Childhood (4)
“This should be enough….”
I brushed the dust from my clothes with a hand that felt oddly light today, then got to my feet.
I didn’t know who the black mage was who had been pulling these men’s strings from behind the scenes, but this should have been warning enough.
Still, if they kept coming after Lia and trying some foolish stunt even after this threat, then I’d have to track down whoever stood behind them and cut them down so thoroughly they wouldn’t even get the chance to breathe.
No. Do I really need to leave them alive at all?
This so-called cult—or the “That Person” he’d mentioned—was backstory that hadn’t even existed in the original novel. In other words, it was an unknown.
And because I had no idea how big it was or how dangerous it might be, maybe the safest thing was to find the whole mess and wipe it out to the last one.
“...Should I just go and cut their throats?”
The words slipped out before I could stop them, and I had the distinct feeling that someone beyond the man shuddered all over.
I stood there for a moment, thinking in front of the severed head.
Should I use this chance to find the people behind them and tear them out by the roots? Would it be all right to step away from Lia for a while, just long enough to remove any future trouble?
I was shaking the blood from my sword when Lia grabbed my sleeve.
“N-no. Cain…!”
“Huh? No? What do you mean, no?”
“You said you were going to cut their throats! You can’t do that! D-defiling a corpse is against etiquette!”
“……Huh?”
I was wondering what in the world she was talking about when I saw Lia point at the corpse with her index finger, and then I understood.
Ah. Was Lia thinking I meant I was going to cut the corpse’s throat again?
Sure, the way I’d said it was out of context enough to sound that way. Even so, I wasn’t such a ruthless man that I’d go around slicing up corpses’ throats. Besides, there wasn’t a throat left to cut anyway, since every single one of them had already been severed.
“Y-you have to bury corpses properly. You can’t just go and hack them up, Cain!”
“Ah… right. Okay. I won’t.”
I nodded without protest, because explaining it would only make the conversation drag on.
At my answer, Lia seemed to relax, letting out a breath as she clutched her chest. But only for a moment; soon enough, she must have grown frightened by the corpses strewn around us and the severed heads, because she edged quickly to my side with a rather scared expression and clung to me.
After glancing at Lia, I gave the nearest head a sharp kick and sent it rolling far, far away. Lia didn’t seem to see that, because she kept tugging insistently on my sleeve and said,
“Cain, hey. What do you think these people… actually were?”
“Well, I’m not sure, but…”
I trailed off and glanced at the head that had rolled into the distance.
Its skin had gone bloodless, the nose and mouth grotesquely twisted. The face was ugly enough that I’d been late to react, taken aback by how hideous it was.
“That guy mentioned a cult or something, and ‘That Person,’ too. He even tried to demand you as a human sacrifice, Lia, so I’d say they were probably apostles of some evil god.”
“An evil god…! W-what is that, Cain…?”
Lia asked timidly, still not fully recovered from the shock. Her face looked exactly like a ten-year-old’s, and I couldn’t help a snort of amusement as I slipped back into the boots I’d taken off and swept my eyes over the corpses scattered all around us.
First, I ought to fix the fact that I’d started speaking casually without meaning to.
“You do know there are many gods in this world, right?”
By gods, I didn’t mean a religious all-powerful deity, a creator god or anything like that, but actual beings that existed and exerted influence on the world.
Lia had learned this from her tutor recently, so she nodded at once.
“Mm-hm, I know. You mean gods like Venus and Sol?”
“Yes, exactly. Venus, who governs love, and Sol, who governs the sun, are gods, right? They’re benevolent gods who have a positive influence on the world. In simple terms, they’re the good ones.”
There was nothing more foolish than judging the good and evil of gods from a human perspective, but if I tried to dig into the philosophy deeply, even a few sleepless nights wouldn’t be enough.
“The one that guy mentioned—‘That Person’—the god who demands people as human sacrifices—that would be an evil god, one that brings harmful influence to the world. Their doctrine itself harms people, after all.”
“Ah… I get it. So it’s an evil god because it harms people. Then the god those people worship is a bad god?”
“Yes, that’s right. An evil god.”
I wasn’t certain whether the “That Person” those bastards worshipped was a real god, but since there was a cult and they’d even spouted the madness of demanding Lia as a human sacrifice, it was fair enough to treat it as a sort of god.
Of course, it might not be a god at all, but did that really matter all that much?
What mattered now was that those unknown bastards had targeted Lia, might target her again, and could even use that as the trigger for Lia’s awakening as a villainess.
In other words, for me—the man who needed to see Lia grow up safely and become the most beautiful woman in the Empire—that mysterious cult itself was a thorn in my eye.
“……Hm.”
I was turning over ways to dismantle them when Lia tapped my shoulder.
“But, Cain. These people… no, these corpses—what should we do with them? Are we just leaving them like this?”
“No, we need to clean up after ourselves.”
“……Clean up?”
“Yes. Clean up.”
Needless to say, just because I was a noble didn’t mean I could kill people however I pleased.
There were laws and trials in this world, after all, and if it was discovered that I’d killed ten burly men, I’d probably end up with a huge fine or some kind of punishment. Even if it was self-defense.
As Lia’s escort knight, I couldn’t allow an ugly stain like that to be placed on my name.
So I gathered the severed corpses and heads at the bottom of the hill. Stacking the bodies on top of one another and placing all ten heads on top of them made for a rather grotesque sight.
“Cain, I’m scared…. It feels like the corpses are staring at me…!”
“They actually are staring at you.”
“……Hiiik!”
After I gave her a little fright, Lia pressed against my side like glue. I patted her head to reassure her and said quietly,
“Lady Lia, you still can’t be scared yet. There’s something you need to do.”
“Something I need to do?”
“Yes. Lady Lia, you recently learned the basics of fire-element magic, didn’t you?”
“Y-yeah, I did…?”
“Then let’s put the fruits of that learning to practical use. Now, Lady Lia. Use magic on this pile of corpses and set them on fire.”
“S-set them on fire…?!”
Startled, Lia snapped her head up to look at me.
Her already huge eyes went round as saucers, clearly shocked that I was suddenly telling her to light a fire. I answered in a calm voice, as though I were asking for the most ordinary thing in the world.
“Yes, Lady Lia. No need to be afraid. These are the men who tried to harm you, aren’t they?”
“T-that’s true, but….”
“Lady Lia, think about it. What if I hadn’t been here? Those men would have kidnapped you to offer you as a human sacrifice, and by now you might not even be in this world anymore. They were that vile. That means there’s no need for you to feel sorry for them.”
“Th-that’s how it is? I don’t need to feel sorry, Cain…?”
“No, that’s right. Why would you feel sorry? If anything, they should be thanking you, Lady Lia. If they’d stayed alive, they would only have gone around harming other people. Thanks to you, they’re becoming fertilizer for a more beautiful world. They’ll probably be grateful even after death, over and over again.”
“I-I see. If you put it that way, Cain….”
Swallowing hard, Lia extended her right hand.
“……Fi, fire!”
Then, with a voice as cute and childlike as a ten-year-old’s, she shouted. A tiny spark leapt from the tip of her small finger, then swelled into a round ball and flared over the corpse pile with a whoosh.
──Bang, whoosh!
With a loud sound, the fire grew even larger. Along with the smell of burning flesh, acrid smoke billowed up and swallowed the place where Lia and I stood.
We stepped back a few paces and watched the unexpected cremation.
...And it wasn’t until about ten minutes later that I finally realized something was off.
“Hey, Cain. How long does it take for corpses to burn completely?”
“To burn down to nothing but bone dust… I’d say at least two hours at around a thousand degrees.”
“T-two hours? There’s already a ton of black smoke rising, though. Won’t people come running before then…?”
“Yes, they probably will. It seems I made a mistake.”
It was my first time burning human corpses with fire, so I hadn’t known, but come to think of it, even back on Earth it took hours to completely cremate a body.
Even a crematorium proved the point, didn’t it? If you burned a body in scorching heat hot enough that you could feel it just by standing nearby, it still took at least two hours. A fire sparked by a bit of magic that wasn’t even half as hot would take much longer than that. At minimum, probably three hours.
And three hours was more than enough time for the villagers to spot the black smoke rising from the burning corpses and come running from every direction.
Once I thought of that, I grabbed Lia by the hand.
“Lady Lia.”
“H-huh?”
“Let’s run.”
“R-run away? Then what about these corpses?”
“You don’t need to worry. I burned them nicely, so they won’t be able to trace us from the sword marks left on the bodies.”
“Ah, I see. Then we can just go—ah!”
Still holding my hand, Lia tried to take a step forward, but her body swayed unsteadily.
I moved fast and caught her around the waist just before she toppled over.
“Lady Lia, are you all right?”
“Mm-hm, I’m fine, but… I feel a little strange, Cain.”
“Strange how? Where exactly do you feel strange?”
“It’s like all the strength is draining out of my whole body, somehow….”
“All the strength is draining out of your whole body…?”
If that was the symptom, then there was one thing I could think of. It was the phenomenon known as mana exhaustion, caused by overusing the mana inside one’s body. But that seemed odd, didn’t it?
Lia was only ten years old now, and even if she was a novice mage who had just begun learning magic, it made no sense for mana exhaustion to strike after she’d only conjured a little flame.
Which meant there had to be an external factor I didn’t know about… but what was it?
As I was thinking, something at the edge of my vision caught my eye: the slightly parted front of Lia’s clothes.
On the back of her slender neck, the size of a thumbnail, was a black clover mark drawn in reverse.
“……”
The moment I saw it, a strong sense of deja vu washed over me.
That was because I knew that black clover mark.
It was the mark of the Curse of Misfortune, embedded in the necklace that villainess Lia von Elleves had given to Stella, filled with her desire for Stella to die because she hated the original heroine of the novel so much.
The Curse of Misfortune that, in the original story, wasn’t supposed to appear until Lia von Elleves turned eighteen.
...Was now, for some reason, lodged in ten-year-old Lia.