Chapter 137: It's Not Your Fault.
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 137: It's Not Your Fault.
“Oh, you're awake?”
When Yohan opened his eyes, a young boy who had been nursing him by his side spoke to him softly.
Rolling only his eyes to look at the boy, Yohan parted his parched lips and spoke.
“...Water.”
“Ah, yes!”
The boy immediately poured water into a nearby glass and handed it to Yohan. Yohan staggered as he sat up and gulped the water down.
A cool sensation spread through his entire body, and only then could Yohan grasp the state he was in.
‘I'm completely wrecked.’
The suit he had been wearing, somehow removed, lay beside him like a heap of scrap metal. His chest, where a hole had been pierced, was clumsily wrapped in bandages.
Seeing the bandages, his pierced chest began to throb. As his chest throbbed, the memory of what Arachne had done to him started to well up fresh in his mind.
How on earth he had defeated such a monster, how he had gotten here afterward—he had no idea.
“Hey, kid.”
“Huh? Yes.”
“Where are the others?”
“Oh, I'll go get the adults!”
Hearing Yohan, the kid bolted outside and started shouting at the top of his lungs. Yohan was about to tell him not to run in the ward, but then he realized the situation was urgent enough to warrant it and decided to let it go.
A moment later, the nurses and doctors the boy had summoned began to enter Yohan's room.
“You're awake!?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you in any pain?”
“My whole body hurts...”
“Well, it was a serious injury.”
The nurse said this as she checked Yohan's injuries and the state of his bandages, then asked if he needed anything.
When Yohan said he was hungry, the nurse told him he couldn't eat because he had a hole in his stomach and it would just leak out.
“...I just drank some water.”
“Oh my, then you'll be getting wet soon.”
After this exchange, which could have been a joke or serious, Yohan immediately asked about the others.
The two who had returned with him, of course, and also the other witches who had not yet arrived.
“So—what about the others?”
“The two who came with you are both lying in the ward. They haven't opened their eyes yet. To be honest, their injuries are so severe it's unclear if they'll ever wake up...”
“What about the younger one? She shouldn't have had any major injuries...”
“It's the same for her. We don't know why, but she's unconscious.”
Hearing that Beatrice was unconscious, Yohan immediately understood the reason.
She was a witch, and she must have used an immense amount of magic power in the fight against Arachne. She had already used up her magic to the point of collapse, but at the very end, hadn't she controlled Elesis to help save him?
She had to be unconscious because her magic power was completely depleted.
“Wait, patient!? You can't get up!”
Yohan staggered to his feet. The nurse tried to stop him, but even injured, she was no match for Yohan's strength.
Leaving the room, Yohan headed straight for the room where Beatrice was sleeping. There, he found her, eyes closed in slumber.
Dressed in a patient gown, her hands folded neatly, Beatrice looked like a princess from a fairy tale.
“Patient! If you keep moving, your wound will reopen...!”
“Hey, sorry, but could you give us a moment alone?”
“What? What do you mean—”
“I'm about to wake up the witch. If you stay here, you'll get cursed, you know?”
Hearing Yohan's words, the nurse flinched and began to back away cautiously. Yeah, that's a normal reaction.
No matter how much the Empire had improved the image of witches, you couldn't change human nature.
The monsters that destroyed cities, and the witches who destroyed those monsters with ease—even without any curses or stigmas, they were beings that people instinctively shied away from.
“Thanks.”
Leaving the nurse behind, Yohan closed the door and began to barricade it with whatever he could find to keep it from being opened.
He'd mentioned a curse, so it was unlikely anyone would come, but... what he was about to do wasn't something for others to see.
“Beatrice, you're always sleeping.”
Mumbling this, Yohan sighed and started to pull down his pants. To be honest, he felt a sharp pain from the hole in his abdomen with every movement, but it couldn't be helped.
This isn't for me.
With that self-justification, Yohan inserted himself into the sleeping Beatrice.
...Squish, squish...
...Slap-! Slap-!
—Haaaahng!
“Hngh, haat—haaahng! Hyaak!”
Beatrice, held in Yohan's arms, wrapped her limbs tightly around his body as she pounded her hips down on him.
Every time she slammed her hips down, a lewd slap echoed through the room, and Yohan's brow furrowed slightly.
“Ngh—”
“Yohan, Yohan—Yohaaan...! Haeeuung!”
Oblivious to Yohan's groans, Beatrice continued to grind her hips down. Each time she did, the pain made Yohan pull her even tighter—.
Finally, when Yohan came deep inside her, he realized something was trickling down his stomach.
‘Ah... I shouldn't have drunk that water.’
As if the barely stitched wound had burst, the bandage began to turn crimson in an instant. Clutching the ruptured wound, he collapsed backward. Only then did Beatrice realize something was wrong and look down at him.
“Yohan...!?”
Realizing that Yohan's upper body and her own clothes were soaked in blood, Beatrice panicked and began to use her magic power to create a thin thread.
The newly formed thread immediately began to stitch Yohan's chest. It was a thread made of magic power with no physical substance, but it was enough for first aid.
Thanks to her skill with a needle and thread, honed from her usual doll-making, the stitching didn't take long.
Having stitched up Yohan's chest in a flash, Beatrice looked down at him, large, clear tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Sob, Yohan, are you... bleeding because of me?”
“...It's not because of you.”
The wound he'd gotten while saving Beatrice had burst open while he was fucking Beatrice, so strictly speaking, it was her fault... but weren't men creatures full of bravado?
The kind of pitiful creature who would rather die than admit he was hurt because of his woman.
“Really...?”
“Yeah, of course.”
Yohan stroked Beatrice's hair and gently laid her down beside him. She was small enough to pass for a middle schooler, but in his injured state, even her weight was a considerable burden.
As he pulled his penis out of her, a whitish fluid trickled from Beatrice's vulva.
He wiped it away messily with the blanket before collapsing onto the bed.
“Beatrice.”
“Yes...”
“Can you tell me? What happened?”
“After we separated, I ran into a monster and fought it all day...”
“Is that it?”
“Yeah.”
Beatrice, whose verbal skills weren't very developed, couldn't explain what she had been through very well.
Yohan looked down at her for a moment, then stroked her head as if to say it was okay. It can't be helped. He couldn't expect too much from someone who had spent her entire childhood as a loner.
“That must have been tough.”
“...Yeah, it was.”
Drip, drip—Beatrice belatedly began to cry. If the tears from before were shed out of worry for him, the ones flowing now were tears of relief, now that the tension was gone.
They were tears shed for herself.
“I... I fought hard. I thought you, or Evangeline, or Margaret... that someone would come. I just had to hold on until then...”
“You did well.”
“Was I... a nuisance? Do you think I'm just a burden, always needing help...?”
Yohan shook his head at her words. It was true that Beatrice had a childish side, but that was one of her strengths.
You needed someone childlike like her for progress to be made. If everyone were an adult, paradoxically, no one would be willing to take responsibility.
“No, do you have any idea how many things have gone right thanks to you?”
“...Really?”
“I'm serious. Who was the first among the witches to awaken in the first place? It was you, Beatrice, wasn't it? That's proof that you're the most outstanding.”
“...Really?”
At Yohan's words, Beatrice gradually began to regain her spirits. Before long, she even seemed to forget that she had just burst open his chest and started to cheer up.
Yohan watched her and grinned. He was glad he'd saved her.
‘By the way, when the hell are the other witches going to get here?’
Thinking of the witches who had yet to arrive, it never even crossed Yohan's mind that they might have failed.
“Motherfucker.”
Hekaterina spat out a curse as she looked at the corpse of the Octopus Head and the dying blue-haired witch before her.
Adelheid, who was dying because of her mistake.
“I'm fucked.”
She nudged Adelheid. Unsurprisingly, Adelheid didn't wake up.
And it wasn't like she had the ability to heal her. She was just lying there, dying.
Worse, was she the only one dying? No, that wasn't it either.
“Shit...”
Hekaterina looked up at the sky. Or more precisely, at the sun shining down from above the water's surface.
She was trapped underwater, in a prison created by the octopus monster. To be exact, in an ice prison that the Octopus Head had made and Adelheid had frozen solid.