Messiah 16 : Scumbag

She hadn't walked for long before she laid Katachi down onto soft grass.

It's tiring having to carry a person around. She felt the growling and churning in her stomach becoming harsher and harsher, and simply sat down to rest for a bit.

R : (He's sleeping. It is pretty late into the night, so I'm not surprised.)

The howling draft stirred up an uncomfortable chill in her spine, and Roberia rubbed her palms against her arms. It wasn't enough to keep the cold spell away, so she reached for Katachi's groundsheet and blanket and began setting it up. As she worked, the brushing of her hand against his skin in the dark was enough of a sign that Katachi was cold as well.

R : (Wha- His icy skin's full of goosebumps! I'm surprised he hasn't woken up from this chill yet.)

She fumbled and flapped the groundsheet wide, and lay Katachi down gently, being careful not to aggravate the wound on his left arm, nor the sprained left wrist.

*Cozy's Notes : AND LO, THE LEFT HAND OF THE BLACK KNIGHT IS OF THE DEVIL'S WORK- I'm joking. Heh. Torturing him by adding salt to his wound.*

Then, she laid next to him, and murmured some things.

R : "I'm sorry for being hard on you, and having you carry me even with a sprained wrist. I'm sorry for having you play along with my lie. I'm really sorry, Katachi. As your consort, I've done little good and gave you many troubles, without so much as trusting you. I'm sorry for being so selfish, Katachi - Even after all I've put you through, even when I know it's wrong of me, I can't help myself but do it because of the circumstances. I'm really, really sorry..."

She wiped off her tears with her thumbs, and withdrew her arms close to her body. And so she snuggled up to him, and prayed for his forgiveness in the silence of the night.

*** ***

They were greeted with a warm invitation of bountiful sunlight as the day started. There were no walls about to block its rays, so it was effective as a method of waking up at sunrise, but a windowed wall would have served the same purpose, and kept them warm throughout the night too. Not like they could complain about it, but they're starving, and their gold is limited, so they could only stomach their fate and pray it turns out better.

R : (It's morning.) "Good morning, Katachi."

Resting next to her, under the wraps was a young, black-haired boy who seemed to be of an Ohdean descent. His clothes was tattered and patchwork was sewn into various spots. He had a serene face about him as he rested on the groundsheet in peace.

R : (... I kind of wish he heard what I said to him yesterday night. But a part of me wished he didn't, so he wouldn't have questions for me, or stuff like that.)

She reached her hand for his forehead, and touched it, checking his temperature for any signs of illness-

*insert Korean sfx kko-reu-reuk*

His stomach growled. Roberia let out a chuckle of relief, and reached for Katachi's pouch of gold.

R : "... You're hungry. Don't worry, I'll go get something."

*** ***

She had left the boy resting in a comfortable, snug position and walked about the town a bit, to look for things she could purchase as food. As she walked, she ran her fingers over the contents of the pouch, to find a disappointing amount of gold inside.

R : (Wow. We are really, really tight on our gold reserves. Katachi's been doing his best in making sure we get by, hasn't he? I can see why he would get so angry over my lie.)

She clutched the small pouch of gold in her palm, and a smile formed on her face.

R : (But, he is rather stupid, isn't he? Falling for my lie this easily. I do feel guilty over how gullible he actually is that he would trust me like so, but I guess there is some form of basic trust between a man and wife when they wed, even if they are strangers.)

At the corner of her eye was a small bench. Roberia tilted her body to the right, steering herself away from low hazards that could cause her to trip unconsciously.

R : (All that aside, I have to find someplace around here where they accept coin like this. We're in Anik now, so I'm not sure if they would accept this. In fact, I'm not even sure if they understand that we're trying to buy their food with our currency, but can't convey it.)

A couple of minutes walking about idly yielded no results. Roberia clutched her stomach lightly, and turned around to head down another street.

"姑娘呀~ 姑娘, 姑娘!"

Someone was calling out to her.

As Roberia turned around, a fat man wearing a cloth vest and pouchy pants was approaching her, with a rather tired look on her face. From how he was outstretching his right hand towards Roberia, he was probably addressing Roberia as this... Gu-nyang person.

"姑娘呀, 要不要跟我一起走, 抽一抽熱鬧呀?"

He used his sweaty palms to grasp onto Roberia's free left hand, and her hand felt a strange, disgusting sensation of being inserted into a lukewarm soft leather pouch that was wet inside. A coarse texture on his skin, lubricated with sweat, was enough to make Roberia look at him in disgust and fright.

R : (What is he saying? What is he doing?! His hands are so revolting. They remind me of the time I had to reach into that fat noblewoman's bosoms to retrieve Cosette's pendant...) "No... Uh, no, no. It's okay. I don't want or need anything!"

Roberia shifted the gold pouch into her pocket, and used her freed up right hand to pull her left hand out, dissuading any persuasions or advances the man planned.

"不要這樣嗎, 和我合作一下嗎!"

*Cozy's Notes : Well, it appears that our dear Roberia has been forced into a state of 合作, that would mean to cooperate with him.

... Oh shit. That's... That's not good, is it?

YOU DON'T SAY, COZY. YOU'RE THE AUTHOR, FOR THE SAKE OF FUC- *

R : "No, I- !" (Wh- What?)

A strange sensation filled her body. She stopped resisting altogether, and the energy in her right arm was draining away rapidly.

R : (What... What? What's going on? I can't move my body? What's happening?)

"好吧, 我們一起走吧."

R : (Why... Why are my feet moving? Why am I walking that way? I don't want to follow the stinky old creep and his slimy paws! Why can't I move?! Help! Katachi! Somebody! Help me!!!)

Struggle as she may, her body was no longer listening to her mind any longer.

It simply cooperated with the commands issued, and did as the fat man instructed it to.

*** ***

K : (Where, oh where could she have gone?)

Katachi placed the nicely-folded groundsheet above his bag, and fastened it with a strap.

K : (To think that she just walked and left, and took my gold pouch, too. But she left her Band of Approval behind, so she couldn't have gone far.)

He glanced into one of the stores where people were chatting merrily while sitting on square wooden stools, and looked at the clock. On it, strange Anikan characters were displayed, and he couldn't make out exactly what time it was. It looked like it was about 4 in the morning, but the sun had just risen. That wasn't possible, unless he's perceiving the clock in a wrong fashion.

*Cozy's Notes : History time with Cozy! Yay. What Katachi had been looking at was a Chinese Zodiac clock. These things are all the rage in the past. They had 12 figures that represented the Zodiac, and they replaced the 1 ~ 12 numbers on our standard mechanical analogue clocks. Where our clock was divided into 12 and the segment between them was represented as one hour, theirs was a 24-hour clock divided into 12 and the segment between the zodiacs are represented as two hours.

In Katachi's case, instead of displaying the symbols of the animals in the Chinese zodiac, it was showing the characters that represented the zodiac animals. In the place of the animals were the characters 子 丑 寅 卯 辰 巳 午 未 申 酉 戌 and 亥. Of course, Katachi has no way of knowing that, he only knows that there are weird Chinese- I mean, Akinan- ANIKAN, symbols on it. My god, my butterfingers.*

K : (... I don't see her hair or anything red...)

He glanced about once more, and continued walking down the street.

*** ***

"旺估大爺,你回來啦!"

A fat man walked through the door, with a red-haired girl following behind him. Greeting him was a middle-aged lady who stood at the counter, wearing a tight-fit dress with a plastered smile on her face that couldn't look any more dishonest.

"把這丫頭帶到後倉庫去."

He issued a swift instruction, and the lady gave a confident nod with a respectful bow before pulling the red-haired girl by her collar to the back.

*** ***

He had spent a couple of hours looking for her, with fruitless results. But he wasn't surprised. Rather, Katachi was quite convinced that Roberia had simply found somewhere more secluded to rest at. Perhaps she was resting under some shady tree, along a small path out of town. Perhaps she had found a comfortable alley somewhere in this small village and sat atop a box, a gentle breeze tickling and brushing against her body.

His meticulous, unfaltering search for Roberia, however, proves to be of no avail. He had seen a carriage with what appears to be a nobleman in a very formal garb stopping by various places in the village, and he had seen mainly children playing with a strange wooden toy that spins on the ground.

As he turned his head right to look through another store, his body naturally swayed and oriented his trajectory towards his left, and he bumped into someone.

"哇呀呀!!"

He freaked out, and raised his hands to guard his face from nothing, while falling backwards and landing on his bottom. The damp sand soiled his pants and he got up, with a frustrated look on his face and wagging his finger at Katachi.

"啊! 你看你看你, 這怎麼搞的, 走路不長眼睛! 還弄髒了我的新衣!!"

K : "Ah, I'm sorry..."

The fat man then grabbed his wrist with his sweaty palms, and tugged him along.

"臭小子, 休想逃! 跟我来!!"

K : "Ah- Wha- What?" (What is he doing? And... Ew, his palm is really sweaty and slimy...)

*** ***

It didn't take long for Katachi to figure out what the man intended for him to do. The man took off his cloth vest and pants, and tossed it into a wooden bucket with metal bands reinforced unto it.

"給我洗過, 洗的干淨點!"

K : (A washing board...)

The man had pulled him into a sort of inn, and released his grasp when they had entered what seems to be a laundry room. With his arms folded, he exhaled from his nostrils loudly and left the room.

K : (Of course. I made his clothes dirty, so I have to take responsibility and see to it that it is cleaned. Fair enough, I guess.)

Katachi put down his luggage onto a side and began rubbing the clothes together, to remove the stain on the pouchy pants. He scrubbed and rinsed, and flipped and tossed the wet fabric about while squatting on the wet floor. Outside, he heard the busy sounds of the market with people yelling things he didn't understand, and many footsteps of different depths and sounds. It hadn't been this noisy when he walked about the streets, so he could only guess that wherever this was, it was near a very crowded area.

After a good while, he was finished. He hung the clothes up on a rack with bamboo sticks improvised as clothes hangers, and pushed open the door with strange, wooden hooks on it, to look for the fat man.

He left the laundry room and entered a corridor. To his immediate left and before him were two open doors with brightly lit areas, but to his right, down the corridor, was a dark hallway with a closed wooden door. He peered into the room before him, and saw a couple of what could be made out as chefs preparing many, many plates of food. Strange, exotic and pleasant smells of tasty foods lingered about the air. He didn't recognize the smells, but seeing how they were in Anik, being unfamiliar with the herbs used locally is a given.

To his immediate left was another hallway, one that led to stairs and some wide, open space with a counter. That was probably where the fat man who dragged him into this place could have gone.

As he turned left, Katachi felt something... Odd.

Something was off.

He couldn't put a finger on it quite yet, but something about the air feels strange.

He turned around, and looked at the dark hallway leading to the closed door. There was something about it that was more alluring than the bright light outside the inn. Something that overpowered his senses, in comparison to the fragrance leaking from the kitchen area. Something... Ominous.

A warning, a foreboding that he would do good not to ignore.

His eyes widened with a strange, purple sigil. Katachi could not see what he looked like, but the walls next to him glowed a faint purple, strange enough. It was gone soon enough, but that was enough of a premonition to urge him to step forth.

*Cozy's Notes : How many more 'enough's does it take before it's finally enough? I dunno. Just felt like making a paragraph full of and enough of that word. There I go again, ain't I satisfied enough? Apparently not enough of enough was used enough. Enough. Enough, Cozy. God, I've had enough of this enough bullshit.*

He took one step, and froze immediately to a loud noise.

He still had his sabots on, and alerting everybody around him to his presence was certainly not the first thing that comes to his mind. Katachi slipped his feet out of the sabots and held them in his left hand, before slowly tiptoeing over to the door at the end.

*Cozy's Notes : In case you were wondering, yes, his belongings are still inside the laundry room. It plays a vital part in the following chapter, really, it does. Besides, it's his fortune he wasn't encumbered by his bulky stuff from this point on.*

He pushed it open gently...

"Aaahhh~!"

A strange voice rasped out as he did. He could hear moans, cries, the sounds of women coming from somewhere. He couldn't make out where exactly, but this was too shady to ignore. Katachi closed the door behind him, and sneaked his way over.

The sounds got louder and louder the deeper he walked down the corridor. It was a straight, linear path, and the only things that distracted him in the passage was the sound of the creaking wood he was stepping on. The cries sounded weird to Katachi. It sounded like the women were being tortured, but it didn't seem to be painful. Rather, the cries sounded more like the grunts and cries of animals, instead.

He reached the final door, and the sounds were really loud now. They were muffled by the door, but from how loud they are and how they seem to echo about, Katachi was certain that whatever beyond this door was some sort warehouse, or large space. Perhaps it was a torture chamber, forcing women to labor against their own will or something. Or perhaps it was some slaughterhouse for an animal he has never met before in his life. His head pondered with many questions, but the uneasy feeling in his heart pressed on.

He pushed the doors ajar, and peeked through the slit, to see a sight he had not expected.

Women. Naked women were all about in the warehouse, and sprawled across the floor, crawling and doing obscene things.

Ladies of many types, of many heights and sizes, were all about the entire warehouse. They were tied up, and forced into each other by rope, restraint devices, and some were isolated in corners with deterrents like spikes on the floors to stop them from escaping. They touched each other in sensitive spots, and these women, by the dozens, were all groping and pleasuring one another uncontrollably.

He pushed the door open fully, and took two steps into the room. It smelled sick. The stench of sweat, feces and something foul blanketed the air like a miasma. He felt, with every breath taken into his lungs, a revolting sensation that regurgitated the acids in his stomach. His lungs burned and his eyes squinted, trying not to look as much as he could. The smell alone was unbearable, let alone the sight of it.

"你?! 你怎麼在這兒?!"

A middle-aged woman wearing a tight-fit dress glared at him with a shocked expression. Next to her...

... Was Roberia, whom was standing there, with eyes half-closed and her shirt half taken off.

K : (Roberia?! She's here, in this place?!)

But, looking harder, he could clearly see that Roberia was not herself. She seemed to have been put into a daze, lazily standing about and swaying to her sides gently, like a piece of grass rustling in the gentle breeze.

K : (No... She's not herself! Something happened to her... They did something to her!!)

"這兒只有客人才能進來的!! 去去去, 快出去!!!"

Katachi clenched his fists tight, and his face frowned into a frightening, fearsome expression that Roberia, and possibly not even Mother Rinnesfeld has ever seen before.

K : "UNHAND MY WIFE, THIS INSTANT!!!!!"