Chapter 32
The first thing to burst from her was a cough. But before she could draw another breath, a broad, gentle hand covered her mouth, and Sylvia let out a hot exhale against the press of that palm. Her lungs swelled and collapsed; her whole body jolted unsteadily. Owen patted her back once, twice, until her trembling eased.
“Shh.”
His low voice warmed the shell of her ear. Her head throbbed as though it might split open, and the dizziness left her face twisted in pain. Her throat was so dry it felt torn raw, and her eyes were gritty, as if someone had scattered sand across them, making it difficult to open them properly.
When she reached out, her fingers found something like a stone floor. But the instant she tried to gather strength in her arm, a soft yet firm hand at the center of her back gently but unmistakably pushed her down again. Her chest was pinned, and something hard but warm touched her chin.
“Sorry, but if you keep moving like that, you’re just going to make things worse.”
The murmured voice rumbled faintly in her ear. She knew someone was beside her, and she tried to ask for water so that person might help her.
“Ah. You’re thirsty?”
Mm.
A helpless little sound, swallowed inwardly, vibrated through her lips. Only then did Sylvia realize she had her mouth pressed against someone’s chest.
“Your canteen had a weird medicinal taste. So I tossed it. We’ll have to make do with one between us.”
Meanwhile, Owen frowned in thought, aware that he could barely move his hands. The waterskin was within reach. He could open it with one hand and drink, but he couldn’t feed Sylvia. He couldn’t lift his arm high enough.
In the end, Owen held a few mouthfuls of water in his own mouth and lowered his head to meet Sylvia’s lips. When he parted them with his tongue and let the water flow in, Sylvia gulped it down frantically. It still wasn’t enough; she even licked at his mouth, begging for more.
Owen was about to tell her to wait, that he’d do it again, but Sylvia moved faster, biting his lower lip and dragging her wet tongue inside to lick at him. The sensation of having his flesh mashed and pressed like that was not especially pleasant. In the end, Owen covered her mouth again—he didn’t want to do it, because it made him feel like a criminal who had kidnapped her—but he took another mouthful of water, moved his hand away, and kissed her lips once more.
By the third time, Sylvia seemed to come to herself and opened her eyes. Still pressed mouth to mouth, she looked at him with glassy, mist-fogged eyes, drifting somewhere between dream and reality before she finally spoke in a voice raw with thirst.
“...Hes... Heston?”
The moment he heard that name, his stomach lurched so violently he felt sick. He had thought, at some decisive moment in the future, Sylvia might call Heston’s name instead of his, but the reality was even worse than he had imagined. It was so awful that even the half-hard thing he’d been sporting went soft.
“Heston?”
Then the ground outside trembled. Owen shut his mouth on the question, and this time he covered Sylvia’s lips with far more willingness than before. The floor beneath them vibrated in a heavy, thudding wave, like a herd of animals trampling over packed earth, and the whole place shook. Sylvia must have sensed instinctively that the situation was dangerous, too, because she drew a careful breath and went still.
It was not going to be a short night.
Their shelter was so cramped that the two of them had to remain pressed together the entire time, and with monsters swarming outside, there was nowhere they could go. Owen closed his tired eyes to the vibrations that rose and fell like a lullaby, and before long he dozed off.
When he woke again, a clearer pair of eyes was looking back at him.
Seeing that her gaze had focused, Owen felt a small measure of relief. At first he had thought something had gotten into her eye and physically injured it, so he had poured water into it after emptying several other people’s waterskins that had fallen nearby. But now that he thought about it, the strange medicine in Sylvia’s canteen must have made her temporarily unable to see.
“I’m glad you can see again.”
But Sylvia didn’t relax at his gentle words. Only then did it occur to him that she might protest this situation—the two of them locked together in such a tiny space, bodies pressed tight.
Owen felt awkward and embarrassed, so he looked away and cleared his throat.
“Mm.”
“Mm?”
Apparently Sylvia thought his reaction far too calm. She had been trapped, unable to move, waiting for him to wake with his eyes open.
“Hi.”
Owen answered lazily, even though he knew that wasn’t what she wanted, and Sylvia frowned before trying to sit up in a hurry, only to smash the back of her head against the ceiling. Owen, half-asleep, found his gentleness again and quietly stroked the crown of her head as she buried her forehead against his chest.
“Ouch.”
“Where the hell are we? No—how did we get here?”
The voice that drifted out of her, still coated in the aftertaste of pain, was dismal to the core. Owen had expected her to ask that as soon as she woke, so he answered smoothly without hesitation.
“Thanks to your barrier, we both survived, but you lost consciousness, so I had no choice but to get you out. You’d been out longer than I expected, and before long the sun had already started to set. I figured we were done for, but then I happened to find a place like this.”
“So what is this place, then...? Wait, is that an air hole?”
After feeling along the tightly sealed wall, Sylvia found an opening and shoved a finger inside. The moment some liquid spat out from a monster outside, she yanked her hand back with a gasp and looked at Owen with wide, frightened eyes.
As though answering her hopes, Owen responded without a pause.
“There were a lot of these. Around the mountain. I guess more than three people are living here.”
“What?”
She gaped in disbelief. Owen lowered his eyes and looked over her expression before glancing away again. His gaze brushed her face and then left it, so obviously that Sylvia suddenly became self-conscious, wondering if she looked rather shabby right now.
Well, what else was she supposed to look like? She’d just come back from the brink of death. Of course Owen still looked immaculate, but most people weren’t beautiful at the exact moment they clawed their way back from dying. They didn’t have to be.
Anyway, back to Owen. Everything happening here seemed deeply strange. The fact that Courtney had suddenly taken off with the holy relic was suspicious enough. No, come to think of it, had that even really been a holy relic in the first place? Sylvia went through it piece by piece: she hadn’t been able to sense where the holy relic was at all, and when Agilse had removed it, there hadn’t been a blinding white light like she’d expected—just a vague blue glow.
“It seems like that was a fake, doesn’t it? The holy relic, I mean. I’ve never even heard of a fake holy relic before.”
Owen gave a perfunctory nod. He didn’t seem especially interested in the question right now. He looked exhausted, too.
Only then did Sylvia belatedly realize how much must have been contained in those few words of his: “I figured we were done for, but then I happened to find a place like this.”
From the start, her barrier had been barely enough even for her alone. Knowing Owen, he had probably thrown himself over her in the end to protect her, taking the full force of the collapse with his own body.
And after that, he would have dug her out from the rubble, then, while Sylvia had sensibly passed out without a care in the world, he would have fought off the monsters that kept bursting out while feeling hopeless about how they were ever supposed to survive here and sinking into frustration.
Sylvia had never been the one left behind, but from what she had heard people say, the fear of being abandoned was beyond imagination. Thinking of him enduring all of that alone made her feel guilty all at once, and something in her chest shifted awkwardly. Maybe she had snapped at him instead of thanking him, and then deliberately turned her attention to something else.
At last, she fidgeted and laid a hand on top of his head. Each tap against his hair made his expression go strangely blank.
“Thank you. You worked hard.”
“...”
“Are you hurt anywhere?”
With no room to move her arm to the side, she had to sweep it down along most of his body just to check him over. Her face grew hot from the awkwardness of it, and then a sharp ache pulsed between her legs, drawing her waist tight in reflex. At the same time, something inconvenient pressed up against her where she was lying across him.
“...”
At this point, it was probably best to remind herself of their position. She was sprawled on top of him, Sylvia’s face against his chest, her breasts against his stomach, her stomach against his... no.
“No way.”
She said it in a shaking voice, but Owen only closed his reddened eyes tightly. For once, the usually shameless Owen was actually showing embarrassment, and Sylvia couldn’t even clap and enjoy the spectacle.
That was because of the damned bond between them. If he got aroused, so did she.
“You’re seriously—at a time like this...?”
She wasn’t so much stunned as exasperated. They might die any minute now. In a life-or-death situation like this, he still wanted to get hard? And what had she even done? All she’d done was pat his head and thank him.
“Come to think of it, where’s your armor?”
Only then, like someone just realizing the barrier had vanished, Sylvia groped at Owen’s upper body. She was still fully dressed in her uniform, but Owen was not. Beneath his thin shirt, she could feel the shape of his body, the lines of him, even the texture of his skin, and it made her head spin. What was she supposed to do later when they had to get out and fight monsters?
“I buried it in the ground.”
He muttered lowly, his voice distinctly uncomfortable. Sylvia let out a breath of relief, but then she became aware of his thing pressing against her belly again and her face flamed anew.
Right. It was only because they were so close together. She’d just stay still.
She clamped her mouth shut and kept her breathing careful, enduring it as quietly as she could. Then she braced her hand against the ground and tried to create even the tiniest space between them—one finger’s width, if possible. But Sylvia had overlooked something: the sensation of bodies parting after being locked together was just as stimulating as the sensation of being joined.
As the air slipped between them, Owen shivered. But that wasn’t all. When Sylvia, trying to force some distance, tensed the knee that had slipped between his legs and then realized there was no room at all for her hips to lift, she collapsed forward again and ground her upper body against him with no mercy whatsoever.
“...Ngh.”
A pained groan escaped him before he could stop it.
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