Chương 39: Chapter 38: The Hikikomori Queen

The house felt empty. Not because no one was here. Because someone was here and she wasn't making a sound. I looked at the stairs. Ella's door was closed. I made breakfast as usual. Two plates. Set one aside. It stayed there untouched, on the counter, for the next four hours. I checked the door once — not knocked, just stood at the top of the stairs and looked at it. The gap at the bottom showed no light. No movement. I couldn't tell if she was asleep or awake or simply unwilling to open it.

Yato was with her on the other side. My cat had defected. Three more days passed the same way. I'd leave a plate outside her door in the morning. By evening, most of it would be eaten. Not all — some left behind, pushed to the edge of the dish like she'd lost appetite halfway through. The anime started on day two. I'd hear it through the ceiling — opening themes, dialogue, the faint sounds of action sequences. Sometimes she'd rewatch the same episode twice. Sometimes she'd binge five in a row. I didn't knock.

What would I say? Are you okay felt stupid. She was clearly not okay. Do you want to talk was even worse. She'd come down when she was ready, or she wouldn't. Pushing wasn't going to speed it up. Yato came down only to eat in the kitchen and poop in the garden. He'd look at me, tail high, then turn and pad back upstairs like I was a pit stop on his way to somewhere more important. Yato was clearly doing more work to console her than I could ever do. I didn't waste the week.

The mark sat warm in my palm, and for some reason I couldn't access it consciously. I'd sit at the kitchen table with the grimoire open and focus on the white lines, trying to pull something out from the catalogue I knew was there. Nothing. The knowledge was buried, locked behind a door I didn't have the key for. Strangely enough, sometimes the mark worked whether I wanted it to or not. I pulled out my lightning diagram. I'd been proud of it. It was my first original offensive spell.

I looked at it and the error jumped out. The stability node was in the wrong position. I hadn't noticed it when I designed it. I hadn't noticed it when I tested it. But now, with the mark resting against my skin, the problem was obvious — a single node shifted two degrees off alignment, creating a turbulence point where the mana was supposed to flow consistently. The spell worked, but it was wasting energy every second it ran. I redrew it without thinking.

My hand moved before my brain caught up, placing the node exactly where it needed to be. The new circle held differently. Cleaner. Tighter. When I tested it, the spell was more focused. Less spread. It came down in a clear focused flash instead of letting some of his energy spread through the air. I spent the rest of the week drawing new circle designs. Finding errors. Fixing them. Learning nothing really new.

Of course I also engraved the corrected version of the lightning spell to one of the few blank cores I had left. Day six. I sat at the kitchen table and listened to the opening theme of something playing through the ceiling. I couldn't identify it. I'd stopped trying. Yato came down, ate, and left. I looked at the empty plate from this morning. She'd eaten more today. That was something. I caught myself thinking: She's become a hikikomori. The thought arrived fully formed, and I almost laughed.

A queen who once led an entire nation, now locked in a stranger's bedroom watching anime marathons. But I didn't laugh. Because I knew she wasn't avoiding me. She was avoiding herself. I'd seen her face when she finally realized that her castle was in ruins. I'd heard her voice when the dragon wouldn't give her straight answers about the whereabouts of her people.

To top it off she'd brought me to the mountain expecting help, and instead the dragon had used psychic on me to shut her up like he was a level max Alakazam. If I'd been the one carrying that weight, I'd be hiding as well. But, to be honest, I was glad my internet connection only worked one way. The world wasn't ready for Ella discovering online competitive games. Day seven. I was making breakfast in the kitchen when I started hearing a sound I had stopped waiting to hear. Footsteps on the stairs.

I looked at the open door, and Ella quickly appeared on the other side. Hair brushed. Eyes clear — not tired, not sad, not the hollow look of someone who'd spent a week in the dark watching moving pictures. Apparently she'd finally decided the evil shower wasn't so evil after all. She looked decided. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"We're leaving," she said. I blinked.

"Sorry, what? Now?"

"Yes. Now." Like it was obvious. Like I should have known. No explanation. Not a single word about the week of silence or for consistently cranking up the sound of the TV when Evangelion's opening was playing, even if it was 4AM. She walked past the kitchen toward the door. I grabbed the lightning core from the counter and put it alongside the warmth core inside of my pocket, just in case I also took the workshop knife from beside the sink and followed her out. She led us into the forest.

This time I tried to stay aware of my surroundings. Ella walked ahead of me without ever looking back. I followed. We stopped at a section of forest I didn't recognise. The canopy was thick enough to block both of the sun's light, leaving the undergrowth in a perpetual twilight. Like everywhere else in the forest the ground around here was really uneven — mostly because of all roots and rocks scattered everywhere.

"There's a beast, similar to the one that attacked you," she said.

"Same genus. Different build. Faster. Less armour." I noticed it after Ella told me, I wasn't going to brag about it, but once again, Ella's presence had made me complacent.

"The other day you fought alone and lost. This time I'm watching you, make me proud."

"And if I lose again?" She looked at me.

"If it happens, I'll take care of it and we'll need to find you another sparing partner." She turned left and walked into the trees. I followed after her, keeping my opinion on what I had just heard for myself. Just like last time the creature came down from above. Not the same species — she was right about that. Leaner. Longer limbs. Its skin shifted between shades of bark and shadow as it moved, never settling on a single colour long enough to track. I brought the lightning core up. The first shot hit.

Not clean — it glanced off a rib — but it hit. The creature faltered, recovered, and came at me again. I fired again. Too fast. The second shot went wide. I'd already wasted a lot of mana.

"Stop trying to win on the first hit." Her voice was coming from behind me. This time I aimed at one of the legs and activated the spell again. It did not deal much damage but that bought me close to a second. I used it to move. The creature quickly recovered. Lunged. I dodged — barely — and felt its claws catch my sleeve instead of my arm Oh shit! I'm actually going to die. And then it was on the ground. Ella had moved past me without a sound. One hand extended.

The creature was pinned beneath an invisible weight, legs splayed, struggling against nothing. She looked at me.

"You lost." She closed her hand. The creature's neck snapped. I couldn't believe it.

"Stand up." We found the next one more than an hour later. This one was ground-level. This monster had a thick hide. A head like a battering ram, low to the ground, built to charge through undergrowth and not stop. I noticed it before Ella told me. That was new. In fact she didn't tell me at all, she noticed I was aware of this one.

"Focus on its mana. It'll tell you where it'll strike before it even starts moving." I could feel the mana gathering in its legs before it moved—dense and heavy, the pressure building until it had nowhere else to go. It's about to charge. I stepped aside as soon as it started to move. The creature barreled past me, unable to stop its momentum. I hit it with lightning as it passed. The bolt caught its flank, but the hide was thick. It didn't go down, in fact it didn't even flinch. It turned.

Started to build another charge. Ella picked up a stone from the ground. She didn't throw it. Her hand didn't move at all. The stone just left the ground — a straight line, impossibly fast, hitting the creature square in the skull. The creature went limp mid-charge. Collapsed. Skidded. She looked at me.

"Use what's around you." She didn't even move her arm. Unlike her previous attack the one that really made her look like Darth Vader, I was certain I could reproduce it with the mana I had. I filed it away. And we kept doing this for hours. Fight. Lose. Ella kills. Stand up. Next fight. She didn't lecture. She gave one piece of advice per encounter — short, practical, and then she made me prove I'd heard it.

"Don't stand still. Every moment in one place, you're already dead." I started moving between shots. Circling. Forcing the creature to track me.

"You're holding the core too tight. Your mana can't flow properly if you're that tense. Even worse you won't be able to think properly. Breathe slowly." I loosened my grip. Took a deep breath, I once read about the US marine's breathing technique, Breathe in slowly, hold your breath four seconds, and release the air in your lungs just as slow as it entered. The next shot came faster. Cleaner.

"That one's a baiter. It's herding you toward the thicket. Don't follow." I stopped. Looked around. There were now two of them. I had stopped monitoring the surroundings. I backed out slowly. They didn't follow. I learned more in one afternoon than I had in weeks of reading. By late afternoon, I was covered in blood. Some of it was mine — scratches, shallow cuts, the aftermath of getting too close. Most of it wasn't.

The last creature's head had mysteriously exploded the moment it dared to look at the evil queen, and I'd been standing too close to dodge the spray. The power gap was clear, their mana resistance didn't mean anything for Ella. My hands were shaking. My mana was so low I could feel the emptiness in my chest like a physical hollow. I stood over the latest carcass, breathing hard.

"I can't do another one." Ella didn't even look at me.

"Shut up." A pause.

"Stand up, be a man." I stared at her. The words were so absurd, so completely out of character from the woman who was usually so nonchalant and gentle that I didn't know whether to laugh or be offended. Where did she even learn that line? Had she started downloading new anime on her own and watched ones I don't know about while I was asleep? But as absurd as it was — it worked. I stood up, filled with some newly found motivation.

By the next fight, I was starting to have enough leeway to experiment on ways to get clean hits. I pulled the workshop knife from my belt. Not to stab — the current enemy was faster than any creature I'd faced, and getting close was a death sentence. I thought about what Ella had done with the stone. The way it had left the ground without her arm moving, carrying inertia in a straight line toward the target. I could do better than a smooth stone. I had a knife. I held it in my palm.

Activated a small circle I had just engraved in a monster core, one that was still covered in blood. Nothing incredible — just force, direction, intent. The knife left my hand. It flew straight. Fast. It didn't arc like a thrown blade — it cut through the air like it had been fired, and it hit the creature's throat before the creature knew it had moved. The creature dropped. I stood over where I was, breathing hard. My knife was embedded in its neck. Blood was spreading across the forest floor.

Ella didn't praise me. She just said: "Good. One more." We were harvesting the cores as we were going. My hands were clumsy from exhaustion. The knife shook when I tried to cut. Instead of flesh, it had found bones immediately. The core of that beast was nowhere to be found. Ella stopped me.

"Stop. This one's core is in the neck. Not the sternum." I looked at her. She was working on another carcass, hands steady, not looking up. Just like she had said, I found it. Wedged between two vertebrae. I wouldn't have been able to find it on my own unless I had dismantled the whole thing. I pocketed the stone. All in all we had collected seven today. Soon, we started walking home. I ached everywhere. My shoulders. My legs. My hands wouldn't stop shaking, and my mana reserves felt scraped clean.

Every step was a negotiation between my body and the ground. I'd rinsed in the river before we left the forest. The water had been cold enough to numb the scratches, and for the blood to come off blood — most of it, anyway. But I was still sticky. Sweat and the remnants of things that weren't mine, clinging to my skin under my clothes. When we reached the village I went straight to the bathhouse.

I stood under the hot water for a long time and watched it run pink down the drain, I was so dirty that I didn't even bother plugging it until I was clean. Then I took my time in a hot bubbly bath. When I got back to the house Ella was on the couch already back to wearing sweatpants and a faded video game shirt. Her hair was damp — she'd washed while I was at the bathhouse. My laptop was open. An episode was queued on the screen. She didn't look up.

"You took your time." I stared at her. This was the same woman who'd spent the afternoon pushing me past every limit I had. Who'd killed a creature with a single gesture in ways that really made her look like a bloodthirsty queen. And she was now calmly chilling on my couch, queuing up anime. I didn't know which version was real. She looked up.

"Are you just going to stand there?" I didn't have an answer. I thought about saying something. Asking if she was okay. Asking if something had changed. Asking which one was real. Instead, I sat down. And she pressed play.