Encounter
Blackmore's infamy began not with its landscape, but with the people it drew in.
The most notorious of the Empire's suicide grounds. Among the three great places where people went to die, Blackmore was infamous for producing so many disappearances that drifters and fugitives from across the continent were drawn there by the dozen.
What did that mean? It meant that decent, ordinary people would never come to Blackmore of their own free will.
Suicide?!
That woman was clearly an imperial noblewoman, the sort who had been born and raised in luxury. If someone like that had crawled all the way out here to kill herself, then no matter which family she came from, they were probably in an uproar by now.
A missing-person report would definitely be filed.
Then the search would begin in earnest.
If it ended as nothing more than a simple disappearance, that would be a blessing. But if her corpse was eventually discovered in Blackmore?
As the nominal administrator, I...
would I really be able to avoid being dragged into it?
No, there was no way.
Once I understood that, the thing I had to do was obvious.
I had to stop her, right now.
But how?
She was only a few steps away from the edge. One more stride and she would fall.
"......"
Shaaa—
The waves crashing up from beyond the cliff roared like a living thing.
The woman's hair whipped wildly in the wind as she stood at the brink.
And then, all at once, she smiled.
At the same moment, our eyes met.
Her eyes were black as pitch, as if she had fallen into an abyss with no light at the bottom.
Something...
Something was about to happen.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
"No—!!"
When I opened them again, I found that I had already started running toward her alone.
"!!!"
Through the violently shaking blur of my vision, I caught sight of the woman's startled face. Her gaze was fixed squarely on me.
And more than anything else—
She stopped!
The woman who had been measuring the distance as if she were about to leap right this second had frozen in place.
Her eyes were wide with shock.
It looked as if she had been startled by my sudden appearance.
My heart hammered as though it were trying to burst straight through my ribs.
Ragged breaths scraped at my throat as I kept running, and running, and running.
Then the distance between us began to close.
"Who...!"
The instant I thrust out my right hand toward her, a tremendous pressure crushed time itself.
Everything slowed to a sickening crawl.
Her hair streaming in the wind, dust kicking up from the ground, even the sluggish reach of my own hand—every single motion stretched out before me in agonizing detail, and I could follow each one with my eyes.
"Got you—!"
But just before my hand could touch her, she twisted away in a panic.
"???"
Huh.
Wait. Wait just a second.
Did she just dodge me?
Then I was...
"......Huh?"
My center of gravity vanished in an instant.
At the same time, my body began to lurch in the direction of the outstretched arm.
And in that direction was nothing but—
"!!!"
...an endless, open cliff.
Ah.
God damn it.
That is just so unbelievably fucked up.
Trudge, trudge.
With her silver hair in disarray, the girl dragged her feet forward, each step weighed down by exhaustion.
Swish—!
She glanced around for a moment.
Gloom-heavy fog hanging in the air. Sheer cliffs. Trees packed so tightly together they looked as if they had grown over one another.
Mm. Just as she'd heard.
As expected, there wasn't a single trace of a human being to be found in a place like this.
"......ha."
The corners of her mouth twisted in a smile so cold it seemed to scrape the skin.
Her blurred gaze leaked with unrestrained madness, and a feral grin curled over her otherwise blank face.
How had it come to this?
With her eyes closed, she slowly retraced the past.
Rudine Carlyle.
The second daughter of the Carlyle marquis house, one of the three great guardian families that protected the northern continent.
And an illegitimate child.
There was nothing particularly special about her story.
It was the sort of commonplace tale you heard all the time: one day, the lord of the estate had acted on a passing whim and taken a maid of humble birth to his bed, and a girl had been born from that unconsidered impulse.
Born already saddled with the cruel label of bastard.
"The marquis really has some nerve... bringing a bastard into the manor, of all things..."
"Ah, poor Marchioness..."
"How dare some lowborn bastard think she can cling to the marquis's household?"
No one welcomed Rudine.
Her existence was nothing more than an unexpected accident.
She had only two choices.
Be cast out of the estate and wander the streets at once.
Or endure the endless torment and isolation and remain in the manor.
Rudine chose the latter.
Or rather, she was chosen for it.
She had been far too young to decide anything for herself, and above all, her mother had begged desperately for her to stay in the manor.
From that day on, Rudine changed.
She hid herself behind a mask, lashed herself with relentless severity, and kept moving forward.
She gave her heart to no one easily, and not a single day passed without her striving to be recognized as part of the family.
It was a time of grueling endurance, enough to strip the bones bare.
She burned her life to ash, using every sneer and every humiliation that came her way as fuel.
And then, one day, her patience—pushed all the way to its limit—finally broke.
The head maid burst into her room and struck her across the face.
"Get up this instant! The sun is already high in the sky!"
"I'll punish you for missing morning greetings."
"For the next week, you'd better not even think about stepping outside this room."
This is my room.
It's not a prison.
"Oh my, you must be hungry. Don't be shy—eat up."
"The food's gone a little off, but that shouldn't be a problem, should it?"
"It's a meal prepared with great care for the young lady. You wouldn't want to leave any of it behind, would you?"
For a moment, she almost laughed.
Rage, disgust, hostility—those razor-edged emotions tore her reason to shreds.
The desire to tear that obnoxious woman limb from limb boiled up inside her.
Should I kill her?
What kind of scream would that thin neck give if a blade were driven into it?
How far could she possibly fall before the terror of death?
A voice that sounded like a hallucination rang clearly against her eardrums.
It was as if some echo were urging her toward slaughter.
"Where on earth did you learn your table manners, anyway!"
Rudine lovingly toyed with the dagger hidden behind her back.
"Honestly, this is why common blood is hopeless."
And then she raised her right hand without hesitation.
Slash—!
At that very moment, something unexpected happened.
The dagger clutched in her right hand sank into the head maid's neck.
"Kyaaahhh!!"
A scream sharp enough to tear the air apart filled the room.
With a mad expression on her face, Rudine butchered the head maid as if she were a machine—cutting, tearing, splitting.
Her gaze was soaked through with malice and insanity.
It was the look of eyes where pitch-black darkness itself was writhing.
Fshk—! Fshk—!
Chunks of flesh were torn free and scattered through the air.
Blood spilled out and pooled across the floor.
Thud—!
The horrifyingly mangled head maid collapsed to the floor, her face drained white.
"Hah... hah..."
Rudine steadied the breath breaking from her chest.
And then, looking down at the cold corpse before her, the emotion that welled up inside her was nothing other than—
...Ah.
Ecstasy.
Deep, intoxicating ecstasy.
The next day, the entire manor was thrown into chaos over the head maid's death.
Murder.
No matter what words they chose, it was a situation no one could possibly make sense of.
"Tsk, that damn bitch..."
The marquis clicked his tongue in naked contempt.
An illegitimate daughter who had killed a servant because she could no longer endure the abuse—if that news ever spread through social circles, the Carlyle family's prestige would plummet straight into the gutter.
So the marquis moved quickly to bury the matter.
He silenced the servants who had witnessed the incident.
Then he began erasing every trace of Rudine left in the manor, one by one.
Swiftly.
And thoroughly.
Ah, so this is the end.
Rudine bent over with laughter, then a scream burst out of her throat.
Everything she had spent her whole life striving for vanished in an instant.
What remained was nothing but a swamp of despair.
The black, sticky emotions that had been piling up in chaos finally spread their branches and bore fruit.
And in the end, the judgment passed on Rudine was this:
Rudine Carlyle is to be exiled to Blackmore.
"Ha."
As she pushed through the mountain path, Rudine let out a dry, broken laugh.
Her throat burned as though she had swallowed a coal from the firepit.
Grit.
The sound of her teeth grinding together rang out clearly.
Was it my voice that was boiling over like this?
Or was it the fury aimed at the trash of the marquis house?
Probably both.
"......"
After a long walk, what waited for Rudine was a cliff face dropping straight down into nothing.
At the edge of the precipice, there was nowhere left to go and nowhere left to run.
"...There's no path."
She stood there blankly, and then—
"No—!!"
Someone was coming toward her.
No, more than coming—he was running.
And he was wrapped head to toe in mana.
"???"
A man?
Why was there a man here?
Without warning, the man reached out toward her.
As if he were trying to catch her.
"Who...!"
Rudine was stunned.
He was far too fast.
Did the mansion send him?
That didn't make sense—she'd never seen his face before, and more importantly, she couldn't feel the slightest trace of killing intent from him.
Whatever the reason, if this kept up they would collide.
Instinctively, Rudine twisted away to avoid the impact.
And then.
The man who had reached out toward her—
"!!!"
—pitched straight over the edge of the cliff.