“Fooound yooou!”
I met her in a back alley. That day, I was scared. Lost. Alone.
She wore a pink dress, typical for a young woman in the city, but it was oddly worn out. Her hair was filthy, disheveled, as though it were an old woman’s. Bloodshot eyes and hollow cheeks made her look ghastly, straight out of a nightmare.
As I sat rooted in place, cowering in fear, she threw aside her pack and lunged at me.
“N-Nooo!” I shrieked.
“Be quiet, brat!” she hissed as she tore the pouch I carried around my neck from me. “Heh heh... This is...”
“Nooo! Give it back!”
“Shut up!”
The woman fished into the pouch I’d been told never to open and pulled something out, bursting into maniacal laughter. “Ah ha... Ah ha ha ha ha ha! I knew it! This confirms everything! This is the world of ****! Ah ha ha ha ha!”
I sat there, unable to move, terrified of her hysterics.
✦ ✦ ✦
Until age four, I’d lived with my parents, just the three of us.
I’d wake up to the smell of my mother’s soup, then go wake my sleepyhead of a father. He’d embrace me, rubbing his unshaven face against mine. I’d whine, and he’d lift me high into the air, instantly brightening my mood and making me laugh. My mother would scold us, but without a hint of anger on her features.
Those joyful days would never return.
Three years ago, our town had been attacked by a horde of monsters—there’d been a severe outbreak, the kind that only happened once every few decades. My father, who’d served as a town guard, had bravely set off to protect us, never to return again. The monsters had remained undeterred, and my mother, too, had lost her life to save mine.
I didn’t know how that battle ended. I’d been crying alone amid the corpses of monsters and people littering the rubble when a surviving soldier picked me up and brought me to an orphanage in a distant town.
Never again would I feel the comfort of my father’s broad back or my mother’s gentle smile. All I had left of them was a pouch my mother had given me—a “charm pouch,” she’d called it.
With no idea what would happen, and no time to mourn the loss of my family, I was exposed to the brutal realities of the world.
The orphanage was located in an old church, and about ten of us were brought in, crammed into a small room that looked like a barn. We were given thin, tattered blankets to use as bedding, and watery soup made with only salt and vegetable scraps—all of which was quickly snatched from us by the older kids who already lived there.
The old hag in charge of the place gave us only hardened brown bread and salt soup, twice a day. She made us do everything: fetch water, launder clothes, clean, tend the fields, collect firewood, lug things around, and even do work she’d take on that was unrelated to the orphanage. We were worked from before dawn until after dark, and the older orphans knew they could slack off by forcing the younger to do everything. One hungry boy who’d stolen into the pantry to nibble on potatoes was caught, and the old lady beat him with a rolling pin until he coughed up blood. The next day, he was cold and lifeless in his cot.
More than once, I thought I was going to die. The adults in town wouldn’t help us; no one wanted to get involved with dirty, emaciated orphans. No one wanted to adopt us either. Not only that, the old hag got hefty sums to hand over the better-looking children to well-dressed adults who’d come over from time to time.
I didn’t want to be there, but the memory of what my parents had said kept me going. “No one is bad at heart,” they’d told me. “Smile and let things go, okay?”
So I did. The violent old lady was probably in a bad mood, I’d tell myself. The older orphans stealing from the young were just a product of their bad environment. My smile never wavered, and I let it all go. For three years I endured, keeping my charm pouch safe.
It was only when the old lady came to me, telling me to wash up in the well and wear nice clothes because I had a very special visitor the next day, that I wondered where I’d gone wrong and fell into despair. I hated the way those adults looked at us. That day, no longer able to stomach my feelings of disgust or life at the orphanage, I finally ran away.
Which was all well and good, except I had nothing on me. Hungry and forlorn, I huddled up in an alley, hugging my knees to my chest. And it was then that she suddenly appeared before me.
✦ ✦ ✦
The woman chuckled eerily. “Don’t be scared, Alicia...”
I was stunned when my name suddenly left her lips. How did she know it?
“I’ve been watching you for two days now, you know,” she cooed. “I only knew your name, age, hair and eye color, so finding you wasn’t easy...” The woman looked down at me with a twisted grin, brushing my cheek and hair with her fingers as I stared back in horror. “Oh, look how dirty you are. But don’t worry, you’ll be clean soon. And so thin too... You need to eat better. Your grandfather will be in for a surprise.”
“Grand...father?” I repeated quietly.
Her bloodshot eyes darted about in a maddened frenzy. “That’s right! Your—no, my grandfather! Listen, okay? When I regained my memories of my previous life and realized this was the world of ****, I was beside myself! With both joy...and despair, you see, because the main plot would happen decades later, when the heroine joins the Academy! By then, I’d be an old woman already. I wouldn’t be able to take part in the story in any way. So I figured, you know, maybe I’d become a teacher or something. I became an adventurer, I learned magic, I studied and studied...to no avail. Only nobles could become students or teachers there. And so...”
“Eep!” I yelped as she gripped my neck and produced a knife and a pitch-black rock from her waist.
“I figured I’d just be the heroine. That is, you,” she said, her smile twisting into a grotesque smirk. “Hey, do you know what an aethercrystal is? Beings that have absorbed a certain amount of mana form a crystal in their hearts, using their blood as a medium. Aethercrystals generate aether within the body. They not only accumulate high-purity aether but also retain trace amounts of the host creature’s characteristics.” The woman chuckled. “I was thrilled to discover this technique in ancient texts, you know. With it, one can imprint one’s own memories and personality onto an aethercrystal, then transfer them into someone else!”
Mana? Aether?
She continued to speak as if drunk on her own jargon. “The sorcerer who’d been researching the method stopped at testing it on live frogs, but I knew I could develop it to completion! The only issue was that I couldn’t use another creature’s crystal! I drew my own blood, over and over, and patiently collected the coagulants containing my aether, until finally, after five years, my very own aethercrystal was complete! It was arduous... Painful... But...” The verbose woman grinned broadly, flaunting the pitch-black crystal. “All I need to do is embed this into your heart, and I can discard this old body and become you! I’ll be the protagonist!”
“Eep!”
The woman was mad. She couldn’t have been in her right mind. Even if she succeeded, wouldn’t she just be creating a different person bearing her memories and personality? I was a child, and still I understood that much.
Nevertheless, she raised her knife. “Now, be very still. This’ll be over soon.”
“N-Nooo!” I screamed. In my terror, I flailed, and the knife nicked my hand, causing a small cut on my palm. When my bloodied hand touched the aethercrystal in her grasp, something odd flowed into my mind. “Ack!”
Though I’d knocked the aethercrystal away, the woman’s consciousness seemed to split from the tumbling stone. A feeling both hot and cold flowed into me from the cut on my hand—something disgusting, as though that woman were invading my body. I resisted it with all my might, and only remnants of it settled within me. The feelings of fear that had reigned absolute for the past three years sank coldly to the bottom of my heart.
I narrowed my eyes, realizing that thoughts of seizing the opportunity to strike back were at the forefront of my mind. As the woman continued trying to pin me down, I spotted a convenient rock nearby. I gripped it and, with all the force I could muster, brought it down on the woman’s temple with a loud crunch.
She screamed in agony and tumbled sideways, dropping her knife as she lifted her hands to her head. I picked up the blade in my right hand, supported the hilt with my left, and plunged it into the woman’s torso.