The Great War
Sound spilled from the television in the darkened living room.
Beep.
Carmen killed the TV with the remote and dropped heavily onto the seat beside Yi Siyun.
"It's been nothing but that news since yesterday."
She carefully set a hand on Siyun's shoulder and gave it a gentle pat.
Was this a problem of having too much empathy?
Most people, when something had nothing to do with them, simply labeled it unfortunate and moved on. But Yi Siyun had never been that way. Whenever she saw this kind of news, she would sink into a gloom that lasted for days.
A complete stranger looking at her now might think she was overreacting — but that was simply who Yi Siyun was. She felt other people's pain too easily, and she grieved with them. It was precisely because she was that kind of person that she had grown into someone so righteous.
And whenever Siyun fell into that darkness, it was Carmen's job to coax her back out of it. Their relationship had shifted into something more complicated lately, but that didn't change the fact that they were still best friends — which was why Carmen had come to comfort her.
Calling it "coming over" was a little awkward, though. This was Carmen's house to begin with.
Even after they'd gotten older, they still slept over at each other's places now and then — but for the past few weeks, Siyun had practically been living here. The old Carmen would have driven her back home by now for refusing to leave. That she wasn't doing so meant their feelings for each other had shifted just as much as their relationship had.
Siyun carefully leaned her head against the shoulder of the girl gently patting her. It was the kind of casual contact that once would have meant nothing — but under the new terms of their relationship, it was practically a disaster waiting to happen. Carmen's racing heartbeat was proof enough of that.
Carmen slowly stroked the head resting against her shoulder.
"You don't have to take it so hard. It's not like any of this happened because of you."
Siyun closed her eyes quietly.
She knew that perfectly well. She also knew that even if she had been there, she wouldn't have been much help. And that was exactly why it hurt so much — why it made her so angry. At her own powerlessness.
A long time ago. When Yi Siyun was very small.
Villains had murdered her family. Right in front of her.
It wasn't as though those villains had specifically targeted her family. Their blades hadn't been aimed at the Siyun household alone.
Even fifteen years later, it remained a famous mass-slaughter case. Some called it the Great Catastrophe. Others called it the Day of Tragedy. There were many names for what had happened.
But the most famous name of all was something else entirely.
The Great War.
The first and last war in which Ability Users had died in droves.
It had been a war waged against a single organization that had appeared out of nowhere: Wolshik.
Wolshik was strong — so strong it was baffling that no one had known they existed until then. Strong enough that the various Families and guilds, who until that moment had been ready to tear each other apart, joined hands. A war of the entire world against Wolshik, in the truest sense.
At a glance, the power gap looked overwhelming enough that Wolshik should have been wiped out overnight. Instead, the Great War dragged on for a full six months. Wolshik had hired skilled mercenaries, yes — but even so, it had been an impossibly long war.
They succeeded in bringing Wolshik down. The blood spilled to do it, however, was far too much. By the time the Great War ended, the Seven Guilds had become the Three Great Guilds, and the Five Great Families had become the Two Great Families.
In the aftermath, the guilds and Families struck a certain pact — a firm agreement to respect each other's territories and never casually start a war again. Heroes and villains alike had shed too much blood. And no one knew when another organization like Wolshik might rise.
The Academy had been founded around that same time.
The Great War had left Yi Siyun with a deep and lasting trauma. For someone who had been caught in the middle of it, the Mudwell incident was like having that old wound ripped open all over again. Carmen knew that well, which was why she was being even more careful with her than usual.
Siyun opened her eyes quietly and summoned a face from her memory — the person who had saved her life during the Great War, when she had been on the brink of death.
On the day the Great War began, the Wolshik mercenary who had turned her parents into ground meat had walked right past without noticing her. Even after losing her mother and father, little Siyun had run for her life with everything she had.
But her village had been the very first one hit — the place that announced the start of the Great War. Of course there had been no organized resistance against Wolshik yet. So the child she was could only watch as the people of her village were slaughtered without mercy.
Running without even knowing where she was going, desperate only to survive, Siyun had been caught by people different from the mercenary who killed her parents. Hauled into the air by the scruff of her neck, she could do nothing but wait for the knife in the man's hand to plunge into her stomach — and that was when she appeared.
The girl who appeared out of nowhere jammed a kitchen knife into the throat of the man holding Siyun aloft. Blood sprayed from his neck across both of their faces. As the man's grip went slack and Siyun tumbled to the ground, she looked up at the face of the girl who had saved her — and froze in shock.
She couldn't have been more than twelve. Compared to six-year-old Siyun she was an older sister, of course — but that wasn't the only reason Siyun was stunned.
A girl who couldn't see. A blind girl. The weird one the village kids used to tease, who just laughed it off. That was who she was.
Siyun's eyes went wide at help from the last person she would ever have expected — and then a companion of the dead man started shouting, yanking a knife from his belt. She couldn't understand the words, foreign as they were, but the cursing was unmistakable. The flash of that drawn blade drained the color from Siyun's face. She couldn't even think to run. She just shook.
The blind girl was different. She flicked the blood from her kitchen knife and chose to stand and fight.
Little Siyun was certain the girl had lost her mind — that being blind had made her stupid on top of everything else. How was a kid who couldn't even see supposed to beat a grown man?
But the girl proved her wrong with her own body.
The way the blind girl swung that kitchen knife was clumsy. Of course it was. A girl who had never held a weapon in her life swinging a kitchen knife with skill would have been more terrifying. And yet, strangely, the longer the fight went on, the more the initiative shifted to her — so clearly that even a child like Siyun could see it. The blind girl who couldn't see a thing was dodging the man's attacks as if she already knew exactly where each one would land.
Her body couldn't quite keep up, and small cuts opened across her skin, but she didn't seem to care. If anything, she staggered as though she were already enduring a pain far worse than those wounds.
The man lunged to drive his knife into the reeling blind girl. Even with pain written across her face, she spun lightly out of the way — and drove the kitchen knife straight into his eye.
Even in the middle of that desperate moment, Siyun had never been able to forget the words the girl spoke then.
"Fuck! I missed!"
She yanked the kitchen knife free of the screaming man's eye and swung again, burying it in his throat. Blood sprayed across Siyun once more — but the feeling that flooded her in that instant wasn't fear.
It was admiration.
The back of the girl's head was small and thin, the way a child's should be — and yet her back had looked endlessly broad.
Having barely survived thanks to her, Siyun had looked up to that nameless girl ever since. She didn't know if she was alive or dead. She didn't even know her name. But she was Siyun's hero and her role model. She wanted to become someone who could save the powerless the way that girl had — and if she could, she wanted to fight alongside her one day. She had never seen her again after that day, but she believed she was still out there somewhere.
Afterward, once the Great War ended, Siyun had lived in an orphanage. That was where she met Carmen on a playground. Growing up beside Carmen, she nurtured the dream of becoming like the girl who had saved her — and before she knew it, she had taken a step closer. Or so she'd thought. She had gotten into the Academy, after all — the finest school for training Awakeners in the world.
But look. Something like this had happened in Crineas, and she had done nothing.
Carmen watched Siyun still drowning in self-reproach, then carefully helped her to her feet.
"…Want to go to bed?"
"…Yeah."
As she rose with Carmen's help, Siyun accidentally stepped on the remote lying on the floor.
Beep. The television flickered back on, and the news was still talking about Mudwell.
"Ah, damn."
Carmen muttered under her breath and reached for the remote to shut it off again — but Siyun stopped her.
"Wait. Just a second…"
On the screen, they were releasing the identity of the man said to be Mudwell's boss.
The air locked in her throat.
It was a face she knew far too well. A face she had not forgotten for a single moment since the Great War — a face she could never forget.
The man who had killed her mother and father, then kept smiling as he cut and cut and cut and cut until nothing remained but unrecognizable chunks of meat — that man was on the news.
"Hhk—! Hah… hah…"
Clutching her chest against a terrible, crushing pain, Siyun collapsed where she stood.
"Yi Siyun!"
Carmen cried her name in alarm as she suddenly went down, but to Siyun it was nothing but a distant, ringing roar. From her violently trembling eyes, a single tear slid free and rolled down her cheek.