Survival of the Fittest (3)
"Bonjour?"
Looking back on it now, it really was a ridiculous greeting. No matter that the furious gunfire had finally fallen silent, this was still the middle of a battlefield — what the hell kind of "bonjour" was that supposed to be?
The French soldier trembling face-down at the edge of the crater seemed to be thinking much the same thing. He turned his head toward her with the slow, disbelieving caution of a man convinced his ears had simply failed him.
"Qui…?"
Elze cleared her throat a couple of times and stood there waiting for the soldier to fully turn his body in her direction.
"Nice to meet you. I came because there were so many souls gathered here, but it turns out you're the only one left alive."
"Quoi…?"
Hmm. It had been quite a while since she'd used anything resembling complex French. Roughly half the souls dying or already dead around here belonged to Frenchmen and the other half to Germans, but nothing in that process had ever required particularly difficult turns of phrase. Still, she hadn't forgotten the language entirely. She'd manage somehow.
"You don't understand a word of what I'm saying, do you? All that talk about souls and whatnot. Probably the only part you caught was that you're the sole survivor."
"Ah… aah…"
The soldier let out a sound that barely qualified as language — something infinitely closer to a raw scream — and still seemed unable to grasp the situation. Or perhaps he had understood the fact that he alone had survived with perfect clarity, and the relief of it had reduced him to this wordless, murmuring wreck.
"I wonder if you feel lucky. That every other man in your squad is dead, and only you made it out."
"I can't speak for later, but at least for now, you really can relax."
"The Germans are already pulling back from Verdun in stages, so the odds of these trenches taking another artillery barrage have dropped considerably."
How did she know? Simple enough. All you had to do was stroll into a German encampment in the dead of night and hit someone who looked like an officer with Charm. After that, extracting military secrets of every variety was almost trivially easy.
She'd thrown on a rough scrap of fabric that vaguely resembled a uniform for camouflage, and anyone looking closely would certainly have felt something off about her. But once a person became a prisoner of Charm, there was essentially no way for a non-mage to break free under their own power.
Of course, Elze Constanze had no desire to endure the headache of accidental eye contact every single time, so through exhaustive trial and refinement she had developed a magic path uniquely her own. Naturally, that unique magic — the one she had named Nibelung — was active even now.
The witch could actively modulate the output of her Charm however she pleased, and against ordinary humans who were not mages, she kept its activation suppressed as much as possible. Whether because of that restraint or thanks to it, the French soldier in front of her did not simply gape at the witch like an idiot. Instead, he managed something that could almost pass for a final act of resistance.
Click. Even curled into a ball inside the crater left by a shell, he had clung to his rifle the way a man clings to a lover. The standard-issue French Berthier rifle swung up and settled into a clean aim at Elze Constanze.
Elze snorted and smiled.
"Bold of you. I can't tell whether terror has paralyzed you so thoroughly that you've mixed up who you should and shouldn't be pointing a gun at — or whether you've simply got nerves of steel."
The witch from Königsberg ran a rough appraisal over the soldier's appearance as he shouldered the rifle with violently shaking hands.
Sixteen, give or take? No… seventeen at the absolute outside.
Outwardly he was every inch a green recruit, looking a year or two younger than even the lowest age of conscription. Strange. As far as Elze knew, men weren't supposed to be thrown into a front like this until they were past twenty. Still, it wasn't hard to accept. The forces committed to Verdun totaled well over two and a half million — if a kid far below draft age had been fed into the meat grinder, it wasn't exactly surprising.
As always, he was simply another victim and another cog in the collective madness that total war had wrought upon humanity.
The emotion that briefly brushed through Elze's mind was pity.
Pity? Me? For someone else?
It was a feeling even Elze Constanze herself could not properly account for. And why would she? The fledgling standing in front of her was, in the end, nothing more than prey whose soul she intended to devour. What predator in nature dares to feel pity for its quarry? In the natural world, that kind of compassion is practically a sin.
Even while a witch was walking through the heart of Verdun, Charles Darwin's theory had long since become famous. Elze was someone who understood perfectly well that harboring pity like this conferred not the slightest advantage in the struggle for survival — the principle that the fittest endure.
Come to think of it, our bloodline was already at a severe disadvantage in that struggle.
Elze Constanze knew a fair amount about the traits that ran through her own veins. Most of it she had learned from the mother who had given birth to her and her younger sister, then wasted away and died. The rest had come from the elders of the clan — though calling them elders was generous. They were a handful of obstinate old fossils, most of whom still believed the world was merely an extension of the feudal age. Even their most "modern" ideas had stalled out somewhere around the early 1800s.
This bloodline had claimed the power of agelessness in exchange for a curse: bear a child, and you die. The elders who had survived this long were those who had chosen eternal solitude over even a brief companionship. Agelessness did nothing to prevent fatal accidents, so the clan's numbers had been dwindling steadily. Now and then someone would change their mind, go looking for true love, and conceive a child — but even then, preserving the clan's numbers required beating fifty-fifty odds. And if neither of those paths appealed, there were always the elders who simply grew so sick of their unchanging daily existence that they took their own lives.
Elze, who had not yet lived even a full century, still found each day of life fulfilling enough that she couldn't really understand that choice. As it stood, she and her younger sister Claudia were among the youngest of the clan. Under a hundred years old counted as young — that much was fair.
At this rate, before the century was out, the only ones left would almost certainly be Elze Constanze and Claudia Constanze. Just the two of them. Elze herself had no particular desire to die, after all. And if Claudia ever bore a child, and that child was a girl, then she and her niece would become the only two witches remaining. Sister or niece — either way, they would be the sole pair of immortals left adrift in a fleeting world.
So from Charles Darwin's perspective, this bloodline had chosen a failed direction of evolution. Being at a severe disadvantage in the struggle for survival was not a metaphor. It was literal.
But a species being disadvantaged in the long-term struggle for survival did not automatically dictate the fortunes of any single individual. At least here in Verdun, the witch from Königsberg stood firmly in the position of an overwhelming predator.
Perhaps the French soldier sensed that instinctively. He did not pull the trigger. Maybe he had realized that any hostile move would mean the miserable life he had barely managed to cling to could vanish at any moment.
Elze quietly revised her assessment of the soldier in front of her.
Bold — but not reckless.
She decided to put her original plan of harvesting his soul on hold, at least for the moment. Part of it was simple personal curiosity. And part of it was that, rare as a living, fresh soul was to find in Verdun, this one was simply too young.
A human's spiritual growth tends, by and large, to scale with age. That holds true even for people who never set foot on a magic path — in some respects, the tendency is even stronger among those who never do. No matter how still a person sits, the environment forces something to accumulate inside the body: salt, heavy metals, the mustard gas blooming through the trenches. And if physical accumulation works that way, magical accumulation is no different. From the moment a human soul is formed, it walks its own shallow magic path of a sort. Only those who awaken to that path can become mages. Those who never do remain forever ignorant of the world's hidden face, just like everyone else.
Put it all together, and from a witch's perspective, there was genuinely no compelling reason to devour the soul of a fledgling who hadn't even lived twenty years. If you forced the question of eat or don't eat, eating was still better — but it almost seemed wiser to wait until the soul matured naturally, raise it up a little, and then consume it.
No… the resources that would take are obviously greater. There's no real incentive to raise him just to eat him later, either. Waiting three or four more years when I could just find another living soldier's soul somewhere else in Verdun is a much faster proposition.
The scales of her mind tipped cleanly to one side. She had already confirmed the existence of a mage, so she would have to settle things one way or another — but it didn't necessarily have to be right this second.
Rationally speaking, of course, killing him now and absorbing the soul was far superior. But the witch knew that human beings were not a species that moved solely by reason and calculation. A simple example: if you didn't want your clan's numbers to dwindle toward extinction, all you had to do was never take a partner. And yet since time immemorial, countless witches had chosen to blend in among ordinary people, staking their own lives on a coin flip. How was that rational or reasonable by any measure? Elze was a witch who had long since sworn she would never make that mistake herself.
So this was just a brief diversion. She'd play with him for a little while, and when the novelty wore off, she'd eat him.
As for how long "a little while" meant… well, for the duration of her stay in Verdun ought to be enough. In concrete numbers, maybe a month or two. She'd been getting tired of wandering the no-man's-land between the trenches alone every day anyway. Having someone to talk to for a change didn't sound half bad.
And so the witch slowly reached out and closed her hand around the barrel of the Berthier rifle. Then, looking into the face of the soldier who still couldn't quite process what was happening, she clenched her fist — crunch — and crumpled the barrel like soft metal.
At the same time, she asked:
"My name is Elze Constanze. What's yours?"
It was their first meeting. Offering a name seemed like the polite thing to do, the witch thought.