North x Northwest
Chapter 163

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‘Because the mutiny on board isn’t caused by starvation or abuse, it will go moderately. Of course, it’s different from land rebellions. Manpower and supplies are limited due to the size of the ship, and there’s also the constant threat of nature. In addition, if they were to kill each other, it wouldn’t be unheard of for us to all go down together. Because of this, the League has politically established its organisation to prevent such mutinies.’

Still, an ominous feeling pierced Lil like a needle.

“…Anybody there? Alain! Jericho!..”

Thunder covered her pathetic screams and a crackling sound hurled around the room. The waves were so strong that the objects that couldn’t replace any grip fell to the floor and rolled around. As a matter of fact, the only thing that remained fixed in the cabin was Lil.

The ropes around her torso and shins pressed her back against the wooden pillar in the middle of the cabin. Her hands were equally bound behind her back, caught between her body and the pole and as time passed, her wrists were becoming sore due to the scuffing of the rope.

Lil twisted herself to try to make it out somehow, but the girdle only grazed through her skin painfully. As her skin began peeling, it felt like she was getting burned. Ironically, this particular type of pain reminded her of Ed.

‘…Well, of course, I’m thinking about him… he was our doctor after all…’

However, in reality, it was unclear to Lil whether it was her body that was exhausted or her mind that was suffering. Because the pain in her chest was something that didn’t seem to have been caused by any injuries…

‘How funny… Ed was a doctor who only treated physical injuries. So, it’s amusing how it seems like I’d beg him to ease this pain in my heart which can’t even be seen… It’s terrible and beyond shameless that I’m thinking about someone whom I pushed to their death with my own two hands…’

Lil kicked her heel against the pole.

– Thump… Thump… –

‘Perhaps I can loosen the rope if I keep kicking my feet… Thinking about Ed is distressing. The situation I’m in is already hard enough to deal with, but on top of that, I’m starting to lose my mind… I need to think about something else… like how I can get myself out of here…’

After her foot hit the pillar a few times, her toe touched something. Lil recognized it at a glance. It was that weird looking object from Ed’s bag. A wooden face made of ebony with white painted eyes, nose and mouth. Lil couldn’t fully understand the expression it held, but she got the impression it was laughing at her.

When lightning stung all over the hull, the brightly-lit sculpture seemed to open its eyes and smiled.

“…What’s so funny?”

“…”

Of course, the sculpture remained silent.

“Is it funny that I threw him overboard and ended up like this myself?”

“…”

After spitting out sharp words, Lil shut her mouth as if she had made a slip of the tongue. The ghastly face, caught in the gap between the boards and covered in filth, moved with the heaving of the ship, making it appear to be nodding. Flashes of lightning beamed and illuminated the black bloodstains surrounding it. Traces that pierced Lil’s chest immediately.

“…Punishment?..”

“…”

“Is this my punishment?”

“…”

The face was no bigger than the palm of a hand, and the two white dots for eyes looked just like the green eyes she knew so well.

‘How strange. I can’t even stop myself from associating those white eyes with green ones…’

Lil bit her mouth painfully. Although she knew she mustn’t get agitated, the wooden sculpture’s face cast a bizarre shadow, laughing silently at Lil.

It was its gaze on her miserable situation that further heightened her sense of shame.

“Stop staring at me.”

“…”

Lil felt strange. It felt like facing a resurrection. An ominous foreboding that it would soon talk to her in the form of a living thing with a mouth that held no expression, no liveliness, and no breath made her unable to stand it.

“Stop looking at me.”

But its torn mouth whispered softly.

“…Look at you…”

Lil tried to turn away from the sculpture, but her movements were limited. From the corner of her eye, the unrelenting jilting continued to disturb her.

“…This is entirely your fault. It’s because you made the wrong decision. You are aware of this, aren’t you? You should’ve listened to Ed… What if he wasn’t a spy? …Then there would’ve been no mutiny, and the Bell Rock would’ve arrived in Serlio long ago… But you didn’t attempt to listen. You assumed there was no need for you to hear him make excuses. You only had to look at Cesar to convince yourself that Ed was in the wrong. How cruel… He probably called out your name even when he was dying…”

As lightning struck again, Lil shouted, glaring at the sculpture with resentment.

“I know!”

Her irregular breathing sprang out like someone who had been stabbed in their vital organs. Even Lil had speculated that Ed’s last hope was herself. From the circumstances so far, she could only conclude that Ed was attached to the Bell Rock because of her.

‘He took on such a ridiculous risk by not running away even when he was caught by Cesar… Why did you do that?..’

She realised it only after asking her opponent dozens of times. Someone who was not there anymore. It was a question that Ed had already answered. The slow one was Lil. His answers had overtook her questions, and she simply couldn’t keep up.

{ “…Then why do you look like this only to me?..” }

‘He told me so directly.’

{ “…What do you mean, ‘what’?…” }

She continued to hear the voice that she couldn’t understand the first time.

{ “…What do you think I’ve been tailing you around for?..” }

‘If I hadn’t seen the sketch, I would’ve never known till the very end.’

{ “…What do you gain by erasing the past and hiding in one of your shells? Convenience?… I thought you would stop deceiving yourself in front of me, so why did you go back to being so stubborn again?..” }

Lil looked back on those incomprehensible sentences with more meaning this time. Standing there, in the middle of that room, she stared pathetically at her terribly slow comprehension. Answers to her barely articulated questions found her all too fast. She lowered her head as she gasped for breath, and her all too familiar body came to view. Her slender waist and bulging chest were visible from under her shirt.

She suddenly realised.

‘From a certain point, Ed could ‘see’ the real me… Perhaps, since then…’

{ “…At that time, you’re the one who asked! …You asked if I wouldn’t mind regardless of who you are. You wouldn’t ask that if you wanted to go back to how we used to be. So I gave you my honest answer…” }

‘That was the moment when I asked Ed if he wouldn’t mind regardless of who I was. At the time, I was so overcome with joy that I didn’t get to closely look at Ed. But, patching the pieces of my memory about Ed’s face together, I think he was actually very surprised. It was the first time I saw that always smirking face so bewildered. Ed usually expressed his bewilderment when his curiosity was sparked or whenever he found himself in a new and interesting situation. Just like an explorer or researcher. But at that moment, I saw Ed genuinely surprised, even with a sense of rigidity, as if he was seeing a ghost. A pure look of embarrassment that went against his usual personality. Still, he didn’t make any sly comments upon seeing my true self. His plainest response is actually the most suspicious.

I completely misunderstood the change in his behaviour. I got confused because it overlapped with the time I told him that I finally accepted him as part of my crew. But now I know, it was because Ed was looking at a woman. And when he caught me with my birch sap on deck, when he complained he was feeling depressed and blamed me for it, he was definitely facing me as a woman. He had those exceptionally brilliant eyes…’

Lil has always been instinctively sensitive to the lustful gazes of men whose unspeakable emotions flowed like a well. After all, that was the reason for her existence as a woman. Lil’s life had been a constant journey of replaceing the best bidder to whom she would give her womb. As she has been doing it for years, there was no way she wasn’t aware of it. Seeing his embarrassing emotions overflow despite him wanting to suppress them couldn’t be denied as Lil’s mere intuition alone. Lil knew well that his feelings were so pure that he didn’t even know how to hide them.

‘But Ed didn’t seem to have let his emotions overcome him. He confirmed that to others I was still a man. Soon after my appearance changed from his perspective, he immediately tried to separate Marenzio from me. Although Ed frequently commits crazy acts from a sane person’s point of view, it has never been without good reason. So, his attempt to hide me from Marenzio was a judgement purely based on his own perspective.

That’s why Ed had no choice but to obsess over why I looked like that only to him. After all, it’s the same for me now too.’