Normally, the children here had to sate themselves with whatever food Tina gave them. But with her own increasing appetite, dinner had turned into a joyful scramble for food. The sight reminded Nacht of the dining table in the hall of her old guild, Outer Cafeteria. It made her feel quite nostalgic.
Cooking was a hobby Nacht had picked up after arriving in this world. Putting it to use for the church seemed like a good opportunity to prepare a lot of meat dishes, as she hadn’t been eating much in the way of meat while living with Aisha. She had eagerly volunteered to cook for the church in place of a lodging fee. Some fairly high-quality ingredients were in the mix, though, so the struggle for food was fierce.
Some of the children lacked the courage to face the war of the dinner table. One such child was Lotte, a girl sitting by herself in a corner, watching as the food gradually disappeared. She seemed much more mature than Tina, sitting quietly like that, but the greed in her eyes was obvious.
“Don’t wanna join in?” Nacht asked.
Lotte closed her eyes. “I’ll just eat after everyone’s finished...” she said. Noble words, but unbefitting of a child. The girl who should have adopted such an attitude, meanwhile, was in the thick of the melee.
“Hey! Roy! I wanted that one!” exclaimed the so-called priestess as she squabbled with the other children. “Grrrr... Dang it, Mina! I only took my eye off the pumpkin pie for a second and it’s already gone! Ah, but I suppose I do need more balance in my diet. I’ll let you have this one.”
Nacht swiped Tina’s plate out from under her and handed it to the hungry-eyed Lotte.
“Ahhh!” Tina protested. “What are you doing, Nacht?!”
Nacht ignored her and spoke to Lotte. “Sometimes, good things come your way by chance,” she said. “But sometimes, if you don’t reach for them, they’ll slip through your fingers. You need to steel your courage and step forward. If you do, a whole world you know nothing about is waiting for you.” She picked up a wooden spoon and took a spoonful of her special pudding, bringing it toward Lotte’s mouth. The girl timidly leaned forward and bit down hard on the pudding.
“Mmm!” she cried, a smile coming to her face. “Mnh! It’s so sweet! I like it!” Nacht gave her a gentle smile. “Thank you, Nacht!”
Nacht bowed and took a single sandwich from the table’s spread. Then, she turned her back on the chaos of the dining table and stepped outside. A quick hop and she was on the roof of the church. It was a pleasant place to relax, and Nacht had grown quite comfortable sitting here. From her high vantage point, she began casting a spell.
“Ars Terra: Create Golem.” Magic began to well up as she visualized the golem’s form. Human, she decided. A woman. She shaped its features to resemble her favorite and most beloved servant, but then stopped. Drowning her sorrows by playing with dolls didn’t sound at all appealing. She changed the golem’s image, keeping everything she had decided on until that point—its form as a human woman—but making it instead in the image of the cheerful priestess she had only met just recently.
A clump of earth began to move like a living thing. It twisted and contorted and quickly took the form of a human. Nacht’s magic flowed through it, bringing color to its skin. It looked exactly like Tina, from her slender limbs to her soft chest and hips to her brightly colored hair. Nobody looking at it would suspect that it was made out of clay.
Nacht looked over her handiwork, its lustrous hair fluttering in the breeze. “Hm,” she said. “Not bad, if I do say so myself.” But even Nacht’s magic could only create golems that resembled humans in shape. “Control!” she said, casting another spell. Her will entered the being with Tina’s form, ordering it to swing its clay sword.
The golem clutched the sword’s hilt, assumed a low stance, and lashed out with its blade. The wind sang as the sharp blade sliced through the air.
“What are you doing up there?” Tina cried, stepping cheerfully out of the church. They must have finished up with dinner. Then, she caught sight of the golem. “Wait, what the heck is that?! Is that me?! Do I have a doppelgänger?!”
“No, no,” Nacht reassured Tina, laughing to herself at the priestess’s reaction. “This is just a doll I made. How’d I do?”
“I-It’s incredible!” said Tina. “It looks just like me! It’s honestly kind of creepy.”
“I-It’s incredible!” said the doll, in a perfectly identical tone of voice. “It looks just like me! It’s honestly kind of creepy.”
“Wah! D-Don’t make it copy me! That seriously did creep me out!”
“Hey, this is just a little experiment of mine to see if combining creation magic with an infusion of mana can give me fine control of the golem. It looks like it’s not impossible to make these things act like humans.” Nacht waved her hand and the golem crumbled to nothing, returning to the earth. “But whatever’s creating the illusions of all those dead people is something else...”
Nacht reached deep into her memories. Thinking back, the most intense moments back in the game had been when she was selecting her classes and skills, walking the line between her peculiarities and the demands of practicality. It made her heart feel like it was going to burst. Nacht was created as Toru’s third character, the one in which he’d invested all of his weird fixations. Many of his memories revolved around investigating and selecting skills—more than most people who played Real World Online. But Toru’s memory was nothing compared to Nacht’s. She could remember tens, no, hundreds of thousands of skills perfectly. And yet, she had never heard of anything that could accomplish this. All she could think upon reaching the deepest part of her memory was that perhaps it was a skill unique to demons or some other type of creature.
“Even you can’t identify it, then?”
“So it seems,” said Nacht. “But don’t underestimate my ingenuity. I’ll figure it out.”
“I hope we figure it out soon,” Tina said. “I don’t think the departed would wish for us to cling to the past like this.” Her voice sounded oddly lonely. “There used to be thirty-four children here, you know...” Tina took a black-and-white photograph out from where it had been tucked in her shirt and showed it to Nacht, pointing out a number of children and naming them one by one. “That’s Vell...Filia...Yuri...Anri...Tellu...Linne...” None of them had been present at dinner earlier. “I have lots of people I would love to see too. I have precious companions I’ll never meet again for as long as I live. If only I had met the exalted fire dragon earlier...I may have been able to save them...”
As poor as they were back then, there had been no money to buy medicine when one of them fell ill or lost their strength. The church had gotten bigger and grander since Tina was chosen as the fire dragon’s priestess.
“But...” Tina continued, “the dead do not return to us. I’m sure they’ve moved on. They probably wouldn’t even want to return to life if they could...”
Nacht nodded along to Tina’s words. “It’s the egotism of the living that makes them want to return the dead to life,” she said. “But on the other hand, I can’t say they’re wrong to wish their loved ones were still alive.” If a person could distinguish between fantasy and reality, wanting someone to live and be happy was hardly a mistake. But most people simply masked their own selfish desires as concern for someone else.
“Wait,” Nacht said. “Hang on.” Those words, “the dead,” prompted Nacht to suddenly recall something. “Kurone and Shirone aren’t dead, are they? Was it just memories this whole time?”
“Nacht?” Tina looked curiously up at Nacht as the demiwyrm thought intensely.