Forgotten Heart: Resonance (3)
A dry cough wracked my throat. I opened my eyes in the same place—apparently this entire safe zone counted as a checkpoint—and clutched at my left chest, the pain still echoing there.
I never could have imagined dying from a heart that simply seized up and stopped.
The terror that comes when every muscle in your body contracts at once and then the last thread of life snaps—that was something I never wanted to experience again.
Deciding I needed to catch my breath, I leaned my back against a small storage chest nearby, only for the box, which had held up so faithfully all this time, to finally collapse beneath me and send me toppling backward.
"Watch out!"
At that moment, Carmen—whose presence I hadn't even noticed—caught my hand, and my head stopped a hair's breadth from the floor as furniture came crashing down beside me with brutal force.
Her hair spilled down with gravity, tickling my face shyly.
"…Are you all right?"
The woman who had just saved me from being crushed to death beneath the wreckage was now the one worried about me.
My other hand was still wrapped around Fer-de's Fang.
"Thanks. I nearly died."
"No, I… I mean. Yes."
Carmen, who had nearly killed me twice now through her own mistakes, seemed about to refuse my thanks, then changed her mind and nodded.
The warmth of our clasped hands was growing more intense by the second, and fearing it might make things awkward, I let go. She flexed her now-freed fingers open and closed a couple of times.
"Give the dagger back."
"…No. If I give it to you… you'll just die again."
When I reached out for it, she hid the dagger behind her back and took a step away.
Without that dagger, the things I could do would shrink considerably. To put it unkindly, I'd go from recycled trash to something even worse than garbage—a worthless pile of scrap.
"Sorry, but it wasn't me who killed you, Carmen. It was you."
"……"
"If it weren't for you, there'd have been no reason for me to die in such agony."
"I just… I was only…."
As I staggered toward her, she backed away from me, step by step, retreating toward the wall.
"Hand it over."
"…Nnh."
When the woman's back finally met the wall with nowhere left to run, I planted a hand against it on either side of her, cutting off her escape.
"Why can't you ever just leave me alone? What's it to you if I want to kill myself?"
Her jewel-like crimson eyes, meeting mine—eyes shrouded in the Abyss—trembled violently.
"I'm nothing but a murderer. So why do you care when someone like me wants to end it?"
"Because… that's not an answer—"
"—So what?!"
"…"
The rage I'd been holding back erupted out of me.
And seeing myself like this made me feel ugly and ashamed.
"…Haa. I know you won't believe me. But I have no intention of killing you. Not the slightest thought of it."
Breathing carefully so my emotions wouldn't get the better of me, I explained step by step.
"I should at least have the means to protect my own body, shouldn't I?"
"Dean… you must never hold a weapon."
"…Ugh?!"
Carmen placed her hands on my shoulders and shoved me away.
Pushed back by her startling strength, I lost my balance and landed hard on my rear.
"Don't worry. Protecting you is something my strength alone can manage just fine."
And with that, Carmen slid the dagger into her own belt and declared that Fer-de's Fang would not be returned to me.
"It's not about whether you hurt someone. You're just… far too fragile right now."
I'm fragile?
I couldn't understand what she was talking about at all.
Yes, my condition had grown ragged from all the dying, but my judgment was still working, wasn't it? It wasn't as if I'd gone insane and started killing people.
I was saying I wanted to become a rotting rose in a severed garden, so that I'd never pierce anyone with a thorn.
Apparently, that resolve grated on Carmen.
"…"
Despair settled over me once more.
Fer-de's Fang had been my breath of air. And now I was to go back to being the helpless thing I'd been before.
I didn't want to believe it.
The muscles in my fingers twisted one by one, raising a tremor.
"Dean?"
The world that had already been blurred seemed to blur further. Within it, Carmen's face—the one thing that had remained sharp—began to warp little by little.
Like a child gone astray, I exhaled a breath laced with moisture, then dragged myself up and followed her.
Because I wanted to cling to some groundless hope that if I just behaved, she might return Fer-de's Fang after all.
"Dean… are you okay?"
"Yeah. Perfectly fine."
"It's just… I'm worried about you…."
"We're not close enough for that, Carmen."
"…"
I cut off the excuse Carmen hurriedly tried to make as silence descended, and turned my gaze away.
I still remembered the layout of Forgotten Heart: Resonance in perfect detail. Without Fer-de's Fang, I couldn't wander this place alone—so for now, my goal would have to be the Underground Prison.
…Now, how was it I got into the Abyss again?
For some reason, the memory wouldn't come. Thinking it might return once I reached the Underground Prison, I started walking, and Carmen rushed past me to take the lead.
Not much different from when Maeve and I had fought through the Rift Labyrinth, Carmen cut down each enemy we encountered with ease.
My blurred vision couldn't quite make it out, but each time that pale-red hair whipped through the air, something vividly red went flying.
Even if it looked effortless, every enemy in Forgotten Heart: Resonance carried the strength of a mid-boss. The tentacled heart Carmen faced now was no different.
She slipped easily past the tendrils it lashed about and tore straight through the membrane around the heart itself.
Before long, she left the fallen foe behind and came toward me, soaked through with blood.
Thinking I should probably say something nice, I wiped the blood from her cheeks and the corners of her eyes with my hand. Only then did her warped face seem to come into slightly clearer focus.
"…You're beautiful."
Realizing it only now, but objectively speaking, Carmen really was pretty.
"I'm sorry?"
"…Just talking to myself."
I'd murmured it too quietly for her to hear, so I casually brushed the blood from my hand and moved on down the path.
As a little more time passed, her overflowing stress seemed to settle, and her form came into view properly at last.
A woman in a dancer's outfit dyed vivid red with blood, cutting down enemies as if she were performing a dance.
The only landmark left in a world that kept growing dimmer.
"Dean?"
"…Yeah. I'm right behind you."
The deeper we pressed into Forgotten Heart: Resonance, the more often I found myself spacing out.
Why… did my mind feel like it was going hazy?
"Be careful."
"Ah, thanks."
When I stumbled mid-stride and nearly went down, Carmen caught me.
"Dean… you're not in a good state. Are you really all right?"
"Fine. …Probably."
Through the dreamlike sensation, a small thought had taken root. Even without my usual fog of a mind, it would have been hard to notice—but I was certain of it now.
The deeper we went toward the inner depths of Forgotten Heart: Resonance, the fainter my sense of self became.
"Let's check on your condition once we're down."
When Carmen found the staircase leading to the Underground Prison, she guided me toward it.
The moment my foot touched the first step, a sensation swept through my whole body—as if the heavy pressure that had been binding me had simply vanished.
"Gahk—!!"
I vomited blood.
"Dean?!"
It wasn't a wound festering from within, nor blood forced back up by internal injury.
It was the blood of something—not mine.
Astoundingly, the amount of blood I retched up was dozens of times greater than the blood in my own body.
Paradoxically, after purging it all, my mind cleared.
"What on earth just happened…!"
"…You don't feel anything?"
"Feel anything? What are you talking about?"
"This power. Can't you feel it?"
"Power…?"
A subtle force, spread like a barrier across the stairway entrance behind us.
Unlike me—whose spine went cold just from looking at it—Carmen seemed to feel nothing at all.
When I bolted for the stairs as if to flee, she seized my sleeve and stopped me.
"Dean, you stay here and rest. I'll rescue my father and come right back."
Apparently, the fact that I—who had vomited up an impossible quantity of blood and been so drained that my mind was all but dead—had suddenly returned to normal worried her.
I grabbed the wrist of Carmen, who was about to leave me here and descend alone.
"…Don't leave me here by myself."
It wasn't that I didn't understand her heart. For fighting through the Underground Prison, I was far too fragile—nothing but a hindering burden.
And yet… I could feel it instinctively. Staying here was many times more dangerous than going down.
"Don't be stubborn."
"Please…. Can't you feel that cursed power down there?!"
"What are you even saying…? There's nothing there."
Even when I tried to describe the barrier over the stairway entrance, Carmen refused to understand. As if to prove it wasn't there, she started up the stairs, intending to stand at the entrance.
"Don't go!!"
"Kyah—?!"
In that instant, some instinct screamed that I couldn't let Carmen go to that place, and I threw my arms around her shoulders to stop her.
"Let go of me?! If you keep this up, I won't—"
Carmen's gaze, blazing with fury at my sudden manhandling, fell upon the stairway entrance—and her words died in her throat.
——An eye.
At some point, the barrier had taken the shape of an enormous pupil, staring dead at the two of us.
"Wh-what on earth is tha—?!"
"……Don't say it."
I sealed her mouth shut.
It was pure, primal fear—that the moment we put into words the fact that we had recognized it, there would be no going back.
Wrenching my body around with her still in my arms, I hurried down the stairs.
The farther we got from the stairway, the more I felt the eye's gaze receding.
The moment we reached the bottom and the Underground Prison proper, Carmen and I collapsed to the floor together, still clinging to each other.
"…What was that?"
"I… don't know…."
"Was that why you kept spacing out, Dean…? Because of that thing?"
"…Probably, yes."
A terror strong enough to make two people who were mortal enemies depend on one another.
Even racking my memory, I'd never once seen a monster in the game with presentation like that.
It was an atmosphere heavy with dread, true—but the game had kept strictly to its dark fantasy framework, and nothing more.
"…Take it."
Carmen held out Fer-de's Fang, which had been hanging at her belt.
"If we run into something like that again… I can't promise you I'll be able to protect you."
If I'd gone on exploring Forgotten Heart: Resonance without ever noticing that barrier…
I bit down on my lower lip against an incomprehensible, distant terror.
"Can we… get back out of here?"
Whether we could escape to the outside again—she let out a self-mocking sigh.
"…There's a side way out of the prison, too."
But thankfully, the Underground Prison did hold a path to the outside.
The Abyss. Defeat its boss, the Fist King Theodore, and the way opens to Pesoniac—the starting zone.
Ordinarily, we would have had to bring down the boss ourselves. But the situation had changed now.
Because in my arms was the Fist King Theodore's own daughter.
"Let's move. This place doesn't feel all that safe either."
"…All right."