"What does this little thing eat to grow up? With power like that, what's there to fear from Diego?"
At the center of a kilometer-wide pit that looked like a construction site, a groggy Natsuki Subaru rose slowly to his feet. Thanks to the Fixed Effect on him, he'd taken no injury.
Gazing at the ring of earth around him, dug out deep and left utterly empty, he felt for a moment the panic of standing at the heart of a tsunami, the helplessness of facing a natural disaster head-on.
If he remembered right, that earlier 'safe route'—the field stretching cloudless to the horizon—was likely another crater this kid had blasted out too.
The Creator must have gone mad to give a little girl power this strong. Or was she actually the type who looked like a little girl but had really lived several hundred years?
But why had they suddenly gone silent after she let off that big move? Don't tell me it was some 'slay a thousand of the enemy, lose eight hundred of your own' technique?
"Oi—that thing over there that looks like Typhon after she got washed to bits, is it dead? What in the world happened here?"
The shout of a Sanctuary resident pulled Natsuki Subaru back from his thoughts.
The one calling to him was a resident of the Sanctuary: a blond youth, all muscle and equally ferocious of face, sliding sideways down the slope, eyeing warily this odd-smelling Subaru.
Garfiel. Though only a youth, his strength was not to be underestimated; he was the one who'd taken the lead in detaining Roswaal here.
That said, he was actually the one who didn't want to free the Sanctuary. And while watching this whole area get destroyed left him with fairly complicated feelings, alongside the sense of having lost something, he'd oddly also felt a weight lift off his chest.
"Really dead? You—" He rudely seized Natsuki Subaru by the collar and hauled him around to face him.
Staring at Subaru's face, he sank into thought. "You're Roswaal's boss?"
"..."
"Owww—"
Echidna, who a moment ago had kept up all her poise, crouched down clutching her shin. Though she had no physical body, she could feel genuine, honest-to-goodness pain.
Because of Gensokyo's terrain—and taking into account that Yimi couldn't fly and loved to run around everywhere—the shoes Kirisame Marisa had commissioned for her were not only hard-soled but resistant to wear.
Echidna was wearing a thin skirt, and this was exactly like slamming the front of your bare shin into a table corner on a summer's day.
"Mother!" Beatrice glared at Yimi. "What are you doing?"
"It's all right, Beatrice." Rubbing her shin to ease the pain, Echidna kept her smile, though the sense of a grin that never reached her eyes was heavier now.
Returning good for evil, she turned and poured a cup of tea, holding it out to Yimi. "Here—have something to drink first."
The stuff inside was, in effect, her own body fluid.
Yimi stiffened her neck and took a wary step back. "Xun-zi says not to drink, strangers' things."
"Ah, is that so—what a well-behaved child, so wary." Echidna withdrew the cup.
Beatrice quickly took Yimi's hand and tugged her back a little. "Mother, she didn't mean it."
"Ah—Beatrice has come to seem just like a mama now."
"Mother..."
Echidna gave Yimi's cheek a gentle pinch. "It's rare for you to come all this way. Is there nothing you'd like to ask? I am, after all, the Witch of Greed, who stands for wisdom."
In truth it was more that she wanted to understand this little runt; the unknown always makes a person excited, doesn't it?
"Why, did you make Betty guard that place?" Yimi pointed at Echidna, asking the question Beatrice couldn't bring herself to voice.
"Why, indeed?" Echidna tapped her chin with a forefinger. "Who can say..."
With no human heart just now, that was probably the only answer she could give.
The little cat raised her foot again and kicked Echidna hard in the other shin.
"Agh—" Echidna crouched down once more, hugging her leg.
When she lifted her head again, the smile on her face was, at last, becoming hard to keep up.
"..."
And then Yimi and the rest were driven out of the Castle of Dreams.
Waking on the Trial Grounds, now nearly leveled flat, Beatrice gazed blankly at the sky.
Echidna could have erased their memory of going to the Castle of Dreams, to keep these matters from leaking to certain people. But Beatrice remembered what had just happened with perfect clarity.
"You—honestly!"
Beatrice grabbed Yimi's shoulders in exasperation and spun her round and round. "Betty finally got to see Mother for once, and you went and ruined it all! Hand over all your catnip right now. I'm confiscating it—no catnip for three days!"
She'd had so much more to tell her mother: that Geuse was alive and well now, that she'd been reunited with her brother, that Kitty-Mi had lately been talking about 'leaving this world.'
If it were Mother, she'd surely know what had gone wrong with Kitty-Mi's body, surely be able to find a way to fix it...
Yimi resisted her spinning, reaching up to touch Beatrice's face, only to find that this time Beatrice wasn't crying.
"Because, she bullied you."
A kitty's mama would never do a thing like that.
"..."
Honestly. Every time she upset Betty, she'd come out with something like this and make it hard to stay angry at her.
Beatrice's hands went still. "Betty must have made Mother dislike her, then."
She turned her face toward the ruined Trial Grounds.
To be precise, it hadn't been destroyed. The intricate, tangled spellwork lay exposed to the open air, and cradled within it lay Echidna's corpse, resting quietly—still remarkably well preserved, lying in a coffin bedded with flowers.
Beatrice walked over and set both hands on the coffin's edge. "Mother..."
"She died again!" Yimi pointed at Echidna's corpse, shocked.
The kitty had only kicked her twice!
"You're far too slow on the uptake. Mother passed away four hundred years ago; what we met was nothing more than a scrap of leftover consciousness."
Beatrice kept her eyes fixed on the one in the coffin, afraid that with too much time she might forget the woman's face.
Though it had been brief, being able to see and speak with her mother again was enough for Beatrice.
The small resentment she'd carried in her heart had vanished the very moment she saw her. That, she supposed, was what it meant to be a daughter.
"Mother..."
Echidna had told her she'd made her choice.
Beatrice murmured it inwardly—but as she turned an increasingly tender gaze toward Yimi, she found the girl had, at some point, changed back into her little cat form and was pawing at the dirt with her hind legs.
"...What are you doing?"
"Promised, to bury her back."
"..."
Beatrice grabbed Yimi by the scruff and carried her off.
"Is it over already?"
Back before the little hut where Roswaal was recovering, all that remained was a bruised and swollen Roswaal, too weak to resist any longer, and Ram, tossing the Book of Wisdom she'd seized into the flames.
By this point, however unwilling he was, Roswaal had no power left to fight it.
This pink-haired woman had pinned Roswaal down and beaten him black and blue even as she professed, "I love Roswaal-sama dearly." Ram knew that if she went too easy now, then once that child came back, it wouldn't be as simple as a mere beating.
Roswaal looked up at the Sanctuary's sky. In this walled-off region, the sky didn't seem as lovely as the world outside.
"To strike while your master's wounds have yet to heal—what a dreadful maid you are."
"Ram has always been a dreadful maid, Roswaal-sama."