The Punishment for Ignorance

The time ran out, and the servers rerouted the information flow back to energy production. The energy orbs fizzled away. Pestilence turned off the flame of the Hand. And Arai vanished right after.

He was safe. The server’s last hurrah teleported him back to his home, an hour’s walk from this power plant. The room’s entrance reopened.

“Phew, I almost lost my cool there. Thanks for protecting my murder virginity, Dede-chan.” Pestilence wiped the nonexistent sweat off her forehead.

I could call out her body count, but this wasn’t the time or place for delusion breaking. “Are you gonna get something to wear, exhibitionist?”

Pestilence shrugged in response. She waved the Hand of Glory around; the ancient digits dangled back and forth. “While I have this, it won’t matter how many people see me naked.” What on earth was she on about? Consciousness can counter the power of the Hand of Glory, as long as the person isn’t looking at it.

“Are you going to rely on that now? What if they close their eyes? What if you are up against someone who is blind? Do you think that this dead dude’s hand can solve all of your problems?”

Pestilence was about to speak, but I cut her off. “Don’t answer that; just follow me. We’re wasting time.”

I floated along to the exit, assuming that Pestilence would trail behind me. I was tempted to check if she was still there from time to time, but the turn of my head would signal weakness. The sign that I didn’t have a tight rein on Pestilence.

“Let me guess. We just stole from War,” I said, as we strode out of the washroom towards the guard’s changing room. This was just to let Pestilence know that she couldn’t hide anything from me.

“Oh? How do you figure?” Pestilence’s voice rang behind me.

“Call it an intuition. Only he would do something so brutal yet contained.” This would explain how Pestilence knew about the secret passage. War must have told her.

Pestilence didn’t say anything after. Not a word of confirmation or denial.

I led her to the female changing room, where a few spare guards’ outfits hung. Pestilence’s fingers ran through the row of fabric, and she settled on one that fit her the best.

The quiet wait for her to change dragged on. I didn’t mind, but Pestilence actually made small talk, though the topics she chose were questionable. “Dede-chan, now that I’m a slave to you, throw me a bone. Do spirits continue to exist after death? You can see them, right?”

No point in pondering her hidden meanings. Maybe she was just asking out of guilt for the people she had killed; maybe she just wanted to make small talk. “No. They fade into nothingness.” I chose the straightforward answer.

Pestilence didn’t have a chance to ask me a follow-up question. Because the lights turned red and the alarms spurred into a piercing wail. The emergency protocol had activated. Security was on high alert. The lockdown procedure sprang into effect on its own.

But it wasn’t our fault. We didn’t trigger anything. I scrambled to find the cause with my quasi-omniscience. The result it returned was like a handful of stones tossed down my stomach. Because Ogusu Genki, the director of the power plant, had died.

The cause of death was… a heart attack, but the exact trigger was unknown. That was unheard of. Some health conditions might seem random to the naked eye, but my mental search engine still could have picked out the physiological event that triggered the condition. The unknown result confirmed but one fact. This wasn’t a natural death at all.

It wasn't Famine. There were too few casualties.

It wasn't War. He wouldn’t kill a person so sneakily.

It had to be a magical artifact. But which one? And who was wielding it?

My body launched into action on its own. If I were quick enough, maybe I could catch a glimpse of the perpetrator. Diving through wall after wall, I consulted my quasi-omniscience for the directions. No air resistance, no friction, and no obstruction from walls. Nothing could stop my advance.

Oh, I forgot to turn invisible. Luckily, no one had seen me. So, I willed my image away and passed through the last wall into the crime scene.

The quartz floor maintained its innocence, not a single drop of blood spilled. The body was still lying there. Lifeless and hollow. His spirit had long dissipated. Right under my nose.

Even if my quasi-omniscience couldn’t get information on that death, I still should have sensed it, a perk that accompanied my spirit form. Whether it was two buildings away, from another city, or a continent away, distance mattered little. That familiar snap of a string of vitality, the clear boom of the trumpet of demise, would be presented to me all the same.

But I had failed to notice his death until it was too late. A droplet among thousands of others just this night alone.

I stared at his dilated pupils, too wide to hold a soul in. Ominous clouding began at the cornea, taken over by a marble. His muscles fell into eternal rigidity, reminiscent of the myth of Medusa. Color and heat leaked from him; no amount of work could return these spilled essences back.

My gaze stayed on the body, but my thoughts dragged my quasi-omniscience around the room, asking it about every little detail, the strands of hair and clumps of dust. If only I could find a single cell left by the murderer, but I had too much information to look through. My mind was flooded with so much knowledge, but no path forward.

I stood there doing nothing, letting this process consume me. I wasn’t alone in my panic. The manager who discovered the body was pacing around outside the office, having just called the police. Security guards gathered, useless, only here to fulfill their job requirements. Some peeked in to taste the visual experience of a real dead body; others ran off to search the complex for suspicious individuals.

The floundering of other people bought me no solace, for they were mere humans. Helplessness was an everyday experience for them. I held myself to a higher standard. I had to. Because no matter what values I chose, the deaths would invade my psyche every time my host body went to sleep.

I wanted to make a joke. Maybe comment on how ironic it was that his name, ‘Genki,’ sounds the same as the Japanese word for ‘lively’. Maybe laugh at the coincidental timing. Or snicker at how little the rabbit’s foot keychain on the office desk had worked. After all, one thing that quasi-omniscience showed me was that the idea of ‘luck’ doesn’t exist at all. It was all cause and effect. The so-called ‘skill issue’.

Skills... My mood flipped in a second, for I was reminded of a grim reality. I could have done more. Then, the corpse here would have been alive.