Drowned, Strangled, Reborn
Along with Scarlet's mocking laughter, her merciless grip seized my soaked hair and shoved me down once again.
"W-wait—! Sto—!"
SPLASH!
Before I could even scream, I was plunged back into the ice water. Cold liquid came flooding down into my stomach and windpipe, both already swollen from all the water I'd swallowed before.
The roaring pressure in my ears. The suffocating cold freezing my lungs from the inside.
Air... please, air...!
Instinctively I braced my hands against the basin, thrashing, clawing at any desperate purchase I could find—but there was no shaking off the weight of Scarlet pressing down on the back of my skull and spine.
She watched my two legs scrapeuselessly against the floor from above the water, letting her laughter drift down at me.
I was held under far longer than any of the times before. My vision strobed black and white, and only when my brain was on the verge of shutting down entirely from oxygen deprivation did Scarlet finally haul my upper body out of the water.
PUHAACK—!
"KHARGH...! Hrk! Kkah, kkah...—urgh!"
I collapsed face-down on the floor and vomited up the ice water pooled in my gut.
My limbs seized in convulsions, my chest heaving and starving for oxygen. But I wasn't even granted the time to breathe in.
"Your head isn't cooled off yet. I can still see the stubbornness of a human brat in those eyes."
"P-please...! Khk! Hrk... I was wrong... sob...!"
SPLASH!
The fourth dunking.
This time, I didn't even have the strength left to struggle.
The ice water crashing into my nose and mouth slowly turned my body limp, and the thread of consciousness began to unravel, thin and fraying.
Only when I had truly been shoved to death's doorstep did Scarlet dump my limp body out of the basin.
THUD!
"Kghk! Khk, kkah... hah, hahh..."
With my cheek pressed flat against the wooden floor, I retched up the frigid water.
My whole body was locked in uncontrollable spasms—I couldn't so much as twitch a finger—and inside my ears my own heartbeat pounded out an irregular, booming rhythm.
My dignity, my reason, my pride—those had been shattered to pieces in that basin long ago.
Tap. Tap.
With unhurried footsteps, Scarlet walked over to the bed and sat down on its edge.
"Now then, let's start your dog training over from the beginning."
"Lick between every single one of my toes with your tongue and clean them. You've already done it once, so no complaints, right?"
I had to survive. That single instinct alone governed my body. If I refused, I would be shoved back into that hellish basin of water and held under until my breath left me for good.
With trembling arms I pushed myself up off the damp wooden floor and crawled like a dog to her feet, pressing my nose against them.
Lick. Grovel. Survive...!
I parted my lips and stuck my tongue out, long and low.
The instant before it touched the cool tips of Scarlet's toes, I felt a convulsion rise from deep inside my body.
The brutal water torture had left my stomach and airways packed with freezing water, and the backlash of the suffocation sent shock waves rolling through me.
"U-urgh...!"
No—hold it, hold it...!
I desperately clapped my hands over my mouth to dam the disgusting pressure climbing back up my esophagus, but my body had already blown past its limits and refused to obey.
"UURGH—! Hrk! KHAGH, kkah...!"
FWOOOSH—!
The reflux burst from my mouth like a waterfall.
The murky cold water filling my lungs, mixed with sticky yellow bile and stomach acid, spattered across the back of Scarlet's foot, her toes, and the trailing hem of her cloak.
Drip, drip... plip. Plip.
Every sound in the cabin stopped.
I lifted my quivering eyes and looked up. The Scarlet who had been smiling with excitement just moments ago was no longer there.
As she stared down at the vomit splattered across her feet and cloak, her face was so utterly drained of expression that not a flicker of emotion could be found in it, her brow grotesquely contorted.
Extreme disgust. Contempt. And, swallowing them both whole—murderous intent.
"...You filthy piece of trash."
"How dare... where do you get off spewing that garbage all over me?"
There wasn't even a crack of an opening to explain myself.
CRACK!
"AAAGH...!"
Scarlet's foot drove straight into the center of my face. A dull crunch resounded through my nose, white light burst across my vision, and my body tumbled across the floor until it slammed into the wall.
As blood and vomit smeared a trail across the floor, Scarlet approached.
She planted her foot on my fallen body, bent down, and ripped the buckle of the leather collar fastened around my neck, tearing it loose.
CLACK—snap.
"Being treated like a dog is more than you deserve. You don't even have the right to live as livestock wearing a collar."
Scarlet pressed her knee down onto my chest and climbed on top of me, then seized my throat in both of her bare hands.
"KHRGH...! Kk... ghk...!"
Scarlet's fingers crushed directly down on my windpipe and the bones of my throat.
Not a whisper of oxygen got through. My lungs screamed, and instinct clawed my hands up to seize her wrists, raking at them with my nails—but her grip, biting into my flesh like a vise, wouldn't yield even a single millimeter.
"Don't struggle. Just die. Like this."
Scarlet bore down harder with her fingertips, strangling me with the full weight of her body. The wet crunch of my windpipe caving in echoed again and again inside my skull.
My tongue lost all control and lolled out of my mouth, and frothy blood and saliva bubbled up and spilled through the gap in my lips.
"Kh... hah..."
The strength drained from my fingertips. The convulsions of my legs, still raking at the floor, grew duller and slower.
Blackness crept in from the edges of my vision, narrowing the world into an oval.
And at the center of that shrinking tunnel, only one thing remained sharp and vivid: Scarlet's crimson eyes, looking down at me as her bare hands choked the life out of me.
So... this is how it ends.
No flashing montage of childhood memories or cherished moments passed before my eyes.
All that flooded my mind was a nameless emptiness and helplessness.
Dragged without warning into this grotesque forest for no reason I could fathom, forced to live as some madwoman's livestock, crawling at her feet through humiliation after humiliation—and now, strangled to death in the corner of a cabin I never even knew the name of.
Without ever learning who or what to curse for the fact that I had to suffer this fate, the simple reality that my life was about to end here was so terribly, unbearably miserable.
Thud. Thud. Thud... My heartbeat, once loud enough to split my ears, was drifting farther and farther away. And at last, the final flame in my lungs guttered out.
A body slumping, heavy and dead, against the wooden floor.
Scarlet casually washed the vomit from the back of her foot with water and murmured quietly to herself.
"Haah... and this is why wolf brats are..."
Once upon a time, a good little girl named Red Riding Hood set out through the forest to her grandmother's house on an errand from her mother.
The wolf(?) caught by Red Riding Hood was fitted with iron chains and a collar, and broken into livestock—trained to lick its master's feet, violated again and again.
But the bad wolf, deceived by temptation, lingered in a fragrant flower field, drunk on the songs of little birds while time slipped away.
And in the meantime, after a savage water torture, it made the mistake of soiling its master—and had its face stomped into the ground, beaten without mercy, and at the very end, strangled to death by Red Riding Hood's own two hands.
Then a brave huntsman came, defeated the bad wolf, and saved the little girl.
"And now the forest is peaceful and safe once more."
"Haah... and this is why wolf brats are..."
— And after that, Red Riding Hood lived happily ever after with her grandmother —
After that, Red Riding Hood began to wander the forest once more, in search of a new wolf(?).
"HAAAGH—!"
I bolted upright with a scream.
"Haah, hagh...! Hrk, kkah! Khargh...!"
My heart pounded like it was about to split my ribs apart.
My whole body heaved, gulping down oxygen, and my hands scrambled up to clutch the back of my neck.
The horrific pressure of my vertebrae being crushed. Scarlet's fingers digging into my skin. Those crimson eyes filling my vision in the last second before my breath gave out. Every sensation was still vivid, burned into me.
Was it... a dream?
With trembling hands I felt around my throat—but there was no collar constricting it, no wound leaking bloody froth.
And yet the terror of that suffocation, experienced mere moments ago, still clung to every single cell in my body. It was too much to dismiss as a mere nightmare.
Gulping down ragged breaths, I slowly lifted my head and looked around.
This was not Scarlet's cabin, reeking of blood and lamp oil, its floor soaked through with ice water.
Then again, it wasn't my familiar modern bedroom back home either.
What surrounded me were rough walls packed with hardened earth, weathered rafters crossing overhead, and warm sunlight filtering gently through the paper of a sliding door.
It looked for all the world like a single cramped room in some quiet, peaceful thatched cottage from the old countryside.
...Where the hell am I now?
There was no trace of the cabin's murderous aura, none of that blood-red grotesquerie.
The room was silent; only the intermittent chirr of insects outside the window filled the stillness.
No matter how I searched my surroundings, there was no one here to threaten me or watch me.
In that warmth, that stillness, my gaze settled on a single old wooden tray set in the middle of the room.
Upon it sat steaming mounds of pure white rice, a pot of soybean paste soup simmered with care, and a row of humble, seasoned vegetable side dishes, all arranged neatly and with obvious devotion.
The scent of freshly cooked rice drifted across the room and brushed the tip of my nose.
An empty cottage. A warm meal laid out as if for me alone. Faced with this strange, peaceful scene immediately after being strangled to death, an indescribable, alien wrongness began to bloom slowly in my chest.
...No. Don't tell me.
A flash of the hellish reality I'd just lived through, and an icy chill went sprinting up my spine.
The blood-soaked Red Riding Hood. The cabin in the woods. The memory of that terrible strangling. If none of it had been a dream—
If I had truly fallen into a fairy tale, then this cottage was no exception either.
An old thatched house in the countryside. An empty room. And a meal with no one to eat it.
Behind the warm smell of rice that hung in the air, nothing but a heavy, suffocating silence closed in around me.