‘They said there definitely wouldn’t be another bombardment!’

She swept the stray hairs that had fallen irritatingly across her forehead back into place, and flecks of cement dust came away with them.

“Dolor! We’re getting out of here first!”

She hadn’t yet completed the mission to rescue the researchers, so she couldn’t simply flee the laboratory. Bellus’s words meant they needed to get out of this dome they were currently inside. Forced through brutal hardship and honed by countless brushes with death, Dolor understood his superior’s order in an instant and hauled himself to his feet.

“Yes, Major!”

Seeing Dolor move, Bellus immediately seized the thick iron door handle in a rough grip. She pushed the door without hesitation, and only then did she realize this operation had failed completely.

“D*mn it! The door won’t open! The outside must have completely caved in!”

KABOOM―!! KABOOM―! KABOOM―!!

The brief lull had been a kind of cruel joke. As the bombardment resumed in rapid succession, even this thick dome could no longer withstand the impact, and cracks began splitting across it in every direction with sharp crackling sounds.

“Major!!”

The roar continued to pound at her ears. Bellus sprinted toward Dolor. They had to escape the laboratory before the dome gave out under the next blow. She had never once thought her own life was worth sparing when it came to cutting down rebels, but dying a pointless death in a place like this was an entirely different matter.

“Dolor! We’re abandoning this mission and returning to base!”

Dolor, struggling to steady his shaking eyes, snapped himself together at Bellus’s urgent shout and flung himself to her side. They were stumbling through the crumbling dome in desperate haste when they barely managed to clasp each other’s hands.

Wmmmmm.

A vibration that had been almost too faint to hear began steadily climbing in volume. Soon it was resonating through the entire dome at a tremendous pitch, loud enough to drown out the relentless explosions raining down around them.

‘What is happening…?’

They should have been transported outside the laboratory in under a second, yet there they stood, still inside the dome, wrapped in mana and radiating light. Bellus furrowed her brow at the inexplicable phenomenon and looked around, when she suddenly perceived the flow of magic reversing in a bizarre current.

‘……!!’

Her black eyes flew wide open, shuddering with the force of a violent shock, like an awl driven straight into her brain in a single blow. For one instant they flared, filled with mana.

Then that strange gleam faded, and her vacant eyes, all consciousness gone from them, were swallowed by eyelids falling heavily shut. By then, both of them had already vanished from the spot without a trace.

Crumble―

The moment they disappeared, the dome that had held on until the very last let out a bone-chilling groan and cracks split across it all at once, as though it had only been waiting for this.

Rrrumble―

With a tremendous roar, a gust of black Cor energy billowed through the air.

Unlike the dome, which had held out to the end and was only now beginning to collapse, the interior of the laboratory had already been buried under the wreckage of the building, reduced to ruin.

And so, in the darkness that had settled over the rubble, only a single red number blinked clearly in the gaps between the debris.

[1341(-50): Attĭca]

* * *

Tweet, tweet, tweet―

Eyelids resting softly shut gave a faint twitch at an unfamiliar sound tickling the ears.

A clear, trilling birdsong gently wrapped itself around ears that were slowly beginning to register sensation again. Dense lashes that had been trembling gave a sudden flutter, and eyes flew open at something brushing softly against a cheek, accompanied by a damp sensation against the palm.

An expanse of blue, everywhere.

The clean air that pierced through to the depths of her lungs was something she had never breathed once in her life. The sensation of something unfamiliar was vivid, like being struck by an electric current, and the sheer excess of oxygen made her gasp involuntarily.

“Hah, hh…”

She drank in the breath that flooded through her airway like a tide breaking through a dam and pressed a hand to her spinning head. Something that had been touching her palm hadn’t quite pulled away in time and came to rest against her forehead instead.

Bellus stared blankly at the gritty something clinging to her palm and turned it over in her mind.

‘What is this?’

The tiny brown granules of unknown origin were moist, clumped softly together with the dampness they held.

The headache that had been easing gradually, apparently having adjusted on its own, subsided enough for Bellus to push herself upright.

Shhhh.

As she rose, her black hair cascaded down her back. It seemed her hair, which she had pinned up carefully, had come loose at some point. Her military cap had disappeared somewhere as well.

But those things were not what held her attention.

The sounds of life still tickling at her ears. The fresh scent drifting around the tip of her nose. A light breeze threading through her sweat-damp hair.

And the sight filling her eyes.

Dense trees.

It had been around age fifteen, somewhere between the grueling blocks of training, during one of the lessons slotted in to offer a brief chance to breathe. One of those days at the training facility, strange and unfamiliar in every way. Bellus had seen Attica as it had been fifty years ago, before there was such a thing as war.

The footage the cold-faced instructor had played seized Bellus’s eyes in under a minute, holding them as though spellbound.

A vivid, many-colored Attica was all green, and at times blazing red, and at times dyed pure white. Like a child seeing a glittering jewel for the first time, she knew instinctively how precious it was.

The instructor’s usual remarks followed after. But explanations of how terrible the things Justia had done were, how malignant a presence they were to Attica, none of it reached her ears. She only stared, boring into the frozen frame the instructor had paused for his speech, as though she could burn through it.

So Bellus knew, without question.

What it was that lay spread out before her now.

Her black eyes, holding vivid elation, were drinking in everything that existed before her, searing it into her mind, when the distinct sense of a presence somewhere nearby made the faint flush of excitement in her eyes cool and settle.

“Oh, you were alive.”

A strange man appeared abruptly in a space that had held only Bellus.

Bellus watched the man reveal himself gradually through rippling waves, like rings spreading across the surface of water, and furrowed her brow slightly.

No matter how completely she had let her guard down, she should never have failed to detect a concealment spell. The fact that she hadn’t sensed even a ripple of mana meant this was someone with mana equal to her own, at the very least, or greater.

Bellus’s eyes, holding deep wariness, turned toward the man.

‘…Hm?’

Yantis, who had been watching the woman before him with a studying gaze, tilted his head. Until just a moment ago she had been wearing an expression like a child who had come to a festival for the first time, hand in hand with their mother, and seeing those eyes go cool and harden gave him a vaguely dissatisfied feeling.

For all of Bellus’s wariness, Yantis had been watching her from this spot for quite some time.

That is to say, from the moment he had sensed the strangely twisted flow of mana.

Lately, an unusually high number of similar mana distortion phenomena had been occurring. Yet rather than actively investigating, the Department of Magic had been dragging its feet and putting it off.

And then the official statement they had finally, reluctantly released was that it was a naturally occurring mana distortion phenomenon. A passing dog would laugh. Watching those idiots spout nothing but nonsense, it was clear there was something to it.

And that suspicion was what had brought him here.

Mana distortions had been breaking out all across Atlan without warning, and while he was keeping watch on the Department of Magic’s movements as they began to scramble, he had sensed it: a flow of mana so faint it was nearly imperceptible, and yet somehow excessively refined, strange.

What he had first laid eyes on when he arrived was a dead woman.

In other words, this black-haired woman had, without question, been dead. The evidence was the scent of stopped time that drifted from her, the kind that only came from dead mages.

But then, as the scent rapidly faded and those black lashes that had been rustling slowly lifted to reveal those pitch-dark eyes, he found himself, without quite knowing why, holding his breath and choosing to watch her.

He had watched her open her eyes gently, press a palm full of rain-soaked earth to her forehead, stare at that same palm with a somewhat dazed expression as though deep in thought, and then observe the unremarkable forest around her with that faint trace of excitement. By the time he had taken all of that in, he had found himself wanting to speak to her.

‘Oh, you were alive.’

Half surprise, half quiet relief. And yet what came back to him was a face full of wariness like that. Yantis clicked his tongue inwardly at those sharply angled eyes, then recovered his usual composure and opened his mouth again.

“Is this your first time seeing a forest? What could there possibly be worth staring at…”

“Yes. It is.”

What caught Yantis’s attention more than his own cut-off words was the woman’s excessively rigid voice. Her voice, fairly low for a woman, delivered each word in a clipped, squared-off cadence. Like someone who had belonged to the military for a long time.

‘She looks quite young for that, though.’

Yantis’s eyes deepened as he studied her clothing, which looked unmistakably like a military uniform though he didn’t recognize the affiliation, trying to gauge who she was. Around the same time, Bellus, facing him, was quietly sizing up the man before her.

Brilliant platinum-blond hair swayed near the man’s straight brows. It seemed to bother him; a careless sweep of his hand pushed it back and revealed a broad forehead.

His brows, furrowed as though working through something, framed deep, settled violet eyes that called to mind the finest amethyst set in a noblewoman’s necklace, glimpsed once from a distance long ago.