"Hmm... So I still couldn’t get any information."
"I kept slamming him into the ground, but he still wouldn’t talk, so I kept slamming him into the ground. By then, enough time had passed that the sun began to rise, and the instant he was exposed to the sunlight, he turned to dust and vanished.
"Kyaaaah!!"
"I have no idea what the hell is going on..."
Thinking that, Escanor got to his feet and walked, and walked, and walked until he finally made it out of the forest and reached a village.
"Hmm... This is an unfamiliar place. And that thing earlier, too... Is this an entirely different world?"
Just as he was thinking that, he saw a little girl being dragged away.
"..."
Seeing that, Escanor ran in the direction she had been taken, and there he found a white-haired girl being held by a one-eyed man.
"Let go of me!"
"You insolent brat... I treated you well, and you stabbed out my eye?! I’ll make sure you die the most painful death imaginable..."
The man said that and threw the girl into a pit he had already dug. Then he picked up a torch and prepared to hurl it at her.
'...He means to burn her alive.'
Escanor thought back to the moment he had died. He might have been fine with it himself, but it was obvious that girl would die screaming in agony. He could not stand by and watch that happen.
...
She was born as the daughter of a courtesan at the very bottom of the Yoshiwara red-light district.
From a young age, her beauty was so striking that even grown men would avert their eyes, and because of that, many men would speak to her and give her gifts, which was how she made a living.
She had one brother, Gyutaro, and he was the only family she had.
Her mother? That woman did not count as family.
Ume always went everywhere with her brother. She ate with him, huddled against him to survive the cold, and spent most of her daily life by his side.
Her life seemed like it would always go in a good direction.
But then an incident happened.
"Aaagh!! My eye!!! My eye!!!!"
She had stabbed out the eye of a samurai who had been her customer, blinding him with her hairpin. Even she did not know why she had done it. She had simply felt bad, and that was reason enough.
In the end, she was dragged away by the samurai and the courtesans. Furious, they grabbed her hair and hauled her along while hurling every insult they could at her.
They ranted about how well they had treated her, how could she do this to them, and so on, like a tragic male lead betrayed by a lover he had cherished for years.
"Let go of me! It hurts!"
What a joke... They had only wanted her body, so what right did they have to act so self-righteous? She had lashed out at their disgusting advances and at the way they insulted her brother, but she did not regret it.
"I’ll make sure you die the most painful death imaginable..."
The samurai said that and threw her into a pit the courtesans had dug. That was when she realized something was wrong.
The samurai took a torch from the courtesans and headed toward her. He was clearly trying to burn her alive.
"No... Don’t come any closer..."
She was scared. Was she really going to die like this? Me? Burned alive? Tears streamed down her face as memories from the past flashed through her mind.
[If it’s just the two of us, we’re invincible. We won’t be bothered by the cold or hunger. I promise. We’ll always be together. We’ll never be apart. There, now you’re not scared of anything, right?]
Those were the words her brother had once told her. Thanks to what he said to her when she was cold, she found the strength to endure. If she were going to die... she wanted to hear her brother’s voice one more time.
'Brother...'
As the torch drew closer and closer to her...
"Would you mind stopping there?"
A huge man grabbed the samurai’s arm holding the torch.
"Huh? And who the hell are you?"
"No matter what crime someone has committed, trying to burn a child alive is another matter entirely... Do all the people here behave like this? Pathetic."
"What did you say?!"
Angered by the man’s words, the samurai shouted at him, but the man only glanced sideways at Ume and continued.
"No one has died, and you haven’t even put the entire village in danger. Yet you’re going to execute her by fire over nothing more than your own miserable eye? You people are on a truly low level."
"I’ve had enough of this!"
The samurai threw the torch far away and drew the sword at his waist.
"Fine... If you want to die that badly, I’ll grant it! Regret it for the rest of eternity in hell!"
With that, the samurai swung his blade. But it did not leave a single wound on the man.
Clang!
Thwip!
"....W-What... what is this...?"
When the samurai swung his sword, the blade snapped clean in two and flew off, embedding itself in the ground far away. Naturally, the samurai was stunned, and so was Ume.
"My, my... Is something the matter?"
The huge man was still standing there, completely unharmed.
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