The Lying Counselor’s Eloquent Reasoning - Chapter 62
It only took a few tens of seconds for Tomomi to convulse in place, but in that time, the man in the white coat had pulled Ryuichi off of Tomomi’s body and restrained him. For some reason, he seemed to have a cable tie and adhesive tape, with which he had bound Ryuichi, who was spinning his eyes, to a nearby tree.
“Hmm. Thank goodness I accidentally have packaging tape with me. How convenient!”
“Accidentally?”
Does the pocket of this man’s white coat lead to the four-dimensional space? Tomomi wondered as she staggered to her feet.
“Then what’s the tingling sensation just now?”
“Here it is. It’s my secret weapon, Mjolnir.”
Uroma turned back to Tomomi and lifted it up. It looked like a stun gun. So, that was how she and Ryuichi suffered the electric shock.
“Why are you carrying such a thing around yet again…?”
“I use it occasionally in my profession. That’s why I always carry it with me, just in case.”
“P-Profession…”
Counselor’s job? No, maybe this guy is just unique.
“I didn’t mean to harm you, Tomomi, but the two of you were having a wonderful time together, so I had no choice but to take you both out from behind. Well, these things are only for self-defense and are only effective enough to numb you a bit, so I thought it was okay.”
“A bit?”
No, it was pretty intense. I mean, this is the first time in my life that I’ve been shot by an electric shock and fallen down. Indeed, it’s a very unpleasant first experience…
“Y-You… what the hell are you doing!”
Eventually, Ryuichi seemed to snap out of it. He found himself wrapped up in a tree and tied up, and glared at Uroma.
“Haha, Mr. Akiyama, why are you playing dumb? Surely you’ve already remembered what you’ve done?”
Uroma replied coldly, then moved away from Ryuichi and crouched down at the base of a nearby tree. Right in front of him was a corpse lying in an L-shaped.
“It’s been dead for a little over a month. The bones are beautifully skeletonized. It’s in a good state of preservation. Why don’t you come over here, Tomomi? It’s not often you have the opportunity to see something like this up close.”
“I-I rather not!”
Why does this man recommend that I observe a dead body here?
“This person is likely an eighty-six-year-old woman named Nishida Hatsu. She used to live in an elderly care facility near here. Yet, she passed away in a place like this… It’s truly a pitiful story.”
“Y-You… How did you know that…”
Ryuichi seemed awfully shocked by Uroma’s words. Tomomi felt the same way. How come he knows the identity of that corpse?
“No way, did you know all along that this place contained a human corpse?”
“Not from the beginning, but before arriving here, yes.”
“Why! I didn’t even remember the truth until just now! How can you, a stranger, be aware of my own experience that I have forgotten!”
“That’s because there was something unnatural about what you said the other day, Mr. Akiyama.”
“Unnatural?”
“Well, for starters, what I found disturbing is your humanity itself.”
Uroma’s stagnant eyes flashed suddenly, cold and sharp like a blade.
“Mr. Akiyama, you never said a single word until you came here. Normal people would have said them as a matter of fact.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s just something I said a while ago. Pitiful.”
“Pitiful?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Seeing a dead person, one feels sorry for them. Or, ‘pitiful’ when a small animal dies in an accident. These are words that come out of everyone’s mouth as a natural reaction. However, strangely enough, those kinds of words have never come out of your mouth so far. Even though you were the villain who ran over and killed the black cat, from beginning to end you spoke as if you were just a victim possessed by the evil spirit. In other words, you have no sense of empathy for the dead.”
“Empathy? What does that have to do with anything? Are you trying to criticize my personality now!”
“No, I’m not criticizing your personality. My point is that your lack of empathy is completely unrelated to my tentative finding the other day. I said the other day that your eye abnormality was probably caused by the emotional stress of the accident. But do you really think that a person like you, who has little empathy, would feel so much stress over killing a small animal like a cat? For me, it just didn’t seem like it. If someone were to develop some kind of dissociative disorder simply from accidentally killing a cat, I would say that they are a very empathetic person.”
Uroma’s tone of voice was methodical, a stark contrast to Ryuichi’s, who was exhibiting his impatience.