49. Desireful Happy Ending

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/52/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

She had cut Sara down.
The girl who had adored her. The girl she herself had adored. Cut down for a reason that was righteousness itself, compacted into a single mass: because Sara had taken an improper course.
There was no sense of loss. If anything, a feeling of accomplishment wrapped itself around Lily.
No corpse remained. The shadows had swallowed it.
The vampire had collected it, no doubt.
What she meant to do with it, Lily did not know—and to Lily it did not matter. That had been only a lump of meat.
Ah. With this, she could still remain Knight-Captain.
There was no longer anyone to protect, nor any country left anywhere, and yet she had succeeded in preserving her own reason to exist.

By the time she noticed, night had passed, and the morning sun was rising.
Her gaze sat nearly level with the earth.
Far off, a horizon was visible.
In the whole of that spreading view, there was not a single living thing.
For nearly ten hours she had lain upon the ruins of Gravard; what she had done there, and why she was lying down, her memory held only in a haze. A trivial matter.
She stood. She wiped her eyes several times with the back of her hand. She beat the sand from her body, and she began to walk.
In search of a place where humans could live, correctly, as humans.

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48. Egoistic Justice

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/51/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

On the road to Gravard, camping out should not have been necessary.
There were towns within walking distance, and a maintained highway connected them.
But Lily, having fled a town under vampire rule, would not approach human settlements after that.
She did not wish, wherever she went, to produce victims on her account.
Whether she went or not, this country was fated to fall under vampire rule, and she understood that—it was a futile struggle, in short. If she did not look, reality would not yet be fixed.

She sat with her knees up, hands upon them, and stared at the wavering flame.
Sparks snapped. The fire lit the dim forest.
Sara leaned against her, her head dipping and lifting in a doze.
At last her eyes, unable to bear the gravity of sleep, closed, and she fell.

“Of course she’s tired. I only hope the dreams, at least, are kind.”

Lily said it, and smiled at the faint breathing.
Sara had only just seen a nightmare of a landscape; she must be exhausted in mind and in body.
Or perhaps it would be better not to dream at all.
To sink into a deep sleep and find, when she noticed, that her eyes were open.
Time that passed while one remained awake from a dream would wear even Lily’s mind down, steadily.
She did not think Sara could endure it.

“Not that I can say I will endure it myself.”

Her senses were keener; it might be harder for Lily.

“Ah, I know. I know. You’re watching even now, aren’t you? From far or near, I don’t know—but from somewhere I can reach, staring, waiting for the moment my heart breaks!”

Her voice carried through the quiet forest.
Of course there was no answer.
Even so, her honed senses were certainly catching some misshapen presence peering in.
She could not sleep.
How could she sleep.
In an unknown land, in an unknown forest, Lily spent a long, long night alone.

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47. Hijra in the Nightmare

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/50/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

They used a bolt-hole of the Discard District and left the town.
The smell of the corpse-mountain still clung in the back of the nose.
Remembering it was enough to make her want to be sick, but Lily could not afford to show a weak part.
Sara, weaker still, was right beside her.
She was now the last of the royal blood.
Protecting her to the end was the first charge laid on the captain of the knights.
Even if there was no one left to give the order, Lily, who had had that fate pressed on her since childhood, could only obey it blindly.
For the country?
No—to fulfill the reason she existed.

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46. Last Escape

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/49/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

Pitiful, he had said—as if she had not heard it until she was sick of hearing it.
Camilla, too, must have thought of her that way.
Lily thought it of herself.
Pitiful.
However far she chased an ideal, there was no happiness of her own in it.
For the country. For the king. For her parents.
Anyone who looked at a woman who held no wish of her own would think the same.

“Yes. I am pitiful … But I will not turn back now. Not if it means wasting the life I have already spent.”

She mocked herself as she ran toward Sara’s rooms.
Still—not to pass a single soldier on the way was strange, even for this.
If Madis had been right, and the castle had been as good as occupied the moment the soldiers became women, then this emptiness, too, was part of the vampires’ design.

“Come to think of it—Glass, among the soldiers. Ah. No wonder the feeling was familiar.”

What rose in her mind was a beautiful soldier with black hair.
Lily did not know, of course, that Glass—that is, Chigusa—carried the power inherited from Camilla.
So she had decided that the nostalgia she had felt upon meeting Chigusa was simply because they were of the same kind.

She reached Sara’s rooms in no time, and without obstacle.
An emergency. Knocking could wait.
She opened the door roughly. Sara, who had been looking out the window in boredom, turned in surprise.

“Wha—what is the meaning of this, bursting in without even knocking?”

There was no time to explain.
Lily crossed the room in long strides and took Sara’s hand.

“Ask nothing. Follow me.”
“… I—I understand. You will explain the reason presently, will you not?”

Lily nodded without speaking.
She drew Sara away from the window, then drew her sword.
She could not step beyond the human range—but her swordsmanship had reached what people called mastery.
She swung at a speed Sara’s eyes could not follow, and shattered the glass.

“We are going out this way?”

Lily did not answer in words. A nod was enough.
She lifted Sara into her arms and jumped, without hesitation, from the window.

“Hyaaaaaaaaa?!”

They were on the third floor. An ordinary human might well have died of the fall—still more one in armor, however light, and carrying another person besides. Instant death would not have been strange.
Sara’s scream was reasonable.
Lily landed cleanly on both feet.
Then she ran, apparently unhurt.

“Th-that was terrible for my heart …”
“Forgive me, Your Highness. Endure a little longer.”

First they had to leave the castle.
What came after could wait until they reached safety.
Lily cleared the moat, made for the castle town, and chose the emptier streets, aiming for the Discard District.
She ran alleys she would never have used in ordinary times, Sara in her arms.
When Sara judged the moment right, she asked, timidly:

“Why did we have to flee the castle?”

Lily hesitated.
Did she need to tell the girl, here, that her father was dead? The conflict was real.
But concealment would not last.
Better to tell her now, so the wound might begin to close a moment sooner.

“The castle is already occupied by vampires. The knightly order is annihilated, myself excepted. The king, too, is most likely already dead.”
“The knights—?! And Father, dead …”

Sara was surprised, but she did not seem greatly shocked.
The king had never given her a father’s love.
They had been strangers who happened to live in the same building.
However much blood connected them, if no relation had been built, death would draw only this much.

“It cannot have been Camilla?”
“Impossible. I killed her. There is no mistake.”
“… Yes. You did.”

Camilla had been an abomination who had tried to make Sara other than human—and still Sara did not seem to hate her much.
That, more than anything, shook Lily.
Had cutting Camilla down been a mistake after all?

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45. True Happiness and Something Shaped Like Hope

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/48/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

What does it mean to be human?
Kishiri turned the question over whenever her mind cleared, even as Ashera and Lalilalai—who had arrived later—worked her body between their hands. No answer came.
Pride, honor, dignity—none of these belonged to her.
She had been raised from birth to be a tool.
She received orders. She protected other people’s pride. Her own will never entered into it.
Even so, she had refused to become something other than human.
If that refusal did not come from dignity, perhaps it came from instinct: the species trying to keep itself alive.
They say that when a human life is in danger, the wish to bear a child rises of its own accord.
The species refuses.
It is not the wish of the individual.
A life, in the end, is only a journey toward the most complete self-satisfaction one can manage.
If that is so, what meaning is there in being bound to the human species at all?
It had taken a long time—but Kishiri was, at last, beginning to accept that the meaning was none.

Everything was being overwritten by pleasure.
Even the instincts imprinted at birth thinned and faded before something so overwhelming.

Lalilalai’s tongue entered through her mouth and filled her lungs.
Ashera forced her throat open as well, twisting a long tongue down until it occupied her stomach.
In a “sane” state, the act would have been impossible to accept. Repeated often enough, the resistance vanished.
Now she asked for it herself. She wanted them inside her again.
The faintly warm, soft tongues moving through her chest and belly had become, to her, something precious.

So she wished to give something back.
After they had ruined her from within, she pushed Lalilalai down in turn, and when Ashera leaned close she met her mouth.
They scattered saliva, tangled those long tongues, and drove the joined length into Lalilalai’s throat.
They kept that kiss going inside her, sinking it as far as the stomach.
The sensation of her gullet being scraped drew a glad, strangled cry from Lalilalai.
Kishiri and Ashera used the sound like a drug, and answered it with sweet, broken voices of their own.

There was no longer any part of Kishiri they had not claimed.
From her feet to the crown of her head they had mapped her, and the inside of her was no exception.
Shadows sank into flesh and stroked every fiber of muscle with care.
Every opening the body possessed was reached as far as reach would go.
Organs they could not arrive at from without were taken up in their hands after her belly was opened, and tasted directly.
The heart was the worst of it. Each touch sent a pleasure so violent she thought she might die, and her mind went white.
The first time they opened her, she had screamed in terror. She grew used to it soon enough.
Perhaps an ordinary person would not.
She was made to grow used to it.
Because it felt good.
Once a human understands that an act is giving pleasure, vigilance collapses at once.
Heart and body begin to fit themselves to what is no longer human.

It went on like that, again and again.
At last Kishiri told them, of her own will:

“I want it—I want to become … the same as you two. A Demi-Vamp!”

She no longer needed the shadow lurking in her brain.
Goodbye to a cramped world.
Hello to a bottomless swamp.
Humans decide, on their own authority, that the highest thing is to be rewarded after suffering.
That is wrong. It is only an excuse for compromise.
Nothing surpasses a happiness that lasts.
Everyone, in truth, already knew it.

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44. Danger Zone XXX

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/47/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

She dreamed a nightmare.
A dream of slick, misshapen things crawling over her whole body.
In time the misshapen things tried to enter Kishiri from the mouth; her jaw was locked, and they could not.
So they looked for other openings.
A human body has fewer holes the will can close than it likes to think.
Against an abominable fluid organism, it is helpless.
She was entered.
From below to the face, through every opening that would not shut, they came into her, writhed, swelled, and tried to force their way out.
No matter how thoroughly one cut off stimulus from outside, if one was being changed from within, there was nothing to be done.
Kishiri’s flesh was being changed.
A body trained slender and supple became a swollen monstrosity, closer in shape to the misshapen things assaulting her than to a person.
Comrade.
You are a comrade.
The thing writhing in her ear whispered it to her, over and over.
Kishiri shook her head and resisted with all she had.
And on the other hand, she thought this as well.
If her flesh had not rejected magic—if she had been an ordinary human, without a trained mind.
She might already have been at ease.
Then the “true body” of the misshapen things appeared before Kishiri’s eyes and peered in.
It looked like Ashera. It looked like Lalilalai. It looked like Kishiri herself.
It jammed its own skull into Kishiri’s mouth, and tried to force its way into her.
A grind.
The jawbone came out of joint.
The flesh of the cheeks tore with a series of snaps.
The throat, too, was avoided; blood poured in quantity from the neck.
And the thing went in as far as the heart, fused, and began to pulse.
The blood was contaminated, or replaced.
The blood running from the split neck went black and stagnant.
The body was being fatally remade.
And even so—what Kishiri’s body felt was not pain, but a pleasure so strong she nearly slipped into rapture—

◇◇◇ Continue reading →

43. Remaining Myself, I Become Someone Other Than Myself

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/46/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

Kishiri found that she had been asleep on the bed.
When she woke, the view beyond the window was already dyed madder-red.
It had been morning only a little while ago—too long for a nap.

“Good morning, Kishiri.”

Lalilalai was lying beside her.
Kishiri’s small body fit neatly in the woman’s arms, wrapped through and through in that warmth.

(I … I went back to my own room. Why is Lalilalai— No … that’s wrong. This is … her room. I—that’s right. After I left Lily, I came here …)
“My. Still half asleep? You insisted, you know. I have been lying here without laying a hand on you.”
“… Sorry. Lalilalai.”
“It’s all right. I was able to watch a very dear sleeping face.”

Apparently the sleeping face had been thoroughly observed.
Together with being called “dear,” it made her unaccountably ashamed; Kishiri buried her face in the woman’s chest.
Then her head was pulled into a tight embrace, and a violent mass of flesh surrounded her face.

“Mmgh …”
“Fufufu. An honest Kishiri is truly lovely. And you, too, are far happier this way, are you not?”
“…?”

She did not understand what Lalilalai was saying.
When Kishiri looked up from the woman’s chest, Lalilalai narrowed her eyes, loosened her arms with a rapt expression, and—
A wet crush.
A sound in the brain.
Kishiri understood, by instinct, that a kiss was being asked for, and brought her face closer.
What followed she registered only as a courtship gesture she knew by theory. There was no sensation. No taste. Lalilalai looked pleased, and that, for Kishiri, was enough.

“And you will still say you feel nothing? How very sad.”
“I don’t mind … If Lalilalai feels well, that’s enough.”
“How devoted. Ah, that is why I lament. Why a person as self-sacrificing as you cannot be happy.”

Lalilalai pitied her, and stroked her head.
A wet sound.
Then the viscous noise sounded again in Kishiri’s brain, and she—returned to her right mind.

“—?! Wh-what … why am I here … and just now … that—…”

The feel of Lalilalai remaining in her mouth.
Kishiri covered her mouth with her hand and shook her head again and again.

“I discussed it with Mama. What ought to be done. As you are, charm will not take properly, and to leave the insensibility untreated would be far too pitiful.”
“What … are you going to do?”
“I will rebuild your body to my preference.”

Lalilalai’s mouth hooked up.
That was madness. It was in no sense love.
Kishiri shoved the woman’s body away, and by spring of the body alone leapt from the bed and landed on the floor.

“You cannot run. Not as you are now.” Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

41. A Feeling That Does Not Die Even in Death

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/44/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

Kishiri excelled at covert work.
She had been raised for that purpose from the first. Had her employers not been carelessly destroyed, she would still be killing people in places the sun never reached.
They had received their punishment at the hands of the soldiers Lily led, and Kishiri had been left alone.
The one who had not passed sentence on her, but had asked instead, “Will you fight for the country with us?”, had been Lily, and no one else.
Lily was hopelessly kind. She strained herself until watching her made one uneasy. She was surely not, by nature, the sort of vessel that ought to become captain of the knights.
And so Kishiri had thought:
I want to stay at this person’s side. I want to support her from the shadows.

—I have to tell Lily. Now.

Having witnessed Narkil’s death, she moved at once.
She had already found it suspicious.
The replacement soldiers, all of them women. The plainly abnormal closeness of Ashera and Lalilalai. The strange atmosphere that hung over the castle.
But she had not yet obtained the material for certainty.
That was why she had said she would go to Lily’s room and still had not done it.
Now that she had seen the truth with her own eyes, there was no time left to hesitate.

Her small, thin body raced through the castle without a sound.
At a speed ordinary people could scarcely even catch with their eyes, Kishiri had almost—

“What’s the rush?”

At the last moment, she was found by the people she least wanted to meet.
Ashera and Lalilalai. Already, she judged, fallen into the enemy’s hands.
She thought of ignoring them and passing through. She could not.
Her arms and legs were already caught in something that could only be called “shadows”: black, formless, without temperature.

“We were just looking for you, Kishiri.”

Failure.
I should have moved sooner.
Kishiri regretted, sharply, her own lack of resolve.
If the enemy possessed some means of rewriting them, there was only one thing to do here.
Abandon the conceit that she, of all people, could resist.
Bite through her tongue. Kill herself.

“Ngh—?!”

Before she could move, a mass of that same black stuff was forced into her mouth.

“Don’t go wasting your life, Kishiri. We aren’t gonna eat you. We just want to understand each other, that’s all.”
“Quite so. And besides … Kishiri, you must become my ‘Mother.’”

Conversation was already useless.
She had to escape at any cost—but bound hand and foot, every method was already sealed.
Endure. There will be a chance. She made herself believe it.

“All right. Let’s go to my room.”

Still bound by shadows, Kishiri was taken to Ashera’s chambers.
In the end, the crisis unfolding in the castle never reached Lily.

Continue reading →

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 …” Continue reading →