Forgotten Heart: Resonance (4)
《 Checkpoint designated ▶ Underground Prison 》
We hadn't been walking for long when a window popped up informing me that the checkpoint had changed. I'd been agonizing over what to do if I happened to die again, so thankfully that worry lifted a good deal from my shoulders.
The stifling air, never once ventilated, pressed against my lungs as we made our way deeper, until at last we entered the wing where the convicts were held.
"Dean... this is where the skeletons were supposed to be, isn't it?"
Carmen, who had been leading the way, turned back and asked lightly. And just as she said, there were no skeleton packs anywhere in the Underground Prison.
Behind the iron bars stood human beings — but they were nothing more than skin and bones, slowly dying where they lay.
"...It's because the Ruin hasn't come yet."
The reason no skeletons roamed these halls was a simple one. The Ruin had not yet descended upon the world. All those countless skeletons I remembered — they must have been the convicts locked in these cells. Alive for now, but once the Ruin arrived, they would become undead, unable even to die, wandering their cages for eternity.
At that moment, a hand shot through the bars and seized Carmen's arm, halting her in her tracks.
"...Please. ...Get me out of here."
The voice of a man whose throat had withered to a husk rang out sorrowfully at her ear.
"..."
She looked down at the man clutching her forearm with a pitying gaze, and for a moment seemed to weigh whether to save him.
"—! What are you doing?!"
I severed the prisoner's hand from Carmen's arm in a single stroke of Fer-de's Fang. Startled by the blade that had swept past without warning, Carmen rounded on me in a burst of fury.
"Khhak...! Hahahahahah!!"
"...?!"
But her anger did not last long.
"Over here! Forget that worthless hand — I'll make you feel far better than he ever could!"
The armless prisoner tore off his mask and began cackling wildly, hurling taunts. He was nothing like the dying wretch who had begged for mercy mere moments before.
A madman. The raw madness of a man who belonged in a place like this.
Thud, thud—!!
Before long, the prisoner's deranged laughter spread to the other cells, and the unrest flared through the prison like wildfire catching on dry brush. One and all, they jeered at Carmen, spewing obscenities that should never have passed human lips.
Their voices rang deafeningly around her, and Carmen — uncharacteristically flustered — stumbled backward until her back pressed against my chest.
"..."
Little by little, my expression twisted as the noise swelled.
"Dean...?"
By the time Carmen belatedly sensed the faint killing intent radiating from behind her, I was already feeding my blood to Fer-de's Fang.
"Stop it, Dean! Don't!"
She read the storm in me and rushed to hold me back — but the slaughter had already begun. Blades flew with lethal precision at the prisoners mid-taunt, snuffing out their lives one by one.
At last a still, shivering silence settled over the once-deafening prison.
"Please.... that's enough...."
As I moved to kill the last prisoner remaining, she seized my hand and begged with everything she had.
"Haven't you done enough already...?"
The convict who had mocked us from behind his bars was trembling violently, giggling through the shakes. He seemed to savor something depraved in the fact that Carmen was defending him. And there — that gaze, raking over her body as if it were his to appraise.
Even after I had butchered so many before his eyes as an example, that utter absence of fear made fury boil up inside me. I knew I was no different from the men locked in these cells. But I was not the kind who made crossing that line a daily habit, the way they did.
"...You — you! You're just like us!"
The trembling prisoner must have felt a kinship in my eyes, because he shouted in a fever of excitement.
"You put on that mask just so you could get between a woman's legs, didn't you?!"
"Don't, Dean...! He's baiting you!"
Every fiber of me wanted to swing the whip-sword form of Fer-de's Fang and cut that tongue right out of his mouth, but Carmen prayed with all her being that I would not.
"You're no different from the rest of us! You just haven't been caught yet— keghk!"
He would not stop, and in the end I could not bear it. I fired the blade out like a bolt from the sword and pierced it straight through his throat. With a hole punched clean through his neck, the man only laughed — a wet, hacking sound — as the blade sank deeper. Blood gushed upward, and still he showed no pain at all.
Before long the paralytic venom spread through him, and he died with his eyes still open.
When the time limit ran out and the whip-sword shrank back into a dagger, Carmen lifted her gaze to meet mine. In her eyes, rage and disappointment sat side by side.
"Why.... why couldn't you hold back...."
They were people who never needed to die. I knew that as well as anyone. Trash whose entire existence amounted to jeering at strangers from behind bars — doomed to rot in a cell until their last breath. And yet they had crossed a line that must never be crossed, and met their end for it.
"They cursed you."
"..."
"They looked at you with those filthy, leering eyes."
As I offered her my reasons, she seized me by the collar.
"Who do you think you are? What gives you the right to worry about me?!"
"..."
I didn't bother searching for a rebuttal. No one knew better than I did that I had no right to one.
"They were going to rot in this prison whether you left them alone or not."
"They were men it wouldn't have mattered to kill."
"That's...!"
Carmen's words caught in her throat. Because in the eyes of the man who had slaughtered the prisoners, she had found not a shred of guilt — only herself, reflected there.
"I don't need your concern. ...Doesn't it disgust you?"
"It does."
"I keep telling you I hate it, and you keep— you know how I feel!"
"You wouldn't understand even if I explained."
"There it is again! You always say that — that I wouldn't understand!!"
To me, who had, with perfect flair, chosen the worst possible option at every turn, she looked as though she'd been betrayed. Hadn't she wanted me to be a murderer? I had simply acted exactly as she wished. Then why — why had Carmen believed she might find some light inside the thing that was me?
"You're the one who stopped trusting me, Carmen."
I answered quietly, smoothing down my disheveled clothes, then walked past her without another word.
"You.... you really are...."
At my casual dismissal of everything that had just happened, Carmen bit down hard on her lip, the rims of her eyes gone red. Then something in her seemed to decide that this could not go on. She drew up beside me as I headed for the mechanism rooms, and wrapped her hand firmly around the one gripping Fer-de's Fang.
"...Let go."
Determined, it seemed, that I would never spark another massacre, she refused to release my hand. I told her to let go, but Carmen kept her grip, treating me as though I simply did not exist. If our wills were doomed to collide, then she intended to be just as stubborn as I was.
In the end, I had no rebellion left to offer in the face of it, so I turned my eyes elsewhere and looked for the way.
...
Without skeleton sentries carrying torches, finding the mechanism rooms was no easy task. And every wrong turn meant passing more barred cells full of prisoners. Each time, the catcalls and leering jeers at Carmen would come ringing out, and each time the killing intent surged up in me and I moved to kill, her grip would tighten around my hand.
...In the end, without taking a single prisoner's life, I destroyed all five mechanism rooms.
Kugugugu—.
The moment the last mechanism room crumbled, vibration and thunder rolled out from the very heart of the Underground Prison. We followed the noise, and there — exactly as I remembered — stood a colossal stone tower. Along its walls were five levers, arranged by length.
3, 2, 1, 4, 5.
I pulled them in the precise order, and the tower's wall sank into the ground, revealing a staircase.
"Now let go of my hand."
"..."
"I said... let go."
Once we descended into the Abyss there would be no more prisoners to run into, so I asked her to release me — but Carmen only began to walk, giving no answer. Dragged along by her strength, unable to resist, I descended the stairs with her.
...
The stairwell held nothing that could be called a light source, and yet no darkness could be felt at all. A space where the very concepts of light and dark had been discarded — a place where common sense itself was denied. The longer we trod that endless, dead-straight staircase, the less I could tell whether we were descending at all, or ascending.
Whether an hour had passed or a single minute, I couldn't say. It felt as though the stairs would stretch on for eternity.
"..."
"..."
When the two of us finally came back to ourselves—
We were standing alone in a vast, empty plain, utterly featureless. There had been no moment when the stairs ended. We had simply kept walking, and when our senses returned, we were already here, in a space of no known shape.
...The Abyss.
Without our noticing, we had arrived at the special prison where Fist King Theodorus was sealed.
And yet, scan the surroundings as I might, there was no sign of the man Carmen had been searching for. Just as I began to wonder if we had come too early and turned to look for some side passage out—
"—Look out!"
Carmen's eyes flared blood-red — her Clairvoyance had caught something — and she shoved me hard.
WHAM—!!
Having thrown me clear, she took the full force of something enormous hurtling through the air, and her body went tumbling across the ground, over and over.
"..."
My bewilderment at the sudden turn lasted only an instant. Then cold sweat broke across me in the face of the overwhelming presence that had appeared before my eyes.
A colossal frame that could only be called a giant. Bound to each of its four limbs, restraints fitted with iron balls. And eyes the red of a beast's — stripped of everything but primal instinct — glaring down at me with contempt.
The challenge hidden boss of Desperado Reunion.
And... Carmen's father, who had been missing all this time.
"Fa...ther...."
Carmen, sprawled on the ground, clutched her broken arm and called out desperately to the father she had searched so feverishly to find. But some animal instinct already gave her a dim understanding of what state he was in — and a single line of tears traced down from her eyes.
Sealed for untold years within the Abyss that the depths had birthed, Fist King Theodorus had become a monster, his humanity devoured whole. Alive, and yet... not alive at all.
Before that cruel reality, hope trampled into the dirt—
she crumbled, no longer an adult, but a child.
"Forget me and run...."
Swallowed by despair, Carmen grit her teeth and told me to flee — me, a stranger with no part in any of this, and still she wanted me to live.
"No."
The answer I gave her was refusal. Carmen's eyes went wide at my incomprehensible behavior, flustered in a way so unlike her usual self.
And I — erasing the fear that screamed at me to run this very instant — leveled Fer-de's Fang at Fist King Theodorus.