Ex6-4. Sister Complex

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/64/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

When Chigusa’s mouth left her, Shuri fell back on the bed, her chest rising and falling hard.
What she had been given was a sensation she had never known in her life, one that could only be called abnormal.
Her heart refused. Her body would not.
That, more than anything, was humiliating. She hid her wet eyes with her arm and clenched her teeth with all her strength.

“Pride is a hindrance, isn’t it. I think that is one of the reasons people cannot be happy. If you would only accept it, it would be easier.”

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Chigusa stroked Shuri’s cheek with a fingertip.

“… I will not become what you want.”

Shuri glared at her.
Her will to fight had not yet gone.
She was still overwhelmingly at a disadvantage. She was thinking of killing Chigusa if a gap opened. Chigusa had allowed for that much.

“You already understand that you cannot win. Where does the strength to keep resisting come from?”
“You wouldn’t know… I have something I have to protect!”
“Ahaha. A line out of a boys’ manga. The world is not so simply divided into good and evil. I already told you why I resorted to force.”

Chigusa pinned her down and, with her shadows, stripped the clothes from her in an instant.
Shuri found herself in lace underthings the vampires had likely prepared. Training had left her abdomen and limbs as tight as an athlete’s.
Chigusa, similarly dressed, looked her over. Shuri grimaced.

“My companions were hurt. What I ought to protect was hurt. Therefore I punish. What about that is evil?”
“A murdering monster wouldn’t understand an explanation.”
“And a vampire-killer would?”

Shuri turned her face away.
Talk would only run parallel. All Chigusa could do, she said, was teach Shuri’s body what a Demi-Vamp was.
Shuri called it wrong—between women, like this.
“You get used to it,” Chigusa whispered. “Used. To. It.”

What followed was not a fight. Chigusa used her shadows and her mouth to force sensation into a body that had only ever been trained to endure pain. Shuri’s pride held; her voice did not. She had never been taught this. Compared with Senri, who lived on the internet, she had neither knowledge nor experience.

When their eyes met at close range, Shuri’s body would not move.
For an instant she thought, unforgivably, that the red eyes were beautiful, and her face burned.
“To drive a girl this dear into a fight for her life. There are some inhuman people in the world.”

The gentleness of the voice undid her caution for a second. That was enough.
Chigusa kissed her. The rest of the night was a lesson in what a human body could be made to feel, and Shuri, still insisting she would not fall, lost consciousness with the Mark moved to her throat.

◇◇◇

 

Meanwhile Ellis was in another room with Senri.
Senri, unlike her sister, had some knowledge of such things, though none of it with another person. Ellis poured shadow-shaped magic into her and found the Mark far back in her throat, clinging like a faint heart.

“Wow. Showing up in a place like that. There really are unusual cases.”

She treated the Mark until Senri could no longer think. Senri knew it was wrong and still wanted more.
Ellis did not know the shape of Senri’s trouble with her family. She only noticed that Senri reacted too strongly to the word family, and used it.
It was not a lie. Demi-Vamps loved one another; the same blood ran in them, more or less. There was no ranking, no being left out alone, as in the Shirogane house.
What made Senri nod was less the sensation than the promise that they could become family.

“Nunnally, you can come in!”

The door opened. Nunnally, in her habit, shoved a man of about forty down in front of them.

“Dad!”
“Father!?”

The sisters cried out almost together through the monitor.
When they had left home he had been at work. Shuri had asked the main house to protect him. The main house had fallen easily. He had likely been taken there.

“Senri… you’re all right!”
“Yeah. You’re alive too, Dad.”
“Ah—while everyone was being killed, for some reason I was the only one brought here. Where is Shuri?”
“Sis is in another room.”
“I see. Shuri’s safe too… Thank goodness. Truly, thank goodness…!”

There was no other meaning in it. He was only glad his daughters were alive.
To Senri, he seemed to rejoice more for Shuri than for her.
Watching the reunion from the other room, Shuri noticed what was wrong on the screen.
In Nunnally’s hand was a weapon: an iron axe, the sort one rarely saw. A violent chill went through her.

“Well then, Senri. Let’s start the ritual for becoming family.”
“What’s that.”
“It isn’t really necessary, but as you know, this is ‘punishment.’ Sister suggested we needed something like this.”
“… You don’t have to pin it on me.”

Chigusa said it from beside Shuri, without particular interest.

Ellis explained. To become family, Senri would have to do something irreversible. If she still wanted to be human, she could refuse. If she refused, her father would live, and she would remain the leftover daughter of a house that had never chosen her.
Senri looked at the axe.
She looked at her father.
She looked at Ellis, who was smiling as if this were already decided.

Shuri shouted at the monitor. Don’t. Senri. Don’t.

Senri’s father understood her resolve. He gave up persuading her. His voice shook with fear. The gaze he turned on her was no longer a father’s gaze at his daughter, but a stranger’s at a murderer.
Senri saw that, and laughed, out of place. “Nih.”

“Senri…!”

Tears were already running down Shuri’s face.
Chigusa watched the family’s end on the monitor without expression.

Senri put her strength into both hands. She was no athlete. It was still enough to lift the axe.
The blade shone under the LED light.

“Senri…”

Her father looked at the blade about to come down, despair in his face.

“Bye, Dad. I’m going to be happy.”

If he had been a father who could say, Then that’s all right, perhaps something in Senri would have changed.
That was too convenient a fantasy.
His last word was a wretched, breaking “No—”

A wet chop.
Bone and flesh mixed.
The blade went straight into the center of his head, through the skull, into the brain.
He died at once, luckily.
His body lost its balance and toppled to the right. The axe slid free. Pink fluid ran from the opened wound.

“Father… Aaaaaah, Father…! Uuu, uuuuaaaaaaaaah!”

Shuri covered her face and fell forward, roaring.
Chigusa had no particular wish to comfort her, but stroked her back anyway.

Senri’s arms hung. Her shoulders heaved. She stood over the corpse.
Her first murder.
Her palms were wet with sweat—no: her whole body was wet.

The thought rose—perhaps I have made a terrible mistake—
and someone tapped her shoulder.
Ellis was there, smiling more brightly than usual.

“Sorry for the mean request. It was hard, wasn’t it. But it’s all right now. We’re family.”

She drew Senri in. Senri put her arms around Ellis’s back without strength.
She had killed her father. She had betrayed her sister. There was no one left to cling to but this.

“Ellis… agh!?”

The moment she said the name, a burning heat pierced her neck.
Ellis’s fangs.
Ellis had decided that the greatest mercy was to take her blood at once, before Senri could become calm enough to think.

Heat and cold together: something vampiric poured in, and humanity went out with the blood. Senri’s body was replaced by an inhuman one that had lost its warmth.
She ended.

Shuri, still collapsed, glared at her changing sister.
She bit her own finger until it bled, and forced out a moan of anger and grief and hate and disappointment mixed.

“Sen… ri… Fa… ther…!”

Senri’s skin had always been pale; becoming a Demi-Vamp did not change the color much. The rest of the change was obvious. A somewhat slovenly figure tightened; the lines of a woman were emphasized. An allure her old face had not had came into it, a demonic beauty that would draw even the same sex.
It spread to her toes and wrapped her whole body.
Then she lost consciousness.
Ellis held her, testing her weight, and stroked her head.
Some five minutes passed.
Senri, having wholly discarded being human, opened her eyes.
She looked at Ellis, who had saved her and tended her, and narrowed her red eyes.

“Good morning, Senri. Good morning, my beloved family.”
“Ellis… um. From now on, can I call you Big Sis?”
“Of course. We’re family.”
“Yeah! Nihihi. I love you, Big Sis!”

Senri hugged her and pressed their mouths together.
Shuri did not look away.
Her own sister calling a monster sister, and kissing her.

“Well then. Shall we begin the main event?”

Chigusa told Shuri so, smiling, in high spirits.
Shuri did not seem to hear.
She was fully occupied accepting and processing what was in front of her.
So she had surely not yet even imagined.
Why Senri had had to fall first.
Why everything until now had been only an amusement.

Because the true “punishment” was to break Shuri’s heart with her sister’s own hands.

She did not know yet. Nothing. Not any of it.
When the time came, what despair would Shuri show her—Chigusa was not sadistic, she would have prefaced, and still she could hardly wait for that moment.