Just Promise Me One Thing
I had gained a great deal lately.
Even counting only the tangible benefits, that would have been true enough — but what I had truly obtained was something else entirely: rest for my heart, for my mind.
Good deeds coming back like a boomerang and forging a new bond — that, too. But above all, the most important thing was this: meeting her, the most genuinely good person I knew. That alone accounted for the lion's share of it.
To put it with a touch of exaggeration, she was something like a sun to me.
Which is why today, I was able to wave first.
“Hey, Robin.”
“...Hello. Greeting me first? Now there's something you don't see every day.”
Sitting in our usual spot, the purple-haired woman made no effort to hide her displeasure at being beaten to the punch. It was a signal that she was annoyed.
The corner of her mouth was certainly tilted upward in a sly curve, but she was unmistakably seething. I could tell because I'd spent no small amount of time watching her up close.
“Look who's back, Robin.”
“I'm not 'back.' This is how it always is.”
Looking closer, I saw that Robin was clutching a kitchen knife from who knows where. A slight tremor in her grip came free of charge.
She gripped it. Released it. Gripped it again. I had no idea why she kept repeating this meaningless motion, and I didn't particularly want to ask — especially not when she looked as thoroughly foul-tempered as she did now.
“Anyway. Did you have a good time?”
“...With what?”
“Oh, come on. You looked like the happiest man alive. Guess playing around must have been fun — for everyone but me.”
It felt like a subject had gone missing from her sentence, but I understood well enough. I'd only interacted with two people yesterday, and it was obvious as day which one she meant.
“...Don't look at me like that. It wasn't because of that.”
“Want me to do it for you too? Remember this: you are good not because you compromised your line, but because you know how to compromise.”
Just like her yesterday, she placed a hand over her own chest first. The motion that followed matched her words perfectly, without a single error.
The same gesture reached toward me. It didn't land the same way.
“...Stop it.”
“Nice words alone don't make a person whole. You can coddle yourself like a hothouse flower all you want, but this is the wild, and look how far that's going to get you.”
“...Calm down first. I know what you mean.”
She pressed in like an interrogator. The boundless space that had spread out behind us seemed to vanish, and somehow I felt cornered against a wall.
Her softly smiling eyes curved like crescent moons — but that was a crawling moon. Approach it just because it glowed, and you might well be devoured on the spot.
“...I suppose I will.”
A long, deep sigh. Naturally, it was hers.
“So. What did you do with your break?”
“The usual. I was heading off to rest when I ran into someone in trouble, helped them out, and that was that.”
“Good deeds even unto death, huh. You really can't let them go.”
“...Is that a problem?”
Her voice sounded almost scolding, and I faltered for a moment.
“No, it just looks good on you.”
But she had a voice in reserve that could fluster me far more. I blinked, speechless.
Because that radiant smile brought yesterday's her to mind.
“...Still, I got a full day's rest. I can finally see what I need to do.”
“Oh? So you've finally figured out how you're going to use me?”
“...That's a dangerous topic. Don't bring it up so carelessly — your phrasing included.”
“Honestly, you need to work on your self-consciousness a little. Who's going to pay attention to us here? And even if we talk like this, how many people would actually understand?”
I glanced around. Just as she said, not a single soul was looking our way.
Well, of course. This place had always been like that.
“Still, they say walls have ears.”
“Wow, Zeo, you even know proverbs like that? Impressive~”
And with that she poked me in the side, teasing. Thankfully, her mood seemed to have thawed a little.
“So — shall we go somewhere with fewer people around?”
“You have things to say to a woman, do you? How sly of you.”
“...Let's just go. Quickly.”
Ignoring the nonsense was always the best policy.
“Here's the conclusion. Your abilities and mine are clearly above this organization's average — but even so, two people aren't enough.”
“I was planning to bring it up myself if you hadn't said anything by tomorrow. So you do have that much sense after all? Good.”
A short span of time, but the conclusion of deep deliberation nonetheless. The cards currently in my hand were precious things, and their value would be decided by how I chose to play them.
The Guild Master's weakness — known to no one in the entire Underground City. That was my trump card.
“So? Are you willing to share that hand with me?”
“Of course. I'll walk you through it from the top.”
“The plan's more or less finished already.”
“I've got a rough blueprint drawn up. The problem is I lack the means to refine it.”
The design was sketched out. The wretched inability to shape it was all that troubled me.
Which was exactly why I was putting our heads together with her. Robin had plenty of things I didn't.
“Okay, explain it to me first. I'll judge after I hear it.”
“It's... like I said before. When the Guild Master shows herself in person, I'll expose her secret.”
“And what secret is that?”
“Then, one question. What image do you have of the Guild Master?”
I quietly closed my eyes. The atmosphere of the room began to shift, slowly. It was around then that the corners of Robin's mouth began drawing an amused line.
“Leader of an armed force in the Underground. Owner of absolute martial power. A tycoon with overwhelming information networks.”
“Good. Sixty-six points.”
“Sixty-six?”
“It means one of those three is wrong.”
Even Robin, clever as she was, couldn't manage a perfect score on this subject — a fault entirely owed to the Guild Master, who hid herself so stubbornly and completely.
“I'll correct your wrong answer, so listen carefully. And never, ever breathe a word of this to anyone.”
What followed was a single simple sentence — but I knew this was information someone had traded their life to obtain.
And because it was the first time I'd ever laid my only Joker on the table for someone else to see, I swallowed dryly.
Zeo's notebook. The truth written on its final page. Information about the Guild Master's ability.
“The Guild Master's true power is Illusion — magic that projects illusions onto her target.”
“...Illusion?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. Her actual strength is so feeble that you or I could subdue her with one hand — she simply hides that fact behind hallucinations.”
I steadied my breath for a moment.
“And that's also how I can explain why she holds our weaknesses in her grasp.”
“...Keep going.”
Unlike a moment ago, Robin's voice sank noticeably lower. With no reason to hold back, I raised my own voice in turn and pressed on with greater focus.
“I said she shows illusions, right? The truly terrifying part of that magic is that it can reveal the thing a person fears most.”
“...Ah.”
“So the Guild Master can seize a person's weakness almost instantly, and uses it as leverage to subjugate them.”
No answer came back. For a while, Robin hid both of her violet eyes.
Apparently she was synthesizing the information inside her own private world, sorting and arranging it.
I waited quietly for her to return to reality.
“I see... I tried assuming everything you said was true, and none of the puzzle pieces I hold clash with it. If anything, they fit together too neatly.”
“...You believe me, then?”
“Of course. You're too guileless to deceive anyone — you only know how to help people. If someone like you went to this much trouble, then whether it's true or not, believing you is simply good manners.”
“...”
It somehow felt like a dismissal, but the fact remained that she trusted my word, so I didn't press the point.
It would have been a lie to say it didn't sting a little, though.
“So — since the Guild Master's strength is weak, you'll just lop off her head in an instant?”
“No. She'll have guards around her for certain, and if we're careless, we could get caught up in the illusions ourselves.”
“Then what? What's the plan?”
“Our goal is the Guild Master's head either way — but we won't treat success as a given.”
Robin made an exasperated face for a moment. I ignored it and continued.
“The instant her attention wavers, the Guild Master will almost certainly deploy her illusion magic. And that's when I—”
I stretched out my hand. A strange yellow current surged outward, alien and unfamiliar, and Robin watched my mana with evident interest.
“—disrupt it?”
“I've been pouring time into practice every single day.”
This was the crux of it. I would forcibly expand the illusion meant for the attacker and stretch it to cover everyone present.
“The scene will descend into chaos, and the Guild Master, unable to control her own rampaging magic, won't be able to cast anything else. If she tries to force it, I'll interfere.”
“Right. And then you take her head?”
This time I answered nothing — only nodded. Robin wore an unreadable expression, then shortly lowered her head and spoke.
“It's still full of holes. I could point out more flaws than I can count.”
“...”
“But I can feel the effort you put in, so I'll be nice. You built this around your conviction — 'in the end, I can't kill a person with my own hands.' Can't be helped. It was written under that constraint from the very start.”
Somehow, those words pierced deep.
Because I was forced to confront it all over again: unable to kill with my own hands, I would borrow someone else's instead.
But what of it? I'd already made my compromise.
“Good work. What I heard today was quite the shock, so let me think it over on my own for a while — I'll get back to you about it later.”
She smiled and thumped me on the back. A hand reaching up from below, but it landed with a solid, honest thunk.
“Now then, since we're heading out together anyway — tell me in detail what you got up to yesterday. I'm curious.”
“...? We're going out together today?”
“We made it this far, didn't we?”
Robin's words stopped exactly there — but I heard the rest loud and clear.
What, and? Do you not want to?
I'd simply seen too many variations of that pattern. I quietly conceded and took a step forward.
“Fine. Should've said so from the start.”
Only then did she break into a beaming grin — one that unsettled me just slightly, but I didn't push her away. I'd been leaning on her a lot lately, after all.
And then, replaying yesterday in my head, I searched for the most pleasant memory I had.
No matter how deeply I dug, within the bounds of what I could tell without souring her mood, there was really only one story worth telling.
“First of all, I ran into the person I'd helped before and got thanked all over again. That's what stuck with me most.”
With my eyes closed, I painted her — yesterday's her. Rize Valles.
The woman whose life my small kindness had directly saved. The one whose mere presence helped me find my answer about the road I was walking.
And, peculiarly vivid in my memory, the—
“Those crimson eyes, redder than blood, and that impossibly gleaming golden hair. They really left an impression on me.”
“...What?”
Silence followed. Robin's face stiffened in an instant. Startled, I stopped in my tracks too.
“...What's wrong all of a sudden?”
“...No, wait. Hold on, stop for a second.”
Her unprecedentedly hard-edged tone stunned me more than anything else had all day, and left me thoroughly flustered — I even caught myself taking a step back.
Even the way she muttered quietly to herself sent chills down my spine. She soon arrived at some private conclusion all on her own, and krk, ground her teeth together.
It was probably no illusion that the air around us had dropped a few degrees.
“...Idiot girl. You should have probed more thoroughly when you had the chance.”
Thud. She stamped her foot hard, as if seething with frustration. So violent was the surge of emotion that the floor was visibly dented where she struck it.
“What on earth is going on? Say someth—”
“No, I'll handle this myself. You just...”
Watching her rake her fingers roughly back through her hair only amplified the dread coiling in my gut. Everything tangled together in a knot, and I couldn't even begin to understand which part of it displeased her.
But then — smooth as you please — she closed the distance until she was close enough to kiss, and took my hand in hers.
“Zeo. Promise me one thing.”
“What is wrong with you today?”
“Don't ask questions. Just understand. Please.”
That uncharacteristic, pleading desperation only scrambled my thoughts further.
Our joined hands were trembling, ever so faintly.
“Never again. Absolutely never. No matter what happens—”
And then, one last time, she tilted her face up toward me. The violet had bloomed to its fullest — a full moon now.
Her voice, her actions, her very self — all of it carried an impossible, aching persuasive force.
“Don't ever see that woman again.”
Before I knew it, I was nodding along, giving her my assent — but all the while, a stray thought drifted apart from that nod.
Had I ever once called that person a woman?