Chapter 176: Savior in Green (1)

"Wake up…"

The voice reached Hiiro through layers of darkness, faint enough that it might have belonged to the dream.

He stood at the foot of an old staircase with blood drying across his knuckles. Rain tapped against the windows, tracing crooked paths down the glass. The television laughed in the empty living room behind him, its brightness flashing against the walls in cold, colorless bursts.

"Souta."

He lifted his head.

Ayame stood at the top of the stairs.

For one breath, relief struck hard enough to empty his mind. She looked exactly as he had wanted to remember her: both black eyes were clear, there was no swelling darkening one side of her face, no cut splitting the corner of her mouth, and no bruises disappearing beneath the sleeves of her dress. Her hair fell neatly around her face instead of sticking to her skin with sweat and tears.

She wore the dress she favored on quiet mornings, the one that smelled faintly of citrus soap. He remembered her sleeves rolled to the elbows while she packed his lunch, smiling whenever she caught him stealing pieces of tamagoyaki before she could close the lid.

Ayame smiled shyly, almost uncertainly, as though she was afraid he might not want her there.

"Souta," she called again. "Come upstairs."

His chest tightened.

Everything about her looked correct. The soft cadence of her voice, the way one hand rested upon the banister, even the small crease that appeared beside her mouth when she smiled. The dream had reached into him and found details he had not known he still possessed.

That was precisely why he knew it was wrong.

Ayame had never stood unharmed at the top of those stairs, not on that night. She had knelt beside him in a bloodstained bedroom, one eye swallowed almost completely shut, trembling so badly that she could barely hold his face between her hands while she begged him to leave.

Hiiro tried to move, but his legs refused.

Ayame descended one step. "You don't need to be afraid anymore."

He looked down at the blood on his hands. It seeped between his fingers, fresh despite having been dry a moment before.

"I wasn't afraid," he said. The lie sounded pathetic inside the familiar hallway.

Ayame's smile deepened, but the warmth never reached her eyes. "You don't have to pretend with me."

"...Human boy." Another voice pressed through the dream.

The hallway shuddered.

Ayame's gaze flicked toward something beyond the walls. It was only a second, but the false expression on her face slipped. Her fingers curled around the banister hard enough for the wood to creak.

"Come here, Souta." She descended another step, moving with a smoothness no living body possessed. "We can wait together this time."

The rain stopped with every drop frozen against the window at once, suspended upon the glass like clear beads.

"Wake up, damn you…" The distant voice returned, rougher, angrier, and much closer.

Hiiro's eyes narrowed. 'Yup, something is wrong.'

The next instant, Ayame was standing directly in front of him. She leaned in until her lips barely brushed his, close enough for Hiiro to feel the warmth of her breath against his skin.

"Souta." Her voice dropped almost affectionately.

Then, she tilted her head. Her neck bent at an angle no human neck should have been able to reach, yet the gentle smile on her face never changed.

"Stay, my boy."

"Wake up!"

Something struck Hiiro across the face.

Pain tore through the dream, bright and immediate. Cracks ripped across the walls from floor to ceiling. Ayame reached for him as the staircase folded inward, her gentle smile splitting around rows of needle-thin teeth.

Then, the hallway shattered.

===

Hiiro woke up choking on air.

Blue-green shapes swam above him. Leaves, perhaps, or hair. His thoughts moved sluggishly as he tried to decide whether he had opened his eyes at all.

Then the shapes resolved into a face hovering several inches from his own.

Hiiro instinctively jerked backward. The movement drove the back of his head into something softer than earth, but the impact still rattled through his head and brought fresh pulse of nausea with it.

The woman leaning over him grunted. "About time."

Hiiro blinked rapidly. His first thought was 'goblin'. The second followed quickly: 'No… not quite.'

Her face was mostly human in structure, with high cheekbones, a broad jaw, and a straight nose that had been broken at least once. Gray skin carried an olive undertone, noticeable enough to distinguish her from an ordinary human but nowhere near the vivid green of the goblins Hiiro remembered fighting.

Her ears rose to tapered points through coarse black hair hacked unevenly around her shoulders, and the tips of two lower canines showed when she pressed her lips together.

A small scar divided her left eyebrow. Older scars crossed her exposed forearms, pale against muscle built by hard labor rather than deliberate training. She wore patched leather armor over a faded tunic, with a curved blade strapped across her back.

She was also glaring at him with her orange-like iris, with darker rings surrounding the pupils like heated metal.

Hiiro opened his mouth as he stared back at her. Curiosity arrived before anything remotely resembling an alarm, and that seemed to bother her.

The woman's expression changed almost imperceptibly. Her narrowed eyes searched his face once, then again, as though checking for something she had expected to find there, fear… disgust, maybe.

Too bad for her, Worldspire Online had never been a humans-only game.

Even before he had been dragged into this very real version of it, Hiiro had spent hundreds of hours partying with characters and players who belonged to races that would have caused a riot back in the country of Nihono.

Worldspire Online was home for countless races–beastkin, drakonids, sylphs, demi-humans, stoneborn, and even rarer races hidden in remote regions or locked behind obscure questlines.

Once, he had spent almost two months running raids with a Minotaur tank who insisted on cooking after every successful clear and a scalded woman from the Serpentfolk who threatened to poison anyone touching her pet without permission.

Compared with them, pointed ears and unusual teeth barely registered as exotic.

The goblins he had fought after transmigrating had certainly given the species a terrible first impression, but Hiiro wasn't stupid enough to assume every nonhuman face belonged to an enemy.

Race wasn't a threat indicator, behavior was… And this woman had apparently been trying to wake him instead of killing or eating him, so that was rather a strong opening.

The woman slapped him again.

His hand snapped up and caught her wrist before she could withdraw it.

"Okay…" His voice came out rougher than intended. "I'm awake."

"Good."

"That second one felt personal…"

"It was."

She didn't attempt to yank free. Instead, she watched him more closely. Her eyes flickered once toward his hand around her wrist and then back toward his face.

"First didn't work fast enough."

Her voice had a gravelly edge, each word clipped down to what she considered necessary. She did not sound uneducated, but like someone who had spent most of her life speaking while running, hunting, or trying not to die.

He slowly released her wrist. "Fair enough…"

The woman remained still for another second. Then, almost suspiciously, she asked, "You're not afraid?"

Hiiro blinked a few times. "Of being slapped?"

Her expression hardened. "Of me."

'Ah. That.'

Traveling his gaze over her once more, he noticed that she had the sort of build that suggested she could probably throw him into a tree if sufficiently annoyed.

Hiiro shrugged. "Should I be?"

The question seemed to catch her completely off guard.

"If you try eating me later, I'll update my opinion."

The woman stared once more, then made a sound somewhere between a scoff and an irritated breath.

Hiiro tried to sit up, but the world pitched sharply to the left. His stomach lurched, and he caught himself with one hand before his face struck the ground.

"Slow," the woman said, though the word carried more annoyance than concern. "Dream venom's still with you."

He grimaced. "Dream what?"

"Flowers put you under. Oneiris eats you dream."

She caught the back of his coat and hauled him upright.

When his surroundings came into focus, he noticed that he no longer was inside the glowing field.

Luminescent flowers spread across the cavern floor in thick clusters, climbing between broken stones and along the bases of jagged walls. What had once looked serene now felt diseased. Dark threads ran beneath the moss and cracked earth, connecting one patch of blossoms to another in branching patterns like veins burined beneath translucent skin.

Above them, the cavern ceiling disappeared into shadow.

Hiiro followed one of those dark threads with his eyes, where it joined something far larger.

Lifting his gaze, he saw the structure dominating the center of the cavern.

A massive closed bud rose nearly five meters from the floor, its thick pale petals folded tightly around whatever lay inside. Violet veins pulsed beneath their surface, brightening and fading in time with a slow internal rhythm that reminded Hiiro unpleasantly of a heartbeat.

Heavy vines spread from its base in every direction. Several had coiled around stones, crushed grass, and the places where Hiiro had been lying.

One remained wrapped around his ankle, and he stared down at it.

The goblin-like woman drew her blade and hacked through the vine. Dark sap sprayed across the flowers, and the severed end recoiled into the soil with a wet hiss.

Hiiro raised his eyebrows. "That seems bad."

"It nearly drank you hollow."

"Definitely disgusting, then."

"Move before Oneiris wakes."