Death on the Swaying Ship (2)
“Ugh… ugh…”
Fortunately, I didn’t lose consciousness. The man strangling my neck had released his grip again, apparently thinking I had been subdued.
“What the hell is this bitch?”
The group on the deck looked flustered by my sudden appearance. Though they were startled, they hadn’t lost their composure.
Among them, a man who seemed to hold a slightly higher position stepped forward and muttered.
“A passenger who was hiding, huh. Now that I look at it, she does resemble that little kid from earlier. Sisters?” That little kid…? It was obvious. These men had seen Pirel. Not just seen her—they had done something to her. They remembered her face clearly. I ground my teeth.
“…But boss, this woman……”
One of the men pinning my arm beside me spoke hesitantly.
“She’s only wearing a robe with nothing underneath?”
“She’s a mage bitch.”
The man called “boss” let out a snort of laughter.
“Must be some exhibitionist sow. Everyone says mages have a screw loose somewhere in their heads. If that’s the case, this is pretty tame perversion for a mage, isn’t it?”
A wave of laughter swept across the deck. Snickering, giggling—an unpleasant sort of glee. Before their laughter could die down, I spat the words like venom.
“Pirel… What did you do to Pirel…!!”
“Ah, that kid? Bad eyes, has she? She’s right there.”
“Right there? Where…”
I scanned the deck once more, a place now littered only with corpses that had been stabbed, torn, or decapitated.
“Ah…?”
The man who seemed to be the bandits’ leader or commander wasn’t lying. Because there it was—on the deck bathed in the bluish dawn light seeping from the sun that had not yet fully risen over the western plains bordering the river.
“Wh-what…”
Something that should never have entered my eyes.
Pirel was there.
The girl’s skin was a pure, deathly white, her limbs covered in bruises. The crude dress she had worn throughout our journey was gone. Only torn shreds of brown and white fabric lay scattered messily around her body.
And….
I squeezed my eyes shut and bit my lower lip until it bled.
“These boat bastards don’t know how to fight properly. They had the numbers, though.”
Mockery dripped from the bandit’s voice.
“So only four of our boys died.”
This time the mockery vanished, replaced by a tone heavy with calm fury.
“And all four were killed by that tiny little girl.”
Then he pointed directly at Pirel.
“Why are you closing your eyes? She’s your beloved sister. Look at her properly.”
He stepped close and forced my eyes open with his fingers. His other hand clamped my cheeks so tightly I could not turn my head.
“Ugh… ugh, d-don’t… please, pl… ugh…”
The men holding me twisted my body around by force.
“Pi… rel…”
Beneath the girl’s completely motionless, mangled naked body spread a pool of red that had not even begun to coagulate. Having spilled every drop of blood, Pirel’s skin looked not merely white but a bluish ash.
Her body glistened, wet with something. Part of it was sweat. Part of it was the men’s… seed… that had not yet dried.
At the center of the girl’s small torso—where there should have been only the soft skin covering her slightly rounded, yielding breasts and belly—everything was covered in ominous hues. Dark crimson and pus-yellow, pitch-black verdigris and a pale pink that was slowly draining of blood.
Outside her split-open abdomen, her organs lay scattered in pieces. Intestines, liver, perhaps the heart or pancreas. They were so badly mangled and crushed that it was difficult to tell what the visible lumps and clumps had once been.
…Pirel’s lower half… between her legs, the precious place of a young girl….
It had been hacked and pulverized almost beyond recognition. Her vulva was gouged out so savagely it was barely distinguishable, and the excrement she must have released in her final unbearable moments fouled her torn groin.
A small dagger was embedded in what remained of Pirel’s ruined sex. The blade stood upright, catching the bluish light of dawn and gleaming. What kind of sick taste had driven someone to leave it there?
Perhaps because she could not even close her eyes at the moment of death, Pirel’s wide, unfocused eyes held a hollow expression. They had already lost their original transparent, vivid red. The flow of blood that once colored them had stopped.
From the hole piercing her forehead and the back of her skull—from that pitch-black cavity that, only moments ago, had been spurting blood and brain matter—nothing flowed anymore. All life and blood had been spent; it had simply hardened.
“Ugh……”
I barely held back the bile rising in my throat as strength left my legs. The men on either side gripped me too firmly for me to collapse even if I wished to.
“I watched the boat bastards fall one by one, and then this kid who looked just over ten years old pulled out a gun and started shooting. All four shots she fired hit our boys, and every one of them died. We grabbed her by the hair before she could reload, though.”
…Of course. They had been bullets blessed by the God of Rest.
Firing a smoothbore muzzle-loader properly was no easy task. It seemed Pirel had possessed a surprising talent for it.
But now that talent meant nothing at all.
“So we had to give a proper reward to that brave little lady who fought so well. Meanwhile, it looks like her sister was hiding somewhere, naked except for a single robe, trembling like a coward.”
The man mocked me openly.
“She was such a cute little thing that we kept her alive until we’d finished off every last boat bastard. We let her enjoy it slowly. Until she was worn raw, until she screamed and cried until she no longer had the strength to cry.”
I listened quietly to the filth he recited with such pleasure. In my mind I pictured tearing out his throat, watching the blood spray like confetti from a shattered firework.
“When that grew boring I slit her belly open while she was still alive. Only then did she start bawling again like a child her age, turning cute once more. Yes, even her crying was as lovely as her face. I wanted to take her with me and keep using her as a toilet for my pleasure, but we had to collect the price for our boys’ lives. Since her guts were already split and it must have hurt, I gave her a hole in the head to let her die comfortably. I took the very gun that had killed our men, loaded it slowly while mocking her, held it to her forehead, shook it to frighten her.”
The nonsense spilling from the man’s mouth gradually grew distant. I closed my ears to it.
I had to halt every emotion—fear, regret, guilt, sorrow—and complete my judgment.
The conclusion was simple.
These men did not deserve to draw breath in this world.
Sadness, disgust, and rage all subsided as though a storm had passed. Rin inside my head offered no opinion either.
Having regained my cold composure, I asked icily.
“I see.”
The man looked surprised by my calm reply, letting out a soft “Oh?” with a startled expression.
“…Who are you people?”
“Oh. The young lady who hid while her sister was turned into a meat doll for sexual use and had her skull blown open seems quite angry. Well, since you’ll be following your sister in about an hour anyway, it doesn’t matter if I tell you. There’s a special pleasure in violating a woman whose spirit has been broken after she realizes she can’t resist even while grinding her teeth at the truth.”
A snort of laughter escaped me. It was a laugh of pure disbelief. The man twitched an eyebrow at my reaction but continued his explanation.
“You know the great forest south of the river? These are the people pioneering that land. As you know, the empire’s reach barely touches the south bank. Supplies are hard to come by and the soil is barren. Since the empire has done nothing for us, we take what we need from them with our own hands.”
…It meant they were fugitives who had crossed the river carrying their own dark histories. Most were probably criminals. That was why they could survive in such a harsh place, but it also meant they were people who cared nothing for others’ lives or property—men whose sense of ethics had shattered somewhere along the way.
‘Were the priests of that cult more sane than these men…? No. Perhaps those who committed such acts while still possessing proper reason are the ones who are truly insane, compared to these who live like beasts, doing whatever they please.’
Now that I knew what they were, my curiosity was satisfied. There was no need to exchange another word with them.
I simply had to do what must be done.
Had I still been drunk and lost in poor judgment like before, or had Pirel not died leaving only these miserable ruins, I might have chosen differently.
I might have surrendered to that thrilling urge for self-destruction and rewound time only after they had gang-raped me to the brink of death, mutilated me until my organs spilled out and I became a dying half-corpse.
But I did not want that now.
All those vulgar thoughts—the urge for destruction, sadism, nymphomania—that had taken root like tree trunks deep in my mind had been swallowed up, swept away by a quiet rage.
Only now, when fury blinded my eyes and my original personality seemed to vibrate on the verge of shattering, had I become able to think like an ordinary girl again.
The thought that I did not want to give my body to these filthy creatures.
I closed my eyes slightly.
As clearly as if I had opened a book written in large, neat letters beneath a bright lamp, the lives of the two men restraining my arms unfolded before me. Every chapter of the histories they had walked was legible.
Drifting through the poor back alleys of a port city and turning to robbery, being thrown into prison four or five times, murdering the cook at a port inn who had pitied their circumstances and fleeing, then crossing the river to join the “pioneer” band.
Being born the youngest son of a minor noble in a kingdom beyond the empire’s eastern frontier, leaving a house he could never inherit to become a wandering brawler, living as a fixer doing the empire’s dirty work, being betrayed by an employer and branded a criminal, then drifting into Drankafen and crossing the great river.
There is no tragedy without its own circumstances.
Therefore, there is no need to listen to the circumstances of every tragedy.
I opened my eyes once more, twitched my lips, and murmured softly.
"Rewind."
⟨ Time Rewinding ⟩
And it rewound.
Everyone present must have felt it—the intuition that something impossible was occurring, that strange dissonance as though the laws of the world were flowing in the wrong direction.
The two men holding me vanished. The clothes they had worn fell like discarded trash, scattering across the deck and fluttering away on the gentle river wind.
The men who had surrounded me with clear intent to violate me retreated a few steps.
“Wh-what is this? Magic?”
“Magic? Pfft. No.”
I answered with a sneer, then spoke quietly to Rin, who was also suppressing her boiling rage while searching my intentions inside my mind.
‘Rin. Let’s prepare.’
Rin, seized by the urge to see blood, rampaged through my head and answered.
‘Shall we kill them? With what shall we kill them? How shall we kill them? How much shall we kill them? Ah, not how much—it’s all of them, right?’
If I severed their heads from the flow of time, Rin would be able to see the blood she craved.
But I did not want that.
Because that would be too comfortable a death.
‘Yes. So gather every last fragment. We’re going to kill them with magic.’