Something Other
"Puhah—haah—"
It did not seal my nose and mouth the way water would. Nor did it cling to my skin. And yet my body was heavy, reeling. I wanted to collapse then and there. Something kept dragging me downward, as if I were drowning.
"P-pull me up! Ghk—quickly!"
I felt the skeleton soldiers rush in and seize my arms and legs, hauling me upward. At that sensation I forced my eyes open and checked whether Evan was still gripped in my hands—whether my legs still held him fast.
Fortunately, I had not let him go.
This time.
This time, at least.
I felt the gaunt bones hoist me clear and, with quick steps, set me carefully down on the bare ground. For a while I simply caught my breath. Then I stayed wary of the necromancer. If he looked at me again with those strange eyes, if those filthy hands reached for me, I meant to strike him down at once.
But he seemed caught by something. More precisely, ever since he had tried to throw me from the mount, he had kept flinching as though receiving warnings or scoldings from some unseen presence, muttering frantically all the while.
"No! No, I swear! I followed your command! I merely—through your flesh that covers the earth—cough—brought her safely through the darkness to this place, hack, hack!"
As if staring at something in the pitch-black void where no sun rose, he pressed himself flat against the ground, not daring even to think of standing.
"I know nothing of it! Truly! I only followed your orders—ghk—! I am nothing but a lowly servant who receives the will of the great god—ghk— How could a mere sewer cleaner like me dare aspire to anything more—hack, cough, cough! Cough—kahack...!"
I heard him heave and vomit blood. Whether it was the lingering wound from the corpse poison or the influence of the "god" he served, I could not tell.
I had no interest in him, nor in that god of his. I only carefully untied the sack, wanting to confirm that he was unharmed.
Even after crossing through the darkness, even after being bathed once in that violet light, he seemed all right. ...Except for the bruises left from the carriage, that is.
Quietly pressing my forehead to his, I felt his touch for a long while. Cold and hard now—only the wretched truth that he could no longer share any warmth with me flowed into me. But it was enough that I held him. Enough that I loved him.
Rather than asking of him, it was my turn now to give back. To the one who had given me, in four short years, a love that would cover an entire lifetime, I only needed to return what I had felt, exactly as it was.
So I wished he would wake up now. Surrounded by sunny flower fields and trees, holding me, smiling at me.
After losing Evan, there was only misery. Because he had taught me what happiness was, what love was. He had shown me that warmth was not something you simply felt by sitting near a fire. He had shown me that liking someone, loving someone—when sincerity lived in it—could feel entirely different.
And then he left my side.
...Even though I could never accept an ending like this.
If he was going to teach me warmth, he should have taken responsibility until the end. If he loved me, it would have been fair for him to receive the love I gave as well.
If he simply dies alone without even getting the chance to see the love I can give—if he leaves this world making me miss the time we spent together even more—Evan, then I have no choice but to think of you even more.
After the fit ended, he wordlessly staggered and drew a single formula in the air. As he wrote something across the void in black marks that seemed to blot out even the moonlight, what was revealed was his hideout.
The necromancer tried to usher me and Evan into his cave, but I had no choice but to refuse firmly. The corpse poison soaking the entrance from the start would clearly have a bad effect on Evan's body. There was also the possibility I myself would be contaminated by it.
Yet he was strangely insistent on pushing me into his cave.
"B-but the elves will—hik—track us, won't they? If we don't hide, it'll be trouble."
The way he stammered more than before, those eyes anxiously scanning the surroundings—I still could not get used to them. As if I could ever grow accustomed to him looking me over with those eyes in the first place.
"I have no intention of entrusting him to the likes of you, reeking of corpse poison, and no reason to put my body in there either. Do I really have to say out loud that I already don't trust you?"
The one being tracked was the necromancer who had kidnapped three nearly-dead elves—not someone like me, already banished once, who had overturned everything in the sacred forest for love of a short-lived race and been expelled.
So no matter how I thought about it, the only reasons this hunchback kept wanting to get me into his cave were unpleasant, horrifying, and vulgar ones. Having already nearly suffered that kind of thing at the hands of the elves, only worse thoughts rose up.
My breathing naturally grew rough, and anger climbed up to my throat. Even so, the reason I did not let everything go was Evan. The reason I did not berate the necromancer further was the same. If there was something here I could... do for Evan, I had to find it.
The dark arts that moved the dead. Surely there would be something I wanted among them, I thought.
"W-what?!"
The hunchback, bristling at my words, flapped the staff he was holding and twisted his face, then seemed to think of something for a moment. After glancing at the cave, he turned his eyes toward the zombies—
"F-fine. Then. Then I'll show you somewhere else. You'll... like it. Ghk! You'll like it there."
Having spoken again, he soon made the horse kneel before me so I could mount comfortably.
"A-about earlier, ghk, I'm sorry. That—that. I'll apologize."
His increasingly horrific throat condition and intermittent belches were tormenting my nose. Even from this distance I was finding it hard to endure the stench, but thinking it was all for Evan, I could at least—at least—hold myself together. Even those terrible eyes.
After riding a long while, the place we arrived at was a Ruined Village.
There were houses already reduced to ash, and buildings lined with windows and doors thick with bloodstains. It was a horrific sight.
...Right. I had forgotten. The fact I had been able to ignore, because he had saved me, rose to the surface.
Those who did terrible things to corpses. Those horrific monsters who desecrated the bodies of the dead and took pleasure in it. Weren't those the necromancers wearing human skins?
"Th-this is a house! Ghihik!"
Pushing down the growing revulsion, the place he led me to was... a relatively intact house, hung with the symbol of the faith I had abandoned.
But the presence of that meant, in other words, that this had been a house belonging to someone from the order.
Slowly opening the door and going inside, the interior seemed reasonably tidy—except for the medicines and prayer books that looked as if they had been grabbed in a hurry on the way out. How urgent must it have been, to leave even the staff they used to amplify the power of prayer...
"Hihik."
Looking around the house, that thing let out a sinister laugh that made me guess its former owner had met a terrible end.
"Let's just leave now."
"U-hhit! Hhhuhk!"
And this feeling that he had deliberately brought me here was not approaching me well at all.
Walking the streets, I had seen many "intact" houses. There were plenty of cleanly empty ones, and he could have put me in any of them. But I had to find the reason he deliberately left me—who had abandoned the faith—in this place.
First, carefully taking Evan out of the sack, I walked toward the bedroom. He needed a place to rest his body comfortably. After enduring this long humiliation, he deserved to rest. He needed a place to lay down his bruised body and be treated. ...Though I was not sure whether a body that had already gone cold would heal.
But the moment I opened the bedroom door, I smelled a stench. One I had never smelled before—metallic, and somehow old, with a musty atmosphere.
After carefully stepping inside and examining the room for a moment, everything that flashed into view in the faint moonlight that had slipped in made me stumble backward.
My eyes shook. My head spun. And my mouth was already moving before I could stop it.
"This disgusting trash...!!!"
It was horribly defiled. Without needing to ask, I could easily guess what had happened here.
Torn vestments. Green bodily fluids. And something scattered about.
Not wanting to even put that into my head, I slammed the door shut and sat Evan back against the wall.
"Why, why, to me why... why...! Why do I keep having to suffer things like this, why on earth!"
If a god was still watching over me, he clearly harbored definite malice toward me. He could not drive me this hard. He could not torment me this much.
If he were a god who turned toward good, as we had believed, there would have been no reason to torture me like this.
He killed the faithful Evan with a single stroke and defiled his corpse. Not content with the pain of losing him, I had to keep meeting those who toyed with me.
"Ahh, ahhhk...!!"
Clutching my head, I slid down against the wall and sank to the floor. Evan, who would wipe my tears, who would comfort me, sat with his head bowed, coldly gone still.
"Rather, even now..."
Bad thoughts began to surface. Wouldn't it be much easier if I just gave up on everything? Rather than keep suffering like this, if I just died, at least I could stop becoming more miserable—that kind of thought.
With a priest's staff that had a sharp tip—one whose chastity had been violated—I could surely pierce myself through in one go. If I slit my throat as is, it would probably hurt a lot. But it would be much faster than hanging myself, much faster than cutting my wrists with a knife.
I did not want to think complicated thoughts anymore. So as I stood and approached the staff—
"Grrrk, aaaaaah!!!"
The window shattered with a violent crash. Zombies burst through the door, practically tumbling in. Watching them try to force their way in without even caring about the broken shards of the window frame, I finally spat out the things I had never said aloud since becoming involved with him.
"...You aren't even worth the filth on the floor."
In an instant, the staff in my hands pierced through the head of the corpse standing awkwardly in front of me. At least the self-defense techniques I had learned were of some help—that was a small comfort, I suppose.
I began stabbing the heads of the slowly moving creatures one by one with the tip of the staff. Naturally, against ones that could not even properly defend themselves, simply targeting the head was not that difficult.
The problem was the necromancer supporting them.
As expected, the arms and legs of corpses that could no longer move began thrashing, trying to cling to me. But I had no intention of backing down. Evan was right behind me.
And that stubbornness naturally resulted in me being caught. The staff clattered noisily to the floor, and thanks to a corpse's foot stomping on it hard, one of the blades snapped and flew off.
In the end, I was held by corpses slowly dripping blood from their heads, forced to my knees.
"Hihik, hik, hihik!"
That spine-chilling laughter came again, and I saw the hunchback slowly entering the house in an awkward posture.
"Ihihik! Caught you, caught you!"
I was helplessly captured once more. The thought that I could not accomplish anything with my own strength began to eat away at my mind. Evan had given everything to protect me—and I, without even that much strength, just kept being toyed with by someone's malice.
I hated that so terribly.
"Y-you, I've liked you since I first saw you. Much more than the priest I played with! That look of contempt... when it breaks. Do you know how good that feels? Hhhik, the god told me not to touch you, huhh—but I, I need a reward. When I've done good work, I need a reward."
Watching the hand reach toward me, I tensed my arms and twisted my body, but all that came back was the sensation of the corpses tightening their grip harder.
"Kh—"
"Y-yes! That expression. I... huh?"
But suddenly the zombies holding my arms released me and turned their heads to stare blankly at the necromancer.
"W-what? Why aren't you following my orders—ghk—why?"
The one with the ugly face gestured several times, but the corpses did not move. They simply kept staring at their master.
"You have to obey my commands, you stupid—"
The moment the hunchback, unable to contain his anger, raised his hand to strike a corpse, I could see the emotion of terror bloom in those twisted eyes.
"I-I never, brought you back to life—ghk—though."
What he was looking at was behind me. At the same time, the corpses turned their stiff necks to look in the same direction.
At that strange sight, I too turned my body to look behind me—
"...Evan?"
There, Evan's body was standing upright. Slowly spilling onto the floor a purple light—no, something like mist, something strange and flickering, like glittering clouds.