Chapter 173: Cutting Space
Everything unfolding before him was going in a direction Lucian hadn't anticipated.
He felt the magic tool against his chest: the warmth that had been building was dropping fast now, the heat that had been almost searing a moment ago cooling rapidly.
Sebas had arrived.
He didn't need to look. He was certain of it.
When the disc Sebas carried came close enough, the temperature in Lucian's disc reversed back to normal, which meant Sebas had entered observable range without question.
But that was the problem.
The plan had been thrown off, and there was no time left to recover. Lucian no longer had a reason to be captured. Which meant he had no way to trigger Touch Me through that route.
The audience had arrived. The performance had fallen apart.
Should he pretend to snap — act furious and impulsive, charge in barehanded and let himself get taken?
No. With Sebas's eyes on him, that would be seen through immediately.
Forcing the scene now would only make it obvious.
Lucian's thoughts were moving at a speed that had no name.
His gaze swept the battlefield. Gazok stood nearby, club held across his body. The guard captain was staring at the dying child in his hand with an expression that hadn't caught up to what had just happened.
In the edge of his vision, Lucian caught a dark shape.
The old butler had appeared at the perimeter of the camp at some point, standing straight, both hands at his sides.
Sebas was watching the battlefield. He hadn't moved yet; the cease-fire that had briefly settled over the camp seemed to have held his attention.
It's over. There's no time at all.
Just as Lucian had reached that conclusion and was preparing to give up —
In the guard captain's hand.
The girl's head fell completely forward. Her arms and legs went soft and hung limp at her sides, like a broken doll someone had discarded.
Blood ran from the wound in her neck, flowing down along that thin throat, soaking the pale grey blanket into deep red.
The eyes that had curved into crescents only a moment ago were half-closed now. The eyelashes had stopped moving.
She was gone. And it had happened so fast.
Touch Me watched it all happen, unable to look away.
His lips were shaking. The tears in his eyes had blurred everything.
Touch Me wanted to call her name. Leno. But he realized he had only just heard it from her own mouth, just now, and he hadn't even had the chance to say it back to her properly.
"Augh..."
The sound came out of his throat compressed and broken, as though something had been dragged across it.
"No!"
Touch Me's heart lurched.
That single beat landed with a weight unlike any before it — like something breaking through a limit it had never touched.
A force he had never felt before surged up from somewhere deep inside him.
Rage.
Regret.
Self-reproach.
Every suppressed emotion detonated at once, like a levee breaking, washing away every thread of reason and restraint he had left.
He swung the sword in his hand.
Touch Me himself didn't fully understand why he swung it.
The guard captain was more than ten paces away. The sword's reach wouldn't get there. It couldn't possibly.
But his body acted before his mind did.
The blade came down aimed directly at the guard captain.
The image in Touch Me's head was the smile that had bloomed through the blood, and those eyes going dark.
He didn't aim carefully. He didn't think about distance.
Touch Me only knew one thing: it had to reach.
The blade fell.
And then —
Space cracked open.
A fracture line, so fine it was nearly invisible to the naked eye, cut cleanly through the air along the path of Touch Me's swing and split the space apart.
The guard captain was still holding the girl.
The next instant.
The guard captain, still reeling from the fact that his hostage had killed herself, felt the world in front of him slide sideways.
Everything in his vision shifted apart.
Between the left half and the right half of what he could see, a seam appeared, smooth as a mirror's face.
He tried to look down at his own body.
He found he could no longer control it.
His body had been split cleanly in two, from the crown of his head straight down through the pelvis. The cut surface was immaculate: the edges of bone where they had sheared apart carried the same faint gloss as fractured ceramic.
The guard captain's body had been divided down the middle.
The wound was so precise that it wasn't until the two halves began to slide apart that he understood what had happened to him.
"How... is this possible?"
The guard captain pushed out his last words in disbelief.
Then both halves of his body toppled outward in opposite directions, and blood finally surged from the wound, tracing a clean arc across the mud.
The claw that had been holding the girl went slack the moment the body separated.
Leno's body fell from the air. The blanket caught the wind as she dropped, opening around her thin frame, carrying her down like a leaf returning to earth.
The world went silent for one instant.
Gazok looked at what was left of the guard captain, the body split into two halves. The ugly grin on that boar face had frozen into something that no longer had a name.
Lucian stood where he was, watching the crack in space slowly close.
His pupils contracted by a fraction.
It actually worked.
The moment that thought broke open in his mind, he nearly lost control of himself. The force of his relief was so intense that his fingers began to tremble. He closed his fist and pressed it down.
Lucian turned his head and looked toward the camp's perimeter.
He found only a few dry leaves spinning up into the air, caught by a brief eddy.
The figure in the black tailcoat was no longer where it had been.
On instinct, Lucian turned and looked toward Touch Me.
Touch Me had collapsed.
The boy went down on his back, his sword sliding from his hand and landing in the mud beside him.
His eyes were half-open, his breathing shallow and fast. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth down along his jaw.
The last strike had cost him. He had spent the HP he had left to amplify the blow without thinking about it, and the injury showed.
Touch Me's deep blue eyes looked up at the sky. His awareness was beginning to slip. He had no strength left to look and see what his strike had done.
Sebas had crossed the distance to his side in the same moment Touch Me fell, appearing beside him and catching his body as it went down.
The old butler's lined face was wet with tears.
Lucian had never seen Sebas look like this.
The tears ran from those pale grey eyes, tracing the deep lines of his face, and fell onto Touch Me's armor.
Sebas's hands cradled the back of Touch Me's head and his spine, handling him with the same care someone would use for a sacred relic they had thought was lost forever.
His arm slid beneath Touch Me's shoulder blades, the sleeve of his coat putting a layer of cloth between the boy and the mud.
That coat, which was never anything but immaculate, was covered in blood and dirt. Sebas didn't notice.
Through the blur of his tears, the boy in silver armor in front of him and a figure from somewhere deep in his memory overlapped and became one.
"Touch Me-sama..."
Sebas's voice came out rough. His face held disbelief, urgency, joy, and pain, all tangled together into something that had no single word.
"It's really you... it's truly you..."
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