Empty Shell (8)
If I had to say it felt satisfying, then yes — it did. Something close to the feeling of wringing a smug demon bastard's neck with my own hands out on the front lines.
At any rate, the family head would have his regrets, but he was going to have to hand the house over to me as well.
You never know.
The moment I become head, the world might announce that I've cleared some ending and set me free.
I know full well this isn't that kind of world — but a man is allowed a little hope, isn't he?
And if not… well, I'd just have to find an ending somehow.
There had to be one.
There had to be.
First, though, I needed to clean up.
The surroundings were a wreck of liquor stench and the reek of blood.
I grabbed the family head's corpse and dragged it along. Even hauling him by the shoulder across the ground, he was far heavier than I'd expected.
Thinking back on how he'd danced through the air dodging my blade, he couldn't have been this heavy while he was alive.
The dead are always heavier than the living.
The sound of what had once been the family head scraping across the dirt passed strangely through the quiet hill.
I dragged him a long while, then dumped him roughly beside the headstone — the one with the clean cut mark across it — and laid him out.
I'd let him rest side by side with the grave of the woman he'd loved so much. That ought to make me a filial son, more or less.
Devotion deserves its reward.
The seat of family head would do nicely.
I couldn't wrap blue haze around a blade the way the family head or Rione could, couldn't cut through anything and everything… but was that really so impressive?
Not when a man like that had died for nothing at the hands of the very trash he'd always sneered at.
Honestly, a Sword Saint didn't seem like much of anything after all.
Fight for days without tiring, casually slice apart flying arrows and spells, cut through armor and even sealed fortress walls — and still, so long as you simply don't get hit by the attack…
Hah.
I know he went easy on me. I know he was measuring his swings, trying not to kill me, trying to turn me into some obedient little roly-poly toy.
That's why the family head died.
Because he never meant a single thing sincerely with his son.
I, on the other hand, had been entirely sincere.
Anyway — I was exhausted.
Not my body. More precisely, I couldn't focus.
Whenever I tried to think of something, the edge of the thought snapped off halfway through, and I couldn't even recall what I was supposed to do next.
My head felt fogged, as if someone had packed it full of cotton.
Had it been like this when I killed Arin, too?
Probably something similar.
That hollowed-out emptiness that arrives once you set the sword down.
Neither sad nor relieved.
Just cloudy.
A feeling of having stopped, still clouded over.
The battlefield really might have been my calling. Out there, there was no need to… think. Most of the day was spent fighting.
Granted, the beds and the food had been absolute shit.
I stood there blankly for a while, then simply sat my ass down on the bare ground.
The dirt was cold against me, and oddly damp. Fitting enough for the earth beside a headstone the sun never reached.
Not eerie — just cold, clammy, with only the sound of insects close by.
I looked down at my hands.
Blood had dried between my fingers.
Sticky.
An unpleasant man even in death.
I pulled a cigarette from my coat, stuck it between blood-smeared lips, and lit it.
While the smoke filled my lungs, I stared ahead without thinking.
In front of me lay the family head I'd just set down, still warm. Beside him stood the headstone.
My eyes caught on the flowers that had been resting on the stone — now slightly crushed beneath the family head's arm.
Flowers. Looking at them, they seemed to be the ones he'd brought that morning.
Could I ever love someone that much?
I didn't think so. Not me.
And I didn't think I could be loved that way either.
I drew in the air — blood, smoke, and the smell of grass all tangled together — and let it out again.
The smoke drifted out pale and thin, then vanished.
When one cigarette was gone, I lit the next.
While my hands repeated the motions — drawing out a cigarette, setting it to my lips, striking a light — the sun sank little by little.
Only the smoke rose toward the sky.
I couldn't rise. I just sat there.
When the wind blew, the smoke drifted toward the headstone and brushed across the family head's face.
How should I put it.
I'd killed my father, more or less, and yet there was no weight to it at all.
As if everything that had piled up inside me could be blown away just by huffing out a little smoke.
A feeling far too light.
Because dying had become light.
Because the life I was living now was not a life I only got once, it was excessively light.
Maybe that's why… somehow, I end up treating other people's lives lightly as well.
Even though I'm the only one who comes back when I die.
It had been the same when I killed Arin.
By the time I'd smoked every cigarette I'd brought, a heap of crushed butts had piled up at my feet.
Looked like a little grave.
The sun hung half-caught beyond the headstone, and a long shadow stretched out between the family head and me.
I stared at the shadow for a while. Sitting any longer wouldn't give me anything left to smoke, so I stood and dusted off my rear.
The dirt had been damp, so nothing actually came off — only a clammy earthy smell rose up instead.
Once I was on my feet, my knees were stiff and locked. I must have been sitting there for hours.
The path down to the manor was the same as the way up. A narrow trail through the trees, the sound of fallen leaves underfoot, birdsong from somewhere far off.
Things that must have been there on the way up only now reached my ears. I suppose I hadn't had the room to hear them then.
The blood all over me had changed color, too. What had been bright crimson had darkened to brown, slightly hardened, clinging to my clothes and skin like a second rind.
It snagged every time I moved. The pull on my skin felt like an extra layer of shed hide, and it irritated me.
There are things that won't leave the body until you wash them off.
I came down from the rear mountain and made my way slowly toward the manor.
The flower bed I'd trampled on the way up squelched under my feet. Between stems already broken and wilting, my footprints were stamped in a mix of mud and blood. The ones I'd left coming up. On the way back, I stepped in the same places again.
When I reached the darkened front entrance of the manor, the head butler I met inside went white as a sheet.
"Y-Young master!? That blood — what on earth…!"
"It isn't mine, so relax and just get a warm bath ready."
The butler's mouth opened and closed several times.
"Ah — and bring me something to smoke. Anything will do."
With that, I headed straight for the bath.
Perhaps because we'd put up five knights as guests, water already warmed and waiting for me. I sank into it at my leisure.
The browned blood slowly unfurled across the surface, clouding the water. As the dried blood loosened in the heat, the bath filled with a strange mix of blood-smell and warm steam — a faintly fishy reek.
I closed my eyes, tipped my head back, and stayed still for a long while.
If I fell asleep like this and drowned, I'd just come back again.
Come to think of it, I'd never drowned before.
I'd died thrashing with my face shoved into wet mud, sure — but never drowned.
I washed myself properly and changed into the fresh clothes the servants had left for me.
Then, somehow, my feet carried me to the family head's study.
I walked slowly through the room.
A thin film of dust had settled on the desk.
A liquor bottle sat half-empty on top of a drawer — so the man had drunk after all. I'd never once seen him do it while he was alive.
In the center of the desk sat a frame no larger than a hand, holding a portrait of Mother from her youth. I picked it up and looked at it.
The woman in the portrait was smiling brilliantly.
An expression I had never seen in any of my memories.
In the fragments that flickered past every time I died, Mother's face had always been gentle, or faintly sad.
The smiling face, it seemed, had been known only to the family head.
I set it down slowly.
I thought I understood, a little, why he had favored Rione so much.
Talent aside — she really did take after her.
I was still looking at the portrait when a knock came at the door.
"Come in."
When I asked if he had something to say, the butler hesitated a moment, then spoke. His face had settled a little more than earlier.
"Young master. Do you know where… the family head is at present? He left the manor saying he had something to tell you, and it has been quite some time, yet he still has not returned, so I wondered if perhaps…"
"The family head, is it."
I slowly curled my fingertips, then opened them again.
"He's standing right in front of you, isn't he?"
The butler grasped the situation at once and did his best to keep every emotion from his face. His hands, though, were trembling slightly.
"…The young lady will not simply stand by."
"No, she won't. Go and tell them. That Grian's disgrace has finally ruined the house."
The butler's legs seemed to give out; he staggered once, then left the room without so much as a bow.
Fair enough. Learning that the man you'd served your whole life had been killed by the family idiot would be a shock.
That said — I'd asked for something to smoke, and the man hadn't listened at all.
I went to the room I'd been using, pulled a cigar left in the cabinet, stuck it between my teeth, and lit it.
Beyond the window, the sun had almost fully set.
In the dim room, only the glow at the cigar's tip brightened with each draw and darkened with each exhale.
The family head was dead.
Which is to say… that Grian was dead.
And somehow, from that hunted feeling that I still had something I needed to do — I felt, just a little, released.
For the first time since coming to this world, I was happy.