135 – Growth (5)

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I held my breath.

No, I couldn’t breathe.

The goosebumps were so sharp that they made my skin tingle.

His limbs froze as if frozen, and his face was instantly covered in cold sweat.

I was so consumed by fear that it felt like every part of my body was slowly breaking down.

“…Damn it, what do I do?”

Even in the midst of all this, my desperate efforts to somehow use my head were not producing much results.

To begin with, my head itself was a little dizzy.

I was scared.

I wasn’t afraid of fighting, nor was I afraid of the death that was coming to me.

I don’t know how strong the people behind the door are, but if they were just ordinary people, I’m sure they would be torn to pieces by my hands.

That was what I was most afraid of.

The faces of those people whom I had killed with my own two hands when I was mad flashed through my mind.

How many people live in this mansion?

Are those two the only ones rattling the doorknob in my room?

Or are there other people left on the first floor?

This curse, which has spread like a pathogen, may be the trigger that brings about the final end to this world, which is already on the verge of destruction.

That was so scary.

But no matter how much I racked my brain, there was no good solution.

I went to the window to try to escape, but it wasn’t big enough for me to fit through, so it wasn’t very useful.

“Hey, why is it locked in here?”

“Don’t you know? Did someone accidentally lock the door when they came out?”

“Oh shit, which idiot went in last?”

“Isn’t it you?”

“Fuck you, kid. Do you have the keys?”

“Where are our keys? Let’s just go.”

The voices of the two people talking were quite loud and rough.

You could tell just by looking at them that they weren’t very friendly people.

I could tell intuitively that the people who had taken over our mansion were a group of pretty rough thieves.

I held my breath and prayed earnestly.

Please, just go away.

please,

“No, but I clearly heard a sound from inside here.”

“It must be a wild animal like a rat or something.”

“What if someone sneaked in? This is our home. We didn’t even have enough places to sleep, so we put all the furniture in here. We can’t afford to let someone else in.”

“Then what should we do?”

“Get the axe from the first floor.”

“Am I your subordinate? You go and come back, you brat. You don’t know where I am.”

“… Hex has an axe. Borrow it.”

“No, you’re the one who wants to open this door, so you go. I’m a little awkward with Hex right now.”

“What did you do again?”

“I got caught cheating while playing poker the day before yesterday.”

“… Oh, shit. Okay, I’ll go and come back, you keep pulling on this doorknob.”

“I get it.”

I took the dagger out of my bosom.

It seemed as though they had no intention of passing through this door without opening it.

Judging from the conversation, it seemed like quite a few people were living in this mansion.

In the end, this was the only way left to avoid making a big deal out of it.

I unsheathed my dagger and placed its sharp blade against the edge of my neck.

“Ash! Stop it, no!”

Pia screamed in surprise, her voice wet and trembling.

“…Ugh,”

“It’s my fault, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s okay, Pia. It’s not your fault.”

“No. No, no!”

“… This world will be managed somehow by Sylvia and Alice. So Pia, please help those two even when I’m not around. Please.”

Pia shook her head violently and tried to grab my hand that was raising the dagger and bring it down.

“Ash… I hate it, I hate it!”

“I can’t help it…”

Pia shook her head wildly, then suddenly something occurred to her and she opened her eyes wide and looked at me.

And then, soon after, he started to speak while grabbing my wrist even more forcefully.

“That, that’s right, if Ash dies…”

“…”

“When Ash dies, Shi, Sylvia will go out of the forest!”

“…”

My eyes lit up for a moment.

It was a pretty convincing argument, if we were to dismiss it as the ignorant ramblings of a child trying to block a terrible situation right in front of him.

I now knew what kind of person Sylvia was.

I wonder what she’ll do if she finds out I’m gone.

I wonder what she’ll do if she finds out I’m out of the woods.

‘I don’t know anything about the Demon King… I don’t want to be a hero anymore.’

At that moment, I remembered what Sister Alice had said to me.

Sylvia’s appearance, not caring even after hearing that the Demon King was alive.

“…”

Indeed, will Sylvia move to protect this world without me?

As if answering my question, Pia squeezed her tearful eyes shut and shook her head from side to side.

“Ha, but… if it continues like this,”

“Well, there is a way. You can do it!”

Pia’s words that I can do whatever I want flashed through my mind.

Perhaps, among the spirit drinks, there may be a way to resolve this situation.

With a little bit of hope and anticipation coming back to life, I asked Pia.

“… how?”

“Ash’s…things, things that Ash’s hands have touched a lot.”

“…?”

bang!

The man who had been holding the doorknob and turning it began to kick the door violently with his foot, as if he was starting to get annoyed.

Pia perked up her ears in surprise at the sound, then nodded with a determined expression.

I recited an incantation and knocked over a large bookshelf near the door.

A bookshelf fell sideways with a loud noise, blocking the door.

The man outside the door screamed in surprise, then muttered in a voice mixed with fear.

“What, what, who’s in there!”

“Pia, do everything you can.”

“Ash, an object filled with Ash’s memories…”

“… thing?”

I was hesitant.

This is my room.

Of course, since I had become accustomed to living in the cabin with Sylvia, it had been quite some time since I had become attached to certain objects, but I was sure that at least in this room there were still things I was attached to.

My gaze, which had been wandering around for a while, soon stopped at my desk with a small drawer.

However, the desk was pushed and hidden by all the furniture and was pushed to the innermost place.

There might still be something left in that drawer, but the problem was that in order to open it, I had to take out all the furniture that filled the room, one by one.

“Hey! Come here quickly! Look, there’s really someone in here!”

And I didn’t have time for that.

“Friendship,”

Pia closed her eyes tightly for a moment, her tiny body trembling.

Pia’s body appeared to be gradually shrinking in size.

“Pia?”

Soon, Pia, who had shrunk to about half of her original size, placed both hands on the ground and returned to the fox form she had shown me when she first appeared.

Pia, now in the shape of a fox, dodged the piled-up furniture and ran towards my desk, which was located at the innermost part.

Then he lifted the beast’s forepaw, clumsily opened the drawer, and took a handful of the items inside with his mouth.

A small fountain pen that my father gave me,

An old music box that was broken but I couldn’t throw away because of the memories of lying down with my older sister.

Tiny mittens that my mother made with yarn.

Pia had a bunch of items in her mouth that were filled with memories, and she could recite them one after another just by looking at them once.

Pia raised her head with her mouth full of things.

“… Pia?”

Pia began to swallow the items little by little.

That was when.

“I brought an axe, let me open this, it’s blocked up tight.”

“I guess it won’t open if you kick it?”

“I just heard a loud noise and something was blocking the door. It looks like there really is someone there, just like you said.”

I gritted my teeth and reached between the furniture to barely hold onto the blanket on my bed.

When I think back to the day when Sylvia’s curse was right for me, there was no doubt that the condition for this curse to be activated was looking at a face or eyes.

If they come in or see me through the crack in the door that was chopped open with an axe, I can buy a few seconds by not showing my face.

With that thought in mind, I grabbed the blanket that was at my fingertips and pulled it tightly.

White dust spread throughout the room.

I lay flat on the floor, coughing, and covered myself with a dusty blanket.

At that moment, Pia, who had swallowed all the items, came over and crawled under the blanket I was covering myself with.

“Hey! There’s someone in there! There’s someone in there!”

“What the heck, who are you!”

“I’ll call the others!”

The men were startled and started screaming when they saw me with the blanket over my head between the split wood grains from the axe.

As loud as that noise, they started knocking on the door more and more loudly.

As I broke the doorknob with an axe and pushed the door open with my shoulder, the bookshelf blocking the door also began to slowly slide away.

“Pia! Are we still far?!”

“Krung,”

Pia pressed her body against mine and her small body trembled.

I kept my eyes tightly shut and held tightly to the thin sheet that covered Pia and me.

“Eww!”

With a man’s shout, the bookshelf blocking the door fell over.

And then I heard a man’s footsteps coming into the room.

“Let me see what kind of rat you are!”

“Pia!”

The blanket covering me was suddenly thrown away by a strong hand.

I lay face down on the floor and covered my face with both arms.

The man said nothing.

Is it too late?

Has the curse been activated?

Despair enveloped my whole body.

That was when.

“Ash… what are you doing now?”

Sylvia’s voice was heard.

“…Sylvia?”

I looked up in surprise.

Sylvia was looking down at me, holding the blanket covering me.

“Ash suddenly disappeared, and I was going to go look for him… and he was wearing this… Hmm? Why didn’t I see it before? But more importantly, where did this blanket come from?”

“…”

I wiped the cold sweat running down my forehead with my hand and looked down.

Beneath me, Pia, who had now returned to the form of a little girl, was lying there, breathing heavily.

“Oh my gosh, look at Ash’s sweat. What have you been doing?”

“Huh… haa…”

hut.

It was that crappy shack I made.

It seemed like Pia had succeeded.

I let out a sigh and fell backwards into the slump.

“Ash?”

“Sylvia…I brought you a blanket.”

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