chap 13+9

“No, but Haruhiro, you’re kinda...”
“Go! Hurry! I’ll go, too!”
“Then come with me! You have to stick with me, got it?!”
Kuzaku took off running. Haruhiro tried to follow. But he couldn’t run. He couldn’t breathe properly, either. His legs were unsteady, and walking was difficult.
For now, breathe, he told himself. If I don’t breathe in, I can’t breathe out. So breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
It’s sweet. Ohh...
How can it be so sweet?
He had to move forward. What about Kuzaku? Where was he? He didn’t know.
His dagger. Where was his dagger? There. He’d dropped it.
He picked it up, and then what, was he moving forward? He didn’t think he’d stopped.
He ended up in a thicket, or bushes of some kind, pushing through this pink, coral-like stuff, and there were creatures, monsters, whatever they were, things that moved were jumping at him, so he brushed them aside, shook them off, moving forward one step, or a half step, at a time.
Still, it was sweet.
It’s sweet, too sweet, and now I’m getting sleepy.
He wanted to sleep so badly.
I can’t. What would happen if I slept? I have to keep moving forward. Where to? What am I even moving forward for? So sleepy. What am I doing? It’s sweet. Man, it’s sweet. I’m tired.
At some point, he ended up on his belly. He had to get up.
Oh, but I’m so slee—

I can’t see that man’s face.
I don’t know his face, but he’s probably a man, I think.
He’s built like a man.
I am behind that man.
Over his shoulder, I watch everything the man does.
Is it dark there? It’s not bright. But it’s not totally dark, either. It’s kind of, I don’t know, a sepia tone. Maybe the lighting makes it look that way.
The man walks.
His footfalls make no sound, as if he were using Sneaking.
He wears an old, fluffy coat-like garment, and he’s a fairly large guy.
In his right hand, which is covered by a woolen mitten, he holds something.
A blade.
It looks like a carving knife. That, or a butcher’s cleaver.
We’re inside a house, I realize. It’s a familiar house.
The man walks inside with his dirty shoes still on. Ignoring the door on our right, the door on our left, and the door further down on the right, he approaches the door at the end of the hall.
Is this his house, maybe?
No, I have the feeling it isn’t... but I’ve seen it before.
This house, I know it.
The man, he opens the door.
Even when he does, the man makes hardly a sound.
The man is cautious, and more than anything, he’s experienced.
When the door opens, I hear sounds.
Warm sounds.
Chop, chop, chop! Something is being cut up, likely vegetable. Yes, that’s right, with a knife.
This room has an interconnected kitchen, living room, and dining room.
In the living room, there’s a well-used sofa, a table that becomes a kotatsu in the winter, a TV, a TV stand, and a cabinet.
There are figures of characters, and bowls with images printed in them left here and there, and a number of photos on display. Those photos, none of them are new.
In the dining room is the dining room table and four chairs. A cupboard. It’s not a big room. If anything, it’s painfully small. The flowers in the small vase in the corner of the dining room table are not fresh, they’re dried flowers. Poinsettias, if I recall.
The kitchen faces onto the dining room, and a woman wearing an apron is cooking. Preparing a late dinner, probably.
The woman hasn’t noticed the man yet.
Hurry.
Notice.
Hurry.
This is bad. If you don’t hurry up and notice, something terrible will happen.
I want to warn her. I would if I could. But I can’t. I can only watch.
The woman’s hand on the knife stops. She lays down the knife, and turns away.
She opens the refrigerator. Takes out something. She lays it on the food preparation area, and though I can’t see it from here, she must have a pot on the element, and she takes the lid off it.
The woman finally realizes something. As if thinking, Oh, is someone here?
The man has already entered the dining room.
Seeing him, the woman raises her voice. “Ah!” The woman is shocked, and frightened. Well, of course.
The man is awfully big, he’s a giant, and though I haven’t seen his face, I doubt it’s pretty. He must be hideous.
Besides, the man has a butcher’s knife in his hands. He’s not just holding it, but keeping it a chest level, ready to use at any time.
“Nooo, noooooo, stoooooop!” the woman screams.
Backing away, she runs into the shelf behind her, causing the rice cooker, mixer, and coffee maker to shake.
The man is unbothered by this, and he invades the kitchen. The rice cooker, mixer, and coffee maker get caught on the woman’s arm, falling over as she flees.
In no time, she is cornered in the deepest point of the kitchen, next to the refrigerator.
The man does horrible things to the woman who is sitting on the floor, her back pressed up against the wall.
First, he uses the butcher’s knife to — the woman’s —. Next, he — to her —, and then he ties the woman’s — which he — around his neck.
Still, the woman is breathing. Why is that, you might ask? But the man was careful with his work to make sure she didn’t expire.
Each time the woman screams, the man goes, Shhh, shhh! as if silencing her.
Quiet.
Quiet.
Be quiet.
If you’re noisy, it makes my work harder.
You understand, right? Pipe down. Don’t make a racket.
From the woman’s perspective, she has no reason to listen to the man, and she could probably stand to defy him, but each time, Shh, shh! Those vile, abrasive sounds come from between the man’s teeth, she obediently shuts her mouth, and nods her head.
He does this cruel thing, puts her in incredible pain, making her scream because she can’t hold it in, but when he silences her with his, shh, shh, the woman obeys him, as if that were her nature. Like a machine, created to always respond in a fixed way to a certain signal.
Many times the woman closes her mouth, nodding, and eventually, whether from pain or blood loss, she finally faints. When she does, the man’s work is done at last. Immediately, he stabs her once through the heart, ensuring she will never wake again.
What in the world is with him? Who exactly is this man? It’s hard to see him as a person. Not just because of what he’s done. With his woolen mittens, his butcher’s knife, and especially his muscular upper body, with biceps that are unnaturally swollen, and a chest which is too thick, there’s something strange about him.
I don’t know the man’s face. That’s suspicious, and strange.
I feel sick.
How could he kill her?
Yes, I know this woman. The woman who, though I wouldn’t say she’s unrecognizable now, has been broken into a lot of parts, and is lying in a lake of blood, other fluids, some sort of jelly-like substance, and a collection of squishy bits.
I know her as well as I know this house.
The man killed her.
Was that not enough for him?
The man wipes the blade of his butcher’s knife on the hem of his soaked coat, and leaves the kitchen. He walks like before, his footfalls making no sound. Despite that, the man is humming.
It’s a song, one I’ve heard somewhere before.
I’ve heard it once, or perhaps many times before, a long time ago, somewhere other that isn’t here.
I don’t know the title, and I hardly recall the lyrics. Maybe it was a hit a long time ago. It could have been a popular song. Whatever the case, the chorus is stuck in my head, and I can’t get it out.
The man repeats the chorus again and again, humming to himself, as he returns from the dining room to the living room, and then passes through the open door to proceed down the hallway.
The man stops.
He slowly, quietly opens the door on our right. Blood sticks to the doorknob.
The room is dark. There’s a bed. There’s a mirror stand. There’s a bookshelf. It’s a bedroom. No one is here.
The man closes the door slightly, but not fully, leaving it that way as he keeps walking.
...No.
There’s another door ahead on the right.
...Not there.
This hall.
That living room, dining room, and kitchen.
I know this room.
The man stops humming and reaches for the doorknob.
...Stop.
He turns the doorknob.
...Stop it, please.
There’s a click, and the knob stops turning. The man slowly opened the door.
The lights are on. There aren’t many things, but it’s not pretty. There’s just a closet, desk, chair, and bed for furniture, with towels, clothes, scraps of paper, and notebooks scattered around at random. No one comes into this room but family, or rather her mother, the lady the man just killed.
“My mom’s always nagging me to clean up,” she once said when I came here before, to return something I’d borrowed.
“Well, yeah, looking at it, I can understand,” I remember having answered.
“You’re saying it’s dirty?” she asked.
“No, I wouldn’t say that.”
“You’re thinking it, though.”
“Yeah, just a little.”
“It cleans up quick,” she said, quickly moving the many things off to the side, piling them in the corner of the room.
When she did that, if I just ignored that one corner, it wasn’t impossible to say it looked clean.
“I can do it if I try,” she said, sounding a little proud.
It was so funny, I couldn’t help but laugh.
That made her mad. “What?” she said, and punched me in the shoulder. Just lightly, though.
That’s her, lying in bed, curled up a little.
Her eyes, they’re not closed.
She’s not sleeping, but she still hasn’t noticed the unfamiliar man creeping into her room.
That because she’s wearing noise-canceling earphones as she watches videos on her smartphone.
Stop it. Please.
The man silently creeps towards her.
I can hear the sound leaking from her earphones, though just faintly.
Finally, it seems the man, or probably his leg, has entered her sight, because she gulps and her whole body trembles. Pulling the earphone out of her right ear, she seems to jump straight up. Her eyes go wide, and she looks at the man.
“What?!”
Then, I think she was probably about to let out a high-pitched scream, but the man reaches out with his left hand, the hand wearing a mitten soaked in the blood of her mother, and he covers her mouth.
The man has big hands. Mittens big enough to fit those hands are probably hard to buy, so maybe it’s hand woven. That’s why it covers her mouth so easily.
The bloodstained mitten on the man’s left hand fits snugly over the lower half of her face. When compared to the man’s hand, her head is much too small. Thanks to that, she seems fake. Her head looks like a toy.
...Stop.
If the mood took him, and the man decided to crush her head, it probably wouldn’t be impossible for him to do it.
He could do it, I think.
...No.
She’s screaming something, and crying.
Shh, shh! The man shushes her like before.
Unlike her mother, however, she does not stop screaming.
It’s easy to imagine what the man is about to do. I want to stop him. To cling to him, to beg, to make the man reconsider.
Please. I’m begging you. Please.
That’s Choco.
Choco uses both arms to try and tear the man’s left hand off her, but it doesn’t budge. The man is very strong.
No...
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
Shh, shh, the man orders Choco to silence herself, to be quiet, raising the butcher’s knife, and swinging it down.
Into Choco’s left shoulder the butcher’s knife goes. Almost as if it was welcoming it. Like it was saying, Please, come inside me, as deep as you like. It’s okay to come in.
The man’s butcher’s knife easily cleaves through Choco’s clothes, her skin, her flesh, and even her collarbone. Deeply, and without restraint, it enters her.
Choco’s cries become louder, more frantic. The man smothers them, though not perfectly, with his left hand and its bloodstained mitten.
It hurts, it hurts, it hurts! Choco is shouting.
Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
The man turns his head to the side.
He won’t stop.
He won’t stop.
He won’t stop.
He won’t stop.
No way will he stop.
Shh, shh! The man lets out that harsh sound, pulling the knife out of Choco temporarily. This time he takes a horizontal swing, slamming it into Choco’s side.
Choco screams and howls in pain.
When he pulls the butcher’s knife free again, the wound is open, and from inside something, it looks like a hose, her entrails, pour out.
From the wound in Choco’s left shoulder, there’s a spray of blood. Choco’s eyes, they’re halfway rolled back into her head.
Shh, shh! the man shushes her. This time he isn’t telling her to be silent. Hey, hey, don’t pass out, not yet, I’m not done, hang in there, he’s encouraging her. More. There’s more to come. The man pulls the butcher’s knife out of Choco, then stabs it into her. Meanwhile, the man’s mittened hand covers her mouth the whole time, holding her head and keeping her in place.
If he doesn’t, it’s not clear that Choco’s still conscious at this point, but at the very least, she’d slump over, collapsing on the bed stained with her blood, entrails, and their contents. In order to prevent that, the man holds his prey, like he might up an anglerfish to fillet it, supporting Choco with just his left hand.
Keeping her suspended, he cuts up his prey, Choco, sometimes shaving off a piece of flesh, and wounding her however he likes. This is worse than defiling her.
You’re not human. You monster. How could you do this?
Stop. Stop it.
But it’s too late. Much too late.
Choco’s already...
Who are you?
What are you?
The man turns.
At last, I see his face.
The man, his identity is...
Me.
The man has the same face as me.
 



“Ungh...”
With a shock like he’d been punched in the head—no, like he’d fallen from a high place and hit his body all over—Haruhiro awakened.
Had he been sleeping? Yes, he had been lying asleep on the white sand.
He felt like he’d seen some sort of dream.
It hadn’t been a good dream. In fact, it had been a horrible nightmare.
He couldn’t remember anything from it. Or rather, it looked like he had more important things to think about than some dream.
There was someone’s foot right in front of Haruhiro’s nose where he lay in the sand. That person was wearing long boots, and something resembling a raincoat. It might have been a red raincoat originally, but it was filthy, creating a pattern of light brown and dark brown spots. The overall color was a dark red.
The person held what looked like a shovel. It had a longish handle, with a scoop-like blade on the end. It was kind of dark in color, and had dents all over, but taken as a whole it was almost certainly a shovel.
“Kuh!” That person was swinging the shovel with incredible vigor.
Bam! The raincoated person knocked something back.
“Ah...” Haruhiro said, meaninglessly.
The sharp glance that came his way stabbed into him. “Move it!”
Raincoat wore their hood low over their eyes, and had a black cloth or something wrapped around the lower half of their face. It made it nearly impossible to tell what they looked like. However, from the voice, though not necessarily the way they spoke, and the notexactly-muscular body, Haruhiro thought, Maybe it’s a woman.
Whatever the case, it was best to do what Raincoat said for now.
Raincoat wasn’t standing there alone.
There was a big man in front of Raincoat, a large man towering over her.
“No way.” For a moment, Haruhiro’s mind went blank.
The man wore a coat no less dirty than Raincoat’s, with woolen mittens on his hands, and was holding a clearly dangerous-looking butcher knife. That butcher knife was now swinging violently towards Raincoat.
Haruhiro jumped up, almost in a daze.
“Kuh!” Raincoat knocked the man’s butcher knife away with her shovel.
Haruhiro backed away one, then two steps, shocked and amazed. It was a wonder she could deflect that. After all, that guy, he was probably bigger than Kuzaku.
It wasn’t so much his height that was amazing, as how thick his upper body, chest, shoulders, and arms were. Normally, humans couldn’t get like that, no matter how they trained. He was clearly off the charts, out of the realm of what was normal, or even possible.
In which case, was he was just humanoid, and not actually human?
There was a reason Haruhiro couldn’t accept that, and it bothered him.
The man’s face.
He couldn’t believe it, and didn’t want to. But if Haruhiro’s vision or memory hadn’t failed him, he recognized that horrible giant of a man.
He knew him well. Intimately, you could say.
“...Why is he me?” Haruhiro whispered.
He had no hair. He was bald. He had no eyebrows, and was deathly pale. That was why they gave off a different impression at first glance, but no matter how many times Haruhiro looked at the shape of those facial features, they were his own.
“That because...!” Raincoat moved up while shouting. She swung her shovel up diagonally. She was fast. “...of the dream you saw, obviously!”
The giant man with Haruhiro’s face may have been caught by surprise, because he couldn’t dodge quickly enough, and tried to block the shovel with his left arm.
However, he couldn’t block it. The giant man’s left arm was cut clean off a little below the elbow.
Was it something... that could cut like that? The blade of a shovel? If you sharpened it like crazy, it could... maybe?
The giant man’s left arm fell to the sandy ground. His mittened left hand was wriggling. The blood coming from the point where it was severed was properly red.
The giant man backed away.
Raincoat held her shovel at the ready, turning just her face towards Haruhiro. “That guy’s clearly a dream monster you created. You have one hell of an id.”
“I have no clue what you mean.”
“I’ll bet. You look new here.”
While they were talking, the giant man backed slowly away, before making an about face and running.
Raincoat didn’t pursue. “Ran away, huh? Well, whatever.” She shouldered her shovel, sighing.
The giant man’s left arm was still wriggling.
Before Haruhiro fell asleep, there had been a variety of different monsters swarming all over. How about now?
No, they were gone. It was awfully quiet.
There was a something small moving in one of those pink thickets of coral, or plant, or whatever they were made of, and it was casting a white shadow. He didn’t sense anything else. There was no wind, either.
That, and, he suddenly realized, the air wasn’t sweet.
Raincoat started to stride off.
“...U-Um!” Haruhiro called out without meaning to.
Raincoat kept walking for a few steps. Just as he was thinking, Ignoring me, huh? she suddenly stopped, and turned around like it was a hassle.
“What?”
“Uh... I’m not sure what, but, um... where am I?”
“Parano.”
“Is that... the name of this place?”
“I don’t know. But they call this place Parano.”
“Is it one of those things? Like Grimgar, or the Dusk Realm, or
Darunggar? Another world?”
“I don’t really know why, but Parano’s the otherworld, apparently.”
“The otherworld...”
The first thing that came to mind when he heard that word was the afterlife.
What did that mean again?
Oh, right.
The world of the dead.
“...Huh? Did I die, maybe...?”
“Maybe.” Raincoat let out a nasal laugh. “If so, then maybe everyone here is long dead. The afterlife, huh? It could be.”
“...Is it just me?” he ventured. “How about my comrades? Oh, right.
Um, there were others with me... Kuzaku, Shihoru, Merry, and Setora. Four of them, I guess. Oh, there should have been a nyaa, too. Do you know anything about them?”
“They may’ve been here. May’ve not. A star fell, and there was a huge commotion. They may’ve gotten gobbled up by dream monsters. They may’ve run away. Who knows.”
“I’m asking a serious question here...”
“Yeah, and? I have to give a serious answer? Why? Give me a reason.”
“The reason is... Okay, there may not be a reason, but...” Haruhiro hung his head.
The giant man’s left arm still hadn’t stopped moving. Was it still alive? Sickening. It was that thing’s arm. It’d had the same face as him, too.
Haruhiro’s dagger was lying on the sandy ground. He picked it up, testing his grip. It was the dagger from the dwarf hole.
This place, it wasn’t the afterworld, after all. “Nah,” he murmured. “I dunno about that...” “Hey, you,” Raincoat said.
“Uh... yes?”
“Here.”
Raincoat rummaged through the raincoat that had given her her name—though that wasn’t really her name, and Haruhiro was just calling her that in his head.
She pulled out something, lightly tossing it to him. It fell to the ground at Haruhiro’s feet. It was a blackish cloth, with a string attached.
“A mask?” Haruhiro asked.
“Yeah. You’d better put that on. If you don’t, you’ll fall asleep every time the wind blows.”
“Fall asleep... when the wind blows?”

Chapter end