PROLOGUE
YOU’LL BE BACK
You’ll be back.
Someone told me that.
“It’s no good; I can’t find Lyu anywhere,” the human waitress Runoa said, shaking her head.
She had just returned to The Benevolent Mistress, the bar on East Main Street. It was shortly before opening time, and her words caused a sudden uproar among the other employees.
“Where could that girl have gone, meow? I’m sure she’s playing hooky. Unforgivable, meow…” the catgirl Ahnya complained, flinging herself onto the table. Her words, however, had no bite to them.
“But this is the first time she’s gone off without saying a word, leaving only a letter behind,” Runoa said, gripping the piece of paper and sighing as if she was quite upset.
Lyu had vanished from the bar.
Without permission and unexpectedly.
She had left a note in her room in the back building, announcing in her beautiful penmanship that she would be away for a while and apologizing.
“She’s disappeared now and then in the past, but…this time…”
Something felt different.
The staff of The Benevolent Mistress had sensed it and had split up a little earlier to search for their elven coworker in her usual haunts.
“She’s been really tense lately, you know? So tense that whenever I saw her…I felt uneasy.”
“Hey, you blackhearted cat, watch your mouth!”
“Whoops!”
Chloe covered her face with a hand in response to Runoa’s reprimand. The catgirl had been narrowing her eyes and looking completely unlike herself, but when she moved her hand away from her mouth, it was wearing its usual smile, as if she’d switched personalities once again.
“Meow…I’m just worried something happened to her, given she’s someone who has been forced to do work dirtier than cleaning the sewers, meow. Or rather, that she made something happen, meow,” she pronounced, swishing her cat’s tail and smiling inanely.
Her worry was more premonition than insight—the premonition of one who knew about the past of the elf called Gale Wind.
“Hey now,” Runoa said, scolding the catgirl’s half-joking words for a second time.
She glanced at the corner where a girl with blue-gray hair sat wordlessly.
Syr remained silent, an expression of intense thought on her face.
As if to dispel the tension in the room, the two temporarily quiet catgirls began to chat noisily again.
“While the white-haired one is holed up in the Dungeon, Syr is down in the dumps, meow! I’m sure it’s all one of his plots, meow!”
“Definitely! It’s all the boy’s fault, meow! To make up for it, I’ll force him to let me bury my face in that ass of his, meow!”
“You two are disgusting! What in the world are you talking about?” Runoa said.
But even the ordinary scene of Ahnya and Chloe running their mouths and being scolded by Runoa didn’t bring a smile back to Syr’s face. That was because the serious elf, who always reproached the others so calmly, was missing from their circle.
Suddenly, the door to the room opened with a bang.
“What the hell are you idiots doing? Stop gossiping and get to work!”
It was the dwarf owner of The Benevolent Mistress, Mia.
Ahnya, Chloe, and Runoa jumped at their boss’s shout and scurried out of the bar like so many baby spiders.
Alone now, Syr and Mia exchanged looks in the suddenly quiet tavern.
“Mama Mia…Do you know something?”
“If you don’t know anything, how am I supposed to?” Mia replied curtly.
Syr was Lyu’s closest friend.
The dwarf turned and left the bar.
“That elf is a real handful,” she muttered on her way out.
“Lyu…”
Syr’s whisper disappeared into the hushed bar.
Are you okay?
I remember that warmth.
I remember the hand the girl with the blue-gray hair extended to me.
I remember the smile of the girl who brought me back to the world of light after I had wreaked my vengeance, driven by raging emotions and a misplaced sense of justice, long after I had lost my reason to live.
She saved me.
Those women rescued me—those catgirls who worked at the bar and its crazy dwarf owner.
I feel as if that noisy, pleasant bar washed my body clean.
My body defiled by blood and filth.
My sky-blue eyes that had been burned to ash by the flames of revenge.
If someone was to ask me now what the most precious thing in my life was, I’d probably say The Benevolent Mistress.
That’s how sacred everyday life with those women is to me.
All the same, my wounds never went away.
The emptiness from losing my familia, which was as important to me as that bar.
The palpable loneliness that would throb painfully at any chance.
Although I closed my eyes to them, I knew the black embers were still smoldering in my heart.
I would dream about it.
The shrieks that filled the air.
The horrible, piercing screams.
The tears stained red.
The violent last moments of those girls, once so beautiful and noble, kept rising before my closed eyes.
On mornings after I had the dream, I fought to overcome the writhing of my terrible emotions and the unbearable sense of loss.
My raging emotions were crying out.
It almost seemed like I could hear the lingering regrets of companions, their cries searing my body.
I would hold myself and dig my fingernails into the flesh of my arms.
In the shadow of the gentle light that The Benevolent Mistress shone on me, a small darkness lurked. For the past five years, I have been bearing two emotions in my heart.
So I may have known.
I may have known full well that if the chance presented itself, the dam would break and I would transform into an unstoppable monster.
There exists a certain dim underground maze.
Cold drafts fill its passages.
In that maze, there is a cesspool of Evil that the sun never reaches.
What I saw there made my hair stand on end.
“L-L-Leon!”
A voice of despair.
My name, drenched in fear.
The men shivered as they looked at me.
Time stretched out, and when the moment broke, the monster in my heart shattered its chains and roared.
“Leon?!”
I heard them call my name again.
It may have been the last thread holding me back.
But I shook off the voices of my comrades and surrendered myself to my raging emotions.
As the men ran in a panic away from me, I pursued them.
Wherever they run, whatever tangled corner of the maze they try to hide in, my desire will never stop screaming out within me until I pounce.
The flames from the black embers are spreading.
All too easily, they have transformed into hellfire.
You’ll be back, Gale Wind.
My heart told me that.
And it was right.
As long as I do not overcome my past—
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