Chapter 4: Maiden Dried from Dew

Chapter 4: Maiden Dried from Dew

Maiden Dried from Dew

Rewind time to when the evening ball at Libelle Castle had just begun.

The monstrine production plant used by the Fourth was in a manor that stood in a supposedly deserted part of the port city. Since Flarette had arrived in town, they were on heightened alert, tension crackling in the air. The man who was guarding the gate could feel the nervousness from those within the building.

A lone figure approached the manor.

At a glance, she appeared to be an adorable young girl. She wore white gloves and a frilly culotte skirt. The black tights on her slender, fawn-like legs had a heart design over the thigh. It almost looked like the tail of a little devil. With her pink hair put up in two scrunchies, the diminutive girl had an impish air of cuteness.

Her sweet looks were certainly no cause for alarm. At most, one might think it would be dangerous for a young girl to be walking around alone at night.

The problem was the rest of her attire.

She wore priestess robes, albeit in white.

The sleeves and skirt hem had been altered, but it was still unmistakably a priestess’s robes. The white color indicated that she was only an aide, but she was still a member of the Faust, an enemy of the Fourth.

“Hey!” the brawny guard called out, but the girl didn’t slow her pace. He was taken aback by the closing distance between them. She was moving so confidently that he thought perhaps she hadn’t heard him, which made him hesitate to take further action.

But that was only for an instant. He stared the girl down with a mostly menacing face.

“Stop right there. What business does a priestess—”

—have here? He never managed to finish his sentence.

The girl nonchalantly drew a stringlike object out from her skirt and wrapped it around the guard’s neck.

She did it so naturally that he didn’t have time to react.

The sharp string dug into his neck. The prickling sensation on his skin rendered the guard speechless.

In silence, the girl brought her face closer.

When they were close enough that their noses were practically touching, she spoke with an expression so serious, it made the grown man shudder.

“Keep quiet if you don’t want me to saw your head off.”

Her voice was so chilly that her breath felt icy cold on his face. The guard turned pale. He could imagine all too clearly what would happen if the coping saw wrapped around his neck were to move.

The girl rolled her eyes as the man went mute with fear. Then she knocked him out with a knee to the stomach.

The glow of Guiding Enhancement surrounded her body. She placed her hands on the enormous gate, although it was firmly shut.

Her delicate arms moved to the side.

The iron gate bent like it was made of putty. Even with the help of Guiding Enhancement, this strength was far from ordinary. She twisted the gate open with ease, creating a hole large enough for a person to slip through.

After walking through the front gate, the girl stood at the main entrance to the building. When she noticed it was locked, annoyance crept onto her face. She’d technically been trying to be stealthy thus far, but now she raised her foot and slammed the sole of her boot into the heavy wooden door.

It was blasted inside.

A crash far too violent to be mistaken for a visitor’s knock echoed through the building. The workers inside noticed and began clamoring immediately. There was no indication of panic on the girl’s face. She walked into the manor and headed down a hallway with her coping saw in one hand.

As she infiltrated the enemy base, there was only one thought on her mind.

I’ll do my best so I can spend more time with my darling.

Momo was launching a head-on attack on the monstrine production plant.

The people inside acted purely on instinct.

Clearly, they had never thought about the possibility of being attacked. There didn’t even seem to be a proper chain of command. Momo fended off their uncoordinated counterattacks.

The majority of them seemed to be using this so-called monstrine, presumably unaware of its side effects, but they were hardly a threat. The strengthening they got from that strange drug was no more powerful than the average person using Guiding Enhancement.

It was undoubtedly convenient to gain strength comparable to Guiding Enhancement without any training. It enhanced their resilience, too. Being able to take a punch was certainly a significant advantage in battle.

But that was all.

Since they weren’t trained, they were essentially novice fighters. Slightly stronger than average amateurs were no threat to Momo, no matter how many attacked at once. She drove them off with ease.

Some scrambled away, but she didn’t bother chasing them. The area was already surrounded by knights on Sicilia’s command. If the fleeing members of the Fourth saw the knights and tried to resist, they’d be arrested, and if they asked for help, the knights would be able to break into their territory on the pretense of keeping the peace.

Momo stopped abruptly. She sensed an ambush waiting at the end of the hallway. The muzzle of a gun poked out around the corner.

It was a Guiding gun. These dangerous weapons automatically drew out the user’s power, turning it into bullets with the pull of the trigger. The production, distribution, and ownership of Guiding guns were all forbidden, but the Mechanical Society that controlled the eastern part of the Wild Frontier produced these pesky Guiding vessels, nonetheless.

Momo furrowed her brow and charged her priestess robes with power.

Guiding Force: Connect—Priestess Robes, Crest—Invoke [Barrier]

At the same time as a barrier appeared directly in front of Momo, the gun opened fire.

“Just like in Grisarika Kingdom… Where are they getting these things?”

The hail of bullets ricocheted off the barrier. Before long, the firing ceased. Since the Guiding guns used power, they drained the user’s energy rather quickly.

This was her chance. Momo took a step forward. Just then, the wall next to her broke open.

As soon as the gun stopped firing, a fighter from the Fourth burst through the wall to attack. The ambush from the gun up ahead was just a feint. When the firing stopped and created an opening, they would surprise her with an attack through the wall at the side. It isn’t a terrible plan , Momo thought. If anything, the only miscalculation was that they were no match for her.

Momo had already sensed the enemy’s presence, so she was able to react instantly. As soon as the fighter came crashing through the wall, she grabbed his face to stop his charge and slammed him into the floor.

“Gah…agh!”

She paid no mind to the short scream. Instead, she bashed him into the floor a second and third time, paused, and did it again. The floor cracked, and the man’s face dug into its surface. His limbs flailed wildly with each slam. By the fifth time he was smashed into the stone floor, the man had completely lost consciousness, and Momo decided to drag him along as a shield.

By the time she turned the corner, her would-be assailants were trembling in terror of what they’d just witnessed, their Guiding guns lying abandoned on the floor.

“Eek! H…help—”

Momo silenced the cowards with a swift kick to the face.

She didn’t care if they begged for their lives. She beat them up at random and stomped their guns into scrap metal. Since they were forbidden contraband, it wasn’t easy to acquire them in bulk. She assumed that was probably all they had as she moved forward.

When she entered a large room, there were some noncombatants cowering in the corner, presumably having missed their chance to get away. Perfect. She grabbed one of them and interrogated him while pressing her coping saw against his forehead, and he quickly spilled everything he knew.

Just like that, she’d gotten the information she needed. Momo had him lead the way to the office with important documents in it, where she grabbed a few stacks of paper and riffled through them.

“Aha. Bingo.”

The knights were supposed to bring up the rear after Momo’s attack, but just to be safe, she took some images as proof with a recording conjuring.

Once she’d recorded the members and source of funding, she headed downstairs. The monstrine in question seemed to be made with some special production equipment.

She’d noticed the stairs to the basement on her way here. Most of the workers had already either been beaten up or run away, so the manor was quiet. She knocked out the person who’d guided her and calmly headed toward the basement.

By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, the air was almost disturbingly cold.

The room was large and rectangular. It was a ceremonial hall shaped like a coffin, a symbol of death. There were crests carved into the walls that formed all kinds of pictures.

Within the coffin-shaped room were smaller, individual coffins. The images on the walls represented the world after death. These were commonly seen in ceremonial halls related to the Concept of Original Sin.

And here, instead of a coffin, there was something far stranger in place.

“……Ugh.” Momo wrinkled her nose.

It was an iron maiden.

While on the outside it had the carved face of a woman, the inside contained sharp spikes. It was an infamous torture device and method of execution.

If it were only for decoration, that would be one thing. It would just exhibit poor taste.

But since it was in a ceremonial hall for Original Sin Conjurings, there was no way it was a mere decoration. Many of the Original Sin Conjurings required the sacrifice of a “pure maiden.”

Most of all, Momo detected the scent of blood.

There was a person inside. A living person, no less.

“So this is how monstrine is produced? How disgusting.”

Shaking her head, Momo drew closer to the ominous torture device.

There were crests carved into the coffins. A mysterious, warped conjuration. Those used for the sacrificial ceremony were drawn with the iron maiden at the center. Momo couldn’t read the finer details, but it was clearly an Original Sin at work.

A pill dropped from the lower part of the iron maiden with a clatter. Momo recognized it as the red pill called monstrine.

Clearly, whoever created this was not of a sound mind. They’re obviously insane , Momo thought as she undid the latch and opened the iron maiden.

Inside the torture device was a little girl.

She might have been ten years old, or maybe even younger. And yet, this small child was so covered in blood that to call her injured would be a gross understatement.

Her eyes barely seemed to see anything. She was so exhausted from pain that she couldn’t even make a whimper of anguish.

Noticing light outside the dark iron maiden, the girl reached out her hand.

Letting out a groan, her unsteady hand touched Momo’s palm. Even if she couldn’t see, she could at least detect the softness and warmth of a human touch. Her hand gripped Momo’s weakly.

“Mmm…” She let out a breath of utter relief.

A faint smile emerged on her lips. It was a childish, cherubic smile, with the pure trust normally reserved for a mother, or the mischievous glee one might share with a friend.

Then she spoke.

“…Mmmom.”

With that, the last of the strength left her small body.

As the girl expelled her last breath asking for her mother, the weight of her hand grew heavier. She slouched forward, and Momo gripped her hand tightly.

But the girl didn’t squeeze back.

“……”

Even Momo, who was usually uninterested in anything but Menou, felt compassion for a young life lost so tragically. She couldn’t possibly leave the girl like this. Just as she moved to extract the small girl’s body from the iron maiden…

Guiding Force: Auto-Connect (Conditions Met)—Iron Maiden, Crest—Invoke [Explosion]

“What?”

She didn’t even have time to be surprised.

The Guiding Force stored in the production vessel activated the crest, causing the Iron Maiden to explode. Spikes flew in every direction. The force of the explosion sent needles flying toward Momo.

It was almost point-blank distance. Since she was leaned in to pull out the little girl, she couldn’t possibly avoid them all.

Momo wasn’t nearly fast enough to activate the barrier crest in her priestess robe. She just barely managed to use Guiding Enhancement and defended her vital points with her arms. Several of the spikes scratched Momo, and one pierced her side. Momo grimaced in pain.

“Whoever set this up was awfully sadistic…”

It was a booby trap. Someone had set it up so that removing the girl from inside would activate a conditional crest and set off an explosion.

The strangest part was that it activated not when the iron maiden was opened, but when she removed the victim inside. Not only had the person responsible shut a little girl into a vile torture device, they had even used her as bait to set up a nasty trap.

Swearing, Momo pulled the spike out of her side. Fortunately, the wound was shallow. Still cursing to herself, she turned around to leave.

Then her legs faltered.

It wasn’t because of the pain from the wound. She hadn’t lost enough blood to affect her consciousness. And yet, her legs were suddenly shaky. It was a strange feeling, as if something was eroding away her spirit.

“It was coated with poison…!”

Momo clicked her tongue furiously. There had been poison on the iron maiden’s spikes.

“Whoever did this really is the absolute worst…!”

She scowled as she realized her own blunder.

All of this occurred the day before.

The morning after the ball at Libelle Castle, Menou visited the church.

Her pace was usually calm and collected, but today she was rushing in a near-panic. She couldn’t even fully compose her expression; the faint lines under her eyes betrayed her exhaustion.

There were two reasons Menou was in a fright.

One was that Akari had disappeared the night before. She’d been searching for her almost nonstop, but Akari had been gone without a trace since Manon Libelle’s party. This couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.

And there was one more reason.

Menou rushed into one of the sickrooms of the church, where Momo was resting. Lying in bed, she looked pale.

“Darli—”

“Don’t sit up.”

Momo tried to rise to greet her, but Menou didn’t want her to waste any energy. She quickly put her hand to Momo’s forehead and furrowed her own brow.

She was burning. An abnormally high fever and drenched in sweat. Her breathing was ragged and her eyes unfocused.

“……Poison, huh?”

“Yeah…” Momo’s voice sounded weak. “I’m…sorry… There was a kid, and I…let my guard down… I slowed…you down, darling…”

“You don’t need to apologize.” Menou shook her head at Momo, who looked guilty in spite of her awful state.

This was Menou’s mistake. She had placed too much responsibility on Momo. They didn’t have any information about the enemy’s forces, yet she sent Momo into their base anyway, assuming she would be fine.

“Just rest up and preserve your strength. Don’t worry. I’ll stamp out those scum from the Fourth.”

“…Okay.” Looking relieved, Momo quietly closed her eyes.

It must have been hard for her even to talk. As soon as her eyelids shut, Momo drifted off to sleep. But it couldn’t exactly be described as a peaceful rest. The poison was still eating away at her body.

Menou wiped the sweat off Momo’s forehead, then stroked her hair gently, brushing it into place.

She couldn’t ask Momo for any more help with this situation. As she left the sickroom behind, Menou made a rare display of fury, letting out a low growl.