Class Assignment Exam (9)
“Ugh… pant, pant…”
Albert instinctively gasped for breath, desperate to clear his stifled chest and reeling head.
‘What happened…? My memories…’
At some point during his everyday life, he had begun to feel as though his memories were turning strange, warping at the edges. Even then, he had merely found it an annoying nuisance, never suspecting he needed to take any sort of measure.
And from a certain moment onward, it was as if he had fallen into a deep slumber—as if wandering through a dream. He seemed to be awake, yet he had zero control over his limbs, drifting through existence in a lucid trance. By the time his senses finally cleared, he found himself here.
Amidst the profound confusion clouding his mind, Albert suddenly realized that the sensation tingling through his hands felt horribly wrong.
“What in the world…”
A stench of blood so thick and metallic it made his eyes water hung heavy in the air. And then…
‘A weight…’
An unmistakable weight pressed down against his body.
Had he been crushed beneath some debris and injured? Albert considered the possibility for a fleeting second, only to dismiss it as sheer nonsense. Aside from a dull dizziness, he felt no pain whatsoever, and whatever was pressing down upon him felt far too light to be rubble heavy enough to hurt him.
Regardless, lying there with his eyes shut would change nothing.
Albert carefully, quietly peeled his eyelids open to see what was happening. Though his vision remained blurred by the lingering vertigo, the sight that greeted him the instant his eyes focused made his shoulders violently flinch.
‘Is that… hair…?’
Tangled locks of hair, stripped of their original luster and soaked in crimson gore, filled his vision. The stench of blood throbbing against his brain, the bizarre sensation clinging to his fingers, and those blood-matted strands…
A tremor began to ripple through Albert’s frame.
No, it couldn’t be.
‘No, there’s no way… There’s just no way…’
Yet no matter how frantically he denied it in his heart, reality did not budge an inch.
“N-no… No…”
Albert tried to shove himself up, desperate to throw off the girl collapsed atop his chest, but his right hand was wedged tightly inside something warm, wet, and sickening, refusing to slide free. Straining with all his might to pull his right hand out, he realized it was pinned fast and pushed against the ground with his left hand instead.
As his upper body lifted, the girl draped over him slumped limply.
“H-hiek…!”
With that sudden shift in weight, that revolting, squelching texture gripped his right hand once more. Only then did Albert finally understand.
What had taken place in this ruin, and what he was doing with his own hands at this very moment.
Yet Albert desperately wished not to understand. He felt that the instant he truly acknowledged it, his sanity would shatter into pieces.
“Ah… Ahhh…”
Albert cast his shaking gaze downward. The limp, motionless girl—no…
“Th-the Saint…”
Aria’s face was deathly pale. Trails of freshly vomited blood stained the corners of her lips, and for some incomprehensible reason, one of her arms was entirely gone. Her vestments were shredded into ragged ribbons, reduced to bloody tatters that failed to serve even the basic purpose of clothing.
In stark contrast, save for the dull dizziness in his skull, Albert felt not a single ache or wound across his own body.
Because the outward manifestation of the Saint’s divine power was so profoundly shocking, its nature was widely known to almost everyone in the world. Albert, of course, was well aware of what kind of miracle she wielded. And in a situation like this, the fact that she was mutilated within an inch of her life while he was completely unscathed could mean only one thing.
“Haah… haah…”
Albert stared down at his own hand with trembling eyes. To confirm what kind of sickening texture his fingers had been buried in, he grasped Aria’s limp body and pushed her slowly backward. With every inch she moved, the unbearable reality bore down upon him.
“Hiek…”
The further his hand slid out of her, the more Albert’s face twisted into a mask of pure weeping despair. And finally, when his hand slipped entirely free into the open air, Albert froze solid.
“H-heugh…”
Held fast in his palm—pierced clean through his fingers—was a heart that had ceased beating.
“Aaaagh! AAAAGHHH!”
Recognizing what had just been torn from Aria’s chest, Albert was plunged into unadulterated madness. Screaming at the top of his lungs, he violently shoved Aria away and scrambled backward on all fours. Deprived of anything to lean against, Aria’s body collapsed heavily onto the cold stone floor.
Clutching his head between blood-soaked palms, Albert hyperventilated in sheer agony.
“A dr-dream… This is a dream…! It’s a nightmare…!”
This cannot be real.
He could not bring himself to believe that he had slaughtered the Saint of this era with his bare hands. Only now did the memories of what had just transpired begin to resurface, piece by horrifying piece.
Memories of himself twisted into a demon by corruptive demonic energy. Memories of the overwhelming magic power granted by demonization, which he had wielded to murder Aria over and over with unspeakable, agonizing cruelty.
With trembling, unfocused eyes, Albert surveyed his surroundings. The collapsed walls smashed to rubble, the floor and broken masonry painted in thick, congealed coats of dark blood… Connecting the dots through his returning memories, he understood that every crater, every slash, and every drop of gore had been carved by his own hands.
As the recollections flooded his mind, he let out a guttural, wretched shriek, tearing at his hair with gore-caked fingers.
The magical prowess he had held as his greatest pride—far beyond mere confidence, his very identity—had been utilized for nothing other than butchering the Saint. And not just once or twice, but dozens of times. Even if his consciousness had been drowned in demonization and none of it had been his voluntary will, the memories etched into his soul tormented him mercilessly.
If only he had remained ignorant. If only Aria had despised him, had screamed at him in hatred and demanded why he had done such horrific things—it wouldn’t have hurt this agonizingly.
“Hic… ugh… pant, pant…”
Above all else, what drove him completely insane was the way she had looked while restoring him to a human being.
Even as she died by his hands again and again, she had never lost her gentle smile, stepping forward with unyielding resolve and swearing that she would save him no matter what. The sight of her crawling across the dirt with broken, unresponsive limbs in an agony that defied description, desperate to wrap her arms around him and purify his corrupted soul. And the way she had looked at him—as though he bore not an ounce of blame—murmuring how relieved she was with a peaceful, comforted smile…
He could not purge that image from his heart.
‘All of it… Every last bit of this horror was done by me…’
How could anyone possibly go that far for someone else?
It was enough to drive him mad. No—perhaps he had already lost his mind.
To have murdered the girl before him dozens of times with his magic, and even in his final moments of corruption, to have dug into her flesh and crushed her heart just to ensure her death… The sheer revulsion he felt toward his own existence was bottomless. He even doubted whether a creature like him could truly be considered human anymore.
“Ha, haha… Hahahahaha! Hahahahahahaha!”
From Aria’s fallen form on the floor, dark blood continued to seep outward, spreading into a wide pool. Glancing down at her, the memory of her closing her eyes with that utterly serene, contented expression brought his hollow laughter to an abrupt halt.
Dragging his heavy feet, Albert stumbled toward the wall and slumped into a heap against it.
“Ha… Haha…”
His dry chuckles died away completely, and wrapping his arms tightly around his chest, he began to violently rake his nails across his flesh. Because he was clawing through his clothing, blood soon welled beneath his torn fingernails, but to Albert, such minor pain did not matter in the slightest.
He wanted to die. Over and over, he questioned whether an abomination like him should be erased from existence, incoherent murmurs spilling from his lips.
The ancestral magic passed down through his family line had never been learned for this. If he had known it would come to this, he would never have picked up magic in the first place. It would have been far better to simply die as a monster; at least then, he would never have had to suffer through this soul-crushing despair.
Why had she saved him? Why had she thrown her very life away just to preserve his?
Desperate as he was to die this very second, he could not bring himself to commit suicide. Instinctively, he knew that if he ended his life here, he would never have the right to face the girl who had sacrificed everything to keep him alive. Had it not been for that conviction, he would have ended himself with magic long ago.
Yet even as he told himself that death would rob him of any chance to atone, that it would render Aria’s sacrifice entirely meaningless, the agonizing craving for death refused to leave him.
Scritch, scratch.
“Heh… heheh… heheheh…”
His entire body itched. As if he were clad in garments that did not fit his frame, woven from some alien, repulsive fiber, a maddening prickling crawled under every inch of his skin.
It was certainly not a physical itch. Albert knew that full well. And yet, he kept gouging his nails into his flesh. Even knowing that no amount of clawing could ever soothe this irritation, Albert could not stop.
And so, within the terrifying silence of the subterranean ruins, Albert continued to gouge at his own body until someone finally came.
Until the blood flowing from his self-inflicted wounds soaked the stone floor beneath him.