小嫂子的味道

"No, I didn\'t."

The crystal on the pendant that Ellyn was wearing slowly cracked open as light spilled out from it. One of my shards had hit it right in the center, causing it to break.

In no time, the light coming out from the crystal disappeared and it crumbled into a dozen pieces.

After that, the one who moved was not me but Ellyn. She snapped the rope tying her hands and legs, and before the man holding her could realize anything she jabbed him in the gut with her elbow.

She bent her hands behind and grabbed the man\'s head, pulling him upward. She swung the man above her head in a complete one-eighty and smacked him on the ground before herself. The man took a great impact and his sword slipped from his hand.

But by this time he was somewhat aware of the situation as he grabbed Ellyn\'s wrists and tried to jerk her off in order to free himself.

However, Ellyn opened her palms rather than trying to resist the man.

"Lightning!" she said and a magic circle opened right in front of the man\'s face. A bolt of lightning was hurled toward his body and the man danced his death as the attack connected; black fumes rose from his burned flesh when the lightning disappeared.

Ellyn brushed her hands aside and took a few hurried steps back, though she could not maintain her balance and fell on her hips. Rather than trying to stand back up, she sat there with her head buried in her arms.

I walked up to her and in the process, I created another sharp shard of ice and flung it toward the man\'s disgusting-smelling body. The attack was aimed perfectly and it pierced straight inside his heart.

[Why did you do that for?]

\'He wasn\'t dead yet, I\'m sure you could also tell.\'

[Sigh. I won\'t even bother saying that he was not in the condition to move despite being alive.]

"Are you hurt?" I asked as I sat beside Ellyn.

Only then did I realize that this was not a good place to sit as just a few steps away was the corpse of the man hanging from a stone spike and blood was splattered all over the ground, painting it in a deep red.

I patted her on the back, slowly. "It\'s fine. They\'re all dead," I said.

She lifted her head finally and saw that she was crying a handful; her face was a mess.

"Th-They… were sent by my father," a snob. "I-I could tell...b-by the way they were talking to me." Her eyes which had recently stopped shedding tears became wet again.

Tears dripped from her eyes one after another, and she cried. Even harder than the time when Seiren was bullying her on the rooftop, harder than ever I\'d seen.

"It\'s fine, everything\'s alright. I\'m here," I stated and patted her head.

She leaned onto me and wrapping her hands around me pulled me into a tight hug and cried on my chest. I put my arms around her as well, not because of the reason you are thinking. It was to cover her with my cloak as the snowfall was increasing and she was likely to get cold.

"They will kill me…I know. S-Sooner or later, I\'d be dead…" she whispered in a trembling voice.

"No one will be able to do anything to you. Because I am here, and I will protect you from your father. We\'ve made a contract, remember? Now, it doesn\'t matter if he sends a group of killers or god himself, I will protect you because I\'ve said that I will. You don\'t need to worry about anything."

She gripped me more tightly and buried her head in my arms and chest. She was so close I could feel her body heat.

"Thank you…" she said lightly.

"You don\'t need to, or rather you shouldn\'t say that. I am going to protect you because that\'s what I have said I will. We made a contract, right? So there\'s no way I\'m going to let anyone touch you."

She smiled a little after a long while. "So you are able to say things like this too, huh?" she mumbled.

"Come on, we should go. The weather outside will worsen and Anya is worried about you as well. We shouldn\'t make her wait too much," I suggested.

"Y-Yeah, I think you\'re right. We should go," she distanced herself from me and I helped her to stand on her feet.

"Can you stand?"

"Yes, I\'m okay now."

"Sorry but I can\'t heal you, I can\'t use healing magic," I said.

[You would\'ve been able to if you brought Requiem with you.]

"No, it\'s okay. You have already done enough," she replied.

Even so, I wiped the blood from her face with my handkerchief. It turns out that she\'d only bit her tongue when that man kicked her and there wasn\'t any fatal injury.

"I think you might want to step away, I have to burn these corpses first," I said and turned around.

Ellyn took a few steps back and when she was at a safe distance, I used elemental magic and turned all the corpses on fire. I also released the elemental magic I\'d cast before and all the stone spikes that had emerged from the ground disintegrated into dust.

All the bodies burned, and I watched them. The smell of burning flesh entered my nostrils as the light of flames reflected into my eyes.

Standing there as I watched them burn, a thought occurred to me.

\'I think this would be enough. At least now she won\'t think that the contract we made is just for my benefit and I am using her. That\'s how it should be. Since I can\'t put a leash on her like I can with Req, I need to make sure that the thought of betraying me shouldn\'t even occur in her mind. With this, she will start to depend on me, even if a little.\'

Standing there as I watched them burn, I thought about the time when I\'d returned to the Sofrora kingdom after acquiring the Requiem sword.