40. Today Is Garbage Day

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/43/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

To be honest, Lily had not wanted to look at the other knights’ faces, and she had not wanted to report on the king who would not come out, who had made no progress at all.
But several days had passed since the first meeting, and she could hardly remain silent forever; so she had steeled herself.
Thus seven knights gathered before a captain suffering from a stomachache—and yet—

“… Why don’t we just start and not worry about it?”
“No, but still.”
“I think we ought to ignore it as well. Though it is obvious that nothing has progressed, so dissolving the meeting as it stands would also be fine.”

The knights’ gazes were all turned on Ashera and Lalilalai.
That the two of them got on like cats and dogs was common knowledge among them.
Only a few days ago they had had a spectacular fight and made a magnificent mess of things.

“Even so, this sudden about-face is more than even I can hide my confusion over. Oi, you two, are you listening?”

Even when Narkil addressed them, there was no reply.
Ashera and Lalilalai had their arms linked, looking only at each other, building a world of two.
… Or so it seemed; they had, after all, been able to hear. Ashera looked toward Narkil and spoke.

“Have you been talking about me and Lara this whole time?”
“What else would I be talking about! What is that distance … or rather, that way of calling her!”
“Lara is Lara. This kid asked me to call her that.”
“I still have the memory of Mother calling me so. Therefore I wanted Mama to call me that as well.”
“… Mama?”
“Yes! Mama Ashera!”

Lalilalai’s smile was as pure as a child’s.
Faced with an expression that unsoiled, Narkil swayed and crumpled.

“You all right, Narkil.”
“Madis, give me one of your medicines … something terribly strong, the sort that lets one flee reality.”
“It isn’t that I don’t have such a thing, but you would never return to reality.”
“I don’t care! That Lalilalai is calling Ashera ‘Mama’! It is a nightmare, it must be a nightmare! Or rather, Saints, David—are you two not far too calm!?”

Shown a scene he could not accept, yet having grasped that abuse was wasted on a world of two, Narkil turned the point of his anger elsewhere.
Saints and David, however, only answered with a careless “Haha.”
Meanwhile the atmosphere between the two who were looking at each other continued to rise.

“Mama, I cannot bear it any longer.”
“You sure? Everyone’s watching.”
“I do not mind. Whoever may be looking, whatever they may say, only Mama’s words reach my ears.”
“Lara …”

And their mouths drew closer.
Madis, who seemed uninterested; Lily, holding her head; Narkil, beside himself with rage; and two corpses that barely reacted.
There was no one present who could stop Ashera and Lalilalai’s runaway.

At last they began to twine their tongues.
That was not enough; they held each other hard until their bodies were flush, stroking hip and thigh with their palms, working each other higher.
Even Narkil could not endure that—

“Aaaaaaaah! Are you actually doing that for real!?”

He shouted until his voice went ragged, but it did not reach women who had gone completely over into the other side.
Madis patted Narkil’s shoulder in sympathy and spoke to Lily.

“Captain, I would like the conclusion only, and quickly. What became of the king?”
“… Nothing became of him. The king is shut away as ever. I gathered you today intending to apologize.”
“Then continuing any further is a waste of time. We’ll call it dissolved.”
“Aah … I feel faint. Captain dear, until there are results there is no need to gather us again, and I have no wish to hear apologies either!”
“… Sorry.”

In the end the meeting closed without Lily being able to convey even the apology she had wanted.
David and Saints, who had been nearest the door, left the room first.
Narkil, behind them, slowly held his nose and glared at Saints’ back.

“I say, are you washing your body properly? You smell like rotten meat.”
“I? How very distressing. Keeping clean the body one offers to God is a matter of course; there is no reason I would neglect it!”
“But what stinks, stinks! If washing does not take it away, put on perfume or something.”
“If you insist, I could make you some.”
“Nnh … if you go so far, I shall consider it.”

With that exchange, the four of them left the room.
Ashera and Lalilalai, who had finished kissing a little late, also withdrew, still clinging—and

“Lily.”
“What is it, Kishiri.”
“I may come to your room later. I want to talk.”
“Understood. I’ll wait.”

Kishiri, who had stood beside Lily to the last, left those words and went out.
Alone, Lily let out a long breath and dropped into a chair as if throwing her body away.
Since when had she come to feel this much relief in a solitary space.
Come to think of it, for a long time—she could not remember tasting the sense of being at ease with someone.
In other words, the last person she could truly call a friend had been Camilla.
Since then she had spoken with Chigusa several times.
Perhaps because of that, she had been remembering Camilla often of late.
She had not yet told what had happened at the very end, but she would likely speak of that too before long.
It was strange.
She had meant to take it to her grave, and yet in front of Chigusa her mouth slipped of itself.
And she was disgusted to find that she felt that as a salvation.

“I say with my mouth that I am in the wrong, and in the end I do not want to bear the responsibility.”

Wasn’t everyone like that.
Even if a thing were a hundred percent one’s own fault, if there were a responsibility one could get through without bearing, one would want to throw it away.
If the alternative were to spend the rest of one’s life unhappy, then setting the victim’s feelings aside and thinking only of one’s own profit, running was the cleverest choice.
A sense of justice produced nothing.
Another person’s happiness did not fill the stomach.
If someone still said “even so,” that person was without question an abnormal one.

“But I have to become that. The reason I am here—the justification that lets me remain—is only that much.”

A knight captain ought always to be right.
Lily had been told so repeatedly by her parents from childhood, and not only by her parents: the people around her had expected it as well.
Camilla had been about the only exception.
So she had tried to become so—but, for better or worse, she was too ordinary.
Talent, ability, temperament: surely she was fated, down to the soul, never to become abnormal.
If she had lived an ordinary life, she would have made someone ordinarily happy, and become ordinarily happy herself.
She had that much ability.
But she had not been blessed in parents, in circumstance, in friends, and so she had been made to bear unneeded unhappiness.
A station such as knight captain was, originally, something Lily did not need.
Her parents had wished it, and so she was here now.
Then where, exactly, was her own wish—

“Even so, I must keep saying that I was not wrong.”

—Even if it meant killing the dearest friend she had most wished to see again.

“Lily, you are making that face again.”
“… Princess.”

Again.
Before she knew it, Sara was in front of the room, looking at her.

“I do not think that is good. If you keep pushing the things you wish to say down inside yourself like that, you will break someday.”
“I am not so fragile. I am the knight captain, after all.”
“That is a lie. And I am not speaking to the knight captain. I am speaking to the individual human being called Lily.”

Sara looked at her not as knight captain, but as Lily the person.
Lily understood that.
If she had been simply Lily, she would surely have felt it as gladness, and would have begged at once to be her friend.
But the two of them could not become friends. They could only ever be knight captain and princess.
The bloodline running through that body hindered their drawing close—or rather, more precisely, hindered the release of Lily’s heart.
So long as Sara was a member of House Miliosol, Lily would surely never stop behaving as a knight.

“This is an order, Lily. I want you not to think of me as a princess.”
“You say unreasonable things again.”
“If it is a princess’s order, then even if it is unreasonable, a knight captain listens!”
“What you are saying makes no sense, Princess.”
“Even if it makes no sense, if I do not do this much, you will not be saved!”

Even so, Sara would not stop speaking to her.
She had not wanted to give up.
From early childhood, Sara had been lonely.
Her father had not been a father, only a king, and her mother, being a mother, had not thought well of the daughter who carried his blood.
There had been many people around her, and she had been lonely.
In the midst of that, the only one who had looked her in the eye and spoken to her had been Lily.
They had met after Sara was old enough to remember, but it went without saying that the influence on the forming of her person had been great.
Lily might not have been aware of it, but when Sara was small, Lily had surely been fond of her from the heart, with no regard for princess or knight.
That Sara had managed, somehow, to grow up decently, born of such rotten parents, was thanks to that.

“I am fond of you, Lily. And yet you came to treat me only as a princess. Do you understand how sad that is!?”
“… I am sorry.”
“I do not want an apology. Lily, your duty is not supposed to be making me unhappy!”
“I am sorry, Princess.”
“Lily!”

Lily passed beside her and went out of the room.
Sara called desperately after that back.

“I will not give up. I will—I will make you happy, Lily!”

Feeling was shaken; her chest hurt.
The truth was, she was so glad she could have cried.
Even so, Lily’s expression did not move.

You are to remain the knight captain at all times and in all circumstances.

In her head, her father’s low voice refrained again and again.

 

◇◇◇

 

“I still cannot believe it. I truly thought that Ashera and Lalilalai, of all people, would be impossible even if the world turned upside down.”

A little after the meeting, Narkil was walking the castle to settle his feelings.
If he shut himself in his room alone, the shocking scene from earlier returned, and he could not be calm.

“Shocking. A scandal. Or rather, Saints and David—that reaction was absolutely too thin! And Madis as well—this is the first time the captain has looked the decent one!”

They were people that uninterested in affairs of the heart—if one said that, it would be the end of it.
Narkil, however, who lived a life full of such color, still could not accept it.
Walking about in that restless state, he happened to pass Ashera’s door.
He stopped a little way from the room and began to study the door closely.

“If I put my ear to it from outside, I wonder if I would hear those sounds.”

It was not sexual interest. It was mere curiosity.
What sort of affair were those two, who seemed mismatched at the level of the soul, conducting.
It was the mood of observing a newly discovered creature.

“I-I am not eavesdropping. It is purely to satisfy intellectual curiosity. I am not in the wrong. The two who would do such a thing in public in broad daylight are the ones in the wrong. Yes. Quite so!”

Making excuses to someone, he killed his footsteps and edged toward the door.
There he noticed.
The door was, of all things, slightly open.
And as he drew close, the sounds inside began to be audible.

Voices leaked through—Lalilalai’s, broken, calling Mama, and Ashera’s, telling Lara she was a good girl, to keep making those sounds.

Narkil nearly burst out laughing and hurriedly covered his mouth.
He had not thought they would actually be doing it.
He brought his face quietly to the gap and peered in with one eye.

“Oh. They have their clothes on. And it is only fingers in her mouth … and yet why is Lalilalai making those sounds as if it felt so good.”

They were by no means naked in one another’s arms.
Ashera had her forefinger and middle finger in Lalilalai’s mouth, and Lalilalai was sucking at them desperately.
When Narkil looked harder, a heart-shaped tattoo seemed to be carved on the tongue.

“A tattoo on the tongue. How very particular. I have heard that hurts considerably.”

While he was muttering to himself, Ashera pulled her fingers out.
Then she forced Lalilalai’s face toward her and crushed their mouths together as if to devour her.

It was a violent kiss, a one-sided trampling with the tongue.
Ashera watched, smiling sadistically, as Lalilalai’s body shook.
The way she felt it was, by any measure, not ordinary.
Her toes pointed hard; her legs moved restlessly, knees in. Her arms, though, pulled Ashera’s back in tight.
It was as if the two of them were truly joined.
When their mouths parted, Lalilalai looked at Ashera with a completely melted expression and murmured, wheedling, “Mama.”
Ashera gathered her to her chest and stroked her head gently, as a mother would a child.

“Then we’ll start soon, Lara.”
“Yes, Mama.”

At those words, Narkil’s expectations rose.
So everything until now had been foreplay.

He rejoiced like a boy in his early teens, certain he was about to see them go further.
Those expectations were betrayed. The two of them began something he had not predicted.
They held each other again, and Ashera buried her face in Lalilalai’s throat.
Then she opened her mouth and bit.

“Nnaaaaaah!”

Lalilalai arched and cried out louder than before.
After that her mouth stayed half open; saliva ran, and her voice shook.

“Aah, ah … nnah, Mama is … coming … in—”

At first Narkil did not understand what they were doing.
Then he saw Ashera’s throat move, and realized.

“Don’t tell me that is drinking blood? You cannot be serious. Ashera would drink blood, I suppose, but even so that is an exceedingly particular taste.”

He murmured it half as a joke.
Of course, by this point he had already noticed that the act was not merely a peculiar taste.
He continued to observe even so, because he needed certain proof.
Lalilalai, drunk from without pause, had her coloring change, and her flesh transformed into something more alluring.

“… Captain dear. I never trusted you, but this is, I must say, bad.”

Narkil knew the story of Camilla as well.
The princess had nearly been charmed; Lily had exterminated the vampire.
And yet—could that ornamental knight captain have done such a thing? The people of the order had been skeptical.
In fact it had not been Camilla, but the work of a far more dangerous vampire.
There was no way for Narkil to know that at this point.

“Ah … fu … fufu, fufufu … Mama. Now I have become the same as you.”
“Welcome, Lara. This means you and I are bound forever.”
“Aah, Mama …”

In the room, Lalilalai, who had ended as a vampire, and Ashera began to kiss as if celebrating a birth.
At the same time they were removing clothes.
This time they would surely overlap their bodies.

“Now then, what to do. I suppose I ought to ask the specialist in monster-slaying first.”

Narkil had no hobby of watching monsters couple.
He put distance between himself and the room and headed first for Saints’ nearby chamber.
Knock, knock.
He knocked. There was no reply.

“Perhaps he is in the shower, minding what I said earlier.”

Or perhaps he had gone out somewhere—Narkil tried the knob, and the door was not locked.

“My. Careless.”

The moment the door opened, an unpleasant smell spilled from the room.
It was the stench that had drifted from Saints earlier, made thicker. Narkil frowned on reflex.

“What on earth is he doing … ah!”

He would have liked to leave as he was, but he could not.
He kicked the door the rest of the way open.
Entering, he found Saints lying on the bed.

“Oh. If it isn’t Narkil. Is something the matter?”

He spoke as if nothing were wrong.
But there was no flesh on his right arm.
His chest too had the ribs laid bare, and a heart the color of rotting meat pulsed unpleasantly, thump, thump, spitting blood.
In short, what he had been giving off at the meeting had been his own corpse-stink.

“You, that …”
“How troublesome. The truth is, I died before coming to this castle, and until today I have been pretending to live in order to fulfill a certain person’s purpose.”
“What? How does anything become like that!?”
“It is mysterious. I was skilled in the magic of light, and this, it seems, is the power of shadow that stands opposite. But it is only reasonable that a corpse’s flesh should rot. Once I have come to stink enough for you to point it out, I can no longer fulfill my role.”
“I … do not understand.”
“I do not understand it well myself. But the fact that I have bared my true form before you like this means—”

Saints put on a smile without a single shadow, and said,

“That I am no longer of use, I suppose.”

Then the heart burst like a balloon, and he did not move again.
Left behind, Narkil stood there with his mouth open, blank.

“Died, he says? That sort of … that sort of thing cannot be possible, not even with magic!”

He shut the door roughly and headed for another room.
He was a knight even so. He was not so simple as to be led astray by a fraud of this level.
The next place Narkil went was David’s room.
He took the knob without knocking; again, it was not locked.
In David’s case, though, he was slovenly as a rule and often did not lock it.
So Narkil thought nothing of it, and opened the door in one go.

“David, are you there!?”

David was sitting in a chair, unusually, facing a desk, apparently at paperwork.

“I have something important to say.”
“Nn. What is it, Narkil.”

And without twisting his body at all, he turned his head one hundred and eighty degrees toward Narkil.
It was a movement impossible for a human.
Even granting that this was the inhuman David.

“… Don’t tell me you as well.”
“Yeah, that’s right. I died. I should have died. So why am I here. Ah, I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all.”

He said it in an emptied-out voice unlike him, and his head began to turn round and round.
Once, twice, three times.
A human body could not keep up with so absurd a motion.
At last David’s neck, still spinning, twisted off and dropped to the floor with a plop.

“Ah, ah, I don’t get it. What is this. I don’t get it. What’s happened to me. It doesn’t make sense. Hey, Narkil, I—”

Like a clockwork that had broken, the movement stopped dead.
Blood overflowed from the neck as from a fountain and wet the ground.
Of course the head that had fallen to the floor, too, was gradually soiled with blood.

“It is an illusion, this …! Damn it all! Since when have I been under this magic!? At the meeting? Or earlier still!? Then that means Ashera and Lalilalai just now were a hallucination too, and the culprit is watching me flail and laughing right now! Hey. Hey. That is it, isn’t it!?”

He shouted and spun around.
He had thought no one would be there.
The one who had laid the illusion magic would hardly present themselves so readily.
But there stood a girl with orange hair, cut short.

“Why … are you standing there. Why show yourself? Hey. Are you the one showing me this!?”

The girl did not move.

“Say it clearly. Hey!”

Still the girl did not move.

“I told you to talk, you little—!”

Even when Narkil, his face twisted with anger, seized her by the chest, she did not move.
Yes: his hand slipped through her, and went through.
Then the girl’s body melted, thick, and returned to black shadow, and this time appeared at Narkil’s back.
Sensing a presence, he spun in haste.

“Narkil, was it. I don’t especially want to remember men’s names.”
“Who are you.”
“Ellis. A Demi-Vamp who came to kill you.”
“My. Who do you take me for? I am a knight. A knight, one of the strongest humans in the kingdom! And a failed monster thinks it will kill me?”
“You think the ‘demi’ makes me a failure.”
“Of course. All you have shown me is illusions. Trying to kill me with magic this shabby is a million years too early!”

Raising his voice, he set a hand to his hip, took the grip, and drew it in one motion.
It was the weapon Narkil was most skilled with: a tough whip woven of metal.
An ordinary whip is used to strike. His case was different.
He used it to smash, and to tear.
But that meant nothing to Ellis, who had been entrusted with power by Chigusa.

“It isn’t an illusion. It’s all real.”
“Impossible. Saints and David are not so soft as to be killed by the likes of you!”

Narkil raised the whip to tear Ellis’s flesh.
And the moment he put strength into it to begin the attack—the arm was already not there.
There had not even been the sensation of being cut; the arm had vanished.
Ellis looked down on his bewilderment and laughed.

“It is possible. With Sister’s power.”
“You, this—”

Next the left arm.
Then the right leg, the left.
As if swallowed by dark, Narkil’s parts vanished one after another.
When the trunk too was swallowed, his head dropped to the floor with a thud.

“I-it isn’t true … this is a bad dream. Such a stupid thing—”
“I’ve got the hang of it, and Sister said I can put them back easy anyway, and this one is creepy, so I might as well finish him—”
“Wait, stop, please! I still have things I want to do to become beautiful!”
“Like a man could become beautiful. Are you stupid?”

Ellis took a running start and kicked the ball rolling on the ground.
Dobaan!
It flew, struck the corridor wall, and burst like a water balloon.
Blood and what seemed to be fragments of his head were scattered about, but it was already difficult to tell that they had been part of Narkil.

“Ellis, you did that rather showily.”

The moment she saw Chigusa arriving, Ellis’s expression brightened at once.

“Ah, Sister! Ehehe. Actually, ever since I lost to Leia, I’ve wanted to beat a strong human just once. More than that, though—look, I worked hard, so praise me.”
“I know. Here.”

Chigusa opened both arms and held Ellis.
Seeing her in high spirits as her head was stroked and she nuzzled against Chigusa’s chest, Chigusa smiled as well.

“Nnh! Being able to touch Sister really is the happiest … ah, right, Sister. Next is Kishiri, yeah?”
“Yes. I have already given instructions to Ashera and Lalilalai. They should carry out the order before long.”

Just as Chigusa said, Ashera and Lalilalai, given her command and her power, had already begun to move to charm Kishiri.
When that was finished, all that remained was to bring down Sara and Lily.
But before that—she had to know the truth about Camilla.
That, after all, was the root of the Chigusa who existed now.