Seeing that Gehrman Sparrow remained silent,
Looking at the “Disease Admiral,” whose expression betrayed a hint of despair, Klein took a sticky note from his pocket and, with a flick of his wrist, sent it flying forward like a playing card.
With a whoosh, the paper, like a metal blade, cut through a few invisible spider threads, sliced through translucent ice crystals, and grazed Trissy’s left upper arm, leaving a blossoming streak of blood.
The surface of the paper quickly stained crimson. It passed the witch, frozen in place, and spun back into Klein’s palm.
… Trissy had thought the note was aimed at her throat, but it only hit her arm. She was stunned for a moment until Gehrman Sparrow folded the paper and placed it into a tin cigarette case. Then she suddenly came to and asked, “Your real target was to find
Klein casually put the tin case back into his pocket and asked calmly without answering,
“You’re her descendant?”
Hearing this, Trissy, still trapped by the ice crystals and spider silk, let out a low laugh.
“Not just a descendant. I’m her child.”
Child… daughter… Klein silently thanked himself for not killing her rashly and causing the “White Witch” Cattleya to sense something. He then began to analyze whether Cattleya was the mother or father of the “Disease Maiden” Trissy.
If Cattleya had once been a man, she could indeed be Trissy’s father, but the problem was that at the end of the Fourth Epoch, during the “Pale Disaster,” she was already a Sequence 4 demigod, and the “Assassin” pathway transitions from male to female at Sequence 7, the “Witch” stage.
That is, for Cattleya to be Trissy’s father, Trissy would have to be at least thirteen hundred years old. A Sequence 5 Beyonder simply can’t live that long, and even most Sequence 4 and Sequence 3 saints can’t!
There was only one answer: Trissy was born from Cattleya herself, and it was just in the last few decades… A maternal age of over a thousand years… Klein nodded slightly and asked, his expression unchanged, to confirm:
“She’s your mom?”
Trissy’s expression turned odd.
“No. She’s my mother.”
Klein was about to ask what difference it made—essentially one was more formal, the other more casual—but Trissy laughed mockingly.
“My mom is someone else. She used to be my father.”
…What a messed-up family you witches have… But that’s no excuse for spreading disasters to the outside world… Klein used his “Clown” ability to control his facial muscles and continued staring expressionlessly at the “Disease Maiden.”
Already in a desperate situation, Trissy now seemed to give up. Without waiting for Gehrman Sparrow to respond, she sighed and smiled self-deprecatingly.
“Maybe I was a mistake from birth.
“Abnormal parents, abnormal family relationships, abnormal cult members—they both shaped me and hurt me. At eight, I discovered that my father, whom I had secretly admired as a role model, suddenly turned into a woman, growing more delicate day by day and more adept at using her charm. Later, she got a male lover and gave birth to a younger brother for me. Can you imagine how I felt?
“When I ran away from home, went to sea, and after years of effort finally found a normal sense of self and social awareness, figuring out what I really wanted, a potion turned me into a woman too. Ha, woman…”
Klein listened quietly and then said without changing his pace:
“Your ability to instigate is quite good.”
Trissy opened her mouth, but in the end only sighed. With a complicated smile, she said: “I admit, I was trying to arouse your sympathy. Everyone wants to live—is that wrong? But I didn’t lie. That’s my life.”
She didn’t elaborate on her pain and sorrow. After a pause, she said:
“Before you kill me, I want to ask one question. A question that won’t make things difficult for you.”
“What?” Klein looked at the witch across from him.
Trissy hesitated for a moment, then finally asked:
“Last time you came to assassinate me, did Eileen know about it?”
Klein was silent for a moment and said:
“She didn’t know what was going to happen.”
A slight glimmer appeared on Trissy’s face.
“Really?”
Without waiting for Gehrman Sparrow to respond, she said with an extremely complicated expression:
“Before I die, can I ask you one more thing? If you ever see Eileen again, tell her that I feel guilty about what happened, but I don’t regret it.”
With that, Trissy tried to shake her head but couldn’t because of the ice crystals and spider silk.
She could only smile wryly.