Please Kill Me - Chapter 91
One thing was clear: Yekaterina’s normally reticent lips were moving like a music box.
“He gets angry too easily and smiles too easily. He frowns at things that mean nothing to me.”
And he says and does things that I cannot understand.
Would it have been better if I had gone mad like you? Unable to forget, wounds never healing, trapped forever in the same moment.
If that’s what madness means, then perhaps I am mad only when I close my eyes. When they’re open, those memories seem distant and hazy, but when they’re shut, the memories of death glare vividly right before me.
A death filled with excruciating pain, without a single unmarred spot on my body. I can still see my adoptive father’s gaze as he looked down at me in my dreams. The malice in his eyes, his unwavering determination to see me dead, is crystal clear.
When I wake, I always find myself running a blade across my wrist, hoping the memory might still hold some of its vividness. Perhaps now, that magic has finally vanished.
“But even this morning, my wrists were perfectly fine.”
It’s been so long since I’ve felt pain that I can barely remember it. The memories of death are so vivid when I close my eyes, yet here, I can’t feel anything. This reality feels more like a dream.
“I wish I could feel pain.”
Then maybe I’d feel a bit more alive.
I’ve lived my life forgetting everything to survive, but after death, it feels like all those forgotten memories are coming back to kill me.
Yekaterina’s eyelids fluttered slowly. The hand that had been stroking Larisa’s hair stopped. Larisa was now tightly gripping Yekaterina’s hand.
How could such a small amount of warmth evoke these feelings? Larisa, who had been chattering about memories with Marina while holding Yekaterina instead, was now silent, her eyes closed. It felt slightly unfamiliar.
Yekaterina gazed quietly at Larisa’s face, her eyes closed as if dead. She stared for a long time, then closed her eyes and continued speaking.
“Larisa, I remember the day I lost my tears.”
It was a typical mission. There was a need to urgently secure funds for Offenbach, so Yekaterina and the others were sent out to retrieve monster cores from a contaminated forest swarming with high-grade monsters.
“I found out later that everyone sent there was a criminal.”
In Offenbach, crimes are paid for with one’s life. They were sent there to die. Most were missing a limb or two; those with all their limbs intact couldn’t speak. Yekaterina led the group.
She too was a criminal, having stolen something she shouldn’t have. She hadn’t known it at the time, but she had stolen the most important thing from the family, and Sergei was furious. Sergei probably thought he had nothing to lose whether she lived or died.
Maybe it was he expected her to die that made it so.
The unit was annihilated.
Except for Yekaterina.
“I was the most skilled, so I was at the front. When everyone else was dying, I alone managed to survive. I remember running desperately.”
Even as the others died behind her, their screams—whether they were calling her name or just screaming in pain—clung to her neck. But she didn’t look back and kept running.
She ran until she was nauseous.
She just wanted to survive.
“After running away, I shook with fear for days before finally going back.”
It wasn’t to find the bodies of her fallen comrades. It wasn’t for something so humane.
She needed to collect the cores from the dead monsters to survive. Otherwise, she would be executed in Offenbach for fleeing.
When she returned to the place of death…
“There were swarms of butterflies.”
She could still picture it vividly when she closed her eyes.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of butterflies with blue, translucent wings, much like the centuries-old ice in the Ice Caves, covered the horrific scene.
In the contaminated forest teeming with corpses, only the Ice Crystals Butterflies thrived. They got their name because their wings resembled ice crystals.
These beautiful butterflies were also known as the corpse cleaners.
“Did you know butterflies eat corpses? I learned that for the first time then.”
The swarm of butterflies over the dead bodies looked surreal. Those butterflies, flapping their wings over the exposed white bones, seemed to be eating away at her own eyes rather than the corpses.
Dawn was breaking in the background, and the twilight made the fluttering Ice Crystals Butterflies sparkle even more.
In the unfeeling beauty and cruelty of that scene, Yekaterina lost her tears.
That was how she survived.
Wretchedly and miserably.
Not once has she forgotten the scene of that day. Not once has she regretted her choice to run.
In this world, the one who survives is the winner. No matter how strong you are, if you die, you become mere food for butterflies.
“But Larisa, you…”
What death could be so sorrowful that it keeps you trapped in the same moment every time?
Yekaterina’s eyelids slowly lifted. Even though she knew no answer would come, she continued to ask.
