Chapter III.XXX (3.30) - Chiame

  Kizu opened his eyes. Mitsuko held his hand, guiding him forward. She smiled back at him sweetly. His heart thumped rapidly as she batted her eyelashes at him. She had such pretty dark eyes.

  A love potion didn’t make any sense. How would Mitsuko know how to brew a love potion? And succubus blood wasn’t a common ingredient. The creatures lived in urban environments, praying mostly on drunks at night with illusions and pheromones. There wouldn’t be any all the way out here. No, he must be mistaken.

  Unless a witch supplied her with a potion. But to use on him? What would be the point? If it was a love potion then the miniscule amount applied to coat her lips wouldn’t last more than ten minutes.

  He took another step up the stairs, towed along by Mitsuko’s hand. He stared down at the steps, worn wooden boards from years upon years of use.

  “Your father murdered your mother,” he blurted out. He didn’t let himself think. “He shoved her down these stairs and her head caved in. Blood smeared on the edge of the steps. He spent hours upon hours scrubbing out the stains from the wood.”

  Mitsuko hesitated and looked back at him, a look of slight confusion on her face. He’d ruined it. He’d upset her. But…but he needed to confess everything now. She needed to know the truth. Only, he realized she had no reason to believe him. He sounded like a raving lunatic. She probably hated him now. His heart fell as despair reached for him.

  “Let’s not discuss such…distasteful things,” she said after a pause. “Maybe another time. We have so much more to discover about one another.”

  That…wasn’t how he expected Mitsuko to react. She’d grieved over her mother’s death for months after the fact. Spent countless hours at the grave and attempted to shut her father out of her life when he began seeing Piaki. He expected her to either rage at him thinking he lied or embrace him for delivering such a vile secret. But she simply continued leading him up the stairs once again. Had she changed so much in the last few months? Then again, he hadn’t been paying her much attention over the last year. He had avoided watching her once she started dating the mayor’s tyrannical son. It might have been more of a gradual shift in her character that he’d just completely been oblivious too. Still, he felt incredible relief that he hadn’t accidentally angered her.

  They entered a bedroom. Mitsuko pushed him down on the futon sprawled out on the floor then circled around the futon to a red bottle of wine and two glasses sitting on a low table. Kizu blinked and suddenly both glasses were full. The wine reminded him of Emilia and his stomach twisted in distaste.

  “I’m…not thirsty,” he said sheepishly. He smiled up at her.

  She giggled and shook her head.

  “But a cool glass sounds so nice right now. It’s so hot in here.”

  Then, to emphasize her statement, she removed her top. She playfully tossed it at his face.

  He took it off his face and then forgot how to breathe.

  She was lean with blemishless skin. Her stomach was outlined ever so slightly by muscle. His eyes climbed, went too far, then quickly off to the side before she drew in his gaze again.

  She leaned towards him, handing him the drink. He took it. Her skin was mere centimeters away from him. It took every bit of willpower not to toss the drink to the side and embrace her on the spot. His eyes were glued to her soft skin. Her exposed stomach.

  Then he blinked. He double checked, counting again. That wasn’t right.

  Mitsuko now had all her ribs.

  The crone had stolen one of Mitsuko’s ribs. She kept it in her hut. In fact, Kizu had seen it just earlier that same day. It was dangling from a piece of twine next to a taxidermied three-winged chicken.

  That meant it wasn't Mitsuko smiling down at him. Once that revelation clicked in place, he managed to shake some of the potion’s effects off. The specific love potion he thought he’d tasted earlier was dependent on the consumer being conscious of who the person was. If he knew this wasn’t Mitsuko, then she lost her power over him.

  But…maybe it was her. Could she have grown her rib back overnight? But that didn’t make sense with what he knew about medical spells. A rib removed like that would need to be transplanted and have her body reacclimate to it after years apart. Right? But what if she’d taken a transfiguration potion to temporarily regain the rib in an attempt to be perfect for him. That was definitely possible. He could think of the right ingredients for such a potion. If she could get a hold of a love potion, then a potion like that wouldn’t be too difficult to find as well. And it would be really sweet of her to put so much effort in. Wait no, that line of thinking meant she did spike him with a love potion. That was bad. Except…why was it bad?

  “Drink,” not-Mitsuko said. She sat on the futon beside him. “Aren’t you hot?”

  “I-I…” Kizu stammered but struggled to string together a coherent sentence. He looked at the glass in his hand. It quivered as it slowly went up towards his mouth. Some of the liquid spilled over and splattered on the futon, staining it.

  “Relax,” she said with a smile. She held both his hands, steadying the one with the glass and laying the other on her exposed stomach. Under her incredibly soft skin he could feel her ribs. The rib that was not supposed to be there.

  Just as the glass touched his lips, he flicked his other wrist.

  A blade of ice erupted from his hand, puncturing through not-Mitsuko’s body and sticking out her back. Blood discolored the sword with streaks of scarlet. Blood streamed down the blade and onto the tatami, futon, and Kizu’s clothes.

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  “You stabbed me!”

  “Yes,” Kizu said. He’d stabbed her.

  She glared at him.

  “You’re not supposed to stab me like this. Ugh. Of course the crone raises the dumbest boy possible. Perhaps that was her goal all along with you. She clearly dissected out all the intelligent parts.”

  Kizu blinked at her. Mitsuko knew about the crone. Obviously, she’d stolen her rib. But not about him. But this wasn’t Mitsuko. Probably. Mitsuko would die if skewered through the gut. This version of her just looked irritated.

  “Who are you?” Kizu asked.

  She pulled herself back, the sword exiting her body with a squelch. The bloodied tip of the blade fell to the ground. Kizu lacked the strength to hold the sword’s weight. She covered the bloody hole in her body and scowled.

  “Chiame,” she said. She lifted her bloody hand and pointed it at him. “It’s a name to remember. Nowhere will be safe as I rain blood down on the land. It will be the name on the lips of the last person alive on this horrid continent.”

  She looked like she meant to say more, but Kizu didn’t give her the chance. The potion’s effects now broken, he slashed up at her with his sword.

  Chiame fell backwards, tripping on the nightstand and tipping over the wine bottle. It broke in half as it hit the floor.

  Kizu scrambled to the other side of the room. Only now did he realize he had dropped his antimagic barrier. When had that been? Probably after the kiss. He recreated it now, and just in time as the witch on the floor sent a hex at him. It dissipated against the antimagic, but he still felt the barrier strain.

  He glanced at the door. Chiama had locked it when they’d entered. He’d stupidly assumed at the time she’d done it for privacy. Then his eyes traveled across the room to the window. It was behind Chiama. He could jump outside, but he didn’t have an angle on the ground. He’d have to use his best judgment. But…there were villagers below. The risk was low, but not nearly impossible that he’d kill someone if he tried to jump blindly. The image of his foot suddenly replacing the majority of a pedestrian’s head caused him to pause. He could also aim for the air above the road, but then risked falling on someone and breaking their neck. As well as risk his own safety. But no, that was likely his best option. He’d just make sure to land on his monster leg. That should be able to hold his weight fine. He just hoped that he could perform a jump properly with the blood transfusion watering down his spell power.

  Chiame hissed, a shard of broken glass from the wine bottle embedded in her hand as she pressed off the ground to stand. If she’d been infected by the love potion obviously laced in the wine, the witch showed no sign of it. She plucked the shard out and flicked the bloody glass at him. It passed through his antimagic barrier and bounced off his chest.

  Then her skin bubbled and changed. Her body expanded a couple centimeters while her hair shortened. Her eyes yellowed and her eyebrows shrunk to little more than thin lines.

  But most importantly, her stomach no longer had a hole through it. The skin wasn’t as perfectly unblemished as Mitsuko’s had been originally, but it lacked a sword-sized cavity. Even the blood had disappeared.

  “How did you do that?” Kizu asked. A person under a transfiguration potion could return to their form with varying degrees of damage depending on a thousand different factors. But returning from a human form without a scratch?

  “It’s not a potion,” Chiame said. Her voice was a bit lower than Mitsuko’s. The inflections now entirely different. Gone was the rural local accent.

  “Then what?”

  Chiame smiled. She showed him two perfect rows of white teeth. “A hex of course. You stabbed Mitsuko.”

  Kizu’s eyes widened. That hex was…possible. More than possible. It explained her now perfect health. But, that meant Mitsuko….

  His heart dropped and he wanted to fall with it to the ground and weep. He struggled to keep on his feet. He should run now. This was a trap. Just jump and get out of this inn. Why had he stupidly given Basil the emergency contact with Taroe? Where was the shapeshifter?

  “She’s still alive. The stab wound you gave her will have her bleeding out. Probably dead in the next couple minutes. But for now, still alive. Just come with me and I’ll take you to her.”

  “I…don’t know medical spells.” It was the only excuse he could come up with. He fought the urge to rush to Mitsuko’s side with rationality. He wanted to get on his knees and grovel at Chiame’s feet.

  “If you accompany me, I’ll heal her.”

  Another minute. The love potion’s effects should end in about another minute.

  But a minute was too long. Even without the potion’s effects, he’d want to save the girl. He’d stabbed her. He’d killed before. The goblin’s beaten corpse flashed through his mind, then the flaming bloodspawn, and finally the image of Inari and Kateshi as they sank moments before the monster consumed them. But…Mitsuko was innocent. He would be the killer of a girl whose only crime was existing. She was vain and insecure, constantly obsessed with her appearance. But he recalled watching her steal a bottle of wine from her step-mother’s stash only to go out of town to set up a picnic alone in that same field he’d seen her in yesterday. She had wept while watching the sun lower in the horizon and then had spent several hours looking up at the stars. She spoke out into the night about her dreams of escaping the village. A secret she was too scared to admit to anyone in the village. A deep wanderlust hid under her surface vanity. She wanted to shop in the bustling cities in the Hon mountains and visit the vast sea. She dreamed of living through stories like those traveling minstrels sang of. Mythical islands in the sky and forgotten temples buried in the sands of the desert. Mitsuko had no idea he existed outside of the brief sight of him yesterday. But Kizu knew her. He knew more about her than perhaps anyone else in the world. And he didn’t want her to die.

  He bowed his head and submitted.

  “Take me,” he said.

  “Drop the barrier. And don’t resist the jump.”

  Every survival instinct at him screamed as he released his antimagic barrier. He suspected that, like she mentioned, if he tried he’d be able to resist the jump just like he did with beacons. But he lowered his guard.

  Chiame walked up to him and clamped a hand on his shoulder. She was surprisingly warm-blooded for such a nasty person. Their yellow eyes locked. His the gold of an owl monkey and hers, the dull yellow of sickly puss.

  Then, she jumped.

  Ten Blood Curse Academia chapters (5 weeks) ahead of Royal Road.