Frail (3)
I opened my eyes.
The sofa in the dim living room. I widened my field of vision, feeling the crumpled texture of the cushions as they creaked and rustled beneath me.
I couldn't see a thing. My own shortsightedness, in every sense of the word. Night after night I left the house, swung a metal blade, and collapsed the moment I got home — a loop so routine I had never once thought to leave a light on, never once considered that I might be incapable of doing something as ordinary as illuminating my own home.
What a complete idiot.
Back when I first furnished this place, I'd actually believed that stuffing it with furniture and belongings might make it look like somewhere a person lived. How stupid that seemed now.
It was dark. Nothing was visible. There might have been something there, but of course no image could form on my retinas, so I saw nothing at all.
Well, of course. Everything in front of me was pitch black.
Someone who killed people for the thrill of it had no right to long for the light.
What I could feel was the sofa, and a blanket. No pillow.
Cramped. Suffocatingly cramped. This living room, which had once felt so spacious, always shrank the moment I came home still carrying the scent of life on me.
A silence so absolute it raised the hair on my arms dragged my mood endlessly downward.
"Bloody."
Ah.
She wasn't here.
In the dead of night she always retreated into the Subspace to sleep.
Not that I'd been hoping for anything. Having someone beside you at all times was a blessing in its own right.
I lowered my arm and set my palm against my thigh. Soft. Yielding. I really was a woman. Firmer than a toddler's cheek, but only just.
A sadistic impulse boiled up inside me.
"Ah."
I pinched myself. It barely hurt, but I made a sound on purpose.
If I didn't do at least this much, I felt as though I might stop believing I was alive at all.
That garbage heap of a mind of mine was about to throw another fit.
I shook my head hard. I forced my body to twist, changing the position I'd been lying in. My upper body rose, tilted, then straightened again.
— Squelch.
I planted my feet to stand on creaking limbs, and something touched them.
"Ah."
Blood.
A garden of rotting flowers, thick with the stench of wet decay.
An invisible red pool that had claimed the living-room floor as its territory.
"Mine, I suppose."
For a fleeting instant, I wished it weren't.
Because the fact that I had spilled blood without even realizing it meant that, like a beast shedding its coat, I would have to inject that blazing red liquid back into myself all over again.
To keep from losing my mind.
This body of mine — I really do want to tear it to pieces, don't I?
I rolled up my sleeve and bared my upper arm. I pressed the apparatus against the outside of my skin.
A soft click, a foreign sensation, and then a cool liquid seeping into my veins.
"……ngh, haah."
With a trembling hand I clutched at my chest. My heart convulsed and thrashed.
My breathing had been ragged for a long time already.
"Haah, hhk, haah."
— Tick.
I could see a clock.
A clock floating in midair, visible only to me.
Four sharp fangs like something you'd find on a beast.
An elegant, oval frame enclosing them.
Just the right size to fit in the palm of a hand.
Crack.
I'd been seeing it for days now, but I'd ignored it.
Blaming it on this damned character's mental illness, telling myself it would go away if I just looked past it.
But as always, as if the thing held a grudge against me, no mere object had ever once bent to my will.
— Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.
I ignored the relentless noise and pressed the apparatus to my arm again.
Another foreign sensation. Another chill.
Blood fed into my heart, and after a few seconds of silence—
My heart burst.
Crrrack.
"Urgh — puhwaaak!"
The first time, it had hurt. Hurt so badly I'd nearly blown the house apart.
But this magnificent body of mine had adapted even to that, dulling the pain no matter how many times it repeated.
Exactly the eighty-sixth time — no, let me correct that.
The eighty-seventh time my heart had burst, and this was all I felt now.
"Ah, ah."
For several seconds a massive volume of blood laced with mana churned and thrashed through my body, and my flesh, unable to accept the suddenly denser quality of mana and bloodflow, simply stopped working.
A ringing filled my ears. My body screamed.
Bloody tears from my eyes and a heaving gut came free of charge.
Looking at it again, this really was a pathetic excuse for a body.
Or was this just what happened when a heart exploded?
I didn't know. I wasn't human.
Had I ever been human to begin with?
Ghastly blood-red blades materialized around me under the pretense of protecting my weakened self.
What a joke.
Self-preservation? Just kill me already. Sever my soul with those bright crimson blades.
Crack.
It burst again. Again.
The eighty-eighth heart.
When would I finally stop counting this meaningless number?
"Ha. Hahuhu."
Laughter and moans tangled together as they left my mouth.
In this moment of self-mockery, even my mind was driven to its absolute limit.
What a ridiculous story.
A body that lost its reason if it didn't drink blood.
And yet when I gripped a knife in trembling hands and drove it into someone's heart—
When I absorbed their blood while watching the light fade from their eyes as they collapsed dying onto the cold floor—
My body rejected it. Wrong species. Incompatible.
That was why.
Why the heart burst and the limbs were crushed.
Why the nerves snapped and the blood vessels screamed.
And then this body mechanically regenerated itself all over again.
Little by little, forcibly, accumulating and accepting the blood of another species.
"Ha, haah. Hff."
— Tick, grind, tick.
Vampires were mythical creatures that died easily if they couldn't drink blood, weren't they?
So why was a Damphir, who inherited that bloodline, a being that could never die?
Even if the blood dried up and the heart exploded, it still wouldn't die?
And yet it still drove me to commit murder after murder with a hunger I couldn't endure?
I never wanted to kill anything that was like a person.
Three a day.
Three people a day.
All I could do was laugh hollowly.
The standard for not giving up on being human?
I had clearly gone insane.
My thoughts thinned. My bloodflow ran wild.
It wasn't usually like this. Today it was especially bad.
I needed a cigarette.
Mana-leaf, where did I put the mana-leaf…
— Tick, tick.
Crushing the noise underfoot, I lifted my head.
I checked the shelf. Nothing.
Gone. Gone.
Nothing at all.
Cold. Lonely.
My heart throbbed.
It felt like it had burst. No — it must have burst. Or had it? I couldn't tell.
It did hurt a little, after all.
My nerves shrieked and flared.
A powerless voice rang through the silent room and vanished without an echo.
The chill air dyed the invisible darkness even blacker.
What I—
What I could do—
Was the same as those people from my past who had become cold corpses before me with holes punched through their hearts.
Blame my own powerless, helpless self, and calmly accept the pain closing in around me.
Recall the memories of losing my reason and swinging a blade, discarding my victims, and flounder in the red swamp stained with their blood.
"Hngh."
Myself.
I had cursed the self that had dragged the world into a bottomless swamp for a very long time.
It was only natural that I couldn't feel alive even while maintaining this twisted existence.
Ever since the fragrance of life had taken root and the world had been born, I alone had quietly contemplated death while carrying out slaughter.
I couldn't resist the hunger. I couldn't stand against the fate that came for me.
If that was a sin that could never be washed clean—
Then this was the punishment handed down by the countless people who had feared me so terribly, and by every being that had ever wanted my head.
Repeating situations. Repeating fragments of thought crumbling apart.
Of course something had gone wrong.
Rage surged up.
I could see the clock. My nerves snapped toward it at once.
— Tick.
It floated quietly beside me as I sat coughing on the floor.
What the hell are you?
What do you want from me? Are you trying to hurt me? Kill me?
Just answer me this one thing.
Why do you only appear on days like this — only when my madness is at its peak?
When those clock hands point to twelve, is my heart going to burst again?
— Grind, clunk, grind, clunk.
Tell me.
What am I supposed to do?
How do I break this vicious cycle of pain?
Answer me.
Answer me.
And shut up that damned ticking while you're at it.
"……"
Even my desperate wish changed nothing.
In that living room so vast it made my head ache, only my small moans continued to sound.
───Clunk, fzzzzzt.
Something fell from the shelf with a noise, and in the instant my vision grew strangely bright—
My consciousness cut out.
I opened my eyes.
That damned clock was long gone. In its place, a hazy digital clock swam into view.
Morning was breaking.
"Cough, cough!"
The first thought that struck me was that I had to clean all of this up.
It was a small iron rule of mine: Bloody must never find out before she woke and emerged from the Subspace.
I couldn't make her worry.
Any moment now she would tear open a rift in space and come face me.
I switched on a small lantern and set it upright.
First I went to the bathroom, roughly wet a mop, and started scrubbing the floor.
My condition after blacking out wasn't great, but then again, ordinary me was always steeped in exhaustion — I'd long since grown used to it. No problem.
With small arms and hands I scrubbed the floor in the same repeated motions. The dark red blood and its stench gradually thinned and vanished.
The one mercy was that things hadn't gotten as raw and obvious as they did at a hunting ground.
I wiped down the table and straightened the sofa. The blanket hadn't gotten dirty, so I folded it roughly and set it on the floor.
Around the time the word "clean" almost fit, something out of place caught my eye.
"What."
Letters shimmered.
A cold blue book.
The book I had compiled day after day ever since the world changed and my life plummeted into a bottomless hell — documenting everything about the vampire race.
But in the end, I had never found what I was looking for. Never been able to write it down.
— Flutter.
The pages turned.
Toward the final chapter.
Yes. That page.
On Death.
But nothing was written there. Well, of course…
— Flash.
Light erupted from that very page.
The oval clock revealed itself once more.
What?
What is this?
In midair, the frame of a crown took shape, and red liquid began to fill it.
I knew it instinctively.
I needed it.
The blood to dye that Crown crimson.
— Crackle-crackle-crackle.
And a rift tore open in the air.
I urgently swept my arm and sliced through space, hiding both the book and the crown floating in the void.
She couldn't find out.
A spirit's intelligence and abilities were formidable.
There was no way she wouldn't catch the scent of my blood staining that book red, or the smell of flesh that had writhed in agony.
Anxiety gripped me. As if killing people weren't enough — I was afraid of wounding even the spirit closest to me.
The rift opened and violet light poured out. A small red sphere twisted its body free.
Pure white eyes and a dark, tattered cloak gleamed.
"Sleep well?"
My eyes met Bloody's. Without thinking, I clenched my hands tight.
Silence settled between us.