Chapter 245

Mestelexil’s testimony was likely true. He simply hadn’t been able to connect the dots until he saw the girl herself. There was only one person capable of issuing orders to the corspified Mestelexil. “It was the work of this tiny little girl…?!” Kaete was astonished. This mere child had fomented unrest in the largest minian kingdom with her intelligence and schemes. Kaete had lost the power of his faction, and Kiyazuna the Axle had lost an arm. “I will atone…for my crimes……for disturbing the Kingdom…” She needed to be killed. Kaete had no idea what destruction had come to this young girl or why she was left behind in a place like this. However, a vampire bearing an airborne pathogen could potentially annihilate the whole kingdom simply by virtue of her existence. She was not the weakling she appeared to be. She was, without any doubt, the monster who had outfoxed Kaete. Despite this firm conviction and fear… “…I beg you. P-please…kill me…,” Linaris begged Kaete with a sob. “Not happening,” Kaete heartlessly told her. A smile came to him, the corners of his mouth twitching and spasming. He was terrified. “You think mere death is enough to atone for your deeds? Rejoice. I’m making you one of my pawns, too, until I’ve gotten every last breath out of you.” This was the kind of good luck that never came twice. Kaete and Kaete alone would be able to effectively utilize someone who was essentially destruction incarnate—Obsidian herself. The means to make an inexhaustible supply of antiserum. As well as the means to spread the vampire infection as he saw fit. With these two trump cards, unbeknownst to anyone in Aureatia, he could make overthrowing Aureatia a reality in any number of ways. “I’ll be the one holding everything in my grasp in the end.” Kaete the Round Table never backed down. Not as long as his ambitions propelled him forward. However, without fail, all those who confronted Linaris the Oblivion… Kaete used what was largely intimidation to commandeer his base from the leftover Old Kingdoms’ loyalists. It was camouflaged to look like a private residence outside of the Tao Ninth District, and in actuality, excluding the midrange radzio and the munition storage, the facility didn’t differ much from the other homes around it. It was a shabby base point, embodying the present state of the Old Kingdoms’ loyalists, but constructing another ambitious facility like the underground sick room for Kiyazuna the Axle was out of the question. Caneeya the Fruit Trimming was confined to this residence after being recovered from the Obsidian Eyes manor. Her daily necessities and goods for her medical treatment were delivered via Old Kingdoms’ loyalists dispatched by Kaete. Caneeya made a relatively quick recovery, perhaps thanks to her naturally healthy body, but she was still unable to remember the series of events that led her to being locked up underground. During the upheaval of the coup, she had laid out a plan to send an all-out attack on key points in Aureatia—and all her memories from that point had been wiped away by Linaris’s cognition manipulation. Linaris the Oblivion was currently isolated in one of the other bedrooms in the residence. There were black curtains on the windows to accommodate Linaris’s weakness to sunlight—buffered with weather stripping to prevent the virus from spreading. She wasn’t allowed any contact with the outside. In the narrow rays of morning light, Linaris awoke from a nightmare. When she got up, the thin sheets slid smoothly off her skin. She was in so much agony, and yet because of her natural constitution, she didn’t even sweat much. In the darkness, her mind blanky circled the same idea. …I was supposed to die. If she had been born the daughter of an average citizen, she would have succumbed to illness without the choice to get suitable treatment. From the very beginning, she had been born with a body meant to die. Due to her birth, the once-grand Rehart was driven mad by suspicion and jealousy. In order to soothe Rehart’s fear and comfort him, Linaris had desperately demonstrated her obedience. He had died unable to trust in the love of his own daughter, right up to his last breath. Everything was rendered meaningless. Everything destroyed, just because of her very existence. She had continued to fight to reject this truth, and in doing so had taken the lives of people who had no involvement with Obsidian Eyes or the flames of war whatsoever. Hartl had died, and so had Frey. Yuno had become her friend, and Kuuro had been like an elder brother to her once, and they both had rejected her as well. If I just had never been born in the first place… Linaris knew that her wish to die was out of a desire to escape. She had been highly intelligent and insightful from birth, and yet the oh-so-young Linaris never had the imagination to go with it. Linaris was able to take the lives of a great number of faceless, nameless people. It was also precisely because she knew neither their faces nor names that she hadn’t any idea how to atone for what she had done. She wished that her quiet death would be enough to balance out the losses that were greatly disproportionate to a single person’s life. “Sis!” “…” She vacantly looked toward the voice. On the floor of the dark room, a round body with a single purple eye rolled around on the floor. “D-do you…wish to speak with…your dad?” It was a subunit of Mestelexil’s, tasked with surveilling everyone in the house. He had three thin legs, but the level floor made it possible to move by rolling around like this. This unit itself didn’t have a heart of its own but was similar to a radzio transmitter, simply exchanging sight and sounds with Mestelexil—that was Linaris’s understanding. “…My…father…?” “Yeah!” Mestelexil spun around in a circle. “I love…Mama the most…in the world! You love…your dad, too, right, Sis?! Y-you…are always calling…out to…him!” “…That’s right. But…no matter how much I call to him, he will never come back to me… As such…I cannot speak with my Father.” “He won’t…come home?! Why?!” Linaris stopped talking. Father wasn’t coming home. Even if she carried out the rest of his idea, she would never get any praise for it. He was dead. “I wonder…” “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! I—I hope…you can…see him! You’d be a lot…happier…that way!” Mestelexil the Box of Desperate Knowledge was, for some reason, friendly to Linaris. She didn’t know if it was some lingering aftereffect of his time as a corpse or if he was simply referencing the replicated memories, but he called Linaris “Sis” and “Nice Lady” just as he did while under her control. Within Obsidian Eyes, they had the techniques to peer deep inside the psyches of those under their control and rearrange them. In the depths of Mestelexil’s psyche was an unconditional trust in his family. Linaris had been able to parasitically latch on to that trust in his. A hideous and hateful feat. “…Master Mestelexil… You’ll be appearing in the Sixways Exhibition again, yes?” “Yup!” Though she was almost entirely cut off from the outside world, her speculation on the current situation and her assumptions on the tendences of those involved had easily guided her to the answer. Not only Kiyazuna the Axle, but Kaete the Round Table had also staked his life on recapturing Mestelexil, signaling their aim to prop up Mestelexil as a hero candidate once more now that Rosclay’s death had shaken Aureatia’s foundations. “Master Mestelexil, do you fight for the sake of Master Kaete? Or because your mother…because Miss Kiyazuna wishes you to do so?” “Nope! Mama says…I’m free to do…whatever…I want! But…I like…violence! Crushing people, mashing them up, is really fun! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! That’s why…I’m helping…Kaete…of my own…free will!” “…” She was jealous. If she couldn’t atone anyway, she wished she could at least enjoy the killing, the lies, and the torment she brought. There had been a wurm by the name of Atrazek the Particle Storm. A malevolent monster who had constantly tormented the weak inhabitants in the desert. Linaris had used Atrazek in her plot and killed him after condemning him for his sins, but compared to Linaris’s own misery, unable to even make herself happy, she couldn’t help thinking that Atrazek was far superior in this regard. “Sis—” The subunit’s singular eye looked up at Linaris’s profile. “Do you…want someone…to tell you what to do? Otherwise, you can’t…fight?” “…That’s right.” She smiled in pain. Mestelexil was far wiser than his words and behavior made him out to be. In a different way from Linaris, who analyzed a person’s psyche to understand their reasoning, he excelled at calculating backward from the illogicality in another’s actions and using that to get ahold of weaknesses he could exploit in battle. “Master Mestelexil, have you ever…found fighting…painful or difficult?” “Nope! Why would…it be…painful?!” “Wh-what…? Well.” The overly direct question made Linaris confused and unsure as she searched for the answer. “K-killing…killing someone…is the act of stomping over everything said person built up, their lives, their emotions… And well. They might have been…going through the same agony as yourself…or they may have—might have become a friend…” Even a child learned this sort of logic. Linaris, of course, understood this obvious fact herself. However, she had thought that she was different. As long as the other person was a minian, Linaris could never become their friend, and she thought that anyone who found out her true identity would prioritize the justice of the minian races over Linaris, just as Shirok the Sextant had. Vampires being nothing but an enemy to the minian races was a fact of life, and she never felt it was painful or difficult to accept. Her father, Rehart himself, had been able to stain his hands with the blood of others because he believed in this commonsense fact. Yet Yuno hadn’t betrayed her. Linaris didn’t believe she was the single unique example among the minia, either. The natural consequence then being that the potential for such a friendship had existed within all the people Linaris had killed up until that point. “I’ve never…thought about that…complicated stuff! Don’t…try to become…friends with everything! Though, you can k-kill anyone…that gets on…your nerves! That isn’t…painful at all—and actually, really fun! ’Cause I’m…the strongest! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” “…Is that not a…? Um. A slightly violent manner of thinking…” “Sis, can’t do it! Kaete said mean…stuff like that! That Sis…is actually super strong…but really…a coward!” “A coward…” “I-if we…fought…who do you think…would be stronger?! But…I’m fine…not knowing! I’m not going…to kill…you, Sis! You don’t…get in the way…at all!” Cowardice. He was absolutely right. That had been the only way for her to live. However— Doing something…you don’t even want to do…because you’re supposed to… Linaris inwardly repeated the words Yuno had desperately tried to convey to her. There’s nothing free about any of that. Even now, the words held her heart in a vice. She knew what Yuno was saying. However, just like the wickedness of bringing harm to another, though she understood it in her mind, she knew she didn’t truly understand from the heart. Mestelexil fought in the Sixways Exhibition. With a far more pure and innocent motivation than Linaris or anyone else. It wasn’t about any righteousness or justice—or a lack thereof. It seemed to her like the most correct way of going about it. “Master Mestelexil, please. I ask that you keep fighting for me.” “Sure! Y-you’ll…cheer me on, too, Sis?!” “I will.” Wrapping herself up in the thin sheets, she flashed a lonely smile. Linaris’s virus was mutating. If she was capable of wielding a power that could annihilate everything, without paying any mind to anything else… She could fight against the very world itself. “I think I might…like to try fighting you after you win, Master Mestelexil.”