by Akira Kareno
They said that in the ancient language of the emnetwiht, timere meant “a fearful or anxious heart.” The concept was that it bubbled up from everywhere; grew unnoticed; and, before one was aware, gnawed at the heart, crushed it, and devoured everything.
There was no way to know now why one of the Seventeen Beasts came to be crowned with that word. It might have been that the old scholars gave it the name on their gut feeling without really thinking about it. But regardless of the particulars, there they were, the very embodiment of that feeling.
A countless number of Beast Number Sixes, Timere, rose from beneath the sand.
As it so happens, there was a tattered, old, anachronistic clock hanging on the wall of the ship’s hold. Its frame was warped from the humidity, and the wires on its hands were twisted. It was a staunch thing, said to have already been worn down even when the oldest serving crew members first came on the ship.
They say it was a keepsake that belonged to the ship’s first captain’s grandmother. And the story of how it came to hang on the ship’s wall was one that no one could listen to without shedding a tear… But not a single person had ever heard the details of the story. Someone had probably made that up.
The tattered clock was just a tattered clock. It was useful in that one could look up and see the current time. It was nothing more, nothing less.
At the time, the clock’s hands pointed to six and twenty-six.
The first victim was a strapping young ailuanthrope, unluckily charged with cleaning the windows. With an old mop in one hand, he was in the middle of desperately trying to scrub away at the sand that stuck to the window frame.
He didn’t even have a spare moment to scream.
At the time, the clock’s hands pointed to six and twenty-eight.
A somewhat tipsy lizardfolk third officer was walking down the corridor when he heard a grating bang, bang, bang coming from the window. Wondering what it was, he went over to look, and he saw something dark green stuck to the other side of the window. And somehow, it looked like the green mass was trying to forcibly push its way through the window—no, the ship’s hull itself.
The third officer screamed.
A large crack spread across the window.
At the time, the clock’s hands pointed to six and thirty-two.
There was an explosive sound, and the furnaces began to whir.
They had to get away from the ground as fast as possible. Otherwise, everything they had would be swallowed up by the gray sand and vanish.
“Wh…wh-wh-wh-what is that?!” the bewildered first officer cried, and Glick looked out the window in turn. Beyond the faint sandstorm, the silhouettes of countless treelike forms extended their trunks and stretched their branches as they tried to ensnare the body of the Plantaginesta.
“Whaddaya mean? That’s a swarm of Sixes,” Glick grumbled in response as he stuffed cannonballs one at a time into a large cannon.
There was no way, of course, that a cannon could kill any of the Seventeen Beasts, but if it went well enough, then they could at least intimidate them. At the very least, it would be much better than doing nothing at all.
“Y-you think it’s okay that we turn on the engines? I heard that’s how Saxifraga ended up falling!”
That was because Saxifraga had been up against Beast Four. It relied on sound and movement to search for prey. The low humming of the furnaces would have been like painting a target on their forehead.
But Timere wasn’t like that. Whether they had a good sense of sight or smell or whatever it might be, they unerringly searched out the living and attacked. It didn’t matter if their prey held their breath or pretended to be dead or hid behind a door. As long as they were alive, they could not run from their fangs or their claws or whatever they had.
But on the flip side, that also meant that even if an inanimate object, like a furnace, made the biggest sounds in the world and moved erratically all over the place, it would not catch Timere’s interest.
There was no time to be explaining all these little details, and it probably wouldn’t matter anyway.
“Where are those dug weapons?! They’re here for times like these, aren’t they?! Hurry and make them clean up!!”
“Don’t make others deal with the problems you brought on yourself when you decided to ignore reality!”
The ship’s body shuddered violently. It tipped. The propellers spun wildly fast in desperation.
The ground rose.
“Okay, we’ll keep altitude at the fastest possible speed and shake off as many stuck to the outer hull as we can! We’ll get the ladies to do their work after that!”
There was a hopeless thudding sound coming from the outer walls. It somehow almost sounded like it was getting closer.
“Some of them’ve gotten inside! Evacuate everyone to a safe place!”
“I—I can’t do that! I’m an officer, not a—not a commander! This is outside my expertise!”
“Oh yeah?”
If the officer was abandoning his work, then that made things easier for Glick. He grabbed the microphone and began yelling orders to all broadcasting devices throughout the ship. Of course, he didn’t have any expertise or anything like that, either, but in a situation like this, someone who could do something had to do it, otherwise no one would survive.
The clock’s hands pointed to six and thirty-four.
Chtholly wasn’t waking up.
She had showed no signs of opening her eyes after she fainted underground.
They immediately ran back to the airship afterward and rushed to the infirmary. They grabbed the hired doctor and asked him to do something, anything to wake her up.
But of course, in the end, nothing worked.
It wasn’t like she’d fallen ill or had any obvious flesh wounds in the first place. There wasn’t any treatment for someone with no visible abnormalities. She did actually have a long, thin bit of internal bleeding in her chest, but that probably didn’t have anything to do with her coma.
Willem sat on the floor beside Chtholly as she slept, his head in his hands.
There was no point in repairing Lapidemsibilus at this juncture, now that her condition had come to this. That Carillon preserved the health of the user’s body and mind to the best of its ability. It wouldn’t work if its own user never activated even the smallest bit of venenum to awaken the sword.
“…What am I doing?” he groaned quietly.
He wanted to make her happy.
He knew he wanted to make her happy.
How much had he done for her ever since she woke up?
How much had he done to steer her in the direction of the future she wanted?
He couldn’t think of a single thing.
(—You don’t really think much of her at all, do you?)
A voice whispered to him from a dark place deep in his heart.
(You were concerned about her because she was Seniorious’s user. You never paid any mind to Chtholly herself. The only one you ever wanted to save was Lillia. The only promise you ever wanted to keep was the one you made with Almaria. Neither went very well at all, so since Chtholly’s situation was similar, you got caught up with her to fool yourself.)
No.
He had been looking at Chtholly for who she was.
(You realized you could never make her happy, didn’t you? Seniorious’s choice itself is like a curse. Her ability to wield it means from start to finish, she’s been bound, whether by fate or destiny or whatever. She never had a way out to begin with.)
No. No. No.
She could have been happy. That’s what he’d intended to give her.
(She was always being saved on the excuse that she’s a kid, right? You never looked at her for who she was. You kept your distance between the two of you. You might have embraced her, but she never embraced you. You were always the one to give her things, and she never gave you anything in return. She didn’t even stir the order of important things in your heart.)
&
nbsp; No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
I—I just… She—she was…
(“I tried my hardest to do everything I could! But I just couldn’t defy fate! It’s not my fault! Fate is all there is to blame!” …If it’s fate you’re up against, then everyone will pity you. No one’s gonna blame you. Oh, right, that’s ’cause there was nothing wrong with what you did. But—)
No—
(—what was totally fine for you ended up being fatally wrong for someone else.)
The airship rolled.
Glick was yelling over the announcement system for all personnel to seek shelter.
Willem listened vacantly, the words going in one ear and out the other.
“…‘Marry me,’ huh?”
Those were the words that came out of his mouth the day before.
“…What do I really think of her…?”
He stood slowly.
He lightly pressed his own lips against Chtholly’s as she slept.
Plop. A single teardrop brimmed in his eye and spilled onto her cheek.
He stepped back.
He could hear the grating sound of metal being split open. It sounded like the intruders had entered the ship from the outside, somewhere not too far from his location.
“…Ha-ha.”
He gave a small laugh and turned his back to Chtholly.
Though oblivious intruders they were, he was a little thankful for them. He could spend his time much better than just sitting here, thinking about awful things.
“Sorry. I’ll be back in a sec.”
That was all he said as he spoke over his shoulder and left the room.
The clock’s hands pointed to six and thirty-five.
The outlook of the battle was grim.
But for Rhantolk, there were two things she felt grateful for.
One was that since there were a great number of attacking Timere, the individual size of each Timere was not that big. Any attempt on their lives would not outright kill them. More appropriately, they divided just before their moment of death to double their selves, then they pushed the state of “death” onto one half, and the other half lived on. This repeated until each individual reached its division limit. The good thing was that, in essence, she did not see larger individual bodies among them whose division limit would be above ten. Just ten divisions meant even a lone faerie could kill them if she worked hard enough.
The other good thing was how light her body felt. Her venenum had never kindled so readily before, and it easily poured into her sword, Historia. So much so that she almost forgot how serious the situation was; it almost felt refreshing. She knew why— It was that “treatment” Second Officer Willem Kmetsch had done with his hand. She had doubted him, thinking he had simply pressed about randomly because he just wanted to touch young female bodies, but it seemed she was wrong. He certainly was amazing. Personality-wise…she found him favorable, which also meant that he was the type she wanted to tease. She could see how Chtholly was infatuated with him. If he wasn’t an emnetwiht, of all things, she might even fancy him.
“Num…ber…Three…!”
She finished off one Beast.
She flapped her wings straightaway and put distance between herself and the Beasts clinging to the side of the Plantaginesta. The Beasts could not fly. As long as she stayed in the air with her faerie wings, then she could keep a certain degree of battlefield dominance.
And the Plantaginesta would soon secure a good altitude. The Beasts clung to one another, forming a ladder with their bodies as they tried to clamber up, but they were quickly reaching their limit and falling back to the land.
“Okay…”
Now their reinforcements from the ground were gone. All that was left was to clean up the creatures already clinging to the side of the ship.
She looked out over the Plantaginesta again.
The lower third of the ship was completely enwrapped in Timere, almost as though it were prey that had fallen into a leech-infested swamp. Though she didn’t want to look right at them, she still couldn’t ignore them, and she counted roughly a hundred or two hundred of them.
“…No, no. It can’t be roughly a hundred, can it?” She unwittingly murmured a complaint about her own calculations.
Even if the division limit for one body was a sensible number, it was ridiculous how hopeless it was, with how many individual bodies there were in the first place. Even though she was now in good condition from having her venenum poisoning or whatnot cured, a long, strenuous battle right afterward would just make her worse again.
Even with a few favorable factors, the outlook of the battle was still unbelievably grim.
The clock’s hands pointed to six and thirty-eight.
Rejoice, for this is the battlefield.
Something inside Willem whispered to him.
The battlefield was a place meant for the heroic to display their bravery. A place to fight against something, destroy something, and win something. A space born and spent for that process. Here there was excitement. Glory. Tragedy. Fantasy. Reality.
He once vied for the power to stand on the battlefield. He was once bitter because he couldn’t. His heart was once pained when he sent those precious to him off to this place. So this moment now was something he should have long hoped for. It should be a blessed, heart-stirring moment.
Was that always what he wanted? Had he always wanted to feel what it was like to knock down his enemies and win something among the pain?
“…Tch.”
He clicked his tongue and brushed away the delusional distractions. He hunkered down and dashed through the corridor.
A gray mass suddenly flew at him from his side, striking at him about waist height. He lowered himself down even more and let it pass over his head.
The corridor itself became sliced—no, smashed to bits. The overwhelming mass and speed practically made him laugh. Its destructive power was almost hilarious. Bolts and screws and copper and steel plates—metal bits of all shapes and sizes danced in the air. A piece that someone had graffitied flew by in the corner of his vision. May Regule Aire always stay at peace.
The thing slipped from between the cracks in the wall to show itself. It was a gray crustacean. Its sturdy-looking shell and joints made it look a little like a crab. But of course, real crabs didn’t have ten or more legs, and those legs didn’t expand and contract.
It looked like a monster. It was easy to tell.
—This must be a Seventeen Beast thing.
He’d heard a lot about them, but it was his first time seeing one.
He thought he might find himself overcome by deep emotion, but he didn’t really feel anything in particular. In front of him was just a deformed enemy with formidable power. That was all.
—This might be the shadow of what was once emnetwiht.
The possibility stirred something inside Willem ever so slightly. Just slightly.
Once emnetwiht? So what? This thing was in front of him now as a monster. And it was threatening them. That was all. That was enough.
A strong gust of wind howled from beyond the broken wall.
Three of the Beast’s legs each flexed. It rushed at Willem to destroy him, mangling the ceiling and the walls and the floor as it did.
Willem slowly collapsed, closing the distance between himself and the Beast with a graceful step. It was the first step of the running style passed down through the bards in West Garmando. At its peak, it was a special move that would turn the body into shimmering hot air and send everything flying, but for the talentless Willem, he could use it for nothing more than a little distracting trick. And that was enough. The Beast moved and acted like a literal beast. It was nothing but formidable, and without techniques, it had no skills. Just by moving in a way to make it question its reality, he could easily dodge all its attacks.
He came right up to the side of the Beast, just a hairbreadth away. The surface of its body up close appeared to have some sort of odd-looking slime on it
.
(I sure hope that ain’t poison.)
He came to the conclusion as he pulled out his left fist. His fist made contact with a metal sheet that fell from the ceiling and smashed it right into the root of the Beast’s leg. That didn’t damage it, of course. He was up against something notorious for its ability to withstand concentrated artillery fire, so there was no way his bare fist would put it on its back.
He dropped. He bent his ankle. He turned his shoulders. He pooled all his breath into his stomach.
All of his movements tied together seamlessly and created a great strength that fed right into his fist.
The blow made a direct hit. If performed by a master, it was a technique said to have split mountains and caused waterfalls to flow backward, the question of whether that was fact or fiction aside. But those without experience, like Willem, could not pull off such a feat. The best he could do was push the opponent he punched a tiny bit forward.
And, of course, that was enough.
He pushed it toward a big gap in the wall; it was a gap that one of the Beast’s legs had just created. And once it was thrown out into the air, the wingless Beast would no longer have any way to get back to the battlefield.
The Beast fell silently, wordlessly through the madder-red sky, slowly being swallowed up by the gray earth below. As he watched it go, he relaxed the alert tension throughout his body.
“…Gh—”
He’d pushed too hard with his broken body. Everywhere ached. He couldn’t help but grimace.
He wrapped his arms around himself, checking for the damage. He was fine—as long as he didn’t have any broken bones, then his precious muscles and tendons were intact. He could still move. He could still fight.
He could still stay on the battlefield. A bloodthirsty smile spread across his face.
“—I’m surprised.”
Willem turned around, and he saw the color indigo fluttering in the violent wind.
“Hey, glad to see you’re all right, Rhantolk.” He gave a slight chuckle.
“I hate to say this, but it’s thanks to you… It doesn’t seem like you’re doing all right, though,” Rhantolk said, her face sour. “You’re being too reckless. A wounded individual fighting with a Beast empty-handed, without using any venenum, and winning against it? What sort of joke is this?”