I Am No Saint
I am no saint.
...Irritation, anger, selfishness, jealousy. And... an inferiority complex, maybe? This thing.
It was a thought that flickered for an instant through Jil's mind — through that head of his, already severed and fallen away.
Naturally, losing his head meant nothing so final as death. Just as Jenison had surmised, this boy was a slime — and a very special slime at that.
What, then, defined such a special slime? Among slimes, an exceedingly rare few could adapt the traits of the environment they had lived in into their own bodies. Peculiar individuals like metal slimes and water slimes belonged to exactly that category.
And what conditions brought such slimes into being? Simply this: only those who absorbed the first thing ever taken into their body — every last trace of it, leaving nothing behind — gained the power that earned the name "anomalous individual."
And Jil was a one-of-a-kind existence even among those anomalies. Because the first thing he had ever absorbed was none other than a human being.
A newborn slime is weak — weak enough that a boy on the cusp of adolescence could beat one. Slimes are, for the most part, born when a large individual splits off into a smaller one.
It went without saying that Jil, too, had been terribly small at first — small enough to be startled by a single rabbit and go scrambling away in a panic.
But by outrageous luck, it seemed he could win against a young boy who had starved for some three days and collapsed by the riverside. The boy was the first "meal" of his life as a slime.
The body of that first human he absorbed was so sweet, so delicious. To a newborn slime, it was a blessing and a happiness beyond all compare.
He absorbed it. Every last shred, without leaving anything behind. The boy's body, gaunt and small to begin with, was more than manageable even for a slime fresh into the world.
He was happy. He was overjoyed. He wanted this sweetness to last and last. But that bliss was brief.
As mentioned a moment ago, the condition for becoming an anomalous individual was to absorb "everything" of the first object consumed. And that "everything" included the intangible as well.
It surged. The hunger and the pain. They came flooding in. The fatigue and the memories. They rose to the surface. The experiences this boy had lived through.
The hunger of a boy who had gone nearly three days without a bite, and the exhaustion that had piled up in his body over the years — these were things a newborn slime was never meant to endure.
The hunger that would not stop making itself felt, the fatigue accumulating in his body, and the boy's memories that kept pouring in — all of it tormented him.
The cook who waved a ladle at him and snarled at him to get lost when he came begging for a meal. The pack of thugs who muscled in and tormented him even as he sold newspapers to scrape together coins. The man who spat and walked on whenever he lay on the pavement, starving and freezing. The nobles who had worked him and his parents without mercy back in their days as slaves.
A virulent resentment toward every last one of them took root in the slime.
Resentment toward the woman who hadn't spared him even a vegetable root when he was starving. Fury at the thugs who took the money he bled for as if it were nothing. An inferiority complex toward the man who had looked at him with contempt and spat at his feet. A thirst for vengeance against the nobles who drove his parents to exhaustion until it killed them.
Every last bit of it settled into a single slime.
But this slime didn't even know what the emotions now stirring inside him were, and the memories playing out so vividly before his eyes did not tell him what they wanted, either.
What the boy had wanted to do, what the boy had longed for — to a newborn slime, human emotion was a difficult thing to decipher.
So he pondered. There was time enough. He pondered, and pondered again, building on the memories that kept surfacing within him.
How much time had passed? At last, the slime moved. And he remembered — no, he passed judgment.
The emotion this boy had carried was jealousy! And what he must do was revenge.
He had been jealous of the cook who had food to prepare while he starved. Jealous of the thugs who committed robberies his powerless self could never dare. Jealous of the man who had the leisure to spit at others while he shivered endlessly in the cold. He envied and resented the nobles who held the power to do with him and his parents as they pleased.
And so — he would erase them all. If that proved impossible, he would take from them instead. He would shut down his own envy of what belonged to others, and he would stop others from ever becoming greater than he was. So that there would never again be a single reason to be jealous.
Such was the judgment handed down by a slime once young and unspoiled.
And the judgment that young slime passed back then remained nailed into Jil's chest to this very day.
The second time, too — as he absorbed a pig of a noble with grease dripping down his belly. When the girl who had chased after him, a mess of tears and snot, screamed for her life. When Mother took him in all the same. Like a shackle, he acted in accordance with it.
"Haha, I really am jealous of you, Senior!!!"
"...You insane bastard."
Even toward the human who, even now, twisted his face in disgust as he carved off his tentacles — he was, still, jealous. And so he attacked. To take away, as he always had.
Chunks of it scatter — thick, viscous clumps, hacked into fine pieces, plop-plop-plopping to the floor.
"H-hold on..! You're too fast, Senior!!"
"I'm not here to play along at your pace."
Being a slime did not mean the shocks to its body simply vanished. It only meant it would not die, no matter what attack it took. And to the me of this moment, that was, if anything, the part I liked best.
"C'mon.. isn't it about time you took a few hits yourself, Senior? Your arms and legs must be tired clear through by now."
"No. I'm not doing that for anyone's sake."
"Agh.. w-wait.. hold on..!"
It meant I was free to crush this thing apart whenever I pleased. Once more, I flung a small blade — a small blade so slight even a slime could bat it away.
"A..gh..!"
"Fortunately, this seems to work, too."
Even so, the creature flinched. Because from the spot the little blade had touched, something was slowly melting away.
"What is this stuff, Senior? It's been a long time since anything worked on my body..?"
"A simple poison. One I used to use."
Heaven-Overflow Death Poison.
A venom said to be more than enough to kill even the heavens. In my assassin days, it was something I used only when a target proved excessively strong — the true identity of the liquid I had secretly smeared across my blades, an instant-acting deadly poison.
Potent enough to kill in a single dose even the knights of old, who tempered their bodies without pause. That it melted only this much even with that was a mild grievance — but I soon decided it didn't matter, and coated the blade with poison once more. I had no intention of ending this quickly anyway.
"Haah.. and here I wanted to play a little longer.. But what can I do when you pull out something like that.."
"..."
Even so, not a tremor ran through the creature's voice. No — he even looked genuinely disappointed.
Then he fitted the head he'd dropped to the ground back into place as though assembling a model, and once it had fully reattached, that orange hair turned toward me.
"Senior, someone like you has a rough idea where this is, don't you? Am I right?"
"...Inside your body, I'd say."
"As expected of you, Senior!"
"Because otherwise, this situation makes no sense."
There had been no sign of a spell being cast, nor time enough to cast one — and yet I had been moved to a patch of the Great Forest without so much as a blade of grass. A stretch of black-red, sticky ground with no scenery to speak of. And a place bristling with tentacles he could wield as he pleased, no less.
Besides, a nauseating reek of blood had been rising for some time now from everywhere — not just the ground. I didn't know what method he had used, but my senses were telling me this place was inside him.
"It's hardly a place anyone could fail to recognize."
"There were far more fools who melted away without even knowing that much!"
Behind the creature, still smiling so innocently, tentacles kept surging upward. Red tentacles, rising and rising without end. By the time their number crept past two digits, a change came over the very first tentacle that had been summoned.
"Do you know how many humans I've eaten, Senior?"
"No. And I don't need to know."
"Honestly, I don't really know either — I've eaten far too many. And among them, there are some that haven't been digested yet."
"..."
"Even I need time to digest, you see. When too many come pouring in at once, they simply pile up inside.."
"...What are you trying to—"
"Here's the question! Where do you think the ones that haven't been digested yet are?"
The form of the first red tentacle to have risen grew distinct. The tentacle's surface, uniform as a pillar, began to swell into the shape of a figure with arms and legs flung wide, and the sharply defined face and limbs that emerged next twisted my expression.
Large, bright eyes. A high-bridged nose and full lips. And swaying hair and pointed ears. It became a form beautiful enough that anyone would call it an imitation of an elf — and the grotesque face and torn belly skin, so utterly at odds with that beauty, made my eyes fall shut on their own.
"P-please... k-kill... me..."
"..."
"The correct answer is: they stay inside my body and meeeelt, ever so slowly!"
"Pleee...ase..."
"Sorry, but I'm still full — so I can't have you dying just yet!"
"Please... kill me... I said kill me!!! Please...!!! Somebody just kill me!!!"
Her half-formed hands and feet flapped feebly toward me. A mucus-like fluid that looked for all the world like tears streamed from her eyes, and her teeth — melted away, or nearly all gone — deepened the pity of it.
"Now then, what will you do, Senior? Could you kill them?"
"...You think I can't?"
"The Senior I know couldn't."
"..."
"You were always like that, weren't you? Always lending your ear to other people's pointless sob stories."
"..."
"Even when the harm was coming to you, you mostly just let it slide, didn't you?"
"..."
"That's your problem, Senior. Far too stingy with yourself, and far too free spending your feelings on everyone else."
Kill your emotions. Cast away your pity. Lock away your conscience. Show no sympathy for others. Put yourself before anyone else.
Words I had heard so bitterly often, once upon a time.
"And you bitterly, stubbornly never followed a single one of them, Senior — as if discarding them would kill you."
"..."
"Just kill them, wipe your feet, and sleep easy! Not a single soul is going to say a word about it."
"..."
"That's why you've ended up in this state, in this shape. Aren't you doing it even now?"
Each brightly delivered word stabbed into my heart, one after another. As if every blow had found its mark.
Seeing that my lips stayed sealed, the creature seemed to get fired up, and his mouth would not stop.
"When you didn't show yourself early on, I thought, ooh — this human has finally come to his senses."
"..."
"Can't you just ignore anything that doesn't happen to you? Why insist on helping, only to get hurt and ache and be wounded — is suffering a hobby? You can't bear to see others get hurt? What are you, trying to become a saint?"
Before I knew it, a red tentacle had drawn right up to me, touched my forehead, and shoved. My head snapped back into place with the recoil — and was pushed again.
"Don't you know you could die, meddling in other people's affairs like that?"
Shove—
"Or is it simply a hobby of yours, piling up good deeds and debts by helping people?"
Shove—
"Or could it be a compulsion? Do thorns sprout from your skin if you don't help someone?"
Shove—
My head began swinging back and forth like a pendulum, and with it, it began to feel heavy — as though a weight had been tied to it.
I turned the exchange over in my mind and met it all with silence. For the briefest sliver of time — an eternity, to me.
"...Still no answer, I see. This has gotten... boring."
"..."
"Huh..? Wh.. what..? What..?!"
A woman's sobbing began to approach me, slowly. The red elf woman who had been weeping tears of mucus only moments before.
"Dear me. Even I don't want to be the one to kill you, Senior. I'll simply have her do the killing."
"S-stop... don't... don't do it...!"
"Honestly, I was told not to kill you.. but well, I'm sure you can live on without one heart."
Five tentacles shaped like the elf's fingers wriggled toward me. For some reason, dripping tears all the while.
"P-please... kill me... please..."
"..."
"I... I don't want to kill people...! Please...!! Kill me... please..."
In an instant, my vision went dark — and then, slowly, my eyes opened again. Before I knew it, a lump hung in my hand. No — the elf's head. And for some reason, her face was one of pure happiness and joy.
"...No. 8 — no. Jil."
"What is it...? Did you call me, Sen...ior?"
A voice so cold I could scarcely believe it had come from my own mouth. A coldness I had never once unleashed in all my life.
"You're right."
"...?"
"The me of back then was certainly weak. I was bad at killing people, and I threw my useless sympathy around without restraint."
"..."
"But not once did I ever stop."
"...Do you still not understand that's the problem? That you have far too much altruism, Sen—"
"It was self-satisfaction — my way of never forgetting that I was human."
Even living with people's blood wiped from my hands time and again, even when what lay in my grip was a blade instead of a pen — every time I realized anew how easy it was to end a single human life, it was a shock too great for me, who had lived in the modern world and not another one. And that was exactly why, more than anything, I never wanted to forget that I was human, not a monster.
"So I chose to remember."
"...?"
"People died far too easily. To remind myself of the worth of a life. To keep my own conduct from straying past my morals. I decided that, at the very least, I would remember the names of those who died by my hand."
"...Even bullshit has its limits before people stop listening—"
"And."
I cut off his words once more. Along with a blade whose edge carried a chill.
"Just now, because of you, there is a woman who died in my hands without ever hearing her name."
"...I didn't see—"
And what I had cut off was not only his words. His head was now split on a diagonal. Seeing a head cleaved clean open was hardly pleasant — because there was no brain or blood to be found there. Only red flesh, packed solid, wriggling.
"W-wait, Senior? I really didn't see—"
"You said it yourself earlier, didn't you? That you don't know how many humans you've eaten."
"...?"
"You'll be able to remember. The name of that elf woman."
"...??"
"Because I'm going to make your body burn all on its own."
My mouth never opened again. My words were unnecessary. From this point on, every word and every scream that mattered had to come out of him.
"Scream and suffer."
⟨ Hurler et Désoler ⟩
And as the battle began anew, the dragons' tongue echoed through it once more.