The Fruit of Knowledge
The clothes Sunya wore amounted to little more than a strip of hide wrapped around his lower body.
Stripping them off would have been no great difficulty.
"…That would be rather problematic."
Even so, he could hardly answer with a meek Very well, I'll undress and simply comply.
Sunya offered his characteristic, faintly embarrassed smile and scratched the back of his head.
"Take them off yourself before I rip them off you."
"No, I really don't think that's—"
Why does he talk so much?
Just do what you're told.
Inanna's left eyebrow twitched.
That alone was enough to send a chill down Sunya's spine.
"You're getting on my nerves. Strip. Now!!"
Inanna closed the distance in a single breath and reached for his lower half.
—Tak.
She was stopped.
Sunya had caught her by the wrist.
"That's far enough."
"You—?!"
Inanna tried to wrench her hand free.
It was useless.
No matter how she pushed or pulled, she could not shake off his grip.
"…Are you going to let go?"
"If you promise not to touch my clothes, I will gladly release you."
"What?!"
Inanna put more force into it than before.
A fierce wave of presence and raw power radiated outward from her body. The ground trembled, and every beast in the vicinity fled in a panicked scramble.
Had she been dealing with an ordinary human body, the arm would have been torn clean off.
Sunya did not budge.
Without the slightest sign of strain, he held both of her arms and calmly met her eyes.
The difference in strength was simply that absolute.
Like any ordinary man and woman, the disparity in their physical power was unmistakable.
"You… weren't human?"
"That depends on where one draws the line for humanity… but for the time being, I am human. At the very least, I was born as one."
"What kind of nonsense—"
Inanna twisted her body hard.
Using the rebound, she launched herself into the air and swung a kick at Sunya's head.
In that brief instant, Sunya yanked the arm he still held and destroyed her balance.
Mid-kick, Inanna found herself tumbling into his arms instead.
"You've grown far too excited. Please, calm yourself first…"
With her head pressed against the broad plane of his chest, her heart began to hammer wildly again, making a thorough nuisance of itself.
By now, Inanna understood the cause of this phenomenon.
This was love.
It was lust.
It was possessiveness.
The primal hunger shared by every creature that came in male and female.
I want this man.
I want to make him mine alone.
Every time she looked at Sunya, Inanna felt it.
She felt no shame in that truth.
What still enraged her was the fact that she could not have him.
"…How am I supposed to calm down?"
"That is…"
"I've always hated that leisurely attitude of yours. That sly little smile of yours pisses me off too!!"
"I never intended to cause you displeasure. From now on, I shall endeavor to restrain myself in your presence, Lady Inanna."
"That's not what I'm talking about!!"
Inanna shoved against his chest and broke free of his embrace.
In her hand, a golden spear had already appeared.
"You keep making everything so complicated."
She thrust the spear with blinding speed, but Sunya turned his head and slipped past it by a hair's breadth.
The price was hundreds of trees behind him, uprooted and shattered, and boulders crumbling into rubble.
The sheer force was enough to reshape the terrain itself.
"And that face of yours—like you already know everything."
The spear left afterimages in its wake.
The spear of a war goddess who had cut down tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of monsters and the dead danced with lethal ferocity.
Watching those movements, Sunya thought of a lion.
It was far removed from orthodox spear technique, and yet it was instinctive and deadly. She favored offense over defense; her stance was low, swift, and agile, leaving little room for counterattack.
—Thung.
Even so, Inanna's spear failed to pierce him.
Sunya simply avoided anything that might count as a vital point and took the rest of the blows bare-handed.
He's that hard?
This was a goddess's spear that could shred any undead or monster to pieces—and yet Sunya's flesh would not yield.
At best, a few shallow cuts and abrasions.
What was one supposed to call this?
Inanna could tear through steel as if it were paper. She could bring down mountains, no matter how vast.
Which meant that Sunya's body was harder and tougher than any of those things.
It was impossible for a human—or even a half-blood hybrid.
Even among the gods, she doubted any possessed flesh of this density.
Or perhaps Sunya, for all his appearance, was some unidentified monster.
I don't know.
Had she ever truly known anything about him with certainty?
He had never once spoken of himself.
All Inanna knew was that he always went about with those suspiciously half-lidded eyes, that he showed the gods no reverence whatsoever, and that he was full of secrets.
In truth, she knew nothing at all.
But it doesn't matter.
She liked Sunya.
She wanted to have him.
She wanted to roll naked with this man and make love to him.
For Inanna, that was enough.
—Kugugung.
The aftershocks of her swinging spear began to chip away at the mountain itself.
Mount Ebih was large and imposing, and for that very reason it could not withstand the power of a war goddess.
Inanna paid it no mind and did not stop attacking.
A dozen spears materialized in midair.
Far fewer than when she had forged them in the underworld.
Her purpose was not to kill, but to subdue.
"Just do what I tell you for once!!"
The burning spears came flying.
No matter how durable Sunya was, being struck by a spear still hurt.
He slipped past the first one by a razor-thin margin, snatching it out of the air as it passed—then cleanly knocked aside every spear that followed.
The entire sequence contained not a single wasted motion.
It was so flawless that the word perfect scarcely did it justice.
It was even beautiful.
And the more beautiful it was, the hotter Inanna's fury burned.
"You always do whatever you want…"
This wasn't enough.
She needed a stronger attack—one he could not evade—to render him helpless.
The moment she reached that conclusion, heat haze began to rise from Inanna's body.
"Wait, Lady Inanna. That is—"
"Why am I the only one who can't do what she wants?!!!"
Sunya knew exactly what she intended.
He seized her in his arms and shot into the sky.
His speed was a streak of pure light.
A sonic boom cracked the air, and for an instant it seemed as though thunder had rolled across a cloudless sky.
They soared so high that the heavenly temple was almost visible—and in that moment, a scarlet explosion erupted from Inanna's body.
The heat and radius were more than enough to incinerate an entire mountain.
Had the blast gone off on the ground, Mount Ebih would have been obliterated wholesale.
"What is that…"
"A red moon?"
Mortals stared up in wonder at the crimson moon that had suddenly appeared in the sky.
Some took it for the wrath of the gods; others simply called it an ill omen.
"Inanna!!"
"What kind of disaster is she causing this time?"
"Haaah."
"…"
The gods who recognized the red moon as Inanna's handiwork merely sighed or clutched their heads.
To them, she was an unstoppable walking catastrophe.
Only Enki, who had a fair idea of the situation, took it far more seriously than the rest.
"That was nearly a catastrophe."
Closest of all, Sunya looked down at Inanna with complicated eyes.
Having weathered the full storm of flame, his body no longer resembled that of a living man.
Most of the muscle on his right arm had been torn away; the limb dangled uselessly, barely held together by bone. The skin of his left chest had been cooked off, exposing muscle and nerve, and a glimpse of rib showed beneath his armpit. Near his mouth the flesh had been blasted away, leaving his gums hideously bare.
Burns large and small covered the rest of him.
For an ordinary human, the injuries would already have been fatal. Even if someone miraculously survived, disability or lasting damage to the mind would have been almost certain.
Yet Sunya showed not the slightest sign of pain.
On the contrary, the wounds from the explosion were knitting themselves shut at a rate visible to the naked eye.
Still holding Inanna, he descended slowly toward the site where his house had stood.
"Well then… what shall we do?"
Sunya's house was gone.
Under ordinary circumstances he would simply have slept outdoors—but leaving a grown woman to camp in the open struck him as unmannerly.
Manners aside, he had no desire to make Inanna rough it however she pleased.
"…It seems I shall have to go down to the village for the first time in a long while."
Sunya suppressed the tangle of feelings in his chest and started down Mount Ebih.
The heat of the explosion still clung to his body, and smoke continued to rise from his skin.
