Volume 3 - CH 3.5

Translator: Kell

“What is all this?”

The floor was covered with numerous drawings, each one a reflection of someone’s emotions. What was once beautiful appeared to be destroyed, twisted, bearing marks of having been forcibly fixed.

“What… do you think?” came an icy whisper.

I glanced up. A slim figure was standing in front of the door, staring at us with fierce eyes. Aya entered the attic and picked up a paper. Slender fingers stroke the crayons.

Before I could ask her questions, she began speaking.

“Terrible, isn’t it?” she said. “All these pictures were drawn by Aya. Poor little girl was cornered.”

Her fingertips touched the dark paper. Sadly Aya regarded the girl whose mouth was smeared over. I took a closer look and saw her feet buried in the ground.

“If you take away a person’s freedom of speech and action, what is left for them?”

Aya smiled thinly. Without waiting for a response, she spread her arms. She spun and pointed at the scattered drawings.

“Our mother was strict. After our father died, she grew even stricter. She pinned all her hopes on my sister. She wasn’t allowed to talk back, and she spent her days studying. The excessive expectations broke her.”

Carrying a heavy burden crushed her young mind.

And the drawings here were the wreckage.

A pool of reddish-black, like ruptured organs.

Aya bit her lip hard. Her face was filled with intense hatred, an expression I had never seen before from her. She looked at the scattered drawings without hiding her emotions.

“So what are you doing here?” Mayuzumi asked indifferently. “Also, aren’t you mad at us for searching the house without telling you?”

Aya’s face reverted back to its gentle expression. She shook her head. “Higasa-san told me that it’s necessary so we could leave the house. Aya has a fever. We need access to the outside. So please, do anything you need to do. I don’t care if you ransack this house that our mother built.”

She stepped on the drawing paper and started walking to the far end of the room without hesitation. There, wrapped in a blanket, lay the corpse of her mother. A shredded arm peeked from within.

“Stop!” I warned.

She must not see the corpse mangled by beasts.

“And I came here to see my mother’s body.”

She flipped the blanket, exposing the butchered body. Broken ribs protruded from the chest, and organs peeked out from the torn abdomen. Eyeballs had sunk into the skull. Aya did not scream at the sight of the hideous corpse.

There was no hint of question, nor a glimmer of sadness in her eyes.

“I couldn’t have asked for a more fitting end for her. Good riddance.”

The corner of Aya’s lips lifted. Her bright smile sent a shiver down my spine.

I recalled the words that Mayuzumi once said.

“Wishing misfortune on someone you hate is, in a way, a sign of a sound mind.”

But her smile was hardly sound.

Aya turned around. She bent down and picked up one of the drawings.

Then crumpled it.

“Aya had a temporary mental breakdown,” she went on. “But my mother raised her to appear sane to the outside world. I firmly believe what she did was wrong.”

The crumpled paper fell to the floor. She stepped on the others, her toes wrinkling the papers relentlessly. The child’s smile ripped in two.

“If I had been there for her, this wouldn’t have happened. I should have protected her. But I was separated from her.”

Sadness flickered across her hateful visage. But the next instant, rage took over.

“Aya wouldn’t have suffered so badly.”

The child stirred in my belly.

My knees buckled at the pain. I looked at Aya, who was staring at the corpse.

From what she said, there must be a reason why she lived alone. The papers scattered on the floor showed the warped nature of this house.

Aya was probably abandoned, and Aya broke down from the heavy expectations.

But they most likely resulted from good intentions.

An innocent chuckle erupted in my gut. At the very least, Aya’s harsh upbringing did not stem from malicious intent. No matter how cruel she might’ve been, their mother must have only thought about what was good for her.

However, egotistic love can sometimes destroy people.

But was it really that bad that she had to die?

Now the result was a lone corpse.

It didn’t need to end this way, I was sure.

“I killed my mother and hid her in the storeroom. I killed my friend and stuffed them in the cabinet in my room.”

I didn’t know what the second statement meant. Still, was it necessary to cause so much tragedy? Was this the only way?

It couldn’t be.

Someone could have done something before it came to this.

“It’s all over, Odagiri-kun. You can’t turn back time.” Mayuzumi’s words were brutal. “There’s only one dead body here.” She bit into her chocolate. Two legs jutted from her mouth.

How could she say that?

Right as I was about to yell at her, she pushed the rest of the chocolate into her mouth with her tongue, and smiled.

“Only one,” she repeated.

Her gaze suddenly turned grim. Dark eyes studied the corpse. Mayuzumi swung her parasol. She spun, hitting the boxes lined up on the shelves, scattering their contents to the floor.

“What are you doing?!” Aya snapped.

After coughing from the dust, I noticed something strange among the clothes and tools on the floor.

An imitation of a corpse of some sorts.

“What is that?”

Hands, feet, legs.

A doll with severed joints had fallen.

Eyes made of glass looked at us silently. Its gorgeously dressed torso had no arms or legs. Overall, terribly creepy.

It gave a peculiar impression—corpses of dolls.

“The ■ asked the girl, who was burdened with a painful sin,” Mayuzumi muttered gravely.

Suddenly she smiled. Lifting her leg clad in knee-high socks, she kicked the other intact boxes. Clothes and shoes spilled out. Winter underwear and socks of all kinds fell to the floor. Clothes blanketed the dolls.

“Y-You’re going too far!” Aya shouted, clearly upset.

Mayuzumi ignored her and looked around. Studying the fallen clothing, she nodded.

“I see. We might be facing an awfully bizarre situation.”

An awfully bizarre situation. She left, not expounding further. She just walked away as if she no longer had any reason to stay. Aya started returning the scattered items back to the boxes. Ignoring her, Mayuzumi stepped into the corridor. Then she stopped abruptly and furrowed her brow.

There was a small shadow near the light of the stairs.

The beast reared its head and shook it, as though asking for something.

As soon as Mayuzumi turned on the light, the beast sprinted down the hallway and slipped into the kid’s room. We followed it inside. Aya was sleeping soundly on the bed. Her small back rose and sank rhythmically.

The beast sniffed around and stopped in front of a bookshelf. It moved around a thick dictionary housed in a case like it was trying to tell us something. Then suddenly it disappeared.

I wondered if that was Akari lending us a hand. Beasts have good noses. It seemed to have sniffed out something suspicious. It must have disappeared because Akari was exhausted. I was worried about her, but Higasa should be by her side.

The priority right now was to open the closed door.

I pulled out the case. It felt unusually heavy. I looked inside and found no dictionary.

The case was instead full of notes.

“Odagiri-kun.”

I lifted it up. We couldn’t read it in front of the sleeping girl. I was about to return to the corridor when the door flung open. Aya rushed in and moved to her sleeping sister.

“Aya… Aya, are you okay?”

She brushed Aya‘s bangs up. I quickly hid the dictionary case behind me, but Aya didn’t seem to notice. She only stared at Aya, stroking her cheeks. Aya finally woke up and stretched. Leaning against her older sister, she closed her eyes. Aya smiled softly and lied down beside her sister.

“You can go back to sleep.”

“…Okay.”

Aya nodded and buried her face in Aya’s chest. Aya stroked her sister’s hair gently. Aya wrapped her legs around Aya’s body, clinging to her tight.

Aya hugged her sister back. “It’s all right.”

They brought their faces together.

“I’ll always be here,” Aya whispered softly.