40. Lies And Lies

It wasn’t just her eyes that wept tears of blood. Blood streamed from her ears and her nose, too.

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

I dragged my blurring mind back under control. If I severed the connection now, all of it would be for nothing. But my will counted for little against the murderous urge to strangle Lillian, which kept welling up without end. Breathing deep and desperate, I told myself over and over that the feeling was a lie.

She’s carried this alone for over ten years?

It struck me anew just how brutally hard Lillian had endured.

Woosuhan, pull yourself together!

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

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

I shut my eyes and bent everything toward forcing out the emotions trying to seize control of my head. I dredged up every stray thought I could and shoved the feeling into a corner by whatever 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 drained away and my emotions settled.

I opened my eyes.

…What is this?

But what unfolded before me still wasn’t reality. A massive, grimy black dining table sat in front of me, and across it a banquet had been laid out with fine silverware.

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

Something about it nagged at me like déjà vu, and yet the scene was shocking enough to betray that familiarity.

To my left sat Valerian, an enormous greatsword buried in his heart. Beside him was Lucius, his face blue, foam at his lips.

And it didn’t end there. Seraphina was bound to a chair, her neck snapped. Kairon’s torso went on with its meal, cradling its own severed head.

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

The ghastly hellscape choked the breath out of me.

Now I understood how the system called DV drove its NPCs mad. Back when I’d played the game, it had been nothing but a number, a stat I’d filed under “high is bad” and little more. Lived through firsthand, it was a system of pure horror.

I can’t even get a word out.

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

I can’t even do this?

On top of that, my chat to Eve wouldn’t go through either. Come to think of it, the distinctive cold that came with activating 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 on its own again. I bolted out of the dining hall, fleeing the hellscape.

I opened the door, stepped out, and saw it.

A small, delicate child’s hand. Golden hair that swayed at my shoulders each time I turned my head.

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

The moment I realized I’d been possessed into Lillian, her emotions began to flow into me. While I was still turning her feelings over, I heard footsteps coming up behind me.

Kairon’s torso, the one from the dining hall, came striding up step by step and lifted its own severed head to fit it back into place. The angle slipped a little along the way, leaving it set on crooked.

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

Unable even to scream, the young Lillian stumbled backward.

— Crash!

She 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, appearing out of nowhere, jabbed a finger at her, 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, that all these terrible visions would hurry up and vanish.

Did the prayer reach someone? Her brothers’ curses faded away little by little, and Lillian was grateful that the nightmare she suffered every single day was ending sooner than usual.

And then she felt the air around her turn warm. As the fragrant scent of herbs pricked her nose, something came to her: whenever she’d had a nightmare, Seraphina had brewed her tea. This scent was the lifeline Seraphina used to wake her from the dream. Or so she believed.

“Ah… aah…!”

— Ssssss…

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 stayed tender, fretting over Lillian. And that gentleness only came back at her as a 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. Knowing all of it was fake, the young Lillian still wept as she scraped the ashes together with both hands.

And then.

“B-Big Sis…?”

In the young Lillian’s hands, where the ashes she’d gathered with all her strength should have been, was the throat of Arden, younger even than she was. The young Lillian was strangling that thin little neck.

“No! Stop!”

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

And so the curtain fell on the nightmare.

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

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

When one nightmare ended, I’d be sent into an enormous room with no telling where it ended, white blankness on every side. There I could float and drift as if in zero gravity, and across my field of view hundreds of doors drifted too, weightless as I was.

Lillian’s traumas.

Every one of those doors connected to a nightmare of Lillian’s that I’d seen. Certain there had to be an exit somewhere among them, I’d been searching them one by one.

No luck.

A fair amount of time had passed, by my sense of it. I still hadn’t found an exit. And I still couldn’t reach Eve.

When a problem won’t crack no matter what I try, the way through is simple.

I can’t just sit here doing nothing.

I quit gnawing at the problem. I had no choice but to trust that Eve would be fine.

Let’s check again.

I opened a door I’d been through before and stepped in. This one led to the nightmare where House Arne’s servants had been hacked apart and strewn across the hallway.

“Sob… sob.”

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

“Stop it.”

Listening to her sobs, I combed the place like a detective working a murder scene. But no matter how thoroughly I dug, I had nothing to show for it.

I gave up and was about to slip back out the door I’d come in by.

“…It hurts so much.”

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

“Does dying hurt?”

Could words like that really come out of the mouth of a small child? I knelt down to meet Lillian’s eyes and spoke.

“Don’t worry. I’ll definitely save you.”

.

.

.

An eternity passed.

I went back and forth through door after door, but the scenes laid out for me were relentlessly, maddeningly the same. Corpses, the reek of blood, and right in the middle of it all, the young Lillian sobbing.

I left every door I’d been through standing open, not one of them closed.

— Please, save me….

— I want to die….

— Why was I even born….

It was as if the wounds refused to close and lay gaping open. From hundreds of doors, Lillian’s screams and cries poured out all at once, a tidal wave of negative emotion that battered my ears and bore down on my brain.

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

I turned the surging wave of negativity into fuel. The goal of finding an exit, I put on the back burner.

Once I’d checked every nightmare that way, I stepped through the very first door I’d opened. The rest of the scenery, I ignored. My only target was Lillian, sobbing in her corner.

“…It hurts so much.”

I looked down at the curled-up Lillian with an ache in my chest, then carefully stroked her head.

“Don’t cry.”

At my touch, Lillian flinched and lifted her head.

“Go away! You nightmare!”

But she soon dropped her head again, set on never being fooled twice.

So for a very, very long time, without a single word, I held her in my arms.

“…Is it really over?”

She cautiously lifted her head and looked at me. Fear and suspicion and a single thread of hope were all tangled together in her eyes.

I carefully released Lillian from my arms.

“It’s a present.”

A big teddy bear popped out of nowhere and landed in Lillian’s arms with a thump. She flinched, her eyes going round.

From behind that teddy bear, a sullen-faced Lucius bashfully rubbed his nose.

“To be 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. Pipe down, Lucius.”

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

“Lillian’s going to play Go with me. Lillian likes Go.”
“No I’m not? I’m gonna play with dolls with her!”

The two brothers fell to squabbling with Lillian caught between them. From the very mouths that had traded savage curses, a childish sister-complex spat was now breaking out.

Lillian, who had been blankly watching the scene, burst into a wide smile for the first time.

“Let’s do all of it! I want to play with all of you, my big brothers!”

Color came flooding back into a world that had been ashen gray, every shade of the spectrum at once. The happy visions followed one after another in an unbroken chain.

The garden that had been an execution pyre turned, before she knew it, into a gorgeous dressing room. Seraphina held a dress trimmed with yellow forsythia up against Lillian and smiled, and the young Lillian laughed brightly and took her hand.

The scenery shifted again. This time it was the family’s grand dining hall, where the young Arden and Lillian sat side by side, sharing sweet cookies and chattering away.

Kairon, who had been watching the two of them, hoisted Lillian and Arden up and set them on his shoulders.

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

Up on his shoulders, the two of them rode through the house. The servants turned their way and waved. Valerian and Lucius trailed after, jealous of the shoulder ride Kairon had given the little ones. And Seraphina watched the scene quietly from behind, a soft, silent smile on her face.

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

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

At Lillian’s confession, the family stopped where they stood. Kairon lifted Arden and Lillian down from his shoulders.

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

But what reached that Lillian was not 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. At that, Lillian sank to the floor and bawled her eyes out, wailing.

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

— Click.

The door closed, and what spread out before my eyes was hundreds of doors radiating light in every color. Behind each of them, young Lillians who had not yet been saved were enduring hell, all alone.

“I’ll be there soon.”

All of this was possible thanks to a skill I’d obtained while surviving 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, finding me sunk inside those nightmares, judged me to be in a hallucinated state. Thanks to that, I was able to paper over her nightmares with lies of my own.

No time to take it easy.

The cries of countless young Lillians were still pouring out.

Until I turn every last nightmare into a happy ending.

I will not stop.