Chapter 11: Girl, Gets Grossed Out
WINDY Village’s big race ended in chaos. The villagers came to their senses and apologized to each other for the shameful way they had acted during the race.
Nichika landed in that awkwardness paler than a ghost and sucked in a shuddery breath when she saw a black object tumble on the ground. The charred lump that no longer looked human was barely alive. What used to be a chest feebly rose and fell, and fragments of the wind orb pierced through scorched hands.
The need to rush to his side and the repulsiveness of what appeared by all accounts to be a dead lump of flesh weighed heavily on the two sides of her mental scales, preventing her from making a decision.
What is that? Is it really the guy who always has a carefree smile?
Is it alive? Is it still alive? Or is it just carbon?
A person? A thing? What is a person? What makes something a person?
Bile rising in the back of her throat, she retreated a step, and then she heard it, between the wheezing gasps for breath—her name.
“L-Lam!”
The scales tipped. Squashing the fear churning her stomach, Nichika scrambled over and kneeled beside the carbonized body. Her hands shook like a drunken sailor and she struggled to bring herself to touch him.
I can’t. It’s too disgusting. I don’t want to touch him.
Flesh had burned off, exposing bare, white bones and the nauseating stench of charred hair, skin, and fat wreaked havoc on her nose. Tears sprung to her eyes; she didn’t know what to do with the maimed body before her.
She covered her mouth with both hands and muffled her cries. Were they moans of disgust or sadness? She didn’t know.
How the hell am I the Spirit Priestess? If I really was such a saint, I should be able to embrace this lump of fried meat without a second’s thought. Yet the utter disgust I feel is winning out. I can’t be a priestess. I can’t become a pure and selfless heroine like in the stories.
Something terrible and inexplicable wriggled deep inside her heart at that somber realization. Why? Why does it feel like I’ve…felt this way before?
“Eek!”
The blackened pile of meat suddenly fastened around Nichika’s wrist. She screamed and tried to swing her arm loose. Yet the surprising amount of strength remaining in that charred hand wouldn’t let her escape. Lambert, whose eyes had been smashed in, jerked his opposite hand over and touched what he had clenched in a death grip to the back of her hand.
“What…?”
She didn’t know what he wanted and remained perfectly still. And then she heard it—a beep from the wristband. The orb furthest to the right lit up—the last checkpoint marker.
“Congratulations.”
Reading his mangled lips struck Nichika hard in the gut. Lambert’s hand—no, what had once been his hand—limply slid to the ground, never to move again.
“Ah…ahhh…”
Nichika’s scream failed to make a sound and she collapsed to the ground.
“—!!!”
Her soundless cry conveyed more pain and sorrow than even the loudest of shouts.
✦ ✦ ✦
OSWALD silently watched over the girl who didn’t stop weeping even after an hour had passed.
“Is that Lambert?” a subdued voice drifted over to them from behind.
Nichika spun around as if someone had set the ground on fire under her legs. Standing there was the king of wind spirits, his long green hair fluttering around him like a cape. She sprang to her feet and grabbed a fistful of his tunic.
“Lord Sylmia! Please! Please save Lam!” she begged, clinging to him.
The Great Wind Spirit glanced at the girl’s wristband. “You are this year’s winner,” he announced with a tight smile. “I’ll imbue my power into your magic orb as promised.”
“Excuse me…?” she wrenched out.
Sylmia held his hand over the dumbfounded girl’s forehead and whispered something in another language. A gentle green wind swaddled her in its caress. Green light twirled within her magic orb a second later.
“There you go,” he continued in an even voice. “Now you have come one step closer to reviving the goddess.”
“Wh-Why? How…could you?”
A half laugh gurgled past her lips and she stepped away from his outrageous show of calm. Sylmia maintained his cool despite the way she looked at him like he was some kind of monster.
“How could I what?”
His frigid question brought another round of tears to her swollen eyes. “You of all people should be able to tell who is lying over there!” she screamed, pointing to the singed corpse behind her. “He may have been adopted, but wasn’t he still your son?!”
“……”
“How could you…be so…cold…” she wrung out between sobs, earning a blistering sigh from the wind spirit.
He snapped his fingers, activating some sort of spell. Wind swirled around them, creating a barrier that severed them from the onlookers. Sylmia confirmed no one could hear them, then proceeded to ask her a harsh question.
“Can you still say that knowing Lambert is the one who rigged your broom to break apart?”
“…?!”
Bowled over by that possibility, Nichika swung her gaze to the broom pieces scattered about. Each piece had cleanly come apart at the seams, which couldn’t have happened over the natural course of use or from whittling it down too far.
Lambert tried to kill me? How was she supposed to take that bit of information? All she could do was reel back from the shock.
“In other words, you knew and still allowed for this to happen?” Oswald accused.
Sylmia quietly closed his eyes and nodded once. “I feel horrible for mixing you up in my gamble,” he apologized in a heartrendingly flat voice. “As you rightly guessed, I purposely overlooked Lam sneaking that magic crystal into my village.”
The wind spirit’s handsome face twisted as he knelt beside his son. A single tear slipped down his cheek and splattered on the back of his outstretched hand.
“Because I had hoped…this child would find it in him to stop.”
As the one who ruled over all the wind in the world, Sylmia knew everything. He knew the hurting young man behind the polished mask Lambert kept up for appearances, about the black flames of vengeance burning deep in his heart, and how he looked down on the rest of the world.
“I desperately wanted to believe that he had, if only a little, come to care for me and this village. My hopes ended in miserable failure though,” he said, his voice coming out in a quiet trickle.
Having heard the truth, Nichika stopped crying and balled her hands into tight fists. “You didn’t…make a mistake.”
“What?”
“I’m positive,” she continued in a quivering voice, “you, and everyone in this village, had become important to Lam.”
All the fear had washed away. She crawled over to the corpse and held the marred hand that once belonged to Lambert.
“Do you honestly believe he’d risk his life to destroy the orb if he didn’t?!”
Green radiated from her wet eyes. Skin crumbled off the charred hand she clutched. She didn’t even notice as she impulsively berated Sylmia.
“Could you be any stupider?! You should’ve sat him down for a proper talk before testing him! It’s too late once the person is dead!”
Skin peeled off in flakes with each shout. New dermis formed in layers underneath. Wind mana absorbed into his body at the same time, causing it to faintly shine. His skin glowed like a firefly.
“Lam was…I just know Lam was…!”
“Stop it! Release his hand this instant!”
“Eh?”
Nichika was astonished by the changes going on around her that she hadn’t noticed. She suddenly felt like a hundred-ton brick had fallen on her back.
“You are pouring all your magic into Lam!” Sylmia warned, panicking for the first time. “Keep that up and you will drain your soul dry! You might die!”
“B-But his body is regenerating.” She stared at the corpse like she had discovered a new hope. But sadness crumpled Sylmia’s face.
“It’s a lost cause…”
At first glance it looked like a miracle, but it was a meaningless act. The somatic cells were being regenerated with magic, recreating the “flesh”, but the soul had already separated. What the girl was doing was just cleaning up the corpse.
“Please…open your eyes!”
But she couldn’t see reality now that she was blinded by false hope. Sylmia had no intention of watching the Spirit Priestess kill herself in front of him. He turned toward her master, Oswald, and sought his assistance.
“Stop her. You are that child’s master, aren’t you?”
The man cast down his gaze and gave his head a small shake. “She can’t be stopped once she becomes like this. She’s ridiculously stubborn and doesn’t know when to give up. She dreams of miracles that will never happen and believes the world is filled with light. She’s got a bad case of heroine syndrome.”
Oswald thought of the day she told him to come with her and pulled him from the shadows into the morning light. That time things went just as she wanted—no, he allowed it to be as she wanted—but this miracle wouldn’t come so easily, if at all.
“Just let her be until she’s satisfied.”
Though he said that, Oswald was going to stop her if she persisted to the point of permanent injury. For now, he carefully watched his apprentice pour out an endless supply of magic.