Volume 4, Chapter 106 [Otto Suwen]
Grimacing at the blistering heat on his skin, Garfiel violently kicked at the fallen leaves around him.
[Garfiel: Th’guy’s got guts, I’ll give’m that]
It was a growl of irritation, but also of honest praise.
“Your half-assed attitude is why you’re going to lose” ――that was what Otto told him. And he was absolutely right.
Thinking that Otto had no combat capabilities, Garfiel had completely underestimated him.
[Garfiel: Fire stones…… the hell’s he tryin’ t’do’ with somethin’ as biteless as that?]
A momentary, vision-obscuring screen of flames.
With his annoyance still fresh on his mind, Garfiel thought back on that flash of searing heat.
All smoke and mirrors, it stung, but its damage was no more than that of a sunburn.
Yet, one thing was certain:
[Garfiel: If he’d used somethin’ more deadly I wouldn’t ‘ve gotten off this easy……]
In that fatal moment, his opponent made an unexpected choice.
What else to call it if not an act of mercy? The opponent he’d held back on and failed to knock unconscious turned around and taught him a lesson instead.
That was just way too wretched and stupid.
[Garfiel: Gotta be fuckin’ kiddin’ me……!]
What was even more infuriating was how his opponent completely ignored him while he was blinded by the flames and just straight-up ran away. By the time Garfiel thought to chase him, Otto was already nowhere to be found.
Just soft soil and fallen leaves. He certainly managed a skillful escape on what should’ve been unfamiliar terrain. Otto wasn’t lying about scouting around the forest at night.
Nevertheless, if this turned into a genuine chase scene, there’d be no way he could escape from Garfiel. Every ten steps that Otto ran, Garfiel would be able to close in two. Such was the enormity of the physical difference between their bloodlines.
But Otto had this covered as well.
[Garfiel: ――Gh! Th’hell!? This…… aghh! Fuck, my nose ain’t workin’!]
The moment Garfiel tried to sniff for Otto’s scent, an intense, painful stench pierced his nostrils. Recoiling from the stench, Garfiel shook his head as his vision strobed from the penetrating pain.
And that was when he saw a clear glass bottle lying on the spot where Otto had been standing. He could immediately tell that the colorless liquid flowing from the uncapped bottle was the source of that pungent scent. But that was all his nose could tell him.
[Garfiel: Son of’a bitch……! Does’he think he can beat me just by cloggin’ my nose?]
Baring his fangs, Garfiel flushed with rage at his dwindling options.
Just how many traps had Otto set against him? Every step of the way, these tricks had perfectly held him in check.
[Garfiel: ――――]
Touching the scar on his forehead, panting, Garfiel repeated his ritual to calm himself.
He drew in a deep breath to settle his heart and lungs and wrestled back his senses from being consumed by rage. Thinking about it now, there is no way Otto could keep him subdued indefinitely.
So why would Otto risk himself in such a reckless battle?
Besides, the fact that Otto would challenge Garfiel in the first place was strange.
He said his goal was to buy time―― to draw Garfiel’s attention while the refugees escaped the Sanctuary via other routes.
If what he said was true, then it’d be impossible for Garfiel to stop all the carriages now.
The thought of sending the Lewes clones to chase them had briefly crossed Garfiel’s mind, but since he doesn’t know any of the carriages’ current locations, it’d only be a futile effort.
The replicants lack knowledge and experience, and could only carry out very crude commands.
They wouldn’t even know to eat their meals unless instructed to, and if they were pushed beyond their limits, they’d just curl up into little balls and give up on life.
Garfiel was too sick and tired of having to run around looking for them when that happens.
[Garfiel: And in th’end, th’only one I can rely on ‘s myself. Hah! Same as it’s always been]
He was out of options, and his nose was disabled.
But Garfiel wasn’t pessimistic. He still had his powerful body. And it still had more than enough strength left to carry him through the forest and achieve his goal.
No matter what Otto’s objectives may have been, he dared to stand against Garfiel. Surely, when he decided to oppose him, he must’ve been prepared to taste Garfiel’s claws and fangs.
As far as Garfiel was concerned, Otto was no longer a simple prey.
This was now a hunt that would require all of his efforts, and he would not stop until he had Otto completely at his mercy.
――By the time Garfiel thought this, he had already all but forgotten his original intent and didn’t even realize that he was falling right into Otto’s plans.
[Garfiel: Where’d y’get th’fuckin’ gall. That bastard left y’instructions, didn’t he…… th’hell did he say?]
Just before setting out into the forest in pursuit of Otto, Garfiel turned his head, looking to the carriages Otto left behind.
The carriages were decoys pretending to be carrying fleeing refugees. Yet the two ground dragons drawing them were real, and all through Otto and Garfiel’s standoff, they had been quietly sitting there like it was none of their business.
[Garfiel: Y’think if y’just sit there I won’t hurt ya? Cheeky bastards. Yer lucky I don’t like t’kill unless I need to]
Shaking his head, Garfiel passed by the dragons and reached for the passenger car once more.
Countless items of clothing had been heaped inside the car to mimic the scent of fleeing villagers. Last time, Garfiel left it as soon as he confirmed this, but there might’ve been something else he’d missed.
Pushing apart the piles of clothes with his feet, Garfiel scanned his eyes over the seats and walls. Nothing stood out, and, after searching a little more, he was about to descend the carriage when,
[Garfiel: ――Huh?]
He saw something sticking to the back of the carriage door as he turned.
A white piece of paper fluttering in the wind, as if placed there specifically to be visible from the inside.
――Feeling a sense of foreboding, Garfiel walked up to the fluttering note, tore it off, and opened it in his hands.
And,
{――If you’re really this gullible, then it was totally worth the trouble}
Reading the message, Garfiel’s vision flashed furious red.
The next instant―― the seats of the carriage shot up as the black lumps underneath exploded in the narrow space, expelling a violent gale in the form of a storm of winged insects, drowning Garfiel’s roars to nothing.
――For the young Otto Suwen, the world was like a cradle of hell.
[???: ――――]
[????: ×××××××××]
[?????: ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※]
[??????: ＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊!＊!＊]
Day and night without end, Otto’s ears were flooded with words that made no sense to him.
He’d sit on the floor in a daze, and the voices would come, sometimes like close-by whispers, sometimes like distant cries, sometimes like pleasant songs, and sometimes like shrieks of death, the world constantly reminded Otto of their connection.
No matter where in the world young Otto went, the voices always followed.
Day after day without respite, the eternal echo of their discordant chorus, that useless infernal concerto, remained Otto’s constant companion.
――How could everyone live in such a noisy world like it was nothing?
In a hell where he couldn’t properly understand anyone around him, Otto asked himself that question.
His parents would hold him up and cast him words of affection, smiling. But no matter how much love was abound in those words, the dissonant clamour would consume them, never allowing them to reach Otto’s ears.
When his parents noticed that something was different about their son, they immediately took him to a doctor.
He wouldn’t laugh, wouldn’t scream, and wouldn’t cry. This utter lack of emotional expression was because all external stimulus felt the same to Otto.
And so, in spite of his worried parents, Otto spent his early childhood in emotionless indifference.
Perhaps it was fortunate that the Suwens was a middle-class merchant family wealthy enough to send their son to the doctor’s.
But none of the doctors could figure out what was wrong with Otto. Well, naturally. Since all Otto had in terms of symptoms was deafness from the excessive noise.
Otto has a brother two years his senior, and a brother two years his junior. Unlike Otto, his brothers grew up healthy, nourished in their parents’ love. Their parents’ attention to Otto gradually faded as the love that was portioned for three was eventually divided between two, and Otto grew distant from his parents’ warmth.
Otto held no grudge or jealousy towards his brothers or parents. At the time, he felt no hate nor envy, nor any discernible emotion for that matter. Although Otto couldn’t understand a thing they were saying, his brothers still interacted with him as patiently as they could. And besides, it was only natural that his parents would be emotionally exhausted.
If he were in his brothers’ shoes back then, Otto wasn’t sure that he would’ve been so kind to such a strange family member. For that, he was grateful to them.
While sounds could not reach him, written words still made communication possible.
It was his older brother who first discovered this while reading a book out loud to Otto.
Of course, learning to read and write proved extremely difficult.
Otto couldn’t register the sounds needed to understand the words, so it took him ten times longer than an ordinary child to memorize the sequences of letters.
Nevertheless, it didn’t bother him. And sadly, this was because Otto lacked the sensibility to be distressed by that fact, having no concept of what life was supposed to be like for normal children.
{――Thank you, for everything}
He could still vividly remember the tears streaming down his parents’ faces as they hugged him when he wrote these words on a piece of paper and showed it to them.
He didn’t completely understand the concept of gratitude, but he figured it was something he ought to do. That was young Otto’s decision, and when he wrote down these words out of that sense of obligation, a flutter was born in his heart.
――That might’ve been the first time since birth that he’d cried so loudly. And indeed, it was like his second birth-wail.
[???: Ffaghatkgaoytajijijiji]
[????: ＡＧＡＴＥＧＡＴＡＧＦＡＴＴＴＥＴＡＡＤＡＥＲＴＥＲＡ]
[?????: Mi~mi~mu~mi~me~mi~mi~]
It wasn’t long after Otto’s second birth-cry that he started discovering patterns within the once incomprehensible chorus of hell.
And, little by little, Otto found that he was able to sort and selectively block out the myriad of noises assailing his eardrums.
It was around Otto’s eighth birthday when he became capable of completely separating himself from the ambient noises at will.
Otto was now practically a healthy child, and, like rain falling on an arid desert, he greedily soaked up everything he could.
Otto had already lost the chance to learn most of the things an eight-year-old would need to know, so although he had diligently poured his time into learning to read and write, his comprehension level was still far behind other children his age. But, using his newfound concentration as his weapon, Otto closed that gap in no time.
From there, Otto Suwen’s hidden potentials bloomed.
He was no longer falling behind his brothers. Or rather, his comprehension and intelligence even surpassed them. With his exceptional ability to learn, Otto soon distinguished himself among his peers――
――and spectacularly botched his interpersonal relationships, leaving him friendless.
[Otto: How could everyone live in such a difficult world like it was nothing?]
Otto muttered, hugging his knees, his cheeks red and swollen courtesy of the girl he had a crush on.
At ten years old, Otto was diligently studying so as not to shame himself as a merchant’s son. Most children of that era didn’t have access to education at such an early age. So Otto was certainly privileged to be able to spend his days alongside his peers this way.
The only problem was that Otto’s emotional and mental age were both seven years behind other children his age.
Otto never had a chance to make the mistakes most children should have made, so, now that he was able to, naturally, he made them all. While he would’ve been forgiven if he’d done this when he was younger, since Otto was way past the age to be making such mistakes, the result was utter bafflement all around.
To make matters worse, Otto Suwen was a boy perfectly blessed with bad luck.
If you ask his parents, then Otto’s misfortune began immediately after birth when he almost drowned in his first bath. And despite everyone’s best efforts, he’d always be tumbling down stairs, hit by bird poop, drowning in puddles, and generally beset by misfortune.
The reason he wasn’t aware of this at the time was because he’d never developed a concept of what misfortune was.
Looking back on it now, however, Otto shuddered at his own history.
What did he have to do in his past life to be so abandoned by fortune?
[???: Big one, gone, gone now, it’s gone]
[????: Shiny, shinied, shine is, faraway, shiny, shiny, shining]
[?????: Hey, monster’s coming. Hey, monster’s coming]
It was around this time that the noises Otto was consciously blocking began to change.
And the once senseless chorus became imbued with meaning.
Although he still couldn’t understand most of what he heard, in his efforts to transform confusion into comprehension, Otto discovered the true nature of the hell that was his early childhood.
Apparently, he could communicate with non-human creatures.
Eleven years after its manifestation, Otto Suwen realized that he had this ability called the “Divine Protection of Anima Whispering”.
After that, hoping to discover the limits of the power bestowed upon him, Otto went all around town testing his Divine Protection. Over repeated bouts of trial and error, he found that the more intelligent the creature, the more clearly ideas could be communicated between them.
Then, he spoke with the family ground dragon in front of his older brother and confided that he’d had this ability since he was an infant.
[Older Brother: Uuh, okay. Right…… so, um…… Otto. That power is, um, something. Yeah, it’s really something, but…… well, just. Don’t use it where anyone can see you, okay?]
Possessing a Divine Protection meant being blessed by the world, but not everyone welcomed the holders of such powers. It’d be one thing if the Divine Protection benefited many others, but Otto’s ability only applied to himself, and one could easily imagine all the childish mischief it could be used for.
Conceding this much, Otto nodded to his worried brother’s suggestion.
After promising his older brother, who had gone pale and was averting his eyes, Otto resolved to let no one else know about his Divine Protection.
His power was dangerous, not only to him, but to those around him as well.
A sense of duty lit up inside young Otto’s heart: he must protect his beloved family.
Three days after making his promise to his older brother, his Divine Protection of Anima Whispering became common knowledge, and all his peers shunned him entirely.
His younger brother caught him talking with the family ground dragon, and Otto reluctantly told him about his Divine Protection. Otto also told him about his older brother’s concerns and that the power was incredibly dangerous.
The next day, his younger brother dragged him in front of a huge group of kids in order to show him off. They watched him talk to a bug, and, for the first time in years, Otto saw hell again.
The downside to the Divine Protection of Anima Whispering was that he needed to use the other creature’s language for communication. Simply put, for Otto to talk to a ground dragon, he would have to bray like a ground dragon, and, to speak to a bug, he’d have to chirp like a bug.
It took only an instant for the name “Zodda-Bug Boy” to stick.
From that point on, Otto was determined to seal away his Divine Protection, never to use it again. It would be several years before he managed to undo his tainted reputation and erase that accursed memory from everyone’s minds.
When he finally achieved this, Otto was the impressionable age of fourteen.
Being fourteen, all excuses for his mental immaturity stopped working. His body was steadily entering adulthood, and when his limbs had fully grown out, Otto could even be described as rather handsome.
Grey hair, and somewhat luckless, tender features. Mild eyes, and a disposition to put his all into everything he did. Young Otto had grown to possess surprisingly many characteristics that tickled the maternal instinct, and just when he, like any boy his age, began taking interest in romance――
He made an enemy of the daughter of the most powerful figure in town with his Divine Protection of Anima Whispering, and was banished.
That was the winter he turned fifteen.
Long story short, Otto had gotten himself involved in someone else’s love-scandal.
On the night of the powerful man’s daughter’s birthday party, the girl’s boyfriend came storming in, roaring about her being with another man. His crosshairs immediately landed on Otto, who had been talking with her only moments earlier.
Otto protested that he was honestly just asking her for the time, but the red-faced man lashing him with “Zodda Bug Boy” would hear none of it.
And when Otto heard his long-buried past suddenly dug up, even he lost his composure.
So, in order to completely clear his name, Otto unsealed his Divine Protection, and, after listening to nearly every creature in town, he learned that the girl in question had been with seven different men that night and triumphantly told her hapless boyfriend: “Looks like you were the eighth!”.
After the man gave him a thorough beating, the girl who had her romantic trysts exposed hired an assassin, and Otto was forced to flee the town of his birth. Relying on his father’s connections, he wound up working for an acquaintance’s merchant company.
There, once he had learned the trade―― Otto Suwen set out on his own as a travelling merchant at the age of sixteen.
Otto’s journey as a travelling merchant could only be described as an uninterrupted series of misfortunes.
His affinity for bad luck hadn’t diminished over the years. He’d be hit with bad weather whenever he transported fragile cargo, attacked by mountain bandits whenever he took shortcuts through the hills, and, whenever he camped with other merchants, Otto would be the only one swarmed by blood-sucking insects.
The only reason Otto managed to survive these calamities was because his exceptional business ability counterbalanced his tragically poor luck.
He wasn’t making big profits, but he wasn’t suffering debilitating losses either. With an uncanny sense of balance known as the bane of merchants, he managed to break exactly even as four years passed in the blink of an eye, and Otto was now twenty.
The fact that he never lost heart nor turned back was thanks to Furufu, the ground dragon he’d known since he was little, whom he brought along when he was expelled from his hometown.
Honestly, Otto did have some complicated feelings about Furufu, who was the reason his brothers found out his Divine Protection of Anima Whispering in the first place. But, for the present Otto, Furufu was nothing less than his cherished and inseparable family.
For whatever reason, other merchants tended to shy away from teaming up with Otto, so he spent many sleepless nights speaking with Furufu to keep his loneliness at bay.
“Let me sleep already”, Furufu would say, but Otto’s imploring always got him to stay awake for a little longer.
Perhaps it was only natural that other merchants stayed well away when they saw Otto braying with his ground dragon by his fire in the dead of night.
While to a bystander, those days might seem rather uneventful, for Otto, it was a constant life and death struggle. Then one day, there came a turning point.
――He misjudged a business opportunity and utterly screwed up.
This time, Otto decided to peddle oil. It was almost winter and oil would sell for an outrageously high price up north in Gusteko, or so he heard from a red-faced man with a beard and an eyepatch. So Otto traded all his metal wares for oil and triumphantly set his sights on Gusteko―― when a sudden breakdown in diplomatic relations utterly destroyed any hope of selling his goods.
And to rub salt into his wounded heart, he quickly found out that the metal wares that he had previously struggled to sell were fetching exorbitant prices in the Capital.
Realizing that he’d been duped, Otto sensed that his travelling merchant’s life was in peril.
Unless he could find a way to reverse his circumstances, he’d have no choice but to sell Furufu. Not only that―― he might even have to go crying back to his family.
Otto could never allow that to happen.
It had been over five years since he last saw his family, but his love for them had not faded in the least. The fact that he could live his present life, as difficult as it may be, was all owing to his family, who never abandoned him as a child.
In the first ten years of his life, Otto had already given them a lifetime’s worth of trouble. So for those ten years of kindness, he was determined to spend the rest of his life to repay them.
It was only right that debts should be repaid. After all, Otto Suwen was a merchant’s son.
――And so, when a trader he knew told him of an opportunity to make a quick profit, Otto took it.
This job wouldn’t involve any merchandise, only his ground dragon’s legwork. Someone was hiring dragon carriages to transport a large number of people from one place to another.
Without a second thought, Otto activated his Divine Protection of Anima Whispering and told Furufu to rush there at full speed before anyone else.
Zooming through shoddy roads, travelling along unmarked paths, and ignoring Furufu’s protests of “Let’s stop already, young master”, Otto managed to be the first to arrive.
And,
[???: My my my…… just where are you going in such a hurry…… DESU!?]
Not good.
A bunch of guys with deranged eyes tied him up and rolled him up in a mat, and it was then that Otto realized that his misfortunes had truly, truly reached its peak.
He was separated from Furufu, stripped of his belongings, tossed into a cold cavern, and left there to wait for his joke of a life to be brought to an end.
Who could possibly understand the depth of the despair that submerged Otto’s heart back then? Surely, no one.
In hopes of finding some way to escape from their evil clutches, Otto completely released the restraints on his Divine Protection of Anima Whispering as his last resort. But he was greeted by a soul-crushing silence―― for despite unleashing the full power of his Divine Protection of Anima Whispering and expecting to be met with the hell of early childhood:
That nostalgic, loathsome cacophony did not come.
The insects and small creatures that were supposed to be dwelling in these forests and caves were all hiding from that same evil presence―― while Otto, who had prepared for hell, had his heart shattered by a very different hell instead.
His eyes lost their vigour, and all strength drained from his body. He knew that it was all over.
There was nothing he could do, and this cold cavern would be his end.
The despair was too great for tears. And, it was when he had grown numb to the passage of those empty hours, that Otto Suwen’s fate was unexpectedly saved.
[????: What the! Those Witch Cult nutjobs really don’t discriminate, huh! Wouldn’a expected any less, though!]
A booming voice reverberated through the cave, bringing Otto out of his trance and jolting him back to reality.
Lifting his head, he feebly called for help. And it was a large, dog-faced beastman with a heavy Kararagi accent who heard his pleas.
Hh, huh…… I, I’m crying?
Before he knew it, teardrops were rolling from his eyes.
D-damn it…… what, what is this, why…… why am…… I……
Without understanding why, the irrepressible tears kept flowing as a senseless scream engulfed his mind.
――Now that he was released from the despair that had dried up his tears, perhaps it was only natural that he would be crying.
I-I’m so glad…… I didn’t die……
He hadn’t achieved anything yet.
He hadn’t repaid a single one of his debts.
If he had died there, his life would have ended without having had the slightest meaning.
And it was because he survived, that he now realized that fact.
――Every time Otto cried, he felt his life begin again.
His first birth-wail was when he was born into this world.
His second birth-wail was when he recognized his family’s love and found the whereabouts of his own heart.
And the third, was when he understood the meaning of his life after he had all but resolved to die――
――Otto Suwen screamed his third birth-wail that day.
※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※
[Otto: ――It’s not like anyone asked me to buy time like this…]
Single-mindedly driving his overtaxed feet into the ground step after step, a wry smile rose on Otto’s face.
As much as he wanted to forget those memories of his unsightly bawling, every memory in which he was crying was far too important, and he couldn’t forget them even if he tried.
[Otto: But I’ll repay my debts, no matter what. ――Because I’m a merchant, after all]
――That youth who saved his life:
Otto Suwen owed Natsuki Subaru a debt that must be repaid.
For saving his life, Otto would move heaven and earth to repay him.
It was only natural for a merchant to think this way.
And, more importantly――
[Otto: ――Because he’s my friend!!]
Both as a merchant and an independent human being, Otto ordered himself to stay true here and now.
It was a battle he was unlikely to win.
Nevertheless, against all odds, Otto Suwen chose to wager his very existence on Natsuki Subaru’s victory.
That was the will of his merchant soul, and a testament to their friendship.
――Far off in the distance, from the direction of the abandoned carriages, Otto heard the raging roars of a beast.
Sensing that the true battle had now begun, Otto unleashed his Divine Protection―― and, offering himself to that all-familiar hell, intent on giving this fight his all, he ran.
-=Chapter 106 End=-
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