Beautiful, deeply seductive singing, like a young girl breathing warm breath softly into one's ear.
The instant the song was heard, on the ship, every person's blood began to run hotter, and restless, clouded thoughts began to drift through their minds.
Then Night noticed the scene before him had changed.
The world seemed to have undergone a transformation.
Starting from the distant horizon, the ocean began to disappear.
In its place, a beautiful garden appeared before his eyes.
When he looked toward the center of the garden, several familiar figures came into view.
?!!
Using these faces as the bait?
At the heart of the garden, beside a pool, several young women were playing in the water, their clothes left on the dry ground nearby.
The golden-haired girl had water droplets trailing down her damp hair onto her fair collarbone, her crimson eyes turning this way with something like anticipation, openly displaying her figure without any shyness, an unmistakable invitation.
The girl with silver-blue hair had both hands pressed to her chest, and noticing his arrival, her pretty face flushed red as she lightly bit her lip.
The slender, smooth toes of the girls dipped beneath the water's surface, their feet gently pressing against the pebbles at the bottom of the pool, soft ankles arching slightly, and slim, delicate feet and calves drawing into one elegant curve.
The golden-haired one lay back and lifted a small foot out of the water, lightly patting the surface with an almost ballet-like grace.
Those small, dainty toes were smooth and soft; fair skin just barely blushed with warmth, the water droplets catching the sunlight, beautiful as something carved from art.
Five plump, slender toes playfully curled and shifted, quite adorable, almost as if beckoning someone to hurry over and hold them.
Beyond those two,
There were many other beautiful girls with hair of different colors, though none of them could compare in appearance to the first two.
They were none other than Helena and Chryseis!!
Night's gaze passed completely over the other princesses, who were little more than background figures, and fixed on the two delicate faces wearing expressions he recognized.
Perhaps through Apollo's musical blessing, there was a great deal of technique on how to use one's voice to enchant others.
Though Night rarely used any of it to cloud people's minds, he knew enough of it and, as a result, had developed some resistance to the effects of charm.
Even as his consciousness had been drawn into this clearly suspicious world, a final thread of clarity remained in him.
An illusory world?
Because it was all conjured from imagination, everyone appearing before him was someone he was familiar with.
But no matter how precisely the appearances and personalities were copied, there was a subtle strangeness to the girls, something faintly bewitching and not quite right, that clashed with the real people in his memory.
If his memory was not playing tricks on him,
Every single one of these figures was without a doubt a fake.
But even knowing they were fakes, looking at the faces of Chryseis and Helena was enough to drive any hero to madness, enough at the very least for Agamemnon and Achilles to come to blows over.
At this moment, they were without a stitch of clothing in the water, although the key parts of them were submerged and hidden beneath the surface; that half-concealed quality was somehow even more difficult to look away from than if they had been entirely exposed.
Combined with the fragrance that continued to drift through the air and the singing, both of which seemed to carry something that acted directly on the nerves.
Treat it as a toxin.
But Night had already tested it.
Even holding his breath, the scent still found its way into his nose, and his mind grew more and more agitated.
He needed to think of something quickly, or he really would not be able to hold out much longer.
Wait. The fragrance and the singing??
Ah. Right.
'What was I doing again? I was on the deck, and I heard a voice, and then...'
No. Wait. The deck?
This was a garden.
The fairies' garden. The heart of an island far from the sea.
How could there be a deck anywhere near here?
If there was a deck, there had to be a ship.
Which meant something did not make sense at all.
In a fairy garden this far from the ocean, a ship had no business existing.
So why did it feel as though he had been standing on a deck just moments ago?
As that thought pulled him deeper into focus, a shy, soft voice calling his name floated into his ears.
The voice of Chryseis.
And this time, he did not find it strange at all that Chryseis, who should have been far away in Troy, was standing here in front of him.
Night took one step forward.
.
.
And at this moment,
Outside the illusion.
In the actual reality,
On the ship where Night and the others sailed, an island had appeared from nowhere directly in their path, on a route where no island should have existed.
On the rocks not far ahead of the island, beautiful supernatural beings were singing at the top of their voices.
They were the daughters of the river god Achelous, beautiful creatures of supernatural origin born from divine blood.
The Sirens.
Because they had once competed against the Muses in a musical contest and lost, the goddesses stripped them of their wings, leaving them unable to fly.
Without their wings, they were left to wander the shores, sometimes transforming into mermaids, using their musical gifts to lure passing sailors to their doom.
Two heroes in Greek legend had encountered these creatures before.
One was the fleet led by Odysseus, and the other was Orpheus, son of Apollo.
Odysseus had received advance warning and had his sailors seal their ears with wax, escaping the deadly song and passing safely through the waters where the sirens dwelled.
Orpheus simply overpowered the sirens' voices with the sheer force of his own playing.
Night, who already carried Apollo's musical blessing, could in theory have used his lyre to suppress their singing as well.
But under a certain divine power enhancing their song, the voices had been strengthened into something far more lethal.
In an instant, he was dragged into the illusion before he had any chance to prepare.
Even Orpheus, son of a god, would sink helplessly into the enchantment and lose consciousness if he heard the sirens' song without warning and had no time to play.
Night, in this moment, was in an even worse position.
Quite a few crew members were already grinning stupidly, drool running from the corners of their mouths, and one by one they were jumping from the deck and swimming toward the shore.
In their eyes, the creatures on those rocks were not sirens at all, but beautiful mermaids of radiant appearance and graceful form.
Because of the sheer gap in power, the sirens' song barely needed any effort to work on ordinary men.
No illusory world was even opened for them.
Just their real forms and the faintest whisper of allure were enough to strip mortals of their minds on the spot.
Almost all of their power right now was concentrated on him, on this person believed to be the hero Griffith Lista.
And yet, up until now, he had not moved so much as a step.
Even after the sirens instinctively shifted into the forms of the most beautiful women in his memory, that man was the only one left standing on the deck, completely unmoved.
Cold impatience began to flicker in the eyes of these daughters of the river god.
They continued to sing with outward gentleness, but the chill behind those beautiful eyes grew deeper with each passing moment.
.
.
.
(End of the Chapter)