Tantei wa Mou, Shindeiru - Volume 9 - Chapter 5.02

The bride’s wish and the king’s choice

Siesta had fainted, and I laid her down on the bed, then left the room. I walked through the Nightless Castle alone.

When I got back to the sanctuary, Scarlet wasn’t there.

I went upstairs, looking for him, and arrived at the top floor. The sound of wind suddenly caught my ears.

Following the noise, I stepped out into an open space. Scarlet was there, standing on a balcony in the night wind and gazing up at the moon.

“Siesta’s asleep again,” I told him. Slowly, Scarlet turned around. “Sorry, but I win.”

“Then why bother returning?” The corners of his lips curved mockingly. “You could have simply carried her on your back and escaped.”

“I really wish I could have, but it’s not like you’d let us go.”

The fact that he’d been keeping watch from up here, at the very top of the castle, was proof of that.

“I see. However, the fact that you have returned of your own accord means you must also be prepared to die, correct?” Scarlet’s one black wing unfurled. He wasn’t giving me the slightest opening to attack him.

Not that I planned on fighting anyway. I’d only come back to talk to him.

“Scarlet. Your greatest wish isn’t to make Siesta your bride, is it?”

The vampire’s gaze sharpened, as if he were trying to gauge my true intentions. “Why did I abduct the Daydream, then? You already know what I was attempting to use her for, don’t you?”

“Yeah. For the prosperity of the vampire race. That was just your secondary wish, though. You couldn’t accomplish your primary goal anymore, so you moved onto the next one… No, that plan was your last resort.”

Scarlet’s original wish had been something else entirely.

“What do you claim I truly wanted?”

“To protect the person you treasured most in the world.”

His eye twitched.

“In exchange for annihilating your kin, you asked the Federation Government to protect a certain girl. In other words, your greatest wish was her safety… But for some reason or another, that contract was broken, so you made your goal the prosperity of your race instead.”

Then he’d resurrected the kin he’d personally killed as undead and put them to work, and kidnapped Siesta to make her his bride, which is where we were now.

“At first, I thought the girl you were trying to protect was Siesta. But it’s someone else, isn’t it?”

Scarlet and Siesta had probably met after they’d both become Tuners. Scarlet had learned about Siesta’s unique origins and reasoned that he could use her as a future bride candidate. In other words, she’d only been insurance. Fifteen years ago, there had been another girl whom Scarlet had truly wanted to protect.

“Yes, you’re right,” Scarlet said calmly. “She was an old friend; we grew up in the same town. She was cleverer, nobler, and more beautiful than me. A girl so dazzling it was impossible to believe she was a demon.”

An old friend. Scarlet had mentioned her in passing before.

That girl wasn’t Siesta, though.

I was sure she wasn’t Elizabeth, either.

“She died fifteen years ago. Someone set our town ablaze, and she revived three times, but not the fourth. Her powers of regeneration were average for a vampire. In her final moments, she reached toward heaven with a charred, blackened hand, then breathed her last. I had no time to despair, however. I was being consumed by the flames myself.”

I already knew the rest of this story.

Scarlet had conquered the flames with his extraordinary regenerative powers, then met the government dignitary, Odin. That man had appointed him as the Vampire and charged him with killing his own kind. As the price of the contract, Odin had promised that the government would protect a girl.

“Then the girl you asked them to protect was…”

“Yes. My old friend, whom I’d resurrected as an undead.” Finally, Scarlet revealed the whole truth. “She came back to life just after I made that contract with the government; I’d brought her back with my powers as a vampire. However, upon awakening, she’d forgotten everything. Our tribe, me, even herself. Her instincts made it so.”

Her only wish had been to come back as a human.

That was why, when she had resurrected, she’d lost all her memories of being a vampire.

“She was, indeed, reborn as a human,” Scarlet said with a tender smile. “Yet she was still unable to escape the curse of the short lifespan of vampires. Very soon, my old friend will die. So in the end, I decided to make her other wish come true. Long ago, she told me her dream: that in the future, she wanted the world to be a place where our race, our children, could live just as long as humans. That is why, at the end, I will carry out her plan here in this castle.”

Having finished his story, Scarlet turned to face me. “Do you find it strange that I would tell you everything in detail?”

“No. I thought it was one final mercy before you killed me.” That probably wasn’t all, though. “That, and I’m pretty sure you wanted somebody to hear your story.”

Scarlet’s eyes widened for a brief moment, before he spat out a sentence.

“Someone like you could never understand!”

The next second, he was gone. A heavy impact ran through my stomach.

“……! ……Hah…!”

My consciousness faded before the pain hit. I didn’t realize Scarlet had kicked me until after I’d crashed into the wall.

“You made a similar wish yourself once. You swore you would bring a girl back to life. That you would sacrifice anything to make it happen. Yet you were unable to shoulder that burden!”

As my mind dimmed, I remembered. I really had said those things when I’d decided to get Siesta back: That I’d pay any price. That I wouldn’t hesitate.

But then Natsunagi had sacrificed herself to wake Siesta up, and I’d felt immeasurable regret. Even though I’d said I didn’t care what I had to sacrifice, I’d clenched my fists, thinking it wasn’t supposed to be like this. I had too many precious things—so many that, at some point, they’d begun to slip through my fingers.

“I loathe that human foolishness from the depths of my heart!”

Scarlet flew at me, shattering the floor beneath his feet. A floating sensation swept over me briefly, followed by a vicious impact. I’d fallen, landing hard on my back on the sanctuary floor… I couldn’t breathe. Did I have broken bones? I could still move, just barely…though I really didn’t think I’d managed to land right.

“You won’t die. You have also been affected by a vampire.” Scarlet looked down at me.

“…Because Siesta bit me?” Had that temporarily boosted my physical abilities? I’d had no idea that was how it worked. That said, it hadn’t made the pain go away, and just trying to get back up made me break out in a cold sweat.

“You can’t save the Daydream,” Scarlet told me, as I got shakily to my feet. “If the world and the Daydream were hanging in the balance, there is zero possibility that you would choose the latter.”

He wasn’t exaggerating.

Ice Doll had said the same thing. That was why she’d warned me to forget all about my role as the Singularity and cut off my involvement with the world.

“I’ve got no response to that.”

The world, or a girl. When forced to choose between the two, it was normal for story protagonists to pick the second.

I couldn’t do that, though. Nor would I make excuses like, “I’m sure Siesta wouldn’t want that, either.” It was that I, personally, couldn’t make that choice.

“But, Scarlet, you did choose. You chose the girl over the world.”

As long as Scarlet’s old friend was alive, that was enough for him.

Even if he was shackled with the fate of continually killing his companions. Even if it meant being hated and cursed, not just by that old vampire and Elizabeth, but by all of his comrades, hearing their screams as they died. Even if the girl he was willing to go so far to protect didn’t remember him. As long as she was living happily somewhere far away, he didn’t need anything else.

That was why Scarlet was angry now: Because I was uncommitted. Because I couldn’t choose to protect just one person who was special to me. He was trying to prove that he was in the right here. That was why he’d told me everything, and why he was accusing me now.

“Was I wrong?” Scarlet said with a smile.

It was the loneliest smile I’d ever seen.

I told the king of the vampires without hesitation, “No. I respect you for it.”

I wasn’t telling him what he wanted to hear just to try to get out of this alive: It was what I genuinely thought. I sincerely wanted to show I respected his choice.

“—I see.” Scarlet smiled again.

He put a hand to his forehead, his face twisting into a laugh.

“I’m not the one to decide whether you made the right choice, though,” I told him.

There was someone else better suited to that. Scarlet had told me so himself.

Which is why…

“Let’s ask your real bride.”

The door of the sanctuary opened, revealing a sight that made Scarlet’s eyes widen.

“Sorry we’re late, Kimizuka.”

Natsunagi came in, out of breath, her cheeks and her clothes smeared with mud.

She was pushing a wheelchair.

A wheelchair that held the Parasol Witch.

“What are you doing here, Jeanne?”

Scarlet called to his bride.