Oomi
“So that’s how it is…”
After a long silence, the Harvester of Hearts spoke, sounding unbearably sad.
“They couldn’t endure…? I wronged them. Poor souls.”
I hated the God. To the Harvester of Hearts, who had carved away his own heart to save people, he said—without so much as a change in his expression—that those very people had tasted eternal loneliness and that he himself had killed them.
As I thought, God was the lowest of the low. So defenseless like this—right now, surely—
“That’s how you’ve killed so many, isn’t it?”
God spoke curtly without even looking at me.
――In my right hand was a spear of ice. That’s right, with this I had killed the obstructive personalities inside Oze-san time and again.
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No, I hated it. This cold, savage thing—I wanted to cast it away, yet it clung to my hand and would not come off. My eyes met Aochi-san’s. Of all people, I didn’t want Aochi-san to see me like this.
“I’m sorry… I—”
Gently, Aochi-san took hold of the hand gripping the weapon, peeling my fingers away one by one. Though he applied no force, my fingers came loose from the ice, one after another, as if fluttering free.
“Oomi, it’s all right.”
With Aochi-san’s words, the ice sank into the blossom of a cosmos flower.
A short sound, half sigh, half laugh, escaped God’s lips as he raised his face.
“Then let’s begin from this side. From your passenger—one of my weaker cells.”
At that moment, I understood clearly. To God, we were nothing but cells. However desperately we lived, fighting, protecting, gasping for breath, he saw us only as “weak cells,” “strong cells,” “necessary cells,” “unnecessary cells,” classifying us no further.
The thought that we might have been born from such a being made my skin crawl.
For the Harvester to be drawn into the eyes of someone so terrifyingly, merely beautiful—it didn’t suit him, not in the least.
The place our Harvester belonged was not such a cold domain.
“…No, I cannot bear to watch.”
The Harvester spoke in a faint voice.
“I see.”
God, sounding hardly interested, stepped closer again, taking the Harvester’s hand.
“Come now. Touch my eye, and enter within. Poor one, no sadness will ever reach you again.”
Saying this, with those flawlessly white fingers—perfect to the point of being hateful—he beckoned the Harvester toward his own eyeball.
No… don’t go—