She blinked hard once or twice. The tears that had collected in her lower eyelids formed drops, and rolled down her cheeks. Then she shut her eyes, and place a tightly-clenched fist on either side of her hips.
"I appreciate all you've done for me, Mr. Doon!"
She bent her spine in a deep bow to her mentor, who was facing away from her in the arms of the monster. Immediately afterward, she ran off across the paving stones, without a backwards glance at the cemetery. The road radiated from the center of the city. It was still a long way to the castle.
Doon heard the clack of her geta behind him. He did not look back either. He had succumbed to the monster's temptation, and been corrupted. As Koyoi's senior in their profession, he could not bring himself to face her.
"This is for the best."
Finé, who had lifted the wall of mana, hugged her husband's body tight with both arms.
"That girl will soon realize how wonderful it is to surrender yourself to the mana," she said, and placed her lips over Doon's.
◊ ♦ ◊ ♦ ◊
"Lady Tasogare is missing!"
An attendant one of the branch houses had dispatched to wait on Tasogare shouted. It was three days after Tōtetsu's funeral.
"Hey, Bunkichi's gone too," someone from the main house exclaimed during the search for Tasogare.
It was true. The boy Bunkichi, Tasogare's closest attendant, had vanished along with her.
"He can't have made off with Lady Tasogare, can he?"
Bunkichi's family had the lowest status of all the branch houses. Even before Tōtetsu's passing, the people of the main house and the more prestigious branch houses had attached themselves to Shinonome or Koyoi. With, needless to say, the ulterior motive of getting in with the contenders for the next head of the clan. Shinonome, Koyoi, and Tasogare were all candidates, but everyone around them assumed that the position would go to one of the two older sisters. Consequently, the job of seeing to Tasogare's needs had been foisted on Bunkichi's low-ranking family.
Naturally, the bulk of criticism was aimed at Bunkichi's family. His parents and siblings, who remained, were showered in verbal abuse by members of the other households.
They're blaming everything on Bunkichi.
Koyoi watched her own attendants mercilessly rebuking them with anger in her eyes. But she could not intervene. Three days ago, she had gone from being "Tōtetsu's granddaughter" to "potential head of the clan." Every move she made, every word she spoke, had come to represent the entire Amanomiya clan. She could not afford to base any action on superficial feelings.
Little by little, her feelings of anger turned on herself, for watching without being able to act. She pursed her lips, and mentally apologized to Bunkichi's family.
If I become head, I won't allow this sort of thing. I won't let this be the kind of family where anyone has to be sad.
A short time later, a note in Tasogare's handwriting was found. A note scribbled on a spare practice talisman.
"Everyone in the Amanomiya clan, and elder sisters: Please forgive an action that will dishonor the family name. I have acted solely on my own judgment; Bunkichi bears no responsibility. Please do not condemn him."
When Koyoi read this letter, her mind turned to how Tasogare had looked on the day of the funeral. Her younger sister had been standing on the veranda and facing the garden, but her eyes had not been watching the pines planted there, or the carefully arranged white sand, or the carp swimming in the pond. She had seemed to Koyoi to be looking at somewhere else, somewhere far away.
◊ ♦ ◊ ♦ ◊
Tasogare probably wanted to escape from the prison called Amanomiya.
For the first time in her life, Koyoi had witnessed the moment a human was corrupted by a monster. Checking the spread of corruption and monsterization was one of a monster slayer's jobs. As a result, while she had seen humans who had already been corrupted, she had never seen the process.
Doon, her mentor, had fallen to the resurrection of his deceased wife. Koyoi had never seen anyone with a will as strong as his. And he had been corrupted in an instant.
Her teeth were still chattering with fear. In her heart of hearts, however, a longing toward corruption that was hard to resist had begun to appear.
Is this how Tasogare felt before she ran away?
After all this time, she was feeling sympathy for the younger sister she had not seen in years.
When Koyoi extricated herself from the vortex of her thoughts, the gigantic castle gate had come into view. Massive and made of metal, it was so large that an ordinary house could pass through it without getting stuck. One look at it made Lescatié's enduring strength obvious.
"When did I...?" She muttered. She had obeyed Doon and fled from the cemetery, but she did not remember which way she had run.
The castle gate gaped open. It had abandoned its duty.
Koyoi gulped audibly. She felt the air charged with violet mana, thick and thin, whispering to her to enter. The fear she had suppressed gradually rose again inside her. The root of the vast mana infesting Lescatié was inside. She must be an order of magnitude stronger than Finé. Koyoi felt certain that she could not win alone.
But...
She looked around her, but she could not see an enemy, let alone an ally. She could only hear sounds. Close sounds from the other side of the ramparts; distant ones from here and there in the residential areas. The voices of tens, hundreds of pairs of men and women crying out their love.
"Aaaahh..."
An especially loud, carnal cry in a woman's voice shook Koyoi's eardrums.
"Come on, just a little more, and you can get free of what's holding you down. That's it."
A different woman's voice.
As soon as she heard it, Koyoi felt a chill run down her spine, making the hairs stand on end.
...