Sun, Moon, and Stars (1)
Lee Jun's room.
Jeanne sat quietly on the bed, taking stock of her surroundings.
"So this is what your room looks like, Oppa."
"It's nothing special."
"It smells like you, somehow."
"...Well, obviously. It's my room."
And with that, she went about burying her nose in the blanket, pressing her palms deep into the mattress, and seating Siara and Timothy side by side on the pillow...
No, seriously, what is she doing?
"You're still as spacey as ever."
"Were you hoping I'd changed?"
"No."
Nothing about her had changed at all — which, if anything, was a relief.
Jeanne, Siara, Timothy. All of them.
"Um... can we talk now?"
"Yeah. I've got the soundproofing on."
"Haah... I thought I was going to die of boredom!"
The moment Lee Jun finished speaking, the two dolls began hopping around the room.
Apparently, in order to keep from moving at all, they had to loosen their connection to the dolls for a while. Doing that dulled their senses, they said — left them feeling like they were just tied down and left to sit there.
Lee Jun knew nothing about that sort of thing, so all he could think was that it must have been suffocating.
"Anyway. There are two things I need to hear from you."
"One would be what happened in Lyon recently, I take it?"
"And the other is the hint Kyle left behind."
"Perceptive as always."
The moment the two dolls finished speaking, Lee Jun turned his gaze to Jeanne.
Both of those matters required her input, after all.
"Let's start with what happened in France."
Going by what Timothy had just said, something had gone down in Lyon.
He had a rough idea why.
Lyon was... where the French Hunter Association's headquarters stood.
"Was it a terror attack over there too? Or an assassination, like in Russia?"
"An assassination."
"So they were targeting someone high up in the Association. If they attempted it that openly, it could tip over into outright terrorism before long."
But Jeanne slowly shook her head.
So Lee Jun's guess had been wrong.
"The target wasn't someone from the Association?"
"No."
"Then..."
Ah.
It clicked.
A hunter with real influence in France — and a target an assassin might plausibly succeed against.
"It was you."
She nodded once.
That had to be the reason Jeanne had come all the way to Korea in person.
"Honestly, I didn't want to come. I thought I'd only be a burden."
"No, I'm glad you did. Yelena told you to come here, right?"
"Yes."
Liberation would almost certainly never chase Jeanne all the way to Korea.
Because... that one attack would have made the gap between them brutally clear.
"Just out of curiosity — what happened to the assassins?"
"I dealt with all of them. I couldn't get a proper read on the situation at the time, so I wasn't able to leave any alive, but I'm unharmed."
"Good. That's a relief."
"Were you worried about me?"
"...It's not really my place to worry about you, but yeah. I guess I was."
"I see."
Worried. What a pointless notion, really.
He couldn't imagine Jeanne being bested by anyone short of a Liberation executive.
The Liberator rank would never move personally, so if anything, his worry was that the fools who'd lunged at her had died too painlessly.
Or more precisely — not for those bastards, but for the poor souls who'd have to clean up the mess.
Blood was such a pain to wash out.
"She's that strong? I don't really get that vibe."
There isn't a single weak hunter in Arcana.
"Except for you, that is."
True.
People like him couldn't keep up with them even at a dead sprint.
"Hmph. You concede too easily. It's boring."
Because of the air she gave off, Jeanne didn't exactly look like a powerhouse.
Which was why the Liberation goons had probably thought she was worth a shot.
But soft-looking or not, this girl was an awakener who ranked within Arcana's top five in combat strength.
Granted, that was counting Siara and Timothy as part of the package — but that, too, was an extension of Jeanne's ability.
In other words, she was not someone mere Liberation fodder could hope to touch.
'And her ability itself is... devastating.'
Number seventeen of Arcana — The Star.
Jeanne d'Arc Bernadotte.
Her unique ability was... necromancy.
More precisely, the power to grant souls to objects.
"How does that translate to fighting?"
Simple.
Jeanne could stuff any soul she liked into any object around her.
Weapons, of course — but also trees, boulders, even the smallest pebble.
And without any limit on quantity.
Her usual method was to pour monster souls into the surrounding terrain and let them run completely rampant. The more drifting souls there were, the stronger she became.
"...That's absurdly broken."
Still, it wasn't without weaknesses.
The caster couldn't directly control the souls, and handling ones too powerful put a strain on Jeanne herself. And while the odds were vanishingly slim, in a place with no souls at all, she'd be helpless.
Then again, since killing a single enemy supplied her with a fresh soul, that could hardly be called a real drawback.
Jeanne had always had excellent reflexes, letting her respond well to any situation.
And her current prowess came from applying a fundamentally non-combat ability in creative ways everywhere she could.
In its raw form, the power was useless in a fight, after all.
"Fascinating ability."
Just as he was exchanging a few words with Silhouette, Jeanne stepped briskly up to Lee Jun and spoke.
"Um, Oppa?"
Those hazy blue-gray eyes were right in front of him.
"Ah, sorry. I was thinking about something else for a second."
"Is it because of that spirit-like being inside your head?"
"Hm... Yelena told you?"
"Yes."
He hadn't exactly asked her to keep it secret, but... he hadn't expected her to spill it that fast.
Somewhere, he could almost hear a certain mage's voice.
—Fufufu, there are no secrets between comrades, you know?
"......"
Damn you, Yelena.
That mouth of yours.
"Of course, I don't just know because I was told."
"Huh?"
"I can see it. A little. Inside your head."
"Uh... what?"
Sensing that Lee Jun hadn't quite followed, Jeanne raised both hands and curled them into a circle.
Roughly a bit larger than Lee Jun's fist.
Holding up the ring she'd made, she said:
"There's a black sphere about that size."
Cute... no, hold on.
"In my head?"
"Yes."
Jeanne didn't have X-ray vision... did she?
No — that wasn't how it worked, surely. Even if she could see through a skull, all she'd get was bone and brain matter.
"Are you seeing it with your soul-sense?"
"Yes. To be precise, I feel it. And yet it's also as if I'm seeing it with my eyes... I find it a little strange myself."
Having said that, Jeanne added one more thing in a tone of complete certainty — an unusually forceful expression for her, one he almost never saw.
"That soul is deeply sinister. I think it should be removed. Someday."
"Ha! Who does she think she is, telling me to get removed? I don't like her."
"I don't like you either."
"......?"
Apparently she could hear.
"Wh-what is she?! What the hell?!"
"What do you mean, what. It's Jeanne."
The moment she kept answering Silhouette's remarks as if they were perfectly ordinary, Silhouette couldn't take it anymore and revealed herself.
Not in her usual palm-sized form, but as an ordinary human silhouette.
That, too, was an extremely rare occurrence.
Apart from the times she was alone with Lee Jun... he was fairly certain this was the first time she'd shown herself like this to anyone else.
"What — how the hell are you seeing and hearing me?!"
"Why would I tell you?"
"This thing keeps talking back..."
Whoosh—
This time, Jeanne turned her head away entirely.
Was she refusing to engage?
Lee Jun found it adorable, but... setting that aside, it was a reaction he'd never seen from Jeanne before.
Silhouette clenched her fists, trembling — then vanished down into the shadows.
So she chose flight.
Well, hardly anyone could win a war of words against Jeanne.
After all, Jeanne never fought anyone who wasn't in the wrong.
"I didn't do anything wrong!"
Yeah, yeah.
Just let it go.
"That aside — I've never seen you talk like that before."
"Neither have I... I think that's the first time in my life I've spoken that way. Why did I do that?"
"Tch... why do you think? Because you've got no manners."
"I do have manners. That evil spirit auntie is just so awful that the words came out on their own."
"......"
Hold it in.
"Seriously... that little..."
Getting angry means she wins.
She's pure-hearted, so she wasn't saying it with any malice.
"Hoo..."
Plus, wasn't she right?
Three hundred years old, and all.
Grandma in everything but name.
"...If you ever get sleep paralysis, it'll be me sitting on your chest."
"If you do anything bad to Oppa, I'll send you straight to the afterlife."
Jeanne said this while attempting a stern expression.
Except... because she was simply reproducing a learned expression without any feeling behind it, what came out was something oddly vacant.
He suspected she was the only one who believed that counted as stern.
"Look... let's just leave the Silhouette topic here for now."
It wasn't what they'd originally sat down to discuss, anyway.
That said, Lee Jun remained bothered by it.
It was extremely rare for Jeanne to speak up like this.
It wasn't a matter of word choice but of tone. Normally she didn't go around calling things strange or sinister.
For her to press the point this hard meant she was somehow sensing Silhouette's true nature.
After all, this girl... had done something that got her sealed inside a gate.
Silhouette couldn't remember it exactly, but she knew she'd been sealed away.
'I should... look into that later.'
He still remembered the murals he'd seen inside that gate.
He'd have to ask Freya about them — she was from Nezer, after all.
Anyway.
The Silhouette matter ended there.
Back to the main topic.
"So — you think your assassination attempt is connected to what happened in Russia?"
"That's right. At least, that's what Yelena thinks."
The two dolls, who had been watching until now, nodded along.
"That's how it feels to us, too."
"It's not that the methods are similar or anything... but the timing lines up, so it's hard to draw any other conclusion."
"What's the same is that they don't hesitate even when S-Class is involved."
Touching an S-Class hunter was a genuinely serious escalation.
Liberation had never been this bold before.
He had no idea what trigger in this regression had set it off, but... it was absolutely not a good development.
This was the point in the timeline where they should be probing with petty incidents, feeling out the waters...
'Why?'
But no matter how he turned it over, he had no answer for now.
Far too few clues.
Even rifling through his memories of Liberation from previous regressions, he didn't know much about their activities during this period.
They hadn't surfaced back then, so there was nothing to know.
'Either they have a reason to become this bold... or they have a reason they can become this bold.'
Of the two... he prayed it wasn't the latter.
Because that would mean they'd grown strong enough to lay hands on S-Class — or acquired a backer powerful enough to smooth things over after doing so.
"Well... okay, that's settled. While you're all staying here, let's chew on this one gradually."
With no leads at the moment, racking his brain would only get him so far.
So whether it was Yelena or the French Hunter Association, his only real option was to wait until someone brought back something useful.
In the meantime, Jeanne would stay here, and they'd keep an eye on Liberation's movements.
"Then I suppose I should hear the other one."
The other matter.
Jeanne nodded.
"The hint Captain Kyle left behind."
"Right. I already got the other two from these two, so I need to hear what you know as well."
"Understood."
And then, from her lips —
came words that could not have been more unexpected.
"He said: gather Arcana once more. That is the message he asked me to deliver."
"......"
What... why?
"Gather Arcana again. Prepare for the calamity to come. Captain Kyle made it unmistakably clear."
Having heard it all, Lee Jun... had no choice but to be stunned.