91. Broken Doll
91. Broken Doll
The first time I found Casey was not long after I first began operating as a Shadow.
Suspicious movements had been detected from demon worshippers—separate from the Demon Church—and the Inquisitors were mobilized.
I only confirmed the data they had gathered after the fact. Judging it to be no ordinary case, I rushed to the scene, but I was too late.
A hellscape had already unfolded there.
Whether they had been experimenting with fusing demons and humans, the facility was packed with monsters whose entire bodies had turned a sickly purple.
There were traces of the Inquisitors' valiant resistance, but the numbers were simply overwhelming, and they had been annihilated to the last.
I began exterminating the monsters swiftly.
Everything that moved was a monster; everything that did not was a person.
A fire had broken out, and the facility reeked of nothing but acrid smoke and blood. Amidst the black smoke, only the Aura Blade I had manifested shone with any clarity.
In that despair where no living thing could have possibly survived, I found one small child, drenched in blood.
The child knelt before the bodies of what appeared to be her parents, head bowed, utterly catatonic. Even as the monsters closed in around her, she showed no reaction whatsoever.
I do not know what happened in that place.
Because it all transpired before I arrived.
She did not cry, she did not laugh, she did not get angry. She simply sat there, waiting for death, like a broken doll.
A broken doll that could not even react to the death closing in around her. That was Casey.
———————————————
I wasn't lying in a dusty back alley. I was in a proper bed.
After Lucia arrived, we had left the downtown district and checked into a hotel.
We were a mess because of the dust, but we weren't the only ones—most everyone in the downtown area was in the same state, so the hotel staff didn't comment on it.
They just glanced silently at the brooches pinned to our chests, proving we were academy students.
"A bit better."
"Are you... really okay...?"
"It stings a little, but I'll be fine by tomorrow."
I was treating my wounds with my upper garment removed.
Using water and a clean cloth, I washed all around the wound, applied disinfectant, and then spread a wound recovery potion over it.
The injury from the thin rapier hadn't split wide open, but stitching it would be better to keep it from reopening.
What was truly fortunate was that this world had a practical life magic that produced an effect similar to suturing.
Once the first aid was done, I would finish by using magic to seal the wound and then wrapping it in bandages to keep it sterile. That would be the basics taken care of.
Every action that touched the wound brought pain, but this wasn't my first or second time doing this, so I worked in silence.
Lucia watched me treat my wounds, looking as if she might burst into tears at any moment.
She couldn't stay still, and kept motioning as if to ask if there was anything she could help with, but beyond fetching water and towels, there was nothing she could do.
"I... I was the one who... said we should go to a place like that..."
"It's not your fault."
"If we hadn't gone out today... this would never have... happened..."
Lucia insisted that if we hadn't gone out today, this would never have happened, but my thoughts differed.
From the moment Casey followed me right to the academy's doorstep, it was something that was bound to happen eventually.
It was nothing more than a difference of whether it happened outside the academy or inside it.
"I told you, this sort of thing heals fast. It's only flashy on the outside."
"...But!! You're hurt like this... how can I not worry about you!!"
Near Lucia, the two stuffed bears we had bought at the last place we'd visited sat leaning against each other as if exhausted.
Their fur, which had been glossy when we bought them, was now coated in dust and turned grimy, and my blood had soiled them, leaving bloodstains here and there.
The bloodstains on the golden bear resembled how I looked now, and a hollow laugh escaped me.
The wound was firmly closed, and the bandages were wrapped tightly.
"I feel a bit better. Let's go back out in a little while."
Just having the wound sealed made things much more comfortable.
If I meditated a bit and kept my body in check, the wound would be recovered by tomorrow morning.
Ordinarily, a penetrating wound to the abdomen that injured the internal organs would require proper hospital treatment to heal within a week.
The external wound would close in a day, but the internal injuries would take a week to recover.
However, for a transcendent being who had reached the realm of peak Expert or higher, it was a different story.
For a transcendent being, even a gaping stomach wound could be healed faster than a cut finger without much treatment, if they put their mind to it.
"No... let's just rest for today."
But when I said I'd go out, Lucia stopped me, exasperated.
"I need to go buy clothes. Ours are all ruined with dust and blood."
"That's what someone with a hole in their stomach is saying...!"
"It's closed right now, though..."
"Anyway, today ends here..! As soon as morning comes, we go straight back to the academy and you get hospitalized. Understood?!"
"I got it, so calm down. I told you, I'm really fine."
"You're saying that again... Atlas, if the roles were reversed, if I had a hole in my stomach, could you act like that...?"
"That would be a bit difficult, I think."
"...I'll never forgive that person..."
Lucia fumed as she looked at my abdomen, wrapped in bandages.
We had gone out to have fun, and for it to end like this—it was deeply regrettable.
——————————————
"Hah... hah..."
Slipping into a dark, secluded alley, Casey breathed raggedly.
She lifted her rapier and inspected its thin blade.
The slender blade that, until just moments ago, had been churning through Atlas's body was a pristine white, unblemished as ever.
That was because Casey's fiercely blazing aura had burned away any foreign matter clinging to the blade without a trace.
But other places were different.
The cross guard connected to the blade, the grip... the hand holding it was stained with sticky blood.
It was all dried up now, but to Casey's eyes, it still shone a vivid red.
"Liar..."
Casey hated Atlas.
It wasn't mere dislike; she hated him intensely.
He had always been someone who would occasionally vanish without reason and then show up again, but it was rare for it to go beyond two months.
He'd said without a word that he'd be back within 100 days, and yet Atlas had not returned.
100 days became 200, and 200 became 300.
After 300 days without any contact, Casey resolved to find Atlas herself.
She didn't entertain the notion that something might have happened to him.
The thought of Atlas dying alone somewhere no one knew didn't even cross Casey's mind.
In her second year of searching for Atlas without any contact, the first news Casey heard of him was that he had gathered new companions and had become quite famous among adventurers.
They said he had broken through the Demon Realm Snowfield—a demonic realm said to be impossible for any living creature to survive—with a dozen or so comrades.
He had said he was going to find the Growth Potion, so the fact that he had assembled a team and challenged it made logical sense to her.
'The Imperial Knights... are stronger than those people... why didn't he say anything to us...'
The Imperial Knights were full of powerhouses incomparable to those motley adventurers, after all.
Casey suspected that Atlas might truly be trying to abandon the knight order and start a second life.
Afraid that she had been abandoned once again by someone she trusted, she couldn't even sleep properly at night.
When she finally tracked down the Snowfield Expedition Team, Atlas had already found the potion and abandoned them.
Her anger surged once more at that.
Everything was over, so why wasn't he returning to the knight order?
Her head filled with all sorts of negative thoughts.
In a fit of anger, she had said she would kill Atlas, but she had no real intention of doing so.
It was simply an expression of just how furious she was.
She hated Atlas for abandoning her for three years, but she missed him just as much.
The letter that arrived at the knight order contained a summary of the Clover Kingdom's terrorist attack at the academy.
It was about how a Shadow had handled the Clover Kingdom's terror at the academy.
Seeing that, Casey became certain that Atlas was at the academy, and she turned her steps toward it.
Atlas never explicitly said so, and Casey never explicitly asked, but after living in the same quarters as Atlas for years, she had vaguely figured out that he was one of the Shadows.
"The Director... also suddenly went to inspect the academy..? Then... did you receive some kind of secret mission..?"
It was a perfectly plausible story.
If he had been on a secret mission, he wouldn't have been able to make contact.
The picture of Linda noticing the Clover Kingdom's scheme and secretly deploying Atlas completed itself in her mind.
'So he really was... just on a secret mission. Right, there's no way he would abandon me.'
One by one, Casey pieced together the fragments of information as they drifted in, fitting them into a narrative she could accept.
She could accept it, but even so, the fact that Atlas had gone three years without any contact was hard to forgive.
She would be angry about that part when they met.
Truly, terribly angry.
Just as she was trying to enter the academy to search for traces of him, Casey heard a voice that was achingly familiar.
"A talking sword? Isn't that interesting?"
It was Atlas, the person she had been searching so desperately for.
She had clearly heard he had found the Growth Potion, but he looked exactly the same as the last time she had seen him.
"Hey...!!"
She was so overjoyed she was about to rush right out, but the words wouldn't come.
"...It just says unpleasant things... Let's... go to the next place..."
Pressed close to Atlas's side was an incredibly tall woman.
A beauty with a stature far greater than her own... no, far greater than Atlas's.
The two of them looked very close.
"What... are you doing over there...?"
She wanted to step out immediately, but her body refused to move.
Her head swam with dizziness.
Her feet were planted on the ground, but she couldn't tell up from down, left from right.
She couldn't comprehend the situation.
Why was Atlas, who had abandoned her and lain low for three years, acting like that with some other woman?
Ugly feelings crawled their way up through her body.
Someone was whispering in her ear.
After that, she didn't remember much.
It felt as if control of her body had been stolen by someone else.
When she came to her senses, Casey had driven her rapier into Atlas's abdomen.