Chapter 264: So He Really Is Merlin? (2)
What... am I. How was I even born....
I'm a demon's half-blood? One of those blue-skinned demons'? Then who are my parents?
A prison of pitch-black stone. Beyond a small crescent window barred in iron, a blood-red sun was burning a violet sky crimson.
...That vision again.
A prison where darkness of some grotesque color was falling, its hour impossible to tell. Beneath the iron bars, someone sat slumped against the wall.
She looked like an East Asian woman in her late teens. Her left arm was gone at the root, her left leg missing to the knee, and she leaned against the stone with her soul already fled.
Cuts had been carved across her bare body, sharp and deep, and what remained of her arm and leg was riddled with wounds, as if an awl had been driven through them again and again. But no blood flowed. The gashes showed only raw red muscle. Not a drop ran.
Thanks to the voice of that senile-looking old man who called himself Myrddin, I understood it by instinct, somehow. The person I was seeing was my mother. This vision was a memory lived by the woman I would have to call Mother.
I didn't know why the memory had been passed to me. I felt as if I were going mad.
That person was my real mother? The people I had called Mom and Dad for eighteen years were not my birth parents?
I was staring blankly down at the woman who had borne me — Mom... Mother — when blue-skinned demon bastards, at least two tiers above the ones I had seen in the archive at Buckingham Palace, came into the cell with a wet, gleeful cackle.
Two of them approached. Mother showed no reaction at all to the change around her. They did not seem to care in the slightest.
So I'm the child of those demon bastards....
She gave no answer to any stimulus, still as a corpse, and I had to watch as the two bastards slowly began to tear into what remained of her left leg, and eat. They gnawed at her little by little, the way one eats a fine meal, and a rage rose in me that felt as if it would snap the last thread in my mind. My stomach turned so hard I thought I would vomit on the spot.
Those... sons of bitches.
Force went into my jaw until it seemed my teeth would crack. Under a pressure that felt as if it would burst my eyes, something thick and hot ran down my cheeks.
Mother's body jolted with the demons' movements like a broken doll, and even as parts of her were eaten away she did not so much as grimace. I branded the sight of my corpse-like mother, and of those blue-skinned demons, into my brain. This rage, fierce enough to burst my heart, I laid down deep in my chest, layer upon careful layer.
At last, wheezing and cackling as if they had had their fill, the bastards left the cell. Whether they had done something to keep her from dying, her left leg was gone to the root as well — and yet the wound had closed as if ten years had already passed.
...And then, from the eye of the mother whose face was no different from a corpse's, a single clear tear fell.
Collapsed on the pitch-black floor, she could not even think to bite through her tongue and die. She only spasmed, now and then, and wept.
And then — call it a miracle, or call it a curse — masses of light began to rise, slowly, around her body.
...The automatic return. A perk of the first forced summoning.
Long after, when the wreath of light had grown unmistakable and was wrapping her body, two demons unlike the pair who had entered before appeared outside the cell. Bewildered and furious at what was happening to her, they tore the door apart — and in that same instant Mother vanished from the place, rubbed out as if an eraser had taken her.
And then I opened my eyes.
Birdsong, and warm sunlight spilling through the window, tickled my eyes and my ears. I quietly lifted my gaze. A warm hand lay over my forehead, and Franc's face was looking down at me, worried.
I realized my head was pillowed on the soft give of her thigh. When I slowly sat up, she reached out without a word and wrapped both arms around my back.
"..."
I said nothing. I only stared past the rough wooden window at a forest veiled in pale mist, and Franc came back around in front of me to meet my eyes. Her expression was firm, and earnest. She clasped my hand tight and quietly spoke.
"Seoha. I don't care what kind of being you are. You are simply Seoha. You are my everything, and my life."
"...Franc."
"It is the same for Hwayeon, and for Yeongeun. Father and Mother, and Lady Siha — every one of them loves you truly. That will not change, no matter what comes to pass. I give you my word."
"Yeah..."
Would that really hold, even after they learned I was a demon's child? Myrddin had said my soul was a demon's. Even I was revolted by myself. How much more would they...
The fact that my Mana Sieve shone blue, and not with a watery light, had to be tied to the blue of those demon bastards' skin.
And another thing. It was strange, once I looked at it straight. Set beside any other ability user, every last power I had was an absurd, broken spec. I had wondered how Spatial Perception could sense Phase Power at all, and the answer was that an aberrant's sense for Phase Power had been set into it. The proof was simple enough. The range of my Spatial Perception matched an aberrant's range for sensing Phase Power.
An ordinary sensory-type, even a C-Class, topped out around a hundred and fifty meters....
Phase Power sitting inside me like a still sheet of water... that was the same as an aberrant's Phase Power, gathered and quiet, when it was not fighting....
Why I possessed abilities that could not even be compared to other ability users'. Why what I had was different from everyone else's. I knew the reason now. And none of it made me glad.
Even knowing what I was, Franc still whispered that she loved me, and when I sank into her arms the scent of apples crept into my nose and stung at my eyes. They grew hot. Something wet began to run down my cheeks.
I'm a demon's child. I don't know how I was allowed to grow up under Mom and Dad's love, but I am a demon's....
"Seoha..."
"..."
My throat had closed, and my chest was burning. I could not speak. If I opened my mouth even a little, I would have broken and wailed.
"It's all right. You are Seoha, aren't you? Lord Myrddin said strange things, but nothing has changed. There is nothing that will."
Franc stroked my back, gentle, and soothed me in a tender voice.
"But I'm a demon's child..."
Something hot kept streaming down my cheeks. Franc drew back out of my arms, took my face in her hands, and kissed me. I accepted the sweet kiss in a daze, tears still falling, and her eyes filled as well. She rubbed her cheek against mine, showing her affection without shame. Then she met my gaze with eyes that did not waver, strong and steady, and brushed the hair back from my forehead.
"What does that matter? Look at me. I am not even among the living, am I? And yet Father and Mother accepted someone like me, and so did Lady Siha. Hwayeon and Yeongeun do not care. So they will not care either. None of them will."
She swept the tear-tracks from my cheek with her fingers, smiled beautifully, and said, quietly,
"Even if I'm the child of those blue-skinned demons?"
"I don't care! You are simply Seoha — you are my husband!"
At the comfort carried in her sincerity, the heart that had been tearing itself to shreds seemed to mend, if only a little. As if to prove it, Franc peeled away a layer of clothing, and in nothing but her underwear she gathered my head against her full breasts and slowly lay back.
I stayed dazed in her arms. Then I reached up, wiped the tears from her eyes, and kissed her lips, and she wound her arms around my neck and answered me.
A chill seized me from nowhere, cold enough that I thought it might kill me. I threw off my clothes and, in a rush, laid myself over the soft warmth of Franc's bare body. There had been no arousal, and no caress, and yet her petals, full of love, took me in gently.
"Hah—"
I bit into the lush swell of her breast the way one bites into a dumpling, and Franc let out a pitiful moan, twisting her waist a little — but with me buried deep, she could only writhe, a fish on a spit. Relentless, I bit and sucked and licked at her small, pretty ear, the slender line of her neck, the hollow of her collarbone. She could not endure it. She moaned again, heated, and reached out to cradle my head the way one cradles a baby.
I gripped a breast too full to fit even halfway in one hand, bit the nape of her neck, and moved my hips. Pleasure crashed into her belly, and Franc's thighs twisted. I raised my upper body, slid both legs in behind the small of her back, and shifted us into a seated pose. Then I seized her pelvis and pulled, hard, and the length of me drove in so deep it felt as if it would pierce into her womb.
"Hhk. Nn..."
A thin moan, like a quiet sob. Feeling the clinging, sticky rhythm of her depths, I began to roll my hips slowly, and Franc's moans — like a baby crying — grew louder and louder. Her back arched hard. Both her legs wound around my waist like snakes.
The muscles along the inside of her thighs stood out, and she gripped me tighter still. After stirring through her inner flesh three or four times that way, I drew her up to sit in my lap, facing me, and Franc, limp and swaying, kissed me as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
She rocked her hips slowly, forward and back, as we kissed. I took hold of her buttocks and helped the motion along, and Franc, arms looped around my neck, broke the kiss and trembled in fine shivers, melted through. Her sobbing moans brushed my ear. I gave her earlobe a light bite, and the flesh wrapped around my cock — soft enough to melt — clenched down hard.
"Ah... Aah. Aaa... Haaah!"
I stroked down her spine as if I were playing an instrument, and love began to spill from her petals. At that thick scent of apples I shed a tear without meaning to, and Franc — flushed the red of an evening glow — drew her face close and stole it away with her tongue.
"Don't cry, my husband."
White skin, long slender limbs, full breasts — in Franc's arms was a mother's embrace, folding every part of me in warmth. She let out a light moan and moved her hips as if drawing a bow across a violin with her own body, tightening around the part of me inside her, unhurried, and yet racing fiercely toward the peak.
"Haaah..."
"Nngh."
Perhaps her strength was failing. Franc's movements grew a little dull, but the thick pleasure wound around where we were joined did not lessen. Afraid it might, I pulled her — her face buried in my shoulder — into my arms and lay back, setting her astride me.
Even moving only her hips seemed too much. She could not master her trembling thighs. I gripped her buttocks, flushed like a peach, lifted them and brought them down, and thrust up at the same time. A sharp nasal moan burst from Franc's mouth.
Short as the act was, simple as it was, her flesh and mine flared hot all at once. Soon we were buried together in joy and in sorrow, and slowly, without a sound, we came undone.
Franc, who had comforted my wrecked mind with her own body, spent the last of her strength and fell into a deep sleep.
For hours I burrowed, mindless, into her warmth, driving the cold out with her heat.
Franc was right. I was only myself. Learning the secret of my birth had not changed me. What frightened me most now was how my family and my lovers would react, once they learned my soul was a demon's.
...
I sat still a moment, looking out the dim window at the ordered sprawl of a city. Then I drew a blanket over the sleeping Franc, gathered my clothes, and left the room.
I found the room where Myrddin was. He sat in the rocking chair before the hearth, firewood burning, looking exactly as he had the first time I saw him. I walked slowly up to the fire. He opened his mouth without so much as turning his eyes my way.
"The girl is right. You are you. Nothing decides your worth but what you do."
Had he watched Franc and me making love? The surge of it hit me, and something crude flew out before I could stop it.
"You peeping pervert of a gramps."
I glared at the old man, furious. He barked a short laugh, then went on in an ordinary tone.
"Live to my age. However lovely a woman's naked body, the middle piece will not stand."
"Even if it doesn't stand, you can still enjoy the view, can't you. Filthy old pervert."
"Mind your tongue, brat. That girl is far too good for the likes of you."
"Hmph. I know that without you saying it."
I went and sat down before the hearth, where the fire crackled and burned, and the warmth of the woodfire stroked over me. I drew one knee up, set my chin on it, and tried to watch the flames without a thought in my head... but questions about the mess I was in rose on their own.
Where had Mom and Dad brought me from? Did they know what I was? How much did my sister know about me?
Franc had accepted me. Would Hwayeon and Yeongeun, once they heard what I was?
"For a pup, you wear the face of a boy watching the world end."
"A grandfather past seventy has his worries, and a ten-year-old kid has worries of his own. That's how it is, you know?"
"Worries proper to a life. Good. And so — what will you do?"
He gave a dry little laugh and rocked the chair as he asked. Do? I would do what needed doing. Obviously.
"When I get back, I'll ask Mom and Dad."
"And?"
"I'll hunt every one of those bastards down and kill them."
The blue-skinned demons rose in my mind, and my teeth ground of their own accord. The wish to smash them to pieces and kill them welled up, thick and hot.
"Heh heh..."
Myrddin stroked his wildly overgrown beard and put on a look that said it was none of his affair.
No — isn't this the part where you tell me that, to keep my own reason and my dignity, I ought to forgive them? Something like that?
That leisurely face, as if he were watching a fire burn on the far bank of a river — and the malice rising in my chest seemed to break, and fade, of its own accord.
On a whim I turned Spatial Perception on him. Myrddin: the old man my modern age called Merlin, advisor to King Arthur, and a great magician. I could not see Phase Power inside Merlin, nor anything like a Phase Power type. What was this. Could Phase Power be hidden? Or did he simply not have any?
"Tsk. If you are going to peep, peep at Queen Guinevere in the nude. What is there worth seeing on an old man like me?"
Guinevere? King Arthur's wife? The woman who had an affair with Lancelot and tore Camelot to pieces?
"What's worth seeing, peeping at another man's woman. More to the point, Gramps — how did you know I was wondering about the blue-skinned demons?"
"I simply see it."
"..."
This time I looked up at the old man with a face full of distaste, and he chuckled under his breath and spoke again.
"Look into the eyes of a being with a mind, and his inner self shimmers into view, clear as the bed of a sea an inch deep. I only saw that demon's shape, in those eyes of yours."
Not an answer I could fully understand. And yet, somehow, I lost the will to press him.
He was Merlin. I would assume he had some special power, and leave it at that.
I asked something else.
"Gramps Myrddin, you don't even have Phase Power, so how are you using power like that? The illusion laid over Stonehenge, and joining the hut's door to this room's door — that was you, wasn't it?"
"Phase Power? So that is what you lot call the Origin Force. The ways of drawing on the Origin Force and using it are endless. The way you wield the power you borrow from the Origin is no different from a snot-nosed babe babbling while he hurls the toy clutched in his fist. If there is anything singular about it, it is that the toy happens to be a blade with a killing edge."
I couldn't argue with that. More than that — even without Phase Power of his own, he could draw it in and work this thing called magic?
Thinking on it, Mana Sieve had moved the Phase Power mixed through the air as well, so it was not beyond understanding. Then if I only learned the method, I could use magic too....
As if he had read that thought as well, Myrddin snorted, and went on at his leisure.
"The arcane arts are a secret craft crystallized from the essence of thousands of years of druids. With a head like yours, I could explain for a hundred years and you would not understand so much as the dirt under my toenail. Take it as it is, and be done."
"If I learned—"
"If it were something one could use easily merely by learning it, would I call it a secret art?"
"My apti—"
"You, and that young lady sleeping yonder — between the two of you there is not a child's booger of aptitude."
Ah, I couldn't get a word in!
I had been wondering, just maybe, whether I might teach this arcane art to my lovers, or to my family, and the old man — who had never so much as laid eyes on them — prattled on as if he knew the lot.
"Are you reading my thoughts? I didn't even say anything."
"Ho ho. You have only to live, and mind your own affairs. A lazy man does best to live as a lazy man."
"Why do you keep saying things that don't follow?"
"The gears of causality turn on, untroubled, however you may thrash. Play the tragic hero of a secret birth all you like. It is as useless as an ant dashing its head against a boulder."
What is he even saying. And he's tossing out words that have no business in this world, but I don't have the energy to call him on it.
"...Even if I turn the Earth upside down and go around slaughtering people, it has no effect?"
"If you did such a thing, that too would already lie within the current of causality."
Gah— I don't get it! My head was a tangle already, and talking to this old man only snarled it worse.
I had wanted to ask how he had known I would find this place. How he had known I was a half-blood of aberrant and human. What had become of my mother, then. How this world and the world I lived in were joined. But my head was heavy, and I was irritated, and annoyed, and I did not want to talk anymore.
"A sound thought."
"..."
I got to my feet, meaning to go sleep held in Franc's arms, and I had started to walk when old Myrddin spoke, quiet and low.
"...So what do you want me to do about it."
"It means the outcome can change as freely as you please, depending on what you set your mind to."
"...Hmph."
And I meant it.