Three Eyes in a One-Eyed Village
"Hey! You really do know me! Please, just say you know me!"
"Yes. You're that tardy student, aren't you?"
"Nooooo...!"
"Could you step away from Blanc now?"
Cheln was beside herself with injustice.
It was so unfair she thought she might cry.
"Hic...."
No. The tears were already falling.
Cheln, who had always admired the holy knights and resolved to become a person of pure integrity, finally broke down and sobbed under the sheer unfairness of this whole tardiness fiasco.
"Hic...h-hic..."
"Wait. Are you crying right now?"
"I-I'm not crying! Why would I...hic...why would I cry...! Hic...!"
"Uh, uh..."
Noir, who had been pulling Cheln off Blanc, could only stare in bewilderment as the girl suddenly burst into tears.
Where had all that aggressive clinging to Blanc gone? Why was she suddenly crying?
Does she actually know Blanc? But Blanc says she doesn't know this person... Wait a second—could it be!?
Faced with Cheln's incomprehensible behavior, a certain incident from three years ago surfaced in Noir's mind.
"So what were you doing before you joined Yeoro?"
"I have no memories from before I became part of Yeoro."
The day Blanc first woke up at the Leonhart estate.
The interrogation conducted by Lucius and Makel, with Noir present as an observer.
Back then, Blanc had said she remembered nothing from before joining Yeoro.
And now, this girl was weeping bitterly because Blanc didn't remember her.
Could this mean...!
In an instant, hundreds of scenes flashed through Noir's mind.
Two people who had always been as close as family.
Their bond gradually growing past friendship into something more tender.
Then one day, right before the girl's eyes, her friend is kidnapped by strangers in white masks...!
Could she be someone from Blanc's past...?
At last, someone who knows Blanc's past has appeared!
Blanc, this is wonderful!
Thrilled by this long-sought clue to Blanc's history, Noir hurriedly turned toward her—only for still more scenes to race through her mind.
"Young mistress, this is farewell."
"Blanc....?"
"Now that you know my past, I shall leave Leonhart with this person."
"Blanc! Wait, wait just a moment...! No.... No, Blanc...! Blaaaaaanc....!"
No!
Blanc leaving me...!
No, she can't...!
I have to uncover Blanc's past.
But I also don't want Blanc to leave me.
What on earth am I supposed to do?
Just as Noir was about to spiral into full panic—
"I! I today...! Hic... because of you, I got hit by a carriage...! A-and I was late...! Waaaaah...."
"Huh?"
Cheln's pitiful, wretched sobbing finally yanked Noir free of her delusions and back to reality.
Of course. That made more sense.
A childhood-friend character showing up out of nowhere at this point would have been far too abrupt anyway.
Noir felt a twinge of disappointment at losing a chance to learn about Blanc's past—and, at the same time, a wave of relief that this sudden stranger hadn't stolen Blanc away.
"Hmm. So this morning, you were hit by a truck... no, a carriage that was racing by?"
"Yeah..."
"And I was the cause?"
"Mmm...not exactly... Strictly speaking, I was the one who rushed out without thinking..."
After we finally managed to calm the sobbing Cheln, we were able to hear her story.
Apparently, that morning she had seen me about to be hit by a carriage, leapt in without thinking, and been sent flying far away herself.
I had no recollection of any such thing and so could say nothing either way—but the young mistress had witnessed something being flung into the air after a carriage collision, which lent Cheln's account a measure of credibility.
"I just... I just felt so wronged... I had my reasons too... But everyone glared at me and laughed at me and scolded me just for being late, so..."
Ah. So that was it.
Only now did I finally understand why I had never seen the original game's protagonist.
Cheln was the protagonist.
It was quite a shock.
In the original as well, the protagonist had been deliberately left undescribed beyond dialogue choices so players could immerse themselves more easily—so of course I had never known what the protagonist looked like.
But I had always assumed the protagonist was kind and composed!
I never imagined she would be this much of a crybaby!
And a girl, not a boy, at that.
I had thought Destiny was a game about building friendships with the male cast and a harem with the female cast—was it the other way around?
"Waaaaah...!"
Watching a girl burst into tears right in front of me, an old memory floated up—one I had long since framed and hung away on a distant wall of my past.
"Hey....hic... Is it wrong for me to like you?"
Sorry, old friend.
I was sure I had decided to forget your confession—but seeing someone break down crying like that just brought that pathetic confession of yours right back.
A fully grown girl weeping as she asked if it was wrong for her to like me. I don't think I will ever forget that.
A bittersweet, nostalgic memory.
Not long after we finished soothing Cheln, the Owl Class students from the original game began to gather one by one.
Unlike the three of us, who had known one another for ages, and Cheln, who had somehow managed to start talking after that disastrous first exchange, the six students who arrived afterward were meeting for the first time. They were coiled tight with tension and wariness.
"..."
An awkward silence settled over the classroom, but no one particularly wanted to break it.
This was a first meeting, after all, and these were faces we would keep seeing—there was no real reason to force conversation just yet.
Rattle.
"Ah, everyone's here?"
Only after all ten desks were filled and another ten minutes had crawled by did a man walk in and finally shatter that uncomfortable silence.
His grey hair was rather long for a man, and his eyes—pitch black, rare in a world full of vivid, multicolored irises—were heavy with fatigue.
The long robe draped over him made it clear at a glance that he was a mage.
"Blanc, is that man...?"
"Yes. He is exactly the person you are thinking of, young mistress."
A grand mage whose name no student of magic could fail to know.
One of only five people in the world to bear the title of Sage.
Sage Willy R. Garcia.
There was not a soul in this class—or this academy—who would not know that name.
Perhaps not even if one searched all of Lyceum.
I already knew from the original that he would be this class's homeroom teacher, but for the other students, the appearance of such a titan must have been unimaginable.
Even the young mistress, who put on airs of aloof dignity in front of others, was sitting there with her mouth open, speechless at the sudden arrival of a Sage.
And that was her at her best—the other children's faces and reactions were even more of a spectacle.
Still, not every student was thrown into disarray by his entrance.
Just one.
Among the students besides myself, only a single person remained perfectly composed.
A girl whose hair shimmered like a violet sky full of starlight.
Only she kept her expression blank as she looked at Willy.
Lia Marx.
The Sage Willy's personal disciple, and one of the Owl Class's five-star characters.
A character who carried several important plot hooks in the original story.
In effect, this girl—who had simply come to the academy because she followed Willy—was the only one who remained utterly at ease.
"Right, right, you probably already know my name, but introductions anyway. Willy R. Garcia. Anyone got questions? No? Then just come up one by one from the front, introduce yourselves, and sit back down."
At the offer of questions, Fel's hand started to rise halfway—only for Willy to casually ignore it.
He immediately called on the boy with dull blond hair sitting in the very front row: Desang.
It probably wasn't that he disliked Fel enough to snub her question.
He had only asked out of courtesy and found the idea of someone actually answering too much of a hassle.
Mages—and anyone who has reached the peak of their craft—tend to have strong egos.
Naturally, Willy, one of the foremost mages on the continent, was a character with a forceful personality of his own.
There was a reason that the higher the rarity, the stranger the characters tended to become.
Yeoro, in particular, had been crawling with complete lunatics—probably because every last one of them had an ego far too large for ordinary company.
Of course their ranks started at four stars as a baseline.
That a perfectly ordinary human like me couldn't last in that nest of madmen and had to get out was only natural.
Just because you live in a one-eyed village doesn't mean a two-eyed person like me has to poke out one eye and become one-eyed too.
People who want to live have to live, after all.
I did still worry about my junior maid U, whom I had left behind in Yeoro—but if it was her, she would find a way to survive in that fortress of her own accord.
The one thing that still bothered me was that I had never managed to carry out the maid-uniform standardization plan I had been preparing—meant to give Yeoro, an organization that otherwise shared nothing but the white masks its members wore, some actual sense of belonging.
Dress the members of Yeoro in maid uniforms under the pretext of "uniforms," put them through one-on-one training until they became professional maids, and eventually those mere villains would reform and transform into a pan-national charity organization. That was the rough idea behind the plan I had been cooking up.
U had even said it sounded amazing when I told her—but unfortunately, I left Yeoro before I could even flesh the plan out properly.
It had only ever been a vague sense of direction with no fine details, so I abandoned it cleanly enough. Still, I sometimes felt a pang of regret that I had walked out without completing the Yeoro maid-ification project.
Of course, if I had successfully maid-ified Yeoro and then left, there was no guarantee I would have ended up serving House Leonhart the way I did now—so it was only a mild regret, not something I truly mourned.
Besides, Eight the pervert might have gone along with it, but Dante—that fun-cool-sexy-obsessed idiot—would never have put on a maid uniform.
The odds weren't quite zero, but they would have been vanishingly low.
That is why I can't stand that fool Dante.