by Fujino Omori
That’s what she told them.
A dirty magic-stone lamp cast faint light onto the stone walls.
Feeling a cold slab against her cheek, Lilly’s eyes fluttered open.
She lay on her stomach, hands tied behind her back. Ignoring the aches and pains in her body, the prum girl lifted her head to look around. Nothing had changed in her dark prison cell since she was first brought here. Locked in a cage, she couldn’t help but feel that she was a sorry sight to see.
She followed Zanis’s orders to the letter and was brought to the Familia’s wine cellar. She’d been locked up in here ever since.
This floor was designed to hold the Familia members who had violated the rules or gotten a little bit too drunk off the divine wine. She was bound with a metallic wire strong enough to keep lower-class adventurers restrained indefinitely. Several of these compartments were used to store tools as well as serve as a makeshift jail inside the complex. Lilly was being treated as a prisoner as a punishment for the extended length of time she’d spent away from the Familia.
Having lost all sense of time, Lilly had no idea how many days had passed since the battle in the streets.
Lilly wiggled her body into the corner of her cell where a small dish of water had been mercifully left for her. Lifting her head off the floor, she put her lips into the liquid.
Part of her was embarrassed about her miserable condition, but she had been expecting something like this.
The days that she’d spent with Bell were special, but now she’d live her life by slurping the dirty water she was given.
Mr. Bell, Mr. Welf, Lady Hestia…
Were they okay?
That was all she thought about.
No one was guarding her outside of the prison, and stone bricks don’t make the best conversation. She had no way of knowing what was going on outside. But not once did she consider trying to escape. The knowledge that she had fallen to the same level as a prisoner tore a fresh hole in her spirit.
The stone floor was cold and damp. Her body shivered as she drank.
The magic-stone lamp outside her iron cage flickered like a candle about to go out.
“…”
Ker-tap, ker-tap. Noises started coming from the end of the hallway outside her cell, the sound of someone coming down the stairwell.
Lilly willed her body off the floor and into a sitting position. Sure enough, a long shadow was growing on the other side of the bars. Zanis’s shadow.
“How are you feeling, Erde?”
“…Horrible.”
The man looked down at her through the bars as Lilly practically spat her answer at his feet.
He smiled ironically at her, his arms folded behind his back.
“Sorry about this. You see, the past three days have been very busy, collecting information and whatnot. I haven’t had time to step away until now. Forgive me.”
“…Mr. Bell is still okay? Mr. Zanis really hasn’t done anything to him?”
“I’m a man of my word. I swear on the name of Lord Soma.”
Lilly finally got an opportunity to ask the question that had been burning inside her for three days. While she didn’t entirely trust him, she decided to believe his words for now. That settled, there was something else that she wanted to know.
“Why…does Mr. Zanis care about Lilly?”
She asked in the most serious, dry voice she could muster.
She knew he’d said that he needed her when the man took her away. She clearly remembered that moment.
Just like Kanu, the man who had left her for dead, Zanis often took money from her. Never once had he offered a helping hand. She believed him to be a man who saw her only as an insect that occasionally had vals worth taking.
“It’s come to my attention that you are worth quite a lot.” Zanis’s smile deepened. “You can’t imagine how happy I was to learn you were alive. I considered capturing you the other day when you appeared before Lord Soma by yourself…but we were already in negotiations with Apollo Familia. We still needed you for our justification after we had secured their payment. You played your part very well.”
As a result, everything went according to plan, or so the man claimed. Lilly was vaguely aware of her gaze sharpening as she listened to more of his story.
“…Lilly is useless, not worth anything.”
“No, no, I have a use for you. I realized that you were saving up a great deal of money in secret. I believe that anyone with fingers as sticky as yours deserves to be recognized for their talents.
“But above all…” He let his words hang as he pushed his glasses back up his face with one finger.
“You have a rather ‘unusual’ kind of Magic, do you not?”
Lilly’s eyes shot open at the mention of her magic, Cinder Ella.
With the exception of Bell, Welf, and Hestia, she had never told the secret to anyone. “Lord Soma told me,” said Zanis in response to the look of surprise on her face. Soma was the one who’d found that Magic in her excelia and enabled her to use it. Of course he would have known.
Lilly thought about the time frame and came to the conclusion that Zanis probably knew about her Magic before she’d feigned her death.
“Just to check…Erde, you can transform yourself into a monster, correct?”
“…What would it mean if Lilly could?”
A dark crackle of laughter escaped the man’s lips.
Zanis’s eyes narrowed in an evil grin as he looked down at Lilly like a wolf that just cornered its prey.
“There’s a project in which I would love your participation. Nothing much, just a new business venture.”
“And that is…?”
“Luring out monsters, capturing them, and selling them for profit…Isn’t that simple?”
That’s insane!—Lilly mocked him in her thoughts.
Even if a wild monster were tamed, said monster would only listen to the tamer. Should the tamed monster be locked inside a small room and ordered to wait by its tamer, it would still mercilessly attack anyone else who came near it. That’s why tamed monsters were never used for the carriages and other difficult tasks around town.
Monsters considered humans to be their mortal enemy; there was no way around it.
They were completely different from obedient slaves.
“Monsters have no value.”
“Heh-heh…I’m not so sure.”
An unmistakable twinge of greed passed through Zanis’s smiling eyes as he laughed off the girl’s remark.
Anger began to take hold of Lilly. She glared daggers back up at the man. Even her vain attempts to show respect disappeared.
“Is that the reason you brought Lilly back, back into Soma Familia…The reason you got involved in the attack on Bell?”
“Yes, that was regrettable.”
The tone of his voice turned up a notch, getting excited.
His mask of intelligence gone, Zanis’s true character was beginning to emerge.
“I want Lord Soma’s Divine Wine. I want money and women, too. I want to taste the most exquisite dishes—I want every pleasure this world has to offer!”
BAM! Zanis slammed his boot into one of the iron bars.
The cage had been designed to be strong enough to keep unruly adventurers under control without breaking. But Zanis’s Status was too high for it to withstand that kind of blow, and it bent under the impact. Lilly stared in silence, eyes trembling, at the boot-shaped dent in the bar.
The avarice in his voice was far beyond anything Lilly had ever heard before—much more hideous than those under the influence of the Divine Wine, soma.
“I love this Familia. No matter how many questionable endeavors I try my hand at, our god doesn’t say a word. He’s too busy with that hobby of his to give a shit what any of us do. It’s the ultimate freedom!”
“…Lilly can see your true colors.”
“Oops.”
Zanis tried to cover half of his malicious smile with his hand. Taki
ng his boot out of the bent iron bar, the man straightened his posture and continued on, business as usual.
The anger in Lilly’s stomach burned brighter when she realized that this man cared nothing for Lord Soma. It went without saying that Soma Familia’s current condition was partly due to their god’s neglect, but the man standing in front of her deserved a great deal of the blame.
Lilly’s eyes flared as she looked up at the man, a thin smile on his face. That’s when it happened.
“…?”
“The alarm bell…Are we under attack?”
Even the thick stone walls of this prison couldn’t keep out the piercing resonance ringing out upstairs.
The hurried thuds of hundreds of footsteps sounded above their heads, mixed in with the high-pitched tone of the bell. Falling to her stomach, Lilly looked up, down, and all around for a clue as to what was going on.
“Chandra! Where are you?! Tell me what the hell is going on!”
Zanis yelled at the top of his lungs down the hall toward the staircase to the surface.
The hallway was still for a moment as the man’s voice faded into nothingness. A few heartbeats later, a very annoyed-looking dwarf appeared at the base of the stairwell.
“You could go have a look fer yourself…or are those feet of yers fer decoration?”
“Enough sass. What’s happening?”
“A few ‘mice’ got into the maze. From a few Familias…A young-lookin’ goddess was with ’em.”
A bearded dwarf with short hair and an inhospitable air about him, Chandra glanced at Lilly as he approached the prison cell.
The girl’s heart jumped at the mention of a “young-looking goddess.” Zanis’s eyes narrowed as he came to the same conclusion about the identity of the intruders.
“Where are they now?”
“Fightin’ in the first-floor foyer.”
“Is that so? In that case—we need to exterminate the pests. I’ll take command.”
Lilly’s face turned a shade paler in fright. Frantically kicking her legs, she managed to get her body up against the bars with her hands still tied behind her back.
“You’re breaking your promise?! You said that Lady Hestia wouldn’t be harmed!”
“She came to attack us. It’s not my fault if she gets burned by her own flame.”
“Lilly will convince her to leave! Please, let Lilly talk to her…!”
“Absolutely not. I can’t allow my beloved ally to be put in such danger. I bet they’re here looking for you.”
Zanis’s claim that he needed to protect her was the final straw. Lilly’s fury ignited.
“Lilly refuses to work with you if the promise is broken!”
“How unfortunate…”
Zanis closed his eyes and calmly walked up to the iron bars.
A sneer on his lips, he leaned down to look Lilly in the face.
“Then it can’t be helped. I’ve got a bottle of soma with your name on it. I’ll make sure you drink every last drop.”
“—”
Lilly froze.
“Soma’s influence should turn you into a very dependable servant…You’ll be happy to comply with every order I give you.”
The “absolute” that was created by Soma.
A merciless drink that turned the hearts of the people of Gekai into an endless spiral of drunken ecstasy and unbearable craving.
Not too long ago, one sip of the concoction was enough to make Lilly covet it more than life itself.
“!”
Not caring if her skull cracked, Lilly whipped her head forward in an attempt to inflict any amount of pain possible on Zanis.
Dunnnn. But the iron bars got in the way. The sound reverberated throughout the cell as her head bounced off. The man just smiled as he watched a trickle of blood work its way down the girl’s face, thoroughly enjoying every second of the hatred emanating from the girl’s eyes.
“Chandra, keep Erde in here for me.”
“Humph…”
The dwarf didn’t respond to his leader’s order, only turned his back on the prison cell and sat down. Zanis only shrugged in response before disappearing from Lilly’s line of sight.
She wanted to yell out, get him to come back, but no words would come out of her shaking throat. The man had been planning on breaking his promise and even intended to turn her into nothing more than his drunken pet from the start.
Dammit all! Lilly gritted her teeth and decided that now was the time to break out of her cell.
The only reason for her to stay was gone. She had to help Lady Hestia and the others escape.
“…!”
She worked her way into Chandra’s blind spot and began to vigorously pull at her bindings.
But the dwarf just sat there, taking swigs of wine from the calabash strapped to his back. The wires dug deeper and deeper into her wrists as she fought. She called upon every trick she’d learned as a thief—including how to quietly trigger her magic. The claws of a werewolf grew on her fingers, allowing her to loosen the grip of the wires just enough to get her hands free.
However, she kept her hands behind her back to hide the fact that she was loose. Now all that was left was figuring out how to escape without the guard noticing.
Lilly’s mind kicked into high gear as she tried to find a way to get out of the cell without drawing Chandra’s attention.
But it was the dwarf who spoke up.
“Ya want out, get out.”
Lilly was stunned.
Chandra didn’t even bother to look at her, only wrapped his massive palm around the lock of the cell and yanked it clean off the door frame.
“Wh-why…did you go against Mr. Zanis’s order?”
“I hate his guts.”
The loathing in his voice was more intense than the sounds of battle raining down from upstairs.
“I came ta this city ’cause I heard I could drink the most fillin’, most delicious wine around. That’s how I found this Familia. But now it’s nothin’ more than that man’s toy. No amount of our god’s wine can satisfy me.”
Lilly stared at the side of the dwarf’s face as he took another swig from his calabash.
Chandra Ihit, an upper-class adventurer at Level 2, same as Zanis.
Never once had he extended a helping hand when Lilly was alone and tormented by other members of the Familia. At the same time, he had never joined in.
“Got a feelin’ you hate him just as much as I do. So, I’m lookin’ the other way.”
He took another look over his shoulder. Chandra’s deep brown eyes met Lilly’s chestnut gaze.
Lilly decided to believe his rather simplistic desire for delicious wine and seized the opportunity.
“Thank you very much.”
After a quick show of gratitude, Lilly ran out of the cell.
Being restrained and locked up for three days had taken its toll on her body. Tripping over her feet several times, Lilly ascended the stairwell to the surface as fast as she could.
“…?!”
She emerged at the end of another long stone hallway, but the sounds of battle were coming from the other side of the wall.
The clash of metal on metal, desperate yells and screams of pain—every sound was like a knife through Lilly’s heart. She couldn’t stand it. Looking around to find a way through, her eyes managed to catch light coming through a window at the other end of the hallway. She wasted no time getting there.
The window was slightly higher than her head and barred off just like her cell was belowground. She jumped off the ground, grabbed the bars, and stuck her head between them.
“Mr. Welf, Miss Mikoto, too…?!”
Despite her very restricted view of the battle, Lilly saw many familiar faces engaging Soma Familia in combat.
The inner courtyard was wide and littered with piles of boxes, some of which stretched all the way up to the roof. However, the area was absolutely flooded with enemies. Welf and Ouka protected the front lines, Mikoto providi
ng them with blind-side protection. Nahza and Chigusa supported them from a slight distance. Their whole group had been forced into the corner of the courtyard by the seemingly endless onslaught of Soma Familia.
Most of their enemies were lower-class adventurers, but their numbers were overwhelming.
“Please get out of here! Run, hurry!”
Lilly’s face turned blue as she used every bit of air in her lungs, pleading with them.
There was only one reason why these kind people had come so deep into enemy territory: her. All the damage they took, every injury they sustained was her fault.
She yelled with all of her might in hopes that the battle would stop. It just so happened that Hestia was holding her head in both hands behind a storage box near the same window and heard Lilly’s cries.
“Miss Supporter?!”
“Lady Hestia!”
Nahza was using one stack of boxes as cover; Hestia had been even farther behind her. Keeping her head low, Hestia went to Lilly’s window.
The two were reunited, face-to-face through a hole in the thick stone wall.
“Don’t worry about Lilly! Please escape now!”
“I can’t do that! I’m not leaving this place until you come with us!”
“WHY?! Lilly won’t cause any more trouble! Lady Hestia won’t get dragged into any more bad situations without Lilly! So please…!”
The two young ladies argued back and forth, stay or go, through the iron bars of the window until Hestia screamed back:
“We’re going to face Apollo in a War Game!”
“?!”
“It’s a Castle Siege! Two Familias will collide head-to-head with their full strength!”
Lilly was lost for words as she heard Hestia’s blitz of an explanation.
The thought of Hestia Familia, which only had one member, taking on the full force of Apollo Familia in a War Game was beyond belief. Bell was going to have to attack a castle by himself?
Hestia paused for a moment to catch her breath, not taking her eyes off of the flabbergasted Lilly.
“I’m doing everything I can to give Bell a chance to win!”
“Eh…”
“Right now, that boy is going through hell to prepare for the War Game! But it won’t be enough! We need you! It’s hopeless unless you’re with us!”
—What was that?
