Chapter 50: Elf Girl (Part 3)
Chapter 50: Elf Girl (Part 3)
The more I read the emotions woven into her letters, the more I understood why this elf girl I'd never met was being so kind to me.
Just as I found her adorable, like some fascinating small creature I wanted to fuss over,
she'd apparently been treating me like a little boy all along.
Not that it wounded my pride.
My appearance aside, just looking at our lives as Constellations, there was a gap of nearly a hundred years between us.
She had hundreds of farmer Incarnations, dozens of combat Incarnations,
and the scale of points she dealt in outclassed mine by three orders of magnitude.
She wasn't being malicious — just careful around a young human male, a rookie Constellation —
and my personality hasn't rotted to the point where I'd get angry over that.
While I sorted through my thoughts on elves, the blessed Han Ye-ji, Jeong Ah-rin, and Namgung Hui were chatting away.
Even through the screen, their excitement was obvious.
'Well, two Constellations are involved now...'
Jeong Ah-rin smacked Han Ye-ji squarely on the back with a loud thwack, laughing as she pulled out a card.
Han Ye-ji and Namgung Hui played along with her exaggerated theatrics, shuffling off with every intention of mooching a meal.
When Namgung Hui first joined the squad and they became a three-woman team,
things had been awkward. To Jeong Ah-rin, Han Ye-ji was just a skilled junior and an Incarnation who happened to be loved by her Constellation.
A senior treating a junior decently — nothing more.
For Namgung Hui, the two of them were simply colleagues she'd just met at work. What deeper impression could there have been?
But now, their relationship had deepened considerably.
The reason was obvious: the attention of the Unfading Giant Tree.
There's no comparison between getting a cup of coffee from someone else's Constellation and finally catching your own Constellation's notice.
Thanks to Han Ye-ji, Jeong Ah-rin had her Constellation's attention and blessings, and she was grinning ear to ear.
Han Ye-ji, with a formerly strict senior now treating her well and a junior who listened, was sailing through work life.
Namgung Hui, perhaps taking after her own Constellation, seemed indifferent to everything else —
just satisfied that her two squadmates, her workplace seniors, were competent.
Maybe it was the World Tree's branches. Somehow, even through the screen, I could sense other people's emotions and thoughts more fluently now.
First I'd faced them in person, then observed through the screen,
and now through handwriting in letters, through presences felt beyond the World Tree's branches —
Lost in that thought, the world spun.
※
Boys and girls draped in pure white cloth.
I wasn't sure what the garments were called, but the closest comparison would be the sort of thing you'd see in Greek and Roman mythology.
A single long piece of fabric wound around the waist and over the shoulder — that kind of attire.
White cloth descending from one shoulder to wrap the waist and cover the thighs, with green brooches pinning the fabric at the shoulder and hip.
Those ornaments, so finely crafted into the shapes of branches and leaves, told me everything at a glance.
Ah. This is the dream of the Unfading Giant Tree.
Boys and girls with pointed ears or soft, fluffy animal ears teased each other as they worked the fields,
and when branches descended from the high sky to help them, there was no pretending I didn't know whose dream this was.
"Who's on Field 2?"
"Knox and Deia? Think the two of them went together."
"Oh? Those two have been sticking close lately~"
This was like when mere eye contact had sucked me into the Incinerating Tyrant's memories.
Had I been stroking the World Tree's branches to use my power just as the Unfading Giant Tree happened to touch them too?
I couldn't be sure, but we were clearly connected indirectly through the World Tree's branches.
From the moist soil under my bare feet to the crisp air blowing from a colossal tree trunk in the distance that defied all sense of perspective —
a fragrance of nature I'd never felt in my previous life or as a Constellation. While I drank it in, the world rushed forward like a video on fast-forward.
A small boy became a young man with the faint shadow of a beard.
A puppy-eared girl, once cute with her fluffy ears, grew into a woman with a full figure.
The young men became old men, the women became old women.
But the flow of time was nothing alike for the three races.
By the time a young man became an elder, a woman had become an auntie.
Yet the handful of elves remained small boys and girls.
In the years rushing past, only the elves moved slowly.
And the inevitable result arrived.
All the children except the three elves died.
The clearing that had once teemed with green sprouts pushing through damp soil was now packed with gravestones.
Though they'd followed instinct and shared love, no one had conceived — the demon lord's curse, maybe —
and so only three elves remained here.
The first to die was an elf girl who'd been outside and came in late.
Unlike the two who'd stayed pure under the World Tree's protection, the demon lord's miasma had gnawed at her slowly over more than a century.
Not with pain or disability — but a girl who should have lived hundreds of years died before she even reached a hundred and fifty.
Next, the last remaining elf boy died.
Long-lived species like elves had to learn separately how to mingle with short-lived races.
But there were no adults left to teach them, to show them the cycle of life,
and so the boy, despairing that all his friends were dead — all but one — hanged himself.
Leaving a note for the last elf girl, apologizing to the Unfading Giant Tree.
'Another thoroughly fucked-up world, I see...'
The elf girl, left alone, tended the small fields and rice paddies, caring for the World Tree.
Hundreds of cycles passed: sprouts growing, blooming, bearing fruit, ripening.
Then one sunlit day, she did not go to the fields.
And the world cracked.
Not breaking out of it.
Being swept deeper.
Like being caught in artificial waves at a pool, my body dragged somewhere I hadn't intended to go.
An invisible current coiled around my back and waist, pulling me.
Into an inner world shaped like an enormous tree — unlike the corridor and museum of those two Incarnations.
One fruit, one memory.
Powerful memories were large and vivid; faint ones were wilted.
Happy memories gave off a sweet, fragrant scent; sad ones smelled of rotting compost.
At the very top of the tree hung the two largest fruits.
One showed an elf boy smiling. The other showed an elf boy who had hanged himself.
'Well, given all that time, I suppose falling for someone makes sense.'
Unlike the humans and beastkin, who loved swiftly and bonded quickly and faded fast, the love of elves moved slowly.
Slow enough that he'd hanged himself before she could even confess.
The elf boy the Unfading Giant Tree had loved.
That face — I'd seen it somewhere before.
But I stifled my curiosity and looked away.
These memories were too heavy to go prying into, nothing like an Incarnation's.
What I saw now was the wall of my studio apartment, where the World Tree's branches extended.
Either time had run out or I'd gone too deep — I'd been ejected naturally.
[You're really alright?]
[I think I've learned a new management technique]
[I'm sending spirits through the World Tree, the way you do]
[I finally saved up enough points!]
A pile of notes sat beside my bed.
The branch must have tidied them — I read left to right in the order I grabbed them, and the story flowed.
As I slowly worked through the notes, another slip of paper dropped onto my head with a light tap.
[I'm coming over now]
"What is this, a horror movie..."
She'd probably written it without much thought, but for a second I wondered: 'Could I use this for Nightmare?'
I'd just rummaged through someone's memories uninvited, and now the subject of those memories was saying she was coming over, popping in out of nowhere.
Still bad for the heart, wasn't it?
A branch of the World Tree quivered softly.
"He- llooo-!"
Emerging from between the branches was a spirit the size of a forearm.
Mist-like lower body, a face formed from water droplets — definitely a spirit.
Elves meant spirits. Of course.
"Face- to face- we-!"
Whether it was the characteristic elven speech pattern or her own distinctive halting delivery, she cut herself off.
Then that tiny body of water droplets began to bubble and roil, turning into a watery mist —
"Ah, hello!"
— and vanished with a poof.
Just from her face, anyone could tell: that was the reaction of a girl in love.
And only then did I realize who the face of that elf boy in the massive memory resembled.
'It's blatantly my face...'
There were differences between a boy and a young man, but if you had to draw a line, that elf boy who'd hanged himself, had he aged and exercised, would have grown up to look like me.
Not the rough face I'd earned in the apocalypse, but the beautiful face woven from women's dreams.
Was this the famed beauty of their race?
It felt absurd that some village boy happened to have the face of a perfect pretty-boy drawn from women's unconscious minds.
Still, in those memories, the Unfading Giant Tree and the other elves had looked like living, walking works of art.
I lay on the bed with those thoughts, dealing with the aftereffects, but the vanished spirit didn't return.
And the notes stopped too.