Chapter 163 — True Feelings
Water rushed into my eyes and nose.
I had let my guard down while thinking about swimming back to the surface, and I gagged.
I had been plunged into water quite a few times by now, but never before had I felt my life threatened as strongly as I did now.
One question intensified my anxiety.
If the person being addressed was Sierra, then the owner of the voice was not Emperor Sierra.
Judging by the situation, the promise had not been kept.
Then what did the power moving the river want from a descendant of the imperial family that had broken the promise?
At the very least, it probably did not want my death.
It had already let several opportunities to lead me to my death pass by.
Although that did not mean it had no intention of making me suffer.
As the violent current prevented me from even opening my eyes, the excessively vivid voice began forcing information into my mind once again.
[The orcs also staked their lives on this matter. If they do not receive what they were promised, the contract will fall apart. Once the cycle begins, it does not end.]
A promise with the orcs.
A contract.
It was all information that even the leader himself had failed to remember properly, but I had no time to calmly organize it in my head.
[The remaining power will move by any means necessary to fulfill the contract, and once it escapes control, there is no telling what method it will use........]
The voice grew louder and clearer.
By now, it was tormenting me as though someone were shouting through a loudspeaker directly beside my ear.
So what exactly did the orcs want?
I had to know that before I could do anything.
The moment I frowned at the skull-rattling sensation and thought that—
[The contract will be fulfilled here. What they desire will be born in this place. Therefore, you must remain here and ensure that the contract is properly carried out.]
At last, the person who possessed nothing but a loud voice—no, who was nothing but a voice—offered a clue regarding the contents of the promise I had been most curious about.
The orcs.
And the place where they were born.
Those two facts alone were enough to infer what the owner of the voice meant by “this place”.
I considered listening a little longer, but first I had to get out of the water.
I did not have enough breath to remain submerged like this.
I knew I had to rise, but a small temptation caught hold of my ankle.
The temptation that I might learn more if I endured the pain just a little longer.
Would it really be so bad to descend only a little farther?
In the end, I decided to relax my body and surrender myself to the water pulling me downward.
At that moment, a powerful force grabbed the back of my neck and lifted me.
“Gah!!!”
My lungs had stopped functioning so completely that the sudden rush of oxygen felt unfamiliar and overwhelming.
Realizing that, I leaned forward and coughed out my breath.
Once my breathing had recovered to some extent, I raised my head to identify the owner of the hand still gripping the back of my neck roughly.
“Kweeek .......”
A timid cry and vacant eyes.
As far as I knew, there was only one orc who looked this utterly harmless.
* * *
While struggling to restore my breath, various assumptions repeatedly surfaced and sank within my mind.
One thing was certain.
Sierra’s journey recorded in the Red Book truly could not be trusted.
This cunning bastard, whom people worshiped as a god, seemed to have had no hesitation about borrowing the power of monsters to manipulate the world as he pleased.
The problem was that I was apparently expected to clean up the contract he had failed to fulfill properly.
Who decided that?
It was hardly a new realization, but he truly was a god incapable of performing his role properly.
I was not idle enough to clean up after someone like that.
Damn it.
The moment I destroy the holy relic, I am getting out of here.
I looked at the creature that posed the greatest obstacle to that objective.
The dimwit merely blinked with his usual idiotic expression, as though he knew absolutely nothing.
Even though there was no longer any need to continue acting.
Had that meticulous performance somehow moved the leader’s heart?
The leader cared about the dimwit.
Probably with feelings far greater and deeper than I had expected.
However, that was not important.
What mattered was not forgetting the objective.
There was only one purpose behind all this suffering.
Ratel had to absorb Sierra’s remaining power.
Once that happened, this damned contract or whatever it was would come to an end as well.
There would be no reason for me to involve myself personally.
I glared at the dimwit circling around me as though gauging my mood.
“Kweeek, why did you pull me back out of the river after pushing me in to kill me?”
“K-Kweeek .......”
The creature refused to stop pretending that he knew nothing.
“Kweeek, I already know that you ate the leader’s neck. Kweeek, that one-armed bastard is not here either, so say something.”
Your lies were exposed long ago.
The dimwit stole glances at my confident gaze while fidgeting with his fingers.
I watched him patiently.
“K-Kweeek.......”
At last, the dimwit’s lips moved several times.
It seemed as though he were hesitating. Or perhaps he was attempting something unfamiliar.
While his clumsy efforts continued, I watched him with a sinking feeling.
“K-Kweeek, th-then.......”
At last, his mouth opened.
“Kweeek, if you d-die, kweeek, the h-humans will kill the leader.”
It was said that prejudice made it impossible to love another person.
That was something my homeroom teacher had once said during class in high school, despite rarely going off topic.
I could not remember how the conversation had drifted in that direction.
Perhaps a character in the textbook had stirred his nostalgia.
Or perhaps the cold wind blowing through the window had caused him to look back on his life, with retirement awaiting him the following year.
Whatever the reason, I remembered how his fierce eyes had grown moist as he said that was how his first love had ended.
There was a reason why such a pointless memory had remained among the few memories I possessed from high school.
The reason that ridiculous scene had stayed in my mind was because I had found him laughable.
It was not because he had suddenly remembered his first love during class and reddened his eyes.
Nor was it because he had suddenly clenched his fists, pressed his forehead against the blackboard, and shaken his shoulders in an attempt to hide the tears welling in his eyes.
It was because the man advising us not to judge others through prejudice was the very person who had given me the bruise around my eye the previous day.
His reason had merely been that he had scolded me while I was cleaning, saying that the future of punks who walked around with eyes like mine was obvious.
Looking back, quietly continuing to sweep would probably have been the way to prove him wrong.
However, even then, I was the kind of person who could not control either my mouth or my temper and ended up earning an even worse beating.
—Do not wait until next year. Retire immediately. You would probably earn more money laying out a mat somewhere and reading people’s faces.
—.....What? What did you just say, you little bastard? You damned......
—I think that would be better for the students too.
That day, he personally demonstrated that my future held a severe beating.
Had the math teacher not happened to pass by, I probably would have been beaten until something broke or I lost consciousness.
The creature’s awkward speech was practically proof in itself that he had torn out and eaten the leader’s neck, yet I did not feel pleased in the slightest.
His clumsy answer was so far removed from what I had expected that I could think of nothing else while turning it over in my mind.
What are you talking about?
I could not understand what he meant.
No.
It would be more accurate to say that, for a moment, I refused to understand.
“Kweeek, d-do not kill him. Kweeek, d-do not kill the l-leader.”
Perhaps I simply did not want to acknowledge that the awkwardly connected words were nothing more than a desperate plea I had never anticipated.
Today was apparently the day when the dimwit repeatedly screwed me over.
No.
This time, he was not the only one screwing me over. My own complacency and prejudice had done it to me.
At the same time, a faint sense of unfairness raised its head.
If you care about each other that much, then just say it, you lunatics.
* * *
That was a relief.
Things would have become more complicated had I lost consciousness.
Ignoring the throbbing pain in my back, I watched my homeroom teacher delivering his impassioned speech.
Still unable to compose his reddened eyes, he was concluding the not particularly useful realization he had gained from life.
—So, you little bastards, do not judge people by their appearance. Even when you think you already know someone, look again. Huh? That is what you have to do. Understand?
He nodded in satisfaction after hearing the students’ responses.
When our eyes met, his eyes widened before he quickly looked away.
I did not know whether he had recognized his own contradiction or whether there was no particular reason.
As I watched the back of his head while he resumed the lesson, I vaguely realized something.
When I grew older, I would probably become a person not much different from him.
A person incapable of following even a single thing he said himself, merely acting however his momentary emotions dictated.
Well, roughly ten years later, I really did become exactly the sort of adult I had expected.
And now, I felt that perhaps he had still been a better person than I was.
At the very least, the fact that his lesson remained deep within my mind meant he had fulfilled his professional calling to teach students to some extent.
To be a little more honest, there was another emotion slowly rising from somewhere deeper inside me.
Embarrassment.
It was the shame born from realizing that I had overestimated myself without even noticing.
The arrogance of believing I knew everything about this world merely because I had read the original work had led to the delusion that I might be some extraordinary person.
Even though I remained nothing more than an insignificant human being.
I stared at the dimwit’s tense face and the vacant eyes watching my reaction.
A large part of me hoped he had some other motive meant to deceive me. However, there was only one thing I could read from his eyes.
The foolishly simple wish that the leader would not die.
“Kweeek, whether I live or die does not matter. Kweeek, the leader has to die anyway.”
“K-Kweeek! No! Kweeek, if I k-keep hold of you, that terrifying h-human will not kill him. Kweeek, s-so you have to come with me and the leader.”
And then there was his plan, which had no countermeasures whatsoever.
The plan was so flimsy that a hollow laugh escaped me, and for some reason, the tension drained from my body along with my strength.
There was not even a trace of the meticulous and persistent leader from the original work in that helpless appearance.
Forget meticulousness.
By human standards, this was no different from a thoughtless child.
“Kweeek, are you saying that the reason you watched me so persistently all this time was because you were waiting for a chance to kidnap me?”
“Kweeek, it w-was not kidnapping. Kweeek, not at first.”
What was that supposed to mean?
Was he saying that he had not planned to kidnap me from the beginning?
......Surely he had not originally intended to simply kill me.
When I narrowed my eyes, the dimwit rolled his eyes around nervously.
“Kweeek, y-you also knew how to escape from the humans. Kweeek, so I thought it would work if you and the leader ran away together.”
It was not entirely wrong.
It was not as though I had no intention of escaping from Ratel.
Still, there was no reason for him to help me do that.
“Kweeek, why were you so determined to take me with you when you escaped?”
When I voiced the question that arose in my mind, the dimwit’s expression relaxed slightly.
“Kweeek, b-because you are similar to a human.”
That was not entirely wrong either.
After all, I was a creature that had gone from being human to becoming an orc.
While I marveled at his strangely sharp yet completely misdirected deduction, the dimwit continued.
“Kweeek, the l-leader likes humans, even if he does not look like it. Kweeek, so I thought he would be happy if we went together with you.”
“.......”
There was no ambition in the creature’s voice as he dreamed of an utterly impossible future.
No desire to tear out the leader’s neck and take his place.
I was not familiar with it, but I knew this kind of boundless, irrational emotion.
Like a child moments before being scolded by an adult, he was pleading with me.
Damn it.
Fuck.
I belatedly remembered the strange look the protagonist had given me.
I had a feeling that he might have noticed something from my unusual answer.
Although there seemed little point in worrying about that now.
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