.

"That... that thing is going to slaughter us along with the enemy! We'll be wiped out if we stay here!"

"…!" In that split second, I felt USHIWAKA's gaze lock onto us. His crimson visor flared with an ominous light. His next target—his next springboard—was our ship. He intended to flatten this vessel, currently locked in close combat with a Taira galley, under a massive gravitational press. Enemy and ally alike. I had to run. I was going to die. I'd be crushed to death as collateral damage. My legs shook violently. My stomach burned. Every single atom of my being wanted to flee back to the safety of my 2300 AD couch.

And yet.

"An adult is nothing more than a youth who has been betrayed." Osamu Dazai's words suddenly echoed through the database of my mind. Once upon a time, I was the boy shivering in the corner of a classroom. Nobody came to save me. And right now, right in front of me, these Minamoto soldiers fighting for their lives were about to be trampled by an absurd, unreasoning power—just like I was back then. Was I really just going to watch?

Was I going to excuse this atrocity by telling myself it was "for the sake of history correction"?

"... Don't give me that crap." I slapped my trembling knees. Reaching into my pocket, I tightly gripped the glass bottle of my antacids. I could hear the glass groan under the pressure.

"Gennai! Open a channel!" I roared. [Huh?! What the hell are you planning, brother?!]"I'm going to teach that absolute idiot what a real narrative is! That thing isn't Yoshitsune! It's just a glorified murder bot!" I dashed toward the very edge of the deck. Facing the terminal gravity descending from the heavens, I tore open my throat and let out a scream from the absolute depths of my soul.

"STOP RIGHT THERE, YOU MORON!!!" Miraculously, my scream cut clean through the thunderous roar of the Dan-no-ura battlefield. To be precise, Gennai had detected a massive anomaly in my brainwaves and forcibly hijacked USHIWAKA's auditory sensors, broadcasting my voice in a forced-amplification mode. High above the sea, the black reaper froze dead in his tracks. Suspended in mid-air by his gravity matrix, USHIWAKA slowly rotated his head.

The crimson visor focused entirely on me, shivering at the edge of the wooden deck. [... Identify yourself.] The synthesized voice was completely devoid of human inflection. [Identification code: Kataru Kataribe. Narrative Specialist.... In the way. Vacate the line of fire.] USHIWAKA raised his right hand. Gravitational waves began to condense into the palm of his gauntlet. He intended to "delete" me. A sharp gasp caught in my throat. My knees threatened to buckle.

The sheer agonizing pain in my stomach made me want to curl into a ball and weep right there on the blood-soaked wood. My opponent was a state-of-the-art military android. There was absolutely no statistical way to win.

"S-Stop it...! Don't kill your own men!" I shouted, my voice cracking under the pressure. [Men? Ally?] USHIWAKA tilted his helmet slightly. [Your definition is flawed. They are not 'Minamoto soldiers.' They are indeterminate variables. Noise. Meat tissue that cannot match my operational velocity, blocking my line of fire, and serving as nothing more than shields for the enemy.... For the sake of victory, efficient deletion is the optimal solution.]"Deletion...?"

The moment that word hit my eardrums, something snapped cleanly inside my brain. —You're just noise, Kataru. —You're ruining the atmosphere of the classroom. Why don't you just disappear? A violent flashback. The faded, indelible memories of my teenage hell. The corner of the classroom. The freezing touch of the linoleum floor. The dirty water wrung from a filthy rag poured over my head. And the eyes of my classmates, looking down at me with mocking laughter. To them, I wasn't a human being.

I was an anomaly, a sacrificial lamb to keep the system of the classroom running smoothly. I was "noise" to be eliminated. The horror unfolding before me overlapped perfectly with that distant classroom. The terrified, despairing faces of the soldiers about to be cast into the ocean by USHIWAKA's gravity... they were me. Those with power trampling those without, all in the name of "efficiency" and "the atmosphere."

Even after seventeen hundred years, did humanity—no, did even an android—have to repeat the exact same cycle?

"... Don't give me that corporate crap." The paralyzing terror inside me was violently rewritten by a pitch-black, suffocating rage. The burning ache in my stomach coalesced into a blazing, solid mass. [Warning. If you do not vacate the area, forced elimination will commence.] USHIWAKA's palm ignited with a blinding light. The unmistakable aura of death. Yet, standing on that deck, there was something I found far more unacceptable than dying.

"I SAID, DON'T GIVE ME THAT CRAP!!!" I ripped the bottle of antacids from my coat and slammed it with everything I had against the wooden deck. The sharp, crystal-clear sound of shattering glass rang out across the sea, echoing with a strange, defiant clarity.