Pain Gladly Borne

The lips against hers were soft and damp. To think a man this hard and strong could hide something so fragile. It tickled, and it was strange, and Pai’s half-lowered eyelids trembled.

Careful as a feather brushing a flower petal, the kiss changed its character the moment Keith caught her elbow and pulled. Their two hearts lay one over the other. A stifled groan escaped through the gap where their lips had briefly parted, and a wet softness swallowed her mouth.

“Mmmm…?!”

As slick, yielding flesh rubbed against her own, Pai came sharply to her senses.

Th-This. This is my first kiss!

Her heart hammered against her eardrums, loud as a drum.

“Mmf… mmph…!”

One twist of her arm and the hand gripping it slid away. Even so the kiss went stubbornly on, and in the end she had to shove Keith hard in the chest. For all her worry over whether he would shift at all, he gave way easily, without resistance.

“Pah-hah!”

Breathless, her face gone red, Pai rubbed at her mouth. Her heart slammed like a mad thing. Had the situation not been this dire, she would have pulled Keith in instead of pushing him away. That was how sweet the kiss had been.

“Ahem.”

She cleared her throat, then spoke.

“Stay still. It’ll only take a moment.”

“Hh, uungh…”

There was no telling whether he had taken in a word of it. Keith would not manage a single proper step; that much was certain. He sank to his knees, one hand braced on the stone floor and the other at his throat, panting.

“Hgh, uhh. Hhaagh, kak…”

The process of demonization comes with appalling physical pain. Watching Keith struggle, Pai curled her hands into fists. Instead of going to hold him up, she crossed to the sealed entrance and went over the area inch by inch.

“Just as I thought… Traces of a trap.”

Which meant the seal was man-made.

Someone besides Hamel and me is going in and out of the Great Labyrinth.

Now that the trap had been sprung, their presence was as good as known to whoever had designed it. She memorized the shape of the spent magic circle, then scuffed the traces away with her foot. The circle was not of the southern school Hamel worked in.

If I had to place it, it looks like the northern school.

“Hhaagh. Kaff, kaff!”

“Keith…!”

There came the sound of something being retched up. Keith lay sprawled flat on the ground coughing blood, without even the strength left to prop himself on his arms.

“Damn it… I’m sorry. I don’t think I can open it right now.”

She propped his face and neck on her own thigh. The man’s body was cold as a sheet of ice, and yet, strangely, the sweat came off him in streams. Pai wrapped him in the robe she had been wearing, then tore off a sleeve and forced it into his mouth, in case the pain set him thrashing and he bit through his tongue.

“Khh… hh…”

The hand patting him lost its rhythm and went ragged.

The standard of this trap is considerably high.

Naturally enough, it looked to have been designed to break more easily from outside than from within. Biting down on her lip, Pai pinned down the screams buried in the gag and the thrashing that came with them, and worked out fast what to do.

If Keith doesn’t rejoin them by the time the hunting contest ends, they’ll put together a search party.

But the odds of a search party finding them were slim. She did not doubt what the Frost Rose Knights could do; she knew they would never put the Black Forest inside their search area.

But Hamel is another matter.

Keith alone might have been one thing; as it was, she had gone missing too. Hamel would at least wait until tonight. Then he would vault the red rope and come looking for them, into the Black Forest, into the Great Labyrinth.

The hunting contest started at noon. And say I spent about two hours looking for an antler… that leaves five hours until the sun goes down.

How long he would need to confirm the entrance was shut and then break the trap was anybody’s guess.

Ten hours at the outside.

Long.

Stranded on her own, ten hours was something she could have held out through easily enough. She would pick up a little contamination from the demonic energy, but nothing fatal.

“Hgh, kak. Kuhp… khup!”

But could Keith endure it?

“Why in the world has the demonization started?”

She burst out, aggrieved and frustrated. That the clock had begun to turn at all was an anomaly to start with, and there was no predicting how fast it would advance.

…There’s one way.

— Gulp.

She swallowed dryly, then began on Keith’s clothes, undoing them carefully with trembling hands.

“…”

The temperature inside the labyrinth was dropping, so stripping him looked like nothing short of suicide. And yet, paradoxically, that was the way to save him.

“There’s no other way. Nothing but this.”

She murmured it as though making an excuse.

Reddened hands stripped the man’s upper garment off without hesitation. Then, drawing a deep breath as though about to plunge into ice water, she threw off her own clothes as well.

“Hup… It’s cold.”

Only the soft slither of falling cloth and a dull moaning rang hollow through the deep cavern. She folded the clothes roughly, pushed them into a corner, and then took Keith into her arms with her whole body.

“Hgh…”

Out of his senses as he was, skin against skin still struck him as strange, and Keith’s shoulders shook. Her round forehead came to rest at his shoulder, and leg crossed over leg. Like two water-soaked leaves stuck fast and refusing to come apart, they became one body.

“Nn…”

“Shh… I won’t hurt you.”

Whispering gently, the way one soothes a child, she turned her attention to her own slowly warming body, and to the mana heart pulsing there in a rhythm almost the same as her thudding heart.

For a long while she had had no occasion to use her aura, let alone her mana heart.

If anything, I was too busy hiding it.

The mana heart was hers, and still it felt unfamiliar, like another living creature coiled up inside her body.

Pai contracted the all-but-sealed organ, hard.

— Ba-dump!

It expanded hard in reaction, then contracted again. She repeated the contraction and expansion a few times over, until her chest went past warm and turned hot. The mana heart churned, its temperature climbing high enough to melt.

“Haa, hoo…”

Next she released her aura. A swordsman who has reached a certain rank can make out not only sword energy but even aura with the naked eye. Pai Deluosa’s was a cool aquamarine, the same as her eyes. Like water flung up by a fountain, it drenched Keith.

From here she would draw out the aura in him that the demonic energy had tainted, then refine fresh aura and pour it back in. With not one scrap of cloth in the way, it sank into the man’s skin freely and fast. Once enough clean aura was circulating through his body, the preparation was done.

“Hoo… Let’s get started.”

Drawing in aura crossbred with demonic energy demanded more delicacy than anything that had come before it. The trouble was that even if she managed to take it in, the tainted demonic energy would sicken her too.

“It’s all right. I’m strong.”

Her mana heart could purify demonic energy to a degree. Which was to say, only to a degree.

“Kak. Kuh-hagh!”

Black capillaries flickered up across a face white as moonlight. Dark red blood ran from her nostrils, and then she was coughing it up as well.

“I’m not giving up.”

The demonic energy writhed like a snake nailed through the tail, tearing through Keith’s insides. It convulsed as though it had a will of its own, and she took it in just as it came. As though it knew who was interfering, the thing gnawed sharply at her life force.

It felt like thousands, tens of thousands of needles driving into her flesh. Like thick blood pouring endlessly out of the holes they left. Like hundreds of scorpions slashing her winding intestines to pieces.

It was horrible. Enough to want to die then and there. But she clenched her teeth and bore it.

“I won’t let you become a demon like this.”

Physical pain of this order could not bring her to her knees. Because she had already been through the thing more agonizing than anything else.

“Even if I should become a demon myself…”

Namely, being left alone.

Only after losing him did she realize. That she had loved Keith Paragon.

But the newly bloomed feeling had no object to reach, and it dried up forlornly inside her chest.

What meaning was there in a world without love? Even if she killed the demon and saved the world from ruin, there was nothing left for her.

She had barely managed to come back; she could not repeat the same mistake. Mastering this pain, which lasted no longer than an instant, was far easier than writhing in a loneliness and an emptiness that ran on like eternity.

No. In truth, she bore it gladly.

So gladly that she could not stop laughing.

Sweat and blood streaming from her pores, she pressed her sticky body close against the man’s. And she whispered, as though praying.

“Next time, you save me.”