161. The feeling of wanting to jump out the window.
161. The feeling of wanting to jump out the window.
A green meadow.
A high and wide sky.
A gentle breeze brushed against my face, tickling it.
"...?"
What the hell.
A strangely dazed feeling.
A sensation of floating up, yet heavily sinking down.
It felt as if the world before my eyes was flowing slowly, like my head was filled with water.
'What's going on...?'
First, I got up from where I lay.
The moment I stood, the strength left my legs and I plopped back down.
Strange. Something was strange.
The feeling that my body wasn't my own.
Eventually, I sat still like a marionette with its strings cut, and someone appeared behind me and sat down beside me.
"A Main God does not regret."
"....Cronus?"
Long black hair.
A familiar voice. Cronus sat beside me.
"But—if not a Main God, then perhaps something like regret could be permitted."
"....???"
Was this a dream.
It probably was a dream.
After all, the appearance was Cronus, but this was not the Cronus I knew.
The gaze that once looked down on all creation was now simply that of a weak woman,
the presence that once pressured others by merely existing was gone, and now she felt just like a powerless woman.
Simply the very image of a powerless woman lost in sorrow.
Cronus, or rather, 'something' that looked like Cronus, soon asked me,
"If... this is truly a story of 'if.'"
If,
if by any chance I had believed in Rhea,
if I hadn't strived to seize power and merely entrusted myself to the flowing course of nature,
"Would it have been, just a little different from now?"
A deeply sunken voice.
To that desperate murmur, tinged with tears and completely broken, I answered.
"How would I know?"
"....Right. There is no way you would know."
That was correct.
Cronus nodded her head, then slowly leaned her body toward me.
'...Is she crazy?'
I tried to turn my body and avoid her just like that.
But I couldn't avoid her. As I said before, a body like a stringless puppet did not grant me the freedom to move even a single thing.
"Do not be flustered. This place is my dream, my paradise, the sole place of rest permitted to me."
".....???"
Cronus buried her face in my chest.
She wrapped both arms around me and exhaled into my chest.
"...I am afraid. So terribly afraid. Even this very moment, even this space of rest, feels to me like Tartarus itself."
Why was that.
Well, it couldn't be helped.
"If all of this is my karma, if it is my karmic retribution, then I know what awaits after this dream."
A dream is a place where one recalls what they desire.
Therefore, the reason the entity called 'you' appeared in a place like a dream, within my dream, was....
"To punish me, I suppose. Because I cannot tolerate myself, because I cannot forgive myself...."
Thus, a substitute to replace this.
Chrono. My child.
Cronus spoke, her face still buried in my chest.
"Hit me. Ravage me. Take me by force and make me suffer. For this purpose, you must have appeared here."
Cronus took my hand and placed it atop her own neck.
Two trembling hands. Yet she steadily made them wrap around her own neck.
Soon, she lifted her head, and I saw her two eyes. Black eyes, trembling, seized by fear and despair.
"Deliver unto me a punishment befitting the deeds I have done."
"............."
The sensation felt in my hand.
A thin and slender neck. If I applied strength like this, wouldn't I be able to kill her outright?
I lightly put strength into my fingers, and my thumb dug in beneath the throat.
"......Uk...!"
Cronus clenched her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut.
Having maintained that state, on the verge of strangling her, I soon released the two hands gripping her neck.
"....What are you doing?"
Cronus's question.
"You hate me. You loathe me, and you probably feel a sense of betrayal toward me as well. There is no reason anywhere for you not to harm me."
So hurry up and hit me.
Make me suffer.
Teach me, with your own body, the price for the acts I have committed.
A voice growing more heated. A trembling tone. To this, I answered Cronus,
"Why would I."
"Ha...?"
"Why would I do something that you'd enjoy?"
"..........."
I roughly got what the situation was, but...
Cronus, that's not it. At the very least, you can't ask 'that kind of thing' of me.
Because....
"If you want to be punished, you shouldn't force someone else to punish you."
"But.... but you are—"
"—There's no way I'd do something that you'd enjoy, right?"
"!.......I see."
Indeed,
So that's how it was.
"Are you saying that a sinner... cannot even receive punishment on their own terms?"
Cruel.
It was too cruel.
I'm not even asking for forgiveness, I just want to be punished.
Are you saying I don't even have the 'freedom to suffer'?
"Wicked. Spiteful. You are wicked and spiteful, truly vicious."
And certainly,
I may have expected this of you as well.
"You do not wish to grant me even the 'right' to be punished, it seems."
Cronus closed her eyes.
With her eyes closed, she simply stayed in my embrace and breathed.
She breathed in,
and breathed out,
and remained still like that for several minutes....
"....Today, you are staying unusually long."
Cronus said.
Usually, she should have vanished long ago.
"I wonder if this means I have fallen into a deeper dream. It is not bad, but I am afraid of waking up."
Cronus buried her face a little deeper into my chest and wrapped both arms tighter around me.
"The scent is thick... and the warmth, even the reactions I see now.... it is as if you have come to my side in the flesh."
Though, surely, that cannot be.
Cronus rubbed her face against my chest and slowly climbed upward.
Climbing up along my collarbone and the line of my neck, Cronus soon loomed over my body.
"...If it is a dream that will vanish anyway, a delusion that will soon scatter and disappear."
Then, perhaps it would be alright to wish for this much.
Cronus stretched out both arms, wrapped them around my neck, and whispered in my ear.
"Hold me... please."
Strongly, so strongly it's hard to breathe.
So tightly that not a single thought can arise.
"Hold me, and then... and then, if you wish....."
A slightly wavering voice.
At the end, Cronus said,
"Could you... stroke my head...?"
"............"
First,
having come this far, I thought.
At first, I thought this was a dream, you know?
But no matter how utterly insane I might be, there's no way I'd have this kind of dream about Cronus, right?
So, if I were to roughly narrow down the likely possibilities....
"....Did your Hermes put you up to this?"
"Huh...?"
No matter how I looked at it, this was Hermes.
At least among the Main Gods I knew, the only one who'd come into someone's dream to play pranks was Hermes.
"What kind of crazy dream is this?"
Once I recognized it as a dream, it felt like strength gradually returned to my body.
The feeling of strings finally being connected to my body. Simultaneously, the sensation of my body floating up toward that sky.
"....???"
"Ohho?"
It wasn't just a sensation; I was literally soaring up into the sky.
The ground grew distant below, and I spoke to Cronus, who was staring up with a dumbfounded look.
"Your appearance was somewhat similar, but you went way too far into female corruption."
3 points out of 10.
Study up a bit more before coming next time.
...
..
.
"Ah."
An unfamiliar ceiling... well, not quite.
I blinked my eyes and looked around.
'....A hospital room.'
A two-person room with a partition beside me.
The person lying next door was probably Minerva.
"Mmm.... mmm, mm...."
A sense of reality slowly surfaced.
After even letting out a big yawn, the situation finally began to dawn on me.
'Come to think of it, yesterday...'
Right after the trial ended, I was hospitalized.
Unlike last time with Minerva, it wasn't forced confinement in a psychiatric ward, but they said it was to take measures since I had been kidnapped and confined by the Athena Guild, or something like that.
Since various procedural measures had to be taken too, the Ares Guild was directly footing the bill and told me to rest up, they said.
"I'm not exactly injured anywhere, but...."
Still, once you start a lie, you have to bullshit it all the way to the depths of your soul.
Especially since I had completely buried someone, there was nothing good about getting caught needlessly.
'....Ugh.'
Anyway, why was I so tired?
I distinctly remembered sleeping soundly, but my vision was blurry and my energy was drained, as tired as when I'd jerked off six times in a row.
"Hwa~~~~am.... smack."
Should I just sleep more.
I burrowed my body under the blanket and tried to go back to sleep.
"Hwaaaa....."
Maybe it was because it was a two-person room.
Or maybe the Ares Guild asked them to take extra good care of me.
The bed's fluffiness surpassed even our house's scientifically-designed bed, and as for how warm it was, it felt so good I thought I could fall right back to sleep.
"Nice...."
And on top of that, did they even put a hugging pillow in here?
A soft, warm thing fitting perfectly in my arms, about the size of a small child, even a heat pack was put insi— wait, could that possibly be the case?
"............."
No matter how good the service at a hospital is, no hospital would put a heat pack inside the bed.
And no matter how good a heat pack's performance is, with this kind of size, with this kind of texture, and even feeling a skeletal structure on top, no matter how you looked at it....
"....No way."
With a feeling of foreboding, I slowly lifted the blanket.
And what appeared inside was...
"........?"
'Who are you?'
A girl whose name I didn't know.
What's more, she wasn't wearing a single piece of clothing, completely naked.
A situation that defied all common sense: a little girl with short white hair lying together in the bed with me.
"Mmm...... mm...."
The girl blankly blinked her eyes, then alternately looked at me and the blanket, and then...
"Cold....."
"Ah, sorry."
I covered her with the blanket.
....No, I mean, that's not the point!
"What is this?"
Strange.
This was a little, way too strange.
A situation that left my mind reeling in many ways.
While my reason was failing to catch up with reality,
"Ah."
"....Mai..?"
Mai came in, carrying a black plastic bag in her hand.
Mai looked at the little girl sleeping next to me and said,
"Cheating?"
"No."
As an aside,
"We respect preferences."
"No."
"If you want, Mai can become small too."
"I said no, didn't I?"
"Cronus really did have a plan all along...."
"............"
I suddenly
felt like wanting to jump out the window.