Senia, and ■■■ (4)
"Can I ask you something? Did the me in your memories... ever try to use you?"
It was a single question, yet it carried an overwhelming weight—a tangle of another past, another version of herself, another reality, and a hypothesis she couldn't bring herself to fully believe.
She wasn't looking him in the eye as she spoke. For someone whose gaze usually picked up on every fleeting micro-expression and subtle tremor to read another person, looking away meant only one thing: perhaps, deep down, she didn't truly want to know the answer.
Sensing the raw desperation bleeding through her voice, Junon answered without missing a beat.
"Yes."
A lie would have acted as a slow, corrosive poison. Junon chose a blunt, unvarnished truth to meet her plea. His immediate reply froze Senia's hand in midair, just as she had been about to skip a flat stone across the lake's glassy surface, expecting him to take his time pondering the question.
"I... see..."
She had harbored the suspicion, but the reality struck far harder than she had imagined. She had prepared herself for the possibility that she might have committed terrible deeds in those lost fragments of memory, but she had never anticipated an affirmative answer to come so swiftly, so utterly devoid of hesitation. That instantaneous confirmation could only mean one thing: the memory was etched unforgettably into his mind.
The pebble suddenly felt impossibly heavy. Her dirt-smudged hand fell limply toward the ground.
There was no twist of fate here, no miraculous absolution. Despising her own past actions—actions she couldn't even begin to defend—Senia bit her lower lip hard.
There's nothing more to ask.
Her resolve crumbled, exposing her inner confidence as nothing more than hollow deceit. She wanted to demand why she had done it, yet she couldn't reach into the past and grab her former self by the collar. Incapable of discerning right from wrong, she had selfishly and cowardly taken advantage of a fundamentally good person. Such treachery deserved divine retribution. The phrase 'vile ingratitude' fit her like a glove. She had no excuses left to offer him.
"There was a time when you solved a commission entirely on your own, yet pushed the credit onto my name," Junon continued calmly. "Thanks to that, I ended up landing on the second page."
A page? That would mean the public commission board submitted by the citizens of the Grand Duchy. Why was he bringing that up out of nowhere?
"Ah, did I explain that poorly? You know, the request board managed by Professor Muniherr. It existed back then too. At the time, every single member of Team Tembris plastered the entire front page with their accomplishments, while I was the solitary bastard stuck down on page three."
Senia blinked. She had braced herself for a relentless recital of past betrayals, a catalog of the vitriol and scorn he had endured because of her. But this wasn't what she expected at all. In fact, that wasn't even the point. That wasn't taking advantage of someone; that was—
"That's it. That's the only time you ever 'used' me."
It made no sense. There was no way.
"...Stop."
"Sorry. That was too quiet; I couldn't hear you."
"Stop lying to me!" Senia burst out, spinning around with a sudden, furious cry. "I don't care if you tear into me with every single detail! Just spill it all and tell me the damn truth!"
Her voice shattered the quiet of the night, raw and defiant, but she couldn't hold it back any longer.
"Look at when we first met! Don't you remember what I threatened you with after catching you secretly subduing Sylvia?"
Back then, everything she did had been calculated to force her way into Class C. That was why she had approached him, lurking and showing up right on cue.
"And that wasn't the end of it! I actively dug for your weaknesses, deliberately scraping at your nerves every chance I got!"
"Well... yeah, you did back then. But you stepped down after that, so I just let it slide."
"Ha! Let it slide? I didn't step down out of kindness; I stepped down because I couldn't pry any information out of you! Even after that, I kept running background checks behind your back, and I even shared everything I found with Michel!"
Conducting covert investigations into someone's background left no room for dispute. It was an invasive, hostile act, more than enough to provoke disgust and bitter resentment in anyone.
And then came the final strike.
"And lastly... when I deserted the front lines during the Capital Relocation Campaign. I abandoned you purely out of my own selfish emotions and backed you into a corner. That was, for all intents and purposes, using you to take the fall..."
It was the only vivid fragment of memory she possessed. In that memory, her desertion had undeniably prioritized her personal feelings, ultimately leaving him to carry the disastrous burden alone. She had laid out a sound, unassailable argument. Now, surely, he would give her an honest answer. Senia fought to regulate her ragged breathing, waiting for Junon to finally concede.
Yet the man standing before her was far too softhearted.
"I never considered myself used by you."
Hearing him dismiss it so nonchalantly was something she simply refused to accept right now.
"That's just your subjective opinion! Objectively speaking, that's textbook exploitation!"
"That's not my subjective opinion. It's yours."
Senia let out a breathless, incredulous gasp, but Junon pressed on, completely unbothered.
"The reason you sought me out in the first place was to get into Class C so you could attend the alchemy lectures. And in the end, that was all to save the Sirens, wasn't it?"
"...You expect me to just brush it off as some noble white lie? Does that make any sense to you?!"
"When the lives of many rest on the shoulders of one person, the equation changes. Just like how you're doing everything in your power right now to clear the Sirens of their false charges. So if the lives of an entire tribe hung on your actions, Senia, there was nothing strange about what you did."
To an outside ear, it might have sounded like reckless rationalization, but the weight of his former command made his perspective undeniably real. Having shouldered the burden of an acting supreme commander, Junon understood better than anyone the agonizing desperation that came with holding countless lives in his hands.
"Then what about the background checks? Can you honestly defend that the same way?"
That was a completely different matter. Digging into a person's private secrets risked exposing them to the world. Regardless of the motive, it wasn't something anyone could simply overlook.
Even so, Junon dismantled her point with effortless precision.
"If those background checks had been meant to exploit me with genuine malice, the nobles would have quietly eliminated me long ago. But nothing happened after that day. That's more than enough proof for me."
"..."
Back then, had it become known that a noble had been humiliated and defeated by a commoner—and the lowest-ranked student dubbed the weakest vanguard, no less—the nobility would have scrambled to bury the truth. Under normal circumstances, retaliation would have been inevitable. They would have dispatched assassins without a second thought.
Hearing that she had shared the intel with Michel meant very little to him now. Like Senia, Michel wasn't the type to go around gossiping about such things. Once again, Junon had countered her argument with airtight logic, leaving her with no ground to stand on. His unblemished survival was living proof that Senia's digging had harbored no genuine ill intent.
That left only one final point.
Knowing she would fight tooth and nail to refute him, Junon dredged up another vivid memory from his past timeline.
"When you deserted the battlefield during the Capital Relocation Campaign at Shirakh, I was looking right at you. And I mouthed to you: 'Go on ahead and come back.'"
Senia gave a faint, trembling nod. Though she hadn't spoken a word of that detail, his account aligned seamlessly with her fragmented memory.
"I don't know if you ever realized this, though. I was the one who prepared that horse behind your lines."
"..."
There was no way she could have forgotten. A fine, combat-ready warhorse—an invaluable asset on any battlefield—with a map and a short note tucked neatly into its saddle.
Junon delivered the decisive blow.
"I let you go knowing full well what you were doing. I knew that if I forced you to stay against your will in that state of mind, it would only backfire. For you, and for the soldiers under our command."
With that, every lingering question she could have raised was answered.
How had the command structure filled her absence so effortlessly?
Because he had permitted her departure from the start.
How had he known her exact location to mouth those parting words?
Because he was the one who had mapped out her escape route in advance.
Providing the mount, securing the path—as the acting supreme commander, he had possessed both the authority and the means to arrange it all. In truth, Junon had known long before anyone else that Senia would break away from the ranks. He had watched carefully as her seemingly unflappable composure began to fray, just as it was fraying now.
"Do you get it now? Not once have I ever been used by you. Not in the past, and not in the present. Everything that happened was by my own will."
Until the very end, Junon stood firm: he had never been her pawn. Even during the recent crisis, he hadn't acted out of obligation to satisfy anyone's expectations. He had weighed the risks with his own mind and staked his own life in a head-on gamble against Shanberesh.
There were no arguments left to make. No contradictions plagued his reasoning, and not a trace of deception tainted his words. The woman who had once cornered him with razor-sharp insight, reading him as though she possessed mind-reading magic, found herself completely overwhelmed.
Her tightly sealed lips could find no words. For the first time, Senia had been thoroughly outmaneuvered.
"You're probably wondering why I'm telling you all this, aren't you?"
His parting words carried a sincerity unlike anything that had come before.
"To me, Senia, you were never some sly, manipulative schemer looking to take advantage of people. You were one of the precious few comrades who truly acknowledged me, and one of my dearest friends. That's all I wanted to say."
The shattered boundary between Senia's logic and emotion finally settled into place. As fresh tears tracked down her cheeks, she lifted her head and truly looked at Junon.
"Junon..."
Her voice caught in her throat as she called his name, but he had already turned away. Leaving behind a gentle parting wish that they might speak again tomorrow, he staggered slowly into the darkness toward his quarters.
He was far too kind. So kind that it bordered on utter foolishness.
Watching his unsteady silhouette recede into the night, that single thought consumed her mind. And from that thought, a word she had never known in this life carved itself deep into her heart.
It was a word Senia had never possessed until now: friend.
No further ripples disturbed the tranquil lake that night. The skipped stones ceased, the surface smoothed to glass, and the water returned to peaceful stillness, as if nothing had ever transpired.
The Grand Duchy had reason to celebrate.
The rescue force dispatched in haste to save the isolated unit had been met by the survivors returning under their own power. Although the collapse of Shanberesh's subterranean lair had drastically altered the terrain and caused severe delays, the fact that they had returned largely intact was a cause for immense relief.
Beneath the surface, however, a darker reality festered. The number of individuals exhibiting symptoms of the Lemterte Plague had risen steadily. Worse, the pathogen had mutated, dramatically increasing its contagion rate and causing infection counts to skyrocket. When returning soldiers began displaying identical symptoms, the populace was thrown into turmoil.
The time had come to reveal the truth about the plague—a secret previously guarded only by the upper echelons.
"They say... there's still no cure. What are you going to do now?"
Jake handed over the preliminary research report he had managed to receive from Dahlia during their regrouping, his tone laced with grim concern as he questioned Muniherr.
"Can we not hold out a little longer?"
"It's impossible, and you know it. People are already whispering about establishing quarantine zones by force. The moment we return to Revrant, we have to make an official announcement."
Terror had begun fracturing the populace into hostile factions. The primal fear of infection had taken root, turning neighbor against neighbor. If authoritative information regarding the Lemterte Plague wasn't made public soon, riots would inevitably erupt. Jake had come to obtain Muniherr's approval to break the silence.
Yet Muniherr found little comfort in the prospect. Had a cure already been synthesized, an announcement would have brought relief; revealing the truth now, without a solution, risked stoking widespread panic to a fever pitch. Furthermore, he was loath to cast a pall over the soldiers who were currently basking in the hard-won triumph of the subjugation campaign.
And there was another reason.
The safety of a single student weighed heavily on his conscience.
If we reveal this now, that boy will become public enemy number one.
A sense of betrayal always burns hottest when directed at those closest. The primary reason Muniherr had repeatedly postponed disclosing the infection vector was to shield Junon from the wrath of his peers. People wouldn't stop to ask why he had kept silent. They would immediately seize upon the fact that he had known the transmission route all along and blame him for withholding it, accusing him of worsening the catastrophe simply to tear him down.
Announcing the truth would subject Junon to a scholastic life far more harrowing than the one he already endured.
Even so, the delay could not last forever.
"Make the announcement, Jake."
"...Are you certain? Once it's out there, that kid will..."
"We have no choice. If we wish to save even one more life, we must rally every capable mind to develop a cure."
The well-being of one youth versus the lives of countless citizens across the Grand Duchy. Weighed on any scale, the choice was obvious. In allowing personal affection to sway his judgment, Muniherr, as supreme commander, had skirted the boundaries of duty for far too long.
"Understood. I will make the declaration the moment we reach Revrant. In exchange..."
"I will keep a close eye on Junon. He is your treasured student, after all."
"Right. I leave him in your hands; I'm riding ahead. Yah!"
In truth, Muniherr did not even know Junon's exact whereabouts. He had simply taken Cain at his word when the boy reported that Junon was receiving treatment in a secure location.
We need your presence to clear the air. Just when do you plan to show yourself, Junon?
More than a week had passed since anyone had seen him.
Another day slipped by.
My body still protested every movement, but remaining bedridden would only hinder my recovery. Light exercise was essential to get my circulation moving again. It was for that very reason that I dragged myself outside for a stroll.
And on that stroll, I ran straight into Senia once more.
"Wondered when you'd show up. Ah, then again, since we never set a specific time, I suppose it doesn't matter."
"...Don't tell me you've been waiting here for me?"
"Hmm? You told me you wanted to talk tomorrow, so of course I was waiting."
"Haah..."
How on earth could she have known when I'd wake up and head out? Setting the timing aside, we hadn't even agreed to meet by the lake, so how had she picked the exact location?
"Come on, don't look at me like that. I haven't been waiting long. I just figured you'd wake up around this hour and wander over here."
"Hey... does that make any sense to you?"
To any normal person, it defied all reason, but Senia seemed entirely unbothered.
"Why wouldn't it? You're diligent enough to drop by Mizar Hall every single day, so you were bound to wake up in the morning. And even though your body is trashed, you're obsessive about conditioning, so you'd naturally take a walk, right? If you're strolling around aimlessly, there aren't many places to go. This lake is the obvious choice. See? Time and place, perfectly deduced."
She hadn't changed a bit.
Once, in the past, I had asked her if she was just guessing. But it wasn't mere conjecture. To lay out an deduction that specific required a level of certainty bordering on absolute conviction.
Which meant Senia was back in peak condition.
"So, what was it you wanted to ask me?"
"Ah, about that. The people in the basement..."
"The captives were all released this morning."
"...What?"
"I negotiated a deal with the Sirens. Cain escorted them out, so they've probably rendezvoused with the main force by now."
Senia delivered the news with complete nonchalance, as if releasing human prisoners from Siren captivity were the most mundane chore in the world. Surely that wasn't something to gloss over so casually.
"Well... they don't trust humans, but they trusted you. Though they did attach a few conditions."
"Conditions?"
At that moment, Senia reached up and removed something from her hair.
"Senia...? What are you..."
"To have this conversation, I needed to make sure there weren't any other humans around. That's why I sent them away."
As she spoke, her shoulder-length hair darkened, shifting into a deep, pitch-black hue—a familiar shade from the distant past. No, from a time far older than that.
"Jang Seon-hui. That was my original name."
It was the hair color she had carried back in South Korea, long before she had ever tumbled onto the Kempf-Litton Continent.