Painting With Light
'I'm leaving now. Will you be all right on your own?'
'Are you worrying about me right now? How sweet~'
'Don't joke around. Just go.'
'Forget it. I've found something I'd like to experiment with.'
That was my conversation with Robin from a little while ago. Under normal circumstances I would have welcomed her thoughtfulness, but for once she refused the kindness and chose solitude instead.
And with it came the directive not to come looking for her for the next few days. I didn't press the matter — after all, I was the one with the more urgent business.
"...Rize Valles."
There was a time when I'd thought Robin was the most dangerous person in the world, but now that someone worse had appeared, Robin looked positively saintly by comparison.
With an absurd little hah — the sound of air escaping, a sigh — I stepped out onto the street.
Same scenery as always. Dark, dreary, and somewhat downtrodden in atmosphere, but the gazes of those struggling to survive were striking in a way that never failed to leave an impression.
And as a bonus, a pair of black eyes was watching me.
...Hold on.
"...You."
My reaction came a beat late, but the moment I recognized it, I panicked — because I had arrived at a situation I had never anticipated in the slightest.
What followed was shock and fear blended in a careful ratio. Too ambiguous to name any color; there wasn't even time to think it through.
"...Why are you, here of all places."
I turned my head. Black — black without a speck of dust, black so absolute that anyone passing by, not just me, could feel it.
And yet a black that was uncannily clean.
I know this woman. I'd only laid eyes on her once, in passing, but because that encounter came in a moment I could never forget, she was seared into my mind like a lightning strike.
"...Chloe, right?"
The one who had been standing guard right in front of Rize's chambers at the Tocalos headquarters — the leader's personal bodyguard.
A brief silence. Even though I had spoken first, she didn't open her mouth. The strangeness of it made my face contort a little.
It didn't feel like I was facing a person at all.
"Lady Rize has given an order."
Her voice, the first I'd ever heard from her, was the same — hollow. Through no fault of my own, I came to understand the meaning of the word emptiness all the more deeply.
It felt like tossing a pebble into a cave with no visible end. The sound echoed, but not knowing how far it carried made it terrifying.
"I was ordered to stay by your side."
"...Why?"
Unable to make head or tail of it, I drew a question mark on my face with my expression. But the woman in black, Chloe, didn't so much as twitch.
"I did not ask about that. My only order was to remain at your side, that is all."
"......"
My head began to ache slightly. It was a short exchange, but I seemed to have arrived at some understanding of her essential nature — and quickly concluded that this conversation would not be an easy one to continue. I let out a sigh. Mostly, it was suffocating.
"And one more thing. She insisted I deliver this message."
"...Rize Valles did?"
"Yes. She told me to deliver this exact message to you, and to observe your reaction."
The thought of such twisted taste made my face scrunch up on its own. I answered with silence, handing the turn back to her.
She seemed to understand — all five of my senses were fixed entirely on her.
The moment her lips moved.
"Can you kill a person? — that is the message."
Thud. She struck the most tender spot, and something in me groaned.
I tried not to let it show, but my pupils, shaking as if mad, betrayed no lie. And the ash-gray eyes across from me did not miss it.
"Your reaction has been sufficiently confirmed."
Was she mocking me? A hollow laugh escaped me instead, and with it the tension drained away.
Perhaps it was simply that she had discovered a different color in a woman otherwise drenched in black.
Little by little, the proportion of fear that had welled up earlier began to settle.
"So, what's next?"
"As I said before, I was ordered to follow you, Zeo. She also instructed me to answer any question you might have, without exception."
"...And you actually intend to carry out an order like that?"
"Before I could question the content, I received the order. Therefore I carry it out."
That one line made her image crystallize. The color was black, naturally, and the metaphor was a puppet.
A puppet that could never move unless someone pulled its strings. My face twisted once more — this time not from before, but from pity, from wretchedness, from something close to sympathy.
"Even if I say I don't want you around, you won't leave?"
"Insofar as I must carry out my orders, I cannot."
Come to think of it, it was the same last time. Strange as it sounds, even at our first meeting I had felt a faint pang of pity for her.
I don't know the exact reason. But it was certain that right now, I pitied her.
So I simply stared at her, blank and still. As our eyes met quietly, my gaze drifted next to the bandages wound around her arm.
The only part of her that was white right now.
My expression had long since gone completely slack. Why was it, I wondered — that this was the moment I began to want to know more about her.
"What happened to your arm? How did you get hurt?"
"I was injured while carrying out a previous order."
"So you live doing nothing but carrying out orders? With nothing else at all?"
"That is correct."
How candid. Every line of conversation died before it could continue. I pinched the space between my brows for a moment to quell the headache.
But at the same time, a single question scattered into the air.
"Then what purpose do you live your life for?"
"...?"
No answer came back. Not out of dismissal — she simply couldn't comprehend it.
And so I realized another of her defining traits: purity.
She lived understanding nothing but commands, without ever sparing a thought for her own heart or feelings.
Not out of ignoring them — but because she had never been taught, and so could not understand.
It occurred to me that Chloe probably didn't even know what her own life meant, or what it was lived for — and that thought led, inevitably, to pity.
"...Right. Fine. Come with me, then."
"Yes, understood."
Before I knew it, I had come to feel sympathy for her.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Achromatic color refers to a shade that has no hue and no saturation — only brightness. Too ambiguous to call a color, it is closer to nothing more than the height of light. High light becomes white, low light becomes black, and the most ambiguous of all is gray. Neither one thing nor another. The one that looks most lifeless.
Then what of this woman, whose eyes held something as overcast as clouds — a woman who seemed the very embodiment of the word absence?
"Do you have any interest in clothes, perhaps? Accessories would be fine too."
"I have never particularly cared."
"You have a sword at your hip, so you seem like a swordswoman. What about that sort of thing?"
"I only use what I have been given. I have no particular interest."
"...Might I ask what you like, then?"
"I have never thought about it."
The conversation wouldn't flow. The water tried to run, but the downstream was dammed, so it simply pooled and stagnated. It was the first time in my life I'd met someone like this.
But at the very least, she didn't seem to be drawing a line.
Chloe didn't seem unwilling to talk with me — she seemed, purely and simply, to have never learned how.
As though she'd never been taught from the very beginning.
"Conversely — is there anything you want to ask me?"
"No."
I tried, in my own way, but the response that came back was black to the very end. Nothing reflected off it — so much so that it now felt outright uncanny.
I wandered here and there, trying to find something that caught her interest, but nothing changed.
It was the first time a whole day had been wasted like this. In the end, even with the sun half-closing its eyes, I had nothing to show for it.
"We should probably wrap this up. Did anything happen today that you found fun?"
"I do not know what the standard for 'fun' is."
Her purity had crossed the line into the absurd, and I faltered for a moment. This was the moment suspicion hardened into certainty.
"Just — did you feel like you wanted to do what we did today again?"
In place of an answer, she stared into empty air. This time I could tell it wasn't dismissal — she had simply sunk into thought for a while.
So I waited, patiently and calmly.
Her hollowed eyes, watching the clouds — the same thing I was watching. Because we held the same thing, we blended; the two became one.
At last she — Chloe — looked back at me. The answer that followed was this:
"I do not know."
"...Ha."
The fact that everything had dissolved into a bubble so perfect drew coarse language out of me before I could stop it.
Had pitying her been a mistake from the start? I waved my hand as if to brush the thought away.
"...Right. Sorry for making you do all these strange things for nothing. It's about time I headed back, so you should head back too, wherever it is you go."
I slipped my hand into my sleeve and drew out a staff. Spatial storage magic — as an amber glow rippled, the staff I had hidden revealed itself to the world.
It was basic magic, but using it without a single word of incantation was a fairly advanced technique.
Right now, in the entire organization, I was the only one who could do it.
And extended a little further, that led to the fact that few people in the world used magic this way.
"......"
And soon enough, it led to this: for her, something like this must be extraordinarily unfamiliar.
For the first time that day, her gaze fixed in place. On the amber I had let spill out, she turned her interest.
I did not let that instant slip away.
"...Whew."
I lifted a finger and drew it through the air. A very thin line. Straight lines, curves — I etched them without distinction.
Yellow appeared — my own color now, a signature hue. A tangled, chaotic weave of threads, which I slowly unraveled like loosening a skein. Long, long, longer still.
At last, a single strand remained, hanging thin — and I gathered it back together, wadding it into one mass.
What shape this time? A square, a triangle — no, this time a sphere, without a single straight inch, would be best.
The moment the thought arrived, I carried it out. A perfect sphere, without the slightest distortion. Then I compressed it — from the size of my head down to the very limit of my ability.
On and on, endlessly, endlessly, I gazed at the sphere grown smaller than a single knuckle. A mass of pure mana, without a trace of impurity.
And then I pushed it forward — a gift, for her.
"......"
Still she said nothing, but at last a new color was brushed onto her eyes. Yellow — my color. For the first time, it touched her.
Her hands. Her pupils.
"Do you like it?"
I smiled, satisfied. Perhaps she didn't even understand the word like — but that was all right.
Because she had learned a new word today.
Chloe looked at the yellow sphere. She caressed it cautiously, making no effort to hide her interest in it. Then she looked at me.
"It's... fun."
For the first time, I had painted color onto her.