People really could get used to anything.
Yet even so, his cooking refused to improve.
When it came to food, Kaito’s specialties were borderline nonexistent. Because of this, he simply couldn’t come to terms with Elisabeth’s incessant anger in the slightest.
At this point, he had more or less given up on trying to improve. Yet for some reason, Elisabeth still had expectations of him, and her disappointment seemed to grow by the day.
“I no longer harbor hope for your cooking. As such, you need not make dinner tonight.”
It was after she’d sampled his second attempt at a salted, grilled heart that she’d moved to the throne room and finally given up on him. The clear blue sky peered through the crudely fashioned hole behind her.
The Knight’s beast had smashed one of the walls, and she’d seen fit to simply leave it that way. Yet, she seemed to favor the room nonetheless, continuing to use it despite the damage.
She had repositioned the throne, though, and she rested her cheeks in her hands as she sat upon it. Her expression looked like she was harboring a headache as she turned to the waiting Kaito. She pointed to a door he was unfamiliar with.
“In exchange, I order you to spend today hunting through the Treasury.”
“The Treasury?”
As Kaito parroted her words, Elisabeth stomped on the stone floor. In the middle of the room, a spiral of darkness and crimson flower petals flared up like a bonfire. It converged on a single point, engraving a blazing rectangle in the stone as it disappeared. It left behind a black door.
The door swung open from inside like clockwork.
Beyond the door lay a spiral staircase. Considering the layout of the castle, it seemed odd for a spiral staircase to be below the throne room, but given that he’d just seen a door appear out of thin air, he realized that voicing that particular thought would be rather foolish. He decided to be impressed.
“Huh, I didn’t know the castle had a place like this.”
“Indeed it does. A thought crossed my mind after the affair with the Earl the other day. Your cooking is worse than pig feed, but your purin is rather tasty, and your ability to stay rational under pressure and the fearlessness you regard me with are not without value. And when you air the sheets, your face flushes with amusing displeasure. In following, I have decided to grant you a weapon to use in the event you find yourself facing off against a demon on your own. You may select one item from the Treasury—whatever you deem useful. No matter what it may be, I shall grant it to you.”
“Er… I guess I should say that I’m happy and grateful?”
“As an aside, the place I call the Treasury is, in truth, a magical space. I took everything that once resided in the castle in my hometown, moved it all here, and tossed it in. The objects down there have been steeped in hatred and bitter memories, so mind what you touch. Some of them will kill you.”
“Wait, this is just another form of harassment!”
“Silence! Cease your whining and be off already!”
The kick that followed was both precise and accurate, and Kaito went flying like a toy ball. He was, once again, the very image of a cartoon character as he rolled through the door. With exquisite timing, the door slammed shut behind him. He tried pulling and pushing on it, but as he suspected, it didn’t budge.
His path of retreat had been cut off. Surely even cruelty had to have its limits.
At the moment, the spiral staircase in front of him seemed to be commanding him to advance.
The rectangular steps hung floating at fixed intervals, gently curving their way below through the dim light. He looked down, but all he could see were steps going on seemingly forever. A tepid wind blew up from the depths. He couldn’t even tell whether or not there was a floor beyond all those stairs.
“…You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
Kaito reflexively grumbled as he peered down the series of stairs that had no railing to speak of. Despair began creeping into his heart. But he shook his head and reevaluated his situation.
Well, it’s true that Elisabeth usually has a point to the things she says.
He would need a weapon if he was going to fight more demons. If he’d had one before, he might have been able to manage a better fight against the crows and the spider. And there was no guarantee he wouldn’t end up in a similar situation again. He didn’t want to make the same mistake a second time around.
Never again.
And if that meant hunting through this magical space, then so be it.
“I guess I don’t have a choice.”
Kaito faced the stairs, which could very well lead to the depths of Hell, and steeled himself. He spread his arms wide for balance. The clack, clack of his footsteps echoed against the darkness below as he began his descent.
He’d expected the darkness surrounding him to continue on forever and was surprised to find that not to be the case.
As he walked, rubbish gradually began appearing beside the stairs. A massive birdcage and iron maiden appeared in the gloom, followed by a hanging rack and a wooden horse with no sense of rhyme or reason to their order. As the torture devices glowed faintly in the dark, it became apparent that each bore grisly traces of use. The iron maiden’s chest was caked with dried blood, and the spikes sticking out of the birdcage were discolored with chunks of meat and fat.
Kaito realized something as he looked at the rusty tools. Unlike their magical counterparts that Elisabeth summoned, these were real. The ones Elisabeth conjured up were always unused. No doubt she had the ability to summon them without limit, each free of rust or fat.
So why is this place full of their mundane counterparts?
“Beats me.”
Tilting his head in confusion, Kaito continued on.
He suddenly found that the stairs had disappeared and his path was flat again. As this space was throwing off his sense of balance, he had no idea when the change had occurred. The stone floor just looked like a larger step, and he continued down its seemingly endless span. The items around him became even more disorganized.
There was a gem the size of his fist, a round pot covered in three-dimensional bee ornaments, and a barrel of vintage rum. There was a tiger’s pelt. There was ivory. A broken chandelier. Some kind of small mummy. There was a bronze ax, an iron sword, and a silver spear.
He pulled out the splendid-looking sword from the vase it rested in, then found himself stumbling backward.
“This one’s no good; it’s too heavy… And it looks like the ax and the spear are, too.”
It seemed that the weapons the Earl had prepared were chosen such that children could easily wield them. However, the weapons in the Treasury were designed for hardened soldiers and knights. They didn’t seem to offer any sort of magical assistance, either. As Kaito had never undergone any manner of training, he doubted he’d be able to use them to any degree of effectiveness.
He heaved the sword aside. It landed with a clang, then sunk into a pile of gold coins that resembled an ant-lion pit. Turning his eyes from the riches, he continued walking forward. But the farther he walked, the less weapon-like the objects around him became.
A comfortable-looking rocking chair. A sewed piece of embroidery. A painting of a deep forest.
“…Huh?”
Suddenly, Kaito’s shoe hit something soft. He looked down and saw a teddy bear with cotton protruding from its chest. As he examined the space, he realized he was surrounded by children’s toys.
Apparently, he’d reached the stratum containing items Elisabeth had owned in her early childhood.
As evidence that they’d been hers, the stuffed animals’ chests were ripped open, and the dolls were all beheaded. The cross sections of wood, porcelain, and cotton were pitiful to look at.
“I guess she’s been into that kinda thing for a while, huh.”
Kaito muttered dejectedly. They say that people never change, but this wasn’t adorable in the slightest. He almost flung the teddy b
ear away in his annoyance but, feeling sorry for it, gently set it back on its table.
As he was about to resume walking, a hollow voice rang out from far away.
“Elisa……beth… Eli…sa…beth…… Sa……beth…”
“Who’s there?”
Kaito froze in his tracks. The next moment, a man’s deep voice coiled around him like a serpent.
“Elisabeth… Elisabeth… My darling daughter… Elisabeth… My—”
The voice was incredibly creepy. It had the hollow quality of wind blowing through trees yet at the same time seemed almost hot as it coiled around his skin. Kaito felt that if he listened for too long, his eardrums—and eventually his brain—would dissolve.
“What…is that?”
Driven by an intense, visceral disgust, Kaito took a step back. The voice grew louder, as though it were pursuing him. Kaito broke into a run, instinctively trying to shake off the voice. But as if refusing to let him escape, the voice pursued him with strange tenacity.
“Elisabeth… Elisabeth… My darling daughter… Elisabeth… My—”
“Hey, what the hell is going on?”
No matter how far he got, the voice kept coming. He looked around for a way to escape, then spotted something. Behind the pile of broken toys, reminiscent of a mountain of corpses, was a door. It looked almost as though the toys were soldiers, protecting it. Willing to try anything, Kaito grabbed the knob and turned.
The door swung open, but behind it was not light but an even deeper darkness. After he passed through the door, Kaito felt his eyes widen.
He was standing in the middle of an unfamiliar room.
“…Huh?”
Dumbfounded, Kaito surveyed his surroundings. This was clearly a child’s room.
The rectangular walls were covered with wallpaper adorned with a dull yellow floral design, and beside the window were cute confectionary-like plaster sculptures. The furniture was all white, and atop a beautiful chest of drawers with metal handles sat a group of dolls and stuffed animals. There was a four-poster bed, too, with pearl-gray sheets and a heavy mattress no doubt stuffed with down.
Sitting on the bed was a young girl wearing a negligee atop a pile of blankets.
Her chest was stained in the sticky red shade of blood.
She struck a gaunt figure, her wispy veins visible beneath her pale skin. Her long hair was no doubt once beautiful, but at the moment it was devoid of luster and the tips were all tangled together. While her round eyes and shapely nose seemed almost sculpted, those hollow eyes lacked anything resembling vitality. And her thin lips were stained with the ghastly remains of what appeared to be bloody vomit.
Upon seeing that familiar face darkened by the specter of death, Kaito gulped.
There was no mistaking it. This girl was Elisabeth’s younger self.
Oh man… I definitely wasn’t supposed to see this.
Realizing that, Kaito began backing away slowly. He continued doing so until he crossed the threshold of the door he had entered. Once he’d passed through completely, the scene in front of him shimmered like a bowl of still water that had been disturbed, and then it vanished. All that remained were the mountain of broken toys and the door in their midst.
It seemed that he had managed to escape the Nursery. Kaito looked around and breathed a sigh of relief after seeing the Treasury. But the haunting voice returned to assault his ears again. No time to process what he’d just seen, Kaito spun around and made a run for it. He ran with no rhyme or reason, desperately trying to flee from the phantom Elisabeth and the male voice incessantly calling for her.
Cut it out; cut it out… I didn’t want to know about any of this!
Kaito had no desire to learn about that playful yet proud woman’s past. And these were memories she’d likely rather not share, giving him all the more reason not to go peeking. He held little affection for her, yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was committing an act of betrayal.
Elisabeth Le Fanu was both a proud wolf and a lowly sow.
The unflinching woman who’d introduced herself as such seemed completely different from that frail little girl.
Seeing her like that was not something for Kaito, as her servant, to do unbidden.
After running with that sole thought in mind, Kaito found himself in a new location, one with an entirely different ambiance.
“Huff…huff, huff… Where am I?”
Blocking Kaito’s path was a tall stone wall. As he inspected it, he discovered that it was constructed rather oddly—out of tightly packed stone cubes. The wall stretched out in both directions. It seemed endless, as though he’d reached the edge of the world. Then Kaito noticed something.
“Wh-what’s that?”
For some reason, a circular section of the wall was illuminated. Kaito approached it warily.
Iron shackles stuck out of the wall at the lit-up section.
Bound by them, like merchandise in a shop display, was a naked woman.
“What the hell?”
Kaito stood, stupefied. He had to look a few times to be certain of it. But sure enough, there was a beautiful silver-haired girl bound to the wall by her wrists. Her chest was ample, and her proportions were well balanced. Yet, she had been heartlessly cast aside.
For some reason, when Kaito looked at her, he felt like something was out of place. But in any case, he couldn’t exactly keep staring at a naked woman. He would just as soon avoid being taken for a lecher.
Ignoring his conflicting feelings, Kaito looked away. He resorted to timid sidelong glances to confirm her condition. The silver-haired girl just sat there, unmoving, her head cast down.
“Hey, are you okay? Hello? Hey, you.”
He tried talking to her, but she didn’t reply. He had no way of knowing why she was imprisoned, and as such was at an impasse as to what to do. But given Elisabeth’s personality, it seemed unlikely for her to take a demon prisoner. Kaito found it unlikely that this girl was an enemy.
And even if she was an enemy, at least he’d be the only one to fall victim.
Also, if he left, there was no guarantee he would ever be able to find his way back here. He would rather regret having saved her than regret not being able to.
With all that in mind, Kaito decided to undo her restraints. He checked nearby, but he didn’t see anything that looked handy for that purpose. He did, however, notice a small leather bag tied around her ankle.
Her arms were bound, so she herself was unable to reach it. What a cruel placement.
Kaito took the bag and looked inside. He flipped it over, and out fell a key and a piece of parchment. Taking the key, he undid her handcuffs. Her arms slumped feebly to her sides. Even with her freedom restored, she didn’t seem to have any intention of moving. As Kaito looked around for something to cover her with, his eyes chanced on the parchment still lying on the floor. Large red letters were written on its front.
INSTRUCTION MANUAL: WARNINGS FOR START-UP
As his golem functionalities deciphered the script, Kaito tilted his head. Suddenly considering a possibility, Kaito looked more closely at the girl’s body.
As he did, he finally realized where his conflicting feelings had been coming from.
Upon closer inspection, he’d realized that the silver-haired girl’s slender limbs were connected by spherical joints. And her straight silver hair wasn’t, strictly speaking, hair but was made out of glittering silver thread.
She was a doll. She was probably just one more object being stored in the Treasury.
The next moment, the girl’s head went clack, clack, clack as it began bobbing up and down. Her head swung to look at Kaito. Her eyes were made of emeralds, and they glinted ominously. Kaito was struck by fear as he returned her gaze.
Her face was as beautiful as a painting, but it bore no expression. And its surface was as rigid as a mask.
The girl’s—or, rather, the automaton’s—limbs began turning, each ball joint rotating in a different direction.
Alarmed by the abnormality, Kaito ran his gaze over the parchment.
After reading the words in red, his eyes widened, and he started running.
Be careful, as it may attack humans during start-up.
Kaito fled with all his might.
From behind him, the sound of the doll rapidly crawling across the ground pursued him.
Kaito ran, the Treasury acting as an obstacle course. He leaped over a chair, slipped between two chests of drawers, and slid down a mountain of gold coins. Finally, he reached his target.
The doll didn’t appear to understand how to dodge, simply barreling in a straight line. As such, it took time for it to destroy things when it needed to clear its path. Taking advantage of this, Kaito created distance between the two of them as he fled. But he knew that if he so much as stumbled, he, too, would join the destroyed objects’ ranks.
Hold up! C’mon! You can’t be serious!
His leg muscles stretched near the point of snapping, he dashed up the final set of stairs. He ignored the pain, driving his body with sheer willpower. If he turned around, he was done for. He was out of objects to defend himself with.
Swallowing his fear, he somehow managed to reach the black door. But it was still sealed shut. He banged on the door, screaming in desperation.
“Elisabeth, open up! Open the door!”
“What now, Kaito? Have you finally learned your lesson? Henceforth, I hope you’ll properly sample your cooking first.”
“I knew you were trying to punish me! Forget that—just hurry!”
Suddenly, Kaito felt a chill, as though his heart had been pierced by a needle.
Trusting his instincts, he threw himself to the ground. The doll’s leg pierced the air above his head. She struck like a serpent, attacking from a bizarre angle, and the tips of her toes demolished the thick door. Elisabeth’s voice rang out in confusion.
Torture Princess: Fremd Torturchen, Vol. 1 Page 8