Three Shall Come (2)
The day flew by in the blink of an eye.
He settled Choi Jeong-hyeon into her room, threw together a decent dinner, walked her through this and that until the evening's to-do list was done — and by the time he came up for air, the stars were already glittering overhead.
Somehow, without him noticing, night had fallen.
With the household growing from two to three, the place did seem to have a bit more life in it.
Which raised the question — what would this house have looked like if everything had gone according to the original plan?
"...Let's not waste thoughts on that."
Lee Jun lay on his bed and quietly closed his eyes.
"So the next thing on the schedule is... the auction house, then."
Not this week, but the auction two weeks out. In other words... the Saturday after next. Outside of attending that, there was nothing else this month he absolutely had to do.
"Hmm."
Right. So in the meantime, he'd get Choi Jeong-hyeon fitted for a custom prosthetic arm, check on Seo Yoon's private training results, and then look into that matter Yelena had mentioned — the one concerning Hecate.
That alone would eat up the rest of the month. Honestly, it was a relief that nothing had blown up for once...
Except.
"...?"
Something felt off.
A vague, gnawing unease. Whenever this inexplicable itch of wrongness crept in, it usually meant he'd overlooked something.
What did I miss?
But no matter how hard he racked his brain, running back through everything so far, nothing stood out. He believed he had made the best possible call on every decision over the past two months of this life.
At least, the Lee Jun of this very moment believed that.
And whether that belief matched reality or not, the fact remained that Lee Jun himself was confident — which should have meant there was nothing to be uneasy about.
Fine.
Then let's rewind to the previous life.
Around this time... what happened again?
"......"
Nothing happened.
He was certain of it. From this point on, for at least a few months — yes, nothing.
And yet.
Why couldn't he shake the anxiety?
"Next week, nothing. The week after that... nothing here in Korea, at least, aside from the auction. And the week after that one... also nothing worth mentioning."
He laid his thoughts out in order, licking through the events of his previous life one by one like a man searching for a missing piece. But there truly was nothing. September of 2025 was supposed to pass by, plain and unremarkable.
Except.
As he pushed his memory further back, something snagged on it.
"...Ha."
He'd figured it out. The reason for the unease.
How did I forget about that?
Something that happened in his previous life — but not in this one.
His regression had changed a great many things... but this was one event that should never have changed.
...Liberation.
In his previous life, when the mage visited, there had been a disturbance. A terrorist attack committed by Liberation. Against the single greatest S-Class mage in the world — which, naturally, meant the attack was subdued in an instant.
Because Yelena got swapped for Evrah? No — their whole goal was to sow chaos, so there'd be no reason to change targets... right?
Sad as it was for Evrah, if the target had shifted from Yelena to Evrah, the terrorists would probably have doubled down rather than backed off. Yelena was S-Class, ranked ninth, after all. These were people brazen enough to stage an attack in front of her — against Evrah, it would've been open season.
So then... why...
{Hold on a second.}
What?
{...Wake up.}
What?
{I said... WAKE UP!}
"Hnngh...!"
Lee Jun opened his eyes.
White. Everywhere he looked, white.
A blinding, pristine void with no ceiling, no walls, no floor — no way to tell one from another. His room and his bed had vanished without a trace, leaving him lying alone in the middle of that endless whiteness.
His mind, already racing to piece together the situation, was greeted by two voices.
"It's been a while, Jun."
"Missed you~"
A small rabbit plushie.
And beside it, a bear.
"...Jeanne?"
Number 17, The Star. Jeanne d'Arc Bernadotte.
But the words that came out of the two plushies' mouths denied it at once.
"Don't get the wrong idea — this time we're just visiting."
"Though Joana is always waiting for you, Oppa."
So this was... a special occasion, then.
Their answers let Lee Jun grasp the situation well enough.
"Then what brings you here? Going so far as to use your ability for it."
Pushing directly into someone's mind like this was impossible without an enormous expenditure of effort — and the burden of it fell squarely on Jeanne, the owner of that power. Which was why these two never wasted it on casual drop-ins.
More than anything else, though — this had never happened in his previous life.
Why now?
Something was wrong. There was no way these two would go to the trouble of linking minds just to exchange pleasantries.
He was still turning that over when an answer came back — one he could not possibly take lightly.
"We have to deliver what Kyle left behind."
...I'm sorry, what?
"Kyle? What did he leave behind?"
"Wait, you don't know? We heard you recently made contact with Yelena and Evrah."
"You didn't hear anything from the two of them?"
Lee Jun nodded silently. His head was too much of a tangle to manage words.
"Hmm... Don't tell me he only left it with us?"
"Kyle? Why would he?"
"How should I know."
The two plushies glanced at each other, tilting their heads in shared confusion. Apparently they weren't entirely certain of things themselves.
Lee Jun had never heard that Kyle left any message behind. Diablo had been the one partnered with him at the end. But Lee Jun, who had watched Kyle's final moments with his own eyes, never heard mention of any parting words left for him either. The dying man had only sent word that Arcana's story ended here.
So of course he was curious.
What could Kyle have said to these two before he died?
"......"
"......"
But the two of them stopped talking and merely exchanged glances for a moment. Then they nodded to each other and spoke.
"It seems our timelines have drifted a little."
"They do. So what do we do, Siara?"
"In that case... Kyle said to just give him the hints. So that's what we'll do."
"Right. I think so too."
What?
Hints?
"Hold on — you're not going to tell me?"
"Kyle made us promise."
"What the hell does that mean? Talk so I can understand!"
Lee Jun's voice rose without him meaning it to. Was this some kind of joke? They dragged themselves all the way into his head, and now they wouldn't even tell him properly?
If he were never going to know at all, fine. But dangling a mystery in front of him and then walking away — what kind of sick game was that?
"Nothing we can do. We're sworn on an oath, you see."
"I'm sorry, Oppa. We can't unmake ourselves to break it."
"Ha..."
But apparently they weren't finished.
The two plushies exchanged another look and nodded.
"Then we'll give you the hints."
"Kyle left three, to start."
To start — that phrasing. Once they learned he hadn't been left anything through Yelena or Evrah, they must have realized the message they carried might be all there was.
And with that, the rabbit and the bear began to speak in turn.
"First — he told you to find the Ant Nest."
The Ant Nest.
"Second — he said to find the space Kyle left behind."
A space.
The Ant Nest was almost certainly the one Lee Jun already knew about. And the space... had to be the Artificial Space he'd entrusted to Freya. In other words, he was supposed to pinpoint its exact location.
"......"
Lee Jun chewed it over in silence.
Watching his quiet, the rabbit plushie scratched its cheek and added, a little sheepishly:
"We don't actually know where the Ant Nest is, so..."
"No, I know that one."
The plushie flinched at his words and muttered under its breath.
"...Knew it. It's Jun, all right."
"See? I told you he'd know. Our Oppa knows everything."
"Tch... Nobody said he wouldn't."
The two plushies began bickering.
So they were still like this. It was, oddly, a nostalgic sight.
But this was no time to be getting sentimental. Later for that. First things first — he needed to decode Kyle's hints.
"Whew..."
Lee Jun let out a long breath and organized his thoughts.
"Look, Siara. Oppa's gone into detective mode again."
"Don't give it a childish name. Thinking mode... you should call it thinking mode."
"......"
What were these brats even doing?
Anyway.
Hint number one: find the Ant Nest. Already done — though for the life of him he couldn't figure out how Kyle knew the place existed.
Then was the Ant Nest something he arranged?
It was possible. The Arcana relics scattered across each floor, the fact that Kyle somehow knew about a place that hadn't even been discovered back then... In that case, "find it" might not mean simply confirming its location, but retrieving something hidden inside.
...This time, I really do have to push through to the third floor.
He'd have to clear it alone if he had to, leaving nothing to chance. Or... ask the Technical Director for help again, maybe.
And the space...
He'd already probed every candidate location where the Artificial Space could function. But among the places in Korea connected to Lee Jun...
Could it be there?
The place where he first met Kyle. The site of the gate incident — that very place.
But... that area was completely razed...
The Artificial Space demanded perfect alignment in a precise location. Width, depth, height — everything had to match exactly. Only by placing it in a flawless spot and turning the key would it open, so Kyle would never have chosen an outdoor site prone to terrain changes.
"......"
But this was Kyle they were talking about.
It wouldn't be strange at all if he'd deliberately twisted things twice over and picked exactly such a place. And that man... rated Lee Jun absurdly highly. He'd probably believed that no matter how cruelly he rigged it, Lee Jun would figure it out in the end.
"...You absolute lunatic."
Would it have killed him to just make it easy? Making a man do everything twice over. Genuinely unbelievable.
Having reached his conclusions, Lee Jun clicked his tongue in irritation — mid-thought, all of it spilling out loud.
The two plushies watched him and started whispering to each other.
"Ooh... Oppa's talking to himself again."
"Mm. Ara's right. He's picked up a strange habit."
"Hey."
Regardless, the picture was sorted.
Easy or hard — he had a lead on both. That much could be counted as good news, more or less.
Which left...
"Time to hear the last one, I suppose."
The third hint.
But the two plushies' reaction turned distinctly lukewarm.
"That one..."
"We don't know."
The rabbit avoided Lee Jun's gaze, while the bear simply smiled and met his eyes head-on.
What do you mean, you don't know?
"Then how do you know there are three hints?"
"Because Kyle left one with each of us."
"And the last hint — Jeanne has it."
"......"
That complicated things.
Jeanne was... an especially delicate matter.
"Tch."
The first two had been about places. So the third would probably follow the same vein. Of course, there was every chance it was something else entirely.
"...Speculation is pointless, then."
He'd have to hear it from the source. These two showed no inclination of going out and finding anything on their own, after all.
"Haah... I suppose I'll have to reach out to her."
The moment those words left his mouth—
something he could not afford to ignore popped out of the two plushies.
"Oh, don't worry about that."
"Jeanne's already on her way."
Had he misheard that?
"...What?"
But his faint, hopeful echo was met with an answer that shattered every last shred of that hope.
"She's headed for Korea."
"And we're coming with her, of course!"
"......"
What the hell is wrong with you people?
"Did you deliver the message properly?"
"Yep, no problem at all."
"Oppa made such a shocked face!"
"I see."
Inside an airplane bound for somewhere far away, a girl with orange hair was chatting with the plushies.
"...It really has been a long time. This land, too."
"It has, hasn't it?"
"What is it? Feeling nostalgic?"
Empty blue eyes that gave no clue what they were looking at. Their gaze drifted past the window, tracing the clouds beyond.
"...No. Not at all."
The girl gave a small nod and closed her eyes again.
Calm, impassive, unmoved by anything under heaven — a girl as still and quiet as a single stalk of a plant... was riding a plane through the sky.
Bound for Korea.
Chapter 2 — Complete.
To Be Continued?