Emilia's words hung in the air as the wind blew on the building rooftop where her and Ace were perched on, the dark clouds in the sky slowly drifting.
"I simply couldn't. I couldn't forget everything that had happened," Emilia continued, her words carrying the weight of her feelings like an undeniable, double-edged sword called the truth.
"Always asking myself why you couldn't have done things differently. Why couldn't you have helped me. Why couldn't you have saved me in another way."
She remained silent for a moment, the feelings in her heart finally escaping the lid that was placed on them.
"Was there really no other way?" the events of the past flashed through Emilia's mind as she continued to talk. "Did you really need to go so far? Why me? Just why?"
"No matter how hard I tried to understand, I simply couldn't. No matter how many times I tried to let go, I just couldn't. And how could I? The person I considered a friend, a schoolmate with whom I shared the same living space, without any ounce of hesitation, had abandoned me, not bothering to even help me."
Though trying to hide it, holding back the tears that threatened to fall and stream down her face, Emilia had a pained expression etched with frustration on her face.
As though influenced by an unknown force, Ace's eyes broke off from the sky, locking onto Emilia as her voice came out hoarse with grief.
"But you know what? As much as I wanted to hate you, I couldn't help but be grateful to you," she said, wiping off the tears in her eyes with her sleeve.
"If I had been all on my own that day in the warehouse, there's no telling what might have happened. I would have probably gone back to that place," her mind became filled with the memories of her childhood.
The experiments that were done on her, the pain she experienced, the ugliness she witnessed, all of it flashed before her teary eyes as Ace's lips slightly parted.
"Even if it wasn't out of any particular feelings, you taught me how to become strong, and I was grateful for that. No matter how much you said that you were simply using me for your own benefit, you were still helping me."
Rays of sunlight started to pierce through the dark clouds as the air around them became filled with emotion.
"But…" she hesitated slightly, the words caught up in her throat before finally rolling off her tongue. "Even then, I couldn't help but be afraid."
"What did you go through to become like that?" she remembered the time when Ace attacked her after the 5-Star Competition. "Would I also become the same if I follow the same path?"
"But in the end, I couldn't figure it out. The truth about Frank, my fight with Mira, and even you, all those things only made it more obvious that I was barely holding on to my normal."
At the mention of the last word of her sentence, Ace, even though subtly, seemed to have tensed up for a little bit.
"When all is said and done, even that simply collapsed right under my feet."
"Did you know that during those three years you were in a coma, I would always come and talk to you even if I knew you would never answer?" Emilia's head turned towards Ace, their eyes locked onto each other before she gazed back at the sky that continued to clear up.
"When I would always feel like the world became suffocating, I would simply release all my pent-up frustration to you, listening but never replying," she added, the memories replaying vividly in her mind.
"When I couldn't hold it in anymore, I would spend the entire night crying on your bedside. Sometimes, I would even simply stay in the room silently without eating, drinking or even taking a shower the entire day."
Emilia's expression then turned grim, her expression etched with a mix of disgust and guilt.
"And when I first started going after underground groups, getting more and more blood on my hands…" her words hung in the air intensely as she stared into her own hands, reality layering with the amount of blood that they were completely covered in.
"…I remember how disgusted I felt because in the end, I had become no different from them."
Once again, her mind flashed back to the core darkness of her past, and the trail of corpses that had accumulated behind her.
"And when that realization hit me, I felt my mind and heart slowly getting numb," the only memory that she remembered was her vomiting in the bathroom.
"The only thing I felt at the time was that I really had become a monster. In my quest for revenge, I had simply become a murderer with no real goal in sight, chasing something that I had no guarantee of reaching. Why did I even want revenge in the first place? What exactly should I be doing right now?"
A small chuckle escaped her lips, her breath hitching.
"Every time I asked you that question, I never got any answer. The more I tried to hold on, going from one day to the next, one year to another, I desperately clung to you, hoping that I wouldn't break."
Emilia stood up, her hand held towards the bright and clear sunlit sky as her form showered in its golden glow.
"That's why…" Emilia started, her hair swaying with the wind as she turned back her head towards Ace, her smiling expression a conflicting mix of joy and pain with tears running down her cheeks. "No matter how much I want to hate you, I just can't."
Ace's eyes slightly widened as the sight burned itself in his mind, and just as his lips parted wider, a holographic window screen popped up in front of Emilia, displaying the following message:
[You have obtained the Item: Keys of the Truth (1/3)]
"Huh?" with Emilia's focus slightly broken off from Ace by the message, a voice suddenly came out of nowhere from where Ace should have been.
"Eh? What the hell?" as Emilia eyes landed on the owner of the voice, instead of Ace, now sat a black-haired, teenage boy wearing a yellow, open hoodie, white t-shirt, blue jeans and black-and-white sneakers.
Internally, Emilia had the same reaction as the young man.
"Hmm?" the teenage boy's eyes and Emilia's eyes stared silently at each other, and with the silence in the air palpable with confusion, the teenager cut through it like a knife.
"Excuse me, but… where am I? And… who are you, lady?"