A Shock for the Cat (3)
"Shall I call it brave, or simply reckless?"
"......"
An awkward silence hung over the room. When I finally came to my senses, I was lying flat on my back on the bed in my own room—not outside, but inside the convent building.
"What on earth were you thinking, stepping out of the shadows like that?"
"......"
Apparently, I had fainted for a moment. The details were hazy—swept up in some strange feeling, I had stepped beyond the shadows, and now everything felt faint and dreamlike, as if I'd been living inside a dream.
"Remember that you are a vampire."
The tin can's voice drifted over from somewhere close by. I stared blankly at the ceiling for a long moment, then let out one deep breath and slowly took stock of my surroundings.
"...What is this? My head's still foggy."
The tin can sat motionless in a chair beside my bed, and beyond the closed door, I could faintly make out the children's cheerful voices. By my reckoning, not much time had passed since I collapsed—and yet my mind felt as dull as if I'd been out for a solid half a day.
"What in the world happened...?"
I sat up slowly and spoke with care. At that, the tin can beside me made a great clattering noise and abruptly began scratching at its helmet.
"Don't tell me you've forgotten?"
"...No. I'm just feeling a bit hazy."
"You suddenly stepping out of the shadows caused a proper panic, you know. Not that I particularly care—after all, I already know what you are."
Unlike the tin can, which answered with considerable commotion, I could only blink my drowsy eyes over and over with a vacant expression.
"What did you tell the children?"
"I told them it was heatstroke, for now. So don't worry too much."
"And they bought that?"
"Of course they did. I explained it well enough for them to understand."
At the tin can's confident reply, I felt the tension drain from my chest. Reckless as it had been, if things had gone even slightly wrong, I might have caused something I couldn't have handled. Thanks to the tin can's quick thinking, a catastrophic blunder had barely been averted.
"That aside, I was genuinely shocked. Not only did a vampire boldly walk outside in broad daylight—she didn't even burn."
"...I'm not like ordinary vampires."
"Still, you fainted afterward, so I'd say it affects you to some degree, no?"
"Yes. As you can see."
"The more I learn about you, the more fascinating you get."
Ever since I'd come to, a strange ache in my chest had been nagging at me—poking and prodding at me relentlessly. It wasn't severe pain, but it was more than a little annoying.
"So, why exactly did you come out of the shadows?"
At the tin can's question, I slowly rolled my eyes to the side.
"Hmm. Jealousy, I suppose."
"Jealousy?"
"Children who used to know only me—I suppose seeing them grow so friendly with you stung a little."
"Haha, grown woman jealous over something like that? You're worse than the kids."
"I know. It's ridiculous, isn't it?"
By this point, both the strange wrongness I felt from my surroundings and a nameless suspicion about myself had begun to surface. To have my mind go blank over a mere pang of jealousy and to act purely on instinct without a single thought—no matter how I turned it over, it was so absurd that a foolish, hollow laugh kept escaping me unbidden.
"I understand perfectly well how much you treasure the children. But don't fret over every little thing like this. Children are simple creatures by nature."
"I know. I've always been slow about that sort of thing."
"Right. And sooner or later, they'll come to understand on their own anyway."
"Besides, I've never once seen those children throw a tantrum at me."
"Hm?"
As the tin can tilted its head in growing puzzlement, I let a faint, soft smile cross my lips.
"Oh, by the way—where is Priscilla right now?"
"Ah, she's outside playing with the children. I asked her to, so you could rest easy."
"Is that so?"
"Mm. By now she's probably exhausted and panting for breath."
"Everyone's suffering so much on my account. I'm sorry."
"It's fine. Don't dwell on it."
With that, an awkward lull settled between the tin can and me for a brief while. Sitting on the bed, I slowly smoothed down the blanket with my fingertips and sank into my own thoughts. The tin can, too, sat in its chair, silently gazing toward the window. Though the curtains blocked any view of the outside, it nevertheless felt as though the armored figure was staring intently at something beyond them.
"...Well, seeing as you seem all right, I'll step out now."
"Mr. Bell Ross."
"Hm? What is it?"
"Could you stay still for just a moment?"
At my sudden remark, the tin can froze mid-motion. Then it tilted its head again, growing more and more perplexed.
"Why all of a sudden? Your expression's even gone stiff—"
"......"
My mind was still hazy and blurred, as if thick fog had settled over it. That strange ache in my chest, too, continued without pause. No matter how many small breaths I drew, this inexplicable pain would not settle.
"Levinia?"
The tin can's voice sounded softly beside me. And yet, at this very moment—my mind held room for one thought, and one thought only.
"...That's right. How many people in this world approach with nothing but simple goodwill and no purpose at all?"
As I murmured those words under my breath, the tin can standing dumbly before me flinched and jolted in reaction.
"You were suspicious from the very start."
The moment the words left my mouth, every piece of furniture in the room began to tremble faintly, twisting grotesquely as they started to move. The walls, the bed, the chair, the bookshelf—one and all grew blurred, dissolving little by little into wisps of haze until they vanished without a trace. As if they had never existed at all, everything in the room warped gradually and turned formless.
Even as I climbed off the bed and stood dazed in the ever-distorting space, I felt a hollow resignation at this absurd transformation, while a lingering, uncomfortable question bloomed unbidden in some corner of my mind—and my brow furrowed, bit by bit.
"Just how long have you been deceiving me?"
The more the space faded into blur, the more certain I became that this place was not reality. Even the air against my fingertips now felt heavy and unreal.
"......"
At some point, the tin can had fallen silent, exuding an odd, unsettling air. I knew perfectly well that nothing existed behind that visor—and yet, somehow, an unpleasant gaze seemed to press upon me, slowly making my skin crawl.
"...How did you know?"
"That was my question to ask first."
At first, I had simply chalked it up to imagination. The discomfort I'd felt on and off since this morning, the vague sense that something was off—I'd assumed it was all just an unpleasant aftertaste born of my petty jealousy. But after losing consciousness and waking again, those feelings had strangely begun to accelerate. Things I had taken for granted became shrouded in odd doubts, and I found myself wondering why everything had flowed along so smoothly.
"Don't tell me—the sunlight?"
"......"
That brief moment when my conversation with the tin can had lapsed. For some reason, it hadn't reacted to my Spoken Word at all—which struck me as strange. And when I called up my status window on a hunch, it simply wouldn't appear.
After I slew the demon that day, I hadn't checked my status window right away. Whether or not I had absorbed the demon's skill didn't matter much at the time. Checking on the children's condition came first. Plenty of things piled up after that too, leaving no spare moment to look. Even so, it was important enough that it should have crossed my mind at least once. My usual habit of not relying much on the status window had, quite unintentionally, tripped me at exactly the wrong moment.
— FWOOSH!!!
At last it erupted like a bomb, and along with the violent pressure that burst outward without mercy, the hazy mists swirling all around were swept away and vanished cleanly in an instant.
"......"
My eyes had closed at some point. When I slowly lifted my long-lowered eyelids and looked ahead, what spread before me was not the daytime scene of the church, but the nightscape of a forest—somehow, familiar.
"...After going to all this trouble, all you could manage was to hold me this long?"
Only now were all my senses beginning to reclaim their proper places. The air touching my skin and the faint breeze drifting around me felt relatively vivid. The discomfort and wrongness I'd been feeling until moments ago had disappeared as well. Only then did it truly sink in that everything had returned to normal.
"So the reason I suddenly fell into that illusion—was it this greatsword?"
The tin can's greatsword, which pierced cleanly through the very center of my chest, was emitting a strange energy. Apparently, this was the source of that nagging ache I'd been feeling all along.
"Yes. That greatsword is called Severance. If it inflicts a fatal wound, it traps the victim in a space like the one you were just in."
"...Inflicting a fatal wound on me would be no easy feat, I'd think."
"Which is exactly why I stayed behind. To enter the same space as you and keep you from waking up as long as possible."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Ordinarily, merely touching you with that sword would have been more than enough. But you regenerated the moment it was driven into your body, which made the whole affair remarkably troublesome."
It had been driven in through my back. The tin can had stolen close so stealthily that even I hadn't noticed, hauling that enormous greatsword that would have been difficult to so much as draw out again. But while the ambush had succeeded, my body—far sturdier and faster-regenerating than expected—had evidently thrown it into no small panic. I could sense it quite clearly from the haphazard way the greatsword had been embedded.
"So I had no choice but to exploit that brief window while the effect was active—forcibly intervening myself to amplify it."
The instant the tin can finished speaking, the greatsword piercing my body began to lose its shape and melt away.
"You're certainly no ordinary vampire."
"So the owner of this sword is capable of crossing between spaces freely, I take it."
"That's right. And that space also frays the victim's nerves the longer they remain inside."
"...Then how many days have I been under this sword's influence?"
"As you can see, not even a full day has passed."
At the tin can's matter-of-fact answer, my brow creased of its own accord. I had spent several days in that place, yet less than a single day had passed in reality—something about it felt deeply suspicious. But I had no leisure to pick apart every detail now.
Because—
Levinia Fallen Grace
For some reason, the Spoken Word skill was nowhere to be seen in the status window I checked on impulse. For a moment I wondered whether I was still trapped in an illusion—but the status window, which had refused to appear before, had come up just fine this time, so I was certain this was no illusion. Putting all of that together, only one possibility remained that I could conceive of.
"Don't tell me... I failed to finish things off back then...?"
The only explanation that made any sense was that I had been ambushed just as I was about to finish off that demon. If everything had flowed continuously from that moment, then the present situation—less than a single day having passed—became all the harder to understand.
"What on earth is going—no, more importantly, where is that demon right now?!"
"...If you mean the intermediate-ranked one, it's probably just about finished recovering and on its way to the church as we speak."
"Th-the church...?"
All manner of dreadful thoughts came rushing into my head at lightning speed. The cold sweat trickling warmly down my left cheek made my present mood feel all the more sickening.
"Don't glare at me like that. I told you plainly back then, didn't I?"
The tin can's sudden stream of cryptic remarks only deepened my unease, and I couldn't keep my expression from twisting. But unlike me, the tin can remained perfectly composed to the very end, continuing on calmly.
"When an order comes down from above, my personal opinions cease to matter in the slightest."
Those words had clearly come from the tin can's mouth that dawn. At the time, I'd thought nothing of them. Only now, belatedly piecing the situation together, could I roughly grasp what meaning those words had carried. But regretting it now was pointless. What was done could not be undone, no matter how I turned it over.
"All this absurd scheming, just to reclaim a single forest."
Besides, even a demon with superb regeneration would struggle to recover from wounds that severe within a mere handful of hours. Therefore, the worst scenario I was imagining had, with very high probability, not yet come to pass.
"This is the first time in my life I've felt rage welling up like this."