Episode 176: Deep Beneath the Sea — 1
Beneath a sky choked with storm clouds, black thorn-trees writhed like snakes. At their heart stood a black-haired girl with an enormous dragon's arm that scorned the laws of physics, and she was glaring at me.
"Come to stop me, have you?"
She asked it while looking straight at me.
"I'm cold."
Maleficent flinched at the answer. She would understand. In that world I still couldn't tell was vision or dream, she had tasted my suffering secondhand.
It wasn't a cold so dreadful it drove you mad the instant it touched you. What made it dreadful was that it grew stronger forever. There was no limit. Or rather, adapting to it was impossible. Only after you had been steeped in that cold, and realized that even suicide was a luxury, could you finally go properly mad. And even then, the cold went on hurting you.
"My warmth is just melting away into empty air."
A Harvester dying was fine. When they died, I took the warmth anyway. But the people the Harvesters would have killed from here on—or the people who might have become Harvesters—those people were already dead.
"I don't like that."
While I was at it, I swung a white branch and swept the thorns back from around us. The writhing thorn-trees slowly shrank.
Maleficent watched, displeasure written across her face, and opened her mouth.
"Moving as you please again, in a place where mana will not stir. Just what power are you using?"
With a flick, she turned the hand that had become a dragon's back into a human one. Victoria, who had been crouched beneath it, edged carefully toward me.
"Bell. That woman. Strong."
"I know."
I had been hit by a mental attack. My mind had been dug open. She was no ordinary person. She was strong enough to call herself the Queen of All Evil. To declare yourself evil is to boast that you hold absolute power.
"Weren't the two of you on bad terms?"
Maleficent aimed the question at Victoria.
Sowing discord, here? A little crude, wasn't it? If she could manage it, I would much rather she show me some spectacular magic.
"We were only pretending. Bell and I both knew you were up to something strange. Mally."
And since the falling-out had been an act, the wedge didn't take. Victoria glared at Maleficent and, at the same time, began slowly drawing water in from all around her. There was already far too little of it. The air had gone bone-dry, and I could feel Victoria straining. It was a peculiar sensation, but I knew the shape of it well enough: the motion of someone trying to wring out what wasn't there.
All at once Victoria staggered and dropped to the ground. Psychic power doesn't spend mana, but it spends focus together with stamina. She had lost a great deal of blood earlier. Collapsing was only natural.
"Spilled that much blood, and even standing is difficult, isn't it? Shall I put you at ease?"
Maleficent said it with a sneer. But unlike before, there was no superiority on her face. When she had attacked the Harvesters, she had been steeped in the certainty that nothing they did could ever defeat her. Now she watched me instead. Every time she spoke, her eyes locked onto me as if she couldn't bear not to know how I would react, unable to hide what she felt.
I walked over to Victoria, who was panting on the ground, and sat down on top of her.
"Kyagh!"
Victoria shrieked. If I didn't do this, though, she really would keel over from anemia. Her eyes wouldn't focus. She was miserable under my weight, and enduring it left her unable to so much as snap at me.
"Isn't that rather harsh on an anemic child?"
"For a child brimming with killing intent, a proper paperweight is just the thing."
If Victoria's opponent had been some middling warrior instead of Maleficent, her head would already have been off. However solid a safety net she might have had, a girl who destroyed the merfolk's forward base alone was anything but ordinary. I glanced at the black thorn-trees stealthily creeping in along the ground and swung the white branch again. They receded. This witch. She did move underhandedly.
"No matter how I look, I cannot grasp the principle. It was the same last time. Even inside a nightmare, you shattered it at once. I never expected you to try going inward, rather than foolishly heading out."
A nightmare.
So she meant the hallucination I had seen yesterday.
"Did you learn anything about me in there?"
I asked her, and Maleficent closed her mouth. Silence meant she hadn't really learned anything. She must have followed me and seen the same things I had. No one there had said anything of note, so however she tried, there was nothing to learn.
I had learned a great deal myself. If only the Harvesters had been present, there might have been a chance that everyone whose warmth I had taken had come inside. But a memory was only a memory. Hyungkesyuni had been there. Until she sank to the bottom of the water and vanished, I never touched her light, nor her warmth. So that particular possibility did not exist. It was simply a hallucination spun out of memory.
For something of that sort, Hyungkesyuni had stood out unusually on her own. Daegon and Yuanshi Tianzun had stood out quite a bit as well, so they must have been of a fairly high order. Or else they had simply left that deep an impression on me. She had treated me as an enemy to the very end, after all.
"Bell. You pig. Heavy..."
Victoria, pinned beneath me, let out a small groan, but I ignored her. I knew she was still drawing moisture up from the ground. It cost stamina. If she didn't stop, she would collapse.
"Maleficent, what do you intend to do from here?"
I asked it of Maleficent, who had at some point produced a staff set with a yellow jewel and leveled it at me. If she made up her mind to kill me, I could catch her and twist her. In short, the technique I possessed was closer to a counter. To put it in the terms of a game, it wasn't the sort that used the opponent's attack power. It was the sort that waited for the opponent to fall into my gimmick. So, should I start scratching at her temper? I coveted her technique.
"First, Princess Aurora, who insulted me, must sleep forever, just as promised."
"What's this. Were you the only one not invited to the birthday party? All by yourself?"
A tooth cracked against a tooth. Oho. She was grinding them. A witch from a certain fairy tale had come to mind, which was why I asked, and the Maleficent before me had been the same. A powerful witch in that story, too. At least as powerful as the witch standing in front of me.
"Nastier than I expected, Bell. Don't tell me sitting there in that bed all this time like some vegetable was meant to lower my guard?"
I shook my head, denying it.
"I thought Merryweather was a bodyguard. I stayed still because there was no need to move. I really only learned a little while ago that Merryweather was a witch, you know?"
I couldn't tell what she had done or how, but ice so clear it was barely visible even to Victoria's eyes hung in the air, packed with the killing intent to slay the witch before her even if she herself went down. Feeling a prickle of fear at that intent, I lifted my foot a little and stepped on Victoria's hand. A small groan, and the blade vanished. Once I was sure the strength had drained out of her and she had gone limp, I stood up from her back.
Victoria had stopped. Now I had to deal with the witch. A witch with a fierce pride. What could I say that would hurt her most?
"Don't be too disappointed. Even if I had known you were a witch, what I did wouldn't have changed."
I swung the white branch once more and drove out the black thorn-trees filling the background, so she would mistake this place, in this moment, for one where the initiative belonged to me alone.
"There was no need, was there?"
A tone that said the gap between us was so vast that whatever someone like her did was perfectly fine. In truth, even knowing she was a witch, all I could do until she acted was wait. But the words would jab, and jab again, at her pride.
Look. Black mist was spilling out around Maleficent, and the smoke climbed slowly into the sky. She had not been speaking with me thoughtlessly. High overhead, the black smoke slowly drew itself into a vortex.
"Trying to sparkle?"
Putting on a little trick? Knowing full well how it would sound, I asked her.
Thunder cracked. Lightning poured from the heart of the vortex. Unfortunately, it only went so far as smashing the buildings around us.
Oh. What a waste. Someone who had been asleep inside was dead. They weren't a Harvester, so I couldn't tell exactly how they had died, but the light I kept catching in glimpses shrank little by little and vanished.
"You missed."
I said it to mean she ought to aim properly next time, and Maleficent leveled her staff at me. The lightning did not fall again.
"What are you doing?"
"You want to be attacked right now, don't you?"
Ah. I must have moved too obviously.
"Better that I'm the one hit than to have fleeting warmth erased."
I tried to slip the words aside, but Maleficent only glared. She wasn't attacking me, to a strange degree. Given everything I knew of her temper, she should already have crossed the threshold. And yet she was holding back from striking me with this obsessive restraint.
"You heard something from Hyungkesyuni, didn't you?"
She tried to hide her expression. It showed all too clearly.
Correct.
The Hyungkesyuni who had mocked her in there must have told her about my weakness. Of course, the Hyungkesyuni met inside that nightmare was probably not Hyungkesyuni herself. Turning it over on my own, I thought what had spoken was my arrogant heart. I was desperately playing the part of a passive person, and still I thought of ordinary humans as nothing more than simple matches. Or as material that would become Harvesters. The arrogance of standing where I exploited others.
Set aside a cold without bottom or end, and I had once been an ordinary human, so thinking that way was hardly strange. I had kept up appearances well enough. It seemed I hadn't been able to hide what was inside. How was anyone supposed to resist explaining this and that to an opponent they had already beaten, and teabagging them besides? I could understand it. The trouble was that it hadn't been said in a situation where I had actually won—but it had been said in a dream, so I would simply call it unavoidable.
If she had heard that, then I could draw out a little more of what was inside.
"Maleficent. Don't tell me you're frightened? You call yourself the Queen of All Evil, and you're afraid of a monster that doesn't assert a will of its own?"
Victoria was listening, of course, so I twisted it just a little as I provoked her.
"Killing people weaker than yourself doesn't bother you at all, and yet you're scared to lay a hand on a monster."
I turned my back on purpose.
"I'm disappointed."
Then I walked over to Victoria, who was still clutching the flagstones, dizzy, sweat dripping from her. Through Victoria's eyes, I watched Maleficent grinding her teeth.