The Burning Windmill Village (2)
A hardware store. A place that once dealt in various iron utensils.
It had transformed into a shop where the iron itself had melted, becoming a place of molten metal. It didn't take long before the hardware being sold and the shopkeeper himself were reduced to a state where it was difficult to distinguish whether he was burning to death or melting away.
The horrific screams, chilling enough to make even the listener tremble, lingered vividly in the ears of the Wolf and its rider, Little Red Riding Hood, even as they moved quite a distance away.
The agonizing shrieks of the dying. The piercing resentment.
Even if it were the final cry of the most wretched human scum—the kind of person whom a thousand out of a thousand would agree deserves to die—it would usually be enough to stir a moment of pity or human empathy. But to the Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood, it was no different from the sound of a cheerful whistle, blowing naturally because they were having such a good time.
Pity? A final mourning for the dying?
What a ridiculous, nonsensical joke.
They felt only the ecstasy of knowing that because the victim was dying in such agony, everything was going exactly as it should.
The Wolf, carrying the girl, raced forward, continuously savoring this thrill that coursed through its veins. With a faint smile, Little Red Riding Hood pointed her Wand, and a beam of red light shot out, setting fire to a warehouse and then a barn. The fodder, ignited by the explosion, scattered into the air, spreading embers everywhere. Even amidst this, wherever the Wolf left its paw prints, white frost would form, only to melt away again.
The girl riding the Wolf didn't search for anything in particular. She simply repeated the act of firing compressed flames toward any building or person in sight. The Wolf ran, sniffing the air, searching for the scent of humans mixed into the acrid smell of burning.
It bypassed the children still holding their parents' hands, but collided with and tossed aside everyone else.
In the midst of this, there were a few village youths who courageously blocked the Wolf, wielding sickles and hoes.
"You witch! You monster! I'll kill you!"
The Wolf, which had been killing as it ran, showed clear signs of displeasure. It used its tail to nudge Little Red Riding Hood, who was trying to attack from its back, and moved to handle them personally.
"Haaah!"
The youth in the lead swung his sickle.
As the swinging blade collided with the Wolf's claw, the sickle froze solid, and the youth's arm froze along with it. When the Wolf swung its forepaw again, the arm shattered along with the frozen sickle. It then stepped on the youth's collapsed head, crushing it into a crater.
The other youths met the same fate.
Where their sides were bitten and torn away, ice took the place of flesh. Not magical ice, but real ice. It was ice without any function to replace organs, muscles, or blood vessels. Naturally, even if the bleeding stopped for a moment, they would soon be swallowed by the cold and die.
Some had all four limbs torn off, the wounds frozen just enough to stop the bleeding. They would die soon, but even if they were lucky enough to survive, they would never truly live again.
Seeming satisfied, the Wolf looked down at the screaming, spirited youths, the corners of its eyes curling up in a sneer. Hearing a crying sound nearby, it turned its head.
"Waaaaah! Mommy! Mommmmy!"
A child was crying desperately in front of something that was no longer a person, but a charred lump.
The Wolf just rolled its eyes, glanced at them, and passed by.
"Who's next?"
Little Red Riding Hood asked the Wolf as it ran past the wailing children.
Instead of an answer, the Wolf's gleaming eyes searched for the next target. Before long, it found its second prey.
"That guy?"
He was a scrawny, wretched-looking man with a mean, cowardly glint in his eyes.
"Should we burn him alive? Or roast him slowly over a low flame? What? You want me to burn that money bag he's clutching while he runs? Yeah, okay. I got it."
The Wolf didn't even bark, but Little Red Riding Hood understood its intent perfectly and carried out its command.
As Little Red Riding Hood aimed her Wand, flames ignited simultaneously on the money bag—a bag of such suspicious size that one had to wonder how he could even carry it while fleeing this chaos.
"Aaaaaah! My mooooney!!!"
The money, now burning fiercely and rendered useless, was suddenly engulfed in flames. Startled by the heat, he reflexively dropped the bundle he had been clutching to his chest and tumbled over. Even then, he struggled to scrape together the money that was still intact, enduring the pain of his own body burning amidst the money bag that had devolved into firewood, barely fit for a campfire.
"Ha."
Little Red Riding Hood was dumbfounded by such a pathetic display of humanity, and the Wolf glared at the man scraping the fire with his bare hands with an even deeper look of disgust.
It might be noble to endure the pain of burning to find or save something, but if that something was nothing more than mere money—not another person's life or forbidden knowledge—it couldn't be more trivial.
"My money! My mooooney! I saved and saved for years, you evil bastards! What did I do wrong!!!!"
After thrusting his hands into the fire to scrape at things that had turned into black, melted, worthless trash, the man finally shrieked. With tears welling in his bloodshot eyes, he glared at the Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood as if the current situation were the most unfair thing in the world.
Little Red Riding Hood looked at him with an expression of utter contempt.
And the Wolf.
Its eyes were filled with a cold, distinct murderous intent and rage.
"Kyarururuk!!!!"
The man was destined to be torn to shreds by the enraged Wolf in an instant. No, that wasn't the case.
Crack! Snap! Crunch!
"Uaaaaaaargh!!!!!!"
The Wolf butchered the man. Very thoroughly, very slowly, and with great care.
It tore off his hand, then up to his elbow, then up to his shoulder.
The legs were the same. It bit off his feet, sliced through his calves, and split his thighs, stripping the muscle and flesh from the bone.
To ensure he wouldn't die from blood loss or lose consciousness, it infused its teeth and claws with cold, cauterizing the wounds as it went, so he screamed and screamed and screamed again.
But the Wolf did not stop. Little Red Riding Hood, watching, did not stop it either. It removed the lungs from behind the ribs, pulled the intestines from the torn abdomen and draped them around his neck—dismantling the man while he was still alive, as if crafting a masterpiece for a museum or an exhibition.
The result was something akin to grilled fish.
The result of a child who couldn't use chopsticks properly trying to debone a very bony fish.
A grilled fish where the flesh and bones were clumsily stuck together and crushed, with small bone splinters hidden inside the meat, and the inside turned out, leaving one not knowing how to eat it.
"Guh... kururuk..."
Little Red Riding Hood, who had been watching blankly after getting off the Wolf's back, took a few steps forward with a click-clack sound. Having heard the Wolf's request, she gladly performed the task that was difficult for the Wolf's physical structure.
"That's a good idea."
Little Red Riding Hood gathered the trash—which had once contained the money and jewels the man had struggled to protect, but was now nothing more than burnt, melted debris—with her hands.
The tears of others. Overflowing selfishness. A foul personality. Terrible greed.
The wealth built upon those things had turned into a handful of trash, and Little Red Riding Hood gently stuffed it into his mouth.
"Ugh... ugh..."
With their business finished, they prepared to leave and commit further massacres. The man tried to pour out curses and resentment toward them, but only blood-foam bubbled up from between the things stuffed into his mouth.
The man, now in a state resembling a crushed grilled fish, would not die immediately. The Wolf had carefully frozen him to stop the bleeding and prevent death from blood loss. Though he had bled, it was little compared to the butchery and dismantling he had endured. If he were very lucky, he might live for decades more, suffering as a cripple.
Any possibility of his body healing? None.
For a person in that state to walk and run on two feet again, a kind-hearted miracle fairy or a wizard—like, say, a wizard named Tinkerbell, who was said to have died in the past—would have to come. But such a wizard would never heal human trash like him.
And the Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood knew very well that no such wizard existed in this world. They knew it all too well from their own direct experiences.
They left him like that, intending for him to live a long life of illness, should he somehow survive.
As the sound of blood-foam bubbling between his constricted throat faded into the distance, the Wolf ran again.
There were still more targets who needed to be gifted with horrific agony.
***
Crash! Boom!
The large, burning windmill outside the village finally collapsed completely, starting with its wings falling to the ground.
The sound of the collapse was the final cry of the windmill, which had been vomiting black smoke and painting the blue sky black in place of screams.
The sanity of the children, who had been sobbing blankly in the burning village, finally shattered completely.
"Waaaaah!!!!"
"Aaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!"
They wailed in front of their parents' corpses and screamed in despair at the sight of their burning homes.
The fearsome Wolf didn't even glance at such children, simply passing them by as it tracked the scent of its final prey.
"Damn it, damn it! The whole village is burning, but what is this ice! Why won't it break or melt!"
In the midst of the hellish scene where people were suffocating on smoke and burning to death, one person—no, two—had reached the only ice wall surrounding the burning village.
He scratched and struck the ice wall until his fingernails fell off and the bones in the back of his hands broke, but the wall would not break. He thought about carrying his daughter on his back and trying to climb over somehow, but there was nowhere to grab or step. Even if there were, he wasn't a man strong enough to climb an ice wall with his daughter on his back. He had had quite a lot of money, but it would all burn to ash in the village, so it was meaningless.
"Sob... sob... Daddy... what do we do now?"
"Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! What the hell is happening!"
Usually, he would have found a way to reassure his daughter, but this was no such situation. Without even a single word of comfort, he just pounded on the ice wall.
"Where do you think you're going?"
As a girl's voice reached his ears, the man pounding on the wall turned his head.
There stood a large Wolf and a strange girl wearing a Red Hood.
His body was clearly hot from the heat of the flames burning the village, but as he met the Wolf's eyes, he felt a chill so intense it was bone-chilling.