Homeless
I ate a knight.
There had been no other choice. Lately the knight order’s tightened patrols had left Iria with nothing to eat at all.
The absolute limit she could go without consuming human flesh and still keep her sanity was one week.
Last night’s meal had already pushed past the seventh day, so the knight’s luck had simply run out.
“······.”
Iria stood motionless, as if savoring the aftertaste of her meal. She wiped the blood from her lips, then licked what clung to her fingers. The sensation still refused to become familiar.
Killing a person and eating them made her body rejoice. The moment human blood touched her tongue, a thrilling shiver raced through every limb. Right now, in this instant, Iria felt truly alive.
Yet she soon lowered her head.
The guilt of having once again surrendered to desire and harmed an innocent person coiled tightly around her. Even though she was a monster now, she had once been human, and that memory still bound her.
It had been a full year since he—no, she—had fallen into a novel whose plot she did not even know.
In this world she had become the monster named Iria.
A half-human, half-monster hybrid, she wore a human face while carrying every trait of a beast. She was a living mass of demonic energy. That was why she could eat nothing but humans; ordinary food could never fill her stomach.
So.
In the end, this one wasn’t the protagonist either.
If she did not want to keep killing, she had to finish this novel—even if it meant killing the faceless protagonist she had never met.
The Central Empire’s academy was noisy again today.
Perhaps that was only natural for a place that took hot-blooded young students and drilled them in swordsmanship, magic, and every other combat art. There was even a paper from the Magic Tower claiming that constant, near-real combat training turned perfectly normal people aggressive.
In any case, the atmosphere had always been like this. The academy existed to raise students who could stand against the growing tide of monsters.
“Hey, hey! Listen to this! Another knight on patrol vanished last night!”
“What? A knight?”
Even allowing for the usual rowdiness, today’s classroom was especially loud. Had some shocking incident occurred? Iria, who had been trying to sleep at her desk, had no desire to hear any of it and sharply turned her head away.
“They’re saying the whole place is in an uproar. The knight order’s already short-handed as it is.”
“If it’s that bad, something real must be going on, right? It’s not just anybody—knights are disappearing.”
“I don’t know… I’m getting scared all of a sudden.”
The girl with striking golden hair—Rena—shivered as she spoke. The combat strength of a knight who had joined the order was on a completely different level from any academy student.
That was only natural. To enter the knight order you first had to graduate from the Imperial Academy, which itself proved four years of training at the continent’s finest institution. Even within the academy the gap between first-years and second-years was already considerable; four years of study followed by real combat experience put a knight far beyond anything a mere student could measure.
“Iria, aren’t you scared?”
Rena poked Iria’s side. The slightly delayed reaction suggested she was tired.
“Y-yes? Well… it is frightening······.”
“You look exhausted. What were you doing last night?”
“Something came up… I was busy. I don’t think I slept properly.”
Iria gave a small yawn and recalled the previous night. Busy was an understatement—she had spent hours erasing every trace of evidence. By the time she finished, dawn had already broken, so she had no choice but to come straight to school.
That was why she was so tired. In truth she had not slept a single wink.
She forced her heavy eyelids open and mentally reviewed the day’s lectures: basic magic theory, applied elemental magic, and the rest all swordsmanship-related. The subjects barely complemented one another, yet she had signed up for everything she could get her hands on. There was a reason for that, one that tied directly to why she had enrolled in the academy in the first place.
Iria had come here to find the protagonist of the novel she had been dropped into. Someone with that kind of presence was likely to be at the academy. She knew neither the face nor the name, but that was no problem. Simply meeting another person’s eyes let her read their memories.
She had already decided that anyone with an extraordinary background was almost certainly the protagonist.
“······.”
She did not expect to find them quickly, but doing something was better than doing nothing.
“Rena, could you look into my eyes for a moment?”
“Hm? I don’t mind, but why all of a sudden?”
“Quickly, please.”
“Like this?”
“Hmm······.”
Rena was not the one either. Iria turned away with a faintly disappointed expression. At the level of an ordinary student with no mental resistance, simply locking eyes with Iria was enough to inflict psychic damage.
“That’s enough.”
“Huh? What did you just do?”
“Nothing. You just looked like someone who’s had a hard life.”
“Iria, you really don’t have any friends.”
“······.”
After that the conversation drifted into everyday chatter. Most of it consisted of irrefutable facts that mercilessly exposed how terrible Iria was at human interaction. Still, it did not feel entirely bad. Even if she was the one getting verbally beaten, Rena was the only person who ever spoke to her.
“Without me, nobody would even talk to you.”
“Please be quiet.”
The critical hit landed squarely on the silent Iria. Her body gave a small, involuntary flinch. Rena covered her mouth with one hand and snickered; the impact had been better than expected. Pushing any further, though, might actually make Iria angry, so she changed the subject.
“Anyway, you be careful too, Iria. Rumor says it targets women walking alone. You’re pretty enough that you’d be an easy mark.”
“Isn’t it enough just to stay away from that area?”
“Apparently not. The knight order’s manpower shortage is part of it, and even without the rumored monster that neighborhood has always had bad security. Lately there’ve even been cases of young women being kidnapped and sold as slaves.”
“······.”
Iria’s brow furrowed slightly. That was not her doing. Did that mean someone else was living in those back alleys besides her? It felt as though her carefully claimed territory had been invaded.
“Anyone who’s a young woman, wanders around late at night, and hangs out near the back alleys should be careful. Not that I think anyone that stupid actually exists.”
Rena laughed as she spoke. To a normal human, the solution was simple: if the area was dangerous, just don’t go there.
Iria’s thoughts ran differently.
What? That’s me.
No matter how she looked at it, she matched all three conditions perfectly. She was a young woman, she wandered late at night, and she frequently loitered near the back alleys. She briefly pictured what would happen if she were unlucky enough to run into those people.
“Hmm.”
Free meals, basically. No matter how she turned it over, the conclusion kept landing on “might actually be convenient.” Running into them on the way home tonight might not be such bad news after all.
Still, looking too pleased in front of Rena would be awkward. Iria answered with zero soul.
“The world really is a dangerous place.”
Whether she failed to notice that she herself was the main cause of that danger, or simply did not care about her own story, was unclear. In the end rumors were only rumors. True or false, they flared up quickly and died just as fast. The atmosphere would fade with time, so Iria saw no reason to pay it special attention.
Except—
“Still, this time the knight order announced they’ll respond firmly.”
“Respond firmly?”
“If one of their own can go missing, headquarters won’t treat it as mere rumor anymore. They’re planning to send a large-scale subjugation force soon.”
“······.”
Those words could not be brushed aside. A large-scale subjugation force. Iria’s mind ran the calculations at once. Even after a year of living in the back alleys, that was more than she could handle. Her abilities worked best against a single target. Clashing with the knight order would bring nothing but trouble—plenty of annoyance and zero gain.
I’ll just sleep rough somewhere else for a while.
She chose avoidance. She had eaten only yesterday, so she was not particularly hungry yet.
“Thank you for telling me.”
After finishing her day at the academy and heading home, Iria stopped in front of the central city’s fountain.
A familiar uniform blocked her path.
“My apologies. This area is currently under restricted access.”
“······.”
That was the road home.
Iria’s gaze drifted past him. The number of armed knights was far greater than she had expected.
“Do you have business here?”
“No.”
Today, Iria lost her home.