A Record Written in Blood (5)

"So what you're saying is I'm not dreaming, and all of this is real?"

"That's right."

"So I lost my memories, then came back into this fucking Closed City hand-in-hand with you? To kill that Hermann bitch, or whatever the hell her name is?"

"That would be the situation, yes."

"What the actual fuck..."

Yuel blinked, as if the pieces refused to settle into place. At first she had wondered whether she was dreaming; the longer she listened, the less that seemed possible.

"Huh."

She laughed, incredulous.

"I figured that gear-covered bitch had thoroughly ruined me and that I was ruined right along with her. I thought I'd died there."

"You lose your memories. You don't die."

"From where I'm standing, isn't that the same thing? The person before the memory wipe and the person after are completely different people."

Yuel shrugged.

"I definitely should have wiped my memories clean. Why they're still here, I have no idea..."

Why the memories remained.

Najin could have explained it if he wanted to. He had a few theories.

Because this place is the sanctuary of the Constellation of Omniscience, the natural opposite of the Constellation of Oblivion. Because it's the Closed City. Because that bracelet you were wearing interacted with this place somehow...

He could have piled on the speculation and the reasoning. He didn't. Yuel didn't press him for details either. What mattered to her wasn't the why.

She looked at the silent Najin, huffed a short laugh, and rubbed the bracelet on her wrist.

"Well. Fine."

The bracelet chimed softly as it shifted.

"Feels like I just got hazard pay I never saw coming. Hell, if you're going to work someone without a single day off, the least you can do is throw in ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠some overtime."

"How far back do you remember?"

"Well, up through the last conversation I had with you. After that—what the version of me who lost her memories actually did—no idea."

What she had was her memory as Yuel. It seemed she had none of her memories as Yuel Razian. Najin was still rubbing his chin, thinking, when Yuel narrowed her eyes and shot him a sidelong look.

"What? Did you like the amnesiac version of me better? Of course you did... looking at how tenderly you two were holding hands."

"Excuse me?"

"If it puts your mind at ease, she hasn't exactly disappeared. I can feel her taking up space in a corner of my head. What, want me to switch?"

There was a faintly resentful edge to the way she snapped at him.

"I said, want me to switch?"

"Not particularly?"

Najin tilted his head.

"As long as neither of you is gone, it's fine. And if you can swap that easily... well, that works out, doesn't it?"

There had to be a reason the bracelet had reacted so suddenly, a reason the personality had shifted. That was how Najin saw it.

"Besides..."

He let out a quiet laugh.

"It's good to see you again after so long. If it's all the same, I'd rather you stayed. More than anything, the Yuel who actually knows this city is this one."

Yuel's shoulders twitched. The glare she had been leveling at him dropped away at once. She chewed her lip and answered in a voice that had gone small.

"Is that... so? Well. If that's what you say."

Najin stood first.

The same way he had when he served as the lord's adjutant in the Closed City, he held out his hand to Yuel. Getting the lord out of bed every morning—she had always been terrible at waking up—had been his job.

A smile spread across Yuel's mouth as she looked at the hand extended before her. Thank you, Adjutant, she muttered, took Najin's hand, and rose.

"So how far did you and the amnesiac me get? Fuck. I was the one who confessed first, and some other bitch got to have all the fun..."

Clearing up that particular misunderstanding took a little time.

That was how it went.

2.

Najin and Yuel spent some time walking the Closed City.

It was a little different from the city they remembered, but this was unmistakably the Closed City. As they made a circuit of the streets, Yuel spoke.

"Looking at the building façades and the bricks in the roads, this seems to be not long after the city was first built. Definitely not the era we lived in."

And so, she said,

"I don't know much about how you transcendent types operate, so I'll ask. What does this city have to do with killing that bitch?"

"First of all, this is Hermann's sanctuary. A sanctuary is the place a transcendent dwells—essentially their home ground."

"Ah. So we're standing in her base right now?"

Najin nodded and continued.

"Our goal is to take the Star of Omniscience from Hermann. To take it, we have to inflict a perfect defeat on her."

"A perfect defeat?"

"You have to win on the stage she prepared, by her rules. If she sets up a chessboard, you have to beat her at chess. You don't flip the board or blow the other player's head off mid-move."

Same principle as facing the Star of Contempt.

Winning by smashing the stage the way the Helmeted Knight had done against the Star of Contempt wouldn't work. Like Najin himself had done then, you had to face the opponent on their stage, by their rules, and win.

"Just hearing it sounds like a pain."

"It is, honestly."

"But if that's the only way to get what we need, it's a pain worth putting up with. So what do we actually do? What's the victory condition?"

"..."

"..."

"Najin?"

"Yes, Yuel."

Yuel eyed him with open suspicion.

"You don't know?"

"That's what we have to find out from here."

"So you don't know. Fuck..."

You never know until you throw yourself against it. Sanctuary rules were all different; more often than not, the only way to get answers was to charge in headfirst.

"I do have a theory."

Najin stretched out a hand and pointed at the sky.

He described the landscape he had seen the moment he first entered this world.

Tens of thousands, hundreds of millions, trillions of gears meshing and turning across the heavens. A space where the unknown and the mysterious did not exist. A sky lined with nothing but intricate machinery, everything already revealed, dismantled, and analyzed.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

And beneath that sky, discarded things everywhere.

Cities used up and thrown away in the making of the gears that built that sky. The vast experimental ground Hermann had created. The place where Najin and Yuel now stood was the very heart of that testing ground.

"The Sanctuary of Omniscience."

Najin said.

"In their own sanctuary, a constellation is as good as a god. Not a false god—a genuine divine being who creates a world and writes its rules."

A sanctuary was a space built around a constellation. But, Najin went on,

"At the same time, a sanctuary also functions as a shackle for the constellation."

"A shackle?"

"Yes. A shackle. Because the foundation of a sanctuary is the concept the constellation holds. Inside their own sanctuary, a constellation can never act in a way that violates their concept."

If Najin were to unfold his own sanctuary, for instance, he would have to challenge within it. Fail that, and the sanctuary would collapse at once.

Therefore—

"Inside this space created by the Constellation of Omniscience, Hermann must truly know everything."

In this space, Hermann had to be omniscient. In the world she had made, nothing she did not know could be allowed to exist. That would lead directly to her defeat.

Having said that much, Najin closed his fist on empty air.

What he drew forth was Excalibur. While Yuel's eyes went round, Najin poured power into the blade. Radiant light flooded the Closed City.

"..."

"..."

Roughly thirty seconds passed. Nothing happened. Yuel broke the silence.

"What are you doing?"

"..."

"It's blinding. Put that away."

He put it away. Inside him, Merlin finally lost the fight against laughter, and Najin made his excuses. It was a deeply mysterious weapon, full of the unknown—he had figured drawing it would provoke some kind of reaction.

"But nothing happened?"

"Looks like things from outside don't work. We have to find something inside this world."

They ran a few more experiments after that, and the conclusion held. Excalibur, stars, even star relics Hermann herself couldn't possibly know about—nothing he produced drew any response.

"So shortcuts are off the table, then? That Excalibur of yours, the shiny sword—doesn't look like it'll do anything either."

"Seems that way."

"Which means from here on we have to find something inside this place that can deny her omniscience..."

Yuel muttered, rubbing her chin.

"We've done this once before."

Doesn't seem like it should be hard.

Smiling like that, Yuel took the lead.

3.

Ten days passed.

Ten days since Yuel had declared it wouldn't be difficult and strode out with confidence.

To cut to the conclusion: it was not easy at all.

For ten days Najin and Yuel threw themselves into every kind of bizarre experiment, and none of it ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠produced the slightest change in the sanctuary. On the tenth day, the two of them sat side by side on a bench, staring at the sky.

"You said it ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wouldn't be hard."

"...Shut up. I'm embarrassed enough."

He had expected difficulty, but actually colliding with it left him at a complete loss. He couldn't get a grip on anything.

When they had tackled other constellations' sanctuaries, the process itself might have been hard, but finding the method of attack never was. The hardest had been the assault on the Glass Tomb, and even then there had been clues.

Was there even a method of attack here at all?

It felt like being dropped into a vast labyrinth. No way of knowing whether an exit even existed. If someone told him to just smash the maze to pieces, he could do that, but...

Merlin.

-Yeah.

Anything come to mind?

-Not yet. If it really comes down to it, there's another option, but that's a last resort.

A last resort?

-Shatter the sanctuary, drag Hermann's true body out into the open, and beat her until she admits defeat... Leaving aside whether that would even work, I can't be sure we'd get the star that way. High chance the star gets damaged outright.

I've tried it. Nine times out of ten the thing just breaks. Merlin's mutter drifted past him unheeded.

"Still, it hasn't been a total waste."

Najin spoke up.

"We figured out this is an old experimental site, didn't we? And we confirmed that people were dragged here long before you ever were."

"I suspected as much, but knowing it for certain feels strange. Back when I was lord, some old man testified that everyone had fallen into this city all at once about seventy-eight years earlier..."

Yuel gave a bitter smile.

"And before them—centuries before them—there were people who fell into this city."

That was what the last ten days had turned up. There were no people in this city now, but traces of lives lived remained. People had clearly lived here, in this era.

"That Hermann bitch said something to me once. How many people do you think were sacrificed to create a being like you? How many experiments do you think there were? This was probably one of them."

An experiment from the Closed City's earliest days.

Guessing how that experiment had ended was not hard. If it had succeeded, Yuel would not have been sitting here.

"It failed, and they all died. Without leaving anything behind...?"

Yuel's voice trailed off. She touched her own lips, as if something in what she had just said had snagged. She tapped her lower lip with a fingertip a few times, then spoke.

"Without leaving anything behind."

She tilted her head.

"That's strange."

"What is?"

"Doesn't it strike you as odd? If it were me, I would have left something out of pure spite."

Yuel stood.

"Let's go back to the lord's castle. Something just occurred to me."

The lord's castle standing at the center of the city.

Its exterior was different from the one Yuel had lived in, but the interior was much the same. They walked the bleak corridors to the study. Yuel pushed the door open and let out a long breath.

"See? There are traces that people lived here, but no records left behind. There's no way they wouldn't have tried to leave records."

"Wouldn't they have been cleaned out? The way you scrub a lab clean before a new experiment..."

"If they were going to do that, wiping every last trace of habitation would have been cleaner, and they didn't. Why, I don't know."

Yuel settled into the chair at the desk.

"Whether the cleaning was sloppy or they simply couldn't erase everything, I can't say... but in that case, doesn't it stand to reason that someone would have hidden one or two things?"

She began to feel over the desk. She even crouched underneath it, pulling drawers, knocking on panels, searching for something.

"Especially someone who was a lord. Anyone who takes the lordship of a shithole city like this is already half mad. Duty, belief, obsession—they're carrying at least one of those. Or all of them."

The woman who had carried all of them smirked.

"Sit in this seat long enough and a person turns furtive. You start hiding things for no reason, concealing more and more. So..."

Yuel crawled out from under the desk and began ransacking the castle room by room. Then she stopped in front of a wall cabinet. She tilted her head slightly, and as if she had found something—as if the discovery itself were absurd—she laughed.

"Fuck. People really do all think the same way."

She nudged the base of the cabinet with her toe.

With a clunk, the cabinet slid. In the gap it left was a narrow space. Somehow the scene looked familiar even to Najin. Yuel herself had often stashed liquor in hidden nooks like that.

Something lay in that small space.

Yuel reached in and took it. What settled into her hand was a single handwritten volume. A diary stiff with dried, caked blood. The moment she drew it out, Najin's eyes narrowed.

"That."

"What?"

"That's a Star Relic."

Only a faint trace of starlight remained, but it was there. Yuel met his gaze and slowly nodded. Together they opened the diary.