“Hey, Micha-san.”
“Yes?”
There was something else he wanted to ask.
He had asked Miss A this as well when he was at FeTUS, but she had not answered.
He felt like it was wrong to even ask or wonder about this, but he felt like Micha would answer him.
“Did I do the right thing?”
“…”
He leaned on the balcony railing and looked down.
He could so many lights down there. It looked like a sea of lights…or like that pool full of glowing seeds.
“Someone in all that light is probably crying right now.”
Since he still had his feelings, the world would still be full of discord.
As long as there were people left in this world, conflict would never truly end.
He had stopped all that. He had wrapped the entire world in happiness.
But he had let go of it all because he wanted to hold Ange in his arms – because he wanted to be with her, Lucia, and Machina.
Was that the right thing to do?
He felt like Micha would give him an answer he could accept.
“…”
The winged young woman looked him in the eye for a while before speaking.
“Yes, there probably are a lot of crying people out there.” She leaned against the railing too. “Some of them will be crying right this very moment. Some people will have died during the past 10 days even. And not just here. You saw what things were like in that Kurosaki facility, right? There are still places like that all over the world.”
“…”
She showed no mercy in giving him the answer he had expected, so he bit his lip.
“In fact, that place was tamer than most. The people there were treated like slaves, sure, but they had a warm bed to sleep in and food to eat. Not many places in the human world are that blessed. Most children don’t have enough to eat day to day and shiver from the cold as they sleep. Just between the two of us, the resentment that led Ange to be reborn as Metatron was less than so many others go through. There are plenty of angels who are reborn from much greater tragedy.”
“I-is that so?”
He had honestly completely forgotten about the rest of the world. He felt embarrassed for taking the privileges of Japanese life for granted.
“But.”
She laughed and rubbed his cheek.
She had him look up toward the city lights he had avoided looking at the first time.
“What about the people you saw in that facility? The ones made into slaves looked unhappy, I’m sure, but what about the ones enslaving them? The ones who were drinking fancy drinks and using those girls as toys? Did they look happy to you?”
“…”
His eyes widened at this viewpoint he had not even considered before.
That facility had felt packed full of all the world’s unhappiness and inequality, but had even one person there looked happy to see all that unhappiness?
“Finding happiness isn’t that easy.”
“Eh?”
“Happiness isn’t something you’re given by others. You have to create it for yourself. Sometimes you’ll screw it up and cry, get hurt, or even die, though.”
“…”
“You’ll understand eventually. …Yes, once you grow up and leave adolescence, you’ll understand at least a little bit.”
When he looked at the city lights again, they looked so much brighter than the golden seeds in the bottom of that pool.
“Genesis tells us the world will always be full of discord.”
She moved her hand from his cheek to his head and patted it like she always did.
“But who says you can’t find happiness in discord?”
When he looked up, she winked and turned her ever-kind eyes toward the room.
She looked toward his bedroom where the other three were still asleep.
Those three had been fighting as usual. Three worlds bringing three forms of discord.
The warm hand left his head.
The next thing he knew, Micha was standing up on the balcony railing. She spread her red wings to depart.
“Micha-san,” he called out without thinking.
She turned back to him with a smile that told him she would stay there as long as he asked her to.
He just about asked if he would see her again, but he decided against it. He could tell that was not the right thing to say.
If he asked that, she would definitely say yes, but that would only be her coming to visit the person she wanted to see. She would be coming to see someone else, not Fujita Mutsuki.
So he knew what he had to say.
“Let’s meet up again, Micha-san.”
“…”
He looked her straight in the eye as he said it.
That seemed to catch her off guard, which was unusual for her. She seemed somewhat confused as he continued to look her straight in the eye.
But she really was an adult. She soon smiled confidently – although were her eyes a bit more damp than usual? – and winked again.
“Of course.”
He could tell she was not acting quite as composed as usual since she was about to drop the beers she was carrying. He rushed in to push them back into place so they did not fall away.
Now it was time to say goodbye. She put on the face of the daring young woman so she could hide her true feelings.
“Bye bye.”
“Goodbye. …Remember, only two beers a day.”
“Yes, yes. Geez, you’re strict.”
A red line of light vanished into the night sky in no time at all.
Mutsuki kept watching until the lingering light of the flames fully faded and then he finally let out a lonely sigh.
The person who had forcibly dragged him into adolescence had just left.
After she confirmed that his adolescence was coming to an end.
Adolescent Adam 9: Epilogue – Love
The Kurosaki family had deep roots in the political world, but they lost almost all influence overnight with the head of the family dead and the heir, Kurosaki Shuntarou, missing. However, several powerful people (ones who could not allow the full picture of the family’s deeds to come to light) had the family split up, so the truth was sealed away, never to be found.
FeTUS knew Kurosaki owned a few remote islands in the Seto Inland Sea, but it was unclear if those were being used.
In the current age, it was never known who owned what. It could be a politician, a corporate executive, or an unknown individual. The investigation would never reach those islands even in a hundred years.
No one would ever learn that one of them contained a villa equipped with a cruiser dock and a lodge.
“Hey, we’re out of syrup. Are we heading to the mainland to shop again, or what?”
That said, life in a remote island villa came with plenty of inconveniences.
The redheaded girl named Enju stepped out of the lodge. She had been preparing some yogurt as a snack, but she had panicked up finding they had nothing sweet to flavor it with.
The island was warm and comfortable enough to live on, but shopping was still an issue. The shortest route was to Okayama or Ehime, but even that was 40 minutes. And with how long it took the cruiser to get going, they had to plan for at least an hour. The gold bars they had taken with them were enough to live comfortably for 100 years, but converting that into cash that could be used at a supermarket was not easy.
The Bioroid Enjus who had defended the mansion could cover that 40 minutes with ease, but the Enju that had left the mansion with them was the original, not one of the Bioroids. She was the same unmodified demon that Lilith had created her as, so she lacked that athletic ability.
But she needed syrup. Hoping to send the cruiser out, she called over to the two beach chairs out on the sand.
A man and a girl in swimsuits were lying on those two chairs.
“We have cookies and other sweet things, so just use those instead.”
Using the cruiser was a pain, so Shuntarou, who was lying on the right, responded without even removing his sunglasses.
He looked like a giant blob of fat lying on top of the chair and he was reluctant to get up anytime soon.