Loss
Yurin began to rein in her excitement.
The thought that simply taking him would never bring Seona's heart back made her stop the hand she had been reaching toward him. Instead she crossed to the drawer in the room and took out the things she had prepared.
Inside were the adult toys the two of them had used for a full month of play before their wedding. She spread every last one of them across the bed, then turned the computer back on.
While Seona and Miel had been unconscious, Yurin had hauled the hundred-inch monitor from the living room into her own bedroom. It was a surprise gift, meant to rekindle the memories they had shared.
Not long after she had returned from the Demon Realm, she had come home to find that camcorder missing and nearly lost her mind. She already knew Mina and Yura had beaten the truth out of her and discovered the footage, but she had backed everything up to her computer and the cloud, so she had managed to keep those memories of Seona safe.
Now she wanted to show him those moments they had shared, to dredge up the happiness that had sunk beneath the surface of his memory.
She split the hundred-inch screen into sixteen panels and started a different video in each one. There were fifty-four recordings in all, but she had culled the ones where Seona's reactions had been the best and played sixteen of them at once. Then she turned the monitor to face him squarely.
Seona watched the madwoman who had locked him and Miel away act as if she were about to pounce—then, as if she had changed her mind, head for the drawer on the far side of the room. He let himself relax. Maybe she no longer meant to force herself on him right away. Her attention seemed to have drifted elsewhere.
His relief lasted only a moment.
What the madwoman pulled out were things he had never seen before—and the instant he laid eyes on them, his head began to pound. It felt as if his brain were on fire. He had no memory of them, and yet he knew exactly what they were, as if somewhere in his consciousness he had already suffered because of objects like these.
His legs shook so hard they nearly gave out. The burning in his skull wound itself together with a dread that coiled through his whole body. Without meaning to, he started whipping his head violently from side to side.
The madwoman glanced at him once, then looked him over from head to toe the way someone might decide which toy on the bed to try first. Something seemed to occur to her; she suddenly turned on the computer. After only a few clicks of the mouse, moans began to spill steadily from the speakers.
It was a voice he had heard many times before.
The monitor was angled toward her, so he couldn't see the screen, but he knew whose voice it was. A man and a woman screaming in frenzy—or more precisely, the man was only screaming. Those weren't moans at all.
The madwoman looked at his face again, then, with an expression full of anticipation, slowly turned the monitor toward him.
He didn't know why, but every instinct told him he must not look. If he saw it, he would never be able to stay sane. It felt like something dredging the most terrifying thing up from the deepest abyss of his mind.
And the moment those dozen-odd split videos entered his sight, the sensation of his brain burning grew fiercely stronger.
In every single one of them, a man was being raped while he wept and howled with a face twisted in agony. Acts that went beyond sexual violence into something closer to pure, malicious brutality—things no human being, no man, could endure.
When he looked more carefully at the man and woman in those scenes, he understood.
The faces were his own.
And hers. The madwoman's.
Hoping Seona's memories would return, Yurin had shown him the keepsakes of everything they had built together and the videos that proved it. If he saw them and recovered his memories on the spot, that would be the best possible outcome.
Seona flinched for a moment, staring hard at the objects and the footage—then suddenly began thrashing his head from side to side. Clutching his skull, tears streaming, whipping his head back and forth. It looked exactly like someone whose memories were flooding back.
He even clawed at the door the way he had before, desperate to get out of the room, and that only convinced her further. Watching his beautiful nails tear free and leave the wood slick with blood made her chest ache, but once the pain was over he would come back to her as he had been. For his sake, Yurin decided to wait a little longer.
Miel could no longer see Seona, and fear began to rise in her.
If Yurin violated him like this, it would trigger his trauma and his mind would collapse. She was starting to regret several of the things she had done. One of them was amplifying Seona's trauma toward Yurin dozens of times over so that he would never be able to think of her. Locking the memories away hadn't been enough for Miel. The human unconscious shied away from trauma, so she had strengthened that stimulus many times over, intending that even if the sealed memories came loose he still wouldn't be able to recall them. That was the state Seona was in now.
On top of that, she had kneaded and toyed with his mind day after day, leaving him so unstable that any stimulus too severe could send him into rapid collapse.
They hadn't started mating yet—no pleasure or pain was coming through the Yin Crest to reach her. That thought lasted only a moment.
A strange sound drifted through the door. It was like the noise of several people having chaotic sex, and yet it wasn't. Multiple male voices, every one of them unmistakably Seona's. The woman's voice had to be Yurin's.
Miel didn't fully understand what was happening—and then, through the Yin Crest, a tremendous pain slammed into her head.
She had felt this often enough. The same pain that always came after she had finished amusing herself with Seona. Pain only she could stop. It was the headache that appeared when Seona's mind began to break apart.
And this one was not ordinary. It was building faster than even the times she herself had toyed with him while restoring his memories. If this went on, his mind would shatter completely—he would be left an idiot, or he would die.
She had to act at once. Miel screamed and thrashed.
"No! You crazy bitch! What did you do?! If you leave him like this Seona will die! Open the door! Hurry! No—!"
She hammered the bathroom wall behind her until her hands and feet felt ready to break, bellowing at the top of her lungs, but there was no sign of the door opening. And then a strange energy began to course through her entire body.
Yurin watched Seona thrash for a long time.
His behavior looked exactly like someone recovering his memories—but he had been struggling far too long, and the sight of it was unbearable. Wanting those memories to come back faster, she tore open the packaging on the "medicine" Seona had so often enjoyed and began feeding it into his mouth. She thought that once he took the same drugs she had given him when they played together, he would calm down.
The moment he actually swallowed them, the thrashing did subside. What Yurin failed to notice was that the light in his eyes was fading as well. He closed them as if losing consciousness and collapsed with a deathly pale face.
She still hadn't grasped that something was wrong with him—until blood suddenly gushed from his nose in a mad torrent. Then she knew things had gone badly. His eyes rolled back; the nosebleed would not stop.
Sensing disaster, Yurin snapped the collar from his throat with both hands and ran for the bathroom, carrying him to Miel. Miel had to have done something to him. That was what she thought as she stepped inside—and found Miel bleeding from the nose in exactly the same way.
Eyes unfocused, Miel spoke in a slurred mumble.
"Y-you... crazy... bitch... whad... did you... do..."
So it hadn't been a lie that she shared Seona's pain. Miel looked no better than he did. And yet she turned the question back on Yurin as if none of this were her doing.
Knowing that leaving things as they were would only make Seona's condition worse, Yurin answered her straight.
"I only gave him the medicine he's always taken! And then he suddenly collapsed and turned into this!"
"Y-you... turned... his mind... to... mush..."
"What am I supposed to do now?"
"B-bring him... here... h-hurry..."
Looking half-dead, Miel waved her hands urgently, telling her to bring Seona closer. It could still be a lie. In those hellish ninety-eight days, the Miel Yurin had known had loved deceiving and manipulating people more than anything else in the world; she couldn't trust her easily. The thought of Seona being brainwashed by that creature all over again was unbearable, and Yurin held him tight, torn with indecision.
All the while, Seona's nosebleed showed no sign of stopping. Miel gestured even faster, frantic.
"N-no... Seona's... gonna die... hurry... hur... ry..."
That desperate cry broke Yurin's resolve. She had no choice but to hand Seona over.
The moment Yurin set him down in front of her, Miel proved the urgency was real—she laid her hands on Seona's head and began to halt the collapse of his mind. She locked away the trauma-linked memories and tried to stitch the broken ones back together, but far too many fragments had been ground away. It wasn't merely that they had shattered beyond reassembly. They had been pulverized into dust.
Even if she stopped the collapse and restored his mind, a considerable portion of Seona's memories would clearly be lost. Praying that at least the memories of her would not disappear, Miel poured every last scrap of her strength into piecing his mind back together. Her own brain was already mush, yet she forced an enormous concentration and repaired as much of his psyche as she could.
And when the work was done, Miel's strength gave out as well. She collapsed into unconsciousness.