Ishura - Volume 7 - Chapter 8

Chapter 8- Sinag First Administrative District

Qwell the Wax Flower had a large scar down her left flank. Even when she soaked in the bathtub like this, it was clearly visible through the water’s surface.

It was a wound she received when she first stepped on the battlefield at sixteen. Back then, she found the scar to be disgusting and loathsome, but as time went on, her feelings had grown strange and hard to describe—sad, yet also endeared to it.

Qwell believed that the enemy who gave her this scar couldn’t have been that strong. It was quite some time after the Central Kingdom had transformed into Aureatia, so the Old Kingdoms had basically become a remnant group of a lost age, which was why a new recruit like Qwell was seen as enough to handle them.

She thought that everything that happened afterward was completely her fault as well. Chasing the enemy too far, she isolated herself from her squad and ended up in a puzzling melee scrap inside a cramped building.

As if catching her by accident, an enemy’s sword stabbed Qwell in the gut. Qwell desperately struggled to rip it out, but the man gripped hard on the sword hilt as if it was his sole lifeline, tearing a large lengthwise gash in her flesh as he collapsed. That was the last thing she saw before she fell into darkness.

She heard later that it was a miracle she hadn’t bled out from having a main artery severed. The enemy soldier she was fighting apparently had the side of his head and his ribs shattered, dying instantly. The soldier’s physique had been massive. He must have striven several times harder than any other normal minia.

While she had known that she wasn’t a genuine minia, that might have been the first time she really understood it for herself.

As Psianop said, Qwell’s arms were soft and slender. Coupled with her constantly quivering and fearful demeanor, she appeared less like a military officer and more like a young scholarly girl. Nevertheless, at sixteen years old, Qwell was able to beat an Old Kingdoms loyalist soldier to death.

Qwell was a dhampir. She didn’t know her father’s face. He had been exterminated for being a corpse.

While the corpsification remedy had been successful for her mother, she was never allowed to remarry for the rest of her life. Her stout-hearted personality was the total opposite of Qwell’s, and she laughed off what happened to Qwell’s father as though it didn’t bother her at all.

Qwell wanted to give any small amount of ease she could to her mother, but she wondered how her mother actually felt about her daughter, constantly using her dhampir strength to achieve martial glory—now, with her mother dead in a carriage accident, she would never know.

Qwell’s image of her mother would forever be the bright and cheerful version that she had shown to the world.

…I was trying to bring peace to Aureatia for my mother, but…

When she cast her eyes down to look at her scar, the tips of her long bangs slipped into the water.

She had started hiding her eyes behind her bangs when she was seventeen to stop others from looking at her silver eyes, the telltale dhampir characteristic.

If peace truly does happen, then there won’t be any more need for military officers like me.

Among the Twenty-Nine Officials, many of the military officers were superb at handling practical affairs. Some were also socialites with brilliant conversation skills who utilized capable and talented people under them.

All Qwell had was combat. She hadn’t any room to learn anything else.

Psianop, trying to prove he had trained himself up to be the strongest of all despite being an ooze, could express this singular worth of hers more than any other.

That was why he needed to win.

“Lucnoca the Winter…”

Except for her left flank, no noticeable scars remained on Qwell’s body.

She rubbed her hand along the pale skin of her right arm, but unlike her side, she couldn’t remember in detail what sort of wounds had been carved into her skin there.

The natural gap between dhampir and other minian races was so great that no wounds, nor even the memories of them, were left behind.

Even then, Qwell had never fought an ogre one-on-one, to say nothing of a dragon.

“…Psianop can win. He can do it.”

How many times had she tried to convince herself like this?

The ultimate strength to break through the racial barriers that had cursed Qwell from birth.

She wanted to believe Psianop the Inexhaustible Stagnation possessed it, even if he was going up against the Lucnoca the Winter.

Qwell had unconsciously begun to hug her naked shoulders. She tried not to imagine anything further than that.

In a one-on-one fight, what could he even do? What would happen if he were to lose? Would there be any meaning in his death?

Psianop was Qwell’s hero candidate, and a powerful fighter more worthy of respect than anyone else in the world.

Which was all the more reason why she would catch herself wishing that he wouldn’t give up on the fight against Lucnoca.

If I don’t believe in him, who will…?

Like the old wound carved into the Qwell—like how, back then, that muscular minia might have been able to kill Qwell—Psianop must have been able to do the same.

Her thoughts were going in circles, and she might be beginning to grow dizzy from the heat, Qwell thought.

Right as she thought to leave the bath and rose from the bathtub…

“…!”

Qwell stepped out onto the bathroom floor doing her utmost not to make any splashing sound.

She had felt the presence of someone else.

Who could it be?

It was late at night. There were no guests or merchants scheduled to visit.

Some kind of burglar or prowler, maybe? But the Sinag First Administrative District where Qwell lived was crowded with the manors of bureaucrats and nobles, and there weren’t likely to be many criminals who would target an area so heavily guarded compared to other parts of Aureatia.

Whatever the case, I really wish they wouldn’t come at a time like this.

She concealed the sounds she was making and opened the door to the dressing room. First, she needed to get her clothes on, and then she needed to go inform someone patrolling the main road. If Qwell handled the situation on her own, there was a chance the worst would happen, and she would accidentally kill them.

She took the towel hanging on the wall.

At nearly the exact same moment, the door opened, and a man’s bony hand flew into the room.

“Ah!”

Almost entirely by reflex, Qwell wrapped the towel around the intruder’s wrist. Together with a moist crack, she twisted and broke the joint in the wrist.

A well-built man. She realized too late that it likely belonged to a resident of the Sinag First Administrative District.

“Qwell…the Wax Flower.”

The man’s mouth twisted unsymmetrically, showing a row of teeth. Some sort of expression resembling a smile.

“Please calm down.”

“H-how…how do you expect me to do that?!”

She used a low kick to sweep the man off his feet while simultaneously using the towel to pull in his right arm.

The man rotated halfway and was now standing with his back to Qwell.

With his right arm twisted behind him, the man was then pinned to the floor. It would be impossible for him to put up any resistance from this position.

“Wh-what, what is all this?! Y-you…you shouldn’t sneak into someone’s house, y-you know.”

The feeling of shame made her protesting voice faint. Qwell was a young maiden. She also understood that, as a mutant species of vampire, she had a rather well-proportioned physical appearance.

Unless she was simply being overly self-conscious, that may have been the reason why a prowler had waited for her to be in the bath to assault her like this.

However, there was some part of her warrior’s intuition that warned her this was a far bigger problem than that.

…This man’s body. It’s stiff.

She didn’t mean that his joints weren’t flexible—it just didn’t have the same elasticity that minian skeletons possessed, as a material.

This man had managed to easily sneak into the house of one of the Twenty-Nine Officials and get right in front of the changing room before even letting Qwell sense his presence. It was weak and alien, like that of a dead man.

“I want to be friends, Qwell the Wax Flower. What do you say…?” The man groaned. It seemed to be the sound expelled from his crushed lungs, and he didn’t seem to feel any pain whatsoever from his joints being bent to their limits.

“S-sorry. No thank you.”

Just by putting a bit more force on the shoulder joint to the arm twisted behind the man’s back, Qwell easily broke it.

A creaking, dry sensation. The response Qwell felt in her hands had an abnormal lack of moisture.

“Hrm… You just broke it, didn’t you?”

“Y-yes…?”

Just as Qwell suspected, the man showed no pain whatsoever, turning it into a vaguely humorous exchange.

At the very least, it wasn’t the sort of conversation expected after a naked young girl straddled a man’s back and broke his arm.

“M-make…any more funny moves…and I-I’ll break your neck. Wh-what did you come here for…? Wh-who even are you?”

“Hmm… Well, you got me there. There aren’t many questions I can answer. I really wanted to be friends if we could, but…”

He couldn’t possibly be a vampire… A revenant. One that’s been extensively remodeled at that.

Even faced with a string of abnormal situations, as long as she had time to breathe, she could judge what to do. If the enemy wasn’t a minia, she needed to stop him from moving. Pushing her upper-body weight on him, she used her elbow on a point of his spine to—

“Huh?”

An unintended gasp slipped from Qwell’s throat. The arm she was holding with her other hand had come off.

There wasn’t a single drop of blood. It was so light, it didn’t seem to be an actual minian body at all, just a parched and abnormal arm.

“…This worked out perfectly.”

Qwell’s body collapsed forward as she went to bring her elbow down.

In that instant, the man swept his left arm behind him and caressed Qwell’s left flank.

“—!”

“Your nakedness worked out perfectly… No matter where I hit you, I’m guaranteed to touch skin…”

“Ah, eep, ngh!”

She felt an intense pain from the man’s fingers, digging open and slipping inside her old wound.

Qwell imagined some sort of poison, but it wasn’t. A more physical pain, as if a needle was being inserted, began to spread through her.

“My name is Acromdo the Variety. That’s the bare minimum answer I can give you.”

This…isn’t good.

The fingertips of this man named Acromdo stayed attached to Qwell’s side, despite the unnatural position he was twisted into, as if they were stuck to her.

In other words, once Qwell had judged the situation, she used all of her strength to kick Acromdo’s left elbow. It made them put space between each other, shifting away from her straddling position over his back.

“Y-you can…still fight?”

“…Y’know, I’d like to ask that myself. Even with all that pain, you can still move like that?”

Just as Qwell had felt, the contact he made with her was intended to make something penetrate inside of her through his fingertips. She imagined it was either a plant’s roots, or some sort of mushroom mycelia—something made to encroach deeper into her body, minutely branching off as it went, until it was impossible to rip out.

He’s not a normal revenant. The inside of this Acromdo’s body…has to be entirely like that. That’s why the strength of his body is totally different from any minia’s, and he can even detach parts of it himself…

Qwell might have gotten a more detailed understanding if she looked at how her wound was doing, but she couldn’t spare any thought to it right now.

Qwell wasn’t carrying anything at all. The only thing that could be called a weapon was her towel and the slight amount of water it had absorbed. Just as Acromdo had said, she couldn’t let any part of her exposed bare skin be touched. These “roots” were likely to get embedded wherever he did touch her.

She let out a deep breath. She couldn’t ignore the intense pain completely. However, she could construct a fight that used movements to minimize the pain.

Qwell had done such training with Psianop.

“…Hmm, maybe I failed?” Acromdo murmured, sounding bored.

He raised his left arm.

Here it comes.

With a cracking rupturing sound, everything from his left elbow down flew toward her.

It was almost as fast as a bullet—however, Qwell had read her opponent’s attack.

If this enemy was able to self-amputate and then freely rebuild his internal structure, it wasn’t out of the question that he possessed a mechanism allowing him to extend or launch his limbs at high speeds.

I’ll evade the projectile then take one step to the left. This move—

Her sight never dropped to the ground. Instead, she used the towel in her hands to sweep diagonally downward.

The sound of shattering bones. Her high-speed slash with the wet towel got a direct hit on the right arm that Acromdo had cut off.

—was something the enemy expected. His trump card was being able to move his severed arms.

“Hah-hah… You got me! I’ve never failed like this before. Qwell…the Wax Flower!”

“R-really, now!”

She stepped toward him—and stopped. Right before she reached him, she changed the commands she sent to her spine and tumbled outside of the changing room.

A succession of crackling explosive noises reverberated from inside.

Self-destruction. Seeing that he could send parts of his body flying to attack, there was no reason his whole body couldn’t do the same.

Acromdo’s final words, admitting defeat and appearing to raise Qwell’s morale, were also trying to make her come closer and get caught in the self-destructive blast.

“Haaah, haaah…!”

There was something she needed to do first, before getting an actual mental understanding of the threat she faced.

She felt around inside the wound in her flank with her fingers, and just as she had imagined, they entangled around something resembling thin roots.

“Mrrmmmmph…!”

Putting her other hand up to her mouth, she stifled her scream. She began to drag the object out of her own body as if literally pulling out a weed. Lying on the ground, Qwell’s body violently spasmed against her will, and she could feel her sight come and go, even with her eyes closed.

Sure enough, the bloody object was the root of a plant. She was lucky that he had attacked her flank, and that the roots never reached the motor nerves in her arms or legs…or her spine.

“A…plant… Who even…could make such a revenant…”

If the roots themselves were her enemy’s true body, then perhaps it wasn’t a revenant at all, but something else?

Seeing as Acromdo had broken into Qwell’s house and attempted to parasitize her with this root, it would mean that infesting Qwell was his goal from the start.

With her combat concentration broken, the uproar from the street outside reached her ears.

There was some sort of commotion going on. Acromdo had infiltrated her house all on his own, but maybe he had needed to come with someone else in order to break through the district’s security.

An assault, large enough in scale to include a diversion, targeting a hero candidate sponsor.

If that was the case, wouldn’t this be sabotage of the Sixways Exhibition, targeting Psianop?

“Haaah…haaah…”

She wrapped a towel around herself. Her body, freshly out of the bath, was heavily dirtied with blood and sweat.

The one scar carved into her velvety skin had been gouged even bigger than it was before. She would need Life Arts treatment immediately.

“Ahh…but… Tee…tee-hee-hee.”

Still, she had won.

She had managed to be victorious against an unknown enemy.

An opponent that, prior to her training with Psianop, when she still had unpolished combat thinking and technique, she would’ve never been able to best.

“I—I won…Psianop.”

It wasn’t that some authority somewhere had said that being strong was right and proper.

Even then, proper strength did exist.

Qwell thought the pain from her wound, and the elation of victory, proved this fact to her more than anything else.