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Chapter 17
“It’s okay, Mom. I’ve been doing really well all this time. I even made lots of friends. See? I’ve grown this well.”
Rita smiled brightly and clasped her mother’s hands. The duchess looked her daughter up and down—beautiful, unscarred Lilieta—and with reddened eyes, she smiled.
“I’m so relieved… My daughter, you’re so beautiful. You grew up so beautifully. Thank you for growing up so well even on your own. I… I should’ve been there with you, but I couldn’t…”
The smiling face of the duchess slowly twisted. She burst into tears and pulled Rita into her arms.
“Lili… hic… I’m so sorry. I should have protected you properly when you were little. But I lost you… hic… I couldn’t protect you…”
“No, Mom, it’s not your fault. Please don’t cry. I came back this well, didn’t I?”
Rita stayed in her mother’s embrace until the duchess cried herself to sleep.
Leonhardt, who had been waiting quietly by the door, turned as Lilieta came out and spoke.
“Did you mean it?”
“Mean what?”
“When you said you’ve been doing well.”
“I did mean it. Why? Does it not sound like it?”
When Rita asked back in confusion, Leonhardt quietly rubbed his lips. Tilting her head, she suddenly remembered the patchouli incident.
“Is it because I went crazy in front of the dressing room?”
“…”
“Come to think of it, I never explained properly. Do you want to hear why?”
“If it’s not too hard to talk about.”
“It’s not a big deal. Let’s talk in the room, Leon.”
When Rita started walking toward the guest rooms, Leonhardt tried to grab her. Instinctively, Rita knocked his hand away and took a defensive stance.
“…”
“…Ah.”
Leonhardt stared blankly at the hand that had been slapped away. Rita awkwardly scratched her cheek.
“Sorry, Leon. It’s… habit. If someone approaches from a blind spot, I react automatically…”
“…Lili, want to go to your room?”
“My room?”
“You can’t stay in the guest room forever. Let’s go to your own room. It’s the one you used as a child, so it needs redecorating, but… I told them to prepare it this morning, so you should be able to use it for now.”
“Okay.”
Without another word, the siblings left the annex and headed to Lilieta’s room in the main residence.
The room, preserved for ten years by magic, had been released from its spell and tidied up on Leonhardt’s orders earlier that morning.
Rita looked around the cute room with fresh eyes.
Unlike a few days ago when she’d seen it without her memories, now emotions flooded back—memories resurfacing with every little thing.
She passed through layered pink and yellow curtains and sat on a yellow sofa with rabbit ears.
Even the carpet was light pink. Rita let out a small laugh.
“Right. Back then, I really loved pink and yellow.”
“And rabbits.”
Leonhardt jerked his chin toward the enormous rabbit plush on the bed.
Rita looked at the pile of small rabbit dolls around the big one, the rabbit ears on the sofa, and even the dollhouse filled with rabbits, and laughed softly.
“Yeah, I really loved rabbits too.”
“Do you not anymore?”
“Well… it’s more like I don’t really feel anything now.”
Colored pencils were scattered on the table. Seeing the sketchbook with an unfinished drawing reminded her that she’d loved drawing as a child.
I really wasn’t very good… I can’t even tell what I was drawing.
Absentmindedly, she gathered the colored pencils and put them into the gold-trimmed wooden box beside the sketchbook. Leonhardt, sitting across from her, flinched.
“What?”
“…No, nothing.”
Rita looked at the pencils in her hand.
Come to think of it, my family left this exactly as it was.
She looked back at the sketchbook. Finally, she realized what she had been trying to draw ten years ago.
I was making a congratulatory card.
Little Lilieta had been drawing a graduation congratulations card for Leonhardt, who was about to return home from the academy. She’d fallen asleep with the sketchbook open because it got late… and disappeared that very night.
And her family had left everything untouched since then—without moving even a single colored pencil.
Thinking about what they must have felt, her chest ached.
Rita took the pencils back out and wrote over the awkward old drawing.
Congratulations on graduating!
“This is what I was making.”
When she tore out the page and handed it to him, Leonhardt fell silent. He stroked the childish colored-pencil drawing for a long time, then asked:
“What were you drawing down here?”
“Our family welcoming you home.”
“…”
“You couldn’t tell because I drew so badly, right?”
“No, it’s really well done.”
“Liar. You didn’t even know what it was until I told you.”
“…Yeah, you’re right. I had no idea.”
He stroked the drawing again slowly, then murmured wearily,
“I’ve always wondered what the last thing you drew was… Now I finally know.”
Rita watched her eldest brother staring intently at the clumsy drawing, then picked up a pencil again and began sketching something grotesque on a blank page.
“What’s that?”
“A named-class monster called a Mimic.”
“Named…?”
“When a monster is especially strong, it’s given a proper name to distinguish it. That’s what a named monster is.”
She picked up a red pencil and colored the Mimic’s mouth.
“This one is excellent at disguising itself as a human, so it’s called a Mimic. When it was first discovered, it had 172 victims. And even after that, it devoured thousands more over the next three years before it was caught.”
“That’s terrifying…”
“Eight of those first 172 were members of my squad. One of them was my… friend.”
Rita drew a circle inside the Mimic’s wide mouth.
“I can still clearly remember the sight of it rolling her head around in its mouth like candy.”
Leonhardt’s face went pale. Rita set down the pencil and continued.
“That smell back then was the first time I ever smelled patchouli.”
“Patchouli? From a monster?”
“When monsters digest people, they release their energy. Normally only people sensitive to energy can detect it, but especially strong energy becomes a scent anyone can smell.”
Rita wrinkled her nose.
“And it smells similar to patchouli. It’s the smell a named-class monster gives off while digesting someone. If you smell it, it means a powerful monster that just ate a person is nearby.”
“…So that’s why you attacked the maid?”
“I can’t afford to let my guard down against something that looks human. There are lots of monsters where I lived that can wear human skin. But very few can hide that patchouli smell. So I trained myself to attack anything immediately if I smelled it.”
She shrugged and crumpled the drawing of the monster in her hand.
“But it’s okay now. I can use a special ability here—the one I used in the place I lived. With it, I can tell whether something is human or a monster. So I won’t attack innocent people again.”
Leonhardt picked up the crumpled paper, unrolled it, and looked at it for a moment before raising his head.
“Lili.”
“Yeah?”
“In that world… you lived fighting things like this all the time?”
“Well, that was my job.”
“You said you belonged to a place called Beacon. Is it like a mercenary group?”
“Hmm… somewhere between mercenaries and soldiers. Our squad could usually choose missions freely and even take civilian requests, but we still had to obey command headquarters. We also defended the final defense line.”
“Since when? You’re twenty-two now. How old were you when you started?”
“I started training at ten and was sent to the final defense line as soon as I finished, so… twelve?”
“…”
He ground his teeth. Rita gave a bitter smile.
“Don’t be so angry, Leon. It sounds crazy here, but it wasn’t unusual there. There were lots of twelve-year-old recruits. Everyone in my squad joined between twelve and fourteen.”
“Damn it… They made children fight monsters like that? What kind of insane world…”
He couldn’t help swearing. Rita answered calmly.
“A world where the sun had gone out, two-thirds of the land was overrun by monsters, clear skies and seasons no longer existed. Inside the final defense line, people were starving so badly they ate each other. Beyond it, you couldn’t even breathe without dying.”
“…”
“You can’t understand that place using the common sense of this peaceful, beautiful world. Compared to most people there, I was honestly living pretty decently… so you really don’t have to be that angry.”
