7. Luna Herb (3)

“Rats labor under the delusion that the night will hide them….”

The moment Rel’s voice rang out, Elli threw herself sideways on pure instinct and landed behind a huge herb shelf, out where the lantern light couldn’t reach.

“Honestly, you couldn’t be more of a rat. Gone to ground already.”

Thud, thud.

The footsteps came closer, and with each one Elli’s heart sank a little further toward the floor. She pictured herself dying coldly in the dungeon. Funnily enough, she also pictured the Young Master, who’d promised he would die down there right next to her.

If — by some miracle — it really came down to that, what would he say to me?

In her imagination he lay on the freezing dungeon floor, facing her, and wearing that unreadable expression of his, he spoke.

— Elli, this absolutely will not happen, but… if anything goes wrong with the plan, head to the back of the storeroom. On the third shelf there, find a knobbly, mottled little mushroom that glows mint-green. Eat it.

…!

Her mind jolted awake. By sheer luck, the direction she’d been cornered toward was the back of the storeroom.

“Rat’s putting up a fight, I see.”

Elli grabbed the herb crate stacked beside her and hurled it at Rel with everything she had. Rel only shook her head and kicked it aside with contempt. It was just what she’d called it, a rat’s desperate flailing, and it bought the tiniest sliver of time.

But that sliver was enough.

The Young Master saw all of this coming!

The instant the crate was out of the way, Elli darted to the back of the storeroom and started searching the third shelf for a knobbly, mottled little mushroom that glowed mint-green.

Crash!

She tripped over her own foot and went down, and before she could get up again, Rel spoke.

“Now then — time to catch the rat.”

There was no time to hesitate. Elli shoved the mushroom she’d only just managed to find into her mouth and chewed noisily. Along with a foul earthy stink, a strange sensation rippled through her, as if every bone and muscle in her body were being twisted out of shape. But more than anything else, it tasted terrible.

Bleugh.

She forced herself to swallow, and in that same instant the lantern light fell on the spot where she was.

— If by some chance you have to eat the Mimic Mushroom, picture the most terrifying being in this whole manor.

There was a man more arrogant and more cruel than anyone else in the manor, and no one was allowed a single careless move in front of him. That had been the very first warning Elli had ever heard from Leo.

But she was a mere maid and had never had the chance to meet the manor’s eldest young master face-to-face, so at first she hadn’t thought he was that frightening.

Not until the day she saw that.

“…s-sorry.”

She’d been passing through a corridor one day when she happened to see Rel leaving Valerian’s room. That face, so proud and unflinching in front of anyone, had gone deathly white. This was the same Rel who tormented her so cruelly, yet Elli didn’t care about that in the slightest, and she went up to her, looking worried.

“Are you all right?”

Rel had her head bowed to the floor and was muttering something, and the closer Elli got, the more of it she could make out.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

In the end Rel staggered off somewhere, and for quite a while she didn’t cross paths with anyone.

Then, later on, Leo was dragged off to the dungeon on “Valerian’s orders,” and quite naturally, Valerian became the most terrifying person in the manor as far as Elli was concerned.

And now Elli had turned into that very man, and she was face-to-face with Rel, who was trembling violently right in front of her.

“Lord Valerian!?”

At that shocked voice, Elli hunched her borrowed shoulders without meaning to. Her heart was hammering madly.

Did I — did I really change into Lord Valerian?

Only now did she realize what the mushroom had done.

What am I supposed to do?!

Her mind went blank and terror rushed in, along with the feeling that she had to come up with some clumsy excuse, any excuse, right this second. She shook off the urge to say something, anything, and barely managed to open her mouth.

“What brings you here, Rel?”
“I-I… I heard a suspicious sound from inside, so I came to check….”

Rel’s voice had shrunk to a near-mumble.

By any reasonable view, the truly suspicious thing here was Valerian, who was standing in the herb storeroom at this late hour without having gone through her, its keeper. But Rel found him so overwhelmingly terrifying that she couldn’t even form a feeling like “suspicion” toward him.

That was the sheer presence of the man called Valerian Arne.

And —

Elli, currently transformed into Valerian’s form —

…huh?

As she looked at Rel trembling before her, a strange feeling rose inside her, unbidden.

— You stupid little bitch.

The same Rel who had always looked at her like a bug.

— Die together with your beloved Young Master.

The same Rel who had forced death onto her —

“…”

Right now, in front of her, was bowing her head to the floor, unable even to meet her eyes.

Oh my….

The steady, calm beat of her heart sounded in her ears. It wasn’t the pounding that fear made, and it wasn’t any rhythm she knew from all the joys, angers, sorrows and pleasures life had given her.

This feeling is a first.

It was a thrilling exhilaration she had never felt in her entire life.

The fumbling of a moment before fell away completely, and when Elli opened her mouth, her voice came out low and oppressive.

“…You dare.”

She broke off mid-phrase on purpose and slowly advanced on Rel, whose body shuddered with fear, yet who couldn’t retreat even a single step.

“You would suspect me? The eldest son of House Arne, the one who shall succeed our esteemed lord and lead this family? You — a maid, nothing more?”

Rel scraped together the last of her courage and opened her mouth to excuse herself.

“N-no! Lord Valerian! I would never even think of such—!”
“Silence.”

Elli seized Rel’s jaw roughly.

“Khk—!”

Now, the Mimic Mushroom changed only your outward appearance. However hard that hand squeezed, the strength in it was still Elli’s, which meant Rel could have broken free with just a little force.

“I-I’m so sorry!”

Of course, she wouldn’t have dared.

“Do you know why I, of all people, came in person to a foul-smelling storeroom like this?”

Elli pressed on without letting go of her jaw.

“Because of two useless sisters and a pack of dimwitted little brothers who scarcely draw breath! I — the only one in this family Father deigns to summon and speak with alone — must personally see to filthy cleanup like this! And yet, a lowly maid dares to question my movements?”

It was as if the real Valerian had possessed her. The words poured out like water down a flowing stream.

At that roar the strength left Rel’s legs, and since Elli didn’t have the strength to hold up her weight, Rel naturally slipped out of her grip — but —

“…Tch.”

The trousers of the slumped Rel were turning yellow.

The one consolation was that this was a herb storeroom, so the smell wouldn’t be too bad.

Elli scooped up the pouch of Luna Herb that had fallen on the floor. Then she turned to Rel, who was soaked through with fear and shame, the pupils gone from her eyes, and delivered one final warning.

“Do not provoke me again with this kind of pointless stunt. And as for what happens to you if you breathe a single word of tonight’s events to anyone — I trust you understand?”

Rel snapped back to her senses in a rush and nodded.

Elli turned her back and started for the storeroom’s exit, speaking as she went.

“Clean up your own filth.”

Only when she had vanished into the darkness did Rel burst into the sobs she’d been holding back.

Pop!

The moment she stepped out of the herb storeroom, Elli returned to her original form.

“Whew.”

There was no strength left in her legs either, and she wanted to slump to the floor, but after witnessing that scene, she somehow held herself together. In the end, as she imagined it, a fit of laughter burst out of her, and when she’d had a good laugh, she started back the way she’d come with a light step.

“…I should’ve grabbed more of those mushrooms.”

The innocent country girl Elli had, this very night —

Awakened to a new self she had never known existed.

A faint herbal scent drifted through the room.

“Young Master, your Luna Herb tea.”

Without a single tremor in her hand, Elli held out the deep-blue-tinted tea to me. Her face was as bright and pure as ever, with no trace of last night’s commotion, as if it had all been a dream. It was the look of someone who had conquered her fear.

I took the cup and asked, low-voiced —

“Report.”

Elli opened her mouth as if she’d been waiting for the cue.

“Just as you predicted, Young Master, Senior Rel had set a trap and was lying in wait. Right down to the maid patrols and the Dreamveil at the storeroom entrance. Every single bit of it was exactly as you said!”
“Figured as much.”

When winter comes, snow falls. When rain falls, the ground gets wet. To me it was that self-evident.

I can’t be wrong, after all.

What I was actually curious about was something else entirely, so I set the cup down and looked Elli square in the eye.

“That isn’t the end of it, though, is it?”

Her eyes went perfectly round.

“How did you know?”
“There’s nothing I can’t know.”

For a moment she was lost for words, and then she sighed in admiration.

“Wow, Young Master — you really do know everything.”

From the vine-climbing escape from the patrol all the way to being discovered by Rel inside the storeroom, the scenes from Elli’s mouth painted themselves vividly in my head.

“And then you ate the Mimic Mushroom, didn’t you? And turned into Big Brother Valerian, I bet.”

Elli was past admiration now and well into outright shock.

“Young Master — are you a prophet? Or can you see into the past?”

I answered with a smile.

“Something like that, sure.”

But what came after that, I hadn’t actually predicted, though I didn’t let it show. It genuinely surprised me.

Eve’s reaction when Elli launched into her Valerian impression settled it above all: she really had nailed him. She’d caught his signature intonation and his thunderous shouting cadence perfectly.

“And? How was it?”
“Hm?”
“Being Big Brother Valerian for a while — how did it feel?”

Elli looked taken aback by the unexpected question. She hesitated a moment, then mumbled —

“…It was fun.”
“Then that’s that.”
“…But deceiving people is a bad thing to do.”

Simple, innocent Elli needed a taste of the dirty world. She needed to learn that the world wasn’t such a generous place.

“Humans are like that. Tell them not to do something, and they want to do it more. Make a rule, and they try to escape it. Make a promise, and the first thing they think about is how to break it.”

Elli hadn’t survived. She hadn’t made it as far as my world.

But thanks to possessing Arden’s body, I’d been able to meet her. The Arden world I’d been possessed into was at minimum five years in the past relative to the game world I knew —

So I’d been given the chance to meet her.

Yet unless she changed by her own will, she would meet her death in the end.

I won’t let her die.

Not when Elli was one of the important cards in my hand. An NPC with a DV stat of just 2 was more precious than any item could ever be.

So for Elli, whose line between good and evil was drawn so sharply, I planned to keep showing her that the world wasn’t going to go easy on her from here on. The road I would walk was paved with chaos, after all.

I looked at Elli, who couldn’t lift her head under the weight of her guilt over the night’s events. Dulling that guilt was where it all started.

“Sneaking into the herb storeroom was wrong to begin with. Now you turn around and beat yourself up over playing Big Brother Valerian? That’s a contradiction. By your logic, theft’s fine, but bad acting isn’t?”

“…”

I watched her sink into thought.

To make her think more, consider more, and struggle endlessly with the question: that was the point.

“People often say you should be generous to others and strict with yourself… but you need to be a little more generous to yourself.”

I picked up the herbal tea I’d set down and brought it to my lips.

“The tea’s cooled off a bit — gone lukewarm, in fact.”
“Should I fetch you fresh hot water?”
“No.”

I tipped the lukewarm tea down my throat in one swallow, which I could do precisely because it was neither hot nor cold.

“I like lukewarm, myself.”

Elli tilted her head at that. Most people find their footing in the sharp divide between hot and cold, and to them lukewarm is just an unpleasant in-between state, neither one thing nor the other.

“People usually like things hot or cold. Lukewarm feels kind of half-baked, doesn’t it?”

I set the cup down and smiled faintly.

“Maybe a lot of things in this world are like this lukewarm herb tea. Not piping hot, not ice cold either. We’re all too quick to sort the world into black and white, success and failure, good and evil. But the truth, most of the time, lives in the countless shades of gray in between.”

I couldn’t say whether my intent had landed perfectly, but for now the sight of Elli lost in contemplation was satisfying enough.

Ah, that’s right. There was one more simple, innocent girl here.

“…I have a long road ahead of me.”