[V6C2] “Pitiful Little Harpy”
Translated by Jodas 6: Secrets of the Wedge Tower— Kai, the man who saved Tia’s life, sent Tia into the Wedge Tower with clearly hostile intentions, didn’t he?
As Wren’s body shook in response to that realization, Tia was thinking the same thing.
If you considered the circumstances in which Tia escaped from her imprisonment, such a thought was only natural.
— The one who stole her wings was the leader of the Wedge Tower, Headmaster Möbius.
— The odds were high that Kai, who saved Tia, understood that fact when he sent Tia back to the Wedge Tower.
“…I don’t know how to start talking about this. My head is all spinny.”
The target of Tia’s rage remained unchanged.
It was the people who stole her flight feathers and locked her away. It was that innocently laughing girl who wanted to own her.
But she had no idea how Kai was involved with the whole thing.
Tia grumbled “vuvuvuvu…” as Wren leaned around Sevil to talk to her.
“Hey, Tia. Look at me.”
“Peu…? I am?”
Tia craned her neck to look at Wren only to see him winking so dramatically she could almost hear the sparkles.
“How about that? My pretty boy healing power!”
“Pretty boy healing power.”
For whatever reason, those were words she wanted to try saying for herself. Tia repeated them under her breath.
Pretty boy healing power. It was a very fun, Wren-like combination of words.
As Tia mulled over the sound of the words, Wren laughed proudly.
“See, didn’t that help?”
“Yep. I thought ‘wow, that’s so Wren,’ and calmed down.”
“That’s right. I’m always a pretty boy, after all.”
Once her spinning head had been reset by his pretty boy healing power, Sevil spoke up.
“Tia, I believe it would be best to organize the events chronologically.”
“Piroro… chro-no-logic-ally?”
“How much do you remember about the time when you were captured by humans?”
Sevil didn’t tell her anything like ‘you don’t need to remember the painful stuff.’
She understood that, however painful it was, this was necessary.
Tia closed her eyes, and huffed “pefu, pefu” rhythmically. As she did so, Tia tried her best to get her forgetful brain to think back to past events.
“Pefu, pefu… That day… I was flying with my sister and we got separated. A storm was coming, and I was worried about her, so I went looking…”
As one of the strongest Harpies in the Breakneck Gorge, Tia was especially good at flying.
Therefore, she paid no heed to her own safety as she flew about the cloudy sky, aching over whether her sister was okay.
“Then, a chain flew like ‘cling clang’ from the ground and pulled me down to the ground.”
Controlling the chain was a blonde woman wearing thick black clothes that showed almost no skin, with a hood over her head.
At the time, Tia had no words to describe those clothes, but now she knew. She read about it in a book in that girl’s room.
Those were the clothes and hood that ‘nuns’ wore.
“On the ground, there was a man with silver hair holding a sword and a blonde nun. The silver-haired guy cut my wings with…”
As she recalled the events of that day, the anger began to well up again.
Tia started to make hissing noises again as Sevil held her closer and mumbled.
“I see. So that silver-haired man is Headmaster Möbius. In that case, the blonde nun has a high probability of being Assistant Headmaster Miriam.”
“Hold on a second!”
Wren interrupted Sevil’s muttering.
Tia looked at Wren, wondering if he was about to try his pretty boy healing again, when Wren asked Tia with a serious expression:
“Hey, Tia. How many years ago was this? Uh… Since the time you got your wings clipped, do you know how many times Spring has come around?”
While she was familiar with the ways humans used years and months to determine dates, it wasn’t a concept she was often actively aware of.
Tia groaned as she counted on her fingers. Two fingers, three fingers… then as she wavered over whether or not to fold the fourth finger, she stopped.
“Piroro… Probably, three years ago, I think. But there weren’t any windows in the room where they kept me, so… I’m not really sure.”
“I see. Then, in that place, there was Headmaster Möbius, the woman we think is Assistant Headmaster Miriam, and…?”
“That girl.”
At the end of Wren’s sentence, Tia added in a low voice.
There was no way she could forget. Ever.
“That girl was there. A girl named ‘Fiene.’ She said she was the ‘Daughter of God’… She’s creepy. disgusting.”
As a Harpy, she had an obsession with humans as targets of reproduction, but she never really held hostility towards them.
Yet the one person for whom Tia held the clearest hatred for was that girl by the name of Fiene.
“That girl wanted a songbird… she asked for a ‘friend,’ so they offered me to her.”
Both Wren and Sevil responded to Tia’s words by making faces that said they were thinking about something.
Wren cautiously asked a question.
“What sort of relationship does this ‘Fiene’ kid have to Headmaster Möbius? Did Headmaster Möbius and Assistant Headmaster Miriam… Is she their secret lovechild?”
“I dunno. All I know is silver-hair and blonde took care of Fiene. That’s why I just assumed that Fiene was the master and silver-hair and blonde were her servants.”
Both Wren and Sevil looked surprised by those words.
It seemed like both of them had thought the relationship between Fiene and the Headmaster was the other way around.
As far as Tia could tell, both adults cared deeply about Fiene. Although, it was a little different from the love that a parent would show to their children.
Between those three, there was none of the friendliness one would show to their relatives. No relaxed atmosphere.
It felt like the adults approached Fiene with the utmost respect that one would show to a greater, inhuman power.
At first glance, it looked as if Möbius and Miriam were guarding Fiene, but in practice it was the other way around. That was how unique the situation between those three was.
“By the way, can I ask you something? There’s something that’s been bothering me.”
Wren lightly raised his hand to speak, and for whatever reason, Sevil nodded generously.
“Very well, I give you permission to speak.”
“I’m asking it even if you don’t give me permission! Um… At that point, you weren’t in a human form like you are now, right Tia? I thought you weren’t able to live in places with low mana density, right?”
Tia nodded.
Harpies weren’t particularly strong Monsters, so they could move around to a certain extent outside of the Crystal Territory. That said, they would likely end up dying if they stayed out there for a month or so.
That was why even Lesser Monsters generally did not leave the Crystal Territory.
“Then, why were you okay when you were imprisoned? You were there for a long time, weren’t you? Didn’t you feel any discomfort from the low mana density?”
“Piroro… Now that you mention it…”
Tia thought back to that time. She didn’t remember the time she was held captive perfectly, but she knew it was more than just one or two months.
She thought she was probably trapped in there for at least half a year, if not a whole year.
If she was away from the Crystal Territory for that long, even if she was a Lesser Monster, it would still be hard to imagine her surviving.
“…I feel like the room I was trapped in was full of plenty of mana.”
“In that case, then the question becomes: why was that Fiene girl okay?”
“Piyo, that’s right…!”
Möbius and Miriam only entered the room for short periods of time. It wasn’t like they lived in the room or anything.
However, Fiene was always, always in that room with high mana density.
Sevil asked in a low voice.
“Tia, are you sure that Fiene was really a human? Not a Monster?”
“…Piroro… I dunno. I’m just now thinking about it.”
“Then, let’s put our theories about Fiene or whatever to the side.”
Sevil spoke decisively, then pushed the discussion forward in what she called ‘chronological order.’
“After being trapped in the room with the one called Fiene, you have mentioned that you were able to escape by your own power, no? Can you recall any more about that incident?”
“Piroro… Hm… Well… Back then, they put a lot of magical device-looking things on me to restrict my power…”
Back then, there had been shackles on Tia’s ankles and a collar on her neck.
In addition to that, she had a faint memory of Fiene gleefully putting a similar collar on herself. ‘Now we match, because we’re friends’ and such. But that one wasn’t a magical device.
The magical devices on her shackles continually drained her strength to the point where not only was Tia unable to kick Fiene to death — her mobility was restricted to the point she couldn’t even walk.
The collar was even worse. Any time she disobeyed those three, it would strangle her and a strange pain would run through her body.
The collar also restricted her mana-infused songs, the main weapon of a Harpy. Tia couldn’t use her songs to control Fiene and the others either.
“It was hard to break the shackles, but I could just barely get the talons on my feet to the collar, so I broke that.”
“Huh? Eh?”
Wren raised a voice of disbelief, and lifted his left foot onto his right knee. Then, he hunched over his upper body and tried to see if he could reach his neck with his toenails.
“…Nah, this is impossible. You’ve gotta be super flexible to break a collar with your toenails…”
“Harpies can do it. Our talons are really big!”
“Seriously? They’ve gotta be huge!”
Those people probably never would have thought that a Harpy would be able to stretch her legs to the limit and break a collar with her talons like that.
While she would have liked to break both the collar and the shackles, she didn’t have the luxury of doing both. If she had to pick one to break, it would be the collar. If that strangled her and she passed out, her escape would fail for certain.
That was why Tia decided to prioritize breaking the collar.
“I did my best and broke the collar… then I ran a long, long way through somewhere really, really dark. But I got more and more tired, and sleepy, then when I fell over, I heard a voice…”
As a Harpy, Tia could see quite well even in dark places.
Nevertheless, she still had no idea what that place was. All she knew is that it was dark and narrow and really long. It must have been some kind of man-made corridor.
She couldn’t break the shackles, so she couldn’t put a lot of strength in her feet, leading Tia to proceed down the corridor with a hand leaning against the wall.
The further she went, the fainter the mana density became, and her vision went dark. She lost all of the strength in her body… then, she heard someone’s footsteps.
At first, she thought it was them who had come to chase after her.
But she heard the footsteps coming from in front of her.
“What a pitiful little Harpy.”
She heard the voice of a man above her.
Speaking in an unusually chipper voice for the situation, the man — Kai — whispered to Tia.
“I’ll help you.”
Those were the words Tia heard before she lost consciousness.