—Good heavens! A difficult moment of choice has arrived, my friend.
Brown’s bright voice rang in my ears.
—Now then, Roe Deer has only ten passes, but there are forty-five poor candidates who will fall onto the dreadful rotten-flesh altar and suffer.
—By what standard will you choose the forty-five sacrifices, and by what standard will you select the ten dramatic exemptions among them?
—A trial? A vote? Screening? A lottery? Ah, whichever way you go, it all seems so tragic….
Brown’s voice rose delightedly.
—But isn’t that very tension, that pressure, that sweaty-palmed suspense, immersion, sigh of relief, happiness, and despair the essence of a show?
—This is the finest moment. Ah! As it happens, one of the panelists is opening her mouth now!
At that moment—
“What does it matter?”
Jin Nasol spoke up.
“Assistant Manager?”
“I don’t get what difference it makes whether there are ten painkillers or one. Just grab forty-five people and tell them to jump. That solves it.”
Her tone said she truly could not understand what was complicated about this.
Jin Nasol turned toward me.
And then….
“That’s why you went to all the trouble of setting the mood up like this, isn’t it? No?”
Click.
She cracked open the door to Car 1 a little.
“…! Assistant Manager….”
“Look.”
…Through the gap in the door, I could see the passengers in Car 2 waving, or greeting us with worried expressions.
The atmosphere created by the hundreds of people who were so cooperative that everything could proceed smoothly, without friction at all.
“Well, that’s good. I thought you were doing something pointless, but now that I see it, I’ll be able to make the job a little less tiring.”
“……”
“After all, the humans left on the train won’t understand what’s happening anyway, right? They’ll only realize it after they fall.”
…That was true.
In fact, all I had to do was grab anybody at random and say, “This round, forty-five people have qualified, and you’re included. Starting now, you’ll jump one by one.”
Then the people who knew nothing would simply fall from the window without even getting a painkiller….
Into a stretch of torment like torture, without warning.
“No, since it might not end at number…