The Citrine Family's Secret (5)
"So she finally couldn't hold back and went for it."
Watching Terre and the Citrine family's past from our theater seats, I let out a whistle of admiration at her chair shot. Every time she brought it crashing down on the family head's skull, I threw my arms up and cheered like a raucous crowd.
"Uh... are you actually enjoying this?"
Yuri made a flabbergasted face as I squirmed in my seat.
"Of course smashing a bastard's head in is fun—what, you thought otherwise? Good triumphing over evil. That's what watching this stuff is all about."
"I'm sure you know, Lord Solis, but this is—"
"I know. Just a fragment of the past you're showing us with your magic."
An irreversible past. A tragedy far too late for my hands to fix. As if to reflect that very fact, the screen shifted, showing a cold corpse and the pieces of trash walking out of the room.
"That's why I kept my mouth shut and just watched for so long. There was nothing worth seeing after that scene, anyway."
More than anything, though, I liked Terre's spirited response. Her choice, born after round after round of anguish, struck a chord in me—there was something genuinely satisfying about a woman who recognized the wrong and settled it with her own two hands.
"I can't argue with that."
"Right? Look—even after watching something dirty, my dick just sat there limp and floppy."
"You do not need to emphasize that with your finger! Put it away!"
Yuri bit her lip and rattled off her complaints—though perhaps because she was mindful of her standing with me, the grumbling ended there.
"But seriously, how is it that in tens of hours of runtime, the only thing worth salvaging is what Terre made of that family?"
"It wasn't a pretty sight, no. The Citrine house's authority is a history written in blood."
"And the mastermind lurking behind it all, on top of that. Watching this, you'd think one person collects every single ounce of blame, wouldn't you?"
"...I'll refrain from comment."
Yuri dropped her gaze at my words. Conserving her words with a bitter expression—so she did have some sense after all.
Proto.
The name spoken by the family head referred to the leader of the Celestial Clan. A spatial sorcerer wielding the Divine Artifact, Hole of the Void. Defeated by the Archmage and biding his time for a comeback, the man had committed every filthy atrocity imaginable from behind the stage, where no eyes could reach. The Citrine family's crimes had been his direct handiwork as well.
"So? What's your impression, watching the massacre your boss orchestrated with your own two eyes?"
"I'm a woman too, you know. It isn't pleasant to watch."
The sight of Yuri sighing and squeezing her eyes shut would have tugged at anyone's heartstrings. Her politely folded hands and rigid, tense posture were the textbook picture of a sinner begging forgiveness. But—
"My, my, what a master of deception you are. Your first-rate acting nearly had me fooled."
No matter how fervently she performed for my sympathy, no matter how she dredged up the Citrine family's ugliness to appeal to me—
"Give up on scoring points by flattering me."
I clicked my tongue, her true intentions laid bare before my eyes.
"Let's be honest with each other. Stripped of all the polite framing, you couldn't care less what the Citrine family did in the past. Am I wrong?"
"What kind of nonsense is that?! I am confessing everything I know, without a single lie!"
"Mm, yep, you're right about that. It's all true. That's exactly why I'm not nitpicking your words."
Yuri had asked for my cooperation. Like a soldier laying down his arms and raising the white flag, she had dragged me onto a battlefield where the odds favored her.
The Mirror of the Moon.
The technique she had deployed to show us the Citrine family's crimes was a form of mental attack—a vile spell that forcibly dredged up whatever the target least wanted to face: hated memories, traumas, buried horrors. The victim never even realized they'd been swallowed by an illusion; they simply wandered endless nightmares, parading around in borrowed faces and borrowed shells, until at last they forgot their own existence and became a willless doll.
A technique devised by the Celestial Clan to keep humans as slaves.
Naturally, none of that applied to me or Terre, who carried that blood in our veins. In truth, the both of us had seen through the illusion the moment it took hold. And as the owner of the Divine Artifact that symbolized the Celestial Clan's leader, the authority belonged to me from the moment it activated—Yuri may have pulled the trigger, but the gun was already mine.
"I'm grateful, really, that you used the Connector—the relic holding the Citrine family's long history—as the medium to create this space. Thanks to it, I could hand Terre the truth of her house on a silver platter."
My thinking was simple: if I'd been dragged into this, I might as well squeeze every drop of value out of it. So I guided Terre into the illusion. To shatter this space, one had to act opposite to the self one had become—but I deliberately told her to behave the way that servant would have.
The result: a complete success. I no longer had to explain everything to Terre in painstaking detail. On that front, I was quietly grateful to Yuri. Seeing is believing, after all—it spared me a long, tedious persuasion.
"But drop the fake guilt. Drop the fake apologies. That kind of hypocrisy makes my desire to help you evaporate on the spot."
While Terre confronted the truth of her family, I quietly savored the scene and asked myself the same question over and over.
Why is Yuri showing me this?
For someone who had combed through the setting materials and reread Academy Yuri Princess cover to cover, reading this world like an open book, pinning down her intent was child's play. The answer wasn't far off at all. I found it easily enough in the request she'd once made of me.
"Please—help me, and help the successors!"
Successors.
Those granted the next ownership from the heads of the Celestial Clan who wielded the Divine Artifacts—in reality, nothing more than their spare batteries. Consumables kept on standby, ready to be swapped in the moment an artifact owner's Origin was damaged beyond repair. Defeated long ago by Archmage Kairos, who had once been a leader of the moderates, they had already swapped out their Origins once by that filthy, obscene method.
Of the survivors of that atrocity—the nightmare where their own comrades were offered up as sacrifices—only two remained: Yuri and Diana. Delus, owner of the Moon artifact, had come through unscathed, and Vital, owner of the Vitality artifact, had lost everything except her Origin. That was the only reason those two were still safe.
So that's why Diana was always biding her time, waiting for her chance to stab Vital in the back.
I held no particular hostility toward Yuri. She would likely cast aside even her pride to serve me—that was the conclusion I'd drawn from her behavior and everything in the novel. But that loyalty existed solely to serve her goal, and she would use any means to reach it. The ugly truth of the Citrine family she'd stumbled into along the way? She couldn't have cared less.
"Whether Terre suffers or her father commits disgusting atrocities, you feel nothing. Your interest is one thing and one thing only: that girl you treasure above all the other successors."
"...Palad? Did that woman tell you something?"
"Does it matter? What needs settling right now is the relationship between you and me."
I lifted myself off the seat, leaned across to where she sat beside me, and bent down to meet her eyes.
"No need to fake sympathy for Terre to get on my good side. I'll help you save the successors, exactly as you asked. So start thinking about how you're going to pay the price."
A strictly business relationship. I give what I receive, and take back what I give—a clean, honest arrangement.
"...Understood. The price will be paid in full, in due time."
"Good. Now we're actually talking."
She'd clearly intended to stroke just enough of my sympathy and ride my help for free—but not a chance. You're getting milked down to the marrow, so best remember that.
Having heard the answer I wanted, I decided our little chat with Yuri could end there.
Crack!
"Looks like that side's finished, too."
Fissures split across the theater-shaped space, and in moments it shattered entirely. The spiderwebbing cracks scattered and rained down to the floor, and by the time we gathered ourselves, we were back in the cave where the Connector rested. Terre had abandoned the role she'd been assigned—and with her, the axis of the stage gone, the whole illusion had collapsed.
"You okay, Terre?"
"...No. Not even a little."
Worried, I called out to her, and she managed a reply in a voice so small an ant could have crawled under it, her body curled up tight as a pill bug.
"My head hurts so much. Everything's spinning."
"Can't blame you."
The family she trusted, the people she called her own—irredeemable trash, every last one. Terre's mood had cratered to rock bottom, ground down by a reality she couldn't wrap her head around. Even I, a complete outsider, had felt my stomach twist just watching. It went without saying what it had done to her. Being forced to stand by, helpless, as the family head usurped Tis's Origin—that must have been the most bitterly powerless moment of Terre's entire life.
"Hey, um... Solis?"
"Go ahead. I'm listening."
"What am I supposed to do now?"
Terre barely managed the words, her voice on the verge of snapping.
"I was going to kill Yupi. Kill my sister. Take the seat of family head for myself. I thought that was my duty as the head's daughter—but now I don't know anymore."
Countless emotions tangled in her trembling voice. Her eyes, unable to find any anchor, shook like the ground in an earthquake.
"Do you... do you happen to know what I should do?"
She looked up at me with the face of someone a single breath away from bursting into tears. In response, I shrugged.
"Do what, exactly? Beats me."
Where in the world does anyone find the 'right answer' to life? Anything can be the right answer, and just as easily the wrong one. There's no such thing as a perfect choice. But if there was one thing I knew for certain—
"Still, if you absolutely have to pick a way forward, wouldn't doing what you want to do be the easiest on your heart?"
"What I want to do?"
"Yeah. What you want. So—what comes to mind right now?"
"I..."
Terre fell deep into thought. Her lips fluttered for a moment, and then, as if she'd finally made up her mind, she leaned in and whispered softly into my ear. The words rode in on a tickle of warm breath, and a faint smile touched my lips.
"Yeah. Let's do exactly that."
I took her hand firmly and pulled her to her feet. Beside Terre, swaying as though she might crumple at any second, I gladly became the steady pair of legs she could lean on.
"Let's go. Time to see your sister."