Luna
From that day on, Lady Amelia ordered that every lesson be attended jointly by Luna and me.
Luna made no attempt to hide her displeasure, but as for me—I had no displeasure to hide, nor anything else for that matter.
Still, her attitude was unmistakably getting under my skin.
Lady Amelia herself never directly oversaw our lessons; in most cases, Yan stood in her place.
I had privately hoped to receive instruction from the second-in-command of the Demon Realm herself, but the truth was, both Luna and I were painfully reminded that even Yan was a mountain we had yet to even approach.
"Sirius. In the past minute alone, you died a total of nine times. In a real battle, that is."
I know. I know, all right. I'm just hopelessly weak.
"My my~ wherever you go from now on, you'd best never breathe a word that you studied under Lady Amelia alongside me~"
Luna twisted a lock of her silver hair around her finger, watching the lesson with a sneer plastered across her face.
She was insufferable and rude, and she was also infuriatingly beautiful.
But despite her talk, she was no exception to the battering Yan handed out.
"Oh dear~ then who was it, just a while ago in training, pinned against the wall begging him to please stop because she was sorry?"
Long before I'd been broken by Yan, Luna had already collapsed from exhaustion in her bouts with him—many times over.
We were always bickering, she and I, though it was usually she who picked the fight first, as a matter of daily routine.
"Sirius... how is it that your insolence pierces the very heavens more with each passing day~"
She'd needle me, and the moment I said a single word back, it was somehow unthinkable, unspeakable, how *dared* I presume to say anything to *her*.
Strictly by station, of course, she wasn't wrong. She was the Demon King's daughter. I was merely a human.
But Lady Amelia had driven in a nail: for the duration of these lessons, our relationship would stand on equal footing.
And should either of us fail to act accordingly, the lessons would cease.
I silently cheered within, while Luna's expression that day remains, even now, almost pitiable to recall.
Witnessing those delicate, finely sculpted features contort exactly as they had been made was a rare and singular experience.
Our instruction was structured as two days of theory and three of practical training each week.
I studied the demons and the demonkin, their history and their hierarchy, and grasped the fundamentals of martial arts, swordsmanship, and magic alike.
Luna already knew far more of it than I did, yet for reasons unknown, Lady Amelia insisted that she sit through every lesson alongside me.
For better or worse, the two of us were joined at the hip nearly all week long.
"So what's this Hero like, Sirius?"
During a break, Luna asked me while I sat staring into space.
Seria... It had been quite some time since I last saw her.
Was she eating properly? What was she doing even now?
With training consuming me day in and day out, I seldom had the leisure to remind myself of why I was enduring all this in the first place.
"Seria is... hm... cute, and... kind, I guess? She's a pretty good cook, too..."
I slowly brought her image to mind, letting it settle there piece by piece.
And then I caught the look on Luna's face—something about it clearly displeased.
"No. Who asked you to describe *yourself*? Describe the Hero! The *Hero*!"
Heh. This young lady was quite thoroughly laboring under a misunderstanding.
"Since when are you cute and kind? I've never once seen you cook anything."
Both of them had beauty that would turn heads anywhere they went, but call it the rose-tinting of first love—I sank into the ache of that old fondness.
And then, all at once, our last kiss surfaced in my memory.
The look on her face, tears brimming, as she pressed her lips to mine and asked me to wait for her.
How could I ever forget her?
"Sirius. That expression. What is it?"
Ordinarily she would have kept needling me with playful mockery, but this time something in the air was different.
"Hm?"
Caught slightly off guard, I deflected with an awkward protest.
"That expression. I said, what is it?"
The truth was, I had no idea what my own face was doing, and I hadn't the faintest notion how to answer.
"...What were you thinking about?"
A premonition gripped me that if I told her the truth, something very bad would follow.
"Just thinking about the old village. Where I used to live... it was called Homeron."
She stared at me with cold eyes.
She gazed at me long and hard, and then she spoke.
"Do you know why I put myself through this misery under our teacher? I—the Demon King's daughter, wanting for nothing?"
I had wondered about it, once.
About why a girl born with a silver spoon—if ever there was one—should let herself be smashed into the ground by our teacher day after day.
"To destroy her. I will make absolutely certain the Hero never reaches my father."
Resolve burned in her crimson eyes.
"Just as you cannot forgive the ones who destroyed your everyday life, I will shatter the ones who seek to destroy mine."
It was only natural.
Had I been strong enough, I would never have sent Seria away, never let everyone die.
And it went without saying that the existence of the Hero posed a grave threat to the Demon Realm.
Of course it did—throughout a history that repeated itself every thousand years, the successive Demon Kings had always driven humanity to the very brink.
And the Heroes had always, by any means necessary, found some way to take the Demon King's head.
And so, each time, the demons had striven harder still to change a history in which their defeat was endlessly repeated.
They labored without cease to cast off their shackles, and they trained.
I had spent months here watching how desperately they fought to escape their fate, and I knew it.
That was why I sat in silence, saying nothing.
"Sirius. In all this weary repetition of history, there is not one single record of what happened to me. Of a Hero's family becoming one of the demonkin."
I had heard it explained at length in our lessons, too—records stretching back thousands of years of how the wars had been fought.
Looked at one way, it was the most natural thing in the world. Looked at another, it was stranger than anything imaginable.
After all, the families of every Hero in history were said to have been slaughtered by the demonkin—when in truth, the demonkin had never laid a finger on them.
To awaken the Hero in the shortest time possible, humans had fixed a particular pattern into place and carried it out generation upon generation.
The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that there was no trash in this world quite like them.
At times like these, it even seemed that the demons were the gentler of the two.
"You must be on my side. No matter what. That's why I'm here. And our teacher. Why we're all together."
She took my hand in hers.
Pale, porcelain skin. Hands far too small and delicate for the Demon King's daughter.
They were even faintly cold—I thought she could have passed for a frail, sickly maiden and no one would blink.
And my answer to her words had long since been decided.
I knelt before her and pressed my lips to her hand.
"Luna. I swear it. I am your ally now, and forever—always."
One year had passed since I was chosen as the Hero.
Even now, the thought of it was an unbroken chain of absurdity.
We had gone out, Yuwol and I, for nothing more remarkable than a bit of shopping, no different from any other day—and we crossed paths with the knights of the Ivelis Empire. I was taken to the capital that very hour.
I was granted an audience with the Emperor, and from then on, a punishing regimen of training awaited me.
I had never held anything sharper than a kitchen knife, and yet I was receiving personal instruction from Duke Eiern, the greatest Sword Master of the Empire.
And, astonishingly, I had talent.
Among all who trained with the blade in the Duke's house, my progress was overwhelming—so much so that, save for the Duke himself, no one could any longer manage even to spar with me.
But talent, of course, was never strength freely given.
I rose at four every morning to begin my conditioning, and I trained until my whole body ached come evening.
More than once, I had begged on my knees—begged them, desperately, to let me slow down, to ease the intensity even a little.
My body was exhausted beyond bearing, but my mind was driven harder still.
For reasons never explained to me, they blocked me, absolutely, from contacting my parents or Yuwol.
If I borrowed their own explanation, contact with them would only "weaken my resolve"—and other such excuses that made no sense at all.
In their place, they offered a condition. One year.
If I obeyed their instruction without a word of complaint for one year, I would be granted a week to return home.
That promise alone was what I ran toward.
The nights I fell asleep screaming from muscle pain, the nights I collapsed in tears from a loneliness that cut to the bone—all of it, every day, I ran toward the day I would see them again.
And the promised year had passed.
Duke Eiern acknowledged my labors and arranged for my journey home to be as comfortable as possible.
A carriage and an escort were provided, and to show them how splendidly I had returned—
I even picked out a dress myself, at the finest boutique in the capital.
I could hardly wait to see Yuwol's reaction.
Yuwol... you're doing well, aren't you?
I miss you...
The way she whined that she didn't want to go out, the way she shoved me behind her back while trembling with fear herself, the way her eyes flew wide open at my clumsy little kiss—
Not one of those moments has ever stopped being dear to me.
This time, when we meet, I will tell her how I feel. I will, no matter what.
And from that vacation onward, I never once spoke of resting from my training again.