The Process of Becoming an Adult (1)
I regretted the feelings I had belatedly shown her.
The way I had insisted so firmly that I hated her, that I despised her, still weighed on me.
When I thought about it carefully, that couldn’t have been the whole of what I felt.
I didn’t fully understand my own heart either, but hatred alone had never occupied it completely.
Yet Vivian went on acting as if none of it concerned her in the least.
“Hurry up, Kailo. The food’s getting cold.”
“...”
She treated me exactly as she always had.
My fretting felt almost embarrassing; my feelings seemed to have left no mark on her life at all.
...Was that all I was to her?
Sometimes I wondered.
Could we even call ourselves close?
Or were we simply tangled together by circumstance and duty?
I never found an answer.
The days kept flowing past.
I had accepted the role of Witch Hunter, yet little truly changed.
The one thing that did shift was the way people looked at me.
Especially the maids—a light fear began to settle in their eyes, as if they believed I might force the label of witch upon them at any moment.
Sometimes, within my hearing, someone would loudly declare how much they loathed witches, proving their own purity. Other times a person would approach me directly and beg me to leave them alone, insisting they were no witch.
At first Vivian had seemed uneasy about me taking on the role of watcher. Once she saw how the castle began to shun me, though, she started snickering.
“You were the one who agreed to it, Kailo.”
She even teased me about it, and I couldn’t bring myself to mind.
Time continued like that.
I trained, drilled the boy soldiers, ate with Vivian, stayed at her side... slept, washed, ate, and let the hours pass.
Sometimes I carried out executions as well.
Rapists, murderers, bandits, witches...
I took the death warrants Vivian had stamped and swung my two-handed sword.
The sensation of necks dropping one after another grew more familiar with every swing.
And the more familiar it became, the more my name settled into something people feared.
Dragon hunter. Witch Hunter. Eldest son of the Allen family. Executioner. Boy-soldier platoon leader. Vivian’s enemy. Vivian’s escort.
Those titles, combined with my steadily growing frame, made even the knights avoid my eyes.
Todd especially—Baelor’s former lieutenant—was like that.
When I had first become an executioner at fifteen, he had scorned and mocked me. By the time I reached the middle of my sixteenth year, he lowered his gaze without a word.
It wasn’t only Todd.
Maids, knights, retainers... all of them showed how carefully they kept their distance from me.
The atmosphere had been building slowly for a long time, but now it was blatant.
And Vivian seemed to enjoy the sight of me like that.
“It was already true before, but now nobody likes you at all, do they?”
Her sarcasm didn’t sting the way it once might have.
In her eyes I could confirm one simple fact.
I was giving her a sense of security.
The people she had once watched warily now feared me, and she seemed to feel at ease by my side.
The enemy of my enemy is my ally, after all.
Still, I had to admit that Vivian herself bore some responsibility for the fear that had taken root.
The way she stayed close to the boy soldiers, the sharp questions she threw at the retainers she summoned—those days were winding a tight tension through Rondore Castle.
Everyone could feel that a great change was approaching.
Like the calm before a storm, the present was only a temporary stillness.
And since it was an open secret that Vivian and I had formed an unofficial alliance, those who felt uneasy around her had every reason to fear me as well.
Perhaps because of that, the steady feeling I held toward Vivian—who walked through this uneasy atmosphere with me—kept growing larger.
I called that feeling camaraderie.
I suspected Vivian felt something similar toward me.
In that way, a little more than half a year passed after I became a Witch Hunter.
We kept becoming adults.
“Hah... hah...!”
Vivian, who would soon turn sixteen, exhaled hot breaths and strained her arms.
Yet those arms felt as limp and powerless as if they had been submerged in water.
Her will to push away the approaching figure was desperate, but as that will broke, bewilderment and tension squeezed her chest.
“C-can’t you stop?”
She cried out in a trembling voice that sounded almost like a plea.
“I don’t think I can.”
Kailo’s voice was low and deep. It had already been deepening lately.
His unwavering tone carried a fierce certainty.
Vivian didn’t know how she could tell, but she felt that Kailo was thirsty for her.
Her outstretched hands pressed against his chest.
The touch was vividly hot, like fire.
As a northerner who had lived in cold lands, his body temperature ran high.
For some reason, Kailo wasn’t even wearing a shirt.
“Why... why are you undressed... P-put your clothes on!!”
“You touched me first before. Why are you making a fuss about it now?”
Looking like that, he kept closing the distance between them.
Vivian put strength into her arms and kept pushing him away, but he continued to advance.
“Ugh!”
Her arms finally failed to hold him back and collapsed.
As the space between them vanished, Kailo’s powerful arm wrapped around her waist.
That intense pressure stirred a sense of déjà vu.
“Hhk...!”
Breath was wrung from her lungs; she gasped in panic and hastily sucked air back in.
The dense scent of his body—something she had first learned while breathing in the smell of his blankets—washed over her even more strongly now.
That familiar, rich fragrance emptied her mind completely.
When she came back to herself, she was already lying on the bed.
Her gaze, panting as if her breath were caught in her throat, turned upward.
Kailo had laid her down and was looking down at her.
Her heart hammered as if it would burst.
She couldn’t meet those black eyes, and she had no strength left to push him away.
Completely overwhelmed, Vivian could only freeze in place.
“Ka... Kailo... why are you... doing this...”
She stammered the question without meaning to.
It was a humble, almost servile tone, nothing like the speech she had trained herself to use.
The situation was so different from ordinary life that an entirely different attitude slipped out.
Hearing herself stammer only piled a greater sense of helplessness over her.
Fear, a strange excitement, and the sharp awareness that she absolutely must not do this with him—the feeling of committing a wrong—all of it stimulated her further.
Before she realized it, her own upper clothes had been removed as well.
“D-don’t look!”
The moment her mind cleared, Vivian startled and covered her chest, but Kailo didn’t so much as flinch.
“...”
—Tak.
Instead he took hold of her wrists, intending to uncover what she had hidden.
Vivian, ashamed of that much at least, squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head.
“I... I told you no...!”
Even with her eyes closed, his face was vividly clear.
“Relax.”
He spoke as if giving an order.
Vivian felt her body go rigid under the command.
Confused feelings kept flooding her.
She had to refuse.
She knew that... yet she kept hesitating.
“I said relax, Vivian.”
He ordered her again.
“...”
Little by little, the strength drained from her body as well.
—Ssshk.
Like an obedient puppy, she did as he wished.
She hated yielding, and yet she did not hate the yielding itself.
She began to submit to an impulse she herself could not understand.
Vivian squeezed her eyes shut and offered her left breast to Kailo.
The shame that rushed in with the embarrassment made her want to hide, yet at the same time a strange curiosity rose in one corner of her heart.
Would he think it pretty, or would he think it ugly?
Lady Rinne had told her that the shape of her breasts, at least, was lovely.
Kailo’s other hand moved toward that breast.
It had grown larger recently.
Vivian breathed hard, yet it felt as if her breath were blocked and she were suffocating.
Then his hand touched her breast—
“Hhk!”
Vivian expelled the breath she had been holding and bolted upright on the bed.
“Hah...! Hah...!”
She panted, her eyes darting around in confusion.
Kailo had vanished like a mirage.
Vivian herself was wearing her nightclothes again.
Soft moonlight filtered between the curtains, and cool, pleasant air filled the room.
Vivian blinked for a long time, struggling to make sense of the situation.
“...Ha.”
Once her mind cleared, she let out a hollow laugh, her expression blank with disbelief.
Had she just had an indecent dream?
“...”
Lady Rinne had spoken of such things more than once.
It was a natural process, she had said—an inevitable desire that came with growing up, and there was nothing to be done about it.
But Vivian had never imagined it would happen to her.
She had never thought of herself as particularly lustful, and she had never taken any interest in such matters.
...Yet her dream was saying otherwise. Her body was telling her that she, too, was steadily becoming an adult.
But of all people—Kailo.
That Kailo Allen would appear in a dream like that.
She cupped her cheeks in both hands and sank into an unsuppressable shame and confusion.
If she had to name the one person in the world with whom she must never enter into that kind of relationship, it would be Kailo Allen.
The son of the man who had killed her parents and siblings.
Even if it killed her, she must never share a bed with him.
What would her family, looking down from the heavens, think of her?
And yet she had dreamed it.
“Have I gone mad...?”
she muttered to herself.
And amid all of this, what confused Vivian most of all was the fact that her heart was still pounding.
The excitement that had risen once did not fade as easily as her confusion wanted it to.
The revulsion she felt at having dreamed such a thing... and the curiosity about what might have happened if that private fantasy had continued just a little further... both seized her at once.
Thinking of that curiosity, Vivian struck her own head.
No matter how hard she hit herself, her body—sensitively heated—would not calm down.
One more assumption shook her as well.
This was a dream, so it could be set aside.
...But what if the exact same thing had happened in reality?
Would she have been able to refuse his actions the way her rational mind was doing now?
She had only just begun to grasp, faintly, what kind of excitement that filthy, perverted situation could produce.
“...It’s a nightmare... just a nightmare...”
Vivian muttered as if trying to hypnotize herself.
Yet she knew better.
She was someone who often had nightmares, and she knew exactly how her body reacted to them.
When she had a nightmare she woke drenched in cold sweat, her whole body chilled to the point of ice.
But right now it was the opposite.
She had woken with her body burning hotter than anything, as if she herself were a single lump of charcoal.