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Iruma was not religious, or rather, he did not believe in faith. They told him, "The greater your faith, the more That One will offer you," but he believed that the higher one's faith, the greater the shock would be when faced with reality. He had hope—something inherent to every human being—but nothing that made him believe in an intangible entity, for food had never unexpectedly appeared before him like a light, no matter how many times he lamented his hunger alongside the other children on the streets.
On the other hand, he did not reject the compassion that was offered to him, albeit rarely, by the people from the church during festive occasions (periods he identified by the movement of people wearing specific garments or by influencers filming the children while handing out gifts). Regardless of who offered it, food was food, and he was ready to accept and share any nourishment he could receive.
Life on the streets had shaped him in this way, and despite his unexpected adoption by an influential and wealthy family, made up of people who supported him, he did not see it as an act of divine benevolence.
The blue-eyed young man sat down on the bench inside the dimly lit booth. Nothing had changed, and honestly, he had not expected anything to. To be frank, he wished never to return to the church, but a change in plans after the day's meetings had led the family's accountant to bring him there once again. For some reason, they seemed to have concluded that he had enjoyed the place.
He remained silent, waiting for any sign from the other side of the booth, and soon the other person began to speak.
"What's the problem, boy?" It was the same voice as before, deep and thoughtful. "Have you sinned?"
Iruma chose his words carefully.
"No, I don't believe so."
Through the same opening as before, the puppet that had been offered as an ‘offering’ appeared. Whoever was on the other side had certainly taken a liking to the doll, as it was clean and well cared for.
"'I don't believe so.' What an amusing way to deny something, but I shall not judge."
The puppet moved closer, revealing more of the black fabric of the other person's cassock sleeve, and pointed at the boy.
"Then tell me, boy," he began. "If it's not a bother."
The request was made in a modest tone, contradicting the way the phrase sounded more like an order.
The boy closed his eyes and thought about what to say, lightly clutching the white hat resting in his lap. He needed to be careful with his words; as the headmaster of Babyls, he had to pay attention to what he said, but his mouth often betrayed him. His words always came from the heart rather than the mind. It was one of the things he needed to work on, along with his own inexperience and immaturity for someone in such a position, yet it was not a trait he intended to cast aside.
Seeing his troubled expression and clenched hands, the puppet covered its nonexistent mouth with one of its little cloth hands.
"Thinking about adult things again?"
Sullivan had no time to react before the puppet pointed at him.
"Pervert! We're in a church, you know? Ahh, adolescents going through their growth phase are so complicated!"
Iruma's mind came to a halt. Slowly, he turned his head toward the latticed window.
"What?!"
But the puppet continued talking to itself.
"Ahh, dear God, beloved be His name, save this young boy!"
The puppet's voice echoed with theatrical fervor.
"That's not it!"
Iruma exclaimed, the tips of his ears now tinted a vivid red. His cheeks puffed out slightly in frustration.
"Right, that's what they all say."
The puppet shook its head.
"You see, boy, the flesh is always weak. There is no reason to deny such feelings. They are inherent to human beings; we are flawed. Many carry sin upon their skin before it ever reaches their minds!"
Iruma tried to say something, but that sentence made him stop.
The puppet watched his agitation with a disconcerting calm.
"Well then, how was your day?"
The sudden change of subject caught Iruma off guard.
"What?"
He stopped mid-motion, turning back to face the puppet. The confusion in his blue eyes was unmistakable.
The puppet crossed its cloth arms, adopting an almost human posture.
"Why, no one ventures into this forgotten corner without a reason, my boy. Whether it is to seek advice, atone for some wrongdoing, or simply have a conversation."
Hesitantly, Iruma replied, a faint note of defensiveness in his voice.
"I have no need to talk. I have people I can speak with." The image of his new friends at Babyls crossed his mind.
"Right, of course you do."
There was a subtle tone in the puppet's voice — something between understanding and skepticism — that Iruma could not quite decipher and that, for some reason, irritated him slightly.
"The final decision is always yours."
The young man fell silent, merely observing the strange one - eyed puppet.
"So..." he began. "Would you like to hear about my day?"
He did not want to hear about the day of someone devoted to the church, but without even waiting for a response, the priest (?) began to speak.
"Well, I woke up very, veeeery early. Earlier than you could possibly imagine."
Was this really happening? Was Iruma about to listen to the complaints of someone who operated through a puppet in exchange for wisdom?
"I don't remember when I ate, but I do know I ate a lot as well! Oh, how I adore the Sacra Festival. They should hold it more often throughout the year."
"I thought gluttony, greed, was a sin..." Iruma murmured.
Once again, he was not a religious person, but a large part of human history revolved around beliefs and religions. Babel itself, for example, assisted with several charity projects organized by local churches, although he was fairly certain that Morax—the internal Babyls contact within the Holy House—was not exactly a fervent believer either.
"Where does necessity become greed? Isn't it ironic to try to define that? A person who has spent their entire life starving will eat while carrying the trauma of thinking they may never eat again. But is that a sin?"
Iruma remained inside the confessional, standing still as he stared at the one-eyed puppet that stared back at him.
He had not expected the person on the other side to be so difficult to read. It was hard to explain, but being at the center — at the head — of one of the largest mafias in Japan had made him very skilled (despite what Opera would say) at reading people.
"It was a mistake to come here."
He prepared to stand, the abrupt movement betraying his desire to escape the uncomfortable situation.
"Of course. Not thinking too much about sin makes us vulnerable to it. Naivety is both the greatest protection and the greatest weapon against everything."
"Right, if that's what you say."
The young man's voice carried an indecipherable note, almost the distant echo of a private thought.
Suddenly, the puppet pointed at Iruma with surprising aggression. Its small cloth hand seemed to accuse him.
"That's not what I say! It's what you think."
The hand animating the puppet gestured frantically, and had his anger not clouded his vision — a weakness for irritation, he would admit — he might have considered offering another doll to the person on the other side.
"Tell me, boy, why do you insist on repeating that? Is it what you desire? To expose your family to danger? To put Babel at risk?"
Blinded by anger, Iruma did not even notice the strange accusation. At no point had he mentioned Babel to the other person. "I...! I don't owe you any explanations."
Iruma's voice trembled with indignation as he pulled back the curtain and stepped out of the booth.
He walked away from the confessional with firm, angry strides, turning his back on the great wooden box that spewed unsettling words. In his fury, he failed to notice the faint rustle of fabric as the curtain was subtly drawn aside. A long, slender hand, adorned with dark metal rings that gleamed faintly in the dim light, watched his figure as he moved away, following him with an intensity his anger prevented him from noticing.
"Right, of course you don't, Young Boss."
The puppet's voice now carried a subtle irony, almost imperceptible.
Iruma froze a few steps from the exit. The words echoed through the emptiness of the silent parish like a gunshot.
Young Boss.
Iruma was certain he had never said that name aloud. He had never given his name. He had never mentioned the mafia.
Slowly, the anger that had blinded him gave way to the survival instinct he had learned on the streets and refined within Babel. He spun on his heels, blue eyes flashing in the darkness. The wooden confessional looked like an empty, lifeless box. The curtain had already fallen shut.
"Who are you?" Iruma's voice emerged lower, colder, stripped of its adolescent innocence.
From behind the wooden partition came not the puppet's voice, but a muffled laugh —entirely human and far less playful.
The sound of footsteps echoed through the parish, and from the side of the confessional, the priest finally revealed himself in full.
Alicred did not look like a man of God.
He wore his black cassock with calculated carelessness; the upper buttons were left undone, exposing a heavy metal necklace that bore no resemblance whatsoever to a crucifix. His long hair hung loose and unkempt, reaching all the way to his waist, while long fingernails idly spun one of the many rings adorning his left hand.
"Just an employee of the largest entertainment company in the world, kid." Alicred said this as he shoved the one-eyed puppet into the deep pocket of his cassock with absolutely no regard for it. "Some people call it the Catholic Church. I call it the greatest guilt-management syndicate ever created. It's quite entertaining here."
Iruma frowned, his defenses rising. "You mock the place where you work."
Alicred shrugged and strolled toward the main altar with an air of complete nonchalance.
"The plain and simple truth, Young Boss, is that The Church is like a game of 'loves me, loves me not'—they keep plucking at people's faith until nothing is left. One day they tell them that God loves them and that poverty is a divine trial — loves me. The next, they let children starve on the sidewalks while collecting tithes from the desperate — loves me not. In the end, the flower is left bald, their pockets grow full, and the people's stomachs remain empty."
Iruma's stomach twisted. The words struck directly at his childhood memories. "If that's what you think, why do you stay here? Why don't you do anything?"
Alicred stopped before the enormous image of the crucified Christ, staring at the statue with profound boredom. "Because, Iruma, this is how it works."
The priest turned around, a crooked smile tugging at the corner of his lips.
"The people need an anesthetic. If they believe their suffering has a divine purpose, they won't rebel against the system. They'll accept their misery. And while they accept that misery and come here to cry in my pews, they won't interfere with Babel's routes. The house of faith hands out soup and cheap hope; you hand out the order that the government fails to maintain. It's a symbiosis. I provide the absolution your men need to sleep at night after collecting protection fees, and in return, Babel makes sure no one robs my donation box. Pragmatic, isn't it?"
Iruma swallowed hard.
He was the most faithless man who had ever stood before an altar.
"Don't call me by that title here again," Iruma declared, his voice firm despite the impact of the priest's words. "And stay out of my family's affairs."
"What the eyes don't see, the heart doesn't grieve over, Young Boss." Alicred mocked him, making a completely careless sign of the cross in the air and waving goodbye as Iruma pushed open the church's heavy wooden doors, stepping out into the daylight where Babel's car was already waiting for him.
The silence in the back seat of the car still echoed with the priest's cynical words when Iruma finally arrived at Sullivan's mansion. The transition between the tense underworld of the parish and the secure opulence of his new home no longer seemed as different as it once had.
Now, seated in an upholstered velvet chair in the center of the enormous private bathroom, Iruma tried to process the world around him. His reflection in the mirror showed his slightly unruly blue hair, still damp as it was being combed neatly into place.
Behind him, maintaining the impeccable posture he always carried and holding a pair of silver scissors that gleamed beneath the warm lights, Opera prepared to cut Iruma's hair.
The rhythmic sound of metal meeting metal—click, click, click—was strangely therapeutic. Through the mirror, Opera watched the young man's tense expression. His feline eyes caught every microexpression of fatigue and irritation that the boy tried to hide.
"Was the meeting with the accountants really that exhausting? They didn't seem all that difficult."
"...Do you believe in God, Opera?" the younger boy asked without hesitation.
"I believe in human beings."
"And?"
"And that is enough for me. It's difficult to believe in something I've never seen. That's why I believe in human beings, and I believe in you."
Iruma sighed, closing his eyes as freshly cut blue strands drifted silently onto the marble floor. The click, click, click continued to echo through the quiet bathroom, the sharp silver blades passing repeatedly near his neck, until his hair rested at shoulder length, light and free from all the dust of that church. "Thank you."
When Iruma was not out in the field—whether handling negotiations on behalf of his grandfather, the Don—he was usually confined to his desk at Babel's office. He was either studying or reviewing contracts that passed from hand to hand among the allied mafia families.
It was on a particularly sunny afternoon that a white envelope arrived among the day's correspondence, sealed with wax and bearing the parish's crest.
Iruma opened it with suspicion.
Inside, resting atop an ivory-colored sheet displaying a map of one of Babel's territories, was a pressed flower missing one of its petals. The missing petal had been drawn in black ink directly over a specific point on the map, like a target marker.
Beside it, written in hurried, nearly illegible handwriting, was a note:
"For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be brought into the light." — Mark 4:22.
Go, Young Boss. Someone cried in my confessional and left a secret leaking all over the place. Loves me, loves me not—who knows what you'll find? But go.
The Lord be with you.
And with your spirit.
(Have a little faith, kid.)
If Iruma believed in nothing, then what could have moved him to go?
And yet, faithless, he went.