The Crystallization of Radum
So she was a monstrous being after all.
Eva Cardena greeted me with open delight.
She looked younger than she had in the game. Smooth skin. Lively black hair that kept drawing the eye. Proof, if any were needed, that she had appeared far earlier than the original storyline called for.
"You've grown so much. Do you have any idea how badly Mommy wanted to see her little boy?"
Eva's eyes brightened as she smiled and patted my shoulder. The whole gesture felt so natural, so warmly familiar, that for a moment it almost seemed real.
And yet, at the same exact time, a scorching rage began to flood my chest without mercy.
This was not the first time I had felt something like it.
...Shion, is it?
Shion's emotions were pouring straight into me. What he held toward Eva Cardena was pure, unmistakable fury and hostility. Why he felt that way needed no explanation.
"Haha. I wanted to see you as well, Mother."
But I had to endure it. Unlike with Andres, this was not a person I could afford to unleash Shion's feelings on. Slip up and bare those emotions to Eva without a filter, and the result would be my head rolling across the floor.
"I'm so glad my son missed me too. Have you been all right on your own? No one gave you a hard time, did they?"
"What does the path matter? What matters is that I grew up and finally stand before you like this."
For now, I would focus on keeping her happy.
"Oh my~ Listen to how wonderfully you talk. Well? I imagine you have plenty of questions for Mommy. Come here and sit."
Eva Cardena took a chair from the corner and dragged it right in front of me. Just to be safe, I swept it with Nature Realm, but she didn't seem to have done anything to it.
"This one's Eve's, and this one's mine. Now sit. Standing will make your legs hurt."
"Yes!"
"Understood."
Eve answered brightly and sat. I gave a suitably polite reply and took my seat as well.
"It's so nice to finally see my son's face again."
"...Yes. It would have been wonderful if we could have met more often before now."
I barely managed to pin down Shion's boiling rage and spoke with a smile.
"There were circumstances. I couldn't help it."
"May I ask what those circumstances were?"
"My face got a little too well-known among the Freelia family. I couldn't even get near their territory. Ah, but never mind that — aren't you curious about a great many things?"
"I am. There is truly a great deal I wish to ask you, Mother. Enough that I wonder whether a single day will be enough."
"That's all right. We have plenty of time. Ask as slowly as you like."
I nodded and went straight to the point.
"Eve gave me a rough explanation, but I still don't fully understand."
I looked into her golden eyes and asked.
"What... am I?"
"What you are, hm... that's a little tricky to explain."
Eva cupped her chin and hummed thoughtfully for a moment.
"You are my son, and my first successful work of art, and also..."
So that was why Eve called me Big Brother—
"...the crystallization of those who were imprisoned in Radum."
"......"
For a second, I doubted my own ears.
"Radum, you said?"
"Mm-hm. Radum. Don't tell me you don't know where that is?"
Radum. There was no way I wouldn't know that place.
In every world, wherever nations exist, criminals exist as well. Laws and codes differ from country to country, so of course each nation has its own prisons for those it arrests.
But even the abyss has an abyss beneath it.
There exists a continental facility set aside for criminals whose crimes stand on an entirely different plane from ordinary inmates — the so-called Fiends. That place is Radum.
Every Fiend captured anywhere on the continent ends up living inside that prison. There are no rules. No guards. Inside a vast structure from which every means of escape has been completely sealed, the Fiends who have committed unspeakable sins thrash and claw until their last breath simply to survive.
Food is delivered from outside on a schedule, but the quantity is absurdly insufficient for every prisoner to eat. So those locked in Radum stab and tear at one another for the privilege of filthy scraps. A prison that grinds the last shred of dignity from a thinking being into dust — that is Radum.
And I was the crystallization of those Fiends?
"...No, I know of it. I simply don't quite understand what you mean by crystallization."
"Don't you worry. Mommy will explain it step by step."
As if she could read my heart, not a single shadow crossed Eva's face.
"Didn't you notice something strange as you grew up? No matter how hard you tried, your body never really developed. If my guess is right... you've been stuck at 1-Star this whole time, haven't you?"
"That's correct."
"There's a reason for that. You see, you were made by gathering countless Fiends who had been imprisoned in Radum."
At her words, a half-forgotten incident from the game suddenly surfaced in my mind.
Twenty years before the game's starting point, nearly a hundred Fiends dwelling in Radum had vanished without a trace — a mysterious mass disappearance. Back when I was playing, I had shrugged it off as just another bit of lore. I never imagined it was tied to the secret of Shion's birth.
Which meant... Shion was a chimera built from the bodies of a hundred vicious criminals?
"At the time, even Mommy felt what people call a pang of conscience. So using the trash of Radum — people who were going to die anyway — made the ethical problem simply disappear. Perfect, really."
Watching Eva casually invoke ethics after sacrificing a hundred lives purely for her own amusement gave me a clear glimpse of just how twisted her values truly were.
"After all kinds of trial and error, I finally built your body. Ah, right — there was that, too. Do you know why I made your eyes into slits? One of the materials was a demon with a special Magic Eye. A rare kind that overwhelms whoever looks at it."
She spoke as if she were fondly recounting a pleasant memory.
"So I made those Magic Eyes yours. But then I thought — if you walked around with them fully open, someone would pick a fight with you and kill you long before you could grow up properly. So I shaped your eyes that way so you could hide them. You probably could have opened them if you tried hard enough. Have you ever?"
"I have."
"And when you did, didn't the other person become strangely terrified? That's all thanks to those Magic Eyes. Anyway, it was such a delightful project."
I had never even imagined Magic Eyes were embedded in Shion's. The fact that he had been born with those slit eyes was entirely Eva Cardena's doing.
"There was just one problem. I'd made the body, but there was no soul to move it. And if I simply jammed someone else's soul into it, that would be possession — not the creation of a new life. So I came up with a clever solution. Can you guess what it was?"
"...I have no idea."
Eva grinned and went on.
"Those hundred Fiends who made up your body. I took their souls, fused them into one, and rebirthed them as a single new soul. Since I'd built the flesh from their bodies, I figured the soul should come from them too if body and soul were going to be properly compatible. And my prediction wasn't wrong."
...Not content with forging a new body from other people's flesh, she had forged a new soul from other people's souls. A brilliant idea. And a thoroughly nauseating one.
"So you see, Shion — it wouldn't be wrong to say your hometown is Radum. Because your body and your soul both came entirely from the Fiends of that place. Well? Do you understand now why I called you the crystallization of Radum?"
".........."
Shion's body, his soul — every part of him had come from the monstrous beings locked away in Radum.
...So that's why the Proof of Innocence rejected me.
That baffling phenomenon from right after I possessed him — the one that happened in Charlotte's dormitory — was finally starting to make sense. The artifact that inflicted pain on evil beings, the Proof of Innocence. The reason it had rejected me was simple: both Shion's flesh and soul were evil itself.
"It was truly hard work. Well, of course it was — you were the first thing I ever made using a hundred materials at once. The moment that newly born soul settled into your body and your heart beat for the very first time... it felt as if I myself had been reborn. You were a treasure to me."
"In that case, Mother, there is one more thing I would like to ask."
"Mm? What is it? Go ahead."
There was still one thing that didn't add up.
If Eva had truly valued Shion that much, why had she left him with the Freelia family and simply vanished? She would have had more than enough means to raise him herself.
"Why did you leave me with the Freelia family and go away, Mother?"
I expected her to struggle for an answer. Even if she was a madwoman sealed inside her own little world, a child's question about why she had abandoned him should have stirred at least a flicker of guilt.
But—
"Because I was curious."
"...Pardon?"
"I wanted to know whether the life I created could grow up just fine without any intervention from its creator. So that's what I did."
"...Is there no other reason?"
"Nope? Do I need one?"
She was even more of a lunatic than I had thought.