Episode 6
The duchess’s gaze had changed.
Before, it had been full of pity and overflowing with affection. Now it was the opposite.
She was looking at me as if she needed me.
Well, of course she was.
If I died, her children would instantly become nothing more than Lump of Flesh, spilling recovery magic and little else.
In the end, the pity and affection she had shown me had amounted to no more than that.
The sort of sympathy and attachment you might offer a pig you planned to slaughter, murmuring, “I’ll enjoy eating you~.”
Maybe it was even worse than that. Maybe she looked down on me more than I thought.
After all, horses in this world were noblemen’s partners, and they even received proper funerals.
If I died, they would have minced me into tiny pieces and buried me in the ground.
No—if they had followed the curse’s logic, maybe they would have thrown me into a juicer, ground me down into a potion, and used me as an emergency recovery tonic.
The thought sent the corners of my mouth twitching again.
My insides were on fire, but separate from that, laughter burst out of me anyway.
“Ha.”
It was probably because of the duchess’s face.
A face that knew she had done something wrong.
And at the same time, the face of a parent who could do anything for her own children.
It was the very same face my parents in my previous life had worn when they raised me like livestock.
“Hah! Ahahahaha!”
Laughter spilled out of me.
How could I not laugh at the sight of someone trembling with guilt over killing the pig they planned to eat?
They had been involved in everything from the feed to the pen.
Even if they hadn’t been involved in making me, they would have been involved after I was born.
Saving me until the curse took hold, steering me to enter the Forbidden Area willingly, even subtly damaging my reputation to manage the shock their child would suffer—
They had said they would bear it all themselves, that I could resent them if I wanted.
And yet, now that it had come to this, was reality different from the promise?
It was so ridiculous I could only laugh.
They had said they would take responsibility, thinking I was going to die anyway; then they had said that because they had taken responsibility, they weren’t the bad ones; then, when I lived, they had been left at a loss.
There was a limit to comedy.
“You said you’d grant me one wish.”
“……”
“Would you kill me, then? Or perhaps kill one of your sons.”
A rightful claim.
Your promised right.
When I said that and stared at the duchess, she flinched. Behind her, the knight guarding her hand reached for a club and barked at me.
He said I was insane to ask someone to take another person’s life as a wish, that no human could dare to make such a shameless request.
“Why not?” I asked back.
“Buying a concubine to make a curse-doll isn’t shameless, but a wish made after surviving death is?”
“T-that’s—!”
“Ah, right. Since I managed to overcome something that should never have been overcome, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Then isn’t my very existence shameless? Why not just kill me, then? Wouldn’t that be the only way to end this humiliation?”
As I stepped closer to the knight, he backed away.
One step forward, one step back; two steps forward, two steps back.
As I approached with a wet, slapping sound, fluid and blood began seeping from my regenerated arm. The floor quickly turned slick, dark red spreading across it.
And yet, for all my ferocious appearance, my blood carried a sweet scent.
A sweetness so overpowering it was almost revolting.
It was probably an aroma meant to lure demons.
But for people, it had to affect them differently, and perhaps it was the strangeness of that gap that made even the knight and the maid hesitate with expressions that said they had sensed something uncanny.
“Pff—pfffhaha…!”
What a funny sight.
When I hid my face and twisted my mouth again at the way they looked, the knight’s face flushed red and he raised the club. I thrust my head toward him.
If he was going to hit me, then hit my head.
Split it open in one blow.
At that, the knight stopped short and began to falter.
He couldn’t kill me.
If he killed me, what would happen to the child of the bastard he revered so damn much?
“Ahah. Hic, fuhihihihik!”
More laughter leaked out of me.
Only this time, another voice mixed in with it.
Not the laugh of a child, but of an old man, a young man, a grown man.
“Ahahahahaha!”
As I burst out laughing, the knight kept inching backward.
When I raised my voice at that, flames began to rise from my arms and legs, and the others, horrified by the sight, stumbled away from me.
“People can say whatever they want.”
They could say they’d kill me.
They could say they’d grant me my wish.
But when it came to doing it, they couldn’t.
This wasn’t really about competence.
However ridiculous I might look, I was still the duchess’s mistress, and they were vassals of the ducal house.
The sort of thing an ordinary person could never imagine, they would probably do as casually as breathing.
This was about attachment.
A knight might swing a sword for the one he loved, but he could not swing it for necessity.
What was necessary could always be replaced by something else.
So that knight wouldn’t kill me.
The duchess wouldn’t kill me either.
The head of the house wouldn’t kill me.
“Ha, ha, ha.”
I couldn’t die.
“After all, buying a slave and making a child just to kill them isn’t considered a problem. Yes, because it’s something done by the great House of Blium. However those noble people choose to use slaves, there’s no way it could be wrong.”
Because I was just a slave.
So they would keep me alive.
“Making something vile for the sake of an honorable bloodline is the sort of thing you could do a hundred, a thousand times over without issue! You, and you too—if it were to save your own children, you’d all do the same thing!”
What a magnificent form of love.
To make someone do what they cannot do, to force them to endure words they cannot bear—what a magnificent thing.
And what a cruel one.
They were cursing everything they did not love.
Ah, these people were cursing me for the sake of the son they loved.
Jealousy surged up inside me.
I didn’t want their affection, but I couldn’t cut off the feeling of jealousy.
I, who had been born out of necessity, was jealous of those who naturally embraced feelings they were never forbidden to have, and who cursed me without a shred of guilt.
Flames fell.
From the tips of my fingers, from the ends of my toes, sparks dropped away.
Blood like dark red gore.
Thick with a sweet, cloying scent.
Heat piled up.
Like a heart coming to a boil.
“……Ha.”
I shouldn’t have spoken.
I should have just stayed quiet and gone to sleep.
That thought crossed my mind, but once the breath had been vomited out, it would not stop.
It surged up from my chest.
As if I were throwing up stomach acid, my diaphragm rose and squeezed my lungs flat, and every last breath left me, all of it, all of it, until nothing remained in a single alveolus.
And once there was nothing left to retch up, my body began to vomit my feelings instead.
“Ah… ah…”
It was an emotion I should never have held.
An emotion that someone born not of affection but of necessity should never have been allowed to feel.
The conscience forged by the brainwashing that had stretched all the way from my previous life told me so, but once an emotion had been vomited out, there was no way to gather it back up again.
It must have been because I had strength now.
If I had been broken the way I was in my previous life, trapped in a body that could die at any moment, I wouldn’t have harbored feelings like this.
That was how it should have been.
But not now.
I had to live.
No, I would live.
Because they would not allow me death.
They would not give me the death they had promised me.
Like livestock, they would feed me the scraps of love left over after giving it to the head of the house, to the duchess, to the sons, to comrades, to friends, to family, to neighbors—feeding me the leftovers as if dumping them into a slop bucket, and raising me.
“Ah, ahah, h-huh, hwaaaah, aaaaagh!”
So instead, I wanted to kill them.
The moment that thought took root, the entire room burst into flames.
The heat that had accumulated surpassed its ignition point, and as if a fire had reached its peak, it caught all at once.
“Kyaaaah!”
“Ghh—!?”
Amid the crackling of cloth and wood burning, screams rang out.
Everyone, driven by the heat and the threat to their lives, looked toward this side where the exit lay, and I grinned at the sight of them, muttering for them all to just die already.
But contrary to my wishes, not a single one of them had caught fire.
“Pfft! Ahahahaha!”
Once I saw that, I could do nothing but laugh.
I want to kill them.
That feeling wasn’t a joke, and if I had a knife, I would have truly swung it with the intention of killing them.
I really wanted to kill them.
Because I had endured that discrimination just to die, because I had crawled into the place where I was supposed to die, because I had said for years that that was what I wanted—and now they were trying to stop me from dying. Their disgusting behavior was so revolting I could hardly bear to look at it with both eyes.
But the memories of my previous life held me back.
The scraps of love I had received so my younger sister’s reputation wouldn’t be harmed, the morals and ethics drilled into me like a form of brainwashing—they stood in my way.
I was still being dragged around by that violence-free gaslighting.
I was that pathetic.
I had thought emotions I directed at others could be wielded however I pleased, and yet when the chance to kill came, I still couldn’t do it.
“Hah, h-hah…”
I am trash.
Trash so worthless I can’t even compare to the memory of myself as livestock, not even for something I want to kill.
Once I realized that fact, the boiling storm inside me crashed down all at once.
It was so abrupt it could only be called childish capriciousness.
When the feeling subsided, the fire clinging to the room vanished in an instant, leaving behind only sweet-smelling smoke that filled the chamber.
“Why are you looking at me? Have you only just remembered that you never even gave me a name because you wanted to call for me, and now you don’t know what to call me? Cut it out. Keep wishing I’d die like you always have. Don’t suddenly start barking and trying to save me.”
Within the white smoke, a gaze remained fixed on me.
When I sneered at that gaze, the duchess moved her lips as if to speak, then bowed her head deeply and left the room.
I stared after her for a while, then climbed into bed, the iron chain around my neck clinking softly as I went.