Chapter 6

Chapter 6 : He Who Wishes to Die Shall Live (1)

The man who killed Woldeer was named Hwipone.

As if to remind me that the wings I had seen were no illusion, he kept threatening me by freezing the area around us at every opportunity.

[“Can’t you even dodge something like this?”]

He would freeze a perfectly ordinary tree branch and flick it off with a loud crack,

[“If you keep slipping like that, we are not going to get inside by today.”]

Or freeze the ground to make it harder to walk,

[“Then eat this, at least. Just how many days have you gone without food?”]

And when he did toss me something to eat, it was frozen so solid that I could hardly taste it.

He was treating me like an obvious criminal.

It took us nearly half a day after setting out before we finally reached our destination.

The landscape had changed so drastically that the sight of it alone put pressure on me.

The trees rose as though they might punch straight through the sky, so enormous that their tops were nowhere in sight.

They were so huge that I could not even begin to judge whether such a size was possible. I felt like a tiny person dropped into a land of giants.

And when he told me that I had to climb the spiral staircase winding around one of those trees, I genuinely suspected that he intended to kill me by torture.

“Haah, haah, this is—huff—a murder staircase.”

Half-collapsed against the arched entrance, I sprawled there while trying to catch my breath after forcing myself up the stairs.

This was, according to Hwipone, an important checkpoint.

Tilting my head back as far as it would go, I stared up into the space ahead, which resembled a gigantic tunnel.

No matter how large the tree was, did it make any sense for the opposite entrance piercing through to look hundreds of meters away?

I could not understand from the start why this place was supposedly a mandatory immigration gate that everyone had to pass through when moving between territories.

Just perceiving the distorted space was such an alien phenomenon that it made my stomach churn even if I merely looked at it.

Even while retching over and over, I kept staring into the dim tunnel where my fate would be decided.

I had to get through there safely.

If I wanted my offense to remain merely unlawful entry into a restricted area instead of espionage under some security law.

[“Riwin, since you cannot speak our language anyway, it would be best for you to keep your mouth shut once we are inside.”]

I had corrected him again and again that it was Iwon, but he never listened, so in the end I became “Riwin.” I nodded.

The cloak I had thrown over myself in place of my tattered clothes slipped down with the motion and fell to the level of my eyes.

Its purpose was to cover my hair.

Apparently, hair that was nothing but plain black looked dangerous enough to send these people into a panic, so there was no helping it.

[“All right, get in.”]

Hwipone shoved me in the back without mercy, and I was practically dragged along like some roadside inflatable doll.

Before I had taken more than a few steps, something like a membrane of soap bubbles swept over my whole body.

Hwipone walked ahead as though nothing at all had happened, and although I tried to brush it off as normal for this place, the vivid, unpleasant sensation made my steps hesitate on their own.

Then I instinctively resisted the force trying to pull me forward.

Every possible danger signal clung to my feet.

“Wait a sec—ugh?”

At first, it stung.

Then it tingled.

Before long, pain hammered through my entire body so hard that I held my breath.

“What is this—cough!”

A clotted mass of dark red blood spilled from my mouth.

I could not block it all with my hand in time, and blood splattered onto the floor in heavy drops. In agony beyond anything that even resembled shock, I looked desperately toward Hwipone.

He looked bizarrely calm and composed.

I had thought of this as nothing more than airport immigration screening, and now my face twisted under the pain.

[“Disappointing, Riwin.”]

It was a trap—

[“I had hoped you would not trigger the entrance barrier, but I suppose you really are one of the Underfolk.”]

—and I had fallen into it.

There was no other way to interpret the situation.

I had spent so long exhausted and malnourished that a few warm words were enough to lower my guard.

At this rate, I really was going to die.

The pain was beyond imagination, and in the end even the arm I had been using to brace myself against the ground gave out.

The rest of my memory only began after I had already been carried away somewhere by the hands of those who came rushing in, my face planted in the blood I had vomited.

---

Involuntarily, I exercised my right to remain silent.

I would have needed to understand what they were saying in order to respond or defend myself.

Ah, though even without sharing the language, there was one thing whose meaning I could still grasp.

Whatever they were saying, the conclusion was negative.

To make matters worse, the system had frozen up ever since the last Language synchronization, I had been caught red-handed by the barrier, and what followed was torture disguised as interrogation, with no intention from the outset of listening to any excuse.

Most of all, the biggest problem was that my mental state had been thoroughly shattered.

If I clawed my way back through my foggy memories, it went like this.

After fainting because Hwipone tricked me, I woke up to find myself already imprisoned.

It was not a detention cell blocked off by iron bars.

It was closer to a birdcage hanging in midair.

A single isolation room suspended high in a tree, held up by a few treacherous-looking vines.

It was the worst prison imaginable. The whole structure swayed with ominous creaking sounds at the slightest movement, enough to make it obvious that the building itself was unstable.

When I turned my head, I saw a wide-open window.

A peaceful backdrop of green leaves gently rustling.

‘If I jumped out there, at minimum I would die from the fall.’

Even if I somehow managed to shake off whoever was guarding the outside, that would only create the next problem.

“Ha. Am I really in any position to worry about what comes next?”

It would not have been strange if I died at any moment as things were.

I was screwed.

Everything I had gone through in a single day would have sounded savage even spoken aloud.

It was pointless now to blame myself for ever letting down my guard, even for a moment, because I had judged them to be rational and moral beings.

“Hmm. Could these bastards actually be psychopaths?”

They had put me through enough pain that even my fear of heights had been cured to the point that I felt tempted to jump out the window.

Did I mention that I hated pain?

I thought I had even begged them to kill me last night.

No, I had only swallowed the plea inwardly.

The way my memories had been dropping out in fragments had to be my brain’s defense mechanism trying to preserve the bare minimum of my sanity……

‘So what.’

I spat out the blood pooling in my mouth and strained my ears to separate out the muffled sounds around me.

A faint humming noise drifted from somewhere far away.

I pushed the long iron chain attached to my neck into a place where it would not get in the way and sprawled on the floor.

Since they had been tormenting me without even letting me sleep, I had used that time to think through various escape routes.

‘And the only one truly worth using is…….’

The interrogator’s composed face came to mind.

The one emotion I had unexpectedly sensed from him, despite the language barrier, was fear of me.

That was why his hands had grown even rougher.

It was no different from dogs barking louder when they were afraid.

Like something puffing itself up while on high alert, trying to prove it was not weak.

I was planning to use that.

I heard the sound of dragging footsteps.

A structure this unstable made it easy to notice someone approaching just from the vibrations in the floor.

I jammed my fingers into the inner gap of the heavy iron around my neck where it pressed against my skin.

Only the ends of a few joints managed to fit, but it was enough to create a sliver of breathing room around the skin scraped raw at my throat.

Then I closed my eyes and held my breath, pretending to be unconscious.

Clank!

The door opened with the sound of a lock being released, and at the end of those familiar, relentless footsteps, a sharp pain exploded in my side.

He yanked the chain without hesitation.

“Hhk.”

Thanks to the way I had forced my fingers in there beforehand to open a tiny gap for air, I was able to endure the pain without suffocating.

“Could you be a little gentler?”

I openly mocked his careless, violent roughness.

Whether he understood my words or not was beside the point.

Some tones were offensive no matter what language they were spoken in.

“What am I, some animal? You cannot even look at me without a leash, and yet you are the type who gets worked up on purpose by provoking me? What a shitty taste you have. Well? Want me to bark for you?”

Woof, woof.

I was provoking him on purpose because I needed to escape.

No matter what, I had to make him draw a blade.

Over the course of everything he had done to me, I had observed quite a lot, and the important part had been his ability to produce knives.

Whether it was summoning them, creating them from nothing, or pulling them out from somewhere did not matter.

A dagger, a longsword, a saw, an axe—anything that could be classified as a blade would do.

The moment it appeared—

“It is fun when you cannot understand me. Or do you only respond to things like moaning and pain?”

Flinch.

The nape of my neck prickled in an instant.

I clenched and unclenched my damp hands, slick with cold sweat, to keep my tension sharp.

I would only get one chance.

“Go on, keep talking. Stop your perverted little—!”

With every scrap of dynamic vision I possessed, I snapped my eyes wide and focused on the instant he created the blade.

He had a habit.

A red pattern appeared around his eyes, and the moment the blade formed, whichever hand created it, he would transfer it to the opposite hand.

If it formed in his right hand, he moved it to his left. If it formed in his left, he moved it to his right.

That gap was what I was aiming for.

“Hm. I suppose all those times I got stabbed here and there were not wasted after all?”

As the one who had suffered through it repeatedly, I knew the timing better than anyone.

Part of it was probably because he had let his guard down, since I had spent all that time going limp, fainting, and screaming. Even so, I seized the blade more easily than expected and returned it to him at once.

“Ugh.”

Judging by the experience, it was all a matter of timing and stamina.

If I hesitated, I would be the one getting stabbed again.

My strength was too drained to put proper force into it, but when I threw my weight behind it, I could manage at least that much of a counterattack.

Avoiding the ribs, I drove the blade roughly into his lower abdomen, yanked it back out, and jumped away.

In that same brief instant, I even snatched the key to the chain around my neck.

Click.

Following the route I had rehearsed in my head, I unlocked the chain as fast as I could, grabbed a chair from the corner, and brought it down on him.

He was not the sort who would stay down just because he had been stabbed once inexpertly.

“――, ―!”

“Hmm, I do not care. Let us never meet again.”

I looked at him lying there, unconscious and bleeding from the head after the blow, and considered stabbing him a few more times before deciding against it.

I had never intended to kill him from the beginning.

My arm was too weak after going nearly a month without a proper meal, and even that single use of the blade had left my split palm stinging.

Besides, if I truly did something irreversible here and then got caught again, next time there would be no negotiation and no persuasion. They would execute me on the spot.

Honestly, even while doing all this, I kept thinking that this was probably nothing more than a way of buying time.

Even so, to die like this under torture, or to die falsely accused of being one of the Underfolk, or to die without ever once getting to eat something good—

That felt too unfair.

If I had fallen into some bizarre world only to spend the whole time filming a dirty survival story and then die pointlessly, that would truly be the life of an extra.

So—

“I want to live at least until it feels like living.”

If possible, until the ending.

I cracked my neck a few times, now free of the iron chain, and carefully opened the door.

Perhaps because of the peculiar nature of this birdcage prison, it was quiet outside.

The path was rough, though.

“Hmm. Very rough, in fact.”

The bridge hanging in midair several dozen meters up looked so precarious that it made me swallow hard.

Then again, everything I had seen through the window up until now had already looked less like a city and more like some impossible floating metropolis.

Even though it only made sense that the roads would connect through the air, I still had to stand there with my back to the door for quite a while, hesitating.

The black sky after sunset, the forest even darker than that, and the lights shining between it all.

Those things.

“It looks like a movie drenched in CGI.”

Swoooosh.

The leaves brushing in the wind trembled together, and the sound rolled through the forest.

A floating city that defied gravity, and a pitch-black forest.

“A web novel, then an American drama, and now a blockbuster?”

I had already decided where I would run.

A place where I could avoid other people’s eyes, survive in relative stability, and remain uncommon enough that I would not be easily tracked.

From the start, my destination had been the Black Forest I had once escaped.

---

“Huff, huff.”

Someone once said dreams were better the bigger they were.

Bent over, I exhaled a ragged breath I could no longer hold back. It felt as though something besides breath was about to come up too, and the urge to retch hit me again and again.

I barely managed to lean myself against the edge of something that might have been a tree or a rock and shoved back my sweat-soaked hair.

I had thought surveillance would be laxer at night, but they had realized I escaped almost immediately.

There had been several reasons for the failure, but if I had to choose just one, it would be this.

The first resident of this place I ran into saw the bloodied blade in my hand, and I screamed without hesitation, waking even the people who had at least been asleep.

I had assumed the darkness would keep my black hair from standing out, but that had been my mistake.

I had not known that everyone here had splendid, mostly bright-colored hair.

Would it have made a difference if I had stolen the interrogator’s clothes and worn them?

Naturally, an uproar broke out at once, and with my sense of direction completely gone, I ran blindly along the tangled paths twisting up and down.

By the time I knew it, I was on the forest floor.

Now I had gone so deep that I could no longer guess where I was, and I was completely lost.

“I really ruined this.”

Thoroughly, right from the start.