Then You'll Have to Die
"Then you'll have to die, won't you?"
"How hopelessly foolish."
The Heavenly Demon smiled, and the smile was bitter.
This was the last courtesy he would grant Lilith, and the shape of his thanks. Her wish had called him here and led him out of death into life. Poisoned, bloated, a worthless body—and a girl's, not even a man's—yet had they not always said that even rolling through a field of dung, it was better to remain among the living?
You gave me this body. I will repay you as that deserves.
The Heavenly Demon, who had never spared a thought for anyone else's affairs, acted for Lilith's sake for the first time. A mad bitch bent on killing her own daughter—but still, Lilith's mother.
Withdraw now, and I will let today be as if it never happened.
How merciful. How gracious. He had even turned his back on purpose, leaving her a gap through which to flee.
"Tsk."
But humans were savage things, just as expected. Look at her. Handed a chance, and she kicked it aside.
"Diiie!"
Lady Narien charged, a kitchen knife in her hand.
You saw, didn't you? I gave her a chance. And still your mother throws a tantrum, begging to be killed.
Thuk!
She drove the knife straight for Lilith's throat. Stab there, she thought, and the girl would die in a single blow.
"Huh…?"
She was certain she had struck. The knife was only cutting empty air.
"Did you truly believe you could land a blow on me?"
"H-how…"
He had slipped the strike without even turning around. A mere tilt of the head, and the blade passed him by.
"It seems to be my turn."
A light tap at the wrist, and the strength ran out of Narien's hand. The kitchen knife dropped from her grip.
"Now what will you do?"
The knife skittered across the floor. Nothing remained to her with which to face Lilith. The enormous girl turned, and up close that bulk was vaster still. Narien went cold at the size of her. She certainly hadn't been any fine, healthy infant when Narien bore her…
"W-what! You'd commit an outrage against your own mother? Hit me, if you think you can!"
Wild-eyed, Lady Narien shoved her head toward Lilith instead.
"Well? I told you to hit me! Go on—watch your own mother die!"
What absolute filth. The damned woman was wringing her daughter's love for all it was worth, certain to the bone that her child would never raise a hand against her mother.
Revolting.
The Heavenly Demon lifted his hand.
"Ha? You're really going to strike your mother? Fine! Hit me! Hit me! Beat me until you're satisfied!"
Crack!
He brought it down without a shred of hesitation. A palm the size of Lady Narien's own face struck not her cheek, but the whole of her face.
"Guhhhk—!"
In the instant of the blow it felt as if her eyes would burst from their sockets and her face cave in. A hand? This was no hand. It had to have been a brick. Lady Narien was flung toward the floor as if bounced off the air itself.
"Gyaaaah!"
She struck the ground and took the shock a second time.
Ngh… what was that?
Something flashed. For a moment her memory was simply gone, and when she came to she was sprawled on the floor, one cheek burning as if it had caught fire.
"D-don't tell me…"
Narien lifted her head and looked at Lilith. She meant the glare to be murderous, but the tears standing in her eyes only made her look pitiful.
"Y-you… you really… hit me? Your… mother? The one who bore you and raised you?"
Shock still held her, and she could barely tell what was real. However much she had hated the girl, however little love she had ever given, she had never imagined the child would commit such an outrage against a parent.
"Even so! I am! Your! Mother!"
Absurd. My daughter has never once hated me. No matter what I did, she was the daughter who said she loved me.
"Are you… going through a phase? Is that why you're rebelling against your mother? Did you hate the thought of dying for me that much?"
The dog just kept barking.
…One blow wasn't enough.
He had measured his strength and gone easy, because she was Lilith's mother. That had been the mistake.
I should have killed her in a single strike.
He listened in silence, and sure enough, the bitch did not look worth leaving alive.
"How can a human fall lower than a beast?"
Stung where it hurt, Narien's eyes flew wide.
"What? You're saying that to me?"
"Yes. Even a beast knows its own young are precious. And what are you? An insect? Even an insect wouldn't stoop to this."
The Heavenly Demon moved to act.
Shk. Shk. Shk. Shk.
The maids who had been watching mother and daughter drew daggers from within their clothes.
"Heheheh! You! You'll die right here, as punishment for striking this mother!"
"Kh—kahahahahahaha!"
Unable to hold it any longer, the Heavenly Demon broke into laughter. Was this not ridiculous past all belief? The bitch who had been slapped to the floor was still alive only in the mouth, babbling on, while those things that called themselves maids could not even grip a dagger properly and stood there in a sloppy cluster. Was this truly all they amounted to?
Once, the orthodox sects and the Murim Alliance had joined hands and stormed the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult to take him. The Lord of the Murim Alliance, the heads of the Five Great Families, even that old man of the Beggars' Sect—every one of them a master of outstanding skill. Only opponents of that order were fit to face him. And a handful of women meant to kill him?
"Kahahahahahahaha!"
The sheer absurdity dragged the laughter out of him. The world might change, but how had it changed into this? Even in the last instant before his death, had he not himself chosen to die, he would have lived all the same. Life and death—only he decided those.
The laughter that had run its course began to thin. When it was gone entirely, his face was nothing short of murderous.
Why? Why did Lilith, who on any ordinary day was a fool and an idiot, look so immense now?
"What are you all standing around for? Rush her—all of you, at once!"
The head maid shouted, the danger finally reaching her. She had suffered at those hands once before, and she knew Lilith's monstrous strength well. While their numbers still held, they had to kill that bitch, even if it cost one of them.
Crunch!
That was what they ought to have done. The head maid stared blankly into the empty air, as if watching some curious trick. The maid who had charged in first had taken nothing more than a fist, and yet, to the sound of bone being crushed, her body lifted and sailed through the air.
Thud.
The corpse dropped precisely beside the head maid. How to put it… yes. It felt as if the face had been punched clean through. The bridge of the nose and the cheekbones had collapsed entirely, pressed flat.
"Y-you—snap out of it!"
The head maid shook her in alarm.
"D-dead…?"
The maid was already gone. Her breath had stopped.
We're finished.
Killing a person with a single punch? This was beyond anything she had imagined. If she had known, she would have laid some other plan.
Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!
Even now the sound of something being smashed kept coming. No—the sound of people dying. She was too afraid to lift her head.
This is wrong… They're being hit, and they don't even scream…
How could one person strike another and kill them on the spot?
"What? They're all dead already?"
Lilith's voice filled the room. It sounded like a sentence of death.
"As I recall, I let you live once before. Am I right?"
The head maid could only nod, shaking where she stood.
"Then why do something this stupid? Was that woman—Hoian, or whatever her name was—more frightening than I am?"
She trembled. Every single word carried a crushing weight, and worse than the words, something immense seemed to be grinding her very soul underfoot. To be set beside the likes of Lady Hoian. She had been stupid. She had been a fool.
As expected of His Grace's daughter…
In Lilith, she could see Duke Briton.
"Then you'll have to die, won't you?"
Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!
He closed his fist and brought it down on the head maid with everything he had. There was no counting how many times it fell. With every blow, blood sprayed and speckled Lilith's clothes. Beneath a fist that broke a person the way a hammer breaks stone, the middle-aged woman once called the head maid ceased to exist. All that remained was a corpse, crushed flat as a scrap of paper.
Drip.
A drop of blood fell from Lilith's hand. Another's blood was flecked across her face. Narien sank to her knees as humbly as she knew how.
"I-I'm… sorry. M-Mother was wrong. It was all my fault…"
She had to beg. There was no other choice. Six people had already died before her eyes, and still Lady Narien clung to hope.
"I'm… your m-mother, aren't I? So you'll… let me live, won't you?"
The fact that she had given birth to Lilith. She believed that was her absolution.
"Do you still see me as your daughter?"
It was a tightly wound question, several others packed inside it.
And how, exactly, will she answer?
Perhaps—truly, only perhaps—if she spoke the right answer, there was the faintest thought of letting her live.
"Heh… heheh."
"You… y-you call that a question?"
Lady Narien laughed, thin and awkward. Whether she was straining to change the air in the room, or whether the question simply seemed that easy to her, there was no telling.
"O-of course you're my beloved daughter!"
"…Wrong."
The expectation had been wasted after all. Wanting trash like that to be a mother, even for a moment, had been nothing but his own greed.
"I am nothing like Lilith. Not in the way I speak, not in my habits—not in anything. Even the look in these eyes is wholly different… Can you not tell? I am not your daughter."
"Ha, haha! You're taking the joke much too far, aren't you…?"
Said outright, and still she did not understand.
Trash, without a single scrap of affection for Lilith. Truly.
Crunch!
The next morning, one seat at the table sat empty.
…
But no one spoke Lady Narien's name. They had already heard the news. They knew she had been found with her corpse ruined past all recognition of its shape.
"Who."
Duke Briton asked it flatly, midway through the meal.
"I asked who killed Narien."
His tone was that of a man who already knew every fact. While Lady Hoian, her guilty conscience prickling, hesitated and squirmed, the Heavenly Demon set down his spoon.