Persona - 2
Watching her carry on as if she held the upper hand in this relationship was, frankly, starting to grate on my nerves.
She was living as my livestock now — a slave who showed me dreams whenever I needed them — and she had already lost an arm for the privilege. So what exactly was she grinning about?
Maybe I needed to cut off one more piece before she finally learned her place.
Then again, that felt like jumping the gun. Besides, one arm was fine, but losing anything else simply wasn't to my taste.
People are hardwired to prefer things that are whole, after all.
She was already incomplete as a one-armed girl, and yet her appearance remained so beautiful it was almost impossible to believe she was a Disaster who had slaughtered humans. Who would dare look at this tiny girl and call her a Disaster? Who would dare call her incomplete?
Still — I had her beat.
I was prettier.
The thought put a little confidence in my shoulders, and they squared themselves.
Crack.
Ah. That satisfying pop of bone, and the stiffness melted out of my body.
"Mmnh—"
A strange little sound slipped from a mouth that couldn't form language. Spring was still watching me, still grinning that grin of hers. The look of it was still unpleasant, so correcting the habit was probably in order.
Hum.
I gathered starlight that now moved as one with my body and shaped it into a needle — a light-arrow compressed down to the smallest, most efficient form possible.
Whether she realized what I was about to do or not, Spring's eyes gave a faint tremor.
"Ha! I already know you won't do it!"
"You fine with me telling the Hero you've got a dual personality?"
Yep.
Honestly. What on earth was this delusional patient under the impression of?
She had stormed the Imperial Capital and then hit the Southern Front in the blink of an eye, so I had assumed she was intelligent. That assumption was crumbling by the second. Maybe the real brains of the Demon King's army — the ones who actually made the plans — were somewhere else entirely.
Hmm. Entirely possible.
I drifted into thought, leaving a single starlight arrow floating in the air, and she seemed to take my silence as proof that her threat had landed. She puffed up with triumph.
No. Your threat didn't work. I was just laughing at you on the inside and ignoring you.
"And on top of that, you can't kill me! You need me, right?"
No. Not particularly essential.
I don't need you at all.
It was simply that I had no means of recovering my mental strength, and my Erosion Rate was slowly creeping toward 100%, so she was a convenient tool for keeping things stable. And the Erosion Rate could be managed without her help anyway. I was very good at drawing lines. I could keep things cleanly separated.
But this was fun, so I decided not to tell her any of that.
Pfft.
Watching her grow even more confident and start screeching at the top of her lungs, I suddenly found her rather adorable. Back when she was an enemy, I had thought there was no more irritating little brat alive. But seeing her like this — one arm gone, body bound, desperately inflating her own self-esteem — she looked exactly like a mouse puffing itself up in front of a cat.
Small animal. That was the perfect description for her.
How cute.
I almost wanted to ask if she would like me to cut off all her limbs and make her my pet. I could be nice to her then.
Hehe.
Just kidding!
Anyway, she had been passionately explaining all the reasons I mustn't kill her when she seemed to sense something off and fell quiet. The way she sat there full of questions, turning over that tiny brain of hers trying to figure out why I wasn't reacting at all — that, too, was adorable. For a chess piece I intended to put to good use, she also made excellent decoration. Aesthetics really did matter.
If I had captured Summer instead — no, wait. I never would have taken a man alive in the first place. I would have just killed him.
I still had a few experiments to run, so I continued not to respond.
What experiments, you ask?
Several.
First: the pen and paper the Pope had handed me. Famous as the Pope's personal weapons, they were his symbols — the absurdly overpowered tools of a Superhuman and a Star who had mastered the mental arts. And given that my brainwashing had already been underway when he passed them to me, something about the whole thing felt suspicious.
I put on gloves and recited a prayer inwardly.
Purify that which is unclean—
Purification
I needed to run experiments, so I couldn't use the pen and paper to communicate. The time had come to use the scroll I had been holding onto — the one I had never dared use for fear the Hero would discover I wasn't the real Saintess.
I held the scroll labeled Voice Chat to a candle flame and burned it. Complex geometric patterns of blue light lifted into the air and settled into my head.
How hard it had been to acquire this scroll — how I had waited until the Hero was asleep, slipped out at dawn, snuck into a nearby city, and fretted with a pounding heart over whether it would even be there — is a very long story. So please, for the love of everything, work properly.
In the game, it had been a convenience scroll that let you hear your friends' voices while playing together. Now that the game had become reality, it ought to function in other ways as well.
That was my hope, at least.
Hmm. Shall I try transmitting something? Like thinking hard? Or like speaking?
—Ah.—
—Can you hear me?—
Spring heard my words and stared at me in shock.
"You— you said you couldn't talk."
—This isn't talking.—
Spring realized my mouth wasn't moving and went blank staring at me.
"Sound transmission…? No, that can't be right. Telepathy? No, not that either…"
The way she muttered to herself, building hypotheses and then immediately tearing them down, was remarkably similar to a graduate student having a mental breakdown. Were all mages like this? My illusions were starting to crack a little.
"Did you learn magic or something?"
—No. It's a scroll.—
"No, this isn't a scroll. This is a permanent imprint."
—No, I said it's a scroll.—
"Scrolls have a duration!"
There was no getting through to her.
I took the light-arrow that had been floating beside me from the start and sent it past her head — deliberately missing, of course.
Fwick.
Ah. A cut on her cheek. That hadn't been the intention.
"Hey! I'm seriously telling the Hero!"
—I don't care.—
"You're serious?"
—Yes.—
"Y-you're really serious?"
Ahaha.
She was doing this because she knew that if she actually used her last bargaining chip — her last lifeline — that lifeline would snap. The fact that she still thought dual personality was leverage was genuinely hilarious. I could feel a laugh coming on!
Ah, right. Back to the experiments.
The purified gloves were like consecrated objects, dense with holy power. In that state, I handed Spring the pen and paper the Pope had given me. The moment I forced the pen into her bound hands, Spring convulsed, then trembled all over before settling back to normal.
"What the hell is this?!"
—A gift I received.—
"Kill the bastard who gave it to you right now!"
So there really had been something. It was too valuable a weapon to destroy, so for now, storage. I picked the pen back up with my gloved hand and tucked it into a leather bag.
Spring was muttering to herself things like, No wait… we did this kind of thing to our enemies, so does that make them our side…?
Common sense, please. Even if the Pope had been trying to brainwash me, there was no way he was on your side. I could still see it as clearly as yesterday — the way he had literally incinerated demonkin in the game, grinding through the front lines. Of course, even if he was on our side, I fully intended to pay him back for pulling a stunt like this on me.
As for the second experiment — honestly, nothing came to mind. Whether horns had nerves, how a beast became human, why the Demon Realm that vanished in the previous game reappeared perfectly intact in the sequel. There were plenty of background lore questions I was curious about, but those could be answered slowly. I had plenty of time.
As if on cue, the door to my tent opened and someone stepped inside. I squinted against the sunlight pouring in from outside, and when the figure finally resolved, there stood the Hero with a halo of light behind him. Strictly speaking it was backlight, but calling it a halo wasn't blasphemy, surely. He really did have a handsome face.
"Saintess, are you all right?"
—Yes.—
Ah. Mistake.
"…What is this?"
The Hero immediately registered the voice planting itself inside his head and looked puzzled.
—I found a way to speak without using pen and paper.—
"Ah. I see."
Did he let it go? Did he actually let it go? Please just brush past it like it's nothing…!
I prayed.
"I came to deliver a message."
"Orders to return to the Imperial Capital."
"And to bring the captured Spring along as well."
Whew. Looks like he let it slide.
—Understood. I'll get ready.—
And Spring, the moment she saw the Hero, seized her chance and shouted at the top of her lungs.
"Hero! The Saintess is actually a dual personality!"
And silence fell.