Forgotten Heart: Resonance (2)
Walking barefoot over the dirt ground was painful.
Every time I stepped on a small pebble, a jolt of pain shot up my leg, and the scattered twigs on the ground stabbed into my soles like needles.
Calluses had been building up on my feet lately, but the intensity of the pain was no different from before.
I knew perfectly well that it was a foolish choice.
Which was exactly why I had gone out of my way to inflict it on myself.
“…Dean.”
By the time my wounds had multiplied to the point where bloody footprints trailed behind me as I walked, Carmen could bear it no longer and spoke up.
“I'm really fine, so you should wear the shoes.”
As she carefully undid the laces to take the shoes off, I stopped walking again and knelt down to retie them.
“…Are you trying to have a staring contest with me?”
The gesture seemed to make her uneasy, and Carmen reached out once more to undo the laces again.
“Urgh…?”
Not wanting to descend into a childish tug-of-war, I clasped her hands together in mine and held them shut.
“You didn't put up any resistance when I put these on you, but now that I'm the one hurting, suddenly you care?”
“I told you I'm perfectly fine—”
“You did, didn't you?”
I gently pressed her back against the tree behind her.
Though she had more than enough strength to resist, she let herself be pushed back without a fight, her trembling eyes fixed on me and nothing more.
“…Fine… I understand.”
Only when she accepted my stubbornness in a voice tight with tension did I finally release her hands and turn away.
“….”
Carmen stared blankly at my retreating back, her face flushed crimson, and only slowly began to follow after me.
After that, she made no further attempt to take off the shoes.
All she did was send me a quiet, sidelong glance whenever a grimace of pain crossed my face.
Blood and pus oozed from the countless wounds on my feet.
But with my heart a little lighter, the pain seemed less unbearable than before.
…Hypocrisy born of shared kinship.
I wished I could interpret my own behavior that way.
The plan was this: arrive at Forgotten Heart: Resonance, help her with what she came to do, and then leave without a backward glance to handle my own business.
I had resolved to bring things to a close with Carmen like that.
“Shall we rest here for a while?”
As noon approached, we halted our journey to take a short break.
“I'll go find some edible fruit.”
Back at the Altar of Grief, going hungry hadn't mattered much, but now that we were out adventuring, stamina was everything — so this time, I didn't refuse the meal.
The purple fruit Carmen brought back had a taste I'd never experienced in my life.
Its defining trait was a peculiar flavor where lime and strawberry seemed to hit at the same time.
“This is called a Bear Nettle Fruit. It grows anywhere without needing special conditions, so it's great for when you're hungry.”
Carmen told me it was perfectly safe to eat raw, so I made a point of remembering it.
It might not matter if I could return to Earth — but if I couldn't, I'd have to manage meals on my own.
“Here, see the leaves? They're called Bear Nettles because the leaves look like a bear's front paws.”
When I stared blankly at Carmen, who was sharing knowledge I didn't even need, she belatedly flushed red and tossed the leaf to the ground.
“Did I… do something wrong?”
It was the first time I'd seen this side of her personality, so I'd only been looking at her with a kind of idle fascination — but it seemed my expression had been misread through the lens of her looks.
“Nothing at all. Thanks for the info.”
I rolled the fruit between my fingers, then popped the last one into my mouth.
The sweetness I hadn't tasted in so long was almost overwhelming.
My vision had been hazy from my clouded mind, so I hadn't really taken a good look around — but now that I focused, the ground was littered with Bear Nettle Fruit as far as the eye could see.
As I quietly wondered whether fruits like these had even appeared in the game, I remembered what they were: a consumable recovery item that could be obtained with absurd ease.
…Well, back in the 1st playthrough I was already Level 999, so I had zero reason to care about stamina. No wonder I forgot.
Eating something that actually deserved to be called a meal had whetted my appetite, and I got up to harvest more of the fruit.
“I'll get them.”
Carmen made me stay seated and went to gather them in my stead.
“You don't have to go out of your way for me.”
As I took the fruit and offered an oblique word of thanks, her brow twitched for an instant.
“…Out of my way?”
“Hm?”
“Dean… are you really that blind to how bad your feet look right now?”
I'd thought she was glaring at me in contempt for accepting her gratitude — but it turned out Carmen had been worrying about the state of my feet all along.
When I glanced down, I could see the deep bruising mottling my feet, the skin torn and scraped raw.
…It doesn't really matter, though.
Once I reached Forgotten Heart: Resonance, the Checkpoint would change — and once I died and revived there, every one of these wounds would vanish.
Which meant these injuries meant nothing to me at all.
“They look fine to me.”
The moment I relayed my thoughts exactly as they were, Carmen's shoulders shuddered as if something in her had snapped.
She seemed to realize that whatever she tried to say would never persuade me, and instead of arguing, she undid her shoelaces, pulled the shoes off, and hurled them at me.
The thrown shoes rolled weakly to a stop at my feet.
It was an act charged with raw emotion — but I picked the shoes back up anyway, intending to put them on her feet again.
“I said I don't NEED them!”
Carmen's hand, unable to hold back any longer, cracked across my cheek.
“…Don't you dare play the hypocrite with me. …It makes me sick.”
Struck by the hand of a woman whose strength transcended humanity, my lip split open and blood trickled down.
“….”
…As expected, not a single soul believes my sincerity.
No matter what happens, there's no closing the distance between Carmen and me.
If no one else would believe the truth I couldn't convey — then I at least wanted to believe it myself.
And so I moved my hands again.
I brushed the dirt off the shoes that had rolled across the ground, then lined them up neatly in front of Carmen's feet once more.
When I lifted my gaze to look up at her, eyes blazing with disbelief and exasperation were aimed straight at me.
“…I told you it disgusts me.”
“Yeah.”
“Then why are you suddenly doing this to me…?”
“…Because you won't believe me if I say it.”
Neither of us can trust the other.
As that immutable law resurfaced in her mind, Carmen's eyes trembled.
When she finished speaking, I rose to my feet.
I passed by Carmen, who stood close enough that I could feel her breath, and turned to head toward Forgotten Heart: Resonance, leaving the shoes behind.
“Haah… Dean.”
At that moment, her voice reached me.
When I turned my head, there stood Carmen, looking at me with her lace-unfastened shoes still on her feet.
“…I don't know how to tie the laces, so help me.”
I had no idea what whim had taken hold of her.
But Carmen put on my shoes.
“All right.”
I slowly walked back to her and tied the laces for her.
I used a knot designed not to come loose on the road — one that would cinch tighter the more force was applied to it.
In the brief moments spent tying those laces, I felt something knotted and hardened inside me begin to melt away.
Afterward, I rose once more to set out for Forgotten Heart: Resonance.
“…I'm sorry.”
“Kgh—!!”
Carmen struck the back of my neck lightly with the blade of her hand.
The artery running through my neck was compressed in an instant, the blood flow cut off, and I collapsed helplessly to the ground without even the chance to resist.
《 Checkpoint designated ▶ Forgotten H■art: Reso■ance 》
By the time my consciousness came trickling back, a window informing me that my Checkpoint had changed was floating before my eyes.
Carmen had apparently knocked me out and carried me all the way here.
When I lifted my eyelids, I saw a small hideout steeped in a heavy, musty air.
Furniture so ancient it looked as though it had been abandoned not for a few mere months, but for hundreds of years.
And, of course, thick layers of dust piled high upon everything.
Carmen was nowhere to be seen — it seemed she had departed on her own path after arriving at this place, Resonance.
The shoes… she'd taken them with her, it appeared.
I offered a silent little prayer that her reunion with her father would go smoothly.
“…Ugh.”
I decided it was about time I started looking for a way back to Earth — but the wounds on my feet had festered so deep that the pain was excruciating, and I couldn't even stand.
In the end, deciding there was no other way, I reached for Fer-de's Fang tucked into my waistband, intending to kill myself—
“Don't.”
Carmen, whom I'd thought long gone, strode into the hideout at that very moment, seized my wrist, and stopped me.
“Let go.”
“If you die and come back like that, what's left of you?”
“Better than being in pain.”
“…So dying is better than pain, is that it?”
She couldn't comprehend the way I thought.
Why go to the trouble of enduring agony and recovering slowly, when I would simply revive even if I died?
“Won't you let go of this?”
The only way I could search for a route back to Earth was to die and revive, right here and now.
Wasting time on this pointless tug-of-war was making my temper fray.
“No.”
But Carmen's will was every bit as resolute as my own.
“There's something deeply wrong with you.”
“That's not your problem to worry about.”
Unable to bear the seconds bleeding away, I moved my hand quickly and seized the blade.
My palm split open, and the blood seeped into Fer-de's Fang, which began transforming into its Whip-Sword form.
But Carmen calmly caught the hilt and wrenched Fer-de's Fang from my grip.
“AAAAAHH…!!”
Because I had been clutching the blade with such force, the moment it was torn from my hand, my fingers were sliced clean off.
Then a potent venom soaked into the raw cross-sections of every severed finger — all but the thumb — and burst every blood vessel in my eyes until I wept tears of blood.
The poison spreading through my whole body was so agonizing that I couldn't even scream; my breath simply ran out.
“…!! I — I only… I never meant for this….”
Carmen belatedly grasped what she had done, but it was far, far too late to undo it.
“…….”
I lay paralyzed, weeping blood as I gazed at her, and before long the poison reached my heart, and I died.
《 Perk Defeat Addiction triggered! 》
《 Target Carmen's level increases by 10. 》
《 Reviving at Checkpoint¿ LOADING… 》