Chapter 51 -『Yae Tenzen』

――A shinobi must attach their heart to nothing.

That is the absolute teaching bestowed in the Vollachia Empire’s Shinobi Village upon those allowed no way of life but that of a shinobi, a cardinal rule to be observed even more strictly than the iron-blooded codes rooted in the empire’s soil.

If you entrust your heart to anything, the polished blade known as a shinobi will rust with ease. Therefore, without exception, anyone who would be a shinobi must carve that iron rule into their soul and obey it. And yet—

“Aren’t you the same? Like me—since you can do just about anything, life doesn’t have much to get your blood up that way, does it. Wouldn’t it be fine to have one thing in your heart?”

Yae still remembers how unreasonably angry she felt at the village head—who opened his mouth, surprisingly well stocked with neat teeth for his age, and laughed—wondering where that iron rule of the shinobi had gone.

――Including how strongly she felt that she could never live like that.

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――Crimson Sakura Yae Tenzen is a once-in-an-era genius shinobi.

That is an unshakable fact, and even Yae herself, however reluctantly, acknowledges it. Those around her praised her as the most gifted since the founding of the Shinobi Village, and loudly proclaimed that her potential might even rival the 『礼賛者』 of the Kararagi City-States. Frankly, Yae fervently wished they would stop comparing her to such a ridiculous opponent, but putting her feelings aside, the villagers went wild over her innate gifts. In truth, if talent is something that lets you arrogantly short-cut a great deal of hardship in a given field, then Yae undeniably possessed a heaven-sent talent for being a shinobi.

However, in stark contrast to such evaluations, Yae despised being treated as “special.” It was a visceral aversion, a resistance to the very notion of “special”—a “special allergy,” one might call it. She didn’t mind when others were treated specially, but the moment she herself was, an unbearable feeling seized her and she wanted to toss everything away. That was her rejection response.

For Yae, who possessed this intense allergy to “special,” the shinobi’s iron rule—flatly denied at the outset by the head of the Shinobi Village—was in fact a perfect match.

To set your heart on something is to create a “special” within yourself. Because she was allergic to that “special,” Yae could effortlessly abide by the shinobi’s iron rule. She was, truly, a woman you could say was born to become a shinobi. Of course, that very fact was one of the reasons those around her treated Yae as “special,” which made it a real mixed blessing.

――Now then, the path of the shinobi is steep to begin with; it is not something one becomes easily. The bar is so high that they say one in a thousand apprentices becomes a junior shinobi, one in a thousand junior shinobi becomes an intermediate shinobi, and one in a thousand intermediate shinobi finally becomes a senior shinobi—a gate that narrow. For the record, every time Yae hears this analogy, she thinks, As if there’d be a billion aspiring shinobi. Well, it’s a good thing the senior shinobi at least recognize it’s such a grueling path that it makes you want to resort to ridiculous figures. With any torture, it’s only human to prefer it be done with the firm conviction of “There’s a reason to focus on this spot,” rather than to have it done to you while you’re thinking, “What’s the point of this?”

And in fact, the process of completing a shinobi is harsh enough to be called outright torture. Since shinobi training begins around the age one becomes aware of the world, Yae thinks it’s a case that ought to be called child abuse rather than mere torture; but the exploitative darkness of shinobi-making is endless once you start listing it, and if we stumble at the doorway, the story won’t move forward.

First of all, as for candidates for shinobi apprentices, they’re mostly children snatched from elsewhere. As mentioned, shinobi training starts in early childhood, but because they impose inhumane and unreasonable drills, the kids die off mercilessly in droves. So, in the name of efficiency, they don’t take babies; they abduct children of the right age to start training from the get-go. The way they skip the most labor-intensive baby years here lays bare the shinobi’s inhumanity—it’s downright nasty.

And the very first thing done to the abducted children, before anything else, is the processing of their memories. The method is said to be drugs and suggestion, or a technique that directly influences memory; no one’s sure. What is certain is that by this means the stolen children cleanly forget both their families and their hometowns. Yae does not remember her parents’ faces, nor does she know her true name. The name Yae was given to her later; until then, matched to her hair color, she was called “Red No. 8.”

Those without the aptitude stumble first over this memory processing. Either the erasure works poorly, or it works too well and turns them into useless husks; it’s a mess right from the entryway. And Yae, in a way even she considered cold-hearted, cleanly and without a fuss forgot her past. It slipped out of her so smoothly and without resistance that, as she later heard from the man himself, even Fujirou Tenzen, who handled the memory work, was left stunned. Incidentally, this Fujirou would later become the one to name Yae, the previous Tenzen whose family name she inherited. Still, calling him the one who named her aside, what existed between them was closer to the obligatory, affectionless relationship of instructor and pupil than anything like parent and child. To Yae, Fujirou was just the person who gave her a name, someone she happened to deal with more frequently than most in the village.

At any rate, by forcibly stripping away one’s emotional footholds like that and producing an infant with a past scrubbed spotless—a white canvas to be slathered over at will with the black paintbrush called shinobi—once that was done, the Shinobi Village, an institute for raising the inhuman, commenced its true specialty: not mere bodily modification, but human-body modification.

To acquire contortions and acrobatics beyond human ken, they broke and reset bones; to build tolerance to poison, they acclimated you from small doses up to lethal amounts; the dangers of body techniques and shinobi tools were learned with your body, along with pain, as a daily routine, and quotas were set for the number of bones broken, flesh torn, and blood shed. By the next morning, it was common to find peers lying cold, but even they were denied burial, used instead as teaching aids in the training to grow used to death; day after day, the fate of the corpses rotting away and their stench ate at people’s hearts, and one after another lost their sanity.

Yae handled that catalogue of so-called terrifying training without difficulty.—No, saying 'without difficulty' would be a lie. Yae struggled in her own way. But her struggles, compared to what her peers suffered, felt like a ten-thousandth of it, if that.

If that is to be called talent, then it was talent, plain and simple. For the bone-breaking and resetting, she could flip the pain switch inside herself; even the agony of poisons, as if her melted entrails were being churned, left the hematuria and bloody stools she shed to a minimum; once she laid a hand on a shinobi tool she could handle it like a partner used for ten years; a body technique she had once tasted she thereafter used to thrash opponents larger than herself and never suffered it a second time. The stench of corpses was the only thing that was hard, but in the end she got used to that as well.

With that and this, the young Yae, at an exceptional speed, became one of the first thousand.

"—From today on, call yourself Yae Tenzen."

That was the name Fujirou gave her on the day she was acknowledged as qualified to be a genin. Unfortunately, she felt little in the way of emotion. Even as Red No. 8 she had already been treated differently from her other peers, and the presence or absence of a name did not especially affect Yae’s sense of self. She merely found being treated as 'special' itchy and bothersome.

—Why Fujirou named her Yae, she still doesn’t know.

She missed her chance to ask. By now, she’s grown to like it well enough, and 'Tenzen' has a nice ring to it too. It’s far better than, through some mistake, ending up Yae Dunkelkenn. Even that bit of Yae’s sarcasm was laughed off by the village chief with, "Kakakakka! Don’t go getting cheeky on me now!" Come to think of it, there wasn’t a single shinobi in the village with the same family name as the chief; was that because he was bad at teaching, or because he shirked his role? Which was the reason, she wondered. She suspected the former had better odds.

In any case, whether she was called Red No. 8 or Yae Tenzen, the texture of the world to Yae and the way she walked as a shinobi did not change.—What changed was not Yae, but the environment surrounding her.

—And that is precisely the foremost reason Yae came to hate 'special.'

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—Now then, as already stated, Yae has a 'special allergy,' but after she was promoted to genin at the youngest age and in the shortest time, an incident occurred that accelerated that allergy.

In the end, everyone in the village would come to recognize Yae’s talent and ability, but at the point she was acknowledged as a genin, there was someone who had already been captivated by her brilliant future—Fujirou Tenzen. As the one who named her and her senior instructor, Fujirou became completely enamored of Yae’s talent, which took the one thing he taught and absorbed it not as ten, but as a hundred or a thousand.

That, in other words, was an act that violated the shinobi iron rule that one must attach one’s heart to nothing.

Yae Tenzen, a peerless genius, had to be finished by his own hand into a shinobi beyond the ordinary.—Fujirou became possessed by that blind sense of mission.

"You have that much talent. Why can’t you understand that!?"

Fujirou, who spat that out with bloodshot eyes, believed fanatically in Yae’s talent. Day by day, she had felt the heat in the way he looked at her growing, but the damage wrought when that fervor blew up far exceeded anything Yae had imagined.

Fujirou, whose brain had been seared by Yae’s “specialness,” prepared the Insect Curse—a ritual that worked on the same principle as the Vollachia Empire’s Emperor Selection Ceremony, a foolish rampage that roped in thirty genin who were Yae’s equals at the time and could have imperiled the village’s very survival.

Led out to a forest away from the village and ordered to fight until only one remained, the genin never questioned their superiors and threw their lives away. Just as Fujirou, who had set up the ritual, expected, the last one left was Yae Tenzen alone. However, her tactic of never initiating and only cutting down those who came at her, and the outcome where she spared the final peer who begged for his life, left him deeply incensed.

――No; to be precise, not he, but they.

Fujirou was not the only one who lost his way, smitten with the talent of Yae Tenzen. Spurred by his words or having witnessed Yae’s growth, many tried to saddle Yae with warped expectations by carrying out the Insect Curse. Yet even though Yae betrayed the expectations of those who believed in her blindly, their fervor did not cool; it only grew more twisted and burned all the hotter.

Had they decided to dispose of Yae for betraying their expectations and then take their own lives, that might almost have been endearing. But once they made the misguided resolve to repeat the Insect Curse as many times as it took until Yae embodied the image of a shinobi they desired, there was no medicine that could cure them.

「You are a being that overturns what it means to be a shinobi...!」

Up to the very end, collapsing as he said so, Fujirou died believing in Yae’s potential. With the throat that had ceaselessly voiced his grating claims torn open, petals of the White Snow Cherry Blossom, blooming with an irony too beautiful, fluttered down onto the bodies of the one who had named her and his foolish comrades, who lay face-down in a pool of blood. Yae remembers those petals stained with blood, together with an indescribable sense of futility.

「――Well, well, ain’t that somethin’. A wet-behind-the-ears little lass went and wiped out the lot of ’em—even though there were jonin among ’em?」

The village chief, who arrived late on the scene, looked over the corpses of the young men and Yae standing among them, and let slip that carefree impression. Apparently, the clandestine moves of Fujirou and his cohorts had been picked up by the village higher-ups, and regardless of the Insect Curse’s success or failure, they had no future. For all that they had grasped, their response was slow—though I’d rather not indulge the suspicion that they’d simply dumped the job of cleaning up the village’s malcontents onto Yae.

「So, did every last one of ’em die?」

Not because of that suspicion, but Yae lied in answer to the village chief’s question. The cause of Fujirou and the others’ displeasure—the peer whose plea for his life Yae had spared. She concealed the fact that she had let him slip away, not only from the Insect Curse but from the Shinobi Village itself.

That peer had suggested, “Ah—if that’s the case, you wanna bail together?” but Yae firmly declined. It wasn’t that she wanted to stay in the village; she didn’t want to stand beside him. In ability and talent, Yae was far superior. And yet her instincts insisted—if there were a death waiting for Yae, it would be when she stood at his side.

「――Botched it, botched it」

From that peer who left after saying so, she sensed the intent to erase everyone who knew he had survived; but he was rational enough to abandon that aspirational goal, and thanks to that, in this Insect Curse only Yae and that peer survived. Thinking that perhaps, simply by not being the sole survivor, Yae’s “specialness” might be thinned out a little.

「’Kay then, let’s head back. ――『Crimson Cherry Blossom』」

With his back turned, the village chief called Yae by an epithet she was hearing for the first time. She never did learn why Fujirou had named her Yae. But she understood without being told why the village chief called her that.

――Because on that night when far too many shinobi died, the White Snow Cherry Blossoms in full bloom were gorgeously dyed in blood.

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――Crimson Sakura Yae Tenzen is an unparalleled genius shinobi.

Promoted to jonin at the youngest age, and by the time that recognition had become common knowledge and unshakable, Yae’s twisted “specialness allergy” had grown beyond any remedy.

Being treated as 'special' by others is, to Yae, a curse, a threat, a detestable meddling that brings nothing but negative effects to one’s life. Because things like expectations and hope carry such a strong positive impression, there are far too many people who swing them around without realizing they can become blades that gouge others deep. What’s worse, an unselfaware blade makes it hard for both perpetrator and victim to even notice the wounds. Having had her life thoroughly tossed about by such things, Yae had grown utterly tired of it.

「You, isn’t that it? Same as me—since you’re the sort who can do just about anything, life doesn’t have much spark that way. Wouldn’t it be fine to have at least one thing you keep in your heart?」

To Yae, it was infuriating that the village chief, fully aware of the blade’s existence, would say such a thing. The village chief himself was urging her to break a shinobi’s iron rule. He had to be out of his mind. In the first place, Yae wasn’t seeking “something to live for” in life; she had no use for such a thing. That “something” amounts to placing expectations on your own abilities and cherishing hopes for the future—in other words, believing in your own “specialness,” which was, without question, one of Yae’s landmines.

Therefore Yae deliberately distanced herself from the shinobi ideal that everyone expects and pins their hopes on. It was the exact opposite of the shinobi image Fujirou Tenzen and the others had risked their lives to perfect—flippant demeanor, elusive words and deeds, friendly yet never cozy with anyone. As a bearer of that kind of frivolous, flighty personality, the persona of Yae Tenzen was formed.

To be clear, lest anyone misunderstand, this was the natural conclusion for Yae, who loathes “specialness,” and by no means did she model herself on the village chief’s personality. She would dig into no one’s life, face no one head-on, and be precious to no one. That was the very art of living, the life philosophy, that Crimson Sakura Yae Tenzen arrived at—

「――Surely you don’t imagine that such an unseemly way of being is your natural endowment?」

Addressed thus when they were alone, Yae held her breath before that crimson beauty. Having twisted herself into a “special”-allergy, Yae disliked being treated as “special” by others and, at the same time, had a nose for others’ specialness. On that score, the woman Yae was now dealing with at close range was a mass of “special” through and through, inside and out. Not that anyone needed a keen nose; her specialness was so blatant that anyone could see it.

――Bloodstained Bride Priscilla Barielle.

The days with her, whom her subjects affectionately hailed as the Sun Princess, were vivid and memorable even for Yae, who as a shinobi had carried out all manner of missions.

Originally, Yae infiltrated under Priscilla as a maid at the instigation of Chisha Gold, one of the empire’s Nine Divine Generals. Far away, in the Kingdom of Lugunica she was taking part in the Royal Selection; what that meant for the empire, Yae had not been told, nor did she care to ask. To obey orders without prying is the shinobi’s true calling, and Yae was fine with that. The only one who flouted it openly was the village chief; Yae was not like him, so she was obedient.

That said, it was an unreasonable and inscrutable assignment. The basics were to watch the target and report on her movements; there were no instructions for sabotage or obstruction to speak of, nor was it a “go and quickly assassinate her” sort of thing. Since it was a mission specifically requesting Yae, it certainly meant they counted on commensurate ability and a knack for coming back alive, but after slipping into the manor, for a while her days simply continued, blandly, as a mere maid.――Crass as it may sound, it felt like nothing but a waste of the genius shinobi known as the 『Crimson Cherry Blossom』.

In fact, Yae’s bountiful natural gifts gave her a versatility that let her handle not only shinobi work but most other things with ease. So for Yae, who could competently carry out maid duties, the infiltration of Barielle Manor was, like her previous jobs, an easy assignment. Only when dealing with Priscilla did she have to exercise the utmost caution.

By the nature of her work, Yae had had many chances to see personages of rank. The White Spider who had assigned her this mission was one, and for form’s sake the village chief, the 『Wicked Old Man』, was also one of the empire’s notables. She had even seen His Imperial Majesty from afar—on that occasion, her eyes met those of the Blue Lightning standing at the emperor’s side, and he waved at her; it left her in terror at just how far above the “above” there was. Even for Yae, who had dealt with such figures of the highest tier, Priscilla’s insight was fathomless, and she could not begin to predict what the woman would see through.

Even though that couldn’t possibly be true, she had still wondered many times if she’d been seen through as an assassin sent by the Empire. However, if that suspicion were true, there would be no reason for Yae to have been let go, so she must not have been found out. —Or had she? Priscilla had that elusive quality that made you think she might notice and still overlook it.

You could call it a taste for danger so strong she did not even cherish her own life, or, as she herself liked to proclaim, you could dismiss it as a delusion—an unabashed belief that the world will bend to her will.

Either way—it was a misfortune, Yae thought, and she pitied the “special” Priscilla for it.

Priscilla, whose rare beauty goes without saying, and whose bearing, words, and even the way she breathes are steeped in a bewitchment that captivates others, would, whether she wished it or not, have that “specialness” of hers touch everyone’s eyes, lives, and feelings. Crowds would pin hopes on her, cherish expectations, and be ruled by unseemly desires and emotions. —Even the pity Yae felt was something her “specialness” had brought forth.

The words at the start were uttered as if she had seen straight through Yae’s heart. Eyes lowered to the book in her hands in her private chamber, not sparing so much as a glance at Yae as she prepared tea, she suddenly said such a thing without the slightest preamble. That said, as mentioned, Yae was always on guard when dealing with Priscilla. So even then, though a little surprised, she handled it with her usual light touch.

Lightly, with a hint of playfulness, acting as if she had no intention of taking it seriously, she put on a smile. At Yae’s unchanging demeanor, Priscilla closed one eye and—

“—Sooner or later, even you will face a time when I must expend my entire self. Never forget my words; etch them into your heart. Make sure you are ‘perfectly prepared,’ mind you.”

Yae could not ask what those words truly meant. Partly because her shinobi instincts warned her that asking back might arouse suspicion. But more than that, Yae balked at it—the thought of having inconvenient words flung at her from the mouth of “special” Priscilla.

And so Yae does not know what Priscilla truly meant. Nor the reason Fujirou named her Yae, nor what the village chief intended when he kept pressing her, seemingly out of spite, to break the iron laws of the shinobi—none of it.

She shuts her ears to it and keeps averting her eyes, so that others will not treat her as “special.”

—That is Yae Tenzen’s philosophy of life: to desire no “special,” and to avoid being desired as “special.”

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In the end, Yae’s thinking was right. Even Priscilla, who shone so brightly and, with her flame-like “special” way of being, enthralled the masses, fell upon the cruel, merciless soil of the Empire and scattered her life. And those who yearned for the “specialness” she had lost, their souls scorched by passion with nowhere to go, are still burning their lives out, wanting to repay that “specialness.”

Yae Tenzen does not wish to live a life tossed about by such “specialness.” That is why—yes, that is why.

So the sooner the better: erase from this world the “special” that would make her harbor an ill-fated attachment. That, and only that, is why Yae stakes her life to help him—the one abandoned by the “special” he pined for—

“—!”

A disk of ice spinning at high speed, heedless of back and forth, up and down; even so, using it as a footing to construct the battlefield, Yae met the onrushing oni girl—Rem. The steel thread loosed from her right hand ran vertically, while the steel thread in her left swept crosswise the blade it had ensnared—two kinds of cutting flashes, an unavoidable precision double strike that trapped Rem from the front and behind.

—Through their coordination, Yae let Emilia slip away from the battlefield. Emilia, sprouting icy wings on her back, caught the momentum of the struck, spinning ice disk and the wind, and, chasing after Al as he flew off into the far, distant sky, picked up speed by the moment. Her back, drawing farther from Yae, who had no choice but to plummet straight down, finally slipped beyond the range her steel threads could reach. It was still not impossible to use the threads to hurl rocks or blades at long range, but—

“No looking away!”

But Rem foiled her—answering the double attack just before by deflecting the blade with her chain and ducking under the steel threads—and the chance slipped through Yae’s fingers as well. Grinding her teeth at the blunder, Yae used the thrown threads as handholds to make a wide arc, circling around to the opposite side of the ice disk to get away from Rem closing in at point-blank range, and—

“Isn’t it unfair to suddenly get tougher? What’s the reason—”

“—Love!”

“...I shouldn’t have asked!”

Chasing Yae, who had swung around to the far side of the ice disk, Rem brute-forced her way through by shattering the ice. The horn on her brow gleamed as the oni girl’s vitality swelled; to bring things back into her favored mid-range, Yae slipped past the swinging iron ball and those powerful arms with nimble footwork, clung to the rotating footing, and got around behind Rem. Her speed was high, but though the disk’s rotation about its axis had randomness horizontally and vertically, the spin itself had a steady rhythm. Once she caught that, there was no risk of losing her footing; Yae danced freely across the ice, leaping as if in a performance. In contrast to Yae’s elegant conquest of the platform, Rem’s movements were simple and straightforward—

"I won’t let you...!"

As if to drive that home, Rem slammed her spear-hands, her toes, and the iron ball held short into the ice, punching them in as wedges to anchor herself, and chased after Yae with beastlike motion. It was a hunting style rough and ferocious, a carnivore’s way far removed from refinement or grace—and yet fast. In the blink of an eye she closed the distance on the dancing Yae.

"Isn’t being that heedless of appearances unbecoming of a maid?"

"Sadly for you, there’s only one quality our master demands of a maid—giving it your all!"

Lifting her face, Rem twisted her body while keeping three of her four limbs planted, and with the smallest movement, fed in a single blow of the iron ball that exploited the disk’s rotation. Mustering her steel threads, Yae deflected the force and slung it off right beside herself, clicking her tongue inwardly.

A “best-maid contest between the two camps”—Yae had no room for that kind of joke. She outclassed in technique, and in raw ability she could claim not just one but three tiers above; even so, she and Rem were a simply bad matchup. The morningstar Rem wielded was a mass weapon, and those heavyweight, one-shot-kill swings were the very type of armament most troublesome to stop with steel threads. The strength of steel thread is that, when bundled and twisted together, it leaves room to block virtually any attack—but that requires proper distance and a corresponding number of strands. To safely block one of Rem’s blows, Yae had to use seven fingers between both hands. If she didn’t like that, the answer was to dodge—but—

"Her aim is too precise...!"

Despite this treacherous footing, the iron ball Rem hurled in bit into Yae like a great serpent. Its path was so straightforward it always aimed dead center at Yae; there was no way to botch the defense even with her eyes closed, yet it kept breaking the rhythm of her own offense. And as if that weren’t enough, the oni’s fearsome combat performance piled on.

"Aaaahhh!!"

Planting all four limbs into the ice disk and roaring, red steam gushed from Rem’s entire body. That was the result of the low temperature at this altitude as they dropped thousands of meters, the oni racial trait that activates the mana surging through her body, and the fact that the lacerations Yae had inflicted with steel threads were rapidly healing. In the time up to now, Yae had carved numerous wounds meant to disable her while slipping past Rem’s lethal blows. But none of them outstripped the oni’s recuperative power. And above all—

"Sh—"

She kissed the ring, and once more the steel threads were swallowed by fire. In that instant, with flames filling Rem’s vision, Yae snapped the arm she had drawn back toward the neck of the foe beyond the heat-haze—a single strike loosing a steel thread at near-sound speed to take her head. It was Yae’s original technique, not found in any secret manual, the swiftest flash among her thread arts—in Al’s parlance, a finisher. An invisible thread shot of unknown reach, a stroke of certain death she was confident would cut down any opponent—yet Rem evaded it. And not once, but twice.

"—!"

The first time she’d unveiled it, she had gotten greedy and tried to target Rem and Emilia together. Foiled then, this time she loosed it intending to sweep across the chest rather than the neck, so it couldn’t be dodged by simply pulling the head back. The slicing whistle assured her it wasn’t something that could be escaped by a fluke—therefore Rem avoiding it was no miracle or accident. It was inevitable.

Rem has seen through Yae’s steel-thread techniques. The chill mist around them was already gone; it was a different method from how Emilia had sensed the threads’ presence by the way ice particles were cut. She couldn’t be certain of the principle behind it, though.

"I won’t let you."

Abandoning the meaningless mask on her face, Yae murmured with her mouth set hard. I won’t let them. I won’t let them through. I won’t let them stop it. Rem and Emilia—Yae will stop them.

"——"

Spreading stone wings, Al took to the sky without waiting for this battle to be decided. Yae did not take that as being left behind or abandoned. There was a possibility she had been written off, but Al has a miser’s temperament; he doesn’t throw away his cards or his pieces so easily.

And so Yae accepted Al’s withdrawal as something entrusted to her—an order to stop the two pursuing them no matter what. Thus, Al had entrusted Yae with it: a license to kill.

"Even if I have to kill, I’ll stop you."

Stop it. Stop it. Stop it no matter what. Make sure Al accomplishes his objective. Eliminate anything that would get in the way. So that Al, flailing after losing Priscilla, who had been her 'special,' will disappear from the world as quickly as possible.

Unless she does that, Yae Tenzen cannot return to the self that obeys the shinobi iron law, to the existence that attaches her heart to nothing, to the self that loathes 'special' and keeps it away.

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—It was the stars.

Yes, the monster who terrified Yae Tenzen spoke the same words again and again.

The days at Barielle Manor, where she had been sent under orders to infiltrate, came to an abrupt end. Doing daily maid work, teasing the cute butler-in-training, trading light banter with the clown of a knight who wasn’t treated like a knight, and serving the terrifying yet dazzling Sun Princess—it wasn’t bad. But once an order is given, Yae’s feelings are irrelevant. She fulfills the task and disappears without leaving a trace.

Thus, when Yae moved to carry out the suddenly delivered assassination order and tried to creep up on Priscilla in her bedroom, the man stopped her in a dark corridor of the manor. With an interference that tolerated no excuses, as if he had known, Yae and the man—Al—fought a death match. And even calling it a death match, the difference in ability was obvious. Though a knight to a Royal Selection candidate, Al’s skill was far inferior to Yae’s, and the outcome should have been decided in an instant—or so it should have been.

—It was the stars.

The man whose heart she was sure she had struck threw those same words at her. Even faced with such an abnormality, Yae’s body moved without pause, and she drove in the next life-taking strike. Not dying even when killed—this was not the first time she had met such a sort. The world is full of bizarre freaks; she had even fought someone who had not two but three hearts. And he died properly when the third heart was crushed. In short, you just keep killing until he dies.

She cut off his head. She cleaved his torso in two. She burned his whole body. She tore off his limbs. She slit his throat. She smashed his skull. She gouged out his eyeballs. She peeled all the skin off his back. She shattered every bone. She crushed his organs. She made him drink poison. She buried him in the earth. She drowned him in the water. She strangled his neck. She strangled places other than his neck. She tried every shinobi art and technique, took life after life, and carried out every killing she could.

—It was the stars.

And yet, no matter how many times she killed him, Al stood up and hurled the same words at her. She used every shinobi art she possessed, tried every measure she could think of; in the end she even abandoned thinking and entrusted herself to instinct, but she couldn’t kill him. She couldn’t finish the killing.

—It was the stars.

She tried torture that would make one regret being born. It was useless. She tried to abandon the mission and run. Useless. She tried to drag others into it. Useless. At last, deciding this was the end, she looped a wire around her own neck to finish it.

—It was the stars.

Even that was useless.

—It was the stars.

The same exchange repeated, a spiral that wandered between death and death without end; given that same thing on and on and on, for the first time Yae Tenzen—felt fear.

—It was the stars.

If it would save her, she thought she would do anything. She swore she would do anything. If it would end it, she thought she would do anything. She swore she would do anything.

—It was the stars.

Even after she learned fear, Al—the man, the monster—did not let her off.

—It was the stars.

Even with her heart completely and utterly broken, there was no end to the monster’s mercilessness. She hasn’t even kept count. In this world, no one has fought to the death with Yae as many times as that monster. Uncountable times, Yae killed him; more times than she cares to count, Yae was killed by him.

—It was the stars.

There is no other opponent like this. She doesn’t need one. She doesn’t even want to think about it. Even now, released from that endlessness by the monster’s whim, even now as she has been made to swear obedience and gives her whole being to his purpose, it is carved into the depths of her soul.

—It was the stars.

He must disappear as soon as possible—the monster, the man, Al. Whatever the pretext, whatever the reason, whatever the connection, Yae Tenzen’s heart being bound by anything is something that must not be.

—It was the stars.

—For one’s heart to be bound by anything must never be.

△▼△▼△▼△

—It was the stars.

So Yae’s lips wove the words, and an invisible flash of a slash erupted, aiming at Rem’s slender neck. Feeling it together with a sensation that made her skin crawl, Rem reflexively swung the arm gripping her morningstar, slipped the chain into the path of the single stroke, and batted it aside.

The line between life and death—without a doubt, she was standing on it. A crucible that had never come her way during her days in the Vollachia Empire when she had lost her memories and her power to fight, a state she had not reached even in the battles against the Sin Archbishop and the White Whale before losing her memories—Rem was there.

"—Subaru"

With her guts trembling and her blood seeming to boil, the hottest point was the horn on her forehead—drinking in, vivid and raw, the power, emotion, and the pulse of the world flowing from it, Rem called the name of the boy she loved to rouse her soul.

The advice she had received from the dazzling Sun Princess and the swell of her feelings for her beloved worked in concert, and the oni blood coursing within Rem was at last beginning to show its true potential. Even so, the gap in ability between Rem and Yae was great, and the fact that she had managed to press this far against someone who ranked among the very strongest she had ever seen was not due to her own power alone.

It was the culmination of many forces that had doggedly pressed to stop Yae—to stop Al and the others.

From the Pleiades Watchtower, to the clash with the Felt Camp and the battles of offense and defense in the royal capital, to Otto’s relentless pursuit, and now this divide-and-conquer strike—by piling up the irregular with the methodical, Al and his lot had been bound fast by the inescapable chain called attrition. The only reason the gap in ability between Rem and Yae was temporarily filled was thanks to the weight of that chain. On top of that, a twist of fate that could only be called ironic was giving Rem a tailwind. That was—

"—!"

Yae ground her teeth as her fingers danced; the steel threads she sent out split the air and lunged at Rem. The countless slashes raining down—Rem sensed them keenly through her horn, turned them into evasion, evasion, perfect evasion, kept the life that ought to have been severed, and clung to the battlefield. The secret to that godlike—no, oni-like—evasion was one.

"—Killing intent"

She could see it. Feel it. It came through—the will of her opponent, transmitted through an oni’s horn. Slipping past that deathline she could see, colored in—tracing it, batting it back—Rem closed in on Yae.

Just before sending Emilia off—and just after Al withdrew from the battlefield—clear killing intent began to mix into Yae’s attacks. A dance of killing intent that didn’t hesitate to lop off her head or sever her limbs—ironically, it roused the oni’s instincts, and birthed Rem’s superhuman reactions. Had Yae followed her initial policy and upheld nonlethality while facing Rem, Rem would probably have been neutralized by her much sooner. By seriously beginning to bring out her true craft as a shinobi, Yae’s attacks had stopped reaching Rem. What else could you call it but an ironic tailwind?

"—"

With her toes stabbed into the spinning ice disk to support her body, Rem, in a field of view glittering with flying ice shards, fixed on Yae, who was staring back with the smile gone from her face. Sharpening her long, narrow eyes and disciplining her heart, Yae was beautiful enough to steal one’s gaze, and Rem could tell—as plainly as if holding it in her hand—what it was that supported that supple, well-trained body.

What filled Yae’s slender frame was a sense of mission. A wish that had to be fulfilled and a prayer she could not help but see through granted Yae an extraordinary power and lodged in her the resolve to turn the world into her enemy if need be. And Rem knew what that sense of mission welled up from.

"Because I... Rem, am the same."

Horn sprouting from her forehead, body bearing wounds all over, even as she plunged headlong from a height of five thousand meters—the reason Rem could still be standing here like this was also a sense of mission. A wish that had to be accomplished and a prayer she was determined to achieve gave Rem an extraordinary strength and the resolve to throw everything away to save just one person. And Rem had no reason to refrain from saying what that sense of mission arose from. It was—

"—Love!!"

"That’s the only thing you ever say...!"

There was irritation in Yae’s voice as she answered Rem’s roar. The expression of the shinobi, who had frozen or feigned her feelings and never shown her true heart, came apart at the seams. Rem didn’t take that for inexperience, conceit, or carelessness. Gritting your teeth is only natural—if you’re going to spend all of yourself for someone.

"—"

At the edge of her vision, amid the fierce struggle, a line carved into the rock wall grazed Rem’s awareness. Azgadd Canyon, five thousand meters—one mark left—until the depths below—

"—Ten seconds!!" "—!"

Facing a barrage of threads like a surging swell, Rem deliberately shouted that. Give her information. Add to her points for judgment. Throw her thoughts into disarray; if it made even one or two of the twenty digits on her hands and feet hesitate, that was enough. Agitate her, strip her emotions bare, make her hate me. Let malice, hostility, killing intent overflow—slip through, slip through, sliiip through— And then—

"Here!"

As Rem and Emilia intended—right at the final ten seconds, then five seconds after that, a shock from directly below mercilessly blew through the ice disk.

△▼△▼△▼△

"—It was the stars."

Yes, the monster that took up residence in Yae’s heart would often murmur that. Yae still dreams of that man’s voice, a voice she feels she heard thousands, tens of thousands of times.

At first, she found Al’s catchphrase detestable. Even the stars would want to protest if you pinned every last thing on them. It wasn’t the stars that cracked and shattered Yae’s heart; it was undeniably the monster—so how dare he shift the blame.

But little by little, she realized she was wrong—that it wasn’t the man shifting responsibility at all.

"—It was the stars."

When he says it, Al never gloats. What’s there isn’t scorn or ridicule, but probably something like mercy or sympathy. And as proof of that, the monster, the man, Al, did not say it.

He did not say that the death of Priscilla Barielle was because of the stars. He did not say that the stars were to blame for his own disgraceful failure to save her life.

"—It was the stars."

The times the monster, the man, Al says those words are always when his unreasonable power crushes the other party’s wish or purpose. Woven together with mercy, sympathy, and guilt, they are always telling the other person this:

—It’s not your fault.

Ah, I hate it. I hate it, hate it. I really hate it.

She didn’t want to notice that. She didn’t want to notice what lay in Al’s words, in the man’s gaze, in the monster’s heart.

Yae wants to find no reason in Al other than fear. She doesn’t want to hold it. She doesn’t want to remember it. That’s why she wants to end it as soon as possible.

—She doesn’t want to give this “special” anything a name other than fear.

△▼△▼△▼△

"Everything… it’s the stars’ fault…"

Hearing that sound slip from her own lips, Yae dragged back the consciousness that had flown for but a moment. In the next instant, she realized her body had been blasted into the air, her view spinning round and round.

An impact—yes, there had been an impact. The ice disk had been struck by something from directly below, and the shock of the ice shattering had pierced Yae as well. What was it? As she glanced downward at the edge of awareness, she saw that what had smashed the ice disk was the canyon floor thousands of meters below, and from there the summit of a colossal iceberg thrusting upward—the great river running along the canyon floor had been frozen, forming a terrifyingly massive block of ice that lay in wait for the falling disk.

From the speed of the fall, the wind, and the seconds that had passed, the drop distance was roughly five thousand meters—the matching geography was the world’s largest canyon, Azgadd Canyon. Confronted with the brute-force feat of freezing the great river that flowed along its floor, Yae grasped just how out of scale Emilia’s magic was. But what she felt most keenly was—

"…A shrewd woman, indeed."

In her whirling vision, amid the breathtaking sight of fragments from the shattered ice disk glittering into diamond dust, Yae picked out the figure of Rem, crowned with a shining horn. At the moment of collision, Rem had fled into the sky to escape the shock; using the flying chunks of ice as footholds to accelerate, she was now plunging toward Yae, who was still in midair.

She’d been misled into thinking there were another ten seconds when there were five until impact. To lose one’s cool is a failure unworthy of a shinobi. To fall behind is a folly unworthy of a maid. To betray the role entrusted to her is something unworthy of the 『Crimson Cherry Blossom』—

"—It was the stars."

Not to the oni girl closing in before her, not to herself exposing such a disgraceful sight, but to the monster who wasn’t here—far, far away, blown off into the distance—Yae addressed those words. She gave them to the monster with the very same meaning as when that very monster would offer them to others.

"—Ah."

Her whole body creaked from the blow, and Yae couldn’t even tell if her hands and feet were still attached. So what if there was numbness. She’d conquered numbness in anti-poison training. So what if she couldn’t feel her limbs. In torture training they’d broken every bone in her body. So what if her mind wasn’t clear. She’d even overcome training where they drained huge amounts of blood and made her fight on the verge of death. The fact that each of those things was useful to her now made her feel as if she could hear the village head’s sly laughter, and it made her angry. It made her angry—but—

"—Ah."

Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of times—she had repeated the same motion. The steel threads—a technique unused for centuries that required delicate skill to move one’s fingertips by mere millimeters—Yae manipulated them despite the numbness, the blood loss, and the haze over her consciousness. Even if seventy percent of her life were spilling out of this body, the fingers that reeled the steel thread would not err.

"—Aaaah!"

Drawing tight her outstretched hands and feet, in that instant the ice blocks bound to the steel threads roared through the sky. The fragments of the ice disk shattered by the impact, ensnared in the threads, whirled through the air in furious arcs in time with the rhythm of Yae’s whole body and slammed sideways into the onrushing Rem.

「――――」

A thunderous roar resounded, and Rem, clubbed by a block of ice, was blasted away at ferocious speed. To press the attack on the flying Rem, ice blocks snared by steel threads were hurled one after another, one after another, one after another, pelting Rem—who had landed ahead of them on the summit of the iceberg—with crushing blows. The white snow-dust billowing up, the ice-mist hanging thick were tinged with blood, turning the iceberg into an oni’s grave marker.――In the next instant, the gravemarker was pierced, and a spiked iron ball shot straight up to stab into Yae.

「――gh」

The vicious iron mass, with its accompanying spikes, gouged Yae’s torso and plunged deep through her flank. However, she had shifted her vital organs to the side. Thanks to the shinobi’s inhumane bodily modifications, Yae could bias the positions of her internal organs. The spikes pierced an empty cavity, spraying blood from her back. However, she had taken this hit on purpose.

She clenched her muscles and trapped the spiked iron ball within her own body. Then, bursting through the shroud of white snow-smoke, came a blood-smeared oni who had followed the chain of the iron ball speared into Yae and leapt straight up with ferocity. Her trajectory was direct, without twist, without craft, a straight line borne of unfiltered intent—and lying in the path of the onrushing Rem, steel threads woven into a lattice awaited.

「――――」

She flung herself of her own accord into the birdcage of steel threads that would tear her body to shreds; countless lacerations blossomed across Rem’s white skin, threatening to chop her into hundreds of pieces. But just before that could come to fruition, Rem’s lips spun a faint incantation,

「Huma」

A spell that conjured ice, one they had seen again and again in this fight. On the brink, Rem chose that, and Yae braced herself, wary with her whole body as to where the ice would appear—running her nerves three hundred and sixty degrees in all directions to guard against any surprise attack. However, it proved unnecessary. There would be no sneak attack. The ice formed right before Yae’s eyes.

The bite of the steel threads that should have sliced Rem’s body into pieces suddenly stopped. Looking, Yae saw the threads digging into her flesh had been halted by red ice—blood that had been frozen. In the moment she understood, a kiss kindled flame on the threads, and the explosive heat melted the frozen blood to resume the lethal thread-strike. But she was too late.

「Yaaah――!!」

Not missing the instant’s slack in the threads, Rem roared and swung her fist at Yae. It was a blow packed with the will to end this battle and the full might to make it so; from measurement, Yae could tell that blood-smeared white fist carried that much power. Therefore, she could not take it. Must not take it. Emilia still remained.

To reach that point, she drew her trump card.

「――――」

Using the twenty fingers of both hands and feet, the enemy had slipped through every steel thread she had mobilized. But there was one more. There was still one left. The trump card of Yae Tenzen’s steel-thread arts—the red tongue she had stuck out at her foe as if to taunt—

「Beh」

From the ring caught on the tip of that tongue, the final cutting flash was loosed. Unerring, it caught Rem’s slender neck as she rushed in and, with a single stroke, severed her life.

△▼△▼△▼△

――Crimson Sakura Yae Tenzen is a peerless, once-in-an-era genius shinobi.

Her talent and prowess were rated exceedingly, exceedingly highly by 『Wicked Old Man』 Olbart Dunkelken. The person herself greatly disliked being so highly appraised, but since that reaction of distaste so perfectly stoked his sadistic streak, Olbart didn’t stop.

In sheer skill, the one seasoned by years—himself—was probably superior. But her talent far outstripped his, and once it was tempered by years, an unbeatable shinobi no one could touch would be born. So he could more or less understand the urge to dream about Yae.

That said, he was himself and others were others. There’s no point in having someone else fulfill your dreams. So what Olbart—who never stopped dreaming for himself—could offer the prodigy girl was heartfelt advice—no, a warning.

「Y’see, yeah? I’ve been through it myself. Folks like us, out of the ordinary, we tend to outlive your average shinobi and see all kinds of things. And, every now and then, it happens. There comes a time when you can’t keep to the ironclad shinobi precepts.」

「Huh? You think I’m sayin’ the ones with nothin’ precious are weak? Nah, nah, that ain’t what I’m talkin’ about. It’s this: you can’t treat a poison you don’t know, right?」

「We make kids swallow poison from the time they’re brats so they won’t die to poison. Then sayin’ it’s fine to keep one thing in your heart—that’s advice meant to keep you from dyin’, too.」

「See, we ain’t ever loved, ain’t ever been loved. That makes you real weak.――When a shinobi first comes to care about someone, y’know. Kaka-kakka!」

△▼△▼△▼△

With a flash of her trump card, the steel thread that stretched from the ring hooked on the tip of her tongue raced out; unerring, it reaped the slender neck of the onrushing oni girl and severed the link between head and torso.

She lifted her no-kill restriction and carried out the elimination of the obstacle standing in the way of Al's goal. Thinking of that fact, and of Al's reaction when he learned of it, Yae felt a creak deep in her chest――,

「――Huh?」

Just before she could bite down on that ache, Yae's eyes flew wide as she doubted herself at the sight before her. Without a doubt, Yae's steel thread had severed Rem's slender neck. She had felt the sensation of cutting down her prey, and she had clearly heard the slice through blood, flesh, and bone—the wind-shear of a life being cut. And yet――,

「――I cheated too。」

Yae's crimson eyes and Rem's pale blue eyes met. Those eyes had not lost their light. And the red line of death that should surely have been carved across that neck slowly fades.――Not blocked, not dodged; the very strike that should have taken a life was canceled. It was a miracle that should not be, one that cannot be explained by the oni clan's powers of recovery alone. Someone capable of healing magic of that magnitude—in all the wide world, there should be none――,

「――Lord Al」

She had wanted to lend her strength to that monster who would never lose, even if he made the whole world his enemy. By doing so, she wanted to erase the “special” that had taken root in her heart. And yet――,

『――It was the stars.』

Close her eyes, and she hears again those terrifying words that make every hair on her body stand on end. And yet, just in this moment, strangely, what they brought Yae was not fear, but—.

「The cause of defeat――」

「――Love.」

The iron ball, unleashed by that answer's mighty arm, slams into Yae's torso and sinks in. More lethal than a fall from five thousand meters, the oni's blow detonates――atop the iceberg in Azgadd Canyon, cherry blossoms scatter.

――The 『Crimson Cherry Blossom』 known as Yae Tenzen was scattered, fleeting and fierce, before the blue oni.