The One Who Saw Evil

I left her tiny apartment, just like every night these past few days. The air outside was chilly, and it poured into the house rather quickly. Nobody came to close the door behind me, so I had to do it myself.

She had a beautiful name—a name that I shall not speak ever again. No, it was a name that had already left my mind, for once a target had been dealt with, there was no reason for me to remember their name.

I pulled on the doorknob, but my hand wouldn't stop trembling.

"That's weird," I whispered to myself. I'd been in this line of work for as long as I could remember, yet seeing the stains on the floor made my hair stand on its end.

"Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil." 

In itself, that philosophy was deeply rooted in the rules that governed our country. "Mizaru, Kikazaru, and Iwazaru" is what we called those three rules. Those were the rules set in place to protect our peace, and it was murderers like me—tasked with protecting peace—who had to take care of those who didn't respect those rules.

They say it was a curse from Tyrant—the king who ruled the entire world. They've taught us it was a curse he himself had bestowed upon Japan. 

"Whoever breaks those rules is doomed to become a monster of their own creation."

It was true in her case, too. She was doomed to become one of them, because she had acted on the evil she had been seeing.

"She's seen evil. I had to take care of her before she turned," I repeated to myself, it had been a while since I last felt guilt.

 I felt my heart growing weak, so I wiped away the red stains on my knife and went down the stairs.

I found it funny that such a philosophy never spoke about doing no evil. When I dared to ask why, I was punished with no food for three days for thinking "for myself." The only answer Mother gave me was that Sezaru sounded weird.

Focus! I repeated in my head. My mind kept drifting back to her. I forgot her name in an instant, and her face should have followed, but that didn't happen. The mission had been particularly long, so I had probably grown attached to the target.

"She'd seen evil and told the world. What's so wrong about it?"

*Smack*

I slapped myself. I had grown weak. If I paid any more attention to the evil, the curse would have started taking me over.

With a slow flick of the wrist, my watch's screen lit up, and I pressed on a small green check mark. Another target had been taken care of.

Infiltrate, seduce, kill. It was a simple procedure, especially when the target was a woman who had never gotten a taste of being loved. The evil she'd seen gave her a voice to speak out, and speaking out gave her political power, yet her days as a human remained numbered.

It took me a whole month to get her to trust me. From there things moved swiftly, and I was in her room in no less than a week. At first we'd played cards the whole night, the next visit was movies, and she gave herself to me on the third night. That was also the night when I killed her.

"I... I think I love you..." her voice still rang in my ears. I had to put an end to it before she could ask me anything heavy. "Please..." was the last word she spoke.

Her eyes still held a faint glow. She still had time. It's only when that glow disappears, and the small shadow in your eye grows to make your iris completely black, that you stop being human.

"No... It's better to end it early," I told myself, trying my best to forget that sloppy mission. It was unlike me to care so much about a target.

"Truly, a sloppy mission..."

As if to confirm my words, loud bangs came from the apartment I'd left behind. I turned back to look at the building, and what I saw made my heart shrink.

I had failed. She'd been forsaken by Mizaru, she had become a mimono—a blind, rampaging monster.

She had grown two more arms to cover her eyes. The other two arms were meant to grab me, the first person she'd had her screams bounce off of and back to herself, just like a bat on the hunt.

That's how a mimono hunts. It can't see, so it shouts and listens. Her screams were sharp, and her hearing was sharper, so it took little effort to detect me.

"It's time for Sezaru to play its hand, huh?" I said with a heavy sigh.

Those monsters knew only to do evil, and they had the strength to do it. She lunged at me from the 5th floor. She would have made me one with the asphalt were it not for my quick reflexes.

Though her body had become snow-white, I could still tell it was her. She looked in pain, her long hair tangled up from all the strikes she threw at me.

The problem wasn't that she was trying to kill me. She wasn't strong enough to do it, but her screams were going to wake up the whole neighborhood, so I had to act quickly.

"Since Mizaru has forsaken you..."

I drew on the power to see no evil and felt slight pain in my eyes. Moments later, afterimages started dancing before me. Although "afterimage" may not be the right term, since they helped me see the future.

Predicting her next moves, I quickly snuck behind her and pulled the knife that should have had enough of her blood.

They say that Sezaru doesn't exist, but the strange surge of power I felt whenever I would do something bad couldn't be denied. It only took one strike, and the fight was over. Her ghostly body started vanishing into thin air.

With nothing to wipe off the blade this time. I hid the knife back in the jacket. The fight had been brief, but a mimono's screams were loud.

The reason we had to act in the shadows was, of course, because Japan would go into a fray the second those monsters made it on the news.

Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. The rules were simple, and everyone followed them without asking questions. Were you to see evil, pretend you were blind. Were you to hear evil, pretend you were deaf. Were you to speak evil, make sure nobody would hear it. As long as people protected the peace, assassins had to do little evil.

"What... what was that?"

Yet fate has its way of trying to break peace with every chance it gets.

The voice I heard was that of a young boy—probably a high schooler who got a thrill out of walking the streets late at night. There was nothing to condemn in his actions, but he was both unlucky and dumb. When those two traits are combined, disaster is never far off.

I turned his way, and what I saw was exactly what I was expecting. Still wearing his school clothes, a shy boy came up to me.

"What's that?" we both asked at once. He was asking about the watch that kept ringing at my wrist, but I was asking about what he was holding.

It was a plant. Everyone had seen plants before, but that one was different. It felt alive.

Shortly after, I looked at the watch he was asking me about. As if to make sure I would never get to taste peace, fate had played another one of its cards, and it was through the higher-ups this time, for on my hand the message read:

Imperial order: Kill Tyrant