Editing Mushi Uta:Volume 11 Chapter 4 (section)

== 4.06 The Others ==

No matter where he was.

No matter how much time passed.

He could smell the stench of rot at any time.

His country was ruled by a military dictatorship and civil war continued. The military was rotten and bribed, while the anti-government guerilla were no more than bandits.

The army and guerilla always targeted the weak.

Women, children, and the weak who had no weapons or money. They were extorted by the soldiers and had the source of their livelihood stolen by the guerilla. People without any shelter or food accounted for 80% of the residents.

That child was also another weakling.

Loitering around the corners of the capital, he would sleep next to those who starved to death. At that time the stench permeated his body, and there were times where he couldn’t tell whether he was dead or alive. That was why he hated corpses more than anything in this world, but he’d felt a bit safer sleeping next to a corpse while pretending to be one rather than alone, so he bore it.

One day, the army came for that child.

Since he was the dictator’s illegitimate child, he started living in the palace that day. The dictator’s more than ten legitimate children all died in a succession struggle.

Having now grown into a boy, the first thing he did was to erase all stench from the country.

Under the fake pretext of ending the civil war, he sent military forces to the slums and “purified” them. The dictator praised him for how he so mercilessly erased them, not leaving even a single survivor. He then took these slums that had no one living in them, erected churches in the name of mourning and gained the support of civilians.

However, the boy next attacked the town center, where the rich lived.

Then he built a church.

Churches where no one remained to pray.

When he then started indiscriminately butchering the guerilla, the dictator finally noticed.

The boy was trying to kill each and every person in the country—

The church was not for mourning. —It was a grave.

The dictator was mad, but he couldn’t punish the boy. He already had supporters that could be called worshippers, and the dictator couldn’t stop the rebellion by eliminating them.

Meanwhile, the boy wasn’t satisfied.

He couldn’t get what he really wanted.

The crown held by the dictator.

The symbol of a king who’d yield to no one.

He held the qualification.

Qualifications of the King.

Just like the boy saw with his own two eyes—it meant killing many people.

The boy became a youth and came to another country under the guise of studying abroad.

However, his father the dictator made a cruel deal with that country’s rich people.

''—Do you wish to become Undying?

After being taken captive by someone, he was told this by a person in a white coat.

He then received all kinds of torture. The white coat man called those experiments, but the youth experienced the thin line between life and death many times. However, as he aspired to become king, he couldn’t die.

''—Dream on.

A young woman would whisper this to him from time to time.

She was much scarier than even the white coats torturing him so absurdly.

She would look at him kindly with narrow eyes; a witch smiling like a saint.

''—Keep dreaming your important dreams.

Those words let him live.

No matter how much he suffered and felt mentally cornered, her words made him not give up.

They wouldn’t let him die.

The dark, stagnant wish within him made him cling to life.

Wanting to become king one day and create an eternal world with no rot—

It happened when he attained this calm.

He saw a dream.

A dream where his dream came true.

All rot vanished from the world—and yet the narrow-eyed woman woke him from his slumber.

''—It still hasn’t come true, right?

He fell into hell, and that despair and anger brought him back from the edge of death.

Much time passed since then.

Assaulted by an unknown impact and light, he died.

When he came back to life, he was no longer human.

The personality he had when alive vanished; his entire being was now bottomless desire that gathered and took on human form.

Although he attained freedom for a moment, he was soon enclosed again.

Once again, hellish times continued where he could do nothing but amass desire and hatred.

And then another salvation appeared.

A flash of light like the light he’d seen once saved him.

And now—

“I have… obtained the qualification of a King…”

He could feel it being filled by his desire.

Clad in a crown and a splendid cloak, he looked down at that scenery.

There was no sound.

No one moved.

There was only the familiar stench of death and the cruelly spread blood and flesh.

Once it would get erased by the fierce rain and he would never smell it again, even that rot was pleasant.

“I have… been saved…”

A calm smile rose to the girl’s young-looking face.

With her small legs she stepped on the corpses cut into upper and lower torso. One who was scorched fully black also possessed the qualification of a King, but now nothing remained of it.

The Castle floating overhead vanished.

The caterpillars controlling Akamaki City vanished, becoming grains of light.

The crown above the girl’s head vanished, as did the cloak.

“I am…”

In this world with dancing light particles, the girl was wrapped in relief.

Something was vanishing from within her.

Anger, hatred.

Admiration, Desire.

And—even bottomless power was scattering.

“Saved—”

There was the sound of whistling wind.

A severed electric cable spreading sparks moved by itself, wrapping around the girl’s legs.

“—GWOOOOOOOOOOOH!”

The girl’s face twisted in suffering.

Through the electric cable, a golden current surged through the girl’s entire body.

A pillar of pale-blue static electricity stabbed from the girl’s legs to the great sky. Tearing through the dark clouds, the pillar of light connected heaven and earth.

It was the same as the light that brought him back to life again and again.

The light that threw him to hell again and again.

“AAaaAAaaAAH—”

As the light vanished, the girl’s body trembled.

Sweat gushed out and tears overflowed. It was so painful because the girl’s body was human.

“AAaaaaAAAAAAAAAH!”

Around the screaming girl, the caterpillars that should have been gone were born. Just like an erupting volcano, from the gaps in debris welled out enough caterpillars to cover the skies, spreading all over the ruined city.

In the empty sky he could see a small crack being born.

A line of blood dripped from the girl’s bitten lips.

That line of blood soon evaporated, and that bright red color mixed with the miasma engulfing the girl—

Dyeing the miasma red.

''—Did it still not come true?

The cracks growing larger in empty air, overlapped with the witch’s whispers.

That being’s wish.

That nightmare.

Had not yet come true.

As he recalled this despair, that being felt its own will being destroyed.

Right, this being continued many times.

He recalled his dream, made it come true, and yet was pulled back to a reality where it didn’t come true.

This repeated many, many times.

By that witch, and—those glowing fairy-like butterflies

However, there was already the limit.

“—”

The fissure born in air finally broke, and the world hiding the true form crumbled down.

What was there were the collapsed figures of the Mushitsuki in the town turned ruins.

However, there were no corpses.

“—Finally found you, shut-in bastard.”

Only one person standing with two legs on the ground was there. A boy readying a hockey stick.

“So, should I avenge Inuko?”

Pulled back to the world of reality, the person called Diorestoi lost his human personality forever.