Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 14 - Chapter 3

3. My Darling Friends [be_my_friend]

My, but they could fly.

More like, how long were they going to keep flying for?

Forever?

But Haruhiro was finding himself less and less able to think about that.

They weren’t just flying, after all; they were spinning, too. It was a little hellish. No, not just a little. It was absolute hell. Spinning hell.

He figured this was a kind of spin you’d have a hard time subjecting yourself to even if you tried. It was beyond making your eyes spin, or anything on that level. At this point, it was all mush. It was like his brains, his blood, fluids, and organs, even his bones, were all mush, a total mess, and he was still getting shaken, and shaken, and shaken.

Because they were cocooned inside the black skin of the shovel, he couldn’t see outside at all, and the, what, sensory deprivation? That only made the heavy impact seem worse, or something.

They probably touched down, at last, but then: Wham, bam, smash! He felt like there were multiple impacts.

Ohh, we are so dead, he thought.

Which meant he wasn’t dead. What a relief. Well, no, it wasn’t a relief at all.

“...Alice?” he asked hesitantly.

“Yeah?”

“You okay?”

“...Yeah.”

There was no way Alice was okay. Alice’s voice was all weird. Or was he the one who’d gone weird?

Were his ears all messed up? No, that wasn’t all. Haruhiro was supposed to be clinging to Alice. But he didn’t feel like he was touching another person, or anything resembling warmth. Could he move his hands and feet, or couldn’t he? It was all incredibly vague.

He was breathing. No question about that. Alice was, too. They were both alive. That was good, at least.

Was it? Was it really?

He felt like, even if he was alive, quite a few more unpleasant things than pleasant things would come of that.

Quite a few? An awful lot, maybe? It wasn’t fair. Was someone picking on him, maybe? These days, he had to wonder.

Okay. He felt a little better now.

He took a deep breath. “Are you hurt at—”

“We’re getting out,” Alice said before he could finish.

The cocoon made of black—or blackish, well, black was probably fine—black skin came undone, dividing into thin strips, and wrapping around the stick of meat Alice was holding.

Haruhiro narrowed his eyes. Was it a hole? Alice and Haruhiro were in the bottom of a hole. Not particularly deep, or large. He could see the polka dot sky.

The cocoon had probably fallen, and embedded itself in the ground. But it hadn’t come down in a flat place, apparently. Had it hit a building or something? Had they come through a roof, then fallen to the ground?

“Get away,” Alice said, shoving Haruhiro to the side.

Before he could even respond, he was elbowed in the face. That hurt pretty badly, but Alice wasn’t one to care about such things. Alice crawled out of the hole, and Haruhiro followed.

This really was the inside of a building. There was a hole in the ceiling. It was a small, one-floor house, apparently.

There were windows, and they had stained glass in them. Light was coming in through the hole in the ceiling, but it could hardly be called bright. Even so, well, he could more or less figure out the situation inside the room.

There was something like a fireplace. There was a couch, a table, and what looked to be a bookshelf. The walls and floors were likely stonework. In the floor was the large hole Alice and Haruhiro had come out of.

“Someone’s house?” Haruhiro wondered.

“I don’t know that it’s someone...” Alice started to say, then held the shovel at the ready.

The door opened.

Alice took off, as if flying, and knocked whoever opened the door to the ground with the shovel. “Come on, Haruhiro!”

“Huh?”

This was probably no time to be blinking. Alice was already out of the building. He shook off his confusion, and chased after Alice.

The door was still open. The person on the ground, the one knocked to the ground by Alice, was acting as a doorstop.

It was a blond girl wearing a light green dress.

No, wrong.

It would be easy to mistake it for a girl, but it was a doll, maybe?

The shape was human, but the texture of its skin wasn’t that of a living creature. It looked hard to the touch. There were seams at the joints of its exposed arms and legs, too. It was on its belly, so he couldn’t see its face, but it was quite an intricate doll.

It didn’t budge now, but it had been moving just a moment ago.

—Right?

It had opened the door, and attempted to come inside.

Even though it was a doll?

That was creepy, but this was Parano. There were always bizarre things. In fact, there was nothing but bizarreness happening here.

Haruhiro jumped over the doll of a little girl and went outside.

There was a thin haze. Was this a city? There were rows of buildings, all of them stonework with slate-tiled roofs. It was all incredibly normal, really.

It made him think, Yeah, there are cities like this, aren’t there? In fact, it was too normal. It didn’t fit in Parano.

Alice was right over there, having waited for Haruhiro. Or had Alice waited?

This was Alice, so maybe not. Alice might just not have been able to go anywhere.

There were people. The residents of this city, perhaps? Over there on the street, over here, and not just a few of them.

Their forms were blurred in the haze, but there were tens of those residents, maybe more, none of them approaching for now, at least. However, they were surrounding Alice and Haruhiro at a distance. They weren’t just on the roads. He could spot figures on top of buildings here and there. In other words, they were up on the roofs, too.

“We got sent a real long way...” Alice muttered.

“Um... where is this?” Haruhiro asked.

Alice looked down, sighing. “Doll Town. Ruins No. 3.”

“Oh... so that’s it.”

Everything in Parano was transient and changing. Sometimes slowly and gently, other times suddenly and intensely. The geography was no exception. Even if there was a stony mountain here now, it might be a sandy desert soon afterwards, or it might turn into a gray forest instead.

However, according to Alice, who had spent much longer in this world than Haruhiro, even in Parano, there were a number of places that continuously existed. For instance, Ruins No. 1 to Ruins No. 7, the ruins of seven cities and the area around them, were an example of that.

“The place we met the dream monster, the Scarlet Forest, that was Ruins No. 1... right?” Haruhiro asked.

“Yeah.”

“From Ruins No. 1 to Ruins No. 3, that’s...”

“It’d be a long walk.”

Time and distance were vague in Parano, so they could only be measured by how they felt. Even rough approximations, like It’s about X kilometers or It would take about half a day, didn’t work. It might be better to think of it as being less they were vague, and more that time and distance were not absolute measures. Despite that, Alice was saying it’d be a long way, so it must’ve been quite a long way indeed.

“I’m amazed we survived,” Haruhiro said.

“I didn’t want to come. Not here.”

“You didn’t?”

“By the way, there’s a Doll Town in Tokyo, too, but this isn’t like that.”

“Tokyo...” Haruhiro murmured.

The word had a strange ring to it. It was apparently the name of a place. He felt like he knew it, or maybe he didn’t. It felt like he might remember if he thought about it, but this was clearly not the time.

Doll Town.

Dolls.

“All of them, they’re not people... they’re dolls?” he asked.

As he looked at all of the figures on the roofs, Alice let out another exasperated sigh.

“This is the doll master’s town.”

“Um... Someone you know?”

“We were friends. Until she fell into darkness.”

“Darkness...”

“She’s here.”

“Huh? Where?”

“There.”

Alice turned to face behind him, to the left. Haruhiro hurriedly turned that way, too.

No one was there. Not on the street, anyway. But there was something standing on the roof of one of the buildings that faced onto the street.

It had a human form, if you could call it that. There was a head, a body, two arms and two legs, all of the things that should be there, but... they were thin. Damn thin. With the exception of the head, with its extravagant hat, it was all slender. The neck and the limbs were practically sticks. It wore a very short skirt, and its breasts were covered by a cloth that looked like underwear. Its hips were thin, too. Even if a human slimmed down to the extreme, sucked in their gut, and then tightened the waist with some sort of belt, they might not be able to get that thin.

Because of the hat, which made him think of a cake with too many decorations, and the multiple pairs of glasses that it was wearing for some reason, he couldn’t make out the face at all. Still, it had big lips, and they were red to the point of looking toxic. It was apparently a woman. She was apparently the doll master, so she probably wasn’t a doll.

“Ngh... Ngh... Heheh... Heh...”

Was the doll master laughing? She had a voice like the wind blowing at midnight.

“Nui...” Alice thrust the tip of the shovel into the ground, and spoke in a pained voice. “It’s been a while.”

Nui. Had that been the doll master’s name when she was Alice’s friend? Nui.

At some point, the dolls had started moving. It was hard to see through the haze, but there seemed to be dolls here and there, judging by where it was possible to make out the color of their dresses, so they must have been slowly closing in on Haruhiro and Alice.

Or rather, weren’t there more of them now?

Was it just his imagination? No, they were definitely growing in number. Could it be that all the dolls of Doll Town were gathering here at this very moment?

Nui was speaking in nonsense now. “Ahh... Ngh... Heehee... Kuh... Guguh... Fuh...”

“Nui,” Alice said, with grief, “I don’t want to fight you. It may not make any difference to say this, but... we were friends, weren’t we?”

“Foo... reh... nuheh... dzuh... gugheh...”

“I didn’t mean to come. Not that I don’t want to see you. It’s just... I can’t see this reunion going well. So I’ve been avoiding it. You can stay here, forever, making your dolls. That’s what you want, right? I won’t get in the way.”

“Hahh... Heah... Hahh... Nghheheh...”

“No good, huh.” With a click of the tongue, Alice pulled the shovel from the ground.

“What do you mean, no good?” Haruhiro asked.

“We can’t talk to her,” Alice said. “It doesn’t look like she knows me, either. She is a trickster, after all. I can’t blame her.”

“Like Haname, you mean...”

How long ago had that been? Well, in Parano, that question might be meaningless. Alice had taken him to Ruins No. 2, Bayard Garden. The master of that place was a trickster called Haname, and it was supposedly safe if you didn’t mess with her garden, but stuff had happened, and they’d had a bad time there.

That image of Haname as she seemed to fill the sky was still burned into Haruhiro’s mind. If that was the power of a trickster, wasn’t this situation incredibly bad?

“Are... are we going to fight?” Haruhiro hesitated.

“Let me think about that after I’ve hit her.”

Before Alice could add, Come on, Haruhiro hugged Alice from behind.

Depending how you looked at it, this could be the act of a pervert. Haruhiro wasn’t doing it because he wanted to, by any means, but if he didn’t do it fast enough, he might get told off for not being able to do anything without being told to explicitly.

Haruhiro’s magic, Resonance, amplified Alice’s magic, Philia. However, Haruhiro had no idea how Resonance worked, or in what way, or what effect it had. He felt a pull that was spiritual, not physical. If he were to be a bit hyperbolic, it felt like his soul was being pulled out. That, or, if he were to liken himself to a container, he was filled with life energy. That was flowing into Alice.

“Go,” Alice whispered.

Alice could let go of the shovel at any time, so it went without saying that the shovel was not Alice. Despite that, the shovel was Alice’s fetish, making them one and the same.

The hard, yet flexible skin peeled off. Throbbing at the mere touch of the outside air, the shovel’s true form, which was awfully easy to hurt, was exposed. That skin protected Alice. It also became a sword that cut up enemies, as well as a spear and a halberd.

Destroy. Destroy. Destroy. Destroy. Destroy everything that tries to harm me.

The skin unleashed its fury. It stretched and folded freely, whipping about, becoming ten or more blades, and assaulting the nearby buildings and the doll master.

The doll master did not back away. She lifted her stick arms. The shapes of each of her fingers were different. The index and middle fingers were scissors. Another was a curved knife, one was a gimlet, one was a chisel, and one was a bow saw.

The fingers of both the doll master’s hands were all tools for making dolls. However, they were more than just tools. They weren’t just used for delicate work, but dangerous things, too.

The doll master pierced through and stopped the shovel’s strips of flesh with the tools on her hands, cutting them apart. The skin couldn’t hurt the doll master.

But I knew that. It was like he could hear Alice’s thoughts. Knowing that is what let me turn the skin on the doll master without mercy. The doll master—no, Nui—was my friend. Even now that she’s turned into this thing, I don’t want to kill a friend. But Nui fell and became a trickster. I won’t hold back just because the doll master was once my friend.

They aimed for her feet. The skin slashed the hell out of the building the doll master was standing on, the nearby buildings, and the dolls that were pressing in towards them.

The doll master’s buried in the rubble. I’m sure she’ll get herself out in no time, though. Still, we can get out of here before then. So long, Nui—

The moment he moved away from Alice, Haruhiro realized this was all very strange.

Alice was already running. He had to follow, so that was what Haruhiro did. His body was moving as it should, but the inside of his head was a mess.

What was it? What the hell had happened?

Just now, that was Alice.

He had been feeling and thinking almost like he was Alice.

Was it because of the magic? Resonance? He had been Alice’s first time seeing it. It was apparently a rare magic. A magic that amplified the magic of others. The fact of the matter was, when Haruhiro touched Alice, Alice’s magic would get stronger.

But was that really all there was to it?