Chapter 104

Creeeak... The sound of metal being drawn taut as the case opened was chilling. Inside lay a single long drop earring. The very earring Erabelle had placed in the case herself.

Dezeb took it out.

That earring...

Erabelle still remembered how it had felt in her hand: cool and cold. Of course she did. It had only been a month.

“...How could I not know...?”

The moment he closed his hand around it, a heavy darkness seemed to acquire substance and press down on her body. After that, everything became a blur.

By the time the darkness lifted, it °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° was over.

All the Dogs lay prostrate with their foreheads against the ground. Erabelle was on the ground with them, her head bowed as he passed in front of her.

The sound of metal striking metal came from him as he walked by without a glance. The sound of the drop earring...

“...How could I not know...?”

No one had needed to tell her. There was no way she could have failed to realize it.

It’s because of me.

Erabelle buried her face against her raised knees and curled in on herself.

It’s all because of me.

Of course, it couldn’t all be because of her. Erabelle didn’t have an ego inflated enough to believe that.

That cycle involving the dead, or whatever it was that the priest at Sanctuary had mentioned, must have something to do with this.

“......”

For a while, Erabelle gazed through the villa window at the brilliantly clear sky above the capital.

The swarm of the dead that had darkened it was nowhere to be seen.

The air was warm, carrying the crisp scent of sunlight.

It was as though the terrible sound that had torn through the capital’s sky, and the cold that had cut into her skin, had been a lie.

Surely one human being, no more significant than a microorganism beside such a vast cosmic phenomenon, could not have had much influence over it.

There must be things she didn’t know that had set this other world on the path to ruin.

Erabelle forced herself to stop thinking about it.

She tried not to think about the Prince’s earring, which the Dogs had retrieved at precisely the time she had awakened in his body. Or about Dezeb swallowing it at precisely that time and losing his memories...

She tried not to think about any of it.

She couldn’t sit curled up there forever.

Beep, beep—Erabelle turned away from the window to shut off the noisy alarm.

These days, she kept to a very regular routine.

She got up in the morning, made a rough meal from whatever was in the refrigerator, went to the center at ten, when those who had yet to complete the course were allowed in, and left at six. She drank beer for dinner, watched TV until she fell asleep, and repeated it all the next day.

Erabelle had been following the same cycle for two months already.

Apart from occasional trips to the grocery store to refill her refrigerator, nothing worth mentioning happened.

The media was practically collapsing under the weight of the new divine domain, the first ever declared in the Empire’s history.

Erabelle kept trying to find something useful amid the coverage.

But there was almost no solid information. The commentators talked all day, attaching speculation, analysis, and editorials to scraps too trivial to count as news.

“......”

After work, Erabelle stopped at the grocery store for the first time in a while. Back home, she sat on the living-room floor and stared at the same old news until she realized she had finished the can of beer in her hand.

She got up and took another cold one from the refrigerator. It was already her fourth.

Am I getting better at drinking?

Beer alone used to make her pleasantly tipsy. Lately, it was giving her less and less for her money.

After a moment’s hesitation, she mixed into it some malt whisky, over forty percent alcohol, that she had kept hidden from Dezeb. It probably wouldn’t kill her.

She lifted it to her lips intending to try one sip. The next thing she knew, her morning alarm was going off again.

Beep-beep-beep-beep—Erabelle, who had fallen face-first onto the table, reached sluggishly for the alarm.

“...Ugh.”

She fumbled it off, practically crawled to the bathroom, and splashed cold water on her face.

“Urrrgh...”

Making sounds only vaguely human, she crawled through the rest of her preparations and somehow arrived at the center on time.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeeeah...”

Sprawled on the break-room sofa, Erabelle answered with a groan.

“Wow. You reek of alcohol.”

The man sounded appalled, but his manner was surprisingly familiar.

After Dezeb had visited the center, it had been as though an invisible wall from another dimension had sprung up around her. No one would even come near her, let alone speak to her. Since the retrieval ceremony, they had been falling over themselves to help.

“How much did you drink?”

“...Nuh much.”

“Are you feeling that bad? No, please don’t.”

Erabelle quietly clapped a hand over her mouth. The man took a step back and shook his head. He looked so alarmed that she tried hard to keep it down.

“Why don’t you just go to the bathroom and throw—ah.”

If only he hadn’t mentioned throwing up, she might have been fine.

“Bleurgh—”

Erabelle emptied her stomach into the break-room trash can and blamed him for it.

Now no one would speak to her again. In that case, perhaps she could stay on the sofa a little longer.

“......”

She lay back down and stared blankly at the ceiling.

I wish I had something to do... Apart from earning that damned Class A center completion certificate, there was nothing.

The Dogs avoided her whenever she tried to give them an errand. They even dodged her offers to repair things for free. The moment she brought it up, they emptied the few hundred cp in their pockets and fled, making her feel like some kind of schoolyard extortionist.

Annoyed, she briefly considered taking their money in earnest, then decided against it.

“Hah...”

She cleaned up the trash can and went back into the training room. Now that she had thrown everything up, a little shaking should be fine.

Fortunately, that rash thought didn’t last long. Another member of the management team came to the center.

“...What brings you here today?”

“Lieutenant.”

The employee had arrived looking unusually cheerful, but the smell of alcohol startled him.

“H-how much have you had?”

“Not much.”

Her pronunciation was much better than before. Throwing up seemed to have sobered her a little.

“So what is it this time?”

He came by for all sorts of reasons. Whenever he showed up with a box of cloyingly sweet snacks after a medical checkup, or DVDs of a celebrity she followed, she suspected he was worried she might be depressed.

But her medical checkup had been the day before yesterday, and he had visited yesterday. There should have been no reason for them to see each other again for at least a few days. Looking at Erabelle’s puzzled face, he said,

“Dezeb has asked for you.”

His voice was bright, as though he was delighted to deliver the news.

The management team employee led her to the heart of the new divine domain that had dominated the news day after day.

If she could have remained anonymous, she would have liked to take a few photographs and sell them.

News outlets would pay a fortune for even a few pictures of the little stones the Dogs kicked around, or a speck of dust resting on one.

Erabelle waited on the highest floor of an enormous temple whose full scale she couldn’t begin to judge, deliberately filling her head with such thoughts.

Otherwise, she might start pacing in circles on the spot. Or sink down and curl up.

The temple’s top floor stood open on all sides.

Beyond its arches, dark skies stretched over the divine domain, threaded with clouds like the tangled remains of a storm.

She didn’t know how long she had been watching them. Her palms had grown damp with cold sweat when she heard a low voice beside her ear, so close it seemed to stir the fine hairs there.

“I’ve kept you waiting, my lady.”

Erabelle slowly raised her head to look at him.

“It must have been a long trip.”

He was coming down the stairs from the doorway above.

Thankfully, he looked well.

His clothing reminded her of an ancient god’s. The long robe exposed his upper abdomen and trailed past his feet. It suited him, too. In truth, as always, it did more than suit him...

Erabelle clenched her teeth.

He didn’t look as though he was suffering from the memories he had lost. How could he be all right after losing every moment of his life? He couldn’t be, and yet—at least outwardly, he looked fine.

“My lady.”

Erabelle clasped her hands behind her back and bowed her head.

“There’s no need for that, my lady. Please, sit.”

Dezeb stopped her and offered her a seat. In that vast space, there was only one chair: the long one where he had just sat down. The place he offered was beside him.

“......”

Erabelle looked at it for a moment, then approached carefully and sat.

There was no such thing as refusing him in this universe. If the option existed, it would cease to.

“Lady Erabelle Vermilion.”

Dezeb addressed her by that unfamiliar title again.

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

“Yes. Once, at the retrieval ceremony.”

It seemed he was still checking every human around him. For an apex predator, it was a remarkably cruel way to go about it.

As she answered, Dezeb crossed his legs to one side and regarded her fondly.