The Three Female Knights' First Shared Signal Did Not Wait for My Next Command

Even after midnight had passed, the four of us did not fall asleep right away. There was still something to settle before our bodies would let us rest.

Karin passed around a cup of water, Eva handed out damp towels, and Sophie went from one to another, asking whether each person's stop signal had been respected.

"Every single one was."

"I stopped things once — and I was the one who started them again."

"And when I said I didn't feel like laughing, no one asked me why."

Only after all three had confirmed it did we move on to the next question.

"Could it be used in combat too, keyed to Do-hyun's voice?" Karin asked again.

At Level 3, Non-Contact Suggestion could deliver one short sentence to all three of them at once, provided they stood close by. But the Queen Consort had forbidden group linking until she granted separate approval — and testing it in a private room to report only the results ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠afterward would have turned that ban inside out.

"Linking the three of your minds to one another is out of the question. We have no approval from the Queen Consort, and we don't yet know what dangers it carries."

"Then what about each of us learning the same signal separately?"

Instead of answering Karin right away, I wrote down the difference.

"If it's the second one, a minimum-output test falls within the scope of the individual sentences you've already approved. Even then, it stays in effect only until the morning review."

"But if you collapse, Do-hyun, none of us can use the signal at all," Sophie pointed out.

"Which is exactly why it can't be bound to my voice alone. In the end, any one of the four of us has to be able to send it, by the method we've all agreed on. It won't rank above a king's orders or a commander's — and my judgment isn't always right, either."

Together, we composed the sentence.

The three of them reworked the sentence many times over. Karin struck out 'I obey.' Eva changed 'I am safe' to 'I steady my breath.' Sophie made certain that 'each decides for herself' went in at the very end.

Before applying anything, we ran the same test with no power at all. When I said 'Halt' in a perfectly ordinary voice, Karin's eyes went straight to her surroundings, Eva checked my expression, and Sophie's body stiffened, costing her a full breath. Without those baseline reactions on record, we would never know what actually changed once the ability was in place.

"Tell me, one at a time — when you hear the sentence, what do you do?"

"Confirm the entrances and my comrades." — Karin

"Before I smile to make it look like I'm fine, I check my own breathing." — Eva

"The soles of my feet, where I am, and the nearest exit." — Sophie

One signal — and it forced no one into the same action.

With the agreement complete, I applied Common Sense Alteration to them one at a time. While one of them was being worked on, the ability stayed closed to the other two, and between applications I checked for residual mana and the state of their memories.

For Karin: a reaction that, on hearing a command, rechecked her surroundings instead of freezing.

For Eva: a reaction that found her own breath first, before smiling to reassure her comrades.

For Sophie: an exception that used only the single agreed word 'Halt' — not a man's voice in general — as her anchor to the present.

Once the first application was done, I asked each of them the others' names and the conversation we had just shared. Nothing was missing. Karin's anxiety did not bleed into Eva, and none of Sophie's past scenes surfaced before the other two.

"Now I understand exactly why we're not calling this linking," Eva said.

"We're hearing the same bell — we're not becoming the same ear."

The test began with the lowest stimulus we could devise. I clapped my hands once and said 'Halt.'

Karin checked the doorway and her two comrades. Eva let out a long exhale instead of smiling. Sophie looked down at her own footing, not at my hand.

All three looked at me — and not one of them waited for my next command.

The immediate responses sat exactly within the intended range. Even so, I didn't call it a success. We still had to know whether a reaction that had worked once in a quiet room would hold in battle, and whether it might misfire in the middle of ordinary conversation.

Next came the misfire test. Even if I used the word 'Halt' inside ordinary conversation, no body was supposed to lock up. The trigger condition had to include the intent that travels with a panic response.

"The carriage halted."

No one reacted.

"Halt the training."

Only Karin glanced at my face, then settled back comfortably.

If I chose the order of the trials myself, I could pull out whatever results I wanted. So Karin wrote the six test conditions on six slips of paper and folded them.

Sophie shuffled the slips, and Eva drew them one at a time. I never saw the order.

In the first random trial, Eva suddenly lowered her voice.

"Halt."

Karin checked the entrances; Sophie, her footing. Eva herself took one steadying breath. The signal worked even without my voice behind it.

"And the next action?" When I asked, Karin shook her head.

"Right now Eva has to report the situation first. This isn't a test of waiting for your next order."

Only after Eva reported 'Test — no danger' did the three of them let the tension go.

In the second, Karin tucked 'Halt' into an ordinary training plan. Nobody reacted for more than a single breath. It took more than the word — the situation and the emergency intent had to be there with it.

For the loud-noise test, we announced in advance that it would happen once sometime in the next ten minutes. Only the exact moment stayed hidden. So that replaying the past or startling them wouldn't become the point in itself, the stimulus was limited to a single metal cup.

I put out the lamp and threw the metal cup against the floor. Clang. The instant all three bodies tensed together, I sent the signal.

"Halt."

Karin checked the doorway, Eva her two comrades, Sophie her footing. One breath later, Karin spoke first.

"No danger. One cup."

Eva relit the lamp, and Sophie took hold of Karin's arm — on her own, not my hand. The signal had worked, and the next action lay outside my control.

Under the fourth condition, only Karin closed her eyes and called up the metallic ring of the warehouse where Tae-hyun had died. Eva and Sophie stayed calm. Karin sent the emergency signal first.

"Halt."

All three took a breath — but Eva's judgment and Sophie's were not dragged down into her panic. The two of them told Karin where they were and checked the exits. It was not a linkage sharing one woman's fear; it was a structure in which each of them answered one woman's signal.

"I wavered, and the two of them didn't waver with me."

"But we didn't leave her to come back alone, either."

Eva's summary was exact.

Then came the release test. Of the three, only Sophie's sentence was briefly weakened. At the same signal her breathing quickened a little, but she stated her current position by herself.

"Even without it I can come back. With it, it's just a little faster."

That confirmed it was an aid, not a permanent dependence. Sophie would reactivate the sentence of her own will, and in one week we would retest her in a fully deactivated state.

"Do I really have to keep it for the whole week?"

"No. If you find yourself hating it tomorrow morning, I switch it off right then. The week isn't a duty to maintain it — it's only the latest recheck date if it's still there."

Sophie took the record sheet and corrected the wording herself, from 'maintenance period' to 'maximum review deadline.'

When the tests were over, the three of them talked through how they would explain this training to Tae-hyun. Karin said she was, only now, carrying out his order to survive. Eva said that she could finally stay at her comrades' sides without having to laugh. Sophie summed it up as the start of practicing trust in her own choice instead of a man's hand.

"He wanted us kept alive. He never asked for us to be made the same."

At Sophie's words, I changed the record's title — and beneath it, Karin added a line of her own.

Eva said that in the next training she wanted to be the one to shout 'Halt.' Sophie requested a scenario where smoke cut off their line of sight. Karin turned both proposals into the actual training order.

An agreement that had begun in a bed was turning into the draft of a knight order's manual.

On a desk at the far side of the room sat the royal sealing box — the box holding the original black tablet.

After the tablet had been handed over to the Royal Investigation Office, five days of testing its material, its heat, and its mana responses had turned up neither a known workshop nor a known spellcraft. Elena sent the original back to see whether it would react to me or to anything near a Level 3 ability. The conditions were three: do not open the seal; do not touch it with bare hands; and if it reacts, stop using your ability at once and log the time on the royal recording stone.

The box's lid held a narrow crystal window for viewing the interior, and beside it stood the recording stone the royal chronicler had installed at dusk. This was not dangerous evidence smuggled into a bedroom — officially, a passive observation trial was in progress.

I was sorting through the record of the three women's shared signal when a red glow seeped out from behind the crystal window.

"Nobody touch it."

Karin was the first to freeze every movement. I deactivated at once every shared-signal sentence carried by the three of them. Eva checked the clock and called out the time; Sophie confirmed whether the red marker on the recording stone had lit.

The black tablet inside the box. Of its thirteen lines, only the first had lit red. It held for the space of three breaths, then faded slowly away.

The seal had not broken. The surface of the box had not changed temperature, and not one person in the room had laid a hand on the tablet.

"Could you see the cause with Memory Reading?" Eva asked.

"There is no mind in that tablet to read. Casting the ability on it would not draw out an answer — it would only lay my guesses over an object that holds nothing."

I could not directly read or alter something without a mind. Instead, I brought out the memories I had read while Belka was alive, and the record I had written that night.

What was certainly written in the field record was 'when one bowl empties, the next bowl comes.' But the moment I saw that red line, another voice — one I had failed to catch back then — surfaced in my memory.

"Did you write that in the report that day too?" At Sophie's question, I went back through the record.

"No. It's surfacing for the first time right now."

"Then we can't know whether it's a true memory or an association born from seeing the tablet."

"Exactly."

I entered the new sentence not in the facts column but in the box marked 'delayed recall — low reliability.' A past memory could not be promoted to clear evidence merely because it happened to overlap with what had just happened.

Karin proposed postponing tomorrow's training on the spot. Eva suggested recreating the same conditions to compare reactions — then quickly took her own words back.

"No. If we repeat it, we don't know what comes after the first line. We must not do that without the Queen Consort's approval."

Sophie proposed making three separate copies of the tablet's shape and the position that had glowed — not keepsakes to divide among them, but a method in which each of the three drew what she had seen independently, and the chronicler compared the results.

In Karin's drawing, the first line reddened from left to right; Eva remembered it spreading out from the center. Sophie wrote that she couldn't be sure of the direction. Watching the same scene, their observations still differed — and all three differences were left standing exactly as recorded.

The hypotheses for observation were split three ways as well. One: the act of applying the same emergency signal to three people had triggered the reaction. Two: other conditions — the midnight hour, the mana density of the room — had coincided by chance. Three: someone had activated the tablet remotely to steer our behavior. None of them could be settled tonight.

The conclusion: no further contact and no attempts at reproduction, the original kept under double seal, and the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠observation record delivered to the Queen Consort the instant the sun rose. After the red light vanished, there was no reaction of any kind.

If the mastermind was watching our reactions, then from this point on we would record right up to the limits of that watching, too. For the first time, the three women who had been counted as prey took their places on the hunter's side of the trail.

At one in the morning, the four of us lay back down together. The intimacy continued, but no one turned what came next into an obligation. Kisses and hands drifted between us, and whenever one of them began to nod off, we all slowed down.

Karin, pillowed on my arm, said, "Let's test it properly at the training ground tomorrow. Three wooden swords — and smoke bombs, too."

"As combat training, not counseling?"

"We're knights, after all. Safety that exists only in bed is only half a safety."

Eva agreed, and Sophie set the hour — dusk, rather than morning.

"But the shared sentence gets ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠switched back on only after the Queen Consort's review. Tomorrow we match words and movements alone ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠— no ability."

"On the condition that we don't provoke another reaction from the tablet," Karin confirmed.

"Yes. We'll bring in the chronicler and the safety officer as well."

The three of them rewrote the next training schedule with their own hands.

The black tablet stayed exactly where it was, inside the royal sealing box. At sunrise the chronicler would collect the original and the recording stone together, and the patterns the three had drawn would not be kept as personal property either — each one sealed and handed over as comparison material.

One-fifteen in the morning. Only once the desk stood empty of the dangerous thing, and we had kept our distance accordingly, did we return to the bed.

Sophie, who had spent some fifteen minutes steadying her breathing, was the first to sit up. Her silver eyes grew sharp again beneath the candlelight.

"...Do-hyun. There's one more thing I'd like to try."

The mastermind's tablet slept on inside its box — but the night of the three female knights was not yet over.