Watabei cried until her chest heaved and her throat burned.
She couldn't look. She couldn't look at Goburo's face, at the wet, dark ruin where his eye had been. She couldn't look at the blood dripping onto the stone floor. She couldn't look at the empty chair where the man had stood.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
She screamed.
She screamed until her voice cracked, until the sound tore at her vocal cords, until there was nothing left but a ragged, wheezing sob.
And then, she fainted.
The darkness took her.
It was not a peaceful darkness. It was a jagged, chaotic void. It was the darkness of a story torn in half.
And then—
A sound.
A glimpse.
She saw a figure.
Not the man. Not the guards.
Someone else.
A girl.
A healer.
But not like the healer in the market square. Not like the girl who had died in the dirt.
This one moved wrong.
She moved fast. Blurring.
Watabei saw a spray of red.
She saw the man—the man with the slicked-back hair, the man who had taken the map—lifted off his feet.
He was slammed against the tiles.
*CRACK.*
The sound of bone shattering.
The healer stood over him. Her hands were glowing. But the light wasn't the soft, warm gold of restoration.
It was violet.
It was necrotic.
She looked at the others. The guards.
They froze. They were scared.
They dropped their weapons.
And then, Watabei's gaze drifted.
She saw Goburo.
He was screaming.
He wasn't screaming in pain.
He was screaming in terror.
He was staring at the healer.
He was staring at the blood.
He was terrified.
And then the darkness closed in again.
"Hey."
A voice.
A hand on her shoulder.
Shaking her.
"Hey. Wake up."
Watabei gasped.
She opened her eyes.
She was still in the chair. But the ropes were gone. The chains were gone.
She was sitting on the floor.
Goburo was kneeling in front of her.
His face...
His face was bandaged. Thick, clean white cloth wrapped around his head, covering his left eye. A spot of red was seeping through the gauze, small and slowly growing.
But he was awake. He was alive.
He looked... calm.
"Goburo?" she whispered.
"Yeah," he said. "I'm here."
She took a hold of herself. She checked her arms. Her legs. She was okay.
She gradually sat down, leaning her back against the wall.
She looked around.
The room.
It was a slaughterhouse.
The walls were splattered. The floor was slick.
The man—the leader—was in pieces. The guards were in pieces.
And standing in the centre of the room, silent, covered in blood, was the healer.
The girl from the vision.
She stood perfectly still. Her head was bowed. Her hands hung loose at her sides.
Half her face was masked in red.
Her eyes were open.
They were empty.
Watabei felt a chill run down her spine.
She looked at Goburo.
"Who..." she started. Her voice trembled. "Who is that? How did...?"
Goburo followed her gaze.
"Oh," he said. "Her."
He gestured vaguely.
"She came in. While you were out."
"But... she killed them. All of them. She tore them apart."
"Yes," Goburo said simply.
"How?"
Goburo didn't answer for a moment. He adjusted the bandage on his face, wincing slightly.
"Kenji sent her," he said.
Watabei stared at him.
"Kenji?" she repeated. "Your plant friend?"
"Yes."
Watabei looked at the blood-soaked girl again. The necrotic violet energy had faded, leaving just a hollow shell.
"Kenji sent... a healer? To save us?"
"Yes," Goburo said again.
Watabei let out a long, shaky breath. She felt the tension in her shoulders drop.
She closed her eyes for a second.
"I... I am sorry," she whispered. "I am sorry it happened to you. I shouldn't have let them... I shouldn't have..."
"It's no worries," Goburo interrupted.
His voice was flat.
"What matters most is that nobody died," he said. "Well. Nobody that matters."
Watabei looked at him.
*He sounds different,* she thought.
The panic was gone. The fear was gone.
He sounded like...
She didn't know what he sounded like.
She looked around the room again. The blood. The gore.
She looked at the healer.
The girl was covered in half blood.
She looked souless.
The girl's eyes stared at nothing.
"Is she... okay?" Watabei asked.
Goburo looked at the healer.
"Oh, well," he said. "She is a puppet. I think that's what it is called."
Watabei blinked.
"A puppet?"
"Yes," Goburo said. "She is already dead."
Watabei felt the blood drain from her face.
"Dead?"
"Physically," Goburo said. "Functionally. She is being operated remotely. Like a... like a hand in a glove. But the glove is a corpse."
He spoke about it with the same tone one might use to describe the weather.
"A puppet," he repeated. "Kenji's puppet."
Watabei looked from the dead-eyed healer to the goblin with the bandaged face.
She felt a sudden, jarring disconnect.
It felt like there was a chapter missing from the book.
She had passed out in a moment of pure horror, with Goburo screaming in terror and the world ending.
She had woken up to Goburo calmly explaining that his friend—a plant entity miles away—had remote-controlled a dead healer to massacre a room full of armed men.
The gap between those two moments was vast.
It was filled with silence. It was filled with something Goburo wasn't telling her.
She saw the way he held himself. The way he didn't look at the blood. The way his hand occasionally twitched, as if checking for a connection that wasn't there.
The understanding of Goburo—to Watabei—had shifted.
He was not just a goblin anymore.
He was something else.
She just looked at him.
She didn't know what to say.
So she said nothing.
TO BE CONTINUED...