Ex6-1. The Exorcist Sister and the Incompetent Little Sister

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/61/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

In a dim room, the clatter of a keyboard went on without pause.
The girl responsible wore a shapeless red padded coat and sat hunched, locked in a staring contest with three monitors in a row.
Her long black hair was a tangle. Thick black-framed glasses sat on her nose. Now and then a little laugh slipped out of her: “Nihihi.”

“When everybody moves just the way I want, yeah, that’s fun. Nih.”

She was still muttering that unsettling aside when a knock sounded at the door.
Almost in the same instant, without waiting for an answer, someone walked in.
The girl, who had been in such a good mood, let out an obvious “Haaah,” and glared at her sister, who was trespassing as usual.

“Sis… how many times do I have to tell you there’s no point knocking if you come in at the same time?”
“Oh, what does it matter? We’re sisters.”
“Ever heard of courtesy even among intimates?”
“Other houses are other houses. Ours is ours. So? How’s it going, Senri?”

The older sister—Shuri—ignored her younger sister Senri Shirogane’s protest as if it were nothing and asked with shameless composure.
She had come to Senri unusually meek, saying she had a favor to ask. Senri had agreed, and this was the result.
Out in the world, Shuri passed for a bright, kind person of character. Senri would have stated, without hesitation, that this was not the case.

“Tyrant, aren’t you. How did our sister even grow up like this.”
“Never mind that—just tell me! Are the vampire rumors actually spreading?”
“They are. I used every board and every social network, wrote copy that would bite depending on the venue, and posted at the right moment! A stunt like that would be impossible without a brain like mine.”

Ordinary methods would never make anyone believe the nonsense that a string of mass murders was the work of vampires.
Not even as rumor or urban legend.
But if you impersonated a crowd and flooded every channel in a short span, a few people would start to believe.
Then you deepened their conviction and turned them into new sources of spread.
By repeating that, Senri had succeeded, on her own, in circulating the vampire rumor.

“Yes, yes, very impressive. And you’ve covered your tracks?”

Shuri, who was hopeless with machines, had no idea what was impressive and let it slide.
Senri, of course, pursed her lips in dissatisfaction.

“Praise me more. It was a lot of work, you know?”
“You’re so capable. There, there.”

As she said it, Shuri ruffled Senri’s hair in a teasing way.
The hand was batted away at once.

“People with no knowledge always look down on advanced technique. Honestly. Anyway, I’m routing it through overseas servers so it won’t lead back. But do we even need to go that far? Even if you’re right and the culprit this time is a vampire, I’ve never heard of a vampire who uses the net.”
“Just in case. So you don’t get pulled into danger, Senri.”
“Sis…”

Senri was moved, in spite of herself, that her sister worried about her.
The feeling did not last.

“If you’re that worried, maybe you just shouldn’t have used me in the first place?”
“…”

The pointed remark silenced Shuri.
She seemed to think for a moment, and then—

“……Fufufu.”

She began to laugh, slowly and on purpose.

“Fufufu. Fufu. Fufufufufu.”

She kept up the theatrical laughter, patted Senri’s back a few times, and walked out of the room.
Apparently she had found nothing to say and was trying to paper it over.

“Fufufufufu…”

The laugh receded down the hall.
Watching her sister’s retreating back, Senri clutched her head and let out a long breath.
Shuri’s high-handed behavior was nothing new. No one understood better than Senri that getting angry was a waste.
There was nothing to do but give up.

“Well, it’s not like I’m not having fun, so whatever.”

She said it, and resumed her staring contest with the displays.
Later, when she started to leave the room for the bathroom, a bottle of juice was waiting outside the door.
Shuri’s idea of thanks, apparently.
“I’m cheap, getting happy over just this,” Senri thought, with a wry smile.

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Ex5. A Farce Like This, Once in a While

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/60/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

At some point it had become my daily habit to kill time in the park on the way home from cram school.
I would sit on a bench lit only dimly by a streetlamp that drew moths and gnats, and read, or else prepare for the next day’s lessons.
I did not think of it as pain. I did not think of it as loneliness, either.
Being at home was the greater pain. That was why I waited here for as much time as I could make pass.

My parents got along very badly.
I had never seen them when they were on good terms, so I assumed it had been that way since before I was born.
Every time they fought they would say they were going to divorce, but they did not seem to mean it.
They had, they said, a duty not to divorce until I could stand on my own.
I had been born.
Therefore I had to be raised properly.
That, apparently, was what the two of them believed.
Perhaps because I grew up in that environment, I never felt anything I could call love from my parents, and I never loved anyone myself.

I had a fair number of friends, at school and at cram school alike. The smile I had learned in order to manage my parents’ moods was, by itself, enough to draw people in.
I looked up at the streetlamp without quite meaning to.
I was a Moth Trap. They were those insects.
It was not a question of which was uglier, or which was more foolish.
Parents had a duty to raise their children. Human beings had a habit of approaching anyone who looked kindly. That was all.
So long as there was no feeling in my smile, the people who gathered around it were not coming for my character. They were only reflexively approaching a face that looked kind.
There was no affection in it.
So I felt none for them, either.

I killed time on the bench that day as well.
But on a certain day, someone was there before me.
A woman in a suit that suited her well, with short black hair.
Her face looked severe. She was not the sort one approached easily.
Still, that bench was one of the few territories I had, and I felt no urge to look for somewhere else.

“What?”

When I watched her from a little distance, she spoke in a low voice.
It was frightening enough that my resolve to ignore her and sit down anyway withered at once.
Even so, I had nowhere else to go.

“Do you want to sit?”
“ . . . Yes. I always kill time here.”
“Ah. So that’s how it is. Then I’m the one in the way. Sorry.”

She started to stand. I stopped her on impulse.

“No! I mean—it isn’t as if it belongs to me. So . . . you can stay sitting, miss.”
“No? Then I’ll take you at your word.”

She let herself down again and sat.
Then she crossed her legs and began a staring contest with her phone.
I left a person’s width of space and sat on the same bench.
A little unsettled, I opened the paperback I had been reading.
I could not concentrate. The woman had begun muttering under her breath, her brow furrowed.
Before I knew it I was looking at her, and she suddenly lifted her face and looked at me.
She burst out laughing, and I laughed too, without meaning to.
Our voices carried through the park at night.
At that time we did not even know each other’s names yet.

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Ex4. The Story of How She Came to See What Right Love Is

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/59/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

“Ahhhh, I’m wiped.”
“Good work. Today was rough too, wasn’t it.”
“Yeah. It was rough. Praise me. And then spoil meee …”

Saying so, Ririka crumpled to the floor just inside the front door.
Her hair, dyed a bright brown, fanned across the boards the way hair does in a horror film.
Then she reached, pleading, toward the fiancé she lived with.
Toshiya took that hand with a wry smile and pulled her up.
The time was half past eleven at night.
Four and a half hours had already passed since the esthetic salon where Ririka worked had closed.
She had left the shop a little after eleven. Even allowing for work after closing, it was late.

“If my salary were higher, I wouldn’t have to make you push yourself like this.”
“I started it because I wanted to. It can’t be helped.”

After vocational school, she had been drawn in by a full two-day weekend, two months’ bonus, and the treatment of a regular employee. That had been the beginning of her bad luck.
The commission was high and the base pay was low, so the bonus came to barely a sparrow’s tear, and the two-day weekend had been honored only at first.
Now a schedule hard enough to demand ten days on without a blink was wearing down Ririka’s body and heart.

“All right, Toshiya!”

Ririka, who until then had been a limp heap of exhaustion, suddenly straightened her back, put force into her eyes, and spoke fiercely.

“Hug me!”

In short, she only wanted to be spoiled.
When Toshiya held her gently, she poured complaint after complaint into his chest, as if she would never run out.
Coworkers. The manager. Customers. Impossible quotas, and the company products she had been made to buy because she had failed to meet them.
This is ridiculous, this is ridiculous, she muttered, patting his chest.
Once it had been about once a month. Lately it was about once a week that she dropped into this clinging mode.
That was how much stress had piled up.
Able to do nothing but hold her and rub her back, Toshiya privately lamented how pathetic he was.

When she had been spoiled enough, Ririka sat at the table and fell on the meal Toshiya had prepared.
After eating she soaked in the bath, did her skin care, made ready for tomorrow, and got into bed.
When she woke she went to work again, and when she came home there was a meal—the same loop, day after day, until one had the illusion that the same day was stretching on forever.
Ririka dreamed of going independent someday, and she had wanted to study for that, but if this state of things continued, even that would be out of reach.
Or—perhaps that, too, was the point.
Ambition is not always convenient for the head of the pack.
With a head gone vague from fatigue, Ririka carried millet rice to her mouth and looked at the television.

“That’s unusual. You’re watching the news. Don’t you usually put on that late-night comedy thing?”
“Today’s Thursday. That’s Wednesdays.”
“Ah … was it? Heheh. Not good, not good. On a shift system you completely lose track of the days. Still, it’s unusual for you to watch the news, isn’t it? Did something happen?”
“Another murder in the neighborhood. And this time it’s three people.”
“Ugh. They found some at the school the other day too, right? Same culprit?”
“That was two before this. And there was one before that—two students killed near the park.”
“Wow, it’s increasing … so that’s six? And only men? Some kind of psychopath?”

Lately this town had been noisy, one way or another.
A corpse found at the school with the limbs torn off. A corpse split clean in two by something sharp.
None of it was a crime an ordinary person could have committed.
The police seemed to be investigating on the theory that some special tool had been used, but so far there were no useful witnesses, and no progress.
And now, in the midst of that, a third killing.

“I saw police on my way home too. They’re really throwing people at it, aren’t they?”
“A crime that bold, and they still haven’t found a face or a shape for the culprit. Of course the police are desperate.”
“And if something happens in the middle of that—”
“They’ll get even more desperate.”
“Well, more police means the town gets safer. I’m grateful, I am.”
“… Don’t say that outside, all right?”
“I know. I’ll have you know that at work I pass for serious, reliable Ririka-san.”
“That’s right, you did. When we started going out I thought you were a serious girl.”
“Nfufu. I’m a character actress, that’s what I am.”

For the two of them, the incidents on television were someone else’s affair.
Ririka seemed genuinely glad that the town’s safety would improve, and Toshiya had been wondering, until today, whether he ought to start walking her home—but her pleasure at the increase in police officers read, gently, as a refusal, and he chose not to say it.
That was all.
One flower among the many that colored an ordinary life.
That they themselves might be drawn in was something they had not imagined.

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Ex3. A Tour of Memories

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/58/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

Beyond the gate lay the rooftop of a school I knew by heart.
I had chosen, deliberately, to wear my uniform when I set foot there. I looked out over the town, let the autumn night wind move through me, and put the question to them.

“Do you remember? The time we spent together here.”

Memory rose.
The hours I had passed with them.
The abuse they had thrown.
The pain they had carved in.
Bruises.
Blood.
Laughter.
Eyes looking down.

“By now, of course, it is only a story one laughs at.”

The times they had cursed me for no reason, and kicked me.
The times they had pulled my hair and cut it off, carelessly, with scissors.
The times they had said they would pierce my ears for me, and driven a safety pin through the lobe again and again.
The times they had cut my wrists with a box cutter because I was annoying.
The time they had stripped me by force, had men sexually assault me, and laughed themselves sick watching.
All of it felt as distant as another life.
A story to laugh at. A story so far from the present that one could scarcely believe it had happened.

“Isn’t that so, Toka, Sakuna?”
“Yes, Lady Chigusa!”

It was Sakuna who answered so brightly.
Her speech was a little babyish, a little foolish, but she was an obedient, honest pet, and a good one.

“I am sorry, Lady Chigusa. The two of us then … we were not ourselves …”
“I do not mind. If those two had not existed then, I would not exist as I do now. It is only an argument from results, but I am almost grateful.”

Toka’s thinking ran a little too readily toward the dark, but she had become a quiet, pretty pet.
She was sinking, an anxious look on her face, so I crouched and stroked the underside of her jaw as she stayed on all fours.
She made a sweet, wheedling sound, and narrowed her eyes as if it felt good.

The two who had once looked down on me now wore collars, and crawled like dogs while I held their leashes.
This was not something I had wished for. Toka and Sakuna had proposed it themselves.
It had likely been an offer born of guilt, but they had fallen into it far more deeply than I had imagined—
perhaps, I thought, they had bullied me in the first place because they themselves had wanted to be hurt.
I have no such taste of my own. But if my beloved Toka and Sakuna asked it of me, it could not be helped.

“Shall we go, then? You must both be curious what the school looks like after so long.”

When I pulled the leashes a little hard, they made a choked sound of pain—and their faces were glad.
I will say this: it is not that any pain will do.
The important part is that the pain is given by me.

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Ex2-3. Answer

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/57/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

Having carried the golems back to the village, I decided that very night to take everyone and crush the settlement.
I did not take everyone because I needed the fighting strength.
I was thinking of afterward.
No matter how many humans milled about, no matter what genius magician they had, I alone would be enough to subdue them.

First, the defeat of two new golems posted before the cave.
Their performance seemed the same as the previous four; if I drove shadow through them and stopped the circulation of magical power from within, they ceased readily.

“When it was us, we had such a hard time …”

The woman who had come with us looked somewhat stunned. Well—if one fought them ordinarily, they might well be a difficult opponent.
We entered the cave as we were.
Traps, no doubt: stepping on the ground triggered light magic, and it came at us again and again.
Fortunately the power did not seem very high. I crushed each approaching globe of light in my palm.
My hand burned a little, but that was no problem. It would regenerate at once.

When we came out of the cave, men with wooden spears stood blocking the settlement’s entrance.
The spears gave off a faint light; perhaps they had been enchanted.
That, however, was rather beside the point. It could be dealt with however one liked.
The real problem was that the men had lined women up in front of themselves and were using them as shields.

“Heh, hehehe … How about that? You can’t lay a hand on us, can you?”

Vulgar laughter, a vulgar voice, a vulgar face.
All of them worth less than filth, they said that to us.
Between this and putting women’s skins on golems, they seemed to think of us as animals with a nature that would not harm women.

“Would you happen to be the chief of these Demi-Vamp vermin, the one leading them?”

Beyond the surrounding men, a man standing importantly on a low hill spoke.
I had no obligation to answer.

“Well, I suppose that’s it. In other words, breaking the dolls, and coming through that trap-ridden cave unhurt, were your doing. Impressive. Worthy of praise.”

Perhaps he meant to show composure; he began to clap, pat-pat.
Come to think of it, there had been people like this at school.
People who were not ordinarily that sort of character, and who became high-handed the moment they judged their position higher than the other party’s.
Nostalgic, and from where I stood now, also ridiculous.

“So I have a proposal for a clever girl like you. How about withdrawing? I would rather avoid a waste of lives myself. The men pointing spears at you just now are important labor.”
“…”
“No reply, is it. I had hoped for a clever discussion. A pity … All right. Do it.”

The high-handed man gave some instruction. The spearman in front of us moved—and drove his spear into the leg of the woman he had been using as a shield.

“Aaaaaaah!”

The woman’s anguished cry rang through the night sky.
The suddenness sent a ripple of shock through my companions, Lina included.

“Just as I thought. Just as I thought. For some reason Demi-Vamps love their own sex. I don’t know why, but they apparently cannot keep a poker face when a woman is hurt in front of them.”
“Hostages, then?”
“Hahahah! See? A moment ago you were determined to ignore me, and now you’re speaking of your own accord! Kuhahahaha! Ha … ah, forgive me. I’ll answer the question. The answer is yes. Hostages. If you withdraw here, we won’t kill them.”
“Are they not labor as well?”
“Unfortunately, this settlement hasn’t the surplus to keep idle mouths who are clumsy with their hands and who don’t even stir a man’s desire. That isn’t to say there are no other uses—but this use, just now, was more effective and more efficient.”

In other words: lives that could be lost.
No objection came from the men.
Unanimous, was it. Continue reading →

Ex2-2. Tomorrow, Blood Rain Will Fall

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/56/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

Once one person accepted it, the rest followed in an avalanche.
Herd psychology is a terrible thing; even cannibalism can be permitted.
It could not be helped. It tasted far better than gamy wild meat, and it was easy to obtain.
At first the women were consumed simply as food.
Then, perhaps as they gained the leisure to enjoy a meal, they began to torment the women before cooking them.
That escalated, little by little, until they took more pleasure in the women’s suffering and screaming than in the eating itself.

“In the end, humans are only this sort of creature. It becomes embarrassing to live on the same plane.”

Watching the men laugh as they prodded a woman over the fire with wooden spears, Alexander murmured to himself.

A little apart from the feast, he chewed jerky made from wild game and wrote something in a notebook.

“Well—what I am doing is not so different. Animals that treat cannibalism as taboo are the minority, after all.”

Was it even correct, from the standpoint of natural law, to call it a sin?
Flay the skin and roast it, and it was no different from beast-meat.
Add salt and pepper, and it became a finer ingredient than wild game, with less of a smell.
The heart was especially popular for its chew; the other organs had a peculiarity, but they were not bad.
Only the hunted had changed—from wild animals to humans. The rule that the strong slaughter the weak had not changed at all.

“If I still find it ugly, is that proof I am the one bound to the human species? Kuhuhuhu …”

In any case, it did not matter to Alexander.
So long as he obtained “material,” that was enough.

 

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Ex2-1. Where Paradise Lies

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/55/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

It was the last paradise left on the world

After every nation had fallen to the vampires, the few humans who had barely survived wandered in search of some place where they might still live as people.
Those who escaped intact arrived, by chance, at the same destination.

North on the continent, beyond a cave, lay a flatland ringed by mountains.
A settlement had once been there; several dozen people had lived quietly.
The young had gone to the cities. Those who remained had died out. Only rotting wooden ruins were left.
Some came looking for a hiding place, some as if fleeing the rain, some in search of a place to die. All of them arrived.

Rumors of the settlement reached the ears of the surviving humans, and people began to gather there in a body.
Fortunately the land itself was fairly wide, so even with nearly two hundred assembled, they did not quarrel over space.
So long as they sealed the cave, they need not fear discovery by vampires. The people who lived there came, in time, to call that safe place paradise—“Eden.”

Eden was at peace.
Humans whose lives have been threatened respect their own lives, and other people’s, more than those who have never been so exposed.
Everyone showed consideration. Everyone gave kindness.
A true utopia.
Even humans, it seemed, could discard their folly. They would not spend forever at one another’s throats.
There was hope.
Which is to say: there was light.
Where light is born, shadow arises.
The peace did not last long.

The seed of strife was food.
Spring water covered their need to drink, but mountain herbs and the wild animals they could hunt would not feed two hundred.
Hunger roughened their hearts and pared the kindness away.
In the end, humans had never been capable of making a paradise.
At first it was only friends sharing food.
Then the sharing hardened into factions, into a gap between rich and poor; jealousy coiled; the factions began to fight.
Even if the world shrank to a settlement of two hundred, the scale changed and the conduct did not.
The blood-for-blood fighting lasted several days. Eden’s population fell to about a hundred and fifty.

—Then, one day, a single human appeared in the settlement.

He descended as if from the heavens, like a god: Alexander Omicron.
In the age when humans had still been masters of the world, he had made his name as “the greatest magician alive”—a first-rate magical scholar in the true sense.
Having watched the world perish under the vampires, he had come to Eden in search of a place to retire.

“If he is a famous magician, he may know a way to save us.”

The people, weary of fighting, clung to Alexander.
He considered a little, observed his surroundings, and said:

“The ones who joined the fighting were adult men, which means the dead were as well. If the remaining survivors are fifty men, then there are a hundred women. Don’t you think that is too many?”

Among the men, some had apparently resented being the only ones who had to fight.
Many agreed with Alexander.

“We should restore the balance. There is also a way to solve the food problem at the same time. Do as I say.”

Alexander was indeed an excellent magician. Few people knew that, shortly before the human world fell, in the midst of the chaos, his own country had banished him.
Officially, his specialty was the treatment of wounds and disease. That was not true.
—Human experimentation.
In particular, a series of atrocious trials upon young women, which also served to satisfy his own appetites.
That was the field in which Alexander excelled.

He made this proposal:

“We will use fifty of the women as food, and turn the remaining fifty into plants for producing meat efficiently. A few women able to bear proper children will be enough.”

At first everyone opposed it.
But people cannot resist hunger.
Before long, fifty women were chosen from among the survivors and consumed as food.
The remaining fifty were bound; Alexander’s procedures remade their wombs so that, once pregnant, they could immediately deliver enormous lumps of flesh.
Needless to say, the men’s sexual use of those women was included in the production.
Once the men had eaten human flesh, they could no longer see the women as the same kind of creature.
Obedient slaves. Convenient tools. Palatable food.
Appetite, lust, and sleep all satisfied, the men sat at table with Alexander and said, from the bottoms of their hearts,
“So this really was paradise after all.”

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50. I’m Home, Poor World That Still Does Not Know Love

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/53/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

Which she would choose had been a settled matter from the start.
I set in her hand a sword ornamented with jewels, said to have been passed down in the royal house. She went forward without hesitation and raised it.
The killing intent was aimed at her prince.
Which is to say: it was the princess who had taken up the sword.
The two of them had originally been a most affectionate pair of lovers.

“Why … would you do this …!”
“Because my Mistress’s hands make me far happier than you ever could!”

The princess’s cheeks flushed. She gave a cute little “ei!” and brought the blade down on the prince’s neck.
The prince, his expression remaining comically desperate, shed a great quantity of blood and died.
Clatter—the sword slipped from the princess’s hand, struck the ground, and rang with a dry sound.
Then she turned toward me, wore a full smile she had probably never turned even on her prince, and flung herself against my chest.
How dear she was.
We had met only a few days before, and yet I certainly loved her from the bottom of my heart.
In this embrace, and in the words of love I whispered at her ear, there was not a shred of falsehood.

“Mistress. This is all right, isn’t it. I can finally become yours, can’t I?”
“Yes. Let us go together. To a place humans cannot reach.”
“—Ah … nnaaaaaah!”

I sank my fangs in. I let her fall.
Farewell, mankind. Hello, the inhuman.
I drew up the sweet, melting red of her humanity, and poured into the princess the stuff of a new birth.
As she was taken from, given to, and remade, she was wrapped in a rapture no human could possibly confer; and I, swallowing the blood, tasted a bliss the human body cannot feel.

Who, then, is the one at a loss?
I, who had only ever been oppressed, powerless and incompetent, had at last, by discarding humanity, been able to make someone happy, and to become happy myself.
It is the same for everyone.
In the human world, the instant someone’s love is born, hatred is born somewhere.
Someone’s happiness is someone’s unhappiness; plus and minus zero, and the balance is kept.
What an unequal balance. What an unreasonable world.
Which is to say: strife never ends.
I do not mean to conclude that this affair is humanity’s fault—and yet, as a single fact, one cannot deny that the cause lies with them.
If only, a little more, all of humankind had been able to love other people.

Yes. I understand. The world’s structure will not allow it. Humans are a set of light and shadow, made so that the world will never be free of strife.
And yet, if it had been possible.
If I had been loved by my parents, if I had not been bullied, if I had not jumped from the school roof.
Then Demi-Vamps would never have been born.

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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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