The Protagonist Always Wants to Find Someone to Commit Suicide With - Chapter 18

“So, can you explain yourself now?” Dazai Osamu had already loosely pieced together the outline of the truth the moment he heard its previous slip-up. Now, he was merely confirming it.

“You figured out I was hiding something just from that?” The system still didn’t want to admit defeat, stubbornly holding its ground.

It had known from the very start that Dazai Osamu was exceptionally difficult to deal with the way this man’s brain worked couldn’t be evaluated using the logic of normal people. But it hadn’t expected him to see through it this quickly. The system felt as if its dignity as a high-tech product was entirely drifting away.

“The capture target this time is Naraku, who is a villain in the data files in other words, a ‘bad person’ in the eyes of the world. If it were someone like Natsume, I could understand it. But switching the target to Naraku makes it highly bizarre. Why would a system evaluating whether I am a ‘good person’ require raising a villain’s favorability toward me? It is far too contradictory to normal parameters.”

“Aside from that, there are plenty of other clues, right?” Dazai noted. “Your acting is far too clumsy; it can’t even compare to Tsubaki’s.” As he spoke, he rotated his head to glance at Tsubaki keeping pace beside his frame, exposing a praising smile toward her.

The system, whose acting skills couldn’t even match an under-age minor: “…” So furious, yet I must maintain a smile.

“In truth, I am a Total Capture System,” the system weighted its choice of vocabulary with total care. “Telling you before that I was helping you become a good person was actually a lie.”

“Mm. And then? Your intent?”

“Zero intent,” the system unloosed a deflated tone. “It’s exclusively to assist your person in capturing alternative targets.”

“Then why did you fabricate a lie to hoodwink me?”

“I observed your person for a long duration, and loosely felt that if I informed you of the reality tracks from the start, you wouldn’t bind with me at all.” This was indeed a factual parameter. Evaluating Dazai Osamu’s psychological state during his dark era made it genuinely impossible to imagine his person binding with a system of this nature.

The system cautiously monitored its host’s expression, attempting to decode some emotional fluctuations. But transparently, the positions of the system and Dazai Osamu inside the food chain were irreversible. The high-tech product against the former Mafia Executive resulted in a complete blowout victory for the latter.

The system could never decrypt what Dazai Osamu was mentally evaluating. It had initially assumed Dazai would turn wrathful or express rage due to the deception, yet the counterpart merely exposed an understanding expression, looking exactly as if everything fell within his pre-estimations.

“Therefore, while executing your observations on me, your person caught the words Oda-saku voiced toward me back then, and engineered a rationale of that metric… correct?”

“Mm,” the system nodded. At that juncture, it truly possessed zero alternatives to handle Dazai Osamu, forced to resort to a lower tactic of this nature.

“You are genuinely zero human after all,” a long duration elapsed before Dazai Osamu opened his mouth anew.

“Exclusively for a straightforward rationale of this metric.”

“If you had voiced it earlier, I wouldn’t have harbored concern for that long either.”

System: If I may speak directly, where exactly did you display a single speck of concern?

Ultimately, Dazai Osamu summarized: “This layer of naivety across your person is worthy of praise.”

“What about that specific phrase? Since parameters stand to this image, there shouldn’t be a mandate anymore to force a capture target to state that I am a good person, right?”

“That phrase was a customized setting anchored during the initial binding process.”

Therefore, to accommodate its customized persona of “assisting the host to act as a good person,” it had arbitrarily modified the text tracks to the current image.

“Oh.”

“Oh?” The system felt Dazai’s response was far too detached.

“In alternative words, my assignment counts as farming a target’s favorability index, and afterward forcing that person to state I am a good person?”

“That is exactly the parameter.”

“Tsk,” Dazai noted. “Acting to this image makes it look exactly like receiving a ‘good person card’ over and over again.”

“…” There appears to be absolute zero error in that logic.

“I desire to act as a good person” Dazai tightened his grip across Tsubaki’s hand, speaking to his system. “Everything must maintain that line as an absolute prerequisite.”

“As for assignments or parameters of that metric, I shall smoothly complete them along the way.”

“Teacher,” the hand belonging to Tsubaki that was held by Dazai executed a slight movement. Tracking a patch of scorched black earth stretching before their path, she leaned her frame closer toward Dazai’s side.

“Arrived?” Dazai dropped his frame low toward the ground, tracking the soil panels that could be scanned as non-normal within a single glance.

“Looks exactly as if it were contaminated by some entity,” he could modulate every single phrase to unloose an entirely alternative melody, yet it constantly delivered a sensation that parameters fell entirely within pre-estimations anyway.

“Zero yokai nest right here,” Tsubaki perceived the wind currents flowing across their perimeter.

The surroundings held zero living entities, hence it naturally lacked a single sound track. Within the weak wind murmurs, the rising and falling breathing sounds of the two of them could be captured with absolute clarity.

The moon, masked behind the murky clouds, filtered a clear luminescence through a narrow fracture line; yet when it projected down across the soil panels, it abnormally unloosed a crimson reflection, leaving this wilderness which originally maintained a silence identical to a burial ground appearing brilliantly more eerie. A bizarre and intensely uncomfortable sensation diffused across every corner of the perimeter.

“To the metric where even yokai hold zero desire to draw close?” Dazai Osamu advanced his strides inside that patch of land whose boundaries were cleanly demarcated from alternative soils. “Truly provoking a surge of excitement.”

“…” This location couldn’t be considered massive; within merely a few steps of entering, he caught sight of a tachi sliced diagonally across the soil panels. Alongside it lay shattered residual limbs that hadn’t even begun the process of rotting away belonging to both wild beasts and humans.

Items of this nature, bound to terrify normal people until they refused to draw close, presented an unexpectedly harmonious match when laid out right here.

Dazai Osamu tracked everything before his eyes with absolute silence, before shifting his focus over toward the Tsubaki who had followed on his heels.

“Shouldn’t your person currently fulfill a teacher’s assigned duty, directing an under-age minor to remain far away from a bloody scene of this metric?” the system interrogated him.

“I am currently keeping up my diligent efforts to guide my student to adapt to the parameters of this world,” Dazai fixedly tracked Tsubaki’s eyes. When this young girl nested inside the shrine structure before, she was likely trapped inside the phase of practicing cultivation beside her master, catching sight of injured individuals seeking treatment at the absolute maximum; scenes of this nature were parameters she had genuinely never experienced. Her face was slightly pale, her shoulders trembling a fraction.

“Tsubaki,” Dazai Osamu clasped her hand, unloosing a smile that could be evaluated as genuine gentleness. “This is a parameter your person must brave through.”

“A scene of this nature is an experience you will continuously brave through inside your future life tracks; therefore, focus your vision to track it carefully.”

“Didn’t your person desire to transform into an excellent priestess?” he countered, his tone carrying an un-declinable weight that permitted zero refusal.

Tsubaki’s performance was actually remarkably decent. Most young girls of this age metric maintained merely a capability standard fit for assisting their mothers with domestic chores; even if she had constantly lived inside a shrine structure, it couldn’t alter the factual parameter that she was still a small child. Facing a spectacle of this nature, her capability to firmly anchor her footing right here counted as a parameter worthy of praise.

“Yes,” Tsubaki put in all her efforts to steady her emotional parameters. She was brilliantly more clever than her peers, correspondingly rendering her far more anchored and stable. Even if the spectacle before her eyes unloosed a highly potent impact, she could still shackle the terror deep within her core at the absolute minimum… refraining from unmasking it outwardly.

“Does an irregularity exist across this blade?” Dazai Osamu advanced a few strides, stabilizing his frame beside that sword to ask his system.

Tsubaki held zero capability to catch their conversation tracks, merely witnessing Dazai Osamu loosening his grip across her hand to stride over to that side. For a brief fraction, she froze right on her original spot, holding zero idea how to execute her movements. The terror she had just suppressed surged right back up on its heels.

Her dependence parameter toward Dazai Osamu manifested to an inexplicable metric—or rather, Dazai Osamu’s frame intrinsically carried a mysterious attraction parameter that forced a person to un-consciously cluster toward his side. Without a single hint of awareness, she had already treated Dazai Osamu as an asset identical to a religious belief.

While she was still letting her mind drift across a ball of tangled thoughts, the system unloosed an exceptionally shocked syllable after executing a brief observation of the blade:

“This is the So’unga.”