by Akira Kareno
“You don’t have the right to say what you can and can’t do.”
“Okay, okay. I get it. I can’t win.”
He made a show of violently tossing about his own hair and peeled his gaze away from the faeries.
To be honest, he didn’t know what kind of face he was making. He couldn’t even grasp the basics, if he was smiling or crying or scowling in anger.
That was why he didn’t want to show anyone his cryptic expression.
“I’ll finish my work here then head straight back,” he announced over his shoulder. “So go on home.”
“Mm, understood.”
He was sure Nephren was nodding in a place he couldn’t see.
“…I’m not really happy with this, but oh well. Out of respect for the promise, we will back off for today. C’mon, pip-squeak, let’s go.”
“Oh, uh, okay… But…”
“No buts. Let’s go.”
“Uhhhkay! J-just let me go!”
As Ithea and Tiat clamored, the three faeries’ petite footsteps rushed off into the distance. There was the sound of a loud steam whistle that made something deep in his chest clench together tightly. There came a warning from the commuter airship crew member meant for rude customers. “Please refrain from running up the ramp!”
“We could have prepared a ship for them,” the rabbitfolk muttered, watching them off.
“They probably don’t want you to look out for them.”
“I suppose they don’t like us very much… Come on now, some of you get going. Escort them to Island No. 68.”
Three secret policemen obeyed his orders and ran after the faeries into the ship. The crewman yelled.
The ramp lifted.
The propellers made a piercing sound.
The stabilizing arms released.
Then the airship finally departed from Island No. 11.
Along with the four faeries on board.
—Leaving Willem, his back to them, behind.
“At any rate, you have a very unique way of crying.”
The rabbitfolk rudely went to take a peek at his face, and Willem threw a somewhat serious punch at him.
The Immutable Past, the Vanishing Future
-no news was good news-
1. Soul Chaser—A
Let’s turn back the clock a little.
Five days ago.
Island No. 15, before the crash.
A cry that surpassed all reason, that could rip apart an iron sphere with force alone.
In the face of its 178th death, Timere’s husk collapsed firmly to the ground. Of course, a crack appeared on its back barely a moment later as its 179th life began to hatch.
It changed form every time it was reborn, and it looked like it chose the form of a plant this time. Visible within the husk of body number 178 was a writhing green mass from which countless vines were emerging as it twisted.
“Cssserulean warrior, pull back! The artillery troopss ssshall begin ssaturation fire to cover your retreat!”
Limeskin’s orders flew across the battlefield. But the cerulean warrior, Chtholly Nota Seniorious, was not happy with that. The Carillon Seniorious that she held in her hand was completely in tune with the Beast before her. This Carillon, whose power increased in response to the enemy it resonated with, could essentially display its greatest power of destruction right at this very moment.
In that case, she needed to shoulder this battle for as long as possible.
“Let me kill it just one more time!”
“No!”
A sharp reproach.
For a split second, she hesitated, wondering if she should disobey him and stay.
Overwhelming power was at her fingertips. She was contributing much more than she ever had on the battlefield before. After correctly drawing out the dug weapon’s—no, the Carillon’s—power, she displayed the true abilities of the Braves, something that had been lost with the emnetwiht.
They couldn’t win without her or Seniorious. Surely, they wouldn’t mind if she just pushed a little more—
Red Water.
—Huh?
Gray Wind. The Laughing Titan. A Scarred Brow.
—What is…this?
She reeled.
There was no sign or logical connection. All of a sudden, strange images appeared in her mind’s eye.
She thought she was distracted.
It had been more than 120 hours since the battle began, after all. It would not be odd for her concentration to slip while she was unaware. And it was a matter of course that her sense of reality would lapse after spending such a long time in a place that felt so surreal. She thought that maybe she was doing something as clever as dreaming with her eyes open.
She had to concentrate.
She could not lose this battle. And she could not die here.
To go home. To return to him. That was why—
Fish that swim in the night. A tower of sand that pierces the heavens. A sun that crumbles into sea green. The sweet throes of death. An armful of cubes. A red grimoire, locked. A fox’s neck overflowing with tall trees. A silver nail. Bakers who work together to paint the entire rainbow yellow and delete every ambiguous color. A headless clown at the bottom of a shipwreck caught in a midnight storm, who laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs—
“—Wha—?”
Even when she did concentrate.
Even when she wanted to.
She couldn’t keep it at bay.
They kept growing.
Something.
Chaotic images. Disjointed delusions. Self-asserting daydreams. Shadows of the past she shouldn’t have been able to recall. Stains on her soul she should have wiped away. The murmurings of someone who stood back to back against her. A reality outside of dreams. Overwhelming turmoil that pushed relentlessly toward her.
“Okay, that’s enough.”
A familiar voice pierced through her jumbled thoughts.
“Ith…Ithea?”
“I made the suggestion we switch. Here’s where you obey and pull back.”
“But just a little—”
“If your encroachment advances even a little more, it’ll probably be too late.”
Encroachment.
A word she’d heard before. Where was it? Oh, right, they told her about it when she became a faerie soldier. What were they, exactly—what were faeries? How fleeting were their lives? What other ways could they die, besides injury?
Faeries were the souls of those who died young and were unable to leave this world.
Their existence could not properly be called alive. It was merely a natural phenomenon, born as a result of the confusion of ignorant souls. That was why, one day, she would fully remember what she was.
“Is that…what this is…?”
“I thought it wasn’t going to happen for a while, considering your age. But statistics aren’t really reliable, are they? It could be that Seniorious’s venenum has forced it along, suddenly exacerbating the condition.”
“My age…? A-ah!”
Ithea gripped the back of Chtholly’s collar and forced her to withdraw from the battlefield.
The bombardment began behind her. The stalwart lizardfolk soldiers, covered head to toe in armor, stood in a row, lighting their cannons. There was a skull-shattering roar, followed by the shaking of the ground beneath them. The cannonballs, shot without any venenum, mowed down the trees and shaved off the ground, shattering Timere’s rebirthing body into a thousand pieces. It of course would not result in a fatal wound—they had to use dug-weapon or Carillon-class enchantments to take its life—but it was useful enough to temporarily halt its regeneration.
Chtholly dangled in Ithea’s grip, her golden wings spread above them, flying them to the recess tent 1,200 marmer away from the battlefield.
“Hup.”
She practically tossed her onto the floor.
<
br /> “…Owww.”
“Hold on to that while you can. You see a mirror there?”
Still lying on her stomach, Chtholly lifted her head. On the floor, right beside the mountain of crates filled with rations, was a small hand mirror.
“What about it?”
“You’ll see.”
After listening to what Ithea said to her, Chtholly reached out to it. She grasped the handle, pulled it closer, and peered into it.
Someone with crimson eyes stared back.
“…What is this?”
Chtholly Nota Seniorious’s eyes were a deep azure. She wasn’t too fond of the color, but Willem once complimented them, saying they were like the color of the ocean, and her opinion of them had changed a little recently. The problem was that she didn’t know what the ocean was and whether or not she should take those words as a compliment. But that was a different issue.
No matter how much she stared at them, no matter how many times she blinked, the eyes of the girl in the mirror were a flaming red.
“Those are the initial symptoms. They should subside after two hours of rest, but you absolutely can’t use any venenum until then. And think about yourself as much as you can. You can’t let someone else’s memories take you over. Cling to your own memories.”
—Loneliness in a white darkness. Echoing prayers in a small place. A room full of books.
Unidentifiable images swirled and raged in her mind as they had been. She tried covering her eyes with her hands and shaking her head, but they didn’t disappear so easily.
“These…are…memories? Memories of the person who died when they were little, before I became myself?”
“Someone else. Someone who has nothing to do with you, Chtholly. A complete stranger, with no point of contact with you. The second you forget or misunderstand that, it’ll swallow you whole.”
“You said something about my age earlier, so is this…?”
“Yup. There aren’t many faeries who live very long in the first place, and apparently encroachment from a previous life is such a rare case anyway that most of the time, it can just be ignored. The trends we know from these very few cases apparently show that faeries, fully matured in body and mind, will slowly start to remember as they near twenty years.
“Right now, you’re an irregular in an already rare case. Like I said before, it looks like your condition has progressed so far because you kept in contact with a force of venenum beyond your stature for a long time. At the rate you were going, you would’ve died before the day was over, never mind the end of the battle.”
“I don’t want that…”
Chtholly rolled over onto her back.
“It’ll go away after two hours of rest?”
“Only your current symptoms. You won’t be able to push yourself in a fight after this, either, you know.”
“…Sheesh.”
She covered her eyes with her arm, laughing emptily.
It had been her fate to die in this battle. She was supposed to deliberately push her venenum into overdrive and, by inducing a massive explosion, burn the enemy to a crisp.
But because she didn’t—couldn’t—accept that ending, she learned from him how to use a Carillon. She learned how to fight as a Brave.
And yet—
How could it be that now, of all times, a death she had never imagined was looming over her?
“It’s okay. On the other hand, as long as you don’t push yourself, it shouldn’t advance too much. Even if it did worsen a little now, you still have a child’s body. If you keep to a moderate lifestyle, then you shouldn’t have any more incidents of encroachment. It’s not gonna cause you any problems in your daily life. I know a precedent for this pretty well, so I’m fairly confident.”
She tapped her slim chest.
“…Butter cake, I guess.”
“Hmm?”
“I’m thinking about why I can’t die, along with an important promise of mine. It’s important to cling to my own memories, right?”
“True, but what a selfish memory, eh?”
“Needs deeply rooted in instinct are strong—or probably something like that.”
“Sure.” Ithea laughed.
Chtholly felt like it was the first time she saw her smile in a long time.
When she thought calmly about it, that didn’t sound right. Ithea was always cheerful in a not very refined way, always smiling and grinning and beaming and smirking, to the point that it was hard to remember any other expression but that.
“Well, I’m off.”
“…To where?”
“The front line. Ren’s next, and she should be hard at work right about now, so I’m her support. We’ll buy a lot of time for you, so stay calm and keep still.”
“Okay… Thanks.”
“As you say.”
Ithea’s eyes narrowed into slits, and she nodded with a smile.
She had a question.
Why was Ithea this knowledgeable about past-life encroachment?
How did Ithea see through Chtholly’s changes so accurately?
But she couldn’t ask.
There was no reason to.
“Here we go!”
Ithea activated her venenum, spread her wings, and flew into the sky.
She saw a shimmer of crimson in those golden eyes.
Quarreling adults. A big, big puddle. Chicken feet.
“What weird memories.”
A murmur.
A warped lake. An endless orange-colored road. Shimmering silver fabric.
“Souls that died when they were babies become faeries, huh? It really seems like they recognize a lot for babies. Where in the world was this child born?”
Or maybe…
Maybe she just didn’t know, since she was “born” as a faerie who was already somewhat aged, and that was how the world looked in the eyes of young children.
Take a small lizard dashing through the forest. To them, it might be a dragon spewing flames, or it might be a guide beckoning them to another world, or it might be the handle of someone’s bag that had come off and was rolling around in the wind in their eyes.
That was why the world that spread before a child’s eyes—to the eyes of someone not a child themselves—was filled with mysteries and absurdities. Maybe that was what she was seeing now.
“…Tsch.”
She lay on her back, gazing at the inside of the tent. So her tears rolled down her temples and toward her ears.
They say faeries come into existence when young souls who cannot fully understand death go astray.
And as far as she knew, there were no faeries who lived long enough to be called adults.
She’d always thought it was because of the fighting. Starting from the oldest faeries, they’d each get hurt in the intense fights with the Beasts, or they went into overdrive and scattered to the wind.
Or could it be that she was wrong?
Could it be that, in the first place, faeries were beings who could never become adults?
The shadows of the souls that never comprehend death grow up and, in the end, understand death. Then everything comes undone, and they return to nature.
This was probably what fate would feel like if it existed.
No matter how hard she wished, how hard she prayed, she could not overturn what had been decided at the beginning.
“I was planning on pushing him, though, ‘If I live long enough to be an adult, then you have no reason to complain, so marry me.’”
She’d heard it from Willem. Once, in the emnetwiht world, one of the qualities necessary in a Brave was tragedy.
Those who shouldered pasts and destinies that anyone would grieve over were much more suited to be Braves, individuals who wielded tremendous power, than those who didn’t. That’s apparently how it was.
And Seniorious, the oldest and mightiest of Carillon, especially favored those with such tendencies. Only those burdened with fates of death and destruction could wield the virtuous w
hite blade.
“—I get it… That’s why you’re letting me, of all people, use you.”
She glared at Seniorious, which lay on the floor.
Faeries were intrinsically flippant about their lives, perhaps because they were made from souls of the dead. They didn’t really fear death.
In that sense, Chtholly was now in a situation that was not very faerielike. She had a reason she couldn’t die. She had a place she had to go home to alive.
“Butter cake.”
She balled her hand into a fist and murmured those words.
—All right, all right. Okay. I’ll make you eat so much cake, you’ll get heartburn.
—You understand, yeah? So you have to come back.
What came to mind was the promise she made with him that brilliant, starry night.
Her determination solidified.
She didn’t care anymore if she would never be allowed to live long.
She didn’t care if she never matured into an adult by his side.
She hated to admit it, but she would give up on that. It was her fault for being born as a faerie, of all things. That just meant she was unlucky enough to be liked by some tragedy-loving Carillon.
But. Because of that, at the very least.
She wanted to live just a little longer in this ephemeral dream.
Even if the world would end one day, it would still continue to exist until the moment it ended. That was where she lived. So—
“Okay, let’s go!”
She mustered up a show of bravado and raised her fist into the air.
And the fight continued.
The sun set, rose, set again, rose again. Over and over.
There was despair.
Despair took the form of a giant faceless being, made of black ivy that twisted around itself.
That was the Hidden Beast Number Six born from Timere’s 216th death, its husk in the face of its 217th death, the pupa birthing from its 218th life—
