Gun of Ashes

In the blink of an eye, ghostly blue mist and fine rain flooded every corner of Old Dunling. This was the last step of the plan: to clean the battlefield, to sever the continuation of the erosion. It was also the very reason the Cleaner Squad existed.

They were undertakers hiding beneath the shadow, burying countless twisted and treacherous tales of Evil Anomalies.

...

”So where exactly are you taking me?”

Bola lay on the swaying stretcher, being carried off the battlefield by the medics. His eyes were half-closed, leaving only a narrow slit, through which he watched the blurred world. Exhausted to the point of collapse, even his voice was weak, yet he stubbornly clung to consciousness.

”Isn’t it just the nearest outpost?”

Bola kept muttering, but no one answered him.

The doctors had done some emergency treatment; he wouldn’t die for the moment, but he still needed further care. Yet it seemed there was something that mattered more than his treatment.

Whispers rose and fell by his ears. Bola felt he had probably been carried into some kind of sealed room; the piercing cold of wind and rain was cut off, and then came more IV bottles, and needles buried under his skin.

In his daze he sensed something. The hazy world turned clear, and in the corner of the room another figure surfaced.

”Are you the Death God?”

Bola asked. The other truly did resemble the Death God from stories—silent, soundless, appearing out of nowhere.

”More or less.”

Watson walked to Bola’s bedside, reached out, and gently placed her hand on his forehead.

”What are you doing?”

Bola had no strength left to resist. When the doctors had sawn open the warped Armor and dragged him out of it, he had been drenched in blood, bones broken in multiple places. The fact that Bola could still draw breath was already something of a miracle.

But very soon, the sealed room collapsed. Wind and snow surged in through the cracks, and gradually, a world of pure white snow layered itself over the scene. The cold wind made Bola shudder, and then he discovered that all the wounds on his body had vanished, and the hospital bed beneath him was gone as well. He was standing amid deep drifts of snow.

”This place...”

Bola looked around, and a strange sense of familiarity rose in his chest.

He remembered where this was. His mind was seized by another kind of fear, and then he turned to Watson at his side and understood the Truth.

”This... this is my ’Gap’.”

”Mm.”

Watson answered calmly.

”What are you going to do?”

With the pull of the trigger, much of the memory Bola had lost had been retrieved. He remembered that there had been no ”intrusion into my Gap” step in the plan.

”To carry out the final stage of the ’Mechanical Deity’.”

Watson’s voice held no emotion at all, as though Bola was not facing a living person, but something far colder.

”I will use Anti-Memes to erase your memories... I won’t erase too much. It will just be everything related to the ’Mechanical Deity’, all the battles you went through—it will all be rooted out.”

At first Bola was confused, then he seemed to grasp something.

”To completely cut off the existence of the erosion, is that it?”

”Mm.”

The conversation fell into stillness. Bola took a deep breath. He could, in fact, understand Watson’s actions. Someone had to deal with the echoes of this catastrophe, and to eradicate everything they had to free themselves from Roger’s erosion, even though Roger was already dead.

The erosion had bound them to the darkness, and this time the end of that darkness was that scarlet hundred-eyed thing.

”What about the others? Will they be treated the same way?” Bola asked.

”The Soldiers will only undergo a simple Anti-Meme treatment. They will forget everything they saw and heard today. Of course, with this kind of large-scale Anti-Meme influence, it’s impossible to be that precise. They may forget even more.

But don’t worry about them. They only receive orders and then carry them out. They don’t know about Death Row or the Mechanical Deity. They know very little, which makes them very safe.”

”Because I know too much, that’s why you came in person?” Bola asked again.

”More or less. But the main reason is that you are an Upper-Rank Knight, and have a certain resistance. Ordinary Anti-Meme contamination has very little effect on you. You require targeted treatment.”

Watson responded like a machine.

”So... you’re not only talking to me right now, are you? You’re processing others at the same time. Truly busy.”

Bola pondered, searching through his memories. In truth, the time they had spent fighting Roger was not long; not even a full day. When they pulled him out of the Armor of Original Sin, Bola could still see a sky full of bright sunshine.

Yet such a brief span had felt so unbearably long—steel and flesh, fire bursting in all directions, leaving behind only pure, unadulterated death.

”So that means... no one will remember any of this, will they? All those dead, all this pain spread across the ground...”

All of it, just like the history covered up by the Secret Keepers, unknown to all, remembered by none.

Faced with Bola’s question, Watson nodded mechanically.

”You should be very clear on this point already. Even without my involvement, the Purification Mechanism would ultimately choose this method, letting it be ’forgotten’, wouldn’t they?”

Bola fell silent. He looked at Watson, then back at this world of falling snow.

”Please give me a little time. Let me recall it one last time.”

Bola spoke, and nightmares and death flickered through his mind.

This was all that he, as a mortal, could do—utterly insignificant... mourning.

”But... even if we all forget, there will still be someone who remembers, won’t there?”

He asked with a kind of hopeful yearning. It was like a small and beautiful wish. Even if Watson was lying to him, he still wanted that answer. Perhaps it could grant his turbulent heart a measure of calm.

”Yes. There will be someone who remembers. No one will be completely consigned to oblivion.”

Watson gave him that assurance.

Hearing this, it was as though Bola had set down a heavy burden; he felt a faint lightness.

The power of the Anti-Meme began to spread, raising up towering flurries of snow that gathered into a gray-white storm, devouring everything.

On the hospital bed, the furrow between Bola’s brows smoothed out. He sank into a pleasant dream and drifted into deep sleep. When he woke, he would have forgotten all the suffering.

Amid the ruins atop Dunling Tower, Watson withdrew her attention from Bola. She looked to the side, and at some unknown moment Lorenzo had already awakened. His face was still stamped with a fatigue that would not dissolve. In the shadow of the ruins, bearing wounds all over his body, he gazed out at the city wrapped in ghostly blue mist.

He did not say a word.

Watson looked down the tower. In the hazy mist below, the guests she had long awaited approached at last, slow and late.

The messages she had sent were not just a single one. Aimed at different people, they would hear utterly different voices. Wandering through Old Dunling were not only Bola, but others who possessed resistance as well.

Shao Liangxi’s expression was tinged with sorrow. Beside her walked Rod and Eve, and on the other side Shao Liangye came wading through the water. Like Shao Liangxi, at the instant the trigger was pulled, he had understood everything.

And then there were more: Red Falcon and Joey, Night Owl, Bluebird, Blue Jade...

All the Upper-Rank Knights of the Purification Mechanism had arrived here. They did not know what awaited them next, carrying their doubts and confusion.

”Bola resisted quite a lot... I imagine they will be the same, won’t they?”

Watson suddenly spoke, breaking the long silence.

”Probably... Everyone hates forgetting anything. Grabbing something in the left hand, clutching something in the right, turning their lives bloated beyond bearing. Yet when they peel it all away layer by layer, they discover they have so very little.”

Lorenzo sighed, recalling those faces of the dead. They had been living, breathing people, with complete and genuine trajectories of life. Yet now they were to be erased forever, wiped out entirely. They would be officially declared missing to the outside world, and the countless extending lines of their lives would find their end in this storm.

He was afraid too, afraid of forgetting, no matter what was to be forgotten—he feared it.

”So have you decided?” Watson asked.

”Of course,” Lorenzo replied with certainty. ”I hate forgetting anything. Once is more than enough for that sort of thing.”

In the depths of that Silent Sea, Lorenzo could be sure that he had indeed forgotten something—perhaps precious, perhaps worthless.