Chapter 69: The Fall of North America
As the Witch Labyrinth slowly approached, an invisible pressure began to descend upon the west coast of North America, as if setting the stage for the "case" that was about to unfold.
…
On the West Coast, society had long since collapsed. Although Conan's purge had passed through, the people who remained were scattered and hidden. The tide of the "witch hunt" had not left behind the hope of reconstruction, but a deeper suspicion and paranoia. The survivors hid in the ruins, warily watching one another, terrified that their neighbors would pull a knife for half a piece of bread or a mouthful of dirty water.
When the invisible, intangible domain began to envelop the land, the first thing to break was not the buildings, but the already fragile human heart and the false peace it had struggled to maintain.
At first, a "static" filled the air, a disturbing noise that gnawed at the mind.
"While I think you do a fine job, I'm not paying into your social security, and I'm not giving you a salary. There won't be any vacation time or overtime pay, either. And you'll be 'voluntarily resigning' right before payday. Got it?"
"That woman on the corner, I bet she's not paying taxes on the money she's hiding! That's our hard-earned cash!"
"City Hall… those bastards… what did our tax money get spent on… bird food? Opera tickets?!"
"That million-dollar IOU you wrote right before we broke up, you really have the nerve to bring that to court!"
"The way he walks is so arrogant, he must be high on something, I swear I just want to stab him…"
"Can't someone clean up all the addicts on the street? They're like a bunch of zombies."
"Why do I have to pay to use a public restroom?"
"It's impossible to find a bathroom in the New York subway!"
"You have a pinhole camera hidden in your shoe!"
"It has been 683 days since I was falsely accused of taking pictures on the subway."
"Shut up! The sound of your breathing is annoying me!"
"Where's my forty grand? I just want my money back."
"Isn't five hundred dollars enough for you?"
"You don't love me anymore!"
"You gave me all that stuff willingly!!!"
"Let's get a divorce!"
Countless voices whispered in their ears, speaking of forgotten secrets and buried crimes, of the lies and resentments people refused to admit even to themselves, of the murderous intents that were now festering.
Within the Labyrinth's influence, people began to go mad for no reason. Or rather, they found a "reason" to.
A man hiding in an abandoned supermarket suddenly pointed at an empty shelf and screamed, claiming he saw the accounting ledgers he'd cooked years ago turn into a monster. An invisible force then seized his throat, forcing him to experience the suffocating agony of a person who had indirectly died due to his embezzlement. He finally expired, his eyes bulging, leaving only his own terrified fingerprints at the scene.
An old woman, who had once thrown gasoline on her neighbor and served her time, started running madly through the streets, screaming that her dead neighbor had become a thousand eyes in the walls, watching her. In her hallucinations, she was finally "avenged" by the neighbor, dying in a freak "accident"—slipping on a puddle of spilled gasoline and burning to death.
Inside a heavily guarded shelter, a former judge woke with a start. She felt a cold gaze piercing the walls and heard a clear question in her ear, accompanied by the sound of scraping metal:
"Why is the punishment different for the same crime?"
"Why do you pass judgment when the chain of evidence is in doubt?"
"Why was the appeal delayed again and again?"
She looked around in terror but saw no one, only the flickering emergency lights. "Because… because it was reasonable…" she muttered, trying to cover her ears, trying to justify her past actions. She found her hands had become as cold and heavy as the scales of justice, one side tipping down, unable to be lifted. In the end, she was "judged" by a re-enactment of a secondary tragedy her ruling had caused—perhaps the desperate act of a victim's family member—which now manifested as an illusion or a physical entity to carry out the "verdict." The "evidence" left at her death scene pointed directly to her past misjudgments.
The panic intensified the division and led to explosive violence.
"It's you! You must have done something evil to attract these things!"
"Get away! Don't come near me! Your secrets will get us all killed!"
The remaining communities disintegrated once more. People turned on each other over mutual suspicion, using weapons scavenged from corpses to attack one another simply because they suspected the other was "unclean," or just because they didn't like the way they looked. Under the Labyrinth's influence, this "dislike" was amplified into an unforgivable "sin."
A man in ragged clothes suddenly bludgeoned his companion—who was distributing their small amount of food—to death with a rusty pipe. "You were definitely stealing from the relief supplies! Just like the corrupt parasites on the news! Your fake smile makes me sick!" The method of death perfectly mirrored a real-life case caused by unfair distribution.
Two families, who had been supporting each other, erupted into a bloody brawl over the suspicion that the other was hiding "benefits" they weren't entitled to, ultimately killing each other in the ruins. The items scattered at the scene formed a perfect chain of evidence pointing to their mutual "greed" and "suspicion."
Amidst the chaos, a relatively well-dressed young woman ran screaming from her hiding place. Behind her, a wedding dress floated on its own, a black stain seeping from its collar. "It wasn't me! I didn't say it!" she cried at the empty air. The walls of the surrounding ruins began to project blurry images of a bedroom, of an angry, pleading face, and of her own cold, dismissive expression.
"House… name on the deed… prison…" Broken words came from all directions. The phantom of a property deed materialized above her, its paper edges turning razor-sharp as it slowly spun and descended. Her head, along with her terror, vanished.
Paranoia and madness spread rapidly. People no longer killed for food or out of direct threat, but because of these amplified "truths" and the seemingly absurd yet logically consistent "judgments" that followed.
Then, the physical corrosion began.
The edge of the Labyrinth swept through the cities. The twisted laws of "truth" and "crime scenes" began to overwrite reality. Shoddily constructed buildings, built on lies and cut corners, had their internal structures instantly fail, causing them to collapse and bury the survivors within. The manner of their collapse exposed every last construction violation.
Courthouses and police stations began to ooze black liquid from their walls. The ground split open into bottomless chasms, revealing their rotten foundations. In certain offices and interrogation rooms, the scenes of past wrongful convictions began to replay themselves. Outside the judge's shelter, the statue of Lady Justice wept black tears, and the scales in her hand rusted through and broke. Below the statue, images of those who had suffered from her misjudgments appeared, followed by terrifying monsters made of countless voided forms and delayed reports, which crawled from the ruins of government buildings. They moved slowly, but could pull anyone who got too close into a hallucinatory nightmare of endless bureaucracy until their minds gave out and they died, often in the posture of someone working at a desk, a nod to the public projects that were never finished and massively over budget.
A "rain of money" began to fall from the sky. Not real cash, but vouchers detailing all sorts of absurd expenses: "Border Duck Wetland Observation Fee," "Transgender Manga Translation Subsidy," "DEI-themed Musical Promotion Fee." The papers fluttered down, covering the ground. Under the Labyrinth's twisted will, people began to fight over the useless paper, and the ensuing conflicts would often end in "accidents" related to the very projects on the vouchers.
…
On the streets, the wrecks of rusty postal trucks came to life, becoming hungry mechanical monsters that devoured pedestrians, re-enacting real-life "going postal" massacres. In the ruins of hospitals, twisted hospital beds and surgical tools assembled themselves into terrifying medical contraptions that chased the living, their mechanical voices endlessly repeating "improper payment," "recording error," and "scalpel left behind" as they "treated" people in the manner of fatal medical accidents.
Some Familiars took the form of fat, bloated worms holding social security cards, burrowing into the ground and emerging elsewhere to drag insurance fraudsters into the earth. Other Familiars became actors in strange costumes, "touring" the ruins and corrupting people's minds with their bizarre songs, the lyrics detailing a real, forgotten tragedy of jealousy and murder within a theater troupe. Still other Familiars took the direct form of armed soldiers, blindly attacking each other or turning their weapons on civilians, re-enacting various training accidents and friendly-fire tragedies.
Familiars shaped like magnifying glasses floated in the air, their beams sweeping across the ground, amplifying people's darkest thoughts and basest desires, projecting their killing intent into the sky, and then manifesting it as a corresponding "death trap" or simply triggering a violent conflict.
A man ran into a ruined church, fell to his knees before a shattered icon, and began to confess that he had once wished death upon someone over a trivial matter. The church's stained-glass windows were then shattered by an unseen force, and the shards rained down, killing him in the exact manner he had wished upon his victim.
Crowds of people, their desires infinitely amplified, gathered for a final, apocalyptic orgy, their flesh-colored bodies writhing like maggots in the firelight. Suddenly, the flames turned an icy blue, freezing them and everything around them into grotesque sculptures of desire.
Some tried to flee inland with their families, only to find the roads blocked by warped space, eventually exhausting themselves in an endless maze. On the walls, their slightest past resentments and hatreds for their family members were projected, tormenting them until they watched their loved ones go mad or die.
Others chose to hold their loved ones in their final moments, shielding them with their bodies from falling rubble, whispering words of love they could never say before. But in the next second, driven by some trivial, forgotten grudge, they would instinctively push their loved one into harm's way, causing their death. The pusher would then be judged a "murderer" by the Labyrinth's laws and summarily executed.
Beauty and ugliness. Goodness and evil. Great sins and petty evils. All were crushed indiscriminately, placed under the cold judgment of "truth" and "verdict."
At the heart of the Labyrinth, the child-like silhouette made of a thousand conflicting images simply moved slowly inland. It felt no anger, no pity. It just existed. It just executed a cold law of "truth," transforming every covered-up crime and malicious thought, no matter how small, into a corresponding death. This truth was beyond comprehension, based on the very origin of its birth: the boy detective who was forever chasing the truth, and was forever shrouded in the shadow of death.
…
The cities were disintegrating. Life was withering. Death was no longer a random event, but a traceable, "inevitable result" with "evidence" pointing to it.
As the Labyrinth moved deeper inland, the very earth began to groan in agony. Mountains crumbled, rivers ran dry, and great fissures appeared at the seams of the tectonic plates. The very "foundations" of the North American continent, along with all the "falsehoods" and "sins" it carried, were being negated and erased by this Witch.
The march of destruction had not stopped. The fall of a continent had begun.
And at that moment, a new member joined the chat group.