39. Lillian (3)

The vine squirmed with pleasure under Lillian’s touch, and I kept my eyes on that bizarre sight as I asked.

“So this vine has your poison inside it, Sis?”
“Not just this one.”

Lillian sipped her herbal tea, perfectly calm, then crossed to the window and gazed through the glass at the forest beyond.

“It’s in every single one of the children I showed you and called ‘experiments.’”

The flowers that breathed fire out of the ground, the bees that sprayed acid rain, every last one of those ominous creatures.

“I’m going to hell.”

They’d taken on a share of her pain, and that was what had made them monsters.

“I sacrificed innocent lives to stay alive, so I have to pay for that sin.”

I’d have done the same thing.
A human life is worth more.

But I couldn’t bring myself to say any of it, because the face she turned back to me was unbearably sad.

“That’s why I can’t go back.”

“…”

“I’ll die with these children.”

Now I understood the situation perfectly.

As a child she’d noticed something was wrong with her and chosen to live alone, and the desperate things she’d done in that life to survive had come back at her like a boomerang of guilt, strangling her in its coils. Eve saw how miserable it all was too, and big, heavy tears were rolling down her face without end.

“Sis.”
“Hm?”

The Lillian I’d first met and the Lillian in front of me now looked like completely different people. The bright-laughing, bubbly girl I’d taken her for wasn’t in this room anymore. In her place stood a girl with no expression at all, who had given up on life.

I don’t like it.

I didn’t like this story, shaping itself into a tragic self-sacrifice arc. So I picked up the teacup with Lillian’s poison in it and poured it over the vine right beside her.

“— Kyeeeeeeek!”

“What are you doing!?”

Startled out of her wits, Lillian shoved me away.

“Let’s get one thing straight. In the end, all of this was your choice, Sis.”

Her pupils trembled, but I paid that no mind and pressed on.

“Running off to this forest, dumping your poison on innocent lives to survive — every bit of that happened because you chose it.”
“That’s…”

For her…

“You made the choice, so take responsibility for it. Why are you playing the victim?”

To her, those words had to be unbelievably cruel.

I ignored Eve’s reproach and kept unloading the venom.

“Sitting here beating yourself up, saying ‘I’m going to hell’ — does that change anything? Sorry, but no. Not one thing.”

For the first time, Lillian’s blank face twisted.

“Then what was I supposed to do!?” she shouted.

“Was I supposed to kill our family? Was I supposed to wring your neck!?”

She slammed her fist against the window, and the glass shattered with a deafening crash! The shards turned scarlet.

“I don’t want to die alone in this forest either! I want to live an ordinary life too!”

Heavy tears dropped from her eyes one after another. Years of brutal grief, of walking a tightrope between a murderous urge and the instinct to survive, were bursting out of her all at once.

“…But I might kill the people I love with my own two hands, and that scares me even more.”

“You could’ve just said that earlier.”

I was scraping at her wound on purpose, so that she could come out of this forest into the wider world.

“That you couldn’t handle it alone. That you needed help. You could’ve just said that.”

“…”

“Look around right now. Do you really look alone?”

Before I’d even noticed, the creatures of the forest had come in through the broken window and gathered at her side. The bee that had once sprayed acid rain was working to pull a shard of glass out of her hand, and the vine was wiping the wet streaks from her cheek with its leaves.

“Why are you killing yourself trying to carry this alone?”

She couldn’t answer me.

When I got to my feet and stepped toward her, the monster plants crowding around her bristled their thorns at me. But it was less an attack than an instinct, the urge to protect a wounded master. I gestured at the scene, strange as it was, and tender.

“How is this alone? Even the things that grew on your poison — they’re scrambling right now to protect just one person. You.”

“…”

“You’ve got it wrong, Sis. You thought running off to this forest would make everything okay. So how’d that turn out?”

“…”

“You haven’t solved a thing. All you did was turn the forest’s innocent creatures into monsters.”

I stared straight into her eyes as I said it.

“You aren’t some incredible hero who can save the world all by yourself, Sis. You’re just an ordinary person — you don’t have the caliber or the talent for it!”

The instant I grabbed her hand, a vine slammed me away so hard that I flew through the air and crashed into the wall.

Luckily my back was only a little scraped, and I hadn’t taken any serious injury. The real problem was something else.

Eve was right. Dozens of vines were knotting themselves together with Lillian at the center.

“No… no…”

And that wasn’t the half of it, because the vines rushing in from the forest now lunged at me.

“I… have to be alone… I’ll hurt… someone…”

They came at me as sharp, spiked needles.

“…I want to die.”

I drew the sword at my waist and cut them down as they came.

— Slash!

Even from between the severed stalks, a voice spilled out.

“I don’t want to die…”

— Slash!

“I want to go home… I want to be loved… I don’t want to be thrown away…”

I knew what these were. They were the cries of a young girl who’d shut herself away in a forest and borne her suffering alone. This was Lillian’s bare face. She had called herself a monster and chosen solitude, but in truth she’d been the loneliest of all.

The sound of vines being cut and her terrible confessions wailed and echoed across the entire forest.

This wasn’t like the earlier fight. They knew they couldn’t beat me, yet they still threw themselves at me desperately, to protect Lillian.

I hacked through one wave of vines and reached out a hand toward the thickest of those wrapped around her.

“Ugh!”

In that gap, a vine cracked across my side. My ribs throbbed, but I didn’t stop.

“I’m going to fall into hell.”
“No one’s going to love me.”

A vine tried to coil around my throat, so I threw my sword aside and grabbed the thorn-studded stalk with my bare hand.

— Crunch.

Thorns drove into my palm and blood streamed out, but I bore the pain and tore the vine away.

— Thwack! Thwack!

Vines hammered my whole body from every direction, trying to peel me off. My body was turning into one big bruise, and still I didn’t stop.

“Help me.”

Through her scream, through her despair, I finally tore through the last barrier of vines, and there inside it was Lillian, curled up. Small shoulders trembled, her face buried between her knees and her hands clamped over her ears.

“Don’t come… please…”

I reached out my bloodied hand and caught her trembling wrist.

“Don’t run away.”

Lillian lifted her head, and her wet eyes looked up at me.

“I’ll help you.”

“…Sniff.”

We were sitting across from each other at the table again. If anything had changed, it was that Lillian’s eyes were puffy and swollen. She gave her nose a hard blow and spoke.

“You said you’d help me, so take responsibility.”

The depression that had swallowed her a moment ago was nowhere to be seen.

“But I’m the older one, you know? Why are you acting like the big brother here?” she grumbled, lower lip jutting in a pout.

The real me inside this body has plenty of years on you, kiddo.

I smirked inwardly and poured tea into her empty cup as I answered.

“Who cares who’s older in a family? Whoever needs it more gets to play little sister.”
“Pfft… got an answer for everything, don’t you.”

She griped, but she meekly drank the tea I’d poured. Then, a little calmer now, she rubbed her reddened eyes and got down to it.

“So how are you going to help me?”

The teasing had left her voice, and what came through was earnestness, so I went straight to the point.

“You can only go so far transferring the poison into the forest’s creatures, right?”
“Mm-hm. Even one drop’s enough — it transforms them.”

I’d thought as much. They might be living things, but they were only small animals and plants, and there was no way creatures that tiny could endure Lillian’s poison.

“What you have to do is simple.”

I’d held out my hand to help her, so I meant to take that responsibility to the hilt.

“Transfer your poison into another human, not animals and plants.”

Lillian shot upright.

“Are you crazy!? Transfer this onto a person!?”
“Calm down.”
“How am I supposed to calm down!?”

I sipped my tea serenely through her outburst.

“What if there was a special vessel that could withstand your poison?”
“A special vessel? Where would something like that…”

Her gaze drifted naturally toward me, and I casually tapped my own chest.

“That’s right. That’d be me.”

Lillian’s face went white.

“Are you out of your mind? No matter how sturdy you are, you can’t take my poison!”

She really had left home too young. She knew absolutely nothing about Arden, so I spoke up to correct her.

“First off, I’m not sturdy. I’ve only looked like a functional person for less than a year.”
“What does that mean?”
“Second.”

I leaned forward and whispered to her.

“You wouldn’t know it, Sis, but I’m carrying way, way more poison than you are.”

She’d probably hear it as a bluff, but my body was already nothing but a clump of curses, and the ones still eating away at me imposed all kinds of restrictions.

Fight poison with poison, as they say. Lillian’s poison might actually do me a favor.

With the curses and her poison both in me, wouldn’t one of them get driven out of my body? I pictured it, a stronger poison swallowing up its rival.

“There’s nobody more optimized for poison than I am. Trust me on this.”

Lillian saw the certainty in my eyes and wavered. There was fear and worry there, but inside them, a hesitating ‘Can I really trust him?’

“Are you really sure?”

It seemed she’d decided to put her faith in my heavy assurance, so I rolled up my sleeve before she could change her mind.

“Hurry, give it to me. I’m getting dizzy here.”

In case anything happened, I’d merged with Eve.

Eve was my last line of defense.

“I’ll trust you.”

Her hesitation was over and her mind was made up. She held a hand out over my wrist.

Plip.

A single drop of jet-black liquid fell from her trembling fingertip and touched my skin.

And the result?

“…Huh?”
“Arden! Are you okay!?”

Lillian gasped and shook my shoulders.

“Yeah, I don’t feel anything.”

There was no pain at all. None of the auditory or visual hallucinations that had tormented her appeared either. There was just a faint sensation, as if a single drop of water had landed on me, nothing more and nothing less.

Lillian asked as if she couldn’t believe it.

“You’re really all right? You feel nothing?”
“Yeah. Honest to god, I’m fine.”

She must’ve been seriously scared.

Was my guess right?

I was only borrowing Arden’s shell. At the most fundamental level, I was an entity from outside this world’s system, and DV, at its core, was an anomalous stat that appeared only in NPCs.

This… this is huge.

How exactly the world classified my existence was an open question. But if my body could play perfect filter like this, it changed the story entirely.

If Lillian and I combine forces, I can purify the DV of critical NPCs whose demonification is already underway.

This was going to bend my future plans in a very, very good direction.

“Give me more. I’m fine.”

I could see relief and hope spreading across Lillian’s face. She wiped her tears and gripped my arm tightly, and a thicker, denser surge of toxic energy flooded into my veins like a dam giving way.

“A little… more… are you all… ri…?”

At some point her voice began to warp into something grotesque.

And it wasn’t only her voice.

Soon her shape was dispersing into a haze, glitching and breaking apart like a busted game screen.

— Bzzzt.

The world blacked out and lit up again, and —

“And you told me to trust you.”

There was Lillian, weeping tears of blood.