40. Lies And Lies

It wasn’t just tears of blood from her eyes. Blood was streaming from her ears and her nose, too.

Is this the sight the NPCs eaten away by DV are forced to see?

My mind was blurring, and I dragged it back under control, because if I cut the connection now, all of this would be for nothing. But will or no will, the urge to strangle Lillian kept welling up with no end to it. So I breathed deep, desperately, and told myself over and over that the feeling was a lie.

She’s carried this alone for over ten years?

It hit me all over again just how brutally hard she’d had to hold out.

Woo Suhan, pull yourself together!

I hypnotized myself. The horrific bloodlust and despair rising in me were a fabrication, all of it.

Like I’d lose to a piddling poison like this.

I shut my eyes and focused on shoving out the emotions trying to seize my head, dredging up every stray thought I could find and forcing the feeling into a corner by any means I had.

I’m stronger than anyone. I’m the strongest in the world. I cannot die until I’ve cleared this game — not for anything.

I guess I was stronger than I’d thought, because at some point the bloodlust vanished and my emotions settled. So I opened my eyes.

…What is this?

What lay in front of me still wasn’t reality. There was a massive, dingy black dining table, and on it a banquet laid out with fine silverware.

This is the family’s dining hall, isn’t it?

It gave me a sense of déjà vu from somewhere, but the scene itself was shocking enough to betray it.

To my left was Valerian, an enormous greatsword buried in his heart. Beside him I could see Lucius, blue in the face and foaming at the mouth. And that wasn’t the end of it. Seraphina was bound to a chair with her neck snapped, and Kairon’s torso was carrying on with its meal while holding its own severed head.

This is the vision Lillian had to face as a child?

It was a ghastly hellscape, and it choked the breath out of me. Now I understood how the system called DV drove its NPCs mad. When I’d played the game, it had been nothing but a number, a system you filed away as “bad if the value’s high” and not much more. Experienced firsthand, it was horrifying.

I can’t even get a word out.

What’s more, I couldn’t move, as though my free will over my own body had been stripped away.

I can’t even do this?

My chat to Eve wouldn’t go through either. Come to think of it, the distinctive cold sensation of Overclock was gone, and so was the system window. Was I going to be trapped here forever, with no way out?

Then my body moved again. I bolted from the dining hall, running from that hellscape, and when I opened the door and stepped out, what I found was —

A small, delicate child’s hand.

Golden hair that swayed at the shoulders each time I turned my head.

There was no mirror, but I knew. I had been possessed into the young Lillian, just as I’d once been swallowed up by Arden’s memories and glimpsed his memory of Valerian.

The moment I realized it, her emotions began to flow into me. I was still chewing them over when I heard footsteps approaching from behind.

It was the torso of Kairon from the dining hall, striding up step by step —

And lifting its own severed head to fit it back into place. The angle slipped a little along the way, so it ended up set on crooked.

“Where do you think you’re going in the middle of a meal?”

The young Lillian, unable even to scream, stumbled backward —

CRASH!

And collided with something.

“You should never have been born.”

Valerian, the sword buried in his heart, was glaring at her.

“You killed me! I died because you looked at me! You cursed wench!”

Lucius had appeared out of nowhere, jabbing a finger at her and foaming at the mouth.

“N… no, I didn’t hurt my brothers.”

Lillian covered her ears, shut her eyes and curled into herself, praying that someone would help her, praying that all these terrible visions would hurry up and vanish.

Did that prayer reach someone? Her brothers’ curses gradually faded, and Lillian was grateful that this nightmare, which she suffered every single day, was ending sooner than she had expected.

Then she felt her surroundings turn warm. When the fragrant scent of herbs pricked her nose, a thought came to her: now and then, when she had a nightmare, Seraphina had brewed her tea. This scent was the lifeline Seraphina used to wake her from the nightmare.

That was what she believed.

“Ah… aah…!”

Sssssss—

Seraphina was bound atop a blazing pyre.

“I’m all right. My only worry is that you’ll grieve over my death.”

Even as she burned to death, her voice was tender, fretting over Lillian, and that gentleness came back at Lillian as an even crueler blade.

The family I love curse me, fret over me, and die horribly.

There was no way she could ever grow used to the nightmare. Bit by bit, Lillian’s mind crumbled and was trampled underfoot.

“No!”

At last the flames engulfed Seraphina, and without a single scream she crumbled to ash. The young Lillian knew all of this was fake, yet she wept as she scraped the ashes together with both hands.

And then.

“B-Big Sis…?”

Instead of the ashes she’d gathered with all her strength, what the young Lillian held in her hands was the throat of Arden, who was younger even than she was. She was strangling that thin little neck.

“No! Stop!”

Lillian shrieked aloud, but her body, ruled by bloodlust, only clenched tighter and tighter. Arden’s eyes rolled back, and the feeling of him going limp reached her fingertips, vividly.

And so the curtain fell on the nightmare.

After that, I confronted well over several hundred of Lillian’s nightmares.

I suppose I should call them nightmares and her traumas both.

Whenever one ended, I was sent into an enormous room with no telling where it stopped, white blankness on every side. I could float and drift here as if in gravity-free space, and across my field of view, hundreds of doors that had lost their gravity too were floating and drifting about.

Lillian’s traumas.

Every one of these doors connected to a nightmare of Lillian’s I had seen. There had to be an exit somewhere among them, I believed, so I’d been searching them one by one.

No luck.

I felt that a fair amount of time had passed, and I hadn’t found an exit. I still couldn’t reach Eve, either.

When you’re faced with a problem you can’t solve, the way to cope is simple.

I can’t just sit here doing nothing.

You stop fretting over the problem. I had no choice but to trust that Eve would be fine.

Let’s check again.

I opened a door I’d visited before and went in. This one led to the nightmare where the servants of House Arne had been hacked to pieces and scattered across the hallway.

“Sob… sob.”

Past the servants’ corpses, Lillian was curled up in a corner, crying.

“Stop it.”

With her sobs in my ears, I searched the place thoroughly, like a detective at a murder scene, but however hard I dug, I had nothing to show for it. I resigned myself and was just about to slip back out the door I’d come in through when —

“…It hurts so much.”

The young Lillian grabbed my sleeve and looked up at me.

“Does dying hurt?”

Could these really be words from the mouth of a small child? I knelt down to meet her eye level and spoke.

“Don’t worry. I’m going to save you.”

.

.

.

An eternity passed.

I went back and forth through door after door, and the scenery they showed me was relentlessly, maddeningly the same: corpses, the stench of blood, and in the very middle of it all, the young Lillian sobbing. Every door I went through I left open. I didn’t close a single one.

— Please, save me….
— I want to die….
— Why was I even born….

It was as if wounds that wouldn’t close had been left gaping. From hundreds of doors, Lillian’s screams and cries poured out all at once, and a tidal wave of negative emotion battered my ears and crushed down on my brain.

There are this many worlds for me to save. Pull yourself together.

I made that surging wave of negativity my motivation, and the goal of finding an exit I pushed to the back burner. Having checked every nightmare this way, I stepped through the very first door I’d entered. I paid the rest of the scenery no mind at all, because my only target was Lillian, sobbing in the corner.

“…It hurts so much.”

I looked down at her curled up there, an ache in my chest, then carefully stroked her head.

“Don’t cry.”

At my touch she flinched and lifted her head.

“Go away! You nightmare!”

But she soon lowered it again, declaring her resolve never to be fooled again. So for a very, very long time, without a single word, I held her in my arms.

“…Is it really over?”

She cautiously raised her head and looked at me, and in her eyes fear and suspicion and a single thread of hope were all mixed together. I carefully released her from my arms.

“It’s a present.”

A big teddy bear popped out of nowhere and flew into Lillian’s arms with a thump. She started, her eyes going round. From behind the bear, a sullen-faced Lucius bashfully rubbed his nose.

“You’re this happy over something this small? You really are still a little kid! All right, your big brother here will play with you, just this once.”
“Hmph. Quiet, Lucius.”

Valerian appeared from the opposite side with his arms crossed. The greatsword that had been driven into his heart was nowhere to be seen, and in his hand was a Go board.

“Lillian’s going to play Go with me. Lillian likes Go.”
“No she doesn’t? She’s gonna play dolls with me!”

The two brothers started squabbling with Lillian caught between them, and from the very mouths that had traded savage curses came a childish sister-complex fight. Lillian had been blankly watching, and now, for the first time, she burst into a wide smile.

“Let’s do all of it! I wanna play with my big brothers, all together!”

Every color of the spectrum came rushing back into a world that had been ashen gray.

The happy visions followed one after another in an unbroken chain. The garden that had been an execution pyre had, before she knew it, turned into a gorgeous dressing room, where Seraphina held a dress trimmed with yellow forsythia up against Lillian’s body and smiled. The young Lillian laughed brightly and took her hand.

The scenery shifted again, and this time it was the family’s grand dining hall. The young Arden and Lillian sat side by side, sharing sweet cookies and chattering away, and Kairon, who’d been watching the two of them, hoisted Lillian and Arden up and set them on his shoulders.

“My daughter, now you can see the whole world, can’t you.”

Riding on his shoulders, they strolled through the house. The servants waved at them as they looked their way, Valerian and Lucius trailed along, jealous of the shoulder ride, and Seraphina watched it all quietly from behind with a soft, silent smile.

Within this happiness, Lillian, choking up, poured out the words she’d held back all this time.

“I was scared… every night, I dreamed I was killing my family… I was so scared I’d turn into a monster….”

At her confession, the family stopped where they stood, and Kairon lowered Arden and Lillian from his shoulders.

Lillian shut her eyes. She didn’t want to watch this happiness bleed into a nightmare. She wanted to hold onto it forever, this fleeting little happiness she’d never have again.

But what reached her wasn’t the blame or the loathing that had always cursed her.

“It’s all right. It’s not your fault.”
“You aren’t that kind of child.”
“Big Sis is a good person!”

They held her warmly and whispered to her, and at that, Lillian sank to the floor and bawled her eyes out, wailing.

I left that scene behind me, quietly opened a red door and slipped outside.

Click.

The door closed, and what came into view was —

Hundreds of doors radiating light in every color.

Beyond each of them, young Lillians not yet saved were enduring hell, all alone.

“I’ll be there soon.”

All of this was possible thanks to a skill I’d obtained to survive the past four months in the underground training ground.

To think this skill would apply even within Lillian’s traumas.

Her nightmares were all lies created by DV, and the world judged me, sunk in those nightmares, to be in a hallucinated state. Thanks to that, I could paper over her nightmares with lies of my own.

No time to take it easy.

The cries of countless young Lillians were still flowing.

Until I turn every last nightmare into a happy ending.

I will not stop.