Ascension Ritual
Silver blades flashed in the light.
The sword slipped smoothly into flesh.
It looked almost like sticking a fork into pudding, but the result was nowhere near as peaceful.
Swish.
The monster's head flew into the air.
The lifeless skull spun end over end, spraying blood in every direction.
“Ah.”
I’d made a mistake.
My original plan had been to separate the neck and torso cleanly, but I’d let my mind wander while I was cutting, and I’d put far too much strength into it.
Thanks to that, now I was covered in sticky blood….
I muttered to myself as I roughly wiped away the blood clinging to my body.
“H-hold on… you really shouldn’t say things like that so casually, Kana…!”
“You’re at it again?”
What nonsense was she going to spout this time?
I crossed my arms, fully intending to hear her out, and Daeun pulled a white handkerchief from her pocket and rubbed my cheek with it.
Rub, rub.
Squish, squish.
“…”
“Ehehe… heheh….”
“You are trying to wipe me off, right?”
“...Of course I am! There, all done!”
The moment I said that, Daeun snatched her hand away from my cheek.
The handkerchief, once a pristine white—not quite pure white, but close enough—had been stained a dark, blood-red by the monster’s blood.
I doubted washing it would ever restore the original color.
Then again, with that much monster blood on it, it probably couldn’t be used again anytime soon anyway—not because of cleanliness, but because of the Magi.
If we took this straight to a human village on the Ardina Continent, wouldn’t they treat us like terrorists?
“Ta-da! A fluffy Kana, complete!”
“Fluffy? I’m still sticky.”
The blood was gone, but the unpleasantness it left behind, that tacky sensation, still clung to my skin.
Of course it did, since I hadn’t even washed it with water.
“I told you not to say things like that. There are a lot of weird people in this world who can take a perfectly normal phrase and start imagining something absurd, you know?”
“...What part of ‘sticky’ is supposed to make someone imagine something weird? And what exactly is this ‘weird imagination’ anyway?”
“...There are some things it’s better not to know. I just hope Kana stays just as pure and unspoiled as she is now. Can you understand an older sister’s feelings like that?”
“Yeah. First of all, I understand that you’re one of those weird people.”
“...K-Kanakana, what’s that supposed to mean...? It’s because you really haven’t met any truly weird people! Compared to them, I’m practically normal!”
“Hmm.”
But the fact that she said practically normal meant she knew she was weird, didn’t it?
If she truly believed she was normal, she’d just have said she was normal. She wouldn’t have phrased it like that.
I ignored the strange person insisting she was normal and flicked the blood off my sword.
“How many have we killed?”
“Exactly twenty, so far.”
“That’s a lot.”
Instead of Daeun, who was still muttering to herself, Celine answered my question.
“If you’re tired, how about taking a short break?”
“I’m not tired. Just bored.”
No matter what it was, doing the same thing over and over again got old.
All the more so when the task in question wasn’t even complicated, just mind-numbingly repetitive.
“A simple repetitive task… I see?”
“Exactly.”
Wait for a monster to come.
When one got close, separate its neck from its body and send it off to a better place.
That was all there was to it.
If the monsters that showed up were strong enough to ooze thick Magi with every breath, maybe I couldn’t have been so carefree about it. But surprisingly, there weren’t any particularly powerful monsters in the heart of Laxia.
My expectation—that there would be monsters far stronger than anything on the Ardina Continent or in Laxia’s outskirts—had been thoroughly wrong.
At my words, Yustina answered with effortless composure.
“Would that not be the natural result of a barrier built for that very purpose?”
One of the barrier’s roles was to prevent the Magi gathered in the center from spreading across the continent.
Even so, it couldn’t stop every last wisp from leaking out. Still, Yustina said that without the barrier, Laxia’s condition would have been far worse than it was now.
“The source of a monster’s life force, and the origin of its strength, comes from Magi. There’s no way a monster fed on nothing more than this amount of Magi would be able to challenge you.”
“If that’s true, then shouldn’t there be monsters like that inside the barrier? I haven’t seen any, even in there.”
“A farmer must always keep an eye on the fields. If pests appear, they must be dealt with at once, must they not?”
Even if a monster with exceptional potential were born beyond the barrier, it would simply become food for other monsters.
Unlike other living beings, who instinctively shunned Magi, monsters didn’t care about such things.
In the end, the very environment that made Laxia so suitable for producing monsters was what prevented their latent potential from ever fully blossoming.
“Then the reason monsters like that were often seen in Ardina was….”
“Likely because they had no natural predator. If an unusually powerful monster were born there, it would grow by devouring the others.”
“Enough with the explanation. I’m not interested.”
“...Wasn’t Kana the one who started this?”
“Daeun, slander is a bad thing.”
“N-no…! You definitely did!”
Daeun thumped her own chest as if wronged.
I watched her for a moment, then tugged at her sleeve.
“Stop it.”
“...!”
Daeun’s face lit up, deeply moved.
“Are you worried about your sister?”
“Yeah.”
How could I not worry when she was beating her own chest like that?
“Daeun, you like big breasts, don’t you?”
“...Huh?”
“What if you keep pounding on them and they cave in and get smaller?”
“Wait, wait, wait.”
Hoo—
Daeun drew in a deep breath.
Then she exhaled faster than she’d inhaled.
After three or four steadying breaths, she spoke in a voice that was clearly trying to stay calm, though it was nowhere near calm at all.
“I have a lot of things I want to say, but I’ll ask this first. What on earth do you mean by saying you like big breasts?”
“...? I mean exactly what I said. You’re always looking at Celine and envying her. So I thought you liked them….”
Wasn’t that it?
When I tilted my head and asked, Daeun looked visibly relieved.
“Ah… that’s what you meant? Could you try to phrase things more clearly next time?”
“Was there room for misunderstanding?”
“It wasn’t that there was room for misunderstanding—it was overflowing with it. Haah… now it’s happening again. You just said yourself you didn’t mean it that way. Stop bullying a perfectly innocent polar bear! Polar bears are living things too!”
So even things I would’ve failed to understand before were understandable now.
It really was a useful ability.
As I nodded with satisfaction, the arrows turned toward me instead.
“And besides, a chest doesn’t shrink just because you hit it.”
“What are you talking about? If they only shrank, that’d be lucky. Do you know how many people die from a collapsed rib cage?”
“...Do I look like a fool who’d hit her own ribs hard enough to collapse them?”
“...”
“Hey, Kana?”
“...”
“Answer me.”
“Hmm. Who could she possibly be talking to?”
When Daeun spoke to me, she usually used my name, saying things like “Kana” or “Kana~.”
Even when we were face to face, that was how she talked.
It was probably just one of Daeun’s habits.
At first, it felt awkward being called in that soft voice of hers, so gentle it almost tickled my ears, but now I’d grown quite used to it.
Anyway.
What I meant was that if she’d intended to speak to me, she would have used my name. So the person Daeun was calling “hey” right now wasn’t me.
Hmm, then who was she talking to?
It couldn’t have been Yustina, so had she and Celine decided to start speaking casually already?
As I kept pretending not to notice, Daeun’s hand suddenly shot out and grabbed my waist.
“Ah!”
My eye level shot up at once.
My feet, no longer touching the ground, dangled and swayed in midair.
“You. You, yeah, you. Are you trying to send me straight to hell? You insolent little brat! I’ll punish you, so you’d better take it like a good girl…!”
“...Heh, that tickles.”
My face might have been clean, but my clothes were still soaked with blood.
Daeun didn’t care in the slightest about getting her own clothes dirty.
She rubbed against me, hugged me, and tickled me….
After a little while, Daeun, who had been making an enormous fuss, finally set me down.
Whether she knew there was blood smeared all over my face or not, she looked thoroughly satisfied.
“Hoo….”
“You seem to have reflected on your mistakes, so I’ll let this one go. From now on, be good.”
“...Was that reflection?”
Celine, who had been watching from the side, tilted her head.
“Of course. Just look at Kana’s face. She’s clearly remorseful.”
“She just seems to be laughing because it’s ticklish… Still, Lady Daeun.”
“Yes?”
“Well, um….”
Celine hesitated, unable to get the words out.
While she struggled, I kept exhaling hard, trying to calm my ragged breathing.
At last, when I had fully settled down, Celine opened her mouth.
“I sometimes thought I could feel someone’s gaze, and it seems they were looking at me with envy…. If it were something I could give, I would have, but this is not something I can offer even if I wish to….”
“Why are you doing this too, Celine!”
It’s all Kana’s fault!
Daeun made a small wounded sound, as if she were crying.
For now, it didn’t seem to be my fault.
I turned my gaze away, pretending not to notice, and spoke to Yustina, who was looking at us with obvious exasperation.
“We should move locations. I think the monsters in this area are all cleared out.”
They would eventually come if we waited, but it seemed better to relocate rather than sit around.
There were two reasons we were outside the barrier, hunting monsters.
One was to eliminate any danger in advance, in case monsters attacked when the barrier was gone.
The other was to use the corpses of monsters to make up for whatever Magi we lacked, since the barrier might not be enough even after we retrieved it.
As I’d said, it wasn’t especially difficult, and even if the Magi we gathered that way was only a drop in the bucket, it was still better than doing nothing.
All we had to do was raise mana to lure the monsters out, then deal with the ones that came running.
“I think the same.”
Yustina agreed with me.
“How much longer must we keep doing this?”
“Would it not be best to make one full circuit?”
“One full circuit…?”
“I mean around the barrier.”
“...That much?”
The demon village…? City…?
Anyway, the barrier that protected it while also isolating it was enormous.
It wasn’t quite on the same scale as the Holy Magic that encircled the Holy Kingdom, but making a full trip around the barrier would still take quite some time.
And it wasn’t just walking around, either—we had to lure out monsters, kill them, then move on and repeat the whole process….
“Let’s hurry and get this over with.”
Having concluded that we needed to keep moving if we didn’t want to sleep outdoors, I set off without waiting for Yustina’s reply.
I’d participate in the plan, sure, but since there were still monsters in the surrounding area that had to be cleared out first, there was nothing else for it.
The thirsty have to dig the well themselves….
Come to think of it, how much longer were those two going to keep that up?
Worried that stray fire might splatter onto me as well, I chose to ignore Celine and Daeun, who were still bickering furiously.
---