Kapitel 34: Arc 2 - Chapter 6: Stepping on Others (1/4)
"It won't be long, I'll be back in two or two and a half hours at most."
"No problem Mr. Valarfin, I'll take good care of Neko- I mean Yurine."
"Thank you, I trust you."
Yu knelt in front of Yurine after talking to Lucie.
"I'm sorry, even if I say I don't want to leave today, I can't take you there."
Yu looked worried when he said that and Yurine could see his sincerity even if she didn't want to.
But that didn't change the fact that Yurine was angry.
"You're just a stupid person, I'm not surprised that someone like you would lie."
"You'll make me look bad to Ms. Leafera by saying that. Besides, I am very honest with the people I care about."
Having said that, he stood up and turned towards the door to go with Marino to the Thirtyoné Bar.
"If anything happens, run to the post office and if I can't find you, I'll go there too, okay?"
Yurine didn't answer and Yu left.
---
"Mr. Valarfin was right, you're too quiet." Lucie put a slice of cake in front of Yurine. The cake was white, just like Yurine, and had a red strawberry on it.
Yurine thought the cake was Lucie's way of making her feel loved, so she wasn't going to eat it, even if she wanted to.
"You hardly ate anything for dinner, I thought you were saving yourself for dessert."
Yurine crossed her arms over her stomach and waited in silence.
Ever since Yu had left her with Lucie, Lucie had been talking nonstop and Yurine's patience was running out.
There was nothing in Lucie's house that interested Yurine. The house was big and luxuriously furnished, but all these expensive things were meaningless to a child. For Yurine, the only things that existed here were the chair she sat in and the table in front of her.
"Well," Lucie cleared her throat to get Yurine's attention, who was looking at the floor. "So, Mr. Valarfin adopted you."
She wished no one would talk about it. Being Yu's daughter made her think of things she didn't want to think about.
"You seem to be an introverted child."
Trying to break the silence and start a conversation, Lucie drummed her fingers on the table with more force every second Yurine ignored her.
"So, where did Mr. Valarfin go?"
Before Yu left, he told Lucie that he had something to do, but he didn't say what it was.
"That pervert must've gone to go flirting with the girls."
"Flirting?!"
One of Lucie's two sentences was 'Mr. Valarfin' and her interest in Yu was bothering Yurine.
If she could vilify Yu a little and alienate Lucie from him, she was going to do it.
"Don't get me wrong, words like pervert don't seem to suit him."
"Do you think a superior being like me would misunderstand something, elf? You asked me a question and I answered it."
Lucie was waiting for Yurine to say 'just kidding'. Yurine didn't budge and kept talking to cool Lucie down.
"He looks at girls and stuff when he walks, what do you see in him?"
"Not that much!" Lucie slammed her hands on the table and Yurine's glass shook.
As Yurine took a sip of the juice on the table, Lucie tried to normalize what Yurine had said, as if she wanted to ruin her whole plan.
"He's a man, after all, so..." Lucie stopped talking at a sharp knock on the door and stood up. "Perhaps Mr. Valarfin has arrived."
Yurine, feeling it was time to leave, followed Lucie to the door.
Lucie opened the door as it's knocked again "Mr. Valarfin, what is it?"
Yu had obviously come running, his face was red and he was taking deep breaths. He raised his head and looked at Yurine behind Lucie.
"I had to, need to, will have to hurry."
"Why?"
"Some kind of adventuring thing, I'll tell you later." He kept talking, looking at Yurine. "Yurine, let's go."
She didn't like his imperative tone and didn't like to obey, but she didn't want to waste her breath on such a small thing, so she walked past Lucie and came to Yu.
"I thought we'd eat something." Lucie looked after Yu and Yurine, who started running in disappointment.
"I'm sorry, I'll be back tomorrow!" Yu shouted as he took off running.
***
He had come running from the loan shark's place to pick up Yurine. Just after they had left Lucie's house, they had luckily come across a carriage dropping off its last customer, paid him a slightly higher fare than usual, and had driven to the inn and then to the harbor.
"What happened?" Yurine asked. Since they were in the carriage, they didn't speak until they got off, lest the coachman overhear them.
In fact, Yurine was asking for the second time what had happened. Yu had asked her when he was picking up some things he might need at the inn, and Yurine hadn't gotten her answer because they had gotten back into the carriage while Yu was thinking about his answer.
"I'm afraid we had a bad mission." As he looked around, he thought of possible night spots. The last time he had been to the harbor before he met Rie and Yurine, he hadn't looked in the direction of the bars.
"Explain in detail, idiot."
"We went to Marino's loan shark, and he said that if we wanted extra time on Marino's debt, I had to kill his son." As he pronounced the word kill, he reached for the dagger he kept hidden in his waistband.
He knew before he bought the dagger that one day he would need to use it, but he hadn't thought that day would be so close.
Even now, he was praying that he would not need to use the dagger.
"His own son?" Yurine waited for Yu to repeat his words.
"His own son."
Like Yurine, Yu also found it hard to believe. Pepe Don was obviously a bad person, but what could have made him go so far as to have his own son killed?
He took out the necklace the loan shark had given him and handed it to Yurine. When Yurine opened it and looked at the miniature, she too thought it was a girl.
"His name is Camaeron Don," Yu said. His name didn't directly indicate that he was a boy.
"It's a girl."
"It's a boy. Maybe it's some kind of family honor thing, he doesn't approve of his son having different orientations and he thinks he'll clean up his honor by killing him."
Given that there were similarly motivated murders in the First World, honor killings were likely to be more common in the Second World, which was less developed than the First World.
"You can't kill someone if they haven't done anything bad!"
He stepped in front of Yu again and blocked his path, as she had done before. Yu moved left and right to get past her, but Yurine kept getting in his way, blocking his progress.
"Yurine, how do you know he's innocent? The son of a loan shark, who knows what crimes he has committed."
"You're just saying that to ease your conscience!" Yurine shouted the truth and nailed Yu in place.
As she said, all Yu was trying to do was to ease his conscience, to deceive himself so he wouldn't feel guilty.
Because some people were like that, afraid to face the truth and trying to be happy in their fake world by building walls between them and reality.
"It is," Yu replied. He couldn't deny Yurine's words or her realization that what he was doing was bad. He didn't want to do it either, he knew it wasn't easy to kill someone.
But it was not about what he wanted.
"The loan shark has taken Marino prisoner."
When Yurine had asked him where Marino was, he couldn't answer. Now he was telling her.
"He took him prisoner even though his current deadline has not yet expired and said he would kill him if I failed the mission."
If Marino Swann died, his wife would be widowed and his children orphaned, but he didn't care about Marino's family or Marino himself. The only thing Marino meant to Yu was money. If there was someone else who could replace Marino, he would deal with him.
"If he dies, his wife and children will be left out in the cold, but I honestly don't care about that."
He wanted to be honest with Yurine, even if what he said made him sound heartless.
"The first thing I thought about was you. Like I told you, we need money to achieve your goal and-"
"Our," Yurine intervened. "Our goal."
Yu looked like he was helping Yurine with her wish. He also wanted Yurine's wish to come true.
But he still found it hard to believe that it could come true.
"Our goal." He repeated to make her feel better. "Anyway, of course we can think of other ways to raise money if necessary. It's the other thing that's really driving me to do this."
Ignoring the first two reasons, the third one alone was motivation enough for him to accept the mission.
"If the loan shark kills Marino, and I'm sure the bastard will kill him, he will kill me too, to prevent me from blowing the whistle to the city guards because I know who killed Marino."
He wanted to live, he had killed Sorrow to live, and his motivation to live made him accept a mission in which he had to kill an innocent man.
"This is what they call a double-edged sword. If Marino dies, I will be killed to keep me from talking, and if I kill his son, he can say I killed his son and have me arrested. Even if I have to kill him, I have to do it carefully."
As Yu began to plan how to carry out the mission, Yurine moved out of the way and started walking beside him.
Yurine wanted her mother to live, so she wanted to rewind time to prevent her death.
She needed Yu, the only person who knew what had happened, to fulfill her wish.
Yurine whispered. "Why did it have to be with an asshole like you?"
Yu heard her quietly spoken words. He still didn't say anything, he couldn't refuse. He knew he was an asshole.
"I'm not planning to kill him, if things go well we will catch him and give him to his father."
He didn't have a rope to tie him up, but he planned to use the whip he had bought in the hope of using it again one day. The whip was also in his bag.
He did not know how to use it and was afraid of injuring himself trying, but he would not hesitate to use it, just like his dagger, if he had to.
The last thing he had with him to be effective in defense and attack were the magic stones. He had seen Rie using them, and when he found out he could buy them in Rolderhelm, he wasted no time in buying them.
But they were expensive and he had only been able to buy a few magic stones.
"As if he won't kill him."
He had ordered his son's execution, of course he would not hesitate to kill him if he could.
Maybe normal fathers would show mercy, but Pepe Don was not normal.
"If we manage to turn back time, it will be as if it never happened."
He didn't know what to believe, the things he wanted to believe seemed like dreams to him, yet he couldn't stop imagining them.
Wöchentlicher Energiestatus
-- Power-
Rangliste 
-- Power-
Stein