Chapter 99: Her Most Devoted "Character"

Meanwhile, somewhere inside Baron Frarken’s castle.

In a large room opening onto four doors, one on each side, a pile of objects burned in the middle, giving off a black smoke that gathered along the ceiling before draining out through all four openings.

One man stood in front of it, while a second came toward him one step at a time, having just come through one of the doors, apparently reading documents he had only just recovered.

He didn’t look up from them when he spoke.

"So what is Myriam doing? She should have been here a long while ago."

The other man answered.

"I don’t know. Maybe those monsters got her."

"Don’t be stupid, Casius. You know as well as I do that she’s stronger than the two of us put together. Apart from that demon that turned up in the square, there’s nobody who could beat her."

"Are we going to wait for her much longer like this?"

"We simply wait. Besides, it gives me time to look for something that might explain where that demon came from."

"You really don’t know anything about it? The Upper Hands knew nothing? They never mentioned it to you?"

"No, and that’s exactly what I find strange. On top of the fact that this second-rate baron, who can’t keep his mouth shut about anything, never once brought it up in front of me."

He threw the file into the fire, which flared up at once.

Then he turned to look for the next document to burn, and his heart skipped a beat.

A woman was standing in the doorway he had come through himself, leaning back against the frame, one foot crossed over the other.

Her face was lit by the fire, which brought out two large violet horns, amethyst eyes, and an expression full of an irritation she wasn’t taking the trouble to hide.

In one of her hands, someone was being held, unconscious.

No blood. Not a single wound. Not even a tear in the clothing.

Myriam.

Olfred took in every one of those details, and his mind started racing.

A demon? Who is she?

What is she doing here? Does she know about our mission? Was she waiting for the two of us to gather before coming in?

And above all, how did she subdue Myriam? A rank S? But even then there would have had to be a fight, there would be marks... An assassin, maybe, who caught her off guard and knocked her out before she could react? Or maybe she simply surpasses rank S, like—

But that was the exact moment Casius turned around, curious, wanting to know why Olfred had stopped mid-stride.

His gaze fell on the woman, then on the one she was holding in her hand.

But he didn’t have Olfred’s sense, and he drew straight away.

Nobody saw anything. Not a movement, not a shadow, not so much as a blur in the air.

Casius, elite soldier of the Hands of humanity, head of the Frarken order of knights, was on the ground, his back against the stone. Or rather driven into what had been stone a moment earlier, a hand pressed flat over his face.

"...hk."

The sound barely came out, a breath cut off somewhere in his throat, far too weak to be a cry.

The woman rose from where she had crouched over him and tucked a strand of hair back into place.

"I don’t have time to waste on miserable insects."

Olfred, who still didn’t understand what had just happened, simply dropped onto his backside and pushed himself backwards, scraping along the floor with his heels and his palms, as far as he could get from that...

"... m-mon... monster..."

"Haaaa..."

Aria let out a breath and tilted her head to one side as she looked at him.

"It’s always the same refrain with insects of your sort."

She took a step.

"You think you’re clever. You spend your lives believing yourselves superior, wallowing in your own egos, congratulating yourselves because you can toy with the weak."

A second step.

"And then you run into something above you, just once, and suddenly it’s monster, abomination, as though the problem had abruptly come from somewhere other than yourselves."

The air moved.

All four doors began slamming against the walls, pushed from within, and a current came in from all four sides at once to converge on her.

The black smoke gathered along the ceiling folded back down and was swallowed into that movement. The fire at the centre of the room bent over, guttered, then went out all at once, leaving the embers glowing in the dark.

Black filaments appeared in the air around her and began to turn slowly, long and fine, like hair in water.

Olfred felt something crawl up his spine, something that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

"Imagine what I feel..."

She came closer.

The man’s face had lost all colour. His hands no longer held him properly, he was slipping on his own palms, and his heels could find no purchase on the stone.

He wet himself without even noticing, and the smell rose through the room before he understood what had happened.

"Imagine having to watch my mistress go to such lengths. Sink so low. Play the peasant, sleep in straw, let herself be struck across the face by men who aren’t worth the dust beneath her feet."

She stopped.

"Imagine having to watch her face death itself."

Her voice broke slightly on the last word.

"For simple insects like you."

She stopped there, and something shifted in her face.

The irritation was still in it, but something else had come over the top of it, something that had nothing to do with the man on the floor anymore.

Because from talking about her, she was thinking about her. And the moment she thought about her, nothing else really existed.

The wind dropped. The doors stopped slamming. The filaments went still in the air around her.

Aria brought both hands up to her cheeks, and her eyes drifted off somewhere above Olfred’s head.

"My mistress..."

Her whole face changed.

"You can’t understand. You don’t have the means for it, it isn’t your fault, you simply aren’t built for it."

She rocked gently from one foot to the other.

"She’s so dignified. So beautiful. She has this way of looking at things, you know, when she’s thinking she rests a finger against her mouth and narrows her eyes just slightly, and in that moment I would give absolutely anything to know what’s going on in her head."

She laughed, once, very low.

"She mustn’t know. She mustn’t know how close I come, every time she calls on me, every time she looks at me, every time she speaks to me, or even simply every time she’s near me, to collapsing from happiness."

Her fingers closed against her own cheeks, and she bit her lower lip until it went white under the pressure.

"Happiness so intense I could die of it~..."

Her hand slid from her cheek down to her throat, lingered there, fingers closing slowly around her own neck, tight enough that her voice changed when she went on.

"You’d feel it, if you could."

She let go, and the hand continued down, opening flat against her chest, where she pressed through the fabric.

"Right here~"

Olfred had stopped moving away.

He wasn’t moving at all anymore, backed against the wall he had finally reached, watching this thing that was no longer watching him.

"It beats so hard I think it’s going to give out, every time she says my name. Aria. She says Aria and my whole body starts to—"

Her fingers clenched and crumpled the cloth beneath them, pulling at her collar.

A shiver ran up her spine and snapped her shoulders upward.

"Haaaaa~~~..."

Her knees buckled. She caught herself on the door frame without seeming to notice, and the stone gave way beneath her fingers.

Her other hand came up and closed around the back of her own neck.

Her head tipped back, her throat exposed, her eyelids heavy, a smile stretched far too wide across her face.

"Mistress~~... I love you so much~~"

She stayed like that, her body arched, all her weight on one leg, her breathing short and uneven, one hand pressed to her chest and the other closed around her nape.

A sound escaped her, brief, stifled, and she did nothing to hold it back.

It took her a long while to come down.

The whole time, Olfred never took his eyes off her, and something went cold inside him.

It wasn’t the power. It wasn’t the horns, or what had happened to Casius, or the aura.

It was watching a thing like that lose itself completely, right in front of him, without fearing him for a second, without even remembering he was there.

Because he understood in that moment that yes, set against that woman, in her eyes, his whole existence, everything he had built, everything he was, deserved no other name than insect.

Aria slowly brought her head forward again, her cheeks still flushed, her gaze unfocused.

She straightened her collar with an automatic gesture.

"So you understand. You understand her magnificence, her perfection, you understand why there’s nothing else, why there will never be anything else—"

She stopped dead.

Her hand dropped.

"No. You don’t understand. Obviously."

And the black aura rose again.

It climbed higher than the first time, until it covered the entire ceiling, and the filaments started moving again, faster, tighter.

Aria’s gaze fell on Olfred.

And rage twisted her face all at once.

Her jaws clenched hard enough that enamel cracked somewhere at the back, then her mouth split open sideways, climbing up one side until it reached beneath her eye, baring the whole gum and a row of teeth far too numerous for a human mouth.

One eye narrowed until it disappeared while the other opened wide, too wide, the pupil shrunk to a black point trembling in the white.

The skin of her forehead folded into deep creases, veins stood out along her neck, swelled, climbed all the way to the roots of her horns, tracing black lines beneath the flesh.

Something moved behind her eyes. Something that had no room in there and was pressing to get out.

The smile didn’t go anywhere. It stayed, twisted across the top of all the rest, warped and grotesque.

She had never been this furious since the day she was summoned.

"And it’s her."

Her voice had dropped several tones.

"It’s her, her, who’s forced to play along with a morality imposed by insects."

But the man she was speaking to had already passed out on the floor.

Aria stayed frozen a moment longer, her mouth still open around a sentence that no longer had anyone to receive it.

Then she let out a breath.

Her face settled back into place, feature by feature, and the aura withdrew little by little, sinking back down the walls before disappearing entirely.

The wind died away. The doors went still.

The room fell silent, disturbed only by the wheezing of Casius, still sprawled in his crater.

Three tentacles came out of Aria’s back and went to collect the living bodies of the three of them, lifting them without any particular care.

Then she looked upward, to where, through the walls and the floors above, stood the balcony on which her mistress and Kaguya were waiting.

"I do hope that in spite of everything, all of this is entertaining you, madam."