MMFHRK-Chapter 18

Chapter 18: Miss Lilinai, Are You Having a Good Time?

The vine that had appeared out of nowhere coiled tightly around her ankle, and soon extended up her calf.

“Damn it…!”

Lilinai struggled once, but the vine only grew tighter.

She gripped her longsword and swung it violently, severing that vine and dropping back to the ground.

“What on earth is this thing…”

Lilinai dodged the vines slowly creeping across the ground beneath her feet and leapt to one side.

Lightning struck. Its glow lit up the forest. Through blurred eyes, Lilinai saw the clusters of cypress and alder trees ahead. Under the blast of the gale, they seemed to have come alive, shaking their leaves and branches like pairs of claws. The girl couldn’t help stepping back and colliding with a large tree. She turned around, and that large tree was hunched over, waving its twisted, knotted limbs, malicious laughter issuing from the hollow that served as its mouth.

“Stay back!”

In her terror, Lilinai swung her sword again, hacking off a piece of bark.

Was this a hallucination? Or some sort of illusion?

Lilinai shook her head hard and broke into a mad dash.

Instinct told her that something about the current situation was off.

“Boom—“

Lilinai ducked low, evading the alder branches that meant to bar her way.

Boughs stretched toward her from all directions, lashing at her, trying to hook onto her clothes and long hair. The twisted trunks swayed without pause, and from the hollows within came grim, mocking snickers.

For whatever reason, the girl understood what they were calling out.

—You can’t escape! You’ll be trapped here forever until you die!

“Could it be… magic!”

Lilinai realized belatedly.

Regarding the legends about Witches and their towers, there were in fact many attendant rumors.

One of them was this: anyone who had not received a Witch’s invitation, should they trespass upon the territory surrounding a Witch’s tower, would be attacked by the forest!

Though rumors always contained some element of exaggeration, since Airiya was a Witch, using magic to set traps in the forest near her mansion… didn’t seem impossible either!

“Damn it, was the information I gathered still not enough?”

Lilinai thought anxiously.

She swung her sword to cut down the branches assailing her while working hard to think of a countermeasure.

The wind grew fiercer, and the moon and stars were nowhere to be seen. And since half an hour ago, she had lost all sense of direction.

What should she do? Should she try retracing her path? Or just pick a direction at random and worry about getting out of the forest first…

“—Ngh!”

The girl’s footing wavered.

She had placed too much of her attention on those branches, and had instead neglected the enemy that appeared first.

The nimble vines made a comeback, having gathered once again at some point on the path beneath her feet.

They coiled up around her, gave a sudden yank, and pulled her boot right off.

Lilinai lost her balance and fell to the ground.

The longsword flew from her hand and lodged in a tree nearby. She reached out to retrieve it, and a vine dropped down from the tree, instantly binding the girl’s slender pale wrist; at the same time, another vine stretched out from behind, wrapping around the girl’s bare white foot and hoisting her up like a hammock.

“Kuh…!”

Lilinai was lifted up beyond her control.

She struggled hard, but soon other vines sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain, assailing her from every direction, coiling around the girl’s legs, waist, and neck, then slowly tightening.

A sense of suffocation surged up her throat. Lilinai grabbed the vine at her neck and began gasping violently.

No good—if this kept up… she would die here!

The vines at her legs and waist advanced in a spiral, like venomous snakes strangling their prey.

Lilinai raised the one leg that hadn’t yet been bound and kicked hard against the tree trunk behind her.

The recoil carried her swinging forward, and she stretched out her arm and, like a monkey scooping at the moon’s reflection, retrieved the sword below.

“It worked!”

The girl cheered.

With a backhanded stroke, she cut away the vine binding her wrist.

But just as Lilinai was preparing to cut away the vines on her body, an unexpected variable appeared.

Darkness suddenly descended, the air stopped moving, a rotten stench filled everything around her, and a drop of some unknown liquid fell onto her face.

“Wh-what is this!?”

As a slimy, wet sensation registered across her upper body, Lilinai suddenly realized something.

It seemed she had…

been ‘swallowed’ by something!

It should be said that Lilinai’s judgment was correct.

Just after the girl had cut away several vines, new reinforcements for the forest’s trap had arrived.

It was an enormous man-eating flower, easily comparable in size to a hippopotamus. It had hidden its body behind a tree trunk while its head came down around from the treetops, opening its huge maw without warning and taking half the girl’s body inside.

“Nngh…”

The interior of the man-eating flower was filled with a cloyingly sweet odor, which considerably worsened Lilinai’s sense of suffocation.

Unlike her fantasies about such plants in her previous life, man-eating flowers genuinely existed in this world. It was simply that they had no sharp teeth, nor strong acid that dissolved whatever it touched. Their method of predation was similar to a pitcher plant’s: first they sealed their prey inside, letting it slowly suffocate, and once the target had lost its capacity to resist, they would digest it.

Lilinai had heard a little about man-eating flowers from the drifters.

They said it could secrete a plant venom capable of rendering a person unconscious, weakening an enemy’s resistance.

If she couldn’t break free at once, the fate awaiting her would be to be swallowed whole by the enormous thing.

“Let… go of me…”

Mucus secreted, the fragrance drifting.

Lilinai twisted her arm, but the space was too small; she had neither the angle nor the strength to swing her longsword at all.

Under ordinary circumstances, she would surely have managed to escape before the flower’s venom and rotten vapor dismantled her resistance.

But this time, what she faced was not only the man-eating flower but also those vines and boughs—her enemy was the entire forest.

The legs exposed outside the flower’s mouth kicked feebly, but those vines soon came coiling in again, locking her movements down completely.

The suffocation grew ever more severe. The girl began to choke and cough.

Her vision gradually dimmed, her consciousness slowly blurring.

Damn it…

She couldn’t die here.

Resentment and indignation coursed through the girl’s heart.

Her eyelids grew heavier and heavier, her gaze beginning to scatter, gradually turning vacant.

“Father…”

She murmured in a low voice, clenching her ever-weakening fist.

“Please grant me strength, and let me complete my revenge.”

The girl’s eyes abruptly opened.

She clenched her teeth and slashed downward, her palm splitting open on cue, leaving a drop of fresh blood on the blade.

The intense, agonizing pain roused Lilinai’s senses. She shifted the sword in front of her, clutched the blade’s body, and thrust hard downward.

Squelch—

“—”

The man-eating flower seemed to let out a shrill cry—though of course, that might also have been Lilinai’s imagination.

As its body surface was cut open, the rotten fragrance came pouring violently out. The man-eating flower’s great maw was like a ball that had lost its air, no longer able to grip the girl’s body, and it released Lilinai.

Perhaps startled by this turn of events—assuming they truly possessed such emotions—the vines did not immediately respond, and this gave Lilinai a superb opportunity. Without hesitation, as her body hung freely, the girl used the momentum to hurl the sword, precisely severing the vines binding her legs.

The girl flipped over and landed, catching the sword as it came spinning back down through the air.

Then she delivered two crisp, clean strokes, cutting away every remaining plant on her body.

“Haah… haah…”

Lilinai knelt on the ground, panting endlessly.

Most of her clothing was torn, her pale, flushed skin faintly visible.

The girl tore off a strip of cloth from the corner of her cloak, bound her split palm with it, then covered the skin exposed to the open air and drew a deep breath.

“…I survived.”

Escaping death brought her no happiness.

Her boot was gone, and the road ahead would certainly be harder to walk.

And it went without saying that other parts of the forest would surely hold traps just like these.

“Now, what should I do…”

“Miss Lilinai, are you having a good time?”

Just as the girl’s heart was in utter turmoil.

A sweet greeting struck Lilinai like a thunderbolt.

She stood up stiffly, turned around, and looked toward the patch of darkness from which the voice had come.

The white-haired girl who stepped out of the darkness wore her signature smile on her face.

“You performed rather well—and here I thought these traps might let Miss Lilinai enjoy herself a bit more comfortably~”

“Airiya…!”

Lilinai spoke the other’s name in a trembling voice.