Within the Roselle estate, a maid walked through a damaged corridor, holding a folder of documents.
The walls were stricken with gashes, each a metre or two long and half a metre wide; even the floors weren’t spared from what might’ve been an enraged beast’s doings.
These damages weren’t simple in the slightest, for each step the servant took seemed to stir a gaseous dark residue hidden deep within the gashes.
However, with training from the Roselle program, the maid wasn’t fazed or nervous in the slightest.
That was...
Step.
Until she neared the closed entrance into somebody’s chambers.
The Lady of Roses’s chambers.
With keen senses, she locked eyes with a small fly moving through the air.
"A fly...? We’re becoming sloppy." Finding an insect within the estate, the maid scowled and raised a hand.
But right as she was about to swat it away, in the span of a few milliseconds... The entire corridor went black.
A power outage?
With the darkness, a coldness unlike anything she felt invaded her systems.
...
Once the light returned, the small fly that had flown in front of the Lady of Roses’s room had disappeared completely.
The maid gulped.
Getting rid of a fly wasn’t a massive achievement, but the speed at which everything happened... Frightened her a bit.
Reaching and staring at the double doors that would lead into the Lady of Roses’s bedroom, the maid felt a sense of unease.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Upon knocking, the maid was left startled as her entire surroundings went dark before she even knew it. As she was about to back away out of fear, the light soon arrived to save her.
Fearing that she shouldn’t linger for too long, she spoke quickly:
"Miss Roselle, the Crown of Roses had tasked me to forward you this folder in my hand. I suspect it might be about the attendant who would be tasked to escort you during your time at the Legacy Table."
"..."
No response came from the other side of the door.
The maid, sensing it would be best to leave, set the folder on the ground.
"I’ll just leave this outside your doors, my lady."
When she left, a moment or two passed before something dark and viscous began to spill out through the gaps between and under the doors.
But, also through the doors themselves...
The moment they appeared, the lights within the entire corridor suddenly went off, as though they were capable of thought and afraid to draw attention to themselves.
The dark substance neared the folder, its ebony body appearing so pitch-black to the point where no normal human would be able to distinguish whether it was flat or rounded.
Even mages of lower tiers would find it difficult to discern.
After flooding the entire corridor with pitch-black darkness, the ebony substance disappeared mysteriously—along with the folder, leaving no evidence that it appeared from behind the doors.
If one were to be able to peer through the doors, they would find an entire room filled with nothing but black.
If they were to be able to peer further into the black, they would find the insides of the room to be in a mess.
Apart from the bed, everything was thrashed and nearly destroyed.
And on the bed... Was a black-haired masked maiden, who was experiencing great discomfort as she was seen to be grabbing onto the... Air?
No... The darkness itself.
The woman breathed both heavily and raggedly as she laid, on her side, in the middle of a nest of physical photographs that all shared one thing in common.
A girl with white hair, blue eyes, and a smile that the woman couldn’t get out of her mind.
Although there was no telling how many photographs they were, it would most likely be in the range of several dozen.
"Calm... Yourself..." Marionette muttered behind her mask before releasing her hold on the air and wrapping a large stuffed rabbit closer to her chest.
After her surgery, she hadn’t been able to move much from outside the confines of her bed. Was this what feeling ill was like? It was... Horrible...
"Ugh...!"
Holding a hand over where her Mana Core was, a dark miasma began to pour out, fusing with the darkness that already lingered within the room.
Following that were several dark vines that shot out of her back and lashed at the wall behind her.
Quickly summoning a bottle of pills and rummaging inside it, she took off her mask and revealed her face, which was streaked with pure black veins—this was the same for the rest of her body.
Taking one of the pills, the darkness inside her veins retracted, but only to an amount where it wasn’t obvious from a distance.
"Ha... Ha..."
Feeling the dark vines retract into her back, Marionette laid still, breathing heavily as she gazed at her phone that was right beside her.
Managing to reach over and turn it on, she was met with a lock screen of her and Lillian. She smiled a bit and unlocked her phone, then realised that she hadn’t charged it in a while.
[ 9% ]
She sighed and pulled out a pair of headphones from her spatial ring.
Swiping to her playlist, which so happens to be audios she recorded on the day of her birthday—more specifically, when she and Lillian were at karaoke.
Putting on her headphones, Marionette closed her eyes, enjoying the voice she had wanted to hear for so long. It was calming to her, pleasing to her, and even... Therapeutic to her.
’Lillian...’
It’s been too long since she talked to her.
But then...
Ring...! Ring...!
The small smile that was previously across her lips curled downwards instantly into a frown as her moment of rest was disturbed.
Looking at her phone again was immense displeasure; she paused.
[Lillian is calling]
Whatever lack of energy she had dashed away, replaced with excitement as her eyes instantly lit up.
The obnoxious noise of the ringing now felt like a graceful charm to her ears.
Immediately sitting up from her nest of photos of Lillian, she answered and was immediately met with a voice she had been dying to hear.
"Mari~!"