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Chapter 02
The woman, who had been so distracted by her clothes that she’d forgotten about him, flinched in surprise. Once again, her eyes met his.
A doll-like, delicate face. The unmistakable trace of young Lilieta still remained.
Leonhardt was instinctively certain.
That woman was Lilieta del Nisa Laskyle—his one and only younger sister, who had disappeared ten years ago.
It felt as if his hair was turning white. He hurriedly reached out toward her.
“Lili…!”
But before he could pull her into his arms, the woman avoided his hand. She looked at him with a guarded expression.
“Who are you?”
Leonhardt stared blankly down at her sharp features.
This expression was completely different from the bright, cheerful Lilieta he remembered. Cold, dry, and looking worn down.
Even so, she was definitely Lilieta. She couldn’t be anyone else. That face, that voice, that way of dressing.
Then why didn’t she recognize her own family?
More than the fact that ten years had passed and she appeared older yet dressed exactly as she had been when she vanished, that was what felt strange to him.
Half-dazed, he asked,
“Don’t you remember me, Lili?”
“Lili?”
The woman tilted her head, stared up at him, then sighed.
“Well, you look really desperate, so I’m sorry to disappoint you, but—”
“…?”
“You’ve got the wrong person. My name isn’t Lili. It’s Rita.”
“Rita…?”
Leonhardt rolled the name around in his mind. It sounded suspiciously like another nickname for Lilieta.
Could it be that after she went missing, she lost her childhood memories and lived on? Maybe she only vaguely remembered her name, so it became Rita…
Carefully, he called her again—this time using her full name instead of a nickname.
“Lilieta.”
“No, just Rita. It’s not some old-fashioned name like that.”
“…Your surname?”
“Pascal.”
Answering irritably, “Rita Pascal” grabbed her long hair and wrung the water out of it.
“This is driving me crazy. Why did my hair get so long—… what? Why is the color like this?”
With widened eyes, she stared at the hair in her hand. The wet blond strands gleamed like molten pure gold beneath the sunset.
She hurriedly looked down at the lake, checked the reflection of her face on the water’s surface, and her mouth fell open.
“This is… not me.”
Murmuring in shock, she touched her face, then flinched and looked down at her hands. Pale, slender hands without a single scar.
“…This is impossible. Whose body is this, anyway?”
Leonhardt, who had been watching her in a daze, answered her question.
“Lilieta del Nisa Laskyle.”
She turned to look at him. With complicated emotions, he added,
“My younger sister. She went missing ten years ago.”
“This is your sister?”
She asked again, pointing at her own body as if it were an object. Leonhardt rubbed his face with dry hands and replied slowly.
“No. I mean that you are my sister.”
“……”
She fell silent for a moment, then let out a sigh that seemed to rise from deep within her stomach.
“Hah… I’ve seen all kinds of crazy things, but this is a first.”
“Lili, I know you’re confused, but for now, calm down—”
“Hey. I’ll say this again: I’m not your sister. For some reason, I ended up inside your sister’s body. I’m someone else.”
“Someone else?”
“Yeah. My original body didn’t look like this. Either our bodies got swapped… or I became a ghost and possessed your sister’s body or something.”
She continued, pressing her fingers to her brow as if her head hurt.
“…Thinking back to what happened before I lost consciousness, it’s probably the latter. I must be dead for sure. Damn it.”
Leonhardt stared at her with a strange feeling.
The casual swearing, the unfamiliar expression and attitude.
Why did the person who so firmly insisted she wasn’t Lilieta still feel, instinctively, like his real sister?
Is it because it’s Lili’s body? Or…
His 고민 didn’t last long. Whether she was truly Lilieta or not, the conclusion was the same: he couldn’t just leave her here.
“For now…”
Leonhardt took off his jacket and held it out to her.
“Let’s go home, Rita.”
“Home?”
“The sun’s setting. You can’t stay here dressed like that. Come to our house.”
“……”
After hesitating, she looked up at the darkening sky, then down at herself in her soaked nightclothes. She reached out and took his jacket.
“Looks like I don’t have much choice. I’ll impose on you for a bit.”
When she put the jacket on, Leonhardt stepped closer. As she retreated warily, he asked calmly,
“You planning to walk barefoot?”
“Oh.”
“Here. Get on.”
He turned around and offered his back. She hesitated, let out a deep sigh, and climbed onto him.
“…Thanks.”
Leonhardt didn’t reply, simply starting to walk toward the ducal estate.
He remembered carrying his little sister home on his back when she’d fallen asleep after playing by the lake as a child.
The weight on his back felt just as light as it had then. Lilieta had grown—and so had he. It felt as if they had returned to those days.
The woman on his back glanced at the now-distant lake and suddenly murmured,
“The sunset looks like a silk shawl.”
Leonhardt stopped dead in his tracks. The woman on his back asked in confusion,
“What’s wrong?”
“No, nothing.”
He slowly shook his head and started walking again, holding onto a quiet certainty.
Pascal was a great mage and the finest combat instructor. He was famous for taking in orphans from who-knows-where and raising them into exceptional warriors.
The children Pascal trained took to the battlefield in their early to mid-teens. There, they displayed shocking combat power and adapted to war at astonishing speed.
As Pascal’s children consistently achieved remarkable results, people often asked him how he managed to find such talented orphans every single time.
Each time, Pascal would only say it was the result of special training.
At the end of that “special training,” whenever he sent the children to the battlefield, he always gave them the same maxim.
“Do not fear death. Your deaths—l-l-death is…”
A brown-haired boy recited Pascal’s words in a trembling voice.
Click. Rita inserted the magazine, racked the slide, and chambered a round, smoothly taking over the maxim.
“Your deaths will become seeds of hope.”
The boy glanced at her. Rita smiled to reassure him.
Swallowing dryly, he asked softly,
“Aren’t you scared, sis?”
“Of what?”
“Everything. Those damn monsters, this dog-like situation where we’re cut off, the fact that we’re about to…”
That they were all going to die.
Finishing his thought in a hoarse voice, the boy looked away. Rita reached out and roughly ruffled his hair.
“Gah—h-hey, what are you doing!”
“You’re not going to die, Luca.”
“Huh?”
“With all these seniors dying before you, why would the youngest die? Stop worrying about pointless things.”
“B-but—wh—!”
She pressed his head down and added,
“I’ll protect you with my life, so don’t chicken out.”
“No, that’s supposed to be my job!”
“Does the battlefield ever run exactly by roles? You do whatever works. You’ve got a long way to go, chick.”
“Ugh, stop treating me like a kid! I’m a Pascal too!”
“Rita.”
Someone called her while she was teasing the boy. It was a woman with short black hair and glasses.
“Olli?”
“Hand over your magigun.”
“…Why all of a sudden?”
“Oh? Looks like I hit a nerve. Hand it over.”
Snatching Rita’s magigun away, the woman examined the barrel, then sighed conspicuously.
“You overdid it again. You really live like you’ve got no intention of surviving, Rita Pascal.”
“Hey, as long as it’s not broken, who cares!”
“Is not breaking it enough? I’ve told you how many times—forcing an overheated weapon and taking the recoil with your body shortens your lifespan!”
Grinding her teeth, the woman disassembled the magigun at lightning speed, then reassembled it with one part missing.
“Here.”
“What did you take out of my gun?”
“Your anti-bullshit part.”
“What the hell is that? When did you even put that in?”
“I put it in so you wouldn’t push yourself too hard, but it seems like it just made you push yourself more, so I took it out. I completely removed the limiter so you can raise the output more. From now on, take it out on the gun—not your body.”
“Whoa! Seriously? You removed the output limit? It’s totally unrestricted now? That’s awesome—wait, but what if it breaks?”
“If it breaks, I’ll fix it. Better to break the gun than your body, which is way harder to repair. Got it?”
“Thanks, Olli!”
Rita grinned and hugged her tightly. The short-haired woman pushed up her glasses and sighed.
“You’re probably the only idiot who’d be happy that their own magigun just became way harder and more dangerous to use, Rita.”
“What? You removed Rita’s magigun limiter? That’s fun.”
A head of golden-brown hair suddenly popped up over the half-destroyed wall they were leaning against. It was a tall, slender man.
“You’re always lecturing me, but honestly, you’re crazier than I am. Don’t you think?”
Rita scowled and glared at him.
“Shut up, Ethan.”
“Let’s see just how insane it’s become.”
He reached out to snatch Rita’s magigun. At that moment, sparks crackled from the grip in Rita’s hand, sending an electric jolt that knocked his hand away.
“Ah—damn, that stings!”
“Don’t touch it without permission.”
“Oh wow, the magigunner’s zapping people instead of hunting monsters! Oh, the humanity!”
As the man made a big show of clutching his hand, Rita lifted the gun-bearing hand up and aside and chuckled.
“It’s your fault for trying to touch my magigun without permission in the first—”
Just then, another man appeared behind her and casually took the gun from her.
“Rita Pascal. What did you do to your gun?”
He was a well-built, handsome man with black hair.
His right eye was covered with an eyepatch, and a large scar ran from beneath it outward. With his single pale ochre-colored eye, he carefully examined the confiscated magigun.
