Ch.124Girl – 4

Frost mingled with the exhaled breath, and white vapor scattered into the void.

A thick fog settled over every visible place, making it difficult to see even a step ahead, but its nature differed somewhat from ordinary fog.

It was an extremely cold fog made of snow, ice, frost, and rime, formed by every last drop of moisture floating in the air being completely frozen by magic.

An ordinary person would have their skin freeze instantly upon entering this place, and the moment they inhaled and the fog penetrated inside, they would die from the frost blooming in their respiratory organs.

Boots made of luxurious leather stepped onto ground that had become no different from permafrost.

The icy earth, far exceeding the strength of most metals, welcomed the stranger and offered its stored coldness, but none of it was transmitted to those boots.

A woman with long silver hair reaching down to her waist and eyes as deep red as blood revealed herself, crossing through the frozen fog over the land where all living activity had ceased.

It was Charlotte.

Charlotte’s uniform remained in its usual pristine condition, without a speck of dust. Neither snow, ice, frost, nor rime dared to cling to that uniform.

Her indifferent eyes scanned the surroundings. A slight satisfaction settled in those red eyes as they confirmed that there was no moving object in this extreme land except herself.

Absolute zero, spatial compression, sunspot explosion.

Her face was unbelievably calm for someone who had just consecutively used three spells, any one of which would have been sufficient to earn a place in the Royal Mage Corps.

Charlotte opened her right hand. A small orange sphere appeared on her open palm and began to rotate slowly clockwise.

The icy fog that thickly blanketed the world was then sucked into the sphere.

All the frost and ice that had filled the air so densely that one couldn’t see past their elbow when extending an arm disappeared as if melting away, allowing warm sunlight to emerge.

The frozen ground, which had boasted strength comparable to metal, melted into a slushy mire.

The orange sphere voraciously devoured the extreme cold and the ice covering the world, gradually increasing in size.

By the time the sphere had grown almost to the size of Charlotte’s head, the surroundings had returned to ordinary ground, just a bit muddy from the mixture of soil and water.

“Disperse.”

Charlotte lightly flicked her finger. Following her command, the orange sphere rose into the sky, then shattered, scattering its fragments everywhere.

A warm temperature settled. The water that had formed marshlands mixed with soil gradually evaporated, returning to the clouds floating in the distance.

The land, now completely dry, once again exhaled parched dust. Grains of sand blown by the wind rolled across the ground.

As the fog lifted and visibility cleared, another figure besides Charlotte was revealed standing on this extreme land.

Charlotte looked at the figure and spoke flatly.

“Did I not tell you?”

No answer came. That didn’t matter. She hadn’t expected an answer, and the figure wasn’t in any condition to respond anyway.

“That my words are as good as eternal truth.”

A girl with a large greatsword pierced through her heart.

The girl’s entire body was horribly mangled, with only her relatively intact left arm suspended in the air, isolated in a pocket dimension.

The left half of her face had collapsed down to the cheekbone, and the remaining half of her skin was so mushy—perhaps an aftereffect of freezing and thawing—that it seemed it would come off if brushed with a finger.

The right side of her upper body had completely evaporated after being caught in the sunspot explosion magic that followed the spatial compression, revealing internal organs that had barely avoided spilling onto the ground.

Her lower body was no better.

The left thigh had been cleanly severed below the pelvis, dripping dark red blood. The right leg was also missing everything below the knee joint.

“Have you now realized your place?”

“My place?”

Despite her body being horrifically mutilated, there was no change in the girl’s voice. It was a calm voice, as if she felt no pain at all.

Her expression was the same. Between her upturned, grinning lips, the only emotion that flashed was pure madness.

“Shouldn’t that be you? What are you babbling about after taking my master away?”

“‘Taking away,’ you say…”

After repeating that phrase several times in her mouth, Charlotte appeared before the girl in the very next moment. A ripple in space briefly appeared and disappeared behind her.

It was teleportation. And one performed instantly without any incantation.

“You’ve spoken well. I too have mountains of questions I wish to ask you.”

Their eyes reflected each other.

Charlotte’s image in the girl’s one remaining dark eye, and the girl’s image in Charlotte’s pair of blood-red eyes.

Charlotte truly had many things she wanted to ask this girl. She was curious about everything from beginning to end.

At first, she had intended to kill her without caring whether her curiosities were satisfied or not. But after hearing what the girl said and piecing together the puzzle in her mind, she changed her mind.

The identity of the person the girl constantly referred to as her master.

She needed to find that out somehow.

If the identity of this “master” was as Charlotte suspected, if her conjecture was indeed true, then she would have to lock this girl in the torture chamber beneath the royal palace and have a long-overdue candid conversation with her husband.

“Your treatment will be determined by your answers, so you should respond with your whole heart. If you do not, I will personally—”

“Make you understand that there is a life more terrible than death.”

The speech was cut off.

It was Charlotte’s voice, Charlotte’s manner of speaking, and words Charlotte might say, but the one who uttered them was not Charlotte.

Looking at the girl’s grinning face, Charlotte momentarily froze. Her pupils trembled for just an instant.

“So predictable. Too predictable. Utterly predictable. How foolish. The threats that mere humans can come up with are all the same. Did you think you could intimidate me by tearing apart and breaking a human body? How incredibly stupid. I told you. You still don’t understand your place. How many more times do I need to tell you before you get it, hmm?”

A sneer formed at the corner of the girl’s mouth.

Even as her inner thoughts were stained with hatred and rage at that sneering mouth, Charlotte did not act rashly.

Charlotte was a person with intelligence as exceptional as her abilities.

She knew very well that if she lost control here and vented her anger by blasting the girl’s head off, it would be too easy a way to deal with her.

Charlotte had no intention of killing the woman before her so easily.

She felt that her anger might subside a little only after keeping her alive for at least a few months, torturing her again and again, and replacing every organ in her body thousands of times with healing magic.

So she forcibly suppressed her boiling rage. She gritted her teeth so hard that the sound of molars cracking could be heard.

If Christine or Serena had been here, they wouldn’t have shown the same patience as Charlotte.

Their eyes would have rolled back in rage the moment they heard such mockery, and they would have rampaged, tearing the girl’s limbs to shreds without thinking, only to realize and regret afterward that they had given her too easy a death.

No, Christine, being such an empty-headed fool, might not even be capable of such advanced thinking.

At the very least, one needs to know what went wrong to point out that it was wrong.

That woman had such a terribly simple way of thinking that she would likely be satisfied with just blasting the being before her to death and then leaving.

“You seem to be under some misapprehension, so I shall correct that misconception.”

The distance between them gradually decreased. One face was completely rigid, while the other wore an expression difficult to define precisely.

Before sending the girl before her to the underground prison, there was something that needed to be done first.

“I was not threatening you.”

Charlotte’s right hand became semi-transparent. The background was visible through her wrist.

“I was declaring what I will do.”

The semi-transparent right hand was thrust deep into the girl’s head.

She had used magic that forcibly extracts memories from others to view them or transfer them to another body countless times before.

When a living person is subjected to this magic, all their memories are destroyed, leading to the collapse of their mind shortly after, but that was not Charlotte’s concern.

Why should Charlotte care about mere humans?

“…?”

As she moved her inserted hand around, stirring the girl’s brain, Charlotte’s expression began to undergo subtle changes.

First to puzzlement, then to bewilderment, and finally to shock.

“You…”

She withdrew her hand. The right hand that had been semi-transparent, showing the background behind it, had returned to its original opaque state.

Charlotte’s face contorted. In contrast to Charlotte, the girl’s expression showed not the slightest change.

A question mixed with bewilderment and shock was thrown.

“You’re not a living human, but a doll?”

There was not a single memory in the girl’s brain.

That was meant literally.

She couldn’t find any memories—not from before meeting Charlotte here, not after meeting Charlotte, not even of this very moment when her brain was being stirred.

The girl’s mind was an empty void, and that fact could only mean one thing:

The girl before her was not a real human but a doll that had undergone special magical processing.

She was what’s known as a doppelganger.

All memories of the doll are not stored in the fabricated flesh but transmitted directly to the controller, so no matter how much one stirs inside its head, nothing comes out.

The corners of the girl’s eyes curved into crescent moons as she looked at Charlotte. The meaning of that action was clear.

“I told you. Know your place.”

The judgment was swift. As Charlotte waved her hand, the body before her collapsed with a terrible sound.

It wasn’t a living human, and there was nothing to gain from torturing a doll. Why bother when the pain wouldn’t even be transmitted to the real human controlling it?

Bones, muscles, flesh, and skin mimicking those of humans were compressed beyond recognition. The body had transformed into something thin and bright red.

Charlotte irritably shook her hand once. The thinly spread human imitation was engulfed in flames, turning into a handful of ashes.

“…It seems you haven’t told me everything after all.”

Red eyes flashed.

“My dear.”