Chapter 20: Twilight
In pure darkness, the passage of time becomes irrelevant.
Nelly didn’t know how long the long, repetitive punishment had lasted. By the time she finally remembered the glowing system interface, it felt like a lifetime had passed.
The screen full of red looked extremely powerless in the overwhelming darkness, unable to even illuminate the scene a step ahead. Nelly glanced at the clock in the lower right corner of the interface. Only two days had passed, but it felt as long as a week. She closed her eyes, and the white wings and blond knight falling into the abyss appeared before her again, followed by the unspeakably long punishment. In the darkness, she was helpless and terrified, and could only let…
She clutched her head in pain.
After Roland, it was Theon. Another innocent person had been dragged into a mess they shouldn’t have been in because of her, and had ultimately lost their life because of her. This couldn’t go on.
What should I do?
Option one: Accept Karsus’s shackles. Perhaps one day, when he felt at ease, he would let Nelly return to the outside world. But by then, would she still be herself? Nelly didn’t know. But she knew very well that even if she were to leave this cage on some unknown day, she would never be able to return to her own world.
Option two: Wait for the temple’s follow-up rescue. But in the end, she was just one of the guides summoned from another world by the system, which acted on the temple’s will. Where did she get the confidence to assert that the temple would really send reinforcements? Summoning another one was obviously more convenient and faster.
Option three: Find a way to escape. This was now absolutely impossible. Vetoed.
Nelly was not willing to accept the status quo, and the first two options with their slim chances were just fleeting thoughts. Right now, all she could do was fight Karsus to the death, a fight where both would perish.
But even this path, which sounded brave and simple, she had no way to begin. The power gap between the Demon King and a mere system spirit was as wide as several galaxies. In the end, the only choice she had left was self-destruction.
Nelly’s will to live had always been very strong. But under Karsus’s pressure, this was the second time she had been forced to actively seek death. What should she do? The top of the cage was too high, so hanging was impossible. Everything on her had been thoroughly searched, so suicide with a sharp blade was impossible.
As Nelly calmly thought this through, she found it ridiculous. She was actually analyzing methods of death with the calm mindset of solving a mathematical proof.
She rolled around restlessly on the soft fabric at the bottom of the cage, but her shoulder bumped into some kind of cabinet placed in the corner of the cage with a dull thud. Perhaps because she had been in the dark for too long, but after the sound of the impact stopped, Nelly felt that there was still a strange rustling sound around her, like a low whisper.
Rather than being entangled in guilt and anxiety, Nelly preferred to shift her attention to the sounds outside the cage. After listening carefully for a while, she actually felt a very, very low voice calling her name. Just like… just like the voice she had heard in her dream on the night she had first arrived at the Demon’s Lair.
Could it be that that voice had been guiding her here?
In her memory, she had indeed been walking downhill, and the courtyard was much lower than the corridor she lived in… Could this place have some connection to her?
Nelly immediately sat up and, using the faint light from the interface, pulled open the half-height, carved five-drawer chest and inspected it drawer by drawer.
The first three drawers were filled with a messy pile of clothes. She felt around but found nothing.
The next layer was full of bottles and jars. She randomly unscrewed one, and from the smell, she judged it to be tea leaves.
The bottom drawer felt empty at first touch. But as Nelly pulled her hand back, she felt something was wrong. The space was smaller than the previous ones; there was a hidden compartment. She had used this trick as a child to hide her diary, using a broken wooden board to block the view of the box where she kept her things. She familiarly moved the wooden barrier aside, and sure enough, there was a small box at the very back of the drawer.
Why is it so similar to the setup in my own home?
The question only flashed through her mind for a moment. Nelly quickly opened the box, and the faint light from the interface illuminated a translucent blue cone.
It looked like a good tool for murder.
The cone seemed to be cast from crystal, and it was cold and hard in her palm. Nelly felt the tip and was disappointed to find that the end of the cone had actually been rounded off.
The disappointment of her dashed hopes soon turned into boredom. On a whim, she used the cone as a stylus and randomly poked at the system interface.
—Crack.
A faint sound, like ice cracking.
Nelly stared, dumbfounded, as the quest log shattered from the middle and disappeared into particles of light. Almost without thinking, she poked the map hard again.
—Crack.
If she poked the ID card in the upper left corner, would she disappear too?
Nelly gritted her teeth, clenched the cone, and stabbed hard at the blue card labeled “No. 1028.”
Cool fingers closed around her wrist, stopping her movement.
Nelly’s shoulders hunched, and she fell to a sitting position, but she used all her strength to try to break free from the fingers wrapped tightly around her wrist, struggling to guide the cone in her hand toward the ID card.
Just a little more, just a little bit, and I can…
Another hand ruthlessly covered the end of the cone. With a single pinch and twist, fine, crystalline fragments scattered.
Nelly was furious. Without thinking, she elbowed her opponent.
The elbow seemed to have hit him right in the chest, causing him to sway slightly. Nelly hadn’t expected it to work, and she froze for a moment.
In that moment of stunned silence, the lights suddenly came on. It was still a pale, dim glow, but it was bright enough to make Nelly instinctively close her eyes.
When she opened them again, Karsus was slowly kneeling down, his hands on her shoulders, giving her an almost weak embrace. His head was lowered to the side of her neck, and he was trembling slightly.
And at that moment, Nelly suddenly felt dizzy.
It was as if a thousand fine needles had been buried in her mind, and now someone was pulling them out one by one, the secrets all painful. At the same time, something that had been sealed surged up in her heart, making her momentarily unsure of where she was or who she was. She actually wanted to cry. She actually wanted to reach out and hug Karsus back, to touch his inky black hair, to gaze into his deep red eyes.
Why? Why am I feeling this way? What happened before? What have I forgotten?
Nelly gradually began to recall the memory that Karsus had erased. He had taken her to the Moonlight Garden to admire the flowers. She had slipped out to the platform in the early morning to ask the system for help, and had been caught in the act by Karsus. And then… after that, Karsus had used magic. The servant Odo had disappeared, and so had her memory.
But besides this unpleasant memory, something else was dancing wildly behind the last layer of the membrane that was about to fade.
Nelly instinctively knew that this was a more important, more crucial memory, but the precious emotions were hidden most secretly, and for a moment, she couldn’t discern the meaning and details from the chaotic fragments that were rushing in.
Nelly’s breathing became rapid, her vision blurred. She could only vaguely see Karsus lift his head and hold her even tighter. All she could see was the Demon King’s pure black collar. His body heat seeped through the fabric and pressed against her cheek, disrupting the racing of her heart and thoughts.
Just another moment, just one more moment, and she would be able to make sense of these complex, intertwined emotions and memory fragments.
A pair of the coldest hands pierced through her chest. She looked down in a daze, and a wave of pain suddenly washed over her.
A greatsword as wide as two hands had been thrust into her body from behind, the blood-red tip of the blade protruding from her chest.