The Witch's Confession
Because I was a witch, I had merely been using the children. We were all a little confused—not just the novice seminary girls, but me as well.
Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, the room happened to be the very one used for punishing seminary students. Thanks to that, we could be thoroughly scolded without even needing to change locations.
“Goodness, really!! What on earth have you all done to such a precious guest who came to see me?!”
Azalea knelt and scolded the fidgeting girls with a tearful expression. I was kneeling alongside them. Just like that day in Azalea’s bedchamber when we had held Pirel tightly and touched one another.
…This time, however, we had been caught in a puddle of mingled bodily fluids, pressed against several girls, completely lost in pleasure and gasping for breath. It was different from back then.
“P-please don’t be so angry, Lady Azalea……. It’s my fault. I……”
In this world, girls of seminary-student age were considered proper adults capable of “cutting bread on their own,” but my lingering Earth-born sensibilities still saw them as mere teenage girls. I wanted to defend them.
“Hng, that’s right. You know it well. Yes, you said it perfectly! Kaira is the one most at fault. You’re nearly thirty—how could you seduce children like that, really!”
The moment my age was brought up, tears welled in my eyes.
“Hng, hnguuu……”
…If one counted only the age of my soul, the depth of my memories, I was already sixty. Yet my heart seemed to follow the age of my body. Having been returned again and again to the form of a nineteen-year-old girl of only four months, and with a body smaller and younger-looking than my peers, perhaps my heart had grown as fragile as a child’s……
“Ah…. K-Kaira. That is, um……. I didn’t mean it that way……”
The wizard’s tears, still clinging to her soft, girlish appearance, flustered the saint. I hadn’t cried on purpose.
The other girls glanced nervously at Azalea, who was desperately trying to soothe me. In this atmosphere, no one would dare speak first.
I should have stepped in……
“Hic…, hng……”
The sobs wouldn’t stop, so I had no choice but to watch the saint—my once-precious comrade—sweat and struggle to comfort a child for a long while.
“Um, Lady Saint……”
Malinka’s voice cut through my miserable weeping. Azalea answered in a flustered tone.
“Ah? Ah, yes, yes. If you have something to explain, please do. Um…, you were assisting with reception duties, if I recall……. I’m sorry. Your name……”
“It’s Malinka.”
“Yes, my apologies. Please speak, Malinka.”
The girl who had invited me to this room hesitated for a moment before opening her mouth.
“Lady Saint, we invited Lady Kaira into this room. The scent rising from her body was so dreamily sweet…, it felt as though we were bewitched. We’re sorry. Please don’t scold Lady Kaira.”
After listening to the end, Azalea let out a soft sigh.
“To say such a thing……. Haah, you’re right. I don’t even know who I’m angry at anymore. I have no authority to punish any of you—that belongs to the dormitory priestess—and I have no reason to scold Kaira either.”
“Hic…, hng……. Huuu……”
Azalea approached me as I still struggled to hold back my sobs. She must have come straight to find me after returning from the empire where she had gone to borrow strength; a faint scent of sweat and sand clung to her travel-stained saint’s robes.
“Truly…, you’re the same as ever, Kaira. Or perhaps even younger and more fragile than before……”
Whether she was speaking to me or to herself, Azalea gently stroked my hair as she murmured. Naturally, the seminary girls, who knew how to read the room, stayed silent.
“There, there, Kaira. Good girl, good girl……. It’s all right. I’m here.”
Watching her soothe me, I felt Malinka’s gaze from right beside me. Only then did shame flood in and stop my tears.
“But Kaira……. Pirel told me, yet you really have changed a great deal. Your appearance is the same as when we traveled together, but……”
The saint trailed off, hesitating over the words she had been about to say.
“…You’ve become somewhat pale and listless. Still, you’re just as adorable as before, and yet… you’ve definitely become more… lewd, I suppose.”
Hearing that, I lifted my still-wet, slightly swollen eyes to look at Azalea. The saint—who was clearly older than me, yet, like myself, appeared not to have aged at all thanks to the power of light—blushed as though she were a teenage girl who had only just awakened to such matters.
“I suppose I have no choice but to accept that you’re quite different from the Kaira I knew. Well, people do change. Ten years have passed since we traveled together.”
“Lady Saint……”
With tears still lingering in my eyes, I looked up at Azalea’s wistful face. Even as she said those words, she seemed almost unchanged in both appearance and personality, and I found myself admiring her.
Just then, one of the girls still kneeling hesitantly spoke up.
“Um, by the way, Lady Kaira……”
I turned my head toward the voice. It wasn’t Malinka. That face was probably… the girl whose foot had first stepped on my most precious place.
‘Being trampled so cruelly on such an important spot by a girl like that… had felt good……’
Even as I thought that and began to grow damp between my legs again, the girl—one of my “victims”—spoke.
“Back when you were with the Lady Saint, you weren’t this… lewd. How did you end up like this……?”
“Ah……”
Azalea let out a small gasp and glanced at me, still kneeling. The meaning was easy to guess: this was a truly difficult question.
I calculated quickly. A selfish calculation, meant only for myself, ran through my mind. This was an opportunity. A chance that would never come again. Before Azalea could sharply rebuke the girl for her rash question, I opened my mouth as if it were nothing.
“It’s simple. I—the hero Kaira—was kidnapped not long after that adventure ended. I was imprisoned in the Mittenburg household without anyone knowing and lived as a sex slave. …All of it was orchestrated by His Majesty the current Emperor.”
The faces of the girls who had been watching me turned to shock. Azalea’s expression, as she had been anxiously studying my complexion, was no different.
“Y-Yes!?”
“K-Kaira!!”
The girls let out what sounded like screams at the unexpected answer. Even the saint called my name in a panic, trying to stop me, but I spoke quickly before she could cover my mouth.
“During that time, I was happy. Completely steeped in magic and drugs, my reason and soul destroyed, I lived as livestock less than human—unable to think of anything but pleasure. I didn’t have to think or worry about anything.”
Then I smiled faintly with a lonely expression.
“Lady Saint… and the other heroes rescued me from that life. The moment I regained my freedom, I couldn’t hold back and took a petty revenge. I became a murderer. His Majesty the current Emperor’s mind collapsed and he became a cripple. Over time I somehow regained my reason, but the twisted desires from back then… never returned to normal.”
My expression was smiling, yet my eyes grew wet again. Perhaps because of that, no one in this place looked at my smile as though it were merely a smile.
I glanced once at the girls, their mouths agape, unable to offer a single word—not of surprise, not of comfort, not even a bewildered sob—and at Azalea, whose face had grown troubled because she could no longer deny what I had said.
I merely looked. I had never once thought of stopping the story if their reactions were bad. I only hoped that Azalea would understand… the calculation that had forced me to tell this story now.
“There were many reasons. The imperial court wanted to eliminate the hero who had defeated even the Demon King, seeing her as a threat to the peaceful empire…, and the then-Duchess of Mittenburg—that is, His Majesty the current Emperor—wanted me because……”
I paused there. I couldn’t explain it as psychic powers or a gift from beyond. After a few seconds of thought, I found a roundabout word and continued.
“She was interested in the magic I had developed and wanted to keep me imprisoned to use that power. In the end I never taught her the magic itself, but even in my broken, idiotic state I used it to help the then-duchess…. Of course, I also provided sexual entertainment to influential visitors to the ducal house.”
I spoke as if it were nothing, but the girls listened in silence, their faces deathly pale. Azalea’s expression was complicated.
And so, in the Room of Purification filled with horrifying instruments of torture, I told the untainted seminary girls—the girls who should have remained untainted—about my darkest period, about the Mittenburg basement and Arto’s brothel, without hiding anything. Except for the deepest secret: my ability to turn back time.
Having turned back time on my camisole, soaked through with urine, love juices, sweat, and saliva, until it was clean again, I rolled around on the soft bed. In the guest room of the seminary dormitory.
The guest-room door opened slightly, and a familiar face in light clothing entered.
“Kaira.”
She called my name in a solemn voice and with a somewhat angry expression.
“Lady Azalea.”
“That was really too much earlier, Kaira. …I’m sorry to say this, but it was disgusting to watch.”
I didn’t answer, only gave a bitter smile.
“Why did you say such things to the children? They may have desired your body, but that was only because the hero Kaira they had admired happened to be in their grasp and they got excited. It was nothing more than a childish transgression. Those girls… weren’t ready to hear such dark stories. They’ll live the rest of their lives remembering it. They didn’t do anything deserving such a harsh punishment!”
“I know.”
“Th-then why……”
I sat up on the bed and slipped my feet into leather slippers. Then, taking one step at a time toward Azalea, I spoke clearly, one word at a time.
“Because I’m… bad. I—the hero Kaira—am an evil witch after all.”
Azalea’s voice calling my name grew louder as I filled her vision. It was a pitiful voice, tinged with the murky color of bewilderment.
“Kaira……”
“This story… was known only to the heroes. It was a story so shameful that I would never tell anyone, a story known only to you all, whom I trusted absolutely. Besides you, only Pirel and Rin, who read my memories directly with magic, know it.”
By the time I finished speaking, I had reached right in front of Azalea.
“That wasn’t enough……”
Murmuring quietly, I leaned against the saint and buried my face in her warm chest. Azalea didn’t say anything more; she simply wrapped her arms around my head in a gentle circle.
“Those girls will soon become priests. Priests of the largest denomination in the empire. They will live lives devoted entirely to the God of Light and earn people’s respect simply for that devotion; they will also become scholars who have learned many things at the seminary. People like that……”
I lifted my head slightly to look at Azalea and spoke with a strained smile.
“If they were to tell the world that I was actually an ordinary wizard who had been falsely accused and eliminated through such cruel means, that would be good.”
Then I lowered my face again. I wanted to bury both cheeks between Azalea’s soft breasts. Because I……
“I wanted someone to know. Even if it took ten years, even if it took a hundred, I wanted the world to know that the hero Kaira had been purged in such an absurd way. I… will probably still have to live in this world even then. Until that time…, I don’t want to be known only as the murderer who destroyed the ducal house……”
I didn’t want the saint to see me cry again.
“I hate it. I hate it. I don’t know if I’ll live a hundred years or a thousand, but I don’t want to be called the Witch of Sand by people even in the distant future……”
My tears soaked into the chest of the thin, light nightdress Azalea wore—probably something she had put on to sleep with me. The cooled fabric that had absorbed my tears chilled my cheeks.
“So you used those children, Kaira. The very girls who already respected you.”
From within Azalea’s embrace—whether the words were condemnation or pity, I couldn’t tell—I mumbled.
“Yes. I… Kaira… am an evil witch. Worse than a murderer—the Witch of Sand……”
Azalea’s arms, which had been holding me, loosened. A little uneasy, I looked up at her. Azalea… wore a hardened expression.
“I see. I understand. You really have… become a witch, Kaira. May that radiant one forgive you someday.”
I called the saint’s name in a frightened voice.
“A-Azalea……”
Azalea’s expression suddenly relaxed, as if nothing had happened.
“Hehe. Then the wicked witch Kaira must be punished, mustn’t she?”
“Huh? Y-Yes…?”
Before I could even understand what was happening, the saint’s hand grabbed my wrist firmly. Perhaps because it was the same hand that wielded a greatsword taller than I was, it felt a little rough, solid…, and warm……
“Even when we traveled with the hero party, even when I rescued you, even when I came with Pirel, I’ve never once tasted you, Kaira.”
Azalea spoke as she pulled me toward the bed.
“I was always happy. Every time I smelled the sweet scent of bread wafting from you. It’s late, but let me ask properly. Will you let me taste you too, Kaira? As a friend.”
Seeing her smile, I murmured as though collapsing.
“Yes……”
“Good. Then……”
Azalea smiled brightly. A radiant expression befitting the Saint of Light.
“I’ll punish you.”