Catching the cold gleam of the knife from the corner of her eye, "Dorothy" was so terrified she nearly lost her soul. She scrambled out of the way in a panic, narrowly avoiding the thrust. The knife that had been aimed at her throat only ended up slicing her arm, and in blinding pain she staggered down the corridor and fled.
Michael, in his white rubber mask, did not seem in any hurry to kill her. He followed after her at an unhurried pace, his small, measured steps elegant, his heavy footfalls echoing behind "Dorothy" like the ticking of death itself.
Clutching her bleeding left arm, she ran for her life, through the boiler room, through the ventilation ducts, her strength draining away at a terrifying rate as waves of dizziness washed over her. At last, she reached the hospital basement and saw a wooden door standing slightly ajar.
"Dorothy" desperately needed somewhere to rest, somewhere to catch her breath, so she pushed the door open and went inside.
Her trembling hand pushed the door inward—
And the space around her seemed to warp.
Though she had entered through a door in the hospital basement, she found herself on the second floor of a private house.
Pale moonlight streamed through the window, and a jack-o'-lantern sat on the nightstand in the corner.
"No… I don't want this… why…"
Leaning against the wooden door, "Dorothy" sank to her knees, her sobbing thick with despair and fear.
Her gaze was nailed to the double bed in the middle of the room.
Lying on it was a woman identical to her in both face and clothing. Her head had been chopped off—then "carefully" placed back atop the severed neck.
At the head of the bed stood a gravestone, still clotted with dirt and weeds beneath it, as if it had just been ripped straight out of a grave.
"No… I don't want this… I don't want this… Brother… someone save me…"
At that moment, "Dorothy" was just like the real Dorothy had once been when trapped inside that doll—unable to see even the faintest glimmer of hope, her cries for help destined to go unheard.
"Dorothy" backed away several steps, trying to escape that strange, horrifying room.
But the instant she turned her head, a woman's corpse dropped down from the ceiling and hung upside down right in front of her.
Blood streamed from all seven orifices. A knife was buried in the corpse's chest. Beneath its hanging hair, the face twisted in agony—
It was identical to "Dorothy's" again.
Its bulging, bloodshot eyes were fixed on her in a death stare.
"AAAAAHHHHH—!!"
Startled out of her mind, "Dorothy" shrieked and stumbled backward again. In retreat, she slammed into the wardrobe.
With a long creak, the wardrobe doors slowly swung open.
Inside, "Dorothy" saw yet another version of her own corpse.
This one wore a hospital gown. Its neck was empty, cleanly severed. The missing head, still dripping blood, was cradled neatly in the corpse's own hands against its chest, as though some evil ritual were being performed there. The lifted head had its eyes wide open, staring straight at the frozen "Dorothy" standing before the wardrobe.
"Eeeeeeeeek—!!"
The sight made "Dorothy" scream again, her limbs going weak with terror.
And in that instant, a large hand suddenly reached out from the darkness and clamped over her mouth.
Every scream was jammed back down her throat, turning into muffled whimpers.
The first thing to emerge from the dark was a white rubber mask.
Then Michael himself stepped out of the shadows, a knife in his right hand, while the other hand gripped "Dorothy's" face tight enough to lift her off the ground with ease.
"Mmmph… mmfghhh…!"
Her pleas dissolved into hopeless, guttural sounds.
Tears slid down her face. With her mouth covered, "Dorothy" could not even beg for mercy.
Michael raised the knife, pointed it at her chest, and drove his arm forward with steady force.
The blade pierced through the hospital gown and into her body.
Then it was pulled out.
Then thrust in again.
Over and over.
The cold of the metal. The emptiness of her organs being stabbed. Life draining out with the hot gush of blood…
All sensation was mercilessly dragged down into darkness.
And just like before, "Dorothy" was not granted death.
Not granted an end.
Her consciousness was violently dragged back out of the dark.
At Crystal Lake, Jason hunted her down.
In dreams, Freddy hunted her down.
In a bustling city at night, Ghost Rider chased her on his hellish motorcycle.
After dying so many times, when "Dorothy" next came to, she found herself standing in the middle of a crowd.
"Out of the way! Move! Don't block my path!"
A vicious-looking man was running down the street, and everyone around him scattered from him as though he were plague itself, because in his hand gleamed a short knife.
"Dorothy" happened to be directly in front of him.
She failed to get out of the way in time.
The knife plunged into her abdomen, and she died in the street from blood loss.
When "Dorothy" woke again, she found herself on a snowy plain in the middle of a blizzard.
While she was still frozen in confusion, a little rabbit that looked harmless enough came hopping to her feet—
And in an instant, it devoured her entire foot, clean to the ankle.
More and more rabbits were drawn in by the smell of blood. They were fiercer than the most savage carnivores. They pounced on "Dorothy," tore open her stomach, sucked out her brain matter, crunched apart her fingers, gouged out her eyes, fed on her thighs, bit through her tongue, gnawed through her intestines—
Until the white snowfield was gradually dyed a glaring crimson.
By the time "Dorothy" came to again, she had stopped trusting anyone or anything around her.
Those rabbits had looked harmless too, and yet they had turned into monsters more vicious than any flesh-eating beast. Now everything around her felt suspicious. Anything could kill her.
So much so that when a passerby approached out of concern—having heard her scream and seen the ghastly look on her face—"Dorothy" shoved the person away at once.
"Don't come near me!"
But she pushed too hard, and on top of that, her mind had been left so weakened by dying over and over that she lost her own balance as well and fell backward.
As if it had been timed perfectly, a large truck came roaring toward her that very moment.
The wheel ran over "Dorothy's" head, and it burst like a smashed watermelon.
"Gaaaaahhh—!!"
"Dorothy" jolted awake yet again, her small face drained utterly white, her chest heaving with ragged breaths.
How many more times… was she going to have to die?
When would the next death come?
Where would it come from?
Then "Dorothy" saw a little girl.
And terror instantly flooded her face.
By now, even a blade of grass by the roadside was something she would be on guard against. Her nerves had become fragile to the extreme. So when it came to a little girl—
In her eyes, the child before her was far more terrifying than any ravenous beast.
"D-Don't… don't come closer… please spare me…"
As though she had not heard a word "Dorothy" said, the little girl kept one finger in her mouth and walked toward her, one step at a time.
"Y-you stay back…! I said don't come closer, are you fucking deaf?!"
"Dorothy" snarled in a bluffing show of bravado, only to see the girl calmly take another step.
Her pupils instantly shrank to pinpricks.
The next second, a trembling scream burst from her throat.
"I'm gonna go to Somalia and Cairo or something—don't come near meeeee!!"
...
"How does your body feel? Any stiffness in your movements, or any signs of rejection? If anything at all feels wrong, tell me immediately. The soul and the brain are both extremely delicate and mysterious domains—even the gods would not dare claim to have fully understood them. Xu Fu isn't arrogant enough to say she surpasses the gods in those areas."
"N-no… I feel fine. Better than I ever have before, really… Thank you so much, Lady Xu Fu…"
Dorothy sat stiffly on the sofa opposite Xu Fu, rubbing nervously at the hem of her skirt with both hands. She had not taken a single sip of the drink the automaton maid dolls had brought her.
Unlike the "Dorothy" who had been possessed, the real Dorothy was a very soft, meek girl. There was a kind of purity to her, as though reality had not yet had the chance to stain her.
Xu Fu had driven out the evil spirit that had possessed her and returned Dorothy's soul from the doll back to her body. After that, Xu Fu had brought Dorothy back to her home. It was a house she had only recently acquired, but in order to protect the mountain of treasures in her room, Xu Fu had set up so many traps throughout the estate that it bordered on lunacy.
As for the bunch from The Replaced, never mind getting inside—even if a single one of them managed to reach her front door unharmed, she would eat the tea table right in front of Dorothy. Without sauce, too.
"Mmm… that's good, that's good. It looks like your soul and body were separated for a relatively short time, so the rejection isn't too severe… Mm-hm, mm-hm… We'll keep observing you for now. Since it involves the soul, there's no such thing as being too careful."
Xu Fu lightly tapped the armrest of the sofa with her fingers.
In front of her floated a book and a writing brush in midair. The brush was busily writing in the book on its own, silently recording Dorothy's condition in meticulous detail. The handwriting, moreover, was beautiful. The whole scene had a rather magical feel to it.
Hmm… maybe it would feel even more magical if she replaced the brush with a quill pen? But Xu Fu was a Taoist, not a mage, and she had never studied at Hogwarts, so perhaps it would be more fitting to replace the book with bamboo slips instead?
Her main field of study had always been death.
In order to kill the immortal Yu Mei-ren, she had gathered nearly every cause of death in the world. That was closely tied to the soul, of course, but it still was not her primary field. When it came to understanding souls, she was still no match for those gods of the underworld in Chaldea.
"Y-yes…" Dorothy lowered her head, staring nervously at her own fingers. "You saved my life… H-how can I possibly keep causing you more trouble, Lady Xu Fu…"
"That doesn't count as causing trouble." Xu Fu drew her gaze away from the self-writing book and brush and looked at Dorothy instead. "You're someone I saved, after all. If your body develops problems because of my own negligence, it'd make Xu Fu lose face~."
"…"
Dorothy looked so distressed she was practically on the verge of tears, as though Xu Fu had bullied her or something.
That dark Gothic lolita outfit had been nothing more than the evil spirit's bad taste. The moment Dorothy's soul returned to her body, she had immediately wanted to change out of those clothes, and wash off the bizarre makeup on her face as well.
The white dress Dorothy was wearing now had been changed into at Xu Fu's house, though it did not belong to Xu Fu herself. Xu Fu's clothes were not the right size for Dorothy. This dress had been sewn by the automaton maid dolls in the house.
In order to free up their hands as much as possible, Xu Fu had stuffed all kinds of housekeeping skills into those maid dolls when she made them. Every domestic skill she could think of, she had shoved into them wholesale.
Including knife-throwing.
Too bad there was no way to teach them Za Warudo. Otherwise, they would have taken one giant step closer to becoming perfect maids.
"So, you can't go home right now?"
Xu Fu looked at Dorothy and saw her nod frantically, like a chick pecking at grain.
Dorothy was a spiritualist too, though she only had the ability to see spirits and lacked any way to fight them, putting her in a situation similar to Miko Yotsuya's.
Her older brother, Oswald, was also a spiritualist. But he had been possessed by an evil spirit even earlier than Dorothy had, and apparently held no low status within The Replaced.
"Since you can't go back home, stay here with me for now. My place is pretty big. A few extra people won't be any problem."
"Th-thank you, Lady Xu Fu…" Dorothy hurried to thank her, then seemed to remember something and asked, "Th-then… school?"
"School? Mm… right, I almost forgot you're a student. You still have classes to attend."
Xu Fu rubbed her chin. If she remembered right, Dorothy went to the same school as Yayoi Hozuki, and even the class next door.
That did not mean Dorothy could rest easy, however.
"Just keep going to school like normal. I'll have someone protect you, so you don't need to worry about some idiot trying anything against you."
"…"
"And also… you know Yayoi Hozuki, right? That classmate of yours who always walks around as if it were perfectly normal to keep terrifyingly vicious evil spirits by her side. She's a friend of mine. If you run into danger, you can ask her for help too. She probably won't refuse."
With that reminder from Xu Fu, Dorothy immediately remembered that there really was someone like that at her school.
It was just that the evil spirits around Yayoi Hozuki were so dangerous that Dorothy would start trembling in fear even if she only saw her from far away, so she had never once dared to go up and speak to her.
So that girl was a friend of Lady Xu Fu's? No wonder she could walk around so calmly with something that terrifying beside her… Dorothy marveled inwardly.
Xu Fu secretly took a look at the current state of the evil spirit that had possessed Dorothy.
Mm… in just the short time they had been chatting here, that thing had already died seventeen more times.
Not bad. Its mind had not completely collapsed yet.
She would check on it again a little later.
---
T/N: not the subaru treatment :sob: anyway what horror was the last scene we saw with "Dorothy"?
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