Chapter 138: The Wounded Paradise [2]

Freya looked at Kaguya, pressed against her and shaking with sobs, the very one she had wounded with her own words, and her heart clenched. The first reason, the most trivial one, was that she wouldn’t be able to move straight on to her rune gacha, which would therefore be pushed back a few hours, until she got home and found a moment to deal with it.

But she also knew that her heart was clenching mostly for an entirely different reason. The woman she was supposed to apologize to for her behavior had moved past the pain of her words and her gestures, and was at this very moment sincerely worried about her, to the point of crying at the sight of her lifeless, soulless body, exactly like the two sisters earlier that day.

So she raised a hand to her head and tenderly stroked her hair, while with the other she held her close.

That simple gesture was enough to make Kaguya jolt, and her head shot up, eyes red and swollen, cheeks soaked. She stared at Freya for one full second before bursting into tears all over again.

"BIG SISTEEEER!"

She threw herself against her so hard that Freya’s chair slid back a good step, then started talking without stopping for breath, the words tumbling over one another between sobs.

"You weren’t moving! You were barely breathing! Thalassa told me not to shake you, so I shook you anyway, and it didn’t do anything, so I wanted to call Aria, and then I wanted to open a portal to go get someone, but I didn’t even know who, and Atlas held me back because I was about to blow a hole in the cabin, and... and..."

She broke off to sniffle loudly, then buried her face in Freya’s shoulder.

"I’m sorry... I’m sorry, Big Sister... about last time... I shouldn’t have bothered you, I knew you weren’t okay and I just stood there like an idiot, and then I left without saying anything, and... I’m such a bad little sister..."

Freya felt something twist deep in her chest.

She was the one who had hurt her, she was the one who owed her an apology, and yet it was Kaguya apologizing, in tears, as if all of it were her fault.

Freya opened her mouth, then closed it again. She didn’t know what to say. She knew the words she ought to speak, and yet they felt foreign to her, too heavy and ill-fitting, the words of a language she had long since forgotten. So she simply tightened her embrace, and the words came out on their own, a little stiff, almost mechanical.

"No. I’m the one who’s... sorry, Kaguya. You didn’t do anything wrong."

She heard them ring out, clumsy and tense, and knew she meant them all the same, even if she couldn’t manage to say them any other way.

Kaguya slowly lifted her head and studied her, lip trembling, her big eyes still wet as they searched Freya’s face for the slightest trace of a lie, not entirely sure she had heard right.

"...Really?"

"Really."

Freya went back to stroking her hair and tried to smile at her. The smile came, but it felt heavy, a little crooked, pulled by muscles that no longer quite knew how to do it, so she held it on her lips as best she could and added, in a voice she meant to be gentle:

"See? I came all the way here to see you and to apologize. So everything’s fine, okay?"

Kaguya stared at her a moment longer, then sniffled hard and rubbed her eyes with the back of her sleeve, so roughly that her eyelids turned red. And little by little, an enormous, trembling smile, still wet with tears, spread across her face.

"Okay!"

She threw her arms around her neck again and hugged her with all her strength, rubbing her cheek against hers.

"Then you’re forgiven, Big Sister! Completely, totally forgiven! But if you ever scare me like that again, I’ll bite you, got it?"

And while Kaguya laughed against her, squeezing her so tightly she could barely breathe, a tear rolled down Freya’s cheek without her realizing it, from an eye that, for an instant, had turned violet. She barely felt it, and wiped it away with the back of her hand without a second thought, before the gold came right back, without anyone having seen.

Despite the "everything’s fine" she had just spoken, Freya thought the exact opposite. Everything was wrong, she was wrong, and she felt it all the more as she watched Kaguya, so happy to see her awake, laughing and crying against her at the same time.

In a single day, not even a full day, she had faced countless kinds of pain: the disgust above all, the physical pain of fighting the adventurers on the first floor through her replica, the pain of magic training, and then that disgust again and again, so extreme that it devoured her flesh from the inside until it drove her mad.

All of that she understood, at least in part, because she understood the meaning of that pain and why it was there. But now she understood nothing anymore, and she felt ridiculous, pathetic.

She, who believed she had surpassed the old Freya, the one who only ever saw one side of things, she, who felt above everyone as Empress, could no longer even understand simple, trivial things.

I laughed at the old Freya, at her doubts and at all the time she wasted, and here I am already at rock bottom after a single day, not even understanding what I feel and wasting my time the exact same way.

It’s pathetic.

But that word, which defined her so well in this moment, brought the next question right along with it: was she truly stronger like this? Hadn’t she been more hurt, and less efficient, than if she had stayed the simple Calamity, the old Freya? Then why? What was she missing? Unlike before, she had clear goals, the means to reach them and the will to stick to them, even if it meant setting everything else aside, so why was she sitting here, comforting a woman she hadn’t even known for all that long?

"Looks like your soul is hurting quite a bit right now, Freya."

Freya looked up at those words, pulled from her thoughts, to find the one who had spoken them.

A tall, slender woman sat across from her, her skin a pale porcelain white, with white hair and red eyes, red horns on her brow and a long red dragon tail resting against her chair.

"Looks like your complexion is as sickly as ever, despite all that intensive tanning, Izanami."

A stifled laugh rose on her right. It was Thalassa, of course, pressing both hands over her mouth so as not to burst out laughing, and only half succeeding.

The air instantly grew tense around Izanami, who had clearly taken the remark very badly, and the laugh that followed even worse, so that on Freya’s left, someone finally stepped in.

It was a man occupying a chair far too small for his colossal frame, with his brown hair, brown horns and a brown tail that stuck out well past either side of it. He raised a hand as broad as a dinner plate, in a slow, soothing gesture, and let out a long sigh that made his poor chair creak.

"Come on, come on... it hasn’t even been a week since your last argument. Maybe we could hold out a little longer this time, hm?"

Izanami shot him a dark look, but eventually crossed her arms and turned her head away, her tail lashing the air one last time before dropping back against her chair. She had calmed down, at least on the surface.

Satisfied, the man then turned to Freya, and his expression grew more serious, almost worried.

"But you know, Freya... I don’t have Izanami’s gift for reading souls, not by a long shot. And yet even I can tell yours isn’t doing well."

"What do you mean, Atlas?! Big Sister isn’t okay?"

Kaguya had sprung upright, her eyes still red, and before Freya could react, she had already grabbed her face with both hands and turned it toward her, studying it from every angle, brow furrowed and lips pinched with worry.

At that panicked expression, Freya couldn’t help smiling, and gently placed her hands over Kaguya’s.

"No, no, everything’s fine. It’s just a little problem, Kaguya."

Kaguya didn’t let go, though. She narrowed her eyes, brought her face even closer until their noses almost touched, and studied her for a long moment, very seriously, without blinking once.

"Then why are your eyes so ugly now?"

Freya’s smile froze on the spot. An invisible arrow had just lodged itself right in her heart, so violently that a thin trickle of blood escaped from the corner of her lips, and she had to summon every last shred of dignity not to sway in Kaguya’s hands.

Ow! Even coming from you, that hurts!

"They’re... they’re not ugly, my eyes," she replied in a slightly too high-pitched voice, discreetly wiping her chin with her fingertips. "They’re just... a little more golden than usual, that’s all."

But Kaguya, far from convinced, tilted her head without letting go of her face and studied her from another angle, with the utmost seriousness.

"And your stare is scary too."

"That’s the same thing as the eyes!"

But the second arrow had already driven itself in right next to the first, and her protest ended in a bloody cough that she tried as best she could to hide behind her fist. Across from her, Izanami gave a crooked smile, the smile of someone savoring a little revenge that had come much sooner than expected.

"She’s not wrong, you know~" Thalassa chimed in a singsong voice, her eyes sparkling. "You are a bit ugly these days~"

"Nobody asked you."

"And your words, too..." Kaguya went on, thoughtful. "They’re all cold, like a robot’s. And kind of disgusting."

The third arrow sank in deeper than the other two, and Freya, on the verge of breaking, had to grab the edge of the table to keep from sliding off her chair, a trembling hand pressed to her chest and blood now running from her nose as well.

Wait... how does she even know what a robot is?!

On her right, Thalassa had clamped both hands over her mouth and was trembling from head to toe, while on her left Atlas, try as he might to keep a straight face, kept letting a low chuckle slip out, which he immediately smothered by clearing his throat.

"Kaguya..." Freya breathed in a dying voice, stretching a pleading hand toward her. "At least tell me one nice thing... just one..."

"One nice thing?"

Kaguya furrowed her brow and started searching, eyes raised to the sky, tapping her chin with a fingertip.

"Um... there’s the feeling around you... it’s like... like..."

She hesitated, turning the question over and over, and Freya, clinging to her very last hope, leaned toward her, eyes shining. Around the table, everyone held their breath, and Thalassa’s hands tightened a little more over her mouth.

Then Kaguya’s face lit up all at once, delighted to have finally found it.

"...like you stink!"

A total silence fell over the terrace.

Then Freya spat out a spray of blood so spectacular that it traced a perfect arc over the table before raining down in a fine mist onto the tablecloth, right in front of Izanami, who pushed her chair back with a look of disgust. Freya’s chair slowly tipped backward, taking her with it, and Kaguya along with her, still clinging to her neck, until they both crashed onto the floorboards with a loud thud.

Freya lay sprawled full length, arms spread wide, eyes rolled back and face smeared with blood, and for a brief moment, anyone squinting would have sworn they saw a tiny translucent Freya drifting out of her mouth, weakly waving goodbye.

Completely K.O.

The silence held for one more second.

Then Kaguya sprang back to her feet, her hair a mess, looked down at Freya who still wasn’t moving, and turned to her brothers and sisters, white as a sheet.

"I KILLED BIG SISTER! She’s not moving, again! Call Aria! CALL ARIA!"

That was too much for Thalassa.

"PFFFHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Doubled over in her chair, tears in her eyes, she clutched her stomach without managing to catch her breath, and this time Atlas gave up all restraint and burst into a great booming laugh that rattled the table, while even Izanami finally turned away, a hand over her mouth.

And in the middle of all that laughter, Kaguya, on her knees beside Freya, was shaking her by the shoulders with all her strength, screaming her name at the top of her lungs.