Chapter 157
“Aaaaagh!”
Eliza screamed at the sight of hair scattered across the floor.
Her hair, which had once reached her waist, had been hacked brutally short.
The other prisoners didn’t spare a thought for the anguish in her cry. They simply laughed.
She was Number 48, after all. It was only natural, and it was what she deserved.
One person wept while everyone else laughed. What a grotesque scene it was.
“Hkk… hk…”
Eliza was thinking of her doting parents, and all the uncles who had adored her.
‘Eliza, our dream was to have a daughter so we could braid her hair just like this.’
‘Do you know what even a king can’t possess? Why, it’s Princess Eliza herself. From today, you’re my daughter. We even have the same hair color, don’t we?’
‘There’s no way a cherub like this came from you, brother. Something must be terribly wrong. I’ll have to take her off your hands.’
Eliza slumped to the floor and gathered up the severed strands, weeping in hushed, choked sobs.
Her blue eyes were clouded as though storm clouds had rolled in, spilling an endless stream of tears.
Stripped of the days when she was loved and now locked away, her hair had been the one thing that reminded her of the family she missed, the family who shared its color.
‘Eliza. To fulfill the duties and responsibilities of royalty, you must first have a merciful heart. One that loves people and forgives them.’
Eliza’s gentle manner and kind nature hadn’t changed one bit from her days of being cherished to now, and yet the world had turned cold toward her, all because of a single number: 48.
She couldn’t fathom why they treated her so cruelly. Still, she fought not to crumble.
“Mother, Father, Uncle, Eldest Uncle[1]…”
Because there were still people left whom she could call by those names.
Kido was frozen stiff rather than merely standing by, and slowly turned her head.
One of the prisoners pointed at Kido, who was watching in silence, and jeered at Eliza.
“See that? She couldn’t care less. And here you were, going around calling her your friend all by yourself—”
The prisoner trailed off mid-sentence and stared at Kido, struck by an inexplicable sense of unease and pressure.
It was the kind of overwhelming force you’d only expect from a Wielder.
An atmosphere wholly unlike her usual one. In a face so pale it was almost white, her crimson eyes were honed razor-sharp, like a freshly whetted blade.
“Typical half-dead invalid, look at her wheezing away. She probably doesn’t have the energy to take anyone’s side.”
Someone cracked a joke to dispel the strangely charged air, and the prisoners forced out obligatory laughs.
Kido’s gaze swept the room, cataloguing every face, and then her lips drew back, curving upward into a smile.
Like a predator spotting prey and licking its lips in anticipation.
“Heh.”
At first glance, the way her mouth curled into that eerie grin made her look completely unhinged.
But these prisoners had backing they could rely on, so they saw no reason to hold back.
One swaggered up to her, brimming with confidence.
“All this time you’ve been acting high and mighty because the top-ranked prisoners gave you a pass? That’s over now. We’ve got the Bishop’s favor coming our way. From now on, we’ll give that pretty hair of yours the same treatment.”
The prisoner who’d advanced on her, scissors in hand, flinched and staggered back at the eerie, chilling gleam that settled over Kido’s red eyes.
That was the moment.
CRASH—!
A deafening boom, and a cloud of dust billowed up.
As the haze thinned, a prisoner emerged from the clearing, battered to rags, dangling by the hair from Kido’s grip, a wretched heap of limbs.
“Ghhk!”
Kido brought the scissors beneath the blood-retching prisoner’s throat and smiled a ghoulish smile.
“You can give it to me, can’t you? Your hair, I mean. You’ll be reborn anyway[2].”
“Wh-what the f**k! Did you Awaken or something?! So what, your rank is still Number 49! It’s probably some worthless ability!”
Eliza shot to her feet when she saw the other prisoners lunge at Kido, spewing crude obscenities.
“Kido!”
The instant Kido silently pointed at one of the prisoners, the targeted inmate went slack-faced, shuffled over to the wall, and began slamming her own head against it.
Thwack, thud!
Blood trickled freely down her forehead, but she didn’t stop bashing her skull into the stone.
Faced with this bizarre spectacle, the prisoners swallowed their tension and fear and stepped back. It was as if she was possessed by a demon,
As if facing a natural enemy, an instinctive sense of survival began to wash over them like a wave.
Vile creatures who cared about nothing more fiercely than their own safety, the prisoners in the 40s tried to flee, but—
“Stay where you are.”
At a command so cold it could freeze blood, every prisoner stopped in their tracks.
They couldn’t resist their bodies being dragged back against their will.
Kido swept her red eyes, brimming with madness, across the group, and gave her order.
“Kill each other. The last one standing survives.”
This, too, was impossible to refuse.
It was an order from the incarnation of evil lurking within the hallucination, and a manifestation of the primal urge buried deep in human nature.
Demon-drunk and senseless, the prisoners hurled themselves at one another, erupting into savage, murderous combat.
“K-Kido. Was that… you doing all of that?”
Kido, who had been silently watching the hellscape unfold like a scene from an infernal painting, turned to Eliza. She was smiling radiantly, exuberantly, drunk on euphoria.
“Tell anyone, and I’ll kill you too.”
Eliza felt her hair on her neck stand on end when she saw those eyes which were devoid of sanity and dripping with killing intent.
Instinct screamed at her to stop Kido, and she seized her by the shoulders and shook.
“Stop it, please, come to your senses! Even if you borrow a demon’s power, your heart can’t become a demon’s! Corruption of the heart is the shortest path to rampage!”
In truth, Kido’s humanity had eroded and her magic had intensified because her karma had exceeded its threshold, but Eliza, believing this had happened because Kido had intervened to protect her, wept more bitterly than when her own hair had been cut.
“You have to get your precious uncle back!”
Translation Notes
[1] ↩
[2] ↩
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