This Is Why She's Obsessed #8
"Helena… are you serious?"
Just as he was rubbing the sleep from his eyes and starting to rise, Is's eyes flew wide open and he spoke in a low, heavy voice. Hearing Helena's declaration so early in the morning had shocked him so thoroughly that every last trace of drowsiness vanished on the spot.
"Yes, Father. I have secured both the evidence and the testimonies. Therefore, Cain will be executed."
Her gaze was deeply sunken—a cruelty that held not even a shred of warmth. Is truly wondered whether the girl standing before him was the daughter he had known.
This was the child who, even when Cain had directed open hostility her way, had tried to meet it with forbearance. And now she was declaring, without a flicker of hesitation, that she would take his head. With her own hands, no less.
"Summary execution…"
He barely managed to swallow the words Cain is your little brother before they could force their way out of his throat, and frowned hard.
Cain was the one who had first attempted assassination by poison. That he had crossed a line was beyond dispute. Even so, the Helena Is knew would have shown at least enough mercy to banish him to a monastery for the rest of his days. That was the girl he remembered.
But the Helena before him now was nothing of the sort. She was decisive and merciless, as if he were looking at an iron-blooded sovereign—displaying, without reserve, every quality a person meant to stand above others ought to possess.
"Cain tried to poison me, the eldest daughter of this ducal house and one of its fighting assets. Even if he is my own flesh and blood, I cannot let that go. Would you not agree?"
If someone aims for your life, you repay them with a life—Helena drove that point home in a low, unyielding voice, shaking Is to the core. It was a judgment stripped of all affection and perfectly correct, leaving him not even the space for a proper counterargument.
"That much is true. Once you've identified Cain as the culprit, he has to pay the price. However…"
There was no way Helena would come down this hard for that reason alone. Even if Is could not read minds, he could tell that much. She was his own daughter, after all. So he asked the question that would pin down the true reason he already half-suspected.
"It isn't only that, is it? Could it be that the reason you've moved so aggressively is… because Altram's boy drank the poison?"
The Altram boy—Zion Altram. The moment that name was spoken, Helena's eyes sharpened like a drawn blade. The gaze that had been so deeply sunken now burned with life born of pure rage, and her tightly sealed lips trembled visibly. Yet her expression remained so utterly blank that the effect was all the more grotesque—and terrifying.
"Is that not allowed?"
"Helena…"
"Even if I was not the one who drank it, the fact that he tried to poison me does not disappear. In the end, the justification is mine, and I am simply carrying out the punishment that follows from it. Am I wrong?"
Faced with Helena calmly answering his questions and laying out her justification, Is fell completely silent at last.
He had long since noticed that Helena's feelings toward Zion Altram ran deeper than ordinary. He had not particularly intended to oppose them, either. But Is was afraid. Afraid of how far Zion's place in Helena's heart had already grown beyond anything he had imagined—and of what she might become if that place grew any deeper still. Afraid of what would happen if a child who had already surpassed him long ago, and who was still growing stronger by the day, ever truly ran wild.
"…No. You are not wrong. Handle this matter with your own hands."
Cain and Helena were both his precious children. But once one child had drawn a blade to kill the other, making that child pay the price was only natural—as a duke, and as a parent. And through this affair, Is had become certain of one thing.
No matter what happened, Zion Altram had to remain at Helena's side.
"Ugh…!"
Fuck. How many days have I even been asleep?
Clutching a head that felt ready to split open, I barely managed to push myself upright. In a world without proper hospital facilities, sleeping this long ought to have meant I was as good as dead—yet somehow my body was moving just fine.
They must have kept me hydrated while I was out, or used some item to maintain my vitality. Otherwise a human who had gone days without food would never get away with merely feeling hungry.
"At least… my legs still work."
I carefully set my feet on the floor and stood. The familiar, solid sense of balance rising through my soles told me I was fine to move around right away. A heavy growl rolled through my stomach, but it was nothing I couldn't ignore.
Body checked. Next was figuring out where I was—and that turned out to be surprisingly easy. The beautifully appointed room and its furnishings were all far too familiar. In other words, I had somehow ended up occupying a room in the Krauser mansion and imposing on their hospitality.
For a mere attendant, this was absurdly lavish treatment. Gratitude and guilt both rose up at once.
"Haa."
Then again, I had saved the young lady from a poisoning attempt, so maybe looking after me like this was only natural. That thought lasted only a moment before I decided otherwise. If I hadn't been a noble, or if I hadn't built up a certain degree of closeness with Helena, I never would have received this kind of care. Without either of those, they probably wouldn't even have moved this quickly after I drank the poison.
Either way, the time of writhing under the poison was over, and I was deeply glad of it. The sensation of my organs twisting and my flesh melting was something I never wanted to experience twice.
"But…"
It was morning, with the sun already up—and the mansion was far too quiet. Not a single trace of the servants who should have been bustling about their duties. It felt like standing on a windless, empty ocean.
Instinct told me something serious was going on, so I carefully opened the door and stepped out. There was no one in the corridor or the lobby downstairs either. It felt as if I had wandered into a haunted house without realizing it. A chill ran up my spine—until I spotted people gathered in front of the main entrance through a window, and relief spilled out of me in a long breath. At least I wasn't dreaming, or alone in some twisted other world.
Part of me wanted to go join them right that second and find out what was going on. But the same sticky unease of walking into a classroom after the lesson had already started clenched around my heart. Drawing every eye the moment I stepped into that crowd would be unbearable.
So I left the window open, crouched down, and pressed myself against the wall beside it, straining my ears. With mana reinforcing my hearing, I could make out the conversation well enough. The height put some distance between us, but the straight-line range was close.
"Cain. You have nothing more to say, I trust?"
"Damn it! Damn it all!!"
Cain Krauser knelt on the steps, pounding the ground, while Helena stood over him with a sword in her hand. A throng of servants kept watch around them, wrapped in a bleak, taut atmosphere. Something very big had clearly gone down.
"What? 'Damn it'…?"
The moment Cain struck the ground and shouted, the air around Helena turned deathly cold. Even from this distance I could feel a chill brush the back of my neck. Hold on. How much mental care have I been pouring into her, and she's still putting out an aura like that? The shiver racing down my spine was forgotten under pure disbelief.
Having her treat me like a mother substitute was a little much, sure—but it was still well within the range of things I could find endearing. Watching her grow more stable day by day had even made me proud. And now her entire atmosphere had flipped this hard? It was a shock to the system.
"I could have overlooked you trying to poison me. If I had been the one who drank it, drifted to the edge of death, and woken up again, I would have settled for sending you to a monastery…"
But the real shock was only beginning. From the conversation it was easy to tell that the idiot man down there was the one who had spiked the poison—and that the little conspiracy I had glimpsed that day had been for exactly that purpose. I never would have imagined he was crazy enough to try killing his own older sister with poison, but looking at him now, it was all too easy to believe.
The problem was that gentle Helena had driven her sword into her brother's thigh without a shred of hesitation. And she had done it with an Aura Blade.
"Aaaagh!!"
She wasn't content with simply stabbing the thigh—she gave the blade a meticulous full twist. It was the kind of motion that ground flesh and blood alike, so Cain's agonized scream was only natural. I almost thought I could hear the wet shlick of the steel being pulled free from here. The blood running down the blade, the blood seeping from the hole in his thigh and soaking the ground—it was a sight to make anyone's skin crawl.
"You drove Zion to the brink of death, and you dare say 'damn it'?"
Helena spoke my name and drove her sword into Cain's other thigh. A man's scream rode the wind and rolled across the entire estate grounds. That was how loud—and how agonizing—it was.
I had never imagined for a second that I was the reason Helena had become like this. It was a revelation of staggering proportions. It meant my existence in her eyes had grown far larger than anything I had pictured.
"Ugh… uuuugh…"
Cain could no longer hold his kneeling posture. He collapsed with a dull thud and began crawling across the ground. With blade-holes through both thighs, death was only a matter of time—but long before that, he had clearly been left unable to walk. When an Aura Blade thoroughly churned through the center of a thigh, that was the only possible result.
"Cain. As a member of this ducal house, you are a failure. So when you die, you will be stripped of the Krauser name and become the ordinary commoner you always looked down on."
"Wh-whaaat!!"
The instant he heard he would be stripped of the Krauser name, Cain glared up at Helena with bloodshot eyes and growled like a beast, wringing every last scrap of sound from his throat. A man who took such fierce pride in carrying the blood of Duke Krauser was bound to rage at a measure like that. And that very sense of entitlement only seemed to poke Helena's already foul mood even harder.
"Keh… keeeh…!"
Helena's brow furrowed, and she unleashed four more thrusts. Clean, precise wounds opened across both of Cain's shoulders and arms as he crawled. After that he couldn't even scream properly—only choked, strangled sounds escaped him. The sheer intensity of the pain had probably sealed his throat shut.
"It's nowhere near the pain Zion suffered… but this will do. Just die like the insect you are."
The moment Helena whispered those words in a low voice, a silver line flashed and traced across Cain's neck. At a glance it might have looked like a brief brush of wind—so instantaneous that you could almost convince yourself you'd imagined it.
But the line I saw was no illusion. Because a red seam bloomed across Cain's throat where it had passed—and a moment later, his head toppled free and rolled across the ground.
"H-hiiik?!"
One of the servants standing guard sucked in a sharp, involuntary breath, face painted over with pure terror. Blood was jetting vigorously from the severed stump, so it was hard to blame him. And he was far from the only one frozen in fear. Every single person gathered there wore the same look.
Still, no one could really hold it against them. These were ordinary people unaccustomed to blood, and flinching at the sight of a throat being cut so savagely was the most natural reaction in the world. Helena seemed to understand that and paid it little mind—though she did order a funeral director fetched to dispose of the body, without so much as batting an eye. It was a dry, empty manner hard to believe of someone who had just killed her own brother.
Watching her, I felt less horror than a deep, quiet pity. Yes, it had been cruel. But I had suffered under that poison myself, and knowing it had originally been meant for Helena made death a fitting end. Without Zombie Body, I would have died too.
As for why I felt pity—the reason was simple.
"She's sick."
As if she had sensed my presence, Helena looked up at the open window and deliberately curved her lips into a smile—eyes like the abyss melted down into human form.