The Thin Man spoke with absolute conviction, even correctly guessing what I was thinking. He wasn't making some grand declaration that we had to live and die together. He had simply chosen, given the circumstances, to walk this road by my side. If it had been the former, I probably wouldn't have been able to stand it, and I could have refused him outright. But with things as they were, I couldn't say anything.
The Thin Man had made it clear, too: the situation was dire, and we had no choice but to take a chance together.
He wasn't wrong.
"There's really no need..." I sighed. "I'm not that confident, either. If you don't get involved, at least you'll make it through today safely. Maybe by tomorrow, we'll have found a new solution..."
"You don't even believe that yourself, do you?" The Thin Man scoffed. "Anyway, we've made up our minds. I can't think of any way out. Greenleaf and the others don't seem to have one, either, and neither do those so-called experts... It's not just that the statue of the Goddess Ashley is done for; the F Country parliament building has collapsed, and there's been a toxic gas leak at a laboratory in E Country... With things like this, who do you think can come up with a solution?"
The Thin Man made it sound as though the end of the world had arrived. In fact, even without knowing the truth behind these events, just seeing one alarming news story after another in recent days was enough to make anyone feel the tension.
Natural disasters and human calamities kept cropping up.
News that would normally stay in the headlines for two or three days couldn't even last a minute now.
People had started talking about the "end times"