Betrayal
The grand boulevard connecting the eastern and western gates of the Imperial Capital, which would surely have been bustling with people during the day, stood empty and quiet in the dead of night. Only the faint starlight from the clear late-autumn sky illuminated just enough to see what lay directly ahead.
In this season when the approaching footsteps of winter could be faintly heard, a girl wearing nothing but a thin camisole walked cautiously along the edge of the boulevard. From east to west.
“My sandals… I lost them… It hurts…”
With lifeless red eyes, the girl muttered those words as she carefully made her way down the road. Her expression was utterly dead. It wasn’t strange. She had just learned that her hometown village had been almost completely reduced to ruins by disease.
“It’s already so late. I wonder if the carriage… will still be waiting… Hoo. Of course it won’t.”
Stubbing her toes against the paving stones, breaking her toenails, the girl moved her pained steps with care while murmuring her worries to herself.
Only when she reached the front of a large mansion did she lean against the fence surrounding the outer garden and let out a sigh. The lights in the mansion where the banquet had been held were now extinguished, but the carriage she had so desperately hoped would still be there had not yet departed. It seemed packed with people; the vehicle swayed with their restless movements.
And there, leaning against the carriage and waiting for her, was a familiar comrade.
“My, my, Karin. You’re late. While the rich pigs were swarming inside the mansion, did you run off to sell your body to the beggars on the street? Even those decrepit old hogs give generous tips if you just lie there a little while. Turning that down? How stupid. Well, I suppose that suits you perfectly.”
The girl called out the comrade’s name as if in a daze.
“Elvira…”
“Still, I’m a little merciful. I have enough patience to wait for a rookie who wandered off on her own.”
“Thank you…”
“Don’t thank me.”
The girl looked at the carriage she was supposed to ride back in. From inside came a faint clattering sound. Were there dishes in there or something?
No… It’s not dishes. This is…
The girl flinched. It was as if she had sensed the ominous aura leaking from within the carriage. She—Kaira, now called Karin—took two stumbling steps backward.
“Um… The people we came with… they’re all inside the carriage, right…?”
Elvira answered casually, as if the question were absurd.
“What? What are you even saying? You think I’d send them back first?”
“R-right… Haha…”
Kaira gave an awkward laugh and approached the carriage with careful steps. She had to walk carefully or her toenails would break. Just as she reached out to open the carriage door, she decided to check one last time and raised her left hand to cast a faint light.
“Ah…”
Her eyes met those of the people inside. The prostitutes they had come with were nowhere to be seen. The only ones holding their breath in the carriage were three armed men in light attire, weapons at the ready.
Kaira instinctively shoved Elvira aside and began to run. She knew there was nowhere to escape to. She simply prayed that anywhere but here would do, as long as she could get away from this moment.
A sharp whistling sound flew toward her back.
“Ugh…!!”
The small, slender girl—the witch—felt a searing pain as if her calf were being torn apart and collapsed onto the paved road.
What… what is this… An arrow…?
She didn’t even need to touch it to know something had pierced her. Blood was streaming down her ankle. The girl groped with her fingers until she found the foreign object embedded in her leg.
Thick, hard, and short. A crossbow bolt…
She wanted to turn back time immediately, but she had no idea what might happen with something like this lodged in her body. After a moment of hesitation, she decided to do it anyway.
Go back… To a time before this was made, to a moment that never existed in the original world… Ugh…
And time rewound. Elvira, who had been knocked down by Kaira’s push, the men who had just poured out of the carriage to capture the girl who had fired the shot—everyone felt a strange sense of dissonance, as if the laws of the world had gone wrong.
It hurts… so much…
Beyond the empty space where the arrow had been, the blood that had been blocked came gushing out in a torrent. She couldn’t stay still. Kaira barely regained her senses and tried to rewind the wound, but hesitated.
But… if I heal this, the memories will go back too, and I might forget that I need to run… What do I do…?
A few seconds later, Kaira realized it would have been better not to have that dilemma. She hadn’t even managed to run a few steps before the arrow struck her, and the men immediately grabbed her by the hair.
“Kgh…!”
The pain assaulting her from both her scalp and her calf made Kaira grit her teeth and twist her face. In the girl’s line of sight, she caught a glimpse of the familiar sandals worn by the prostitutes of Arto’s brothel.
“You look pathetic, Karin. No…”
Elvira tossed a single sheet of paper in front of the forcibly kneeling Kaira.
“Witch Kaira.”
…So you knew.
As Kaira hung her head in that realization, Elvira spat coldly from above her.
“It’s not like I sold you because I needed money. The reward for reporting you is just pocket change. And I don’t have the ability to capture a terrifying witch anyway. I just wanted to get rid of you because you were an eyesore. That’s all.”
And with that, the carriage departed. It carried the other prostitutes who had been hiding somewhere, everyone except Kaira.
Kaira stared blankly at the vanishing carriage and, once she had somewhat regained her composure, spoke in a low voice.
“Please… spare me…”
Of course, there was no one who would listen to such a plea.
Before dragging the captured Kaira to the local guard outpost with its attached prison, the guards hauled her slender body into a nearby dark and filthy alley. The trail of blood from Kaira’s leg stained the paved road like a mark.
The men, terrified of leaving a witch—a genuine mage—unrestrained, tore a piece of her clothing, stuffed it into her mouth, and secured it tightly with rope. They also bound her wrists firmly with cord.
One man with a graying beard lifted the chin of the glaring Kaira and met her eyes.
“I was curious what a witch would look like… Never thought she’d be such a tiny little girl, just like on the wanted poster.”
“Mmph…!”
A short man with black hair added in a voice laced with amusement.
“And I never imagined she’d be living disguised as a prostitute. Well then, Lady Karin the whore. You’re used to this kind of thing, aren’t you? Since you’re a witch who’s killed so many people, you can atone by serving us.”
With those words, he ripped the nearly see-through thin camisole to shreds. Kaira’s pale naked body was exposed from beneath the shoulder straps.
“Hngh…”
Whether from shame or not, Kaira shook her head with tears streaming down her face, but the man forcefully pinned her moving head in place. With both cheeks gripped tightly in his large hand, Kaira could only glare at him with red eyes overflowing with tears.
“She really is pretty. Must have made a lot of money at the brothel.”
“Ugh…”
From behind the man came a scolding remark from the gray-bearded one.
“Why are you chattering so much in front of a girl who can’t even answer? I’m going first, so hold her legs open for me.”
“Ah, yes, yes. Got it, got it.”
Leaving that half-hearted reply, the man forcibly spread Kaira’s ankles with brutal strength. The wound on her calf, where the blood had yet to dry, and the injuries on her soles and toenails from walking barefoot throbbed with pain.
“Hngh…”
Whether Kaira let out a pained groan or not, the bearded man paid no attention. He had already stripped off his lower garments.
“Let’s see… Mm. It’s pretty down there for a whore. Shall we begin?”
Without any foreplay, without giving the girl’s precious petals even a moment to prepare, the man’s rigidly erect member forced its way into Kaira’s narrow opening.
“Guh…!!”
The girl writhed and struggled from the merciless penetration, but her ankles were firmly held by the man waiting his turn. There was no way she could move them.
“Mmph… Hng… Ngh… Guh… Ngh!!”
The man’s cock, filling her completely, paid no heed to the girl’s body as it writhed in agony. In his eyes, she was nothing more than a meat toy made for his lust.
He would never have done something so brutal to a spouse, a lover, or even a prostitute. Those acts involved an exchange between people—whether emotion or payment.
But Kaira was different. To these men, she was merely a bounty sack that promised money and status once captured. Since she wasn’t human, there was no need to treat her like one. She was simply a sack of meat in the shape of a girl; her holes existed only to be used by the men who claimed them.
“Hoo… Ngh… U-ugh… Kgh, kuh…”
Moans devoid of any sexual pleasure, carrying only pain and misery, leaked from Kaira’s gagged mouth and nose. Tears streamed down, dripping from the rope that held the cloth in her mouth, but the men paid it no mind.
Kaira bit down hard on the rope stuffed in her mouth.
“Hey. If you’re done… Huh?”
The black-haired man, who had been firmly holding Kaira’s legs, was startled by something incomprehensible. The comrade who had been vigorously raping the tiny witch suddenly vanished as if scattering into dust. As if he had never been there at all.
“What? What the hell? What happened? Where did he go!?”
The man looked around in utter panic, searching for any trace of his comrade whose armor alone remained collapsed on the ground. There was no way he could understand. That the comrade who had been violating the witch as a trophy had reverted to the form of a fetus smaller than a pinky finger.
Still, it was clear that the witch before him had done something. The man drew his sword and pointed it at the girl writhing miserably on the ground. The girl slowly pushed herself up with her hands against the earth. The guard realized something had gone terribly wrong.
She shouldn’t have been able to brace herself against the ground. Her wrists were bound; it should have been impossible. Unless she was using magic.
“Magic… after all…”
A witch was a being who wielded wicked sorcery.
The moment that thought crossed his mind, the sword the guard was holding glowed a blazing red. As if it had just been pulled from a furnace.
“Ah, hot…”
The clanging sound of the heated sword falling echoed faintly through the alley. The man stared at the witch in terror, but the girl sitting quietly on the ground had merely extended her hand slightly. He had no way of knowing that her fingertips had just touched the blade.
Terrified, the guard turned his back to the witch. He didn’t even remember that the girl’s fingers had lightly brushed his calf.
“Hoo…”
She had committed murder.
The same act she had refrained from even against the bandits who had raped her—she had done it again, cloaking herself in the excuse of desperation to survive.
Regret seeped from the girl’s sigh.
But… at least I’m alive for now…
Kaira looked out from the alley, her upper body barely covered by the tattered remnants of her clothes. What should she do now? Should she enter a nearby house and beg for clothes, claiming she had been raped? But no one would fail to call the guards if a girl who said she had been assaulted came clinging to them.
Kaira thought she should somehow escape the city by cloaking herself in Enholt’s Veil. If she could just get out of the capital, there would be a way to survive.
At that moment, a sharp, chilling pain pierced through her back.
“Eh…?”
Only then did Kaira remember the fact she had forgotten.
That’s right… There were… three of them…
There had been a third man who hadn’t paid the slightest attention to the witch’s body.
Kaira’s hand, as she lay on the ground, touched the arrow embedded in her back. Her breath caught as if her lungs were filling with blood. She couldn’t help but realize it. She had been hit in the lung. With her mind clouded by pain, the girl crawled across the ground, trying to put even a little distance between them, struggling to erase the arrow and rewind the wound.
But the calm guard gave the witch no such time.
Something flew toward the neck of the writhing girl on the ground. Along with a dizzying impact, a spray of blood like night mist obscured the girl’s vision.
“Eh…”
What… what is this? Wh-what…
When Kaira barely regained her senses, what entered her eyes was her own decapitated body convulsing in a grotesque, urine-soaked spasm. Blood gurgled from the severed neck.
She realized it. The one fact in the world she least wanted to realize. A hollow smile spread across Kaira’s lips. Soon, the vision of the girl whose head alone remained, watching her own dying body, rapidly darkened.
Ah… ……
This was the one thing she could not rewind.
After confirming that Kaira’s life had completely ended, the man expressionlessly stuffed the headless corpse into a sack. He hummed quietly.
“With this, I’ll claim the entire reward myself.”
Then he slightly parted the lips of Kaira’s head, whose eyes had turned a cloudy reddish-brown from lost blood and now held a vacant expression, and lifted it with both hands.
“Then let’s enjoy this.”
The soldier slightly lowered his trousers and gripped Kaira’s head with both hands. After all, he had to fill his desire using the fine hole that was the pretty girl’s esophagus.
Fragmented recollection — a nightmare that cannot be undone
The body remembers. The soul remembers. Even if the mind tries to forget.
“…When you think about it, Rin…”
I cut off the recollection that had once again spiraled into an absurd delusion and spoke awkwardly to Rin, who was connected inside my mind.
“No, these are thoughts I really shouldn’t be having.”
“That’s not it. I… it feels like I’ve survived countless brushes with death. Each time, a trauma formed—‘So this is how I could have died’—and they piled up chaotically, turning me into the broken person I am now. Maybe these bad-ending-like delusions would be more appropriate for the author introduction…”
Rin stretched her body long and thumped me on the head.
“That’s exactly why you shouldn’t write that in the encyclopedia introduction! If you want to use it later when you write your autobiography, then go ahead. Actually, you shouldn’t write it there either.”
“Hoo…”
I let out a deep sigh.
Perhaps all of this wasn’t just my delusion, but a real branching point that split off in that timeline. The being that had stayed silent for years without sending even a single whisper might have twisted fate in strange ways to keep me alive so that the vessel that was supposed to become hers wouldn’t die so pointlessly. Such thoughts kept occurring to me.
Rin would probably dismiss it as ridiculous fantasy.
“Still, thanks to that, I managed to write the author introduction properly without any delusions. So cut me some slack. Then keep helping me organize my memories. The next part will probably be… that section. I’m counting on you, Rin.”
“…By ‘that section,’ you mean the part where I was born, right? …Fine. Let’s see what kind of villain you imagined me as.”