Chapter 31
This is why demons are….
Above all—
“…That’s not even your real name?”
“Still. Please call me Therion.”
If I didn’t call him that, he kept acting as if he’d bother me forever saying, “Please call me Therion.” Reluctantly, I let out a small sigh and spoke his “name.”
“…Therion.”
Only then did he look satisfied and lightly scratched his palm with his fingernail. When I flinched my hand away from the ticklishness, he answered in a voice threaded with laughter.
“Yes. I know. I came to collect that curse. Edith… my purpose was originally here. But it seems Edith’s purpose was here too. Strange, isn’t it?”
“…….”
“May I ask what I’m curious about now?”
“Wait—about the nature of the curse, not yet.”
His hand, which had been holding mine, suddenly tightened. I bit my lip to suppress a groan as a pain like my wrist bones crushing flashed through me. When the laughter left his eyes like fog, his purple irises were looking straight at me.
“You know,” he said.
“…Know what?”
“The curse that scatters the body into ash. And—you cannot truly die until that curse runs its course.”
“…….”
“Edith. You took it, didn’t you?”
My heart hammered. My heartbeat inside my chest told me I was still alive. It emphasized itself, as if to make sure I would not forget.
Right. The fact that I had returned again meant—
‘…the curse.’
That the curse still remained within me.
Because one cannot return without the curse, it made sense that even if I’d gone back to before the curse, the curse would still be on me. And since I had the curse, this place was left as an empty shell with only the barrier remaining.
Rimos Therion—who had come to reclaim the curse—realized that I had already taken the curse when I entered here.
More despairing was the fact that as long as the curse remained in me, dying again would only mean returning once more.
‘But the timing of the return has changed? Why?’
Why was that? According to him, I definitely saw the end of the curse. I had calmed every calamity in the world and closed my eyes for good.
“Oh dear, Edith. Don’t overthink it.”
Rimos Therion wrapped his hands around my head as if to shake me out of my spinning thoughts and tipped my face to rest against his chest. It snapped me to attention.
“You don’t even seem to know everything about the curse. Right?”
No. There was still one thing I could cling to. I gripped the hem of Rimos Therion’s hood desperately.
“…Did I obtain your curse? If so—please undo it. No, kill me if you must. Just kill me.”
“Hm. That’s a problem. It’s not a curse I made…”
“Then why try to reclaim it?”
At my desperate shout he rolled his eyes once, then asked something strange.
“Edith, how many times is this for you?”
“…What do you mean?”
“How many times have you gone back to the past?”
He raked my hair with his fingers, smoothing it aside. I swallowed the urge to shove him away and answered.
“…Countless times.”
“Excuse me?”
“Hundreds. I couldn’t count after the six-hundredth — I lost my mind.”
“…How many times?”
“I said at least six hundred.”
Rimos Therion’s hand froze midair. Lifting my head from his chest to look at his face, I saw his eyes open wide. The casual, languid expression was gone; his cheek flushed bright in an instant. He seemed—slightly excited.
“…I thought it wouldn’t be just once or twice, but wow. I’m really curious about you now, Edith.”
“…Eh?”
He tapped my head with his hand. As I stared dazedly, my head was nudged. “No wonder. I can’t see what’s in here,” he muttered.
Ah — so that was why he’d offered the Q&A in the form of a ‘contract.’
An odd feeling stirred in my chest.
“…Can you read other people’s thoughts?”
“Yes. People who fall outside the norm, like Ethan Behemoth or Camilla Guinevere, are hard to see. And Edith… well, you’re a little different.”
“Different how…?”
“Don’t pry. Anyway, now I get it. It’s because hundreds of causal lines are piled on top of each other.”
“Then explain it properly to me.”
“Do you know how delicious you look to me?”
“…I really don’t want to know.”
“You look very tasty.”
He ignored everything I said.
“…….”
“Edith, would you make one more contract with me?”
He muttered while cupping his own cheek, peering at me with only his eyes moving. Then he closed his eyes and smiled. His smile didn’t look like that of a demon who’d just massacred hundreds with monsters—pure and tender, even endearing.
Ugh.
All the more nauseating.
Suppressing the urge to retch, I forced a calm expression and asked briefly.
“…What kind of contract?”
“Edith. I am a demon who rules the ‘unspeakable unknown.’”
He gently took the wrist that had been crushed and swollen by his own fingers and kissed the back of my hand. I felt cool, soft lips touch and lift.
With a beautiful smile he whispered, “If you let me taste all your long memories, I’ll help you finish this life.”
I swallowed.
“You mean—”
“Yes. I’ll help free you from the curse.”
Therion nodded as if to confirm I had understood. “It seems more fun to me than just watching you be in the way.”
“…….”
That sentence made it clear. This demon twisted everything I remembered in this cycle purely because it looked fun to him. Not because of any noble reason.
The Rimos Therion who’d been a forgettable figure in earlier returns—no, this demon impersonating ‘Rimos Therion’—would have failed to reclaim the curse in the past, unaware that I had taken it.
‘But now I stand out too much.’
So Rimos Therion began to meddle in events. The early massacred professors and knights, the suddenly appearing gigantic Arachne, the monsters obsessively hunting me—
Therion brushed his palm across the altar. As the faint dust cleared, a complex pattern in relief appeared. He turned his gaze to me and tapped my wrist. A faint blue sigil, one I had never seen before, rose on my skin—the same as on the altar.
He looked at it with a fond expression and wiped it away.
“This curse carries excessive causality. The fact that you—just a mere human—have repeated the world hundreds of times is proof. That’s why I tried to reclaim it…”
“…….”
My eyes met Rimos Therion’s. His purple gaze flickered like a wicked flame.
“It’s late, but it’s for the best. For a human to keep their wits—how rare.”
The way he touched my wrist like he was handling a precious, sticky object and the way he looked at me made my skin crawl.
…Did he just say “for a human”? I narrowed my brows and lightly slapped the back of his hand with my other hand.
“Ow.”
Rimos Therion widened his eyes in a pitiful expression and stared at me; if you only saw his face, he looked like an innocent victim.
“What’s wrong, Edith? Are you going to refuse, perhaps?”
He wore a human skin, but I remembered how unnervingly unnatural his thinking had been at odd moments.
‘I must not get dragged in.’
I straightened my back and looked at him squarely, fighting not to show the dizziness in my vision.
“…I will make the contract. But—”
“But?”
“If you make such a contract with me, you must respect my memories. A mere human’s memories.”
I deliberately lifted my blood-tinged chin. I stared at him steadily, refusing to avoid his murky lavender eyes. In this light they didn’t look like meadow flowers but like oil shimmering on rotting mud.
And the reason I could stand so boldly was clear—Rimos Therion’s eyes were already soaked with interest.
“Edith.”
Yes—I shouldn’t underestimate a demon either.
“Which is easier for me: to help you die, or to torment you into returning forever?”
He leaned his face toward mine with a happier smile.
“I’m better at tormenting.”
…Really, beings who like me tend not to have good personalities.
