Chapter 53
As I watched the red trails being embroidered across the empty air.
“…Pretty.”
They looked just like the color of Ren's eyes.
Huey murmured absently,
“Wow… he's got it bad.”
“What do you think it's like for me, having to see that beside me every day?”
The two women whispered behind Huey as they watched him like that.
Immediately afterward.
They watched Ren, who had been standing in the distant sky, suddenly move away from his position.
“Huh? Why is he doing that?”
“I know. It's like he's avoiding something….”
The two women, apart from Huey, looked overhead with trembling eyes.
“Mr. Huey! Quickly, over here!”
“Master! You must get out of the way!”
No wonder.
“Huh? What the hell…? This is insane.”
The thing that had been floating in the sky until just now,
the cocoon of muddy water, filled with blood, corpses, dirt, and rubble, was breaking apart and falling.
At the sight of enough water to drown an entire city falling from overhead,
“Aaaaaaah!”
Huey ran desperately toward Frederica, who was creating a barrier a little farther away.
And Frederica's barrier was completed just in time, right before the muddy current reached them.
-Whoosh!!
Panting heavily after rushing over on exhausted legs,
Huey once again watched Swinford sink beneath the water.
Unlike how it had looked at first, with everything quietly submerged beneath the transparent water,
the water surging before their eyes was murky, as though foreshadowing the future ahead.
“Ugh, what a mess.”
“Master. Are you all right?”
Despite the voice beside him,
Huey merely looked quietly around, overcome by an ominous feeling.
And so.
When the rippling water had finally calmed somewhat,
“Come to think of it, where's Ren?”
“I don't know.”
Huey and Luciela searched around for Ren, who had disappeared.
“Over there.”
Frederica pointed toward where Ren's mana could be sensed.
“He seems to be with a man named Osmund.”
She added that he was accompanied by a faint presence that seemed about to wink out at any moment.
As Frederica flicked her fingers,
the large chunks of rubble scattered in all directions began moving as though they possessed wills of their own, creating a path.
“The rubble….”
“…Threads?”
Huey was startled at the sight of rubble moving on its own and fixing itself in midair,
while Luciela's eyes took on a strange light when she noticed thin threads connected to the moving rubble.
“Let's go together.”
Instead of answering, the two quietly began walking after Frederica.
And so.
In the silence, with only the sound of rippling water lingering around them,
they walked for a while toward where Ren was.
“There he is.”
Just as Frederica had said,
the three of them could see Ren in the distance.
Ren was gazing down with a serious expression, his sword pointed at something beneath his feet.
Before long.
-Shhk.
Ren swung his sword with an expressionless face,
and something sprang upward from the recoil.
“Master. Is that….”
“…Mr. Osmund?”
It was.
For some reason, it was Osmund's head, his eyes closed in a peaceful expression.
“Oh, you're here.”
And only then did he seem to notice the three of them, Huey included, approaching him.
Ren turned his head and spoke.
“Sorry to ask this as soon as you got here, but I'll leave the rest to you.”
Before the three could respond to the sudden, incomprehensible words,
-Thud.
Drenched in cold sweat, Ren collapsed.
“Ren!”
“What happened all of a sudden…!”
Huey and Luciela ran toward Ren as he collapsed.
“…I'm jealous.”
Then, after realizing that what Ren had looked at in his final moment was Huey and Luciela, not herself,
Frederica looked with a complicated expression at Ren's left hand, which had held onto the sword until the very end.
“When will you finally realize that even if you can no longer hold a sword, we won't leave you?”
Her pink eyes brimmed with pity.
“…Honestly, what a coward.”
* *
For the first time in a long while, I dreamed.
A dream from my childhood, so long ago that I no longer even remembered when it had been.
In my dreams, I was always alone.
But I wasn't lonely.
Because I didn't know there was anything other than being alone.
Even so, I had been able to survive because I had strength.
Was that what people called talent?
From a young age, I had a knack for handling bladed weapons.
Since I had already possessed enough ability as a child to rival even adults,
I had always lived by taking what I wanted.
Food, and a place to escape the rain.
It was one day, while I was living that way.
Once I had enough food and a place to rest,
something else began to catch my eye.
Something I always saw when I went out into the streets.
Something that seemed to exist as a matter of course among people who moved about in noisy groups.
And something I didn't have.
A family.
So.
I wanted a family.
That's what I thought.
But a family wasn't something I could create just because I wanted one.
-Eek, a monster!
-Get lost, you monster!
The weaklings who always handed over food when I threatened them with a blade
began to thrash about when I asked for a family, insisting that they could never give me one, even if it killed them.
What could possibly be so extraordinary that they acted like that?
That only made me more curious.
What did I have to do to get a family?
Unable to suppress my longing for a family,
I decided to try making something resembling a family first.
I gathered people in circumstances similar to mine and began pretending we were a family.
Perhaps gathering vagrants off the street was the problem, because they soon scattered again.
The greatest problem was that, in that imitation of family play,
I came to realize what loneliness was.
Once I had learned what loneliness was, I couldn't return to my former life.
That was why.
I began gathering people in the same situation as me once more.
This time, by forcing them to submit.
That was the answer.
Once I began ruling through force, no one even thought of running away.
If I had strength, I would never have to feel lonely again.
If I had strength, I wasn't alone.
That was the conclusion I reached.
But.
That, too, wasn't perfect.
What I had obtained with inadequate strength
would ultimately only be destroyed by a stronger force.
It happened one day.
-Huh, you're quite something.
As usual, I stopped a passerby and threatened them to take their food,
but that person's slender build made it momentarily difficult to tell whether they were a man or a woman, and they instead began examining me as though intrigued.
-Whatever else, I could at least teach you swordsmanship.
The moment I lunged at the person spouting incomprehensible nonsense,
I was sent flying far away with my limbs broken.
-I like you. I'll take you on as my disciple. Consider yourself honored.
When I came to, everyone I had gathered, myself included, had been thoroughly smashed to pieces.
-Oh, and for the record, I don't need your opinion. I'm a tyrant.
That was how I first met my master.
Before I knew it, twenty years had passed since then.
And I was still
longing for something called a family.
* *
My whole body hurts.
“Peep….”
The agony throughout my body
made me give up on trying to sit up, and I opened my eyes.
“Ren!”
“Thank goodness…!”
The familiar ceiling came into view,
along with the two brats calling my name.
“You're too close, you bastards.”
They had their faces so close that it was honestly burdensome.
When I said that with a frown, Huey and Lucy scratched their heads and backed away.
“Anyway, how long was I out?”
I asked while looking at the ceiling of my familiar room.
“About two days.”
“Your voice is hoarse. I'll go get you some water.”
Huey answered me with a disgruntled expression,
while Lucy likewise got to her feet with an uncomfortable expression, as if she had remembered something.
Two days… I was out for quite a while.
“More importantly, are you all right?”
I was still reeling from the fact that I'd been unconscious for two days
when Huey asked me in an unusually serious voice.
“No, it hurts like hell.”
Besides, judging from the sensation amid the pain, it seemed my arms and legs had reverted to a harpy's limbs as well.
“So, what happened?”
I asked Huey, who had been restlessly circling me and examining me, clearly bothered by something.
“You don't remember?”
“Remember what?”
“Well….”
To summarize Huey's story that began that way….
Immediately after I passed out, I apparently began groaning and then started screaming,
and amid a scene that could be roughly summarized as crunches, creaks, and cracks, my limbs returned to their former shape… or so he said.
“Good thing I was unconscious.”
“Could you spare a thought for what we had to see?”
Apparently, seeing a person's limbs transform into a harpy's wings and legs right before his eyes had been quite shocking.
Huey covered his mouth as though merely remembering it made him nauseous.
“…It just went poof and changed when I took it, so why did it have to be like that when it changed back?”
At the description of a sight I didn't particularly want to imagine, I stopped thinking, closed my eyes, and sighed.
“Sigh. I expected something like this to some extent, but the side effects are too severe.”
“Ms. Frederica said there's still one more medicine left.”
…….
“Tell her to throw it away.”
It doesn't even restore all four limbs.
And it's obvious this medicine will have a time limit too.
After trying the medicine, I was certain.
Beatrice's medicine could never return me to my original body.
“Anyway, get some rest. I'll go bring Ms. Frederica here.”
Of course, I still needed to go north at least once, medicine notwithstanding….
But for now, a more important problem had arisen.
“Haa, two days….”
Sighing as I sensed Huey's presence recede outside without waiting for my reply,
I quietly shifted my eyes downward.
More precisely, at my lower abdomen, where I'd started to feel something strange a little earlier.
I'm going crazy. Seriously.