Chapter 58: Monsters
Since Rosella and Marceline believed the story I told them, I had no choice but to tell John and Fumiko the same story during dinner.
At first, they didn’t like it at all, which was a predictable reaction.
My mother had been devoted to the Church of the Golden Halo since my grandparents were welcomed by church members when they arrived in the West. She believed in the purity of the soul and words of kindness. In her view, killing another person was an almost unforgivable sin before God, so knowing that her eldest son had killed a man was not to her liking.
However, Fumiko was mature and understood that it was because I killed Blackpearl that I was alive, and she didn’t judge me for it.
But it was different when it came to being rewarded for killing someone. She didn’t like that at all, probably because she didn’t want it to become a habit for me.
This made me wonder: why didn’t I feel anything when I killed Blackpearl? I’m not talking about guilt or remorse, after all, there was no way I could feel that when I had to choose between being the hunter or the hunted, but it should have been natural for me to feel some revulsion at the mere idea of killing someone. I was human, after all.
While I was immersed in my thoughts, the atmosphere at the dinner table was awful. We were all quiet, and only the clinking of cutlery against porcelain plates could be heard.
When my father took a sip of juice, he placed the glass back on the table quietly and clasped his hands together.
"A long, long time ago, I had a conversation with Nathan about this," John said, drawing everyone’s attention when I mentioned Nathan — my deceased brother. "I remember having this conversation with him on the terrace of this same building. I still smoked, and it bothered him, I knew that, but he would come out every night after dinner to keep me company."
"That day, I saw him admiring the city, and I went straight up to him and asked him what he would do if he had to kill someone to save an innocent person’s life. I wanted to know if he was ready for that." John’s eyes swept over Fumiko, Marceline, and Rosella until they rested on me. "Do you know what he said?" John asked with a smile playing on his lips.
His question seemed to take me back in time, straight to the night they had that conversation.
"The life of an innocent person will always matter more, even more than my own." Nathan replied with a serious expression. "At the Police Academy, one of the first exercises we have to do before we officially start training is to kill a rabbit. Do you know why, Dad?"
John just moved his eyes and took another drag on his cigarette.
"When we decide to become police officers, we have to abandon our innocence so we can learn to value the innocence of the world. Police officers exist to make the world a safer place... There are monsters out there, Dad. I’m not talking about the ones in the books Mom reads to Brandon, but real human beings. I’m talking about those who are willing to kill innocent people."
John took the cigarette out of his mouth, threw it on the ground, and crushed it with the sole of his boot. "Does that mean you would kill these ’monsters’ without remorse?"
Nathan leaned against the building’s railing and admired the city. "Only monsters can deal with monsters... Maybe that’s why there are so many things wrong with the police force."
My father’s paraphrase of my older brother’s words struck me. I had never thought about it until I sat down at that table, but it made sense.
My lack of feelings for killing a man finally made sense to me. I hadn’t seen Blackpearl as human since before I killed him, and just as I felt no guilt for killing monsters, I felt no guilt when I didn’t kill innocent people.
Even so, it would inevitably cause me to gradually lose my innocence.
"So, son..." John said, looking at me. "If you’re going to go down any path, follow your brother’s ideology. He was willing to kill to protect others, but he was aware of the consequences of that for his soul. Our family can’t afford to turn down the money from this reward, but we also won’t allow you to make money solely from the deaths of other people. You must focus on killing monsters and only kill another person when your life or someone else’s is in danger."
"Yes, sir." I bowed my head without blinking, as a father’s advice was not to be argued with.
I glanced at my mother out of the corner of my eye and saw that she was smiling kindly at me, showing that she agreed with my father.
After this serious conversation, the mood at the dinner table became calm again, and we started talking about how we should spend part of the reward.
Fumiko wanted new pots and pans for cooking, my father wanted a fishing net, and, surprisingly, Marceline was the most modest and asked only for a new brush to comb her hair in the morning.
At that moment, while the three of them were discussing this, Rosella and I looked at each other and started laughing, realizing that my family really had no idea how much the reward for a wanted Rank-B assassin was.
When I revealed the amount of 18 gold coins — only half of what I would receive for the Observation Gems — my family was shocked. That was more than double the money my parents had saved before leaving their parents’ homes to get married. As they were already shocked, I revealed that I would probably be included in Rank-B and that they couldn’t ask for such expensive things now that they knew the amount of the reward, since we would need to move quickly.
Once again, they were very surprised, but in the end, it was decided that my mother would skip work the next day so we could go to a real estate agency to look for a new apartment.