Illusion Report

At the end of 2024, the one thing on Brianna’s mind was revenge.

Of course, while she called it revenge, even she knew it was more like a childish fit of pique after being hurt. In her fantasies of a successful revenge, Westley was always full of regret, apologizing, begging for her forgiveness, and would accept and bless the partner she chose.

Sometimes, she would even laugh out loud at how she still had such a childish side.

Enter a Nest, find a rare and powerful Illusion, and steadfastly refuse to sell it to Westley—would that alone really be enough to make her father see the light, to fill him with remorse and regret?

’How old am I?’

Brianna had spent most of her young life in the world of the ultra-wealthy.

From what she knew of his kind, if Westley truly couldn’t buy an Illusion he desperately wanted from her, he was far more likely to hire someone to take it by force. If she didn’t end up in the emergency room, it would only be because he was feeling charitable toward his own child.

After all, to people like him, children were merely the next best thing, a substitute to make up for the regrettable fact that they couldn’t live forever.

Children were a dime a dozen.

After cutting ties with Westley and being written out of his will, the only reason Brianna could still live off a trust fund was because she was the eldest daughter. When she was born, it was his first time being a father. He was still far from being one of the ultra-rich, yet to shed his humanity and become another species entirely.

But people were strange like that. Logic was one thing, emotion another.

She wanted to hear Westley say he was sorry.

It didn’t matter what it took, or how slim the hope was.

Morando had once told her she was too emotional, but she’d also said that someone as passionate and intense as Brianna was also quite endearing.

After discovering she had a Path, Brianna had plunged into Nests eight times in the span of six months. This was a number she would never dare tell Morando; half of those eight times, she had gone secretly on her own. Aside from the first time she had stumbled into a Nest by accident, Morando thought Brianna had only gone with her three times—and even that, she felt, was too often and far too risky.

Back then, with Morando’s experience and guidance, Brianna was under the delusion that she could always escape a Nest completely unscathed.

"I know I’m new to this," Brianna had once protested, "but I want to become a real Hunter as fast as I can. A Hunter who doesn’t need you to take care of her and teach her everything, but one who can fight right alongside you."

That was only half the truth. The other half—the part about revenge—she was too embarrassed to say out loud.

"The Family Faction has plenty of Hunters who can fight alongside me," Morando had said then. "But there’s only one of you. I’d much rather you live a good life and wait for me to come back in Blackmoor City."

...On the day she died in the Nest, it would be impossible to say she had no regrets.

Everything in a Nest was inconceivable, a violation of all common sense. Brianna had thought she understood that, but it wasn’t until the day she died that she truly grasped the weight and meaning of those words.

Her death was an agonizingly long process.

She watched every single cell in her body die.

She felt her lungs wither into dry husks and her heart grow flaccid and swollen, pressing against her ribs. Gas from her intestines flowed back into her chest, and her throat, coated with mold, became choked. From the pores of her skin, she could smell a faint, gray stench beginning to emanate.

A few residents squatted by her side. One of them looked like a child. Several faces hovered over hers, their drool dripping down as they laughed.

"Dying, dying! When’s it going to decompose? Oh, not dead yet? Hurry up and die, you inconsiderate thing."

’...If I’m dead, why can I still feel everything?’

But soon, her consciousness began to die, too. She could feel it.

The feelings from her time with Morando—what humans call contentment, happiness, and joy—were the first to go, screaming, clawing, and fighting, only to be pinned to the ground by death and slowly suffocated.

The joy of being called pretty, the thrill of skiing for the first time, her mother’s kiss on her forehead when she was sick... all of it slowly withered and turned to dust.

What remained wasn’t pure negativity, but a hollow, pitch-black swirl of ink, an indistinguishable, churning mess.

If nothing unexpected had happened, she would have lain on the grounds of the Nest, slowly dying and gradually decomposing. The last thing she would have ever seen would have been the faces of several grotesquely misshapen residents.

Then, she would cease to exist. Only the residents born from her body would walk the Nest in her stead...

And hunt Morando.

A violent shudder ran through Brianna.

"What’s wrong? It was almost done. Why is it regressing? Get on with it, keep dying," a resident grumbled, its tone like a drill sergeant.

’Can’t die can’t die absolutely can’t die no matter what she can’t be allowed to give birth to residents the residents she births will have an overwhelming craving for Morando Morando will definitely be killed by her residents’

"Ah! Wha—What is that? What is that?"

After she’d been dead for who knows how long, someone in the distance shrieked. Panicked and scrambling, they tripped and fell to the ground.

Brianna’s rotting face felt the ground tremble.

It was a man’s voice. He sounded like he was already crying from sheer terror as he scrambled to his feet and shrieked, "Stay away! What are you—Where is this place—"

’Is that a normal person who just fell into the Nest by accident?’

’To land right near my corpse... how unlucky for him.’

Her long, drawn-out death had become a local legend among the residents, attracting more and more of them over time. Now, a large crowd of residents was always gathered around her corpse, waiting for the moment she would "finish dying."

The man scrambled up and ran, but he didn’t get far.

He made it less than a hundred meters, probably, before a baby-like resident tackled him to the ground.

But he was far luckier than Brianna. He died almost instantly, his death not turning into a protracted process. Later, Brianna would come to think that perhaps she’d just been particularly unlucky, a victim of the Nest’s sudden whim.

"Dead already? How boring," a resident said. "Let’s see what’s born from his body. This one doesn’t seem like much; he might not even produce a resident. The woman is way more interesting."

Though it should have been impossible for her to perceive, from within her hollow eye sockets, Brianna could somehow see the spot where the man’s corpse lay.

And another, stronger feeling began to surface.

’If I just crawl over, while his body is breaking down but before a resident is born, and get inside... get inside and I can live live live Brianna won’t die yet she’s thinking right now isn’t she if she can think there’s still hope hope hope’

The residents let out a great cry. She didn’t understand what it meant.

It sounded like surprise, like excitement, like they were watching some new and amusing spectacle. But it was also mixed with angry roars and sharp cries of disapproval.

"Just let her go. She’s practically half a resident now anyway," one resident’s voice shouted over the others. "We’ve never seen a dead person this stubborn before! Let’s watch for the fun of it."

’...What?’

’Oh, right. I’m crawling toward the man’s corpse.’

Of course, the act of "crawling" couldn’t be accomplished by thought alone.

Brianna was crawling forward with her own corpse.

Afraid the residents would change their minds and stop her, she crawled quickly, one push after another. Luckily, her arms had lost all feeling long ago; she felt no pain as the ground scraped away large patches of her skin.

The distance was less than a hundred meters, but crawling it felt like crossing mountains and making a great trek. She didn’t know how long she had been crawling when her hand finally touched the man’s hairy ankle.

"The timing is absolutely perfect,"

The residents, who had been following and spectating the whole way, exclaimed in admiration. "It seems like both of them are on the verge of decomposing, but haven’t quite yet."

"Isn’t it, though," a resident said, looking back behind Brianna.

’...About to decompose?’

Whether it was because of that sentence or something else, something stirred within Brianna.

She, too, glanced behind her.

She saw her own torso and spine, stretched out long, laid out across the path she had taken.

It turned out that as she crawled, her chest, her spine, her waist... had also stretched out behind her head, elongating to a length of nearly one hundred meters.

Her top, of course, could not cover a hundred-meter-long body.

So when she looked back, she saw a long trail of her own bare back. The skin was ashen, her spine slightly sunken, like the track a snake leaves in the sand, stretching on with no end in sight.

Her legs had long since disappeared from view.

Yet she was still connected to them, a hundred meters away.

...Everything in a Nest was inconceivable, a violation of all common sense. Only now did she truly understand the weight of that fact.

Perhaps because she was long dead, Brianna felt neither surprise nor disgust. All she wanted to do was let out a piercing wail.

She turned her head forward again, grabbed the corpse’s feet, and struggled to force her way inside him. There wasn’t even an opening, yet when she came to her senses, she was already inside the man’s body.

The sensation was difficult to describe.

It wasn’t like her mind was piloting another’s body, nor was it quite like slipping on a suit of flesh.

If she had to describe it, it was like she had slipped her hands into his legs, propping him up like a sock puppet—only far more complex and intricate to operate.

In any case, she could once again blink, breathe, think, speak, stand, and walk... The joy of rebirth was so overwhelming that for a moment, she didn’t care about anything else.

’So what if it’s a man’s body? I’m still me, aren’t I?’

She probed the man’s slippery brain, wanting to know who he was, how old he was, and most importantly, what his Path was. And just like that, she found out.

George Green, twenty-nine, a construction cost estimator. His Path was being crushed in the back by scaffolding.

No wonder the back was a little sore.

Brianna reached back to press her own—no, George Green’s—back. Only then did she belatedly look down at the ground.

’...I have to get out of this Nest. Right now.’

It was as if Brianna had borrowed George Green’s neurons, and his emotions along with them. For the first time in a long while, she felt fear again—a nauseating terror that made her want to cry.

She had to leave the Nest at once, and never, ever come back.

Over the next two or three days, Brianna walked through countless streets, searching for the scaffolding.

No matter where she went, whenever she looked back, she would see Brianna’s two shoulder blades connected just below George Green’s calves, right above his ankles.

From the shoulder blades down, her former torso still followed tenaciously behind George Green.

Her body lay prone on the path she’d trod, continuing to stretch with every step, endlessly.