37. Lillian (1)

Creeak.

The carriage that had been rattling along for days came to a stop. I was drifting somewhere between asleep and awake when the coachman’s voice reached me.

“We’ve arrived.”

I poked my head out and found the lush green forest gone without a trace, with a thick, milky-white fog lying over everything in sight. So I gathered my things and stepped down, and the instant my foot touched the ground, a damp chill soaked into the cuffs of my trousers.

“…Big Sis Lillian is in a place like this?”

With the other three siblings, the age gap had been wide enough that I used “Big Brother” or “Big Sister,” the formal elder-sibling address. But from what I’d been told, Lillian was only two years older than me, so calling her anything too weighty felt off.

In any case, the coachman answered my question by pointing a finger at the fog-shrouded entrance of the forest.

“I was told you’d understand on your own once you walked into the fog.”

It was so dense you couldn’t see an inch ahead.

When I kept staring at it, the coachman spoke up.

“I can’t go any farther in, even if I wanted to. The horses are frightened. They won’t move.”

Those horses hadn’t once shown the slightest sign of fatigue, yet now their chins were trembling.

“It’s all right. Thank you for bringing me this far. The next time I’m back at the house, let’s have a meal together.”

I’d noticed that since the Dark Wolf incident he’d been cutting back on his sleep even more, and on and off, in my drowsing, I’d half-heard the dying cries of monsters.

“Be careful, sir.”

The coachman was a curt man, but a warm one. The textbook stoic alpha male, by the standards of this era.

I turned my back on his sendoff and threw myself into the murky fog.

“It really is. Would make a great horror movie set.”

The instant I’d stepped in, the world had dyed itself gray.

The fog writhed left and right as if it were one enormous living creature, and swallowed up inside it, we walked straight ahead. We walked for a long time, with no idea how far or how long it stretched, until —

Rrrrumble.

The fog let out a strange sound, then twisted itself into the shape of letters.

And Eve went ahead and read it out loud, of all things.

“Family aren’t guests!”

When I shouted, the fog roiled and shifted again.

— A human carrying Arne blood couldn’t possibly use a sentimental, overflowing word like “family.”

“…You’ve got a point.”

Once I called the members of the household to mind, I couldn’t help but concede it.

Even Eve had no comeback for that, and she nodded.

Truly, not a scrap of affection to be found among them.

That aside, one way or another I had to meet her and bring her back, because that was what I’d come all this way for.

And it’s the first mission I’ve been given by the head of the house, at that.

A first is a pretty symbolic thing in life, so I couldn’t very well wrap this up without even seeing her face. I shouted into the empty air again.

“Don’t you recognize me?”

I’d decided to play the affectionate little brother, since I figured we’d warm up to each other a bit more easily that way.

“It’s me — Arden! Your one and only little brother!”

— A…rden, you said?

“Yeah, your one and only little brother! We used to get along great, didn’t we!”

What exactly we used to get along great about, I didn’t know. Naturally, since I had no memories of Lillian. But it wasn’t a totally baseless performance, either.

How many little brothers can you find who could enjoy a game of chess with Valerian?

I’d gotten along well enough with the eccentric elder brother, so I must have gotten along with the sister just fine too.

Probably.

— The Arden I know used to laugh in the brightest, freshest way in the whole world! So smile for me!

“Huh?”

— If you can’t, you’re a fake!

So, as she wished, I gave her my brightest, freshest smile, with everything I had. I hooked the corners of my mouth all the way up, made my eyes tremble, and curved them into crescent moons.

“Hehehe!”

Eve’s face rotted in real time as she looked at my smile. It was the expression of someone who’d downed way too much booze and was about to throw up.

— It really is Arden! My cute little brother!

But unlike on Eve, on Lillian the effect was instant. Her suspicion had apparently dissolved, because the fog was slowly thinning.

Right. Now to meet Lillian, butter her up appropriately, and bring her out.

— Although, you know what?

“…Yeah?”

— You could be a fake who’s just impersonating Arden, couldn’t you?

“Wait, out of nowhere?”

What is she, a dwarf? Her mood swings up and down in a single beat.

I don’t like this.

KRRRUMBLE!

Why is it that bad premonitions are never wrong?

— Hisssssss!

The ground split open and an enormous shadow shot out, a thick, long green vine that easily cleared the height of a grown man. But it was no ordinary vine.

“Kyeeeeek!”

“I can see that!”

The vine slammed down where I’d been standing, trying to flatten my very existence into pulp.

KA-WHAM!

It flew this way and that like a whip, and it must’ve had considerable force behind it, because every spot it hit got gouged into a crater.

The kind of force where you’d be in for a bad time from even a glancing blow.

— My cute little brother is flawless and perfect beyond compare, so you’ll help me test out my creation, won’t you?

A voice I took to be Lillian’s rang through the forest.

If it was going to come to this, I wouldn’t have plastered on a smile so forced that the corners of my mouth were still cramping!

Hey, Big Sis, isn’t your idea of a joke a little out of hand? You realize that if I hadn’t possessed him, Arden was fated to die of illness?

There was a great deal I wanted to say, but I swallowed it down and drew the sword from my hip.

Schick.

Thankfully, the vine was simple to deal with, since a pattern that just keeps repeating the same overhead strike is easy to break down.

Schick! Schick!

If there was a problem —

“Ow!! Owwwww!!”

The vine I’d cut was screaming.

The vines had been spraying green sap, and now new stems sprouted from the cut ends. Cut one and it became two. Cut two and it split into four.

“Kyeeeeek!”

Scream or not, I didn’t care, and I kept cutting. If anything, the more they multiplied, the more attacks I had to dodge, which meant I got to move my body even more busily, and that suited me just fine.

Maybe I’ve gone a little strange too.

If I was treating this as part of my training, I wasn’t exactly normal either.

After enough merciless butchery, the vines stopped throwing themselves at me. Was there intelligence in them after all?

“Not coming?”

— Slither, slither.

The moment I approached, they fled into the ground. Still gripping my sword, I shouted up at the empty air.

“That’s enough, right?”

The answer came back quickly.

KA-RUMMMBLE!

This was different from the warning before the vines had shown up. The ground beneath my feet abruptly gave way, and like an hourglass, it began swallowing every bit of earth around me.

WHOOOSH!

I tried to dig in my ankles to keep from being dragged down with it, but it wasn’t enough. The entire ground was swirling into a giant vortex and collapsing in toward me as its center, like an antlion pit out in the desert.

Lots of looking down today, huh.

Anyway, I looked where Eve was pointing with a scream, and there, at the very deepest part of the swirling mound of earth, at its very center, a massive maw lay gaping open.

Anyone with trypophobia would faint on the spot — it’s that hideously gross.

The trypophobia-inducing worm was sucking the sand down with the momentum of something that meant to grind up everything that fell into it.

“Take a closer look.”

I let the strength drain out of the feet I’d been forcing into the ground to keep from being sucked in, and the instant I did, gravity took my body and I was pulled toward the maw at terrifying speed.

“There’s an old saying — if you want to catch a tiger, you go into the tiger’s den.”

Ignoring Eve’s wail, I re-gripped my sword.

“And they say there’s no paradise where you run to.”

The giant maw opened wider still to swallow me down, and I didn’t resist. I threw myself into the darkness of its esophagus.

And —

SHUNK!

At the speed of my fall, I drove my sword into the softest-looking part of the worm’s inner wall.

“Kyeeeeeeeeeek!!”

A shriek even worse than before tore out of it, and the entire ground screamed and convulsed. It writhed in agony, its massive body twisting, and since my sword was lodged in the worm’s mouth, I swung this way and that with its thrashing, like one of those wobbling inflatable tube men in front of a supermarket.

“Hey, knock it off with the shaking. You’re gonna make me motion-sick.”

I was on the verge of being sent down into its stomach, so I dangled from the sword right above that boundary, swaying back and forth as if hanging from a pull-up bar.

Eve had covered her own eyes, so she probably hadn’t seen it, but this worm had no teeth. In other words, as long as I didn’t get sucked down into the stomach, where the digestive juices were lined up and waiting, I was golden.

Thunk! Thunk!

Both my feet kicked the inner wall mercilessly.

“Kyeeeeeeeeeek!”

In the end the worm couldn’t bear my one-man riot any longer. It convulsed violently, as if heaving a dry retch, and with a powerful surge of pressure my body was shot back out into the open. I somersaulted through the air and landed on the forest floor, coated head to toe in sticky slime.

“That was a perfect ten out of ten.”

Honestly, even I was impressed. Killed it. Absolutely killed it.

.

.

.

After that, the experiments kept on coming. Fire-breathing flowers suddenly bloomed from the earth, and bees that sprayed acid rain came chasing after me from the sky. Lillian was less a magician than some grotesque biologist.

One way or another, I broke through the flames, dodged the acid rain, and cut down every single creature that came lunging at me. The time I’d spent rolling around the training ground really hadn’t been for nothing, as became apparent yet again.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding.”

When I finally pushed through the last thicket and stepped out, a quiet, peaceful clearing appeared, like a lie. A green lawn lay bathed in warm sunlight, without a wisp of fog anywhere, and in its center stood one small, pretty cottage. White smoke rose from the brick chimney and flowers of every color bloomed in the garden. It felt like being inside a charming storybook.

“First it was a horror movie, then halfway through it swerved into an SF planet adventure, and now it’s some peaceful healing-genre thing?”

What a crap mash-up of every popular element you could grab.

In any case, I had no clue when it might switch again, so I walked up to the cottage without lowering my guard, and when I reached the entrance, the door opened on its own.

Instead of a billowing robe, the first thing that caught my eye inside was a woman dressed in comfortable indoor clothes. Her blonde hair, glittering in the sunlight, was carelessly tied up, and she was humming a tune to herself and stirring a teacup. The kicker was the teaspoon doing the stirring. It floated in midair, moving all on its own.

The blonde-ponytailed woman raised her head, and clear, transparent emerald eyes met mine.

“You’re here?”

Lillian welcomed me with the most innocuous smile in the world.

“Come on over and sit!”

Lillian beckoned with a smile that crinkled her eyes.

She really is Kairon’s daughter.

She was completely unlike the gloomy, stiff Kairon, beaming as she called me over, and yet. Like father, like daughter, sure enough. I could see Kairon’s face in hers.

“I said let me see your face up close!”

When I wouldn’t drop my guard and sit, Lillian sprang up and came to me.

“Mmpf!”

She cupped my cheeks in both hands and started pawing them this way and that, firing off exclamations.

“My goodness, look at this baby-soft skin! So this is what youth looks like!”
“Um, Sis? Hang on. I can’t… breathe…”
“Oh dear, sorry! I just got too excited to see you!”

She let me go with a giggle. From any angle, this was the picture of a doting elder sister overflowing with little-brother love.

“Enough with the youth talk. We’re only two years apart.”
“Are we?”
“Yeah.”

Doesn’t this sister of mine have any sense of distance?

To think there was a type like this in the household.

In the middle of all that, Eve, who’d apparently finished her analysis of Lillian, reported in to me.

It can’t be that high, however high it is.

As bright and cheery as this, she might honestly be close to Elli.

But Eve’s words were utterly unexpected.