WeTried Translations

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◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈

Chapter 33: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (33)

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#33.

This is the story of a historical assassination that captivated Onik while he was surfing the web one day during his first summer vacation in middle school.

#

Saturday, September 10, 1898.

Elisabeth, the first Empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Duchess of Bavaria, was assassinated on the beautiful lakeshore of Geneva, Switzerland.

At the time, the Empress of the Dual Monarchy was traveling with only her lady-in-waiting.

Naturally, she was using a false identity.

She disliked the fuss of grand, luxurious processions.

There were too many things to worry about with such an entourage. ‘I need peace of mind.’

But her secret was not kept.

At the luxurious Hotel Beau-Rivage, where the Empress was staying, a hotel employee carelessly let slip her true identity while speaking with an acquaintance.

「You know, the manager made me promise over and over not to tell anyone but you...

That Countess Hohenembs staying in the finest room is actually Elisabeth, the Duchess of Bavaria.」

The secret leaked this way passed from one low-wage worker to another. Eventually, it appeared in a local newspaper extra and reached the ears of an Italian anarchist.

That anarchist's name was Luigi Lucheni.

Lucheni had originally come to Geneva intending to assassinate Philippe, Duke of Orléans.

When he first prepared for his journey, he had heard that the Duke of Orléans would be staying in Geneva. But by the time he arrived, Philippe had already left.

For the orphaned anarchist, sunk in frustration, the local paper's extra edition was like a revelation.

「Anyone will do. All I have to do is kill royalty, whoever it is. I'll kill royalty and send a message to those rulers who do nothing for the poor!」

Having renewed his resolve, the assassin set out with only one sharp tool, a metal file.

He had stolen it from the factory where he worked, where it had been used as a work tool.

The assassin had wanted to buy a proper weapon, a sharp dagger, and use it for the assassination.

But someone raised in an orphanage who had lived at the very bottom of society could not even afford a single dagger...

September 10, 1:35 p.m.

The Empress of the Dual Monarchy left the hotel with her lady-in-waiting and walked along the lakeside promenade. They were heading to board a ship for their next destination, Montreux.

That was when the assassin approached.

Having learned techniques from fellow anarchists, Lucheni pretended to stagger and collided with the Empress.

At the moment of impact, the metal file, sharpened by a lowly laborer's hand, drove into the Empress's chest.

The crude weapon broke her fourth rib, then pierced her lung and pericardium before passing through her left ventricle.

All this had been done with a piece of metal barely over ten centimeters long.

The Empress fell from the shock, and the assassin quickly fled.

This was where the story became interesting. At least, by a frightening boy's standards.

Though the weapon had passed through her heart, the Empress did not die on the spot.

She did not even realize she had been stabbed.

The Empress was wearing a black dress to mourn her dead son, with a corset tightly laced beneath it.

The tightly drawn corset dulled the pain.

It also restrained the bleeding for the same reason. The corset acted as a compression bandage.

Blood was filling the punctured pericardium and gradually pressing against her heart, but not enough to kill her immediately.

Finally, the pitch-black dress made the slowly seeping blood difficult to notice with the naked eye.

The lady-in-waiting supported the Empress while glaring at the fleeing assassin.

「What was that? A pickpocket?」

The assassin, who had trained diligently in his own way, stabbed and withdrew the small weapon with lightning speed.

He had also hidden his hand behind his own body, moving faster than the eye could follow. Even the lady-in-waiting standing right beside him had not seen the bloodied weapon.

「I'll help.」

A passing carriage driver helped the lady-in-waiting raise the Empress to her feet.

The hotel concierge, who had been watching the departing Empress, helped as well, though all that help amounted to escorting her to the pier so she would not miss the ship.

The Empress of the Dual Monarchy did not lose consciousness until after she boarded.

The people around her laid her on a chair and removed her dress and corset so she could breathe more easily. She regained consciousness, but that only hastened the bleeding.

The people asked the Empress, who had briefly come to, whether she was in pain.

「No. It doesn't hurt.」

After answering, the Empress panted and looked around in confusion.

「What happened to me?」

Right after asking that faint question, she lost consciousness again.

That was how Elisabeth, the first Empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Duchess of Bavaria, died.

Onik found the story utterly fascinating.

#

The frightening boy's dark instinct led him into grim, vivid imaginings.

He was drawn in against his will. Before he even had time to cut it off with the blade of self-loathing in his heart, he was pulled in as though being sucked under.

‘If it had been me, I could've done better.’

If the boy had taken the Italian assassin's place in Geneva on the afternoon of September 10, 1898, the weapon he thrust would not have broken a rib by mistake.

No, it would not even have grazed one.

‘I’d stab precisely through the soft gap between the ribs...’

A fast and powerful yet gentle thrust would have ended with a delicate withdrawal, leaving only the smallest wound and the least possible shock.

Perhaps the Empress stabbed by the frightening boy would not even have fallen.

She might have felt only a sharp sting, just as the Village Youth Association President, the first person the boy had killed, had.

Of course, she could hardly have avoided swaying a little.

The historical murderer's method was reconstructed in the boy's mind.

Stabbing while deliberately colliding with the target from the front was an inferior tactic.

If one's hand was fast and precise enough, it would be better to stab from behind while passing by.

Even if the victim noticed something was wrong, they would not be able to see the wound themselves. They would not even be able to feel for it properly.

‘If it were me, I'd control the depth of the stab more precisely, too.’

Considering the medical technology of that era, piercing all the way to the ventricle was excessive.

He only needed to make a small hole in the pericardium.

The boy had the ability to tell the difference from the sensation traveling up through the handle alone.

Then the slowly gathering blood would gradually press against the Empress's heart, granting her a death at least half an hour later than in the original history.

A noblewoman dying over half an hour, overcome by inexplicable distress, shortness of breath, and blood loss, without even knowing she had been stabbed.

And an assassin who calmly left the scene and disappeared among the people, leaving her behind.

It was fascinating.

Truly, it was a fascinating picture.

The thought of creating what was practically a living corpse was especially fascinating.

It would have been even more perfect if he had used a thin metal skewer instead of a crude metal file.

The thinner the weapon, the greater the chance that it would bend midway and fail, but the frightening boy's dark talent was too precise to permit such a failure.

‘All I need to do is apply force exactly perpendicular to the surface. Stab in a perfectly straight line through the grain of the muscles, then pull it out in another perfectly straight line.’

A perfectly straight thrust was extraordinarily difficult. Even more so when it had to penetrate a human body.

Still, the frightening boy was confident he could do it.

He thought a weapon only two millimeters thick would be enough.

Or perhaps even an ordinary skewer used to grill lamb kebabs would work.

Onik continued those imaginings in a daze, only barely coming to his senses after a long while.

Then he felt disappointed and frustrated with himself.

“Ah...”

Since his first murder, the frightening boy had tried desperately to control and master his dark impulses.

He killed nonhuman things to relieve, however inadequately, his blood-red craving. At the same time, he had tried not to think about killing people whenever possible.

Yet for him, this was a harder tightrope to walk than resisting sexual desire was for other “ordinary” boys.

The frightening boy's dark impulses were that sticky and intense, and his first murder had carved an unforgettable ecstasy and spiritual exaltation into the boy's unconscious.

“...I can't be like this.”

Gloom and anxiety swept over the boy together.

At this rate, how long could he really postpone his ‘second murder’? If possible, he wanted to postpone it again and again, until the day he died.

With complicated feelings, Onik stared at his smartphone screen.

A photograph of the historical assassin being led away by police was displayed on it.

The assassin in the photograph was smiling brightly.

Truly brightly. Without a speck of darkness, regret, or even fear of death.

That rare abnormality made Onik see himself in the historical assassin.

Objectively speaking, Luigi Lucheni's assassination was difficult to judge favorably.

Onik had no choice but to admit that the method used to kill a person was fascinating, however much he did not want to.

But he had chosen his target poorly from the start.

Elisabeth, the Duchess of Bavaria, was famous for being kind to commoners. She even liked them more than her fellow nobles.

Commoners, too, viewed Elisabeth favorably.

They did not look kindly upon her leaving the Crown Prince exposed to the abuse of his father and paternal grandmother, but she had still given much charity to commoners.

Her will, written in case anything happened, even asked that her jewels be sold to help struggling commoners.

So when Luigi Lucheni revealed his motive during interrogation, 「I'll send a message to those rulers who do nothing for the poor!」, the investigators could not understand it at all.

「Is this bastard seriously insane?」

Simply put, Lucheni had not killed someone who deserved to die.

He had lost his ability to judge rationally and was ruled by blind hatred and impulse.

At the same time, he had brought grief into the world by murdering the wrong person. He was only a foolish killer who had thrown himself into a pit of ruin.

For a boy wary of his own dark desires, Lucheni was not someone to admire. He was someone who ought to serve as a cautionary example.

And yet, simply because the method of murder fascinated him, he had fallen into imagining himself in Lucheni's place. How chilling was that...?

The sighing boy even felt self-contempt.

‘I really am a bad kid.’

Even Lucheni's end was itself a cautionary example.

He had smiled brightly when he was caught, apparently believing he would become a martyr for the anarchists.

But that was not what happened.

The investigators did not give him the opportunity to make the public statement he had naturally expected to deliver.

Even among his fellow anarchists, many did not take his side. He asked to be sentenced to death so he could become a martyr, but he was only sentenced to life imprisonment.

In the end, he tried to kill himself in prison with a can opener, but even that failed.

Only later, after hanging himself with a belt, was the foolish assassin finally able to end his stubborn life.

Such an ugly and miserable end might one day have been Onik's own.

#

That night, Onik had a nightmare that was not quite a nightmare.

In the dream, Onik was a murderer holding a metal skewer in his hand.

He wandered through an unfamiliar city at night beneath streetlamps, and the young murderer stabbed passing people at random, sending them toward death.

Whenever the frightening boy's hand and arm blurred, the victims let out brief groans.

“Ow!”

“Ugh!”

“Argh!”

The victims, given a slow-arriving death by the young murderer wandering through the city's darkness, tilted their heads in confusion as they searched their backs for the spot that had suddenly stung.

“Ah, what is this? Something hurts...”

That was all.

The victims continued on their way. Without a single exception, they did not know what had happened to them.

Yet the murderer could feel, one by one with the remarkable sense granted to him, the moments when those who had gone far away staggered and fell somewhere out of sight.

Every time a person died, the young murderer's soul sang a song full of joy.

The boy's dark soul grew fuller with every death.

The boy in the dream was an evil beast who felt nothing but joy from every murder he committed...

After killing countless people beneath an ominous star, the boy finally woke.

He felt fear as his consciousness awakened, as though slowly rising from deep water, and reason only barely returned to him at the very end.

“No!”

This awakening resembled, in some ways, the way “ordinary” boys woke from wet dreams as they felt themselves climax.

Rather than rational fear, it was the heat coursing through his veins and the exhilaration driven to its limit that awakened the boy's consciousness.

While others had nocturnal emissions, Onik dreamed of killing people.

It was a dream that showed him the future his unconscious most desired and his conscious mind most feared.

“...”

Onik clutched his chest and breathed harshly.

His body trembled.

‘This wasn't just a dream.’

He simply knew. The dream he had just had was a temptation and revelation whispered into his unconscious by the dark instinct he had restrained and controlled until now.

At that moment, Onik was glad that he slept alone in the room across the hall at night.

If Grandpa had been beside him, it would have been terribly hard to pretend nothing was wrong.

“Sniff...”

In the lingering aftertaste of rapture left by the blood-red dream, the boy cried quietly because, on that dark night, the self he had always feared had become a little more frightening.

Footnotes:

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