Homecoming (2)
“...Revenge?”
When Cartesia asked back in a faintly uncertain voice, I only answered with a cold smile and a nod.
“Why? Did you really never imagine I’d ever use a word like that? That I’d always just grin like a fool no matter what those girls pulled on me, and then, in the end, wrap everything up in some heartwarming fairy-tale ending where we all forgive and forget?”
“...No, I didn’t exactly think that,”
Cartesia said, though her expression suggested she really had never considered anything else.
“Honestly... I did think you might just smile it off again and act like nothing happened. So I was wondering how, exactly, I was supposed to convince this idiot and land those bitches a proper blow.”
Her words were sharp enough, but to some extent they were also realistic.
Because until not long ago, I probably would have acted exactly as Cartesia described.
But not anymore.
From now on, I was going to behave a little differently from the way I had lived so far.
Because I had finally realized that if I kept thinking of my sister before myself, nothing would ever change.
No, to be more precise, it would be more accurate to say that because those girls were my family, I had treated them with an unusual amount of leniency.
After I entered the academy, all I really had to deal with were things like Ricardo poking at me, or small, almost adorable schemes like strange rumors spreading around me. But the world I had originally lived in had been a battlefield.
A world where people killed and were killed without a second thought, where a life could vanish in the blink of an eye.
There, I had spent years rolling through war zones as a mercenary, and in the end I had survived when so many others had not.
The reason I survived the battlefield, as I’d said before, was partly because I’d simply been lucky. But it was also because I had never once broken the rules I’d set for myself as a mercenary.
Never trust anyone carelessly, but if you do trust them, trust them to the very end.
And if that person ever betrayed me, make them pay in some way—enough to teach everyone else a clear lesson.
If another person ever chose to betray my trust, I would make an example of them so that next time, I would not stay silent.
It was nothing more than that simple principle, which I now intended to apply to my sisters as well. Nothing about me had changed.
“But revenge... I can tell you’re really furious right now, but you’re not thinking of crossing the line or anything, are you?”
“Crossing the line?”
“Well... you know. For example, killing those girls, or making them wish they were dead, or something like that...”
For a moment, I stared at Cartesia with a dumbfounded expression.
“...Kill them? Me? My sisters?”
It was an absurd thing to say, truly beyond all reason. From the start, I had no reason whatsoever to kill them.
“Think about it, Cartesia. Why would I kill them? The worst my sisters did was stab me in the back. They didn’t try to kill me, they didn’t cut my limbs off, and they certainly didn’t lock me in a prison.”
A laugh escaped me.
No, I felt as if something deep in my chest was boiling over so fiercely that if I didn’t laugh, I wouldn’t be able to hold myself together.
But I also knew that anger was useless when it came to thinking and making judgments, so I forced my heart as cold as I could and continued.
“You seem to be misunderstanding me because I said revenge, Cartesia. I’m not talking about killing my sisters. I’m talking about making them pay for what they’ve done. For everything they’ve done to me until now.”
“...Pay?”
Cartesia tilted her head, as though she didn’t quite understand what I was saying.
“I thought of them as my family. So I did everything I could to take care of my sisters, and I even helped strengthen the talents they were born with.”
And yet the price for all that had only ever come back to me in the form of horrific betrayal.
...Well, fine. If I were to be generous a hundred times over, I could at least understand betraying me itself.
For my sisters, who had lived at the very bottom of the gutter until now, the temptation to rise into the upper class just by striking me in the back must have been unbearable.
So as an older man in life, and as someone who had once been their family, I thought I had every right to lecture them.
That was all I meant by the revenge I was talking about.
I would take away everything I had ever given my sisters, and drag those girls—who had once looked down at me arrogantly from far above—back down to the place of orphans scrambling through filthy back alleys.
And at the end of it, I would approach the sisters who had been reduced to ragged scraps and lost everything, just as I had now, and ask them a question.
How did it feel? Did they really not know they’d end up like this when they were playing around with me?
Now, did they finally understand even a little of the misery I had felt back then?
Did they regret the dogshit things they had done to me?
Only after I had driven my sisters all the way down into the dirt and humiliated them would the words forgiveness or reconciliation have any meaning at all.
A loser who has already lost everything saying “I forgive you” to the victor is not true forgiveness.
It is nothing more than the petty cowardice of someone who doesn’t want to acknowledge reality.
Only after thoroughly crushing the other person, tossing them into the gutter, and leaving them so broken that they could never dare come at me again—only then would I extend a hand of pity. That was what I considered forgiveness in its truest sense.
That was the form my revenge against my sisters would take.
“.....”
And Cartesia, who had listened silently to everything I said, looked at me with strangely sorrowful eyes.
“...Then I’m useless to you now.”
“What are you talking about now?”
To me, Cartesia’s words sounded utterly ridiculous.
How many times had I relied on her help to get where I was now?
If Cartesia hadn’t been by my side, I would never have even been able to speak the word revenge here—I would have been expelled from Rutra exactly as Ricardo and my sisters had planned.
More than that, in the difficult times when everyone in this world felt like my enemy, how much comfort had I taken from the fact that Cartesia stayed beside me as my one and only friend?
I could say it without hesitation: until now, the person who had helped me more than anyone else in the world was none other than Cartesia.
“Sorry, but that’s just your human affection toward me. I could never be of any real use to you. You know that too, don’t you? I’m just an ordinary person without the monstrous talent you and your sisters were born with.”
Objectively speaking, Cartesia was indeed a talented woman with tremendous potential.
She had awakened her own power, dormant within the imperial bloodline; like Lobelia, she was innately highly attuned to spirits and could command lesser spirits without effort, and she even possessed excellent swordsmanship.
But that was also Cartesia’s limit.
She was impressive in many fields, but she lacked any one area of truly exceptional talent.
And with such meager talent, it was unlikely she would be of much help against Eli, Letitia, Seria, and Lobelia from here on out.
Not now that the emperor had forbidden imperial power from interfering in disputes among the cadets, either.
But—
“What exactly is the problem with that?”
“...What?”
“If you’re worried because you think you don’t have talent, then there’s a simple way to solve that right here.”
I smiled and pointed at Arieta, who had been listening to our conversation with a blank expression the whole time.
That was right. If it was anyone else, I didn’t know, but at the very least for me, artificially raising the talent a person was born with was a remarkably simple thing.
But when she heard my “solution,” Cartesia looked at me with a thoroughly shocked expression.
“You mean... you were planning to use that ability on me too?”
“Why? Don’t tell me you don’t like my ability?”
Flustered by Cartesia’s odd reaction, I frowned, and she shook her head hard from side to side as though denying my words.
“No, that’s not it. It’s just that you’d trust me enough to use that ability on me... I’m so grateful. If you were to use that power on me... it would also become proof that we’re connected no matter where we are. Right?”
As she said that, Cartesia grabbed my hand with an excited expression.
“So? What are the activation conditions for that ability? What do I have to do?”
“Huh? Oh, honestly, it’s nothing much. The simplest way is for you and me to exchange bodily fluids, and that’s it...”
But I couldn’t finish the words I had been about to say. Because Cartesia’s heated lips sealed mine shut.
“Mmph!”
In an instant, a sweet fragrance spread through my mouth.
Feeling Cartesia’s tongue ravage every corner of my lips, I thought to myself:
...Though actually, even if we just exchanged blood instead of kissing like this, the ability would still activate.