What She Desired (3)
Yuel had decided the path she would take.
Knowing where she had to go and how she had to get there, her steps held no hesitation. She was that kind of person. Yuel quietly, steadfastly carried out what she had to do.
"The truth is,"
"I was afraid. Think about it. I close my eyes, open them again, and I'm dumped in a city I've never seen. I finally catch my breath, and then—'From now on, you're the lord'—and right in front of me my godfather kills himself."
"The city's a complete mess, people running around with blades everywhere, and somehow I'm the lord. What was I supposed to do? I had to pull through. Let's just hold out for one year, I told myself. If I could last even a year, I figured I could at least look that old bastard in the eye and say I'd done okay…"
"Years went by. The stench of blood clung to my hands. One look at the red and I wanted to vomit. Ah, I hate this. I really hate it. Fuck—is this how I live and how I die? How much longer do I have to keep living like this?"
"I stopped knowing what I was. Ah—people just look at me and they're scared. If I rule through fear, at least it'll be better than this. Fine. I'll just become a creature of pure terror. That was my decision."
"I made that decision, and I lived by it."
Yuel looked at Najin.
"If you hadn't appeared, I would have lived that way and died that way. Imagining my end isn't hard. An existence everyone feared. The most vicious of vipers, who executed every last soul in the city with her own hands."
She smiled bitterly.
"A monster would have been born—bloodless, tearless, empty of feeling, obsessed with the law."
But, she said, and took Najin's hand.
"Not now."
Fingers intertwined with fingers. Gazing at Najin, Yuel wore a faint smile. Her lips moved.
"Najin."
"Yes, Yuel."
"You are my anchor."
The city's residents defined her as their lord. They feared her, shunned her, regarded her as some freak set apart from themselves. Had things gone as they once would have, the Yuel who was losing herself would have accepted that as her new self.
But now it was different.
As long as the man holding her hand was there—as long as he held her fast, as long as he looked at her—Yuel could keep from losing herself. Najin was the one anchor that fixed the human named Yuel in place.
"In front of you, at least, I can still be me."
Yuel smiled softly.
That smile held countless feelings. Gratitude, affection, tenderness, a touch of regret, and a thread of desire.
"So this hand."
Yuel leaned into him.
"Don't let go."
The stage began its headlong plunge toward the finale.
The city's population dwindled.
Countless incidents flashed past in a blur. Massacres, terrorism, arson, cannibalism, torture—criminals appeared and vanished in endless succession.
As if urging the human thrashing on her own stage to give up, the god who had made this world sowed chaos without end. Yuel's confidants betrayed her. Rebellion spread into the lord's castle itself. Yet she did not waver.
She pressed forward without hesitation. She killed those who broke the law. In a city swarming with beasts, she hunted the beasts for the sake of the humans who remained.
By the time the population that had once been a hundred and seventy thousand had fallen to ten thousand, only those of unusually iron will were left in the city.
They sensed their own ends. Some of them accepted it; those who could not thrashed and fought.
And so.
In Swaepedosi—the Closed City built to shove a hundred and seventy thousand humans inside and birth a single beast—
Yuel endured the long years. In all that time she never once broke the rules she had set for herself. It was her obsession, and a kind of madness as well.
To prove she was human before a god who treated humans as livestock, Yuel endured.
And the end was drawing near. The 172,387th human who had held out to the last committed a crime not by the god's impulse but by her own will. In a way, it was suicide. She died smiling under Yuel's hand.
Ordinarily, she would have been the last.
But one more human remained in the city.
"Najin."
A variable that should never have existed in the experiment designed by a transcendent.
Yuel looked at Najin. The man before her was, save for Yuel herself, the last human left in this city. Gazing at him, she smiled bitterly.
"I see."
As if something had clicked into place.
The number of lives required for one human to become a transcendent was 172,397. And this city's population had been maintained at one more than that—172,398.
The man before her was the 172,399th human.
A variable that should not have existed here. Facing that variable, Yuel couldn't help but laugh.
"I'm glad."
"Glad of what?"
"That you're the one left at the end. If I'd had to kill even you with my own hands, I probably…"
"Probably?"
"Do I have to say it out loud?"
Najin shrugged.
Yuel fell silent for a moment.
The two of them were now perched in the middle of Swaepedosi, with no one left but the two of them.
"…"
Without a word, Yuel squeezed Najin's hand hard. As if she knew it was time to let go, yet she did not want to. She bowed her head deeply.
She was hesitating.
She knew it too. Only one step remained. One step, and she could put a period on this wretched story. How many years had she endured for that period? Now the ending truly stood right before her.
"Ahh."
Yuel let out a sigh. Knowing her own ending, she smiled as if it were a pity.
"There were a few more things I wanted to say. Plenty of things I wanted to try with you. It's a little disappointing."
"Things like what?"
"If you don't know, then say so. Ha, fuck—it's not like you're completely dense. You're asking even though you already know, aren't you?"
Najin shrugged. No matter how oblivious he might be in this particular direction, failing to notice this was impossible. He had only acted that way because Yuel seemed to want him not to notice.
"Will you be all right?"
"As if I could be."
Yuel lowered her head. Pure white hair spilled down. The strands that curtained her face swayed.
"But I said it back then, didn't I? In a city like this—a city that goads people's desires—I don't want to say it as if I'm being shoved into it. It would be too wasteful to speak it like some kind of excuse."
"Is that so."
"Yes. So…"
She rose from her seat. Then she released Najin's hand. Even after letting go, she opened and closed her own fingers as if the loss still stung.
"I'll save the words I've been holding for when we're outside."
She knew it herself.
The moment they stepped outside, there would be no more time to deliver those words. Knowing that, she still forced a smile.
"Thank you for everything, Najin."
If she so wished, a seed rested in her heart that could finish everything in a single instant—from Sprouting past Blooming all the way to Full Bloom. Yuel rested a hand on her chest and looked at Najin.
Bitterness. A touch of regret.
Yet eyes that had made their resolve.
Yuel let out a long breath and accepted the self she had refused for so long. Her heart beat hard. Her soul began to tremble.
"Because of you, I could remain human until the very end."
Not a precise machine for maintaining the city, but the human named Yuel.
"See you outside."
With those final words, Yuel closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, it was the lord of Swaepedosi who looked out.
The lord who had, by her own hands or by the rules she herself had made, slain a hundred and seventy thousand humans affirmed herself.
The qualifications were met. The conditions were fulfilled. All she needed was to affirm herself as lord.
The moment she accepted herself as lord, the seed at last Sprouted. The instant the shoot broke the surface, the flower bloomed. Petals steeped in blood-red Bloomed and began to scatter around her. The flower dyed in crimson reached Full Bloom.
Fwaaah.
In a place where neither sunlight nor starlight ever reached, the fully bloomed flower swallowed the city. As if blood were flowing through the city's sewers, as if blood had soaked into the cracks between bricks, as if drops of blood were falling from severed heads displayed in the square—red flowers bloomed across the entire city.
Swaepedosi was steeped in blood.
In the center of the blood-soaked city, the lord stretched a hand toward the sky. The gathered blood surged upward. The moment the red petals touched the night-sea sky, a star rose where no star had been.
Flash.
It was not a platinum star. The platinum star was drowned in blood. The star inverted and blackened. Black and red swirled together and began to become a dark-red star.
—Ah.
The moment she saw that star, Merlin's eyes went wide. She was not the only one. Najin's eyes widened as well. That Yuel had become a transcendent was no surprise. What startled them both was the color of the star.
A red star.
Not merely red—a star steadily approaching black.
There was no one who did not know what a dark-red star was called. If the first star a child heard of was Arthur's, the next story the adults told was always about the Calamity Star.
The Witch of the Abyss.
The termination sealed at the world's end. Deferred annihilation. The existence that had once swallowed nine-tenths of the world. The dark-red star, the Calamity Star—that word had always pointed to her alone. Every dark-red star was a star born from her.
A Calamity Star rose into the sky.
Only then, as if something had clicked, Merlin's face twisted. She turned over the words the madwoman who had designed this experiment—Hermann—had once muttered.
"One who would be born must destroy a world. The moment a human destroys the world that cages them, they leap into a space no one else can reach."
The destruction of a world.
"Some transcendents are strong, some weak—where does that difference in strength come from? It comes from the shape of the world they have recognized."
How one perceived the world.
—Ha.
Merlin let out a hollow laugh.
What that madwoman Hermann had been trying to create was not an ordinary transcendent. She had not poured this much effort into simply producing one more transcendent.
What Hermann had sought to create was a Calamity Star.
A being who dyed the entire world she recognized in blood and declared the end of that world. Compared to the star of the Witch of Camlann it would be meager, but at the very least she had intended to birth a transcendent whose star shared the same color and the same nature.
…And here stood one human.
A human who, in the space she had recognized as a single world, had killed every last person but herself—a human who now held the qualifications to ascend to transcendence.
A human who had defined herself solely through terror and fear.
What she would possess was not a beautiful star.
In the sky over Swaepedosi, a dark-red Calamity Star shone.
The moment the Calamity Star rose, the city could not endure the presence of a transcendent. It had been designed that way from the start. The instant a transcendent was born, the experiment ended.
Crrrack.
The sky tore. The city collapsed. As one world was destroyed, Yuel reached transcendence.
"The bird struggles to break free of the egg."
"The egg is a world."
"One who would be born must destroy a world."
"The bird that is born flies to God."
And the name of that God is Hermann.
Hermann watched the fledgling bird beating its wings toward her. Looking upon the masterpiece she had created, the corners of her mouth split wide. With eyes curved into half-moons, she clapped.
Cheers. Praise. Applause.
She moved her body to meet her masterpiece face to face.
And she was not the only one who moved.
The moment Swaepedosi collapsed—the very moment the stage shifted and took a form fit for transcendents to set foot upon—two constellations other than Hermann moved almost simultaneously. Both were variables that should never have existed in this story.
The Revelry Emperor unfurled her script.
Najin drew his sword.
Almost at the same instant, two transcendents crashed onto the stage.