NEEDY GIRL OVERDOSE

Marilyn Manson?

Yeah.

Jesus Christ's most famous hater.

Nervous?

How the hell are you not nervous, Nechika?!

Let us begin.

Yes. Even the most beautiful flower means nothing if it never blooms.

All right. Here we go.

The first time I went to school,

everyone in class was so proper and normal, and not warped at all.

It scared the hell out of me, and I just couldn't fit in.

And I couldn't sense enough goodness in the teachers to trust them, either.

The whole place just felt creepy.

When I got online, I was so excited.

All those people who'd shed their humanity and hid behind the mask of anonymity...

I couldn't wait to see how ugly they were compared to me.

But the online world was actually cleaner than what I'd imagined.

If anything, without all the social niceties,

you could glimpse something pure in them.

And they had rotten personalities, and only knew how to act rotten.

- It made me feel sick. - It made me feel sick.

- I just felt pathetic. - I just felt pathetic.

All that extreme slander was just their complexes turned inside out.

Over and over, they attacked elites and the bourgeoisie with cheap, lazy populism

born from shallow understanding.

A broken metronome.

They waved around fake justice,

but couldn't even become proper villains. The most half-assed trash imaginable.

And when I realized that, the helplessness of it all actually started to feel kind of lovable.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I liked other people.

I come to report. I come to report, my lord.

That man is cruel.

Cruel, yes. A vile creature. An evil man.

Ah, I cannot stand it.

He must not be allowed to live.

Yes, yes. I'll calm myself and tell you properly.

That man must not be allowed to live.

He is the enemy of the world.

Yes, I'll tell you everything. All of it. Every last thing.

I know where he is.

I'll take you there at once.

Cut him to pieces. Torture him. Kill him.

That man is my teacher. My lord.

Do you have any idea how I've secretly protected them all this time?

No one knows.

No, not even the man himself knows.

No, he does know.

He knows perfectly well.

And because he knows, he treats me with even more spiteful contempt.

That man is arrogant.

He knows how much help he receives from me, and that galls him.

He is stupidly vain.

He seems to think accepting help from someone like me is some terrible shame.

He's desperate for everyone to think he can do everything by himself.

Absurd. That is not how the world works.

If you mean to live in this world,

you have no choice but to bow and scrape to someone,

and then suffer, step by step, until you can hold others down yourself.

What can that man do, truly?

Nothing. He can do nothing.

To my eyes, he is still just a naive child.

If I hadn't been there, so long ago,

he and those useless, idiotic disciples of his would have died like dogs in some field.

I think that man is beautiful.

To me, he is like a child, free of greed.

Even when I scrimp and save money for my daily bread,

he makes me spend every last coin on some worthless thing.

But I do not resent him for that.

He is a beautiful man.

I may be nothing more than a poor merchant, but even so,

I believe I understand what it means to be a man of spirit.

So no matter how foolishly that man wastes the little coins I worked so hard to save,

I feel nothing.

Nothing at all.

But if that is so, then once in a while, couldn't he at least offer me one kind word?

Yet he is always cruel to me.

Once, as that man was wandering along the spring seashore,

he suddenly called my name.

"You do so much for me."

"I understand your loneliness."

"But you must not always have such a sullen expression."

"To look lonely when you are lonely is what hypocrites do."

"It only means you are changing your expression on purpose,"

"trying to make others understand your loneliness."

"If you truly believe in God,"

"then even when you are lonely, you should pretend nothing is wrong."

"Wash your face clean, anoint your head, and smile."

"Do you not understand?"

"Even if no one else understands your loneliness,"

"it should be enough that your true Father, somewhere unseen, understands it."

"Is that not so? Everyone is lonely."

When he said that to me, for some reason, I wanted to burst into tears.

No, I did not need the Father in Heaven to understand.

I did not need the people of the world to know.

"If only you, you alone, understood me, that would be enough."

"I love you."

"No matter how deeply the other disciples love you,"

"their love could never compare to mine."

I love that man. If he dies, I will die with him.

That man belongs to no one. He is mine.

If I must hand him over to another, then before I do, I will kill him myself.

I abandoned my father, abandoned my mother,

abandoned the land of my birth, and followed that man until this very day.

I do not believe in Heaven.

I do not believe in God.

I do not believe in that man's resurrection.

How could he possibly be the King of Israel?

He is a liar.

Every word he speaks is nonsense, from first to last.

I do not believe a single thing he says.

But I believe in his beauty.

There is no one in this world as beautiful as he.

I love that man's beauty, purely and wholly.

That is all. I ask for no reward.

Yet after I longed for him with life-and-death devotion

and followed him all this way,

he never gave me a single kind word.

Instead, he blushed as he defended that lowly peasant woman.

Ah, so that was it. The man was weak after all.

He had lost his edge. There was no hope left for him.

He was ordinary. Just a man.

It would be no loss if he died.

Once I thought that, a terrible idea suddenly came over me.

Perhaps I had been bewitched by the Devil.

From that moment on, I thought I should kill the man with my own hands.

He was surely destined to be killed one day.

And at times, I even caught glimpses of him

acting as though he were deliberately forcing others to kill him.

I will kill him with my own hands.

I will not let another man do it.

I will kill him, and then I will die.

Ah, the birds are so loud.

Their cries are stuck in my ears.

Why are the birds causing such a racket?

Chirp, chirp, chirp. What are they making such a fuss about?

Oh, money?

You're giving it to me?

Thirty pieces of silver?

I see.

No, I must refuse.

You had better take that money back before I strike you.

I did not come here to accuse them because I wanted money. Put it away!

No, forgive me. I'll take it.

Yes. That's right. I was a merchant.

Because of money, that graceful man always despised me.

I'll take it.

In the end, I am a merchant.

With this despised money, I will have my splendid revenge on him.

This is the method of revenge most suited to me.

Serves him right!

He will be sold for thirty pieces of silver.

I'm not crying at all!

I do not love that man!

I never loved him. Not one tiny bit.

Yes, my lord.

Everything I told you was a lie.

I only followed that man because I wanted money.

Oh, yes. That must be it.

Tonight I saw clearly that he would never let me make a profit.

So like any merchant, I quickly changed sides.

Money.

The world is nothing but money.

Thirty pieces of silver! How wonderful!

I'll take it.

I am a petty merchant.

I want it so badly I can't stand it.

Yes. I thank you.

Yes, yes. I nearly forgot to say.