The Secret of House Citrine (4)
Ter's world had shattered the day she faced the truth — everything she believed about her father lay in pieces at her feet.
He was no flawless saint. He was a monster who had buried his past behind a smiling mask, committing vile sins in the dark while the world saw only warmth and grace.
She hadn't wanted to believe it. But the memories she'd experienced through the eyes of Anna the nurse had been almost painfully vivid, and Solis had vouched for them.
Why Yupi had suddenly massacred the members of the family. Why Tis, Yupi's younger sister, had been erased from the family records entirely. Every question that had gnawed at her had been answered all at once.
And yet some stubborn thread of hope refused to die in Ter's heart.
There had to have been a reason her father couldn't escape. Some problem with the family's finances, or some desperate circumstance she simply didn't know about — surely that was it.
However unforgivable his sins, he had still been the father who raised her with warmth. So she prayed, desperately, that things would go no further — that this moment would stop repeating itself.
But cruel reality crushed her hopes without mercy.
"Please stop this... Daddy."
Tis begged in a voice crawling from the bottom of her throat. She no longer had even the strength to resist. Drained of mana day after day as she absorbed the lust of the men sent to her, she was drying out like a mummy, dying by slow degrees. All she had left was the indignity of begging.
"I'm your daughter. This is... this isn't right."
"Quiet."
Crunch!
"Ghk—!"
The head of the family seized her wrist hard enough to shatter it. Blood rushed to the crushed flesh and bruised it a deep purple, but he didn't so much as blink at her screams of agony. Instead, his eyes glistening with desire, he simply raked his gaze greedily down his daughter's body.
"You could die and come back to life a hundred times and you'd never understand how long I've waited for this day."
"What... are you talking about?"
"Exactly what I said. How much care I've poured into claiming the source that dwells within you."
Stroking her hair with an almost intoxicated smile, he recited his crimes as though reading from a list of amusements.
"Every human carries a divine miracle called the source. To put it simply, think of it as an organ within the heart that generates mana."
His rough fingertip traced a ticklish circle near Tis's heart. Then the hand drew a slow, unpleasant line down her skin and seized her breast in a brutal grip.
"Ah... Daddy! It hurts, please!"
"Of course, our glorious ancestor made it so that men could not possess a source. But that doesn't mean we lack a vessel to carry one."
Rip!
The head of the family tore Tis's clothes away without hesitation. Between the shredded scraps of fabric, her naked body lay utterly exposed.
"Which means I can take the mana — and the source itself, that organ of creation. It requires a demanding process, but every condition has been met."
He licked his lips like a guest seated before a lavish banquet. Watching him, drooling and stuffing himself despite being ready to burst, was enough to make her skin crawl — he looked less like a man than some revolting monster.
"If I obtain that source, I can live on for ages yet, like everyone else born with mana. And as for how I take it — I don't suppose I need to explain, do I?"
"...You raised me just for this?"
Tears welled in Tis's eyes. Beneath their deep shadows, thin streams of water fell like rain slipping through a crack in the window.
"Raised me like livestock so you could eat me? All for something like this?"
"..."
"I always believed there had to be a reason when you ordered me to do these things. So I endured it. I worked so hard, because I trusted you..."
Tis's voice broke, and the words died in her throat. A sobbing, keening moan finally spilled out of her, impossible to swallow back.
"Tis. My dear daughter."
The head of the family stroked her cheek with tender gentleness. At a glance the gesture seemed affectionate, yet there was something deceptive lurking beneath it. And the words that followed cut deeper than any blade.
"You were always too good-hearted for your own sake. I even cast magic on you to make sure you'd never expose what I truly am to Yupi — and it turns out I never needed to bother."
Squeeze!
"Ugh—!"
His hand closed around Tis's slender throat, those sinister fingers tightening into a merciless chokehold. Her breath cut off, gasping against the suffocating pain, her face turned a deathly blue. She moaned in agony as sticky drool leaked from the corner of her mouth.
"It's far too late to tell me what's really in your heart. It changes nothing."
A cruel smile curved his lips. Smiling a smile more wicked than any demon's, he leaned close and whispered into her ear.
"There was a time, once, when I too felt regret over deeds like these. It tormented me. Though it was so long ago I can barely remember it now."
"I... I don't know what you're talking about, Daddy."
"Did I not tell you just now? Steal another's source, and even a man can live for centuries — something close to eternal life."
Shuuuu!
He closed his eyes, and when they opened again, a faint shimmer of mana rose from his entire body. It was a feeble, guttering light, like a lantern in the wind, ready to die at any moment — but it was unmistakably power drawn from the source in his heart.
Yet merely sustaining it seemed to be his limit; the mana scattered and faded like perfume spritzed into the air. Immediately afterward, wrinkled creases crawled across his skin. Teeth dropped from his gaunt, shrunken face, hair fell away from his scalp, and in an instant the head of the family withered into a decrepit old man.
"For others, those years wither and die in the blink of an eye. But I am different. With the help of those people, I have clung to life like this for hundreds of years."
"Ah... ah..."
"Do you know how many children I've sired in that time — and harvested with these very hands? Do you truly think killing one more would make me blink?"
Before that horrifying truth, Tis's expression froze into stone. Her will to live guttered out like an ember dropped in water. She gave up her resistance at last and closed her eyes.
Satisfied by her helplessness, the head of the family let out a maddened laugh.
"Good. Lie still, and this is easier for both of us."
Then he began to violate her body. Breathing out beast-like pants that steamed in the cold room, he inhaled the scent of her skin. With revolting, groping hands he stroked her breasts, her sex, every precious part of a woman's body.
"Yes, this is it. The scent of a woman after so long — the warmth of flesh in my arms. I've missed it so much. It's been torture, holding back."
No one was there to stop him. He licked her greedily with his tongue and lowered his hips.
"Now die quietly, just as you are. Offer the power you carry to me."
The head of the family lowered his hips further. His lower body touched Tis's bare skin, and in the very instant he drove his weight forward—
CRACK!
Unable to bear the sight a moment longer, Ter snatched up a nearby chair and swung it down onto the head of the family.
"Kghuhk!"
He staggered, swayed — then crumpled and rolled off the bed, landing on the floor in a heap.
"Aaargh!"
Ter didn't waste the opening. She threw herself at him, hacking down with the chair again and again, beyond all reason.
"No. No, no, NO!"
She screamed her rage through her tears. She knew she shouldn't be doing this, knew it — but her body had already moved without her.
"Haa... haa..."
Only when her breath ran out and the last of her strength drained from her limbs did she finally collapse, arms falling limp. She had beaten him until there was nothing left to beat.
"Uuuuh..."
The floor was slick with blood. What lay sprawled across it was no longer anything one could call a person — just a shapeless mass of ruined flesh.
Ter's hands shook uncontrollably. Worse than the terror of taking a life for the first time was what the blood on her hands stirred loose — memories from a past she had buried.
"Do you know how many children I've sired — and harvested with these very hands? Do you truly think killing one more would make me blink?"
"AAAAAAAH!"
That single sentence struck Ter like a knife straight through the chest. Because it meant that in the end, she was no different from Tis — nothing more than another piece of feed.
Her father's gentle smile. The kindness of the family's people. All of it, every last bit of it, had been a lie.
"Please... tell me it isn't true..."
She prayed with everything she had — that this was some vicious nightmare, a trap someone had laid just to deceive her.
She pressed her hands together and begged, invoking even gods she had never believed in.
Slap. Slap.
"Ah... ah!"
Through her trembling, dilating pupils, the true face of that warm past finally came into view.
Click.
"Phew. That's exhausting. Extracting a source from a human body never gets any easier, no matter how many times I do it."
The image of the head of the family — the man Ter had just beaten to death — flickered with static, and the scene shifted. This was a record of a past already fixed in place, one she could never reach, never change.
"You've worked hard, my lord."
"Thank you, Anna. See to the disposal of this corpse."
"As you wish. I'll incinerate it, per your standing orders."
The woman's body lay cold and ruined, smeared with semen. The lifeless eyes and bluish skin were proof enough that she belonged to this world no longer.
"That should buy me another two hundred years at least. The source fits me well — fitting, for a child of my own blood."
"My congratulations. Though it does mean you'll be unable to find a woman to offer to Lord Proto in the end."
"No matter. The preparations for him are already complete."
He finished changing his clothes and left the room. As Anna followed, he added a final word over his shoulder.
"Reports say one of my wives has just given birth. Cover the mother's death as an accident, and bring the child into the family."
"Ah — you mean that child."
Anna took out her phone, tapped at it briefly, then bowed her head.
"The name is Ter, my lord. Is this the child?"
"Yes. That's the one."
Gazing down at the baby displayed on the screen — golden hair, sapphire eyes — the head of the family spoke.
"Grant this child the name of House Citrine. It is the command of the family head."