Volume 9, 2 - The Final Discord

Volume 9, Chapter 2 - The Final Discord

“N-n-n-n-no, no, no! Wait a sec. I can’t deny you’re good looking, but we only just met and we should really take things slower. Get to know each other first and all that. As the faithful guy, I prefer to do these things right, you know?”

“You do not like me?”

“I didn’t say that, nor would I ever, ever, eeeeever. But how about we start by introducing ourselves?”

Tomono Sakae was flustered.

He had been playing video games in his room when a naked woman had appeared out of nowhere, so of course he was.

Was she a white woman? He had never seen anyone so pretty and beautiful, so when she stared at him with those azure eyes while her long, long platinum blonde hair swayed, he felt like he was being sucked in toward her.

He had a casual demeanor but was shy deep down, so this was too much for him. The most he could manage was to shut his eyes so he could not see her nudity.

“Gaze upon me. And then love me.”

“No, I’m not looking. You need to take better care of yourself.”

His odd fixation on purity overpowered the perverted side that every boy had. Lilith scratched at her head after running across this unexpected challenge.

“Sakae, it’s okay.”

“Eh? Mutsuki?”

The woman gave a look of wounded pride before transforming into a boy.

Sakae opened his eyes upon hearing his friend’s voice. The person he saw there was indeed the childhood friend he knew better than anyone who had been out of school for the past five days.

“I didn’t know what to do. What was that just now? Did you see her, Mutsuki?”

It was just as strange for his friend to be here, but he was still flustered from the beautiful woman’s advances. He wiped sweat from his brow and looked to Mutsuki once more.

He grew flustered all over again when he took a closer look at his friend.

Mutsuki was not wearing clothes either. He was naked. And…

He had a female body.

Sakae did not even have to check “down there” to tell. The budding breasts, frail shoulders, and general roundness were enough to notice the change in his childhood friend.

“M-Mutsuki? Eh? Are you Mutsuki?”

He doubted this was some stranger who happened to look like his friend. But he had bathed with the boy several times when they were little. He knew what Mutsuki had “down there”.

The girl who looked all the world like Mutsuki giggled and moved her face toward the confused boy.

“I am Mutsuki, Sakae. You can tell, can’t you?”

“I can…but…”

“I’ve turned into a girl.”

Her face moved closer and closer until their foreheads touched. The height difference meant she was definitely floating in the air, but Sakae did not find that odd right now.

“Well? What do you think of this version of me?”

The girl tore down all his defenses since she looked so much like Mutsuki. She laughed with an alluring smile that looked so very unlike Mutsuki. That smile rubbed the male mind the wrong way. Yes, it was the same provocative smile that woman had given before.

“Y-you look cute.”

The smile excited Sakae and he blushed.

He did not mean that as flattery. His childhood friend had always had a fairly cute face, so thinking of that friend as a girl made her so attractive he started feeling funny.

This boy had never been too fixated on looks. Ibekusa Machina was his classmate and Katsue Subaru was his homeroom teacher, but those breathtakingly beautiful woman had only elicited a “Yeah, I guess they’re good looking” from him.

But when the best friend he knew so well looked so cute…it set his heart pounding.

“I’m glad?”

“Ah…”

Her face was so close her breath reached him. It had a girly scent.

Then the lips from which that scent came pressed against his own. They were so surprisingly soft he took a step back.

They only made contact for a moment. The girl bumped her body – chest, waist, and below – against him and then flew through the air. She really was floating. She moved with a nimbleness freed from gravity and landed on the bed a short distance away.

“Then, Sakae, will you make me yours?”

“Eh? M-mine?”

“You want to do it, don’t you? I can tell. And since I’m a girl right now, we might as well, right?”

She lifted up one leg and held the knee. She pulled it as high as she could while lying on her back, so she was spreading her legs like a gymnast.

The lips hidden between her legs parted and showed off the pink within as if to temp him.

“Come on. I became a girl just for you.”

“Mutsuki.”

“Love me, Sakae. This hole here is just for you.”

She giggled and smiled in that provocative way while spreading her legs even more boldly.

The boy was helplessly drawn in. He took one step, then another to approach this person who had his best friend’s face but was something else.

“…”

And he placed his hands on her shoulders.

“No, Mutsuki.”n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

“Eh?”

“You’re crazy cute right now, but boy or girl, we’re friends. So I don’t want to make you mine.”

He only touched her shoulders. He looked his best friend straight in the eye.

“We’re equals as friends, so neither of us can be the other’s. That’s what friendship is, right?”

“…”

She shut her mouth with a calm smile on her lips.

She could say nothing more.

Friendship.

That word was so far removed from what she was doing now that she lost sight of what she was even doing.

But a moment later, the girl that was Mutsuki returned to being that blonde woman. Sakae was overpowered as he looked her in the eye and ended up clinging to her chest as if sucked in. A moment later, he became black water and disappeared.

“Friends.”

Lilith retrieved the floating speck of light…but she too could not move any further as she pondered something.

Even though a perfect being should not have had any questions.

The words left by that best friend remained in both Mutsuki and Lilith’s hearts.

An underground tunnel had been rapidly and directly dug from the Kurosaki facility to the Port of Kobe.

More and more ships had been piling into the port without waiting for approval. They bumped into the other ships and came to a stop, but then no one disembarked.

Then the ocean itself swelled up and parted those ships.

A single passenger ship left port.

The Sephiroth was a massive ship that would normally have been seen off with a grand event.

There was no parade since there were no people, but after it departed, decorative lights did turn on to decorate the ship almost as an afterthought.

The inside of the ship was also deserted and lonely, but…

“They have wine.”

“Thanks, Micha-san.”

It was not entirely deserted.

A young man was relaxing next to the filled pool on the aft party floor.

Black Cat, aka Schwarze, and Lavriel, aka Shirohara Ren, lay happily at his feet.

They were naked, they had male and female fluids seeping from between their legs, and their minds were woozy with ecstasy.

A great feast had been waiting here for the party scheduled for the night. Rapha and Daima Makoto were divvying it up between their group when they were instructed to bring something to go with the wine. Micha stood next to the young man with a wine bottle and two glasses.

He accepted one of the glasses and they unsealed the bottle together. Once their glasses were full of that blood-red fermented liquid, they clinked them together.

“Phew.”

Micha drank hers down and sighed, as if to celebrate a job well done.

She then watched with great interest as he slowly but surely emptied it.

“Heh heh. So you’re finally willing to drink with me. Wasn’t long ago you would always refuse.”

“You shouldn’t have been offering alcohol to a minor.”

“Was wine a good choice?”

“Yes, I seem to like it. Especially the grape flavor.”

“Could that be Lilith’s tastes showing through? I prefer beer myself.”

She gave the maid a signal and Makoto brought over a beer and poured it into a new glass without saying a word.

“Don’t drink too much,” cautioned the young man when she started on her second drink already.

She was so used to hearing that line that she burst out laughing, spitting out her drink.

“Avalon, I thought I could meet you if I worked with Lilith, but it seems you’re mostly Mutsuki on the inside.”

“So it seems.”

The young man smiled thinly. The smile hid a lack of confidence that belied his apparent adulthood. It was exactly Mutsuki’s usual smile.

“The memories within the Fruit of Knowledge that forms my core are the Mutsuki boy’s, and this seems to be the result. Lilith’s personality had matured too far after living for millennia, so she is in something like a half-asleep state.” He turned toward the pool. “So I will reshape the world according to the Mutsuki boy’s wishes.”

A light glowed at the bottom of the pool water.

That was a common enough thing at night pools, but a closer inspection showed some objects were laid out at the bottom and those things were glowing.

A speck of light flew through the night like a shooting star and fell in the pool. The glowing object sank to the bottom to become one of the stones illuminating the pool.

They were all apple seeds. Glowing apple seeds.

Most had sunk to the bottom, but a few were floating around in the water like fireflies.

The young man reached out his hands.

“Now there will be no conflict. Everyone can live in peace, equality, and happiness.”

He scooped up some of the pool water that contained one of the moving seeds.

“A world without discord. A world of only relief.”

It had been moving around in a worried sort of way, but once he touched it, it came to a stop as if in relief. He returned it to the water where it sank to the bottom.

Micha turned aft.

Firefly light showed the path the ship had taken away from the port.

The seeds would gather in the pool, but once they calmed down, they would be swept out to sea. The process was complete for about 80% of the humans on earth, but every Fruit of Knowledge was being collected – from heaven and hell as well. The pool would fill up in no time, so the young man would calm down the overexcited ones and return the calmed ones to the ocean.

Once the firefly lights sank into the ocean, they would float around in a pleasant sort of way and vanish into the depths of the night.

“Once this is complete, I will add all of you here as well.

He smiled.

“Of course.”

“As you wish.”

The angels and humans agreed to the proposal with looks of pure joy.

They were not blindly obeying. The FeTUS Witches and the angels knew very well what the young man was saying.

The seeds gathered in the pool could be compared to brains in vats.

But this was an act of benevolence.

After being freed from the bonds of their physical bodies, the seeds were returned to the ocean while dreaming of eternal happiness. These were dreams of loving and being loved.

It was hard to define what exactly this young man was.

But he had just one reason to exist: to be loved by all.

To be loved by him was the greatest happiness a living being could experience.

The witches and the angels were overwhelmed by happiness just by being with him here, so they understood the happiness those seeds were permeated with.

In fact, the ones working here were the unhappy ones. For example, Schwarze and Ren never got along, so they ended up thinking about which one he loved more, which only led to jealousy and worry. It also pained them to see Micha receiving special treatment from him.

They could forget those feelings once they were only a seed. They could cast off their emotions and thoughts and exist only to love him.

There would be no discord there.

“You too, Micha-san.”

“Hmm? Oh, yes. I suppose so.”

Micha emptied her beer glass and gave a halfhearted response to the smiling young man.

“But not yet. As a seed, I won’t have a mouth to drink beer.”

The maid quickly filled her glass once more.

When the young man smiled bitterly and chided her for drinking too much, she pressed her tipsy cheek against his and leaned against him.

“It’s been so long. It feels like forever since I started working with Lilith to bring about this day. And it was all so much harder after I met Mutsuki-kun and started stimulating the Adam within him. Since he had that convenient Serpent’s Eye, I assumed he would abuse it the second I taught him the joys of sex. I never imagined he would refuse to use it for himself even after I took his virginity.”

“I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to abuse it, but I felt like I didn’t have to since I had you with me.”

“Heh heh. Well, there was my mistake right there.”

She was still smiling, but a hint of sadness appeared deep in her eyes.

She had been working towards this day ever since they had first met and that had fundamentally twisted the boy’s purity. She did feel some shame about that.

But it was gone soon enough.

“You can take a vacation now. Feel free to enjoy yourself.”

She held out her glass to the young man.

With a defeated smile, he accepted it and drank about half of it.

“So this is beer. To think wheat tastes like this if you brew it.”

“It doesn’t have the grape flavor of wine, but it’s pretty nice, isn’t it?”

“It’s a little bitter.”

“You child.”

They sat with their shoulders together.

Schwarze and Ren looked a little pained at not being a part of it.

“Nh.”

His expression suddenly changed.

“Is something the matter?”

Makoto tilted her head while ready to pour some fresh beer or wine.

He wrinkled his brow in thought.

Then a new golden seed flew in.

It plopped down into the pool and was calm from the beginning, so it would sink right down to the bottom and vanish into the ocean soon enough.

But after so many hundreds of thousands of seeds, this was the only one to make him look puzzled.

“Sakae,” he muttered. “Friends, hm?”

He must have known what look was on his face. He set down his glass and asked a question.

“Where did Ange, Lucia-kun, and Ibekusa-san go again?”

“Um, towards Megutono Academy.”

“I see. Yes, I thought they would be here in short order, but it seems I was wrong.”

Even at sea, Makoto accurately pointed in the direction the jet carrying those three had flown. She pointed toward the city containing Megutono Academy and FeTUS Headquarters.

When the young man faced that way, the sea swelled up and the ship rapidly changed course. It turned in the direction Makoto was looking.

“Let us go get them. …Yes, they are the Mutsuki boy’s precious friends.”

“Did something happen, Avalon?”

Micha must have assumed there were no problems remaining. She had imbibed too much alcohol and was quite red in the face as she tilted her head.

“Humans have this pesky habit of causing discord. And the Mutsuki boy is human. He is no exception.” The young man smiled bitterly. “It seems the Fujita Mutsuki boy is my final obstacle.”