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An Akudama’s fate is decided from the moment their prison sentence exceeds a certain number. Once it gets too high, it stops being a question of how to get them into prison and becomes a question of how fast and how publicly they can be executed.
The police database collects all of these numbers, systematic and fluid, sentences climbing as new crimes are catalogued, numbers dwindling with each year spent in prison. Even if the victims are dead or forgotten, the database remembers. It’s the foundation of Kansai’s criminal justice system, possibly even the only thing holding South Kansai together.
And yet Swindler messed with it. A supposed three hundred trillion yen of property damage, but a blank criminal record. If she could clear her own sentence, what else could she do? Control of the database is control of justice—from giving citizens undeserved years to acquitting criminals, she can quite literally decide who lives and who dies. She has the whole of Kansai at her fingertips.
Capture is always preferred to on-site execution. People with light sentences should be imprisoned, and people with higher sentences are nice trophies for public execution. Private, on-the-job executions are scolded behind closed doors—the Kansai Police values honor and public approval; justice is secondary.
But for Swindler, with a clean record and a penchant for deception, even if she's captured, it should be child’s play to swindle her way to total acquittal.
Swindler must die.
Despite the terrifying abilities hidden in her fingertips, Swindler is physically rather weak. As Pupil chases the Akudama down the Shinkansen, Swindler is the first to tire, leaning heavily against the walls to catch her breath each time they stop so Hacker can unlock another door.
Pupil is quick to lose track of Master—Brawler is eager for a rematch, and Cutthroat is just plain blood-thirsty—but they agreed beforehand that Pupil would focus on eliminating Swindler, and so she continues ahead.
She almost gets her, when Swindler’s yelling at Courier to go after he gets distracted by something Pupil can’t pinpoint, but Doctor, who somehow kept both of her hands, pulls her out of reach in the nick of time, and Pupil’s blade cuts through air.
Courier holds her back, and they trade a few blows—his prosthetic is frustratingly durable—but Master catches up, even as Cutthroat and Brawler follow at his heels, and Pupil uses the distraction to run ahead.
The short briefing the Shinkansen staff gave them about the security isn’t proving to be very helpful, because the Akudama are dealing with everything first. They’ve left the train doors wide open in their rush, the lasers and traps disabled or destroyed, and the fragments of broken security drones strayed across the floors.
Pupil catches up to them in the second-to-last car, but the door to the cargo room is already opening. Her breath hitches. Today, their job as Executioners is supposed to be second to protecting the cargo. Even Boss, who was usually so single-mindedly fixated on eliminating criminals, had said that the cargo took priority. She can’t let them into that room.
She breaks into a sprint. Hoodlum, the only one looking her way, lets out a scream, and Swindler makes a break for the door. Pupil dodges lasers that leave smoking holes in the Shinkansen’s floor, and when Doctor lunges for her with a syringe, Pupil twists her arm and seizes the syringe to stab her through the heart. Hoodlum, standing in the way, trips backward.
The door starts to close, but Pupil slides through it, and the metal slots into place behind her. The lighting is dimmer here, all concentrated pretentiously on the suspended cargo in the middle of the car, but it doesn’t take long to spot Swindler, hand pressed to the lock button underneath a lever.
Swindler sinks to her knees, panting, and wipes the sweat from her face, trying to catch her breath. When she finally turns around to see Pupil, she yelps—a short, striking sound, high-pitched without being grating, that Pupil automatically categorizes as “cute” before realizing that it’s probably an act to gather sympathy.
“Wait!” Swindler says, waving her hands in front of her. She scrambles back and hits the wall. “Don’t kill me! I’m really just an ordinary person!” Eyes wide, she sounds frantic, full of emotion as if she truly believes what she’s saying.
“I’m not falling for it,” Pupil tells her darkly, and draws her sword. The blade blazes to life, casting golden light onto the floor and into Swindler’s widening eyes. She’ll die quickly.
“Wait,” Swindler says again, and holds her hair up so the collar around her neck is clearly visible. She taps the metal. “This is a bomb.”
“Are you threatening me?” Pupil asks. The collar is small, but depending on the blast radius, it could reach the cargo, and while the cargo is surrounded by layers of protective casing, the cargo’s safety is too important to be risked.
But she’s bluffing, Pupil deduces. Swindler’s frantic demeanor isn’t the behavior of someone prepared to forfeit their own life.
“No!” Swindler says. “No, I’m not threatening you, I would never. I’m not—” Her eyes dart to the door. “I don’t want to be here, but I’m being threatened. We all are. There’s this cat—well, it’s a robot, really—who’s giving us orders, and…” She deflates. “...and you don’t believe me, do you?”
“Of course not,” Pupil says. “You hacked the police database. Your continued existence is a threat to all of Kansai.”
“I didn’t, though!” she says, standing up. She glances at the door and lowers her voice. “They were going to kill me, so I told them that I was Swindler and that I tricked the record. Hoodlum just exaggerated what I said.” She forces a laugh. “He likes exaggerating things. He told us that he had a prison sentence of five million years, even though it’s really…”
“Four years,” Pupil finishes. She studies her. “So you managed to trick some of the worst Akudama in Kansai. Impressive.” Swindler frowns but doesn’t refute her. “How did you get involved with them in the first place?”
“I…” She looks away, averting her gaze to the controls behind her. “I saw Courier buying takoyaki, back when I didn’t know who he was, so I decided to order some, too. Then, I noticed that he dropped 500 yen, but when I tried to give it to him he refused and left. I got my takoyaki, but it turned out that the vendor only accepted physical cash, and I didn’t have any, so I needed to pay 500 yen…”
“So you gave her Courier’s 500 yen?” Pupil asks, not seeing where the story is going.
“No, I didn’t!” Swindler says. “It wasn’t my money.”
“He practically gave it to you,” Pupil says. “It’d be fine to use it.”
“You can’t say that!” Swindler says, looking stricken. “You’re a police officer!”
Pupil stares.
Swindler stares back, intently, and Pupil uses the moment to study her vivid pink eyes and see if her pupils dilate from lying, before Swindler flushes and looks away at the cargo. “Anyways,” she says, “I told her that I’d go get some cash, but she thought I was going to run, so she called the cops on me! I was brought to the police station, but then the police station was attacked, and I followed a kitty because I didn’t want it to get hurt, and that’s how I met the Akudama.”
Pupil tries to assess her expression, but Swindler doesn’t meet her eyes, instead looking past her. Her story is absurd, but if she was lying, it’d be easy to go with something more believable, wouldn’t it? But maybe she predicted that a more implausible story could actually be more convincing, and… Mental games aren’t her forte.
“Will the collar explode if you die?” Pupil asks.
“Maybe,” Swindler says. “I don’t know. They blow up if we try to take them off, but I think they’re also remote-controlled. The cat said that it’d blow them up if we tried to leave.”
Yes, it will explode, would have been the smarter answer. A simple way to stop Pupil from killing her on the spot. The fact that she missed this, does it mean she’s telling the truth? Or did she know this would make her more convincing, too?
“How good would you say you are with computers?” Pupil asks.
Swindler tilts her head. “Probably normal,” she says. “Maybe a little better. I work at the Seal Center.” She bites her lip. “Or, at least, I used to.” Her eyebrows furrow. “I used to…” Her eyes widen suddenly and she turns to look frantically at Pupil. “I don’t have a job anymore,” she says, voice hushed.
Pupil taps her foot. “Yes, well,” she says impatiently, “when you commit a serious crime, you forfeit your right to exist peacefully within the bounds of society.”
“I don’t even have a home ,” Swindler realizes in a whisper. “I’m not going to be able to return to my apartment.”
She’s seen this before, the moment when Akudama finally realize they’re past the point of no return. Often it’s Pupil that causes the realization; there’s nothing like the threat of death to make people regret things. Swindler’s panic, fake or not, isn’t anything she’s not already used to. “You should have thought of that before you decided to become an Akudama.”
“But I didn’t decide anything!” Swindler says. Her legs tremble. “I didn’t want to be here. I’m normal. I had a normal family, I have normal friends, I have a normal job, and I have a normal home! I’m just an ordinary person!”
Pupil folds her arms. “An ordinary person who caused three hundred trillion yen of damages?”
“I’m not that impressive!” Swindler shouts, hands clenching at her sides. “I’m normal. I’m just normal. I’ve never been particularly good at anything, and I’ve never really focused on anything. I don’t have any special interests or talents. I could never become such an accomplished criminal.”
Swindler’s eyes look suspiciously wet even as she tries to avoid eye contact, and Pupil allows herself to wonder for the first time if she’s actually telling the truth. Pupil walks over, takes Swindler’s shaking hands in her own, and tries to convey the sentiment of comfort that she can’t find the words for. Swindler relaxes her hands, fingers uncurling, even as she stands rigidly and breathes in sharply.
Apart from the small marks on her palms where her fingernails dug into skin, Swindler’s hands are normal, soft and uncalloused. It’s hard to imagine that she could kill anyone with these hands, let alone commit the countless number of crimes she’d need to reap three hundred trillion yen in damages.
While Pupil certainly doesn’t know everything, she hasn’t heard of any big incidents with no identified culprits, making it hard to imagine where three hundred trillion yen of damages could even come from. Swindler had said Hoodlum was prone to exaggerating, and he, unlike Swindler, had an official record of theft and blackmail. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been so quick to take stock in an Akudama’s words.
Pupil presses her thumb to Swindler’s left wrist, over the radial artery. Her heartbeat pulses fast and steady. “You’re really not an Akudama?” she asks.
“No, I’m not,” Swindler says.
Her heartbeat doesn’t increase noticeably, but it’s already beating rapidly, which could be the result of anything from lying to fear of death to being winded from running down the whole Shinkansen.
Pupil drops her hands. She doesn’t have enough information, frankly, but she now realizes that she doesn’t have to find out right away. She can always ask questions later, or leave the investigation to the specialists, but if Swindler dies, that’s the end, whether she was guilty or not. It makes her a little ashamed that she was so quick to aim for her life, even though she’s still innocent in the eyes of the database.
“Then let me help you,” Pupil says. “The Kansai Police has teams trained in disarming bombs. If you testify that you were threatened, and we provide the collar as evidence, you’ll be cleared for the attack on the Shinkansen. I’ll even get you acquitted for the 500 yen. So just stay out of the way and play along with their demands enough so they don’t kill you, and I’ll deal with the Akudama.”
Swindler glances back at the door, shifts her weight, and shakes her head. “Thank you,” she says sincerely, “but I can’t accept your help.”
“Why not?” Pupil snaps. “If you’re an ordinary person, then I can help you. It’s my job. ”
“I can’t!” Swindler insists. “I can’t betray the others. They’re—” Another glance at the door. “Deep down, they’re good people, probably.”
“Really,” Pupil says. Blatant lies aren’t convincing. She should know better.
“Okay, they’re not,” Swindler admits. “Not at all. They’re really, really bad people. But they are people, and they think of me as one of them now, so I can’t back out on them.”
“So you’re okay with them killing other people?” Pupil hisses.
“No!” Swindler protests. “Of course not. But they’ll never learn better if they’re dead.”
She’s so painfully idealistic. Pupil remembers when she had a phase like that, too, but the academy was quick to teach it out of her. Once a sentence gets too long to be served, the Akudama is irredeemable. They have countless moments to choose to stop, and they ignore all of them, so the rest of society has no obligation to accommodate them. “They won’t learn better if they’re alive, either,” Pupil says.
“You don’t know that,” Swindler protests feebly.
“Look,” Pupil says, “my job is to execute Akudama. Whether or not you cooperate, I’m not going to fail this time, so the least you can do is help yourself.”
Swindler looks at her grimly, and Pupil knows she’s already decided. Her glance falls to the floor. “Sorry.”
“Why?” Pupil says. Her hand instinctively finds her sword, and her fingers tighten around the handle. Her hands sweat. “I can help you. If you’re an ordinary person, it’s my duty to help you. So why don’t you—”
“Look out!” Swindler shouts, and then immediately gasps and covers her mouth.
Pupil leaps back, just in time to dodge the heavy metal door falling inward, edges still burning red from where Hacker’s drones must have cut them. Courier stands on the other side of the door, with Hacker at his side. Doctor’s already recovered, or maybe the syringe never worked in the first place, and Hoodlum is hiding his face behind a fluffy black cat.
Pupil looks past them and doesn’t see Master, but she doesn’t find Cutthroat or Brawler, either.
“The cargo controls are over there!” Swindler calls, pointing past Pupil, and Hacker flies insides. Swindler shoots Pupil a glance, apologetic yet resolute, lips pressed together, holding none of the teary-eyed uncertainty from a few minutes ago. She’s made up her mind.
Pupil climbs to her feet. Disappointment settles at the pit of her stomach, inexplicably, and her jaw tightens. She draws her sword in one clean stroke, flicking the blade on, and attacks, ignoring Swindler to lunge at Hacker.
She sees Swindler out of the corner of her eye, still apologetic, but she pushes her to the back of her mind and throws herself into fighting because even if she’s bad at helping people, she’s always been good at hurting them.
She finds Master and their transportation, and they get off of the Shinkansen just fast enough to avoid being carried into the Absolute Quarantine Zone. None of the Akudama are any less alive than they were the previous day.
She knows that Boss will be disappointed that they failed their mission, especially since Master was so enthusiastic in promising success, and she knows that even though it technically isn’t in their jurisdiction, they’ll get in trouble for letting the cargo get taken. She knows that they’ll have to work with the reinforcement that Master is so disapproving of, and she knows that even if he won’t say so clearly, Master is disappointed in her for saving him and not focusing on their goal.
Today was a failure, one of her worst days on the job since she was starting out, and yet, maybe it’s the adrenaline, but she can’t find it in herself to be disappointed that Swindler will live to see another day.