Before I Could Even See the Prologue, I Was About to Die (2)
I stared wide-eyed at the so-called spirit who was staring straight back at me. She must have thought I didn’t understand, because she planted both hands on her hips, tilted her chin up slightly, and repeated herself.
“Contract…? With me?”
So not many people could see spirits, huh? I kept staring at the tiny fairy-like spirit with my eyes still as round as a startled rabbit’s. The spirit—no, Silph—didn’t seem to like that. She puffed out her cheeks a little and spoke again.
Silph raised her right hand and pointed at the horse whose body had been completely shredded apart. Ah. So if I screwed up, she’d kill me. My face went deathly pale as I nodded frantically. Only then did Silph look satisfied. She smiled and began reciting what she wanted.
“Um… I have… one question…”
I timidly added a polite ending, and Silph shot me a glare for interrupting her, waiting for me to continue.
“J-just because I can see you… does that mean we can just… make a contract like this?”
Wait, didn’t you just blow up that carriage earlier? Didn’t you rip the coachman and the horse to shreds? When I looked at the blurry remains of the horse and carriage with that thought in mind, Silph’s lips twitched upward in clear panic before she started explaining.
“So… if no one recognizes you, you can’t maintain consciousness?”
“Which means… only your instincts remain, you can’t form a proper shape, and you’re searching for something even you don’t understand?”
Silph answered with a bright smile. In short, she needed me in order to gain a will of her own. And if I refused, I’d be turned into ground meat and erased from existence. So basically… contract with her if I wanted to live.
For her sake, and for mine.
Silph seemed to read my expression. She quietly extended her hand.
When a spirit was rolling up her sleeves and offering a contract like this, there was no reason for me to refuse. I nodded vigorously in agreement and reached out my own hand.
“P-please take good care of me. Hehe… So… you’re sparing me, right?”
“How exactly do we do the contract?”
At my question, Silph nodded, flew closer, and placed her hand on my solar plexus. A pale green light bloomed from her palm in a spherical shape and slowly spread outward.
“Cain.”
Silph suddenly looked flustered. She yanked her hand back and stared at me with wide eyes. Up close, I could see her eyes were a deep emerald green. They were so clear and beautiful that I thought if she had a human form, she’d be stunning. Those eyes bored into me, unable to hide her panic.
“???”
Even so, calling it garbage was a bit much, wasn’t it? I looked at her with an aggrieved expression. She must have had some conscience left, because she averted her gaze, cleared her throat a few times, and spoke again.
“Oh, really?”
I hadn’t even known spirits existed in this game, so I simply nodded, fascinated by the new information. Silph rested her chin on her hand with a troubled look and tilted her head in thought. That gesture was kind of cute. So this is what raising a daughter feels like.
“Ahaha…”
Silph looked at me with clear murderous intent. No, what the fuck! I couldn’t die this pathetically. I had no choice but to use every trick I’d learned from shedding blood and tears in society—offering up my liver and gallbladder if that’s what it took.
“P-please spare me! I can’t die before I even get to see the prologue!”
“There’s… that kind of thing, okay? Anyway! You need me too, that’s why you’re asking for a contract, right?!”
I poured as much emotion into my voice as I could. If this creature had any emotions at all, she would surely be moved. I slammed my forehead against the ground and begged. Silph frowned, seemingly weighing how to deal with me. After several minutes of deep thought, she clapped her hands together as if she’d found a solution and looked at me.
“R-right. If you think of spirit arts as a type of magic, then…”
Silph’s face twisted for a moment at the word “magic,” but she let out a sigh and continued.
With that, Silph placed her hand on my solar plexus again. She closed her eyes and seemed to pour mana into my body. Do spirits have mana too? As I watched her with that thought, she noticed my gaze and spoke.
“So you’re injecting the mana of nature into me to check the state of my body. Is that it?”
Silph said this with a beautiful smile. The problem was that the words that came out of her mouth were anything but beautiful.
“L-life force…?”
I really hope it was just my imagination that her eyes looked terrifying for a second. Using life force as the price—what the hell did that mean? Wasn’t she saying she’d use my lifespan to wield power? So this crazy homicidal spirit was planning to suck my life force dry.
“By life force… you mean you’ll use my life—my actual lifespan—as the price to use power?”
I was done being polite. At this point, I decided to go all out.
“No, what the f… fuck… You said you needed me too. But if we contract using my life force as the price, I’m the only one who dies. Isn’t that a lose-lose?”
Silph glared at me with eyes full of dissatisfaction and poked my forehead repeatedly with her other hand.
“Aren’t you being a little too harsh…?”
Silph smiled again, radiating killing intent. This insane spirit! She was giving me a binary choice—die, or contract with her. Weren’t spirits supposed to love nature, cherish life, and all that wholesome stuff?
“Are all of you this fucking crazy?”
Huh? This was definitely connected to the game’s lore. The final goal of this game… was to defeat the god trying to reset the current world, right? The scale seemed huge, but Spirit Savior had been built well enough to fully contain that ambition. So maybe the reason players couldn’t see spirits in the game was related to that god?
Contracting with a spirit that players had never been able to see in the game—I had no idea how that would affect the future. It was a worrying moment, but I couldn’t turn away from this spirit who was still staring at me without retracting her killing intent.
“As long as you guarantee my survival, I’ll form the contract.”
There had to be a reason spirits needed to form contracts. That was probably why she had approached someone like me who had no mana.
“Uh… um…”
What was I supposed to say to that? I stared at her with that exact expression. Silph let out a deep sigh and gestured for me to raise my hand. I turned the back of my hand upward. She placed one of her own tiny hands on it, closed her eyes, and focused her energy.
With a flash of pale green light, a kind of summoning circle began to draw itself on the back of my hand.
“If it wasn’t at the cost of my life force… it would’ve been perfect.”
I smiled bitterly and rubbed the back of my hand. Well. This much shouldn’t get me expelled from the academy at least. The carriage was gone and I’d lost all my luggage, so I needed to hurry.
Silph smiled brightly, said “Nice to meet you, Cain,” and held out her tiny hand. I returned the handshake with a still-bitter smile, giving it a light shake.
Thinking back to the day I left home and the start of the game… if I hurried, I should arrive right before the prologue began.
“Silph… you can’t make me fly or anything like that, right?”
“……”
Silph seemed intrigued. She carefully created a small whirlwind above her palm. As the vortex spun, I felt something inside my body being drained away. My head started pounding and my stomach began to hurt. The moment I opened my mouth to tell her to stop, I coughed up blood.
“Cough! Cough!… I said stop, damn it…”
Silph must not have expected it to be this bad. She quickly stopped the whirlwind and flew around me in circles. Fuck. The twisting pain in my gut wouldn’t stop. Even my heartbeat hurt. This was the first time I’d ever felt the sensation of expending life force, and the pain that came with it was far more than I could handle.
“Ah, fuck. I’m so screwed. For real.”
I hadn’t even enrolled in the academy yet, and I was already standing at death’s door wondering how much life I had left to spend.