Time for Physical Purification (?)
I let out a long sigh. Was it already morning? Through the window, the shameless morning sun was creeping in, bright and oblivious. I hadn’t slept a wink all night. At first I thought I was having a nightmare. But no—this wasn’t sleep paralysis. It was two S-rank condensed mana dump trucks mercilessly crushing my solar plexus and dantian from both sides.
“Kooo… kuuul…”
“Suuu…”
No matter which way I chose, it felt like my limbs would be torn apart, so I exercised my right to remain silent. The two of them had built a serious fortress on top of my body and spent the entire night growling at each other before finally exhausting themselves and falling asleep. Honestly, this was ridiculous. They’d kept a person awake all night under threat of death and overwhelming physical pressure, yet here the culprits were, sleeping peacefully in my arms like it was the most comfortable place in the world.
Still, I couldn’t exactly kick these walking S-rank disasters in the gut and bolt upright. I’d better wake them up first. My organs really felt like they were about to rupture, and my spine was on the verge of snapping like a dry twig.
“Hey. Get up right now.”
“Mmm…?”
At my hoarse voice, both Cecilia and Rahel rubbed their eyes and woke up at the same time.
“Hmmm… Did our puppy sleep well? Master’s chest must have been nice and warm, right?”
“Uung… Mujin… I wanna sleep more…”
“Cut the nonsense and get off me. I feel like I’m going to die from how heavy you both are.”
Just then, Rahel—who had been sluggishly sitting up—suddenly grabbed Cecilia by the collar.
“Hey, you gloomy bitch!! Did you seriously spend the whole night clinging to our Mujin?!”
“Uung… O-of course… Mujin’s heartbeat… it felt so good…”
“You filthy insect!!”
Haah, seriously. They were fighting the moment they opened their eyes. As usual, it fell to me to stop this absolute circus.
I summoned my resolve, kicked off the blanket, and shot upright from the bed. The two women hanging on either side of me tumbled straight onto the floor.
THUD! SMACK!
“…Our puppy? I think I just got slammed into the floor by my own master. Or am I imagining things?”
“Oww… Mujin… that hurts…”
Rahel and Cecilia, sprawled on the ground, looked up at me in disbelief. I rubbed my stiff neck and declared firmly.
“Stop fighting first thing in the morning and go wash up. There’s somewhere I want to go.”
The moment the words “somewhere I want to go” left my mouth, the eyes of the two women rolling around on the floor lit up in unison.
“Where?! The sea?! Or maybe that secret spot only our puppy and I know about?!”
“I-I don’t care where… As long as you’re there… I’d even follow you into the sewers…”
“By the way, you’re really something else.”
I looked down at Cecilia as she delivered that skin-crawling love confession and asked.
“How the hell do you keep tracking me like a ghost? From what I can tell, you followed me for an entire year right after I ran away—no, retired to the countryside.”
“That’s what I’m saying!!”
Rahel chimed in, her voice rising at the end.
Cecilia covered her mouth with a pale hand, stretching her lips into a wide, unnatural smile.
“Hehe… A-actually… I attached my own special ‘Magic Beacon’… to your body, Mujin…”
“What? On my body?”
“You insane insect!! How dare you tamper with Mujin’s body?!”
Rahel’s eyes flashed as she reached for her axe. I quickly wrapped my arms around her waist to hold her back.
“Calm down!! But seriously, where exactly did you put it? I’ve been showering every day for a year and never noticed anything.”
“Hehe… I stuck it in a place only I know… a ve~ry intimate spot… You’ll never find it in your lifetime, Mujin…”
There was a tracker on my body that I didn’t even know about? In an intimate place? Wait a second. I scrub my entire body vigorously with a towel every single shower and never saw it? Then where on earth… No way…?
Don’t think about it. A horrifying list of anatomical locations flashed through my mind, along with the rapid collapse of my human dignity. While I stood there, face pale at the creeping truth, Rahel lunged for Cecilia’s hair.
“Take it off right now!!! You’re not removing that disgusting thing from my puppy’s body?!”
“W-why should I…? If you can find it, go ahead and stick your own on him…”
“You voyeuristic freak, I’m definitely chopping you into pieces today!!”
Haah… Just as Rahel was about to summon her battle axe from thin air, I hurriedly threw out the main topic.
“Stop fighting and get dressed! I said there’s somewhere I want to go! We’re heading to that Crop Shop right now to shake it down!!”
“Crop Shop? Aha, because of that demon bitch yesterday?”
“Yeah. We need to dig a little. No matter how I think about it, something’s off.”
As I answered while pulling on my coat, Rahel raised one eyebrow crookedly and glared at Cecilia.
“Hey. You don’t know that bitch Roselia, do you?”
“Hehe… I know her? When it comes to Roselia’s private life… I know a hundred times more than you do…”
“You damp little insect, where do you get off running your mouth!”
Haah. They fought the second their eyes met.
“Welcome~!”
The moment we stepped into the Crop Shop, my brain short-circuited. What the hell was going on? The Roselia whose head had been cleanly severed by Rahel’s axe yesterday—the one whose decapitated head had rolled across the floor—was standing there perfectly fine, breathing and greeting customers with her usual bright smile. There wasn’t even a single scar on her neck.
The two insane women who had been growling on either side of me fell completely silent, staring blankly at Roselia.
What was this? Had she resurrected overnight? Or had yesterday’s events been a hallucination? While I was lost in confusion, my eyes met Roselia’s.
“Oh my, hello, Mujin. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep our appointment yesterday. I came down with a terrible fever and was bedridden. Ho ho.”
…Huh? She didn’t come yesterday?
“What? You… you didn’t come to my house yesterday?”
“No? I was burning up with fever all day and couldn’t even get out of bed.”
“But you definitely came to my house with a pretty basket full of cookies…”
“Cookies? Me, bringing cookies to your house? …Oh! Welcome, customer!”
Another customer entering the shop cut our conversation short.
She’d been sick and couldn’t come. Then who the hell was the Roselia who showed up at my house yesterday and got her head chopped off? Had a demon perfectly disguised itself as her for just one day? Or was the demon standing in front of us right now, resurrected and lying through her teeth?
A fierce detective drama was unfolding in my head at that exact moment.
CRACK!
“Aaaagh!!”
Sudden, bone-crushing pain exploded from my right wrist. Rahel had somehow moved right beside me and was gripping my sleeve with hydraulic-press strength.
“Hey! Hey hey hey! That hurts! My bones are breaking! Let go right now!!”
“…Who told you to flap your lips and smile at another bitch without Master’s permission?”
Rahel slowly turned her head. Her hollow, blood-red eyes locked onto me with terrifying precision.
This atmosphere… I was screwed.
“Th-that’s right… Mujin… Who told you to have a friendly conversation with some other woman instead of us…?”
At the same time, Cecilia’s ice-cold voice drilled into my ear from behind. Even Cecilia!
“N-no! This isn’t the time to be jealous! I was just trying to get information because the Roselia who died yesterday is standing here alive and it’s giving me chills—!”
“Who cares about that?! The important fact is that you were wagging your tail at another bitch!!”
A blazing inferno of injustice erupted inside me. Logically speaking, the demon mastermind who might have swallowed the entire village was a hundred, a thousand times more important! A spine-chilling mystery that could decide the fate of the world was unfolding right in front of us, so why was I the only one being dragged away by the collar into a romantic horror show?!
“No, obviously the demon is more impor— AAAAAAAGH!!”
CRACK!
This time an excruciating pain exploded from my left shoulder, as if the entire joint had been dislocated. The second culprit was Cecilia. It felt like a giant man-eating crocodile had clamped its jaws around my shoulder.
“Aaaagh! I’m sorry! Spare me! I was wrong, so let go! Please let go!!”
“Hehe… N-now… you understand… what you did wrong…?”
“Good thing you reflected, our puppy.”
Only after I broke down in tears and snot, waving the white flag, did the shackles on both sides slowly loosen.
Haa… Haa, haa. I really thought I was going to die. World peace, demon conspiracies—none of that mattered. My own life had been in the most immediate danger.
Then Rahel’s small hand slid up my back from behind and patted me gently.
“There, there. I’m glad you realized what you did wrong. But a mistake is still a mistake…”
Her hand slowly crept from my back up to the nape of my neck.
“So you’ll have to pay the appropriate price, won’t you?”
“P-price? What price?”
At my trembling question, Rahel’s red lips stretched into a grotesque smile that reached her ears. In the shop’s deep shadows, only her blood-red eyes floated eerily in the air, pinning me in place.
“What else? Your mouth that dared to mix with another bitch and got all dirty…”
Rahel breathed hot air into my ear and whispered.
“We’ll have to physically purify it. Thoroughly.”
“Ph-physically purify it?”
How? Were they really going to pour bleach down my throat? Or scrub my tongue raw with a steel scouring pad? While I stood frozen, face pale, Cecilia’s pitch-black hair slithered down like snakes from the other side, blocking my vision.
“Y-yes… In our own special way… We’ll purify you all the way to the root… nice and sticky…”
Cecilia, too, stretched her lips into a long, unnatural grin and laughed eerily. The moment my eyes met her unfocused black pupils, a horrific chill swept over me, as if thousands of insects were crawling through my veins.
On my right, blood-red eyes sharpened like blades, ready to pry my jaw open. On my left, abyssal black eyes that seemed ready to numb every sensation in my tongue forever. The two pairs of madness began closing in on my lips at the same time.
This… I’m really going to lose my tongue and die today…