A sword came into Bido’s field of vision.
She twisted her body on reflex.
Too late.
The blade grazed past, splitting open her side.
The pain followed a beat late.
“Ugh...”
The late-arriving pain did not end late.
Something hot flowed down from her side,
spreading along her waist.
The fact that her skin had been torn open became clearer every time she drew breath.
Bido pressed the tip of her tongue between her teeth.
If a groan slipped out,
she knew that one time would summon the next.
After that, it remained perilous.
No,
she had already been too late once.
Bido clenched her teeth and moved again.
Instead of retreating, she rolled to the side.
She kicked off the wall and threw herself forward again.
The sword pursued her again.
This time, even closer.
Her body moved before the thought of dodging could form.
She scraped across the floor and rolled away,
barely escaping its trajectory.
Her breath escaped roughly.
Bido pressed her back to the wall and counted her breaths.
One, two.
She could no longer tell where pain ended and fear began.
The smell of blood stabbed at her nose.
“Ha—”
The air she inhaled would not go all the way in.
Bido did not stop.
She knew that the moment she stopped, it would be the end.
But her body would not obey easily.
Her foot caught on the floor, and in the next moment her balance collapsed.
She tried to get back up,
but instead, her knees folded first.
The sword paused for a moment above her line of sight.
A brief opening.
An extremely short silence.
Bido mistook it for a chance.
The instant she twisted to slip away—
The impact came first.
This time, it was not her side but her abdomen.
Her breath was knocked out of her all at once,
her vision swaying as her body spilled to the floor.
And just like that, she collapsed.
Now there truly was no strength left in her arms.
The moment she planted her hand,
it slipped on the blood spread across the floor.
She tried to inhale in a hurry,
but her chest would not open properly.
Then—
The sword descended again.
Bido clenched her teeth and rolled across the floor once more.
Her back struck the wall, and the world before her eyes shook.
And the man’s sword did not stop.
There was no hesitation in the motion of his swing,
and his speed was constant.
Neither fast nor slow.
His feet always moved the same distance,
and the sword fell from the same height at the same angle.
That regularity instead made her predict the “next” move.
The illusion that she could predict it became the reason she was a beat too slow.
Bido was deceived by that trap again and again.
She twisted her body, but her feet were late.
It grazed her shoulder.
Every time the wind of the sword passed, it felt as if her skin had been cut first.
Bido crawled across the floor.
Her nails scraped against stone,
and her elbows tore open.
She had to stand.
If she did not stand—
Before that thought could even finish, a red blade appeared in her sight.
Bido kicked off the wall and flung herself away.
Unable to regain her balance, she fell just as she was.
This time,
her body would not roll.
Her legs no longer obeyed her either.
Bido gasped for breath and raised herself up.
And this time, she knew she truly could not avoid it.
It was not because her body would not move.
Nor because her path was blocked, or her luck had run out.
It was because now,
she had realized that no matter where she moved, the result would be the same.
The sword was already calculating where Bido would stand.
There was no room to flee,
no room left to deceive.
She tried to breathe in, but the air caught in her chest.
Her heart rang beside her ears.
That sound was so loud that she could hear nothing else.
Her body was growing cold.
Sensation drained from her fingertips,
and she could no longer be certain whether the soles of her feet were touching the floor.
This was fear.
The fear felt in a situation from which there was no escape.
The fear of erasing, by one’s own hand, the possibility of survival.
Bido clenched her teeth.
She forced down a breath that came out almost like a sob.
Before her eyes, the sword was raised again.
Now,
I am going to die.
It was at that moment.
Not her body,
but something inside her reacted first.
The fear of death was so great
that the emotion, unable to find a place to flee, surged inward.
It was different from suffocation.
Not her lungs,
but somewhere deep in her chest felt as if it were being pressed from within.
Bido stopped midway through inhaling.
The more she drew breath,
the more it felt as though something was tightening.
As if
something were being forced into a gap far too narrow.
It hurt.
And
it was unbearably heavy.
Her heart beat one beat late.
An uneasy blank opened, as if the next beat would never come.
Bido felt it too.
This was
not a simple reaction of the body.
It was neither thought nor will.
Fear had taken the wrong path and was striking against her insides.
It felt as though the fixed rules of her body were being pushed aside, out of place.
In that instant, Bido clenched her fist even harder.
Her hand trembled, but she did not let go.
Because the moment she did,
she felt certain she would collapse first.
The sword had already come close before her eyes,
but that fact reached her a little late.
For one brief instant,
it felt as though the world had slipped out of alignment.
And then,
the sword faltered for the briefest moment.
It had not stopped completely.
Nor had its speed slowed.
It was simply
as if the motion that should have continued had lost a single beat.
That gap was short,
so short that if one failed to notice it, it was as good as nonexistent.
In that moment,
Bido’s eyes had turned red.
They did not flash,
nor did they give off light.
It was merely
a faint hue settled deep within her pupils.
Bido herself did not know it.
What she felt was something else.
Oppression.
Something different from suffocation.
As if
the exits inside her body had been sealed shut.
A sensation like striking her forehead against an invisible wall whenever she tried to move.
Her thoughts could not advance,
and her emotions only circled within her body.
Bido inhaled again.
This time, air entered.
But at the same time,
something inside her body grew heavier.
A sensation of being pulled from deep within her chest.
The feeling of her soul being forcibly pushed out of place.
It hurt.
Bido clenched her teeth.
She did not know what this was,
but one thing was clear: she could not endure it for long.
At last, the tip of the sword reached her eyes.
It was so close it seemed it would cut the tip of her nose.
Close enough for breath to touch.
At that moment—
It stopped.
The sword descended no farther.
Bido could not move right away.
The fact that the sword before her eyes had stopped did not reach her mind first.
The tip that, until a moment ago, had been close enough to cut through her neck.
Confirming that the tip had stopped
required one more thought.
It was quiet.
Even the sound of breathing seemed to return a moment late.
No one had seized it,
and Bido had not blocked it.
It simply
did not continue any further.
Bido exhaled.
Something inside her surged out violently,
then cut off with a snap.
The pressure she had been holding back drained away all at once.
Her legs gave out.
Bido stepped back.
One step,
then another.
In time with that movement, the sword wavered.
And the hand of the man holding that sword lost its strength.
There came the sound of metal touching the floor.
Neither clear
nor loud—
a short sound.
The sword fell to the floor and stopped without a twitch.
The man remained standing as he was.
With his scale-covered body,
his arm still raised.
But he no longer moved.
Neither reason nor madness,
but a state of nothing at all.
By now, not even the sound of breathing remained around her.
Bido stood there for a long while, unable to move.
Then she looked at the sword that had fallen before her.
Her hand trembled.
Even when she consciously tried to stop it, it would not stop.
The more strength she put into it,
the more finely it shook.
It’s all right.
The words that surfaced in her mind
were far too light to convince herself.
Bido drew in a breath.
Shortly,
and then once more.
Deep inside her chest, the oppression still remained.
It felt as though air would not properly return to the place where something blocked had been forcibly pushed aside.
Is it over?
No certainty attached itself to that question.
Bido looked down at the sword lying on the floor.
The thing that had been descending toward her only moments ago.
The thing that had been hers,
and had nearly killed her.
The object that had been entrusted to her.
That fact
now felt strangely heavy.
Bido did not reach out at once.
Even taking a single step closer required a moment’s hesitation.
Without taking her eyes from the sword,
she surveyed her surroundings.
What entered her eyes was the man’s body, hardened over with scales.
The man who had stolen her sword and threatened her.
He stood in an awkward posture, as if neither alive
nor dead.
A short distance away, unmoving bodies lay scattered.
Those that had fallen over,
those sprawled face-down,
those that had stiffened while bleeding.
There was no sound of breathing here anymore besides her own.
Only the traces of those who had fled remained on the floor.
Bido looked over that scene for a long while.
Unable to avert her eyes,
unable to give it meaning.
This is...
The words would not come out properly.
The fear that had ruled Bido’s inner self had not vanished.
It merely remained inside her chest in an unmoving form.
In the end, Bido bent at the waist.
There was hesitation even in the moment she reached out.
What if again—
What if once more—
But she did not follow that thought to the end.
She gripped the sword.
It was cold.
Its familiar weight settled exactly into her palm.
And so,
she did not let go.
Bido lifted the sword and looked around once more.
At the grotesque corpse,
and the deaths left around it.
And—
in the very center of it all,
she slowly accepted the fact that she was standing alone.