Furthermore, the girl wielded a magic wand right in front of them.
And the spells she cast were exactly the same spells Clarice had used for many years to vanquish the dead. It was a nostalgic sight. And at the same time, it was obvious that those spells were much too advanced for a five-year-old girl to be using.
Everyone at the Crescent Moon Company thought a miracle had occurred.
And they welcomed the girl, who was just barely five years old, into the company.
Several decades after that happened, the same thing happened again. Clarice died, and several years later, a little girl calling herself Clarice showed up.
Truly a miracle.
Clarice returned to this world time and again in order to defeat the dead.
The people of Twilight Helbe celebrated Clarice’s continuous resurrection. They came to revere her as their protector, the only one who could defend them.
Eventually, the people started to become restless whenever the end of Clarice’s life approached.
Whose child would be the next Clarice? they wondered. Who would be the parents of their hero and savior? They started to look forward to her death and rebirth.
“I moved here when I was eighteen years old,” the mother of the current Clarice reminisced. “The boy I was dating at the time was from around here, you see, and he had a job he desperately wanted to do waiting for him back in his hometown, so he said he wanted me to go with him and asked me along.”
She had been deeply in love with him and had readily agreed to go with him.
After that, the two of them got married, and four years later, she became pregnant with their child.
It was another half a year after that when he passed away on the job.
“He put his life on the line fighting the dead in order to protect the people here and won a victory for all of us. If he hadn’t been there, there likely would have been a huge number of casualties—”
The Crescent Moon Witch attended his funeral.
The man had been a member of the Crescent Moon Company. He was honored as a hero for giving his life in combat against the dead.
His wife didn’t even feel any resentment.
At the time, Clarice was an old woman in her eighties. Moreover, it was uncomfortably obvious to everyone, even someone who had only lived there for a few years, just what kind of character Clarice was.
“I pray that you and the child in your belly will be blessed.”
Clarice kneeled and touched the woman’s belly.
The woman looked down at Clarice in a daze. The members of the Crescent Moon Company applauded the scene with tears in their eyes. Even though none of them had shed a tear as her husband’s coffin was buried in the ground.
She found that disturbing and repulsive.
But she couldn’t bring herself to leave, because it was the place where her beloved husband had been born. Because her many memories with him still tied her to that place.
Six months after her husband’s death, she gave birth to a child.
Mysteriously, it was the same day as the anniversary of Clarice’s death.
“……”
As for what happened after that, even without hearing all the details, I could guess. “And the child that was born was her, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
Yet again, Clarice had obtained a new life.
The townspeople envied her for becoming Clarice’s mother and gave her their blessings.
“Congratulations!”
“You’re the mother of a hero!”
“I’m so jealous!”
Almost every day, freshly picked vegetables and fruits were delivered to her door, and if she ever went out into town, the people greeted her with a lot of applause and smiling faces. All because she was Clarice’s mother.
You didn’t eat your dinner last night, but you really must eat properly, you know.
You sighed at home yesterday, didn’t you? Is anything bothering you?
You stayed up late last night, huh? You’ve really got to go to bed earlier.
If you’re ever having difficulty with anything, just let us know!
Since you’ve become the mother of Lady Clarice, you don’t have to worry about anything anymore, for the rest of your life!
She knew the townspeople were saying it all with the best intentions.
But she found their smiling faces repulsive. Much more so than the dead that roamed the streets at night.
“—Mother, let’s move out of this house today and live on the fourth floor of the Crescent Moon Company building.”
One day, when Clarice was three years old, she proposed this to her mother, as if it was only natural, and they moved out of their house.
And so they started living in their current home.
After that, Clarice grew up quickly. On the outside, she was a child. But inside, she was a witch who had lived for three hundred years. She knew everything about the world, and of course she also knew everything there was to know about magic.
Clarice did what society expected of her and took the qualifying exams in order to become a witch. She was five at the time. Of course, she passed on her first attempt. After that, she halfheartedly chose a teacher and returned home as the Crescent Moon Witch.
She knew everything.
If they ever encountered anything Clarice’s mother didn’t understand, even a little bit, Clarice would point it out to her in a know-it-all tone of voice. Well, Clarice really did know everything. Her mother quickly figured out that if they argued, she had no hope of winning, so she stopped talking to Clarice altogether.
Clarice also meddled in diplomacy with other nations. Whenever the other parties mocked her and questioned what a mere five-year-old was talking about, she showed off her power and silenced them with her abilities, and if another country ever tried to invade, she stood on the front line and thoroughly beat them back.
Eventually, she became known as a god child in several foreign countries.
And in her own homeland, she was called a hero and a savior.
Her mother was the woman raising that god child, that hero.
Other people only ever looked at her with envy in their eyes.
That was how she spent her days.
Her husband was dead, and the child she had given birth to was a prodigy who could do anything. However—
“Even though I had given birth to his child, I sensed something else was wearing the face of the child I made with him, pretending to be my daughter when it talked to me,” she said.
More than anything, the idea that Clarice, the cause of her husband’s death, had become her child and been reborn into the world was unbearable to the mother.
Consequently, she grumbled—
“I find her really creepy.”