For a moment, the blind songstress had been at the fountain, the next she was directly in front of him. Close enough that the crooked grin seemed carved solely for him. Her face lingered just inches away, suspended in that intolerable distance.
Ruvian felt a bit strange to feel so powerless while simply standing still. When the distance between them vanished, his composure went with it.
Facing death was difficult enough, but facing it while still breathing was somehow worse.
'It seems like I will never get used to this feeling.'
A strip of cloth hid her eyes, but he felt them pressing down on him anyway. Ruvian had told himself not to flinch when her fingers descended to the nyckelharpa, but he accidentally did it anyway.
And then she broke her own silence.
"Oh well~ Your time's over, anyway~"
For a second, Ruvian tried to wrestle sense out of her words.
'Time's over? What the hell does that mean?'
That was the kind of nonsense villains liked to spit right before killing someone. He would've asked what she meant, but the luxury of conversation vanished the moment the bow scraped across the strings.
The music answered in her place.
No gentle lull this time. The notes tore in the air, harsh, dissonant and yet beautiful in the same way a blade was already pressed against your throat.
He only watched, eyes locked to her blindfolded face, heart thudding behind a wall of ribs and tried to brace himself against the unknown.
One thing for sure, this time… the song wasn't pulling him forward.
It was coming for him.
The bow moved faster now, guided by hands that blurred into motion, no longer human. The sound came fast, almost percussive in how quickly it hit the space.
It no longer sounded like a song, or even anything that deserved to be called music.
What poured from the nyckelharpa now was something altogether different—stranger, vibrating against a place deep inside Ruvian that had no name.
It felt like standing too close to a sound not meant for human ears, a resonance that bypassed flesh and bone entirely and scraped at the soul directly, trying to unmake it note by note.
He squinted slightly, breath shallow, and took a step back without realizing he'd moved, a reflex more than a decision.
And then, as soon as he halted, something burst.
The man in the front row, his head burst like it had caved inward, folding in on itself with an awful softness.
There was no sound from him, only the dull, fleshy thump of a body collapsing, and the gentle, almost polite sound of blood spreading across old stone.
Ruvian stood frozen.
'What the fuck just—'
Every instinct screamed at him to do something, but he was no longer in the part of the world where instincts mattered. He turned his head, slowly, like a puppet on strings that didn't belong to him, and watched another fall.
Next was a woman—her face remained calm, almost peaceful, right up until the top of her skull exploded.
Her knees folded, and she collapsed inward like a dying insect, her body twitched for a few times, before falling still in a puddle of herself.
The tempo of the music increased.
The blind songstress's movements quickened again.
She wasn't smiling wider or laughing now.
She was entirely and perfectly focused for a performance.
The crowd began to drop, one by one at first, then two at once, then more. The sound of bodies hitting the ground began to outpace the music itself. No one attempted to run away, but falling and painting the ground red that increasing notes after notes.
'Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! What the hell is going on here!!?'
He tried to run but his body didn't listen to him.
And he couldn't even tell if she was killing them deliberately, or if the music itself had taken on a will of its own.
Some corpses slumped with faces turned toward him, mouths slightly open, as if waiting for his turn. Ruvian stood in the middle of it, unmoving, too alert to collapse and too uncertain to act.
He was trying… still trying to understand the logic behind it all.
'Was it a spell? A cursed frequency? A forbidden technique tied to auditory suggestion?'
He didn't know how many seconds had passed but… finally, there were only a few more heads to burst.
But a sea of red stillness already soaked his shoes. Ruvian didn't breathe for several seconds. He wasn't sure if he was supposed to.
Then she stopped playing, it seems she'd reached the end of the notes or perhaps was taunting the remaining survivors. Her blindfold still covered her eyes, but Ruvian knew, he knew she was looking at him.
"Eh~ There are still a lot of you who survived the first wave. How wonderful."
'No, I can't let it end just like this…'
Ruvian stood still amid the wreckage of what had once been a crowd, his eyes scanning the field of fallen bodies without allowing emotion to reach the surface.
His breathing had settled into something measured and controlled, because every second he bought was another inch of ground he could use to think.
He forced himself to remember, not just what had happened, but how it had unfolded, the sequence, the rhythm and the placement of each death.
Recalling the memories only took him a few seconds.
There had been a first.
He could picture the first man even now, a lanky figure near the eastern edge of the gathering, standing beside a broken lamp post, clapping just before his head had gone first, a sudden burst that dropped him.
He traced the position in his mind.
Then the second, then the third. He drew an imaginary line between them. But the pattern didn't hold. They hadn't fallen from the front row, or the back, or in a circle that suggested proximity to the woman.
'It hadn't been a spreading force or an expanding wave. So, it had been chosen? No, rather, it was… triggered.'
That was when the question sharpened at the center of his thoughts.
"Should we move on to the next phase?"
The mysterious woman giggled.
But Ruvian ignored her as he was locked deep in his thoughts.
'Wait, why wasn't I among them?'
He had been close enough. Near enough to hear every note. He'd even been clapping at one point earlier, though not of his own will. He hadn't moved far from where he arrived, hadn't hidden behind anything.
So why him?
Why was he still breathing?
He narrowed his eyes slightly and glanced at the blindfolded woman. Her face was undetectable beneath the mask of calm.
She hadn't spoken since calling him out. She hadn't made a move toward him or against him… as if she was recharging.
'Why did she stop playing the musi—? Wait, she was playing a different tune before. The first one was soft and gentle. Second one was harder with killing intent.'
He remembered how the first melody made his steps float forward without instruction, how his body had moved before his thoughts caught up, and how the moment of arrival hadn't felt wrong until it already was.
'That first melody… hadn't been an attack, it had been an opening door, right? It brought us here. Drew us in and lowered… our guard?'
His thoughts continued to untangle her magic spell.
'Meanwhile, the second melody was an attack. The moment she shifted the rhythm, when it grew louder, more complex, more aggressive, that's when they started… dying.'
So there were two songs.
'No, rather, it was two stages of the same spell.'
The first one dulled the will. Blurred thought. Removed resistance by degrees so slow no one realized they had become hollow, a gentle sedative for the soul.
And the second… the second was an execution.
She only played the final notes when she was sure her victims were already empty. It explained why the others died, and he didn't. Why she hadn't struck him down yet. Why she hadn't needed to rush.
'They had nothing left inside them to resist. But I… I still had my consciousness. But why? Why was I able to stay conscious even while the others had been hollowed out?'
He hadn't been immune, his body had responded. The song had gotten in and that much he couldn't deny.
But it hadn't gone all the way.
Again, Ruvian forced himself to rewind, to mentally walk backward through those first moments.
He remembered something.
He had been thinking actively.
His mind had been buried, tangled in something entirely separate.
After meeting with Dain, he had been reconstructing narrative arcs, reordering events in his head and retracing the scenarios placement of the post-feedback timeline of the manuscript he once knew.
'That was it!'
He'd been mentally ranting!
Even as the melody had slipped into his ears, his focus had been chewing through the logistics of this world's internal story structure.
And during all that obsessive mental sifting, his body hadn't moved yet.
But the moment his thoughts stopped, really stopped was when he gave up on the story logic and started listening fully to the music… that was when he felt his limbs begin to drift out of his control.
That was when the fog started to settle!
'So the answer is never about resistance. It is mental fortitude or willpower. Or any distraction can also work.'
And now, with that understanding, the conclusion landed smoothly. The spell didn't just need ears, but it needed focus to break free from its chains.
After a minute had passed, the woman lifted her bow again.
Ruvian knew that her spell wasn't a weapon that tore through flesh indiscriminately but a hook that embedded itself in silence.
'Which meant the only real defense against her spell… was noise. An internal one.'
He almost laughed, not aloud, just bitterly inside.
'Who would have guessed that thinking about this damnable novel is the only thing that keeps me alive. Such irony.'
Still, his deduction was not one-hundred percent clean, but it was the only theory he could hold on to now.
And If surviving meant being the dissonant chord in her perfect composition…
"Fine, I'll play that role."