6
Lye slowly stepped forward, fanning away the rising white dust.
He moved with measured and graceful footsteps that demonstrated a maid’s refinement, born from the desire to avoid causing a stir and to avoid bringing shame to one’s master.
His dear sister should be slumped somewhere beyond this curtain of smoke. He wanted to see her make every sort of face. He wanted to look straight into those fiery, gleaming pink eyes filled with such powerful emotions. It was an innocent sort of desire, almost like a first love.
“Oh.”
On the other side, the first thing he saw was the black ground dragon dragging its legs.
The beast had disappeared from view while he was focused on talking with his sister. He didn’t find it particularly interesting, but he had business with the hindrance the dragon was carrying.
He was enough. There was no need for anyone else to adore his dearest sister. Sister was his alone.
“Ah, there you are.”
Past the dragon, he spotted the hindrance leaning against the wall.
Her body was propped up perfectly, leaving her neck and heart wide open. Time to tidy up that hindrance and move on to the main dish.
Closing in, Lye noticed it.
—There was a faint glow near her blue-haired head.
“I’ll amend my statement.”
“—! Sist—”
“I thought I had no luck. But I was wrong.”
He started to call out but never got a chance to finish.
An attack crashed into Lye’s face first. He was stunned, and the next moment, the impact sent him flying back down the corridor he had walked through.
“—?!”
Unable to dampen the force of the impact, Lye slammed through two walls before coming to a stop. The surprise he felt outpaced the pain, and he stood up just once before slumping to his knees again.
What had happened? Lye’s sweet face filled with shock—
“It seems even the heavens are driven mad by how cute Rem and I are.”
As Lye peered through the dust filling the hole in the wall made by his body, the next moment, a palm grabbed his face with a speed that outstripped sound.
“…Sis…ter…”
“Unfortunately for you, my sister is sleeping inside. I know this for a fact because of our shared consciousness.”
“Shared…”
“That’s right—Rem and I are sisters who apparently got along very well. We could share joy and anger, sadness and pain, and more. And the blessing and burdens of our horns as well.”
He wasn’t following. But what Lye saw with his own eyes confirmed what she was saying.
Before he had been blown away, he had seen a white horn on the sleeping princess’s forehead—the one and only way that Oni girl was more gifted than her older sister.
So what if she had that? So what if it was shining and connected?
“It annoys me that Barusu’s plan was a hint, but so be it.”
“What did Subaru—?”
“Don’t say his name with that face and that voice.”
Suddenly, Lye’s head slammed into the wall with Ram’s hand still gripping his face.
His arms and legs twitched and spasmed. Ram opened and closed her other hand, confirming something, and Lye saw a terrible amount of blood flowing from the old wound on her forehead.
But Ram was untroubled by it. She smiled, almost as if she welcomed it.
Like the blood and pain was proof of a lost bond being reconnected.
“Those born in a dark place should return to their holes. If you were born screaming, then you can die that way, too.”
Wiping the blood from her forehead with the back of her hand, she looked down at Lye with her pink eyes.
Everything he had planned was so he could see intense emotion in them.
What the Archbishop of Gluttony got from Ram was an ice-cold gaze.
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