Public Enemy: The Nightmare of the West (4)
"What's with you?"
Liam hesitated at the voice that had addressed him. Nothing came to mind. His lips merely twitched, as if they'd been sealed shut.
"I didn't do anything."
The answer he barely managed to squeeze out was as stupid as they came.
"No, I mean you've been staying out of trouble lately. Finally come to your senses?"
Pink eyes, bright with curiosity. Clitia stared at him the way a person stares at something genuinely fascinating.
I'm going crazy.
When had it started? A feeling had taken root in a corner of his chest and kept swelling, growing heavier by the day. His face burned. He couldn't even meet her eyes, fidgeting like a child. After three years of feeling nothing at all, why had it suddenly become like this?
He had turned the question over and over, and only recently had the answer finally surfaced.
Clitia was different from other women. She looked at the heart, not the face, when she spoke to you. She complained constantly and still took care of him anyway. A rough-edged, compassionate Saintess. A woman who made excuses for him and even worried over him when all he ever did was cause problems.
Liam clutched his chest. At last, it was filled — that deep emptiness that had walked beside him through every wandering year. He wanted to picture a happy future together. He wanted to laugh and talk and spend ordinary, humble days at her side.
But Clitia never so much as glanced at men. She seemed to have no interest whatsoever.
"The Goddess was right after all. There really was sunlight dwelling in your heart."
And her faith ran deeper than anyone's. She was a Saintess who yearned for the Goddess's favor far more than she would ever yearn for the love of a man.
"Just keep being like this from now on."
"...Alright."
Affection with barely a sliver of a chance to take root. Of course, that didn't mean he planned to give up.
Just wait a little longer.
Liam made up his mind. Once they defeated the Demon King safely, he would tell her how he felt.
"I missed you."
It had been a long wait. At last he had found her — the Clitia he had searched for so desperately. There was something he had wanted to say. The Demon King was still alive and well, but that no longer mattered.
Clitia's face crumpled. It was the expression she always wore when she was swallowing a surge of displeasure — and it hadn't changed at all.
Liam couldn't hold the laughter in. It burst out of him, carrying every ounce of the feeling that had been buried in his chest. At least, he believed he was smiling.
Looking at Liam's face, split cleanly in half, I felt wretched. There was a strangeness to it I couldn't put into words. I couldn't tell whether he was smiling or whether the whole thing was simply contorted.
"I've been turning the Demon King's territory inside out looking for you."
Even then, that warped voice kept spilling out of him.
"I never thought you'd still be alive."
"What the hell is that face? And why are you hanging around with Corpse Locusts?"
Liam had died. I had watched his head split open right in front of me. And yet here he was, wearing the face he'd had in life — half of it, anyway — and playing commander to the Corpse Locusts instead of serving as their host. None of it was easy to explain. I couldn't even begin to guess what had happened to him.
"Take it as what you see. Half of me became a Death Knight. The other half became one with the Corpse Locusts."
Liam stroked his skull, then his living face, alternating between the two with a calm, almost tender touch.
"When I came to, I was like this."
"..."
Whose work was this? Not the Demon King's, at least. That bastard prized the will to fight to the bitter end. Every member of our hero party had received his praise before we died. He wouldn't have turned us into undead just to make us suffer.
"How I ended up like this isn't important."
Liam's tone grew serious as he spoke again.
"Clitia. Come with me."
"...You want me to become a corpse?"
"I wouldn't use such a crude method."
While I was still processing that, a single insect wriggled out of Liam's eye socket. A Corpse Locust — thicker-bodied than the usual kind, with eyes so red you could almost believe they were glowing.
"A variant. You'd get the picture just from hearing that, right?"
No. An ugly possibility surfaced at once.
"We can be together even while you're still alive."
Something was going very wrong. I could feel it — the malice of someone deliberately driving everything toward the worst possible outcome. The most likely culprit was a dark mage, and I already had a name in mind.
The Lich Remiraen.
He was a Public Enemy who featured quite prominently in Apolis Tales as well. What was he after? I wanted to know, but speculation could wait. What mattered was the thing standing in front of me.
"And if I join you? Then what?"
"Revenge."
Liam slowly raised his greatsword and set it on end.
"I'll tear the Demon King apart and kill him. If only to settle the grudges of the comrades who died by his hand."
The greatsword tipped upward, pointing at the sky — at the sun, which had already nearly slipped below the horizon.
"And after that, I'll drag the sun down to the earth. Don't you want that too?"
I clenched my fists, shut my eyes, and opened them again. I couldn't stand to listen to another word.
"Clitia, don't look at me like that. It hurts."
"After spewing that kind of bullshit?"
"The Goddess abandoned us."
The hatred Sun-bask had felt at the Purple Magic Tower came crawling through the air, thick and clinging.
"The Goddess left us to be destroyed by the Demon King. And not just us. She drove every hero party in history to their deaths."
Liam's body trembled as if rage had seized him by the throat.
"That bitch plants duty and burden in the hero parties and sits back to watch them die at the Demon King's hands."
"...Don't twist things."
"You're the one twisting things."
A cold gaze pinned me in place.
"You're not a Saintess anymore. You were abandoned, weren't you?"
"..."
"She got tired of playing with a toy like you. You survived, and instead of comforting you, she threw you away. Am I wrong?"
That was absurd. It was wild speculation.
"Stop turning away from reality and explain it. Why the Goddess who supposedly cherished and loved you so much decided to abandon you."
I wanted to refute him. I couldn't. Because if what he said was true, it would explain why She had excommunicated me without a single word.
"The sun no longer shines on us. I'm not a hero anymore. I've abandoned the name Liam, too."
The miasma rising from his blackened armor grew sharper, more distinct.
Suffocating miasma rolled out in every direction. I was certain now. This was not a situation that could be resolved peacefully.
I fused Aura with my body to push back against the miasma.
Aura Stage 3
Absolute fusion of body and Aura
Dragging this out would be dangerous. I intended to end it fast.
"...I didn't think you'd be talked around that easily anyway."
Miasma poured over his split head and hardened into a helmet.
The sun slipped fully below the horizon, and the dark thickened. Liam melted into the gloom and swung his greatsword, miasma whirling along the blade. The edge came down on a diagonal. Trusting Sun-bask once more, I stepped in without hesitation. An opaque barrier shimmered into being over my shoulder.
"I can't block this!"
The barrier sheared apart like paper. The blade did not stop. It came on, aiming to take the shoulder I was about to throw my punch from. But Aura fused with the body does not cut so easily. My fist, its momentum unbroken, punched a hole straight through his chest.
Power overflowed. The aftershock of that enormous physical force shoved his miasma-wrapped body backward. But I knew better. This wouldn't be enough to put him down.
"That hurts."
Liam stood there with no expression at all, staring at me. Miasma filled the hole in his chest — and it didn't stop at healing. It clung to the armor and writhed across it in wild, living ripples. A realm comparable to Aura Stage 3, maybe. The sheer pressure of his presence reached out and started closing around my throat.
And in the middle of all that, my heart pounded with spectacularly bad timing, as if to inform me that this was a fight I could actually lose.
"Sun-bask."
"I'm listening."
"Draw on the Holy Power."
"Are you serious?"
I can't use Holy Power. Sun-bask, however, can draw it out and spend it. An unauthorized act. The price is an agony like the world itself grinding you underfoot.
"Put everything into defense."
"Yes. Leave it to me."
Sun-bask — Full Defensive Deployment
Unauthorized use — backlash imminent
The instant she answered, pain seized my body.
"...Don't go too crazy with it."
It was far worse than I'd expected. Bad enough to make even Riella's Great Annihilation bombardment look like a light tap.
"If the fight drags on, the Holy Power will run dry."
"I know."
Once would be enough. If it opened even the smallest window in a single exchange, I could win.
"Be careful."
I charged. The greatsword came around at the same time. Confirming the vivid barrier Sun-bask had thrown up, I threw my punch — abandoning defense entirely, pouring every last scrap of Aura into my fist.
The blade's momentum was more vicious than I'd accounted for. It hung for a fraction of a second against the barrier, then punched through without much trouble and came on to split me open. But the gap had already opened. That fleeting defense had done its job.
My fist shattered the armor a second time and reached his chest — ahead of the greatsword that was trying to take my shoulder. The concentrated blow drove through the miasma-wrapped plate. I felt bone crush under my knuckles.
In an instant, the match was decided. I glanced at my half-severed shoulder and said it plainly.
"You lost."
The living corner of his mouth curled, just slightly.
"So I did."
Far too calm. Because he was insane? No. Liam was a Death Knight now — a being that had already stepped past death. There was no way he had walked in here without a contingency.
"Don't think it's completely over. I'm undead now, you know."
The shock sent Liam's head tumbling to the ground. He kept flapping his mouth anyway, perfectly unbothered.
"Since you won, I'll withdraw quietly."
His face twisted into something grotesque. That expression — the one you couldn't look at with your eyes open — made its return.
"But I'm not a good person like you."
In that instant, a small figure came flying from somewhere and cut between me and Liam's head. A body no bigger than a palm. Wings of a mysterious, shifting color. A halo that shimmered behind it like a backdrop from another world.
A fairy. It just hung there, flapping its wings with hazy, vacant eyes — a strange, emptied-out little thing.
"Know who this is? Happened to be here in the west."
"...You crazy bastard."
A being he had specifically chosen to produce in a moment like this. There was only one candidate.
"That's right. It's the Great Warrior."
The strongest warrior... was a fairy? There was no time to be shocked.
"I had an interesting thought."
Liam's head, already melting away, forced out its last words.