42. Let My Love Bloom in Your Innermost Depths

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/45/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

Kishiri was brought into Ashera’s room, laid on the bed, and bound hand and foot by something black.
The room’s owner and Lalilalai stretched out on either side of her and spoke into her ears.

“You needn’t be so wary. We only mean to make you feel well.”
“…”

The gag meant to keep her from biting her tongue had already been removed, but for some reason Kishiri’s mouth would not take force.
It was not that she could not speak. She simply could not bite her tongue properly.
They had likely done something to the muscles, or the joints, on the way here.

“I don’t even hate that kind of defiance. Refreshing, isn’t it? Getting to teach Kishiri, who doesn’t know ‘real happiness,’ with my own hands.”

Ashera set a hand on Kishiri’s chest and, with one hand, began undoing the buttons of her outer clothes.
Kishiri’s face did not change.

Lalilalai moved as well. They worked at her from both sides, trying to pour charm in through contact with the skin.

And still Kishiri’s mouth stayed in a hard line, as if she did not even feel the tickle.
Ashera and Lalilalai, touching her directly, noticed the strangeness.
Two of them at once ought to have forced some change in body heat, willing or not. Kishiri showed no such tendency.
At the same time, there was a sensation that the magical power of “charm,” which ought to have been flowing in through the skin, was being struck away.

Ashera thought, abruptly, of the possibility that the girl had been educated from early childhood.
If one were raising a child as a spy, or an assassin, instruction alone would not suffice.
In some cases, one would rebuild the body into a convenient shape.

“You don’t feel anything when you’re touched, do you.”
“…”
“That face says, ‘And what of it?’”
“In other words, an absence of sensation?”
“Something close. But a body that refuses magical power isn’t something you can make easily. There’d have to be a matching price.”

Pleasure, of course—and pain, most likely, as well. Taste, probably, was dead too.
Only after going that far could a human acquire resistance to magic.

“Fine. We change the method.”
“What do you intend?”
“If the outside won’t work, we touch her from the inside.”
“Ah. I see!”

Lalilalai clapped her hands in understanding.
From behind the two of them, a single black tentacle extended.
It had come from their shadows.
It approached Kishiri’s ear slowly, and slipped, with a wet sound, into the canal.

“—…”

Pain was nearly gone, but the feel of a foreign thing entering the ear was apparently still there; a muscle in Kishiri’s cheek twitched.
It writhed like a worm, pushing farther, and farther in.
It was an object whose very substantiality was unclear.
The eardrum was not broken. The shadow went deeper still, and at last, as if following the auditory nerve, reached the brain.

“Oh. So this is Kishiri’s brain. Soft, lukewarm—quite pleasant.”
“Yeah. No matter how you train, this place is defenseless. That’s why it’s soft.”
“In other words—if we give her pleasure by touching the brain directly.”

As they said, Kishiri could feel the presence of “something” crawling inside her own head.
Not every nerve running through her body was dead. They had only been deliberately gated.
So if the inner ends of those connections were stimulated, she could not refuse it.
When the thing in her brain touched a region that mattered to her, her right leg kicked up of its own accord, against her will, and a violent numbness, enough to white out her vision, struck her.

“—Hhk—!”
“Got it. So that’s the right leg. Then this would be the left?”
“Nnh—gh—!”
“My, Kishiri, what a voice. Was it that agreeable?”

Agreeable did not begin to cover it.
The size of the sound, the pitch of it, were things Kishiri had never produced in her life.
Hearing it, she could not believe it was her own.

A crawling sensation climbed from the ends of her feet, slowly, toward the thighs.
Kishiri’s legs went rigid; her head fell back; a sound was forced out of her.
The sound was shaking.
It was a shock like lightning, yes—but the sensation was too unknown, and it frightened her.
For someone who held her own life cheap, it was probably a terror greater than her own death.

“Doesn’t look like she’s accepted it yet.”
“Poor thing. If you would only open your heart, you could feel something far more wonderful.”
“Like she can do that alone. She’s been forcibly forbidden this her whole life. If we don’t help, she’ll stay scared forever.”

A wet sound.
Kishiri thought she heard it, still deeper in her ear.
In that instant, the terror of the rising sensation vanished from her mind.

Resistance dropped away at once. Sweetness began to mix into Kishiri’s voice.
From the thighs to the waist. From the waist to the chest.
A sensation like a swarm of insects clinging and climbing.
It ought to have been repulsive.
She still remembered thinking it repulsive a moment ago—and yet—

(Why … why do I want more of this? It’s wrong. It’s wrong. This is wrong …!)

She knew. Knowing did not help. Understanding and instinct were separate things.
They had been completely cut apart.
This was the shadow that had entered her brain. She knew that far.
And still—the wanting would not stop.

The insects did not move only over the skin.
They moved inside as well.
They stirred in the stomach, climbed the esophagus, filled the heart and the lungs, and were expelled from the mouth as sound.

Before she knew it, Kishiri was making a beast’s noise.
Her back arched; she screamed as if mad; she thrashed.
Ashera and Lalilalai watched with fond expressions.

“At last you are being honest, Kishiri. Well? A pleasure you have never felt before, I trust?”
“Hah—gh—!”
“Ah, ah. Drooling like that. What a waste.”

Ashera wiped the saliva from the corner of Kishiri’s mouth.

(No. No. No. Any more than this is absolutely— My head—it’s going wrong—!)

The sensation, having climbed as far as the throat, resembled the urge to vomit.

It passed the throat; something seemed to be forced out; the drag of it against the mucous membrane felt as if it could become a habit.
That such a thing existed in this world.
From early childhood, she had not felt pain.
She had not been able to taste food.
The world had always been without color.
That had been a necessary condition for Kishiri to go on living, and she had never once thought it a misfortune.
On the contrary: thanks to it, she had been able to house a resistance to the sort of magic that invaded from outside—curses, poisons.
If that could be bought by discarding sensation, she had genuinely thought it cheap.

At last the sensation passed the inside of the nasal cavity, the backs of the eyes, and returned to the brain.
A crackle.
Something like sparks scattering inside the skull.
Something burst … perhaps it had been Kishiri’s brain.
Smashed, pulped, broken, exploding.
Her eyes rolled up. Her body arched as if to snap the spine.
Muscle exceeded its limit; force enough to tear the restraints gathered through her whole frame.
Tears overflowed; foam mixed with saliva ran from her mouth; the lower body failed and voided itself—and the whole of her felt as if it were melting.

Then a roar, larger than the rest, shook the room, and Kishiri collapsed onto the bed and did not move.

“Oops. Overdid it, maybe.”

Apparently she had fainted under a quantity of forced sensation clearly beyond human limits.

“She isn’t dead, I hope.”
“Her chest is moving, so that’s fine. But when she wakes …”
“Fufufu. She won’t forget it. It is a place human hands could never reach, after all.”

Lalilalai stroked, with something like tenderness, the cheek of Kishiri, who slept as if dead, smeared with her own fluids.

“Feeling nothing means you’ve never felt anything. An unknown sensation is sweet just for that.”

The seed had been planted.
That was all, for now.
A little more tending would be needed before the harvest—but the basis of it was only to wait.
Ashera worked her shadows, and Kishiri’s body floated lightly.
She was carried to her own room, her clothes changed, and laid in bed with a clean body, as if nothing had happened.

◇◇◇

 

When she woke, Kishiri confirmed that Ashera and Lalilalai were not around her, and was relieved from the bottom of her heart.
She sat up and touched herself, checking. There was no sign that anything had been done.
There was no need, after all, to go to the trouble of delivering an unconscious girl from that place to her own room—

“A dream, then.”

A vicious nightmare, if so.
But if so, that was fine.
Having something inserted into the brain, toyed with, and fainting because it was too much—as if such a reality could be allowed to exist … She got down from the bed and stood.

“… Ah?”

A wet sound.
In that instant, Kishiri thought she heard something deep in her ear.
She shook her head in haste and tapped her ear several times, but it did not feel as if water had gotten in.
And aside from the sound, there was no particular change.
Imagination, perhaps.

“Just because I dreamed badly. I’m overthinking it.”

She told herself so, and this time left the room at once, to tell Lily about the vampires.

◇◇◇

 

Lily seemed to be sorting documents in her own room.
Kishiri knocked lightly and gave her name, and Lily invited her in with a soft “Come in.”

“What is it, Kishiri?”

Lily asked with a gentle smile.
David and Narkil had already been taken. There was no time.
Kishiri cut in directly.

“I have something to say about Ashera and Lalilalai.”
“Ah … haha. Did those two do something?”

Lily put on a pained smile.
Natural enough. After being shown a kiss that violent in front of her, one could only laugh.
But that act itself had been the omen.
Kishiri’s being bound by those two ought to have been a thing in a dream—but those two were probably no longer human.

(I have to tell Lily at once—)

A wet sound.

(Tell her—yes. Make her understand how wonderful it is. Because it felt that good.)

For an instant, Kishiri’s expression twisted into a vulgar grin.
She had remembered yesterday—the sensation, which ought to have been a dream, of her brain being handled.

“Are you all right, Kishiri? You look strange.”
“… No. I … I wanted you to know. That Ashera and Lalilalai were truly in love.”
“Hah? Ah, ah … is that so?”
“Yes. That’s so. Loving each other is very important. It’s only natural if you suddenly want to kiss. That’s what love is.”
“Is that how it is? I don’t really understand.”
“That is how it is. So I want you to understand it too, Lily.”
“… Well. If they fulfill their duties as knights, I haven’t much to say. But I do wish they would at least choose the time and place.”

Lily, still failing to notice Kishiri’s strangeness, said it with the same pained smile as ever.

“Today I wanted to tell you that.”
“If you say so, Kishiri, I’ll try to accept it.”
“Good. Then I’m going back to my room.”
“Ah. Come again when you have time.”

Kishiri left the room and shut the door with a bang.
A wet sound. A crush.

“Ah … ah …”

The sound came again, deep in her head.
Then she returned to her right mind.
What she had done. What had become of her. Only then did Kishiri understand.

“What … why did I … I was going to tell her those two were … dangerous …”

The moment she entered the room, the contents of her head had been rewritten, and she had said something else.
Not only her mouth.
Her thinking itself had been completely changed.
In that instant, Kishiri had genuinely, from the bottom of her heart, thought Ashera and Lalilalai a “wonderful pair.”

“It wasn’t a dream. Inside my head … something is in there …!”

Once she was conscious of it, she could indeed feel as if some presence were seated there.
But no matter how she clawed at her scalp, no matter how she dug her nails in until she bled, she could not break through the skull.

“U, uhh … I don’t know this … what do I do? What do I … do …?”

Feeling, in the depths of her brain, the unidentifiable object that governed her, Kishiri went back to her own room on unsteady feet.