06 / 04 / 2019 - Daito, Prefecture Osaka, Japan.
2:30 PM, Akane's Room.
'Hoh, so that's how it is?'
Becoming normal once again, eh? Was the [Code: Veil] really that powerful? Though the mass memory alteration was undeniable.
Even though the city had been practically wrecked into ruins, the citizens were carrying on with their lives as if nothing had happened — of course, their basic awareness and logic were still intact.
Irina herself had said they were aware of the ruins, but even if they were doubtful, the subsequent thought process would only lead back to the containment breach itself — undeniably fabricated.
For now, proven: Ayato, Irina, and even Auntie were not affected — including himself. The latter two were straightforward, but the last remained questionable. Lost in his calculations, Akane stared blankly up at the ceiling.
The room had fallen quiet. His little investigator had finally drifted off to sleep right in the middle of her interrogation — unreliable as always. Then again, he couldn't really blame the little devil; she was exhausted.
Keeping his right hand moving in a slow rhythmic pat against her soft silver hair, he glanced sideways at her sleeping face. Irina was snoring softly, dead to the world without a single care. Hence, he let out a quiet sigh.
Her hair was a messy nest, a few loose strands draped over her nose and the corner of her lips. The large dark bow was still anchored to the back of her head, her ponytail jutting out at an awkward angle. It piqued his curiosity — she usually wore a blue ribbon.
'Sleep well, then…'
At long last, she was resting. But Akane couldn't join her; he had already caught a nap earlier. Propping his upper body up from the soft mattress, he reluctantly tore his gaze away from his sister.
Suddenly, a familiar instinctual ping mirrored in his mind.
Knock. Knock.
'Here we go again….'
Glancing at the brown wooden door with a sense of utter helplessness, he braced himself for another visitor. It felt like a relentless case of déjà vu, though this guest was far more polite — waiting patiently outside instead of bursting right in.
"Akane-kun… are you awake? May I come in?"
The voice was melodic and calming, almost identical to Irina's but a distinctly mature, refined version. He didn't need to guess who it was. He already knew exactly why she had come.
Letting out a heavy breath, he slid his feet onto the cold floorboards, resting his left hand against the edge of the mattress while using his right to adjust his blood-stained shirt. Once decently covered, he pressed his fingers against his temple.
"Yes, nee-chan. You can come in…" he replied, his tone laced with weariness.
Massaging his throbbing temple, he watched the door handle click and pivot inward.
Stepping into the room was a woman who technically should have been showing her age, but had clearly decided to defy time entirely — like an eternal witch.
Processing her profile out of sheer habit, Akane noted the staggering familial traits.
His aunt possessed the exact same delicate, porcelain-fair complexion and slender facial structure as Irina. Her small nose was sharply defined, giving her a timeless, aristocratic elegance.
Just like the little devil sleeping on his bed, she bore large, incredibly expressive sky-blue eyes. However, hers possessed a brilliant crystalline clarity — like polished topaz — framed by thick, darkly sweeping eyelashes that lent her gaze an intensely perceptive, mature quality.
Her pristine silver-white hair was meticulously styled in intricate braids along the crown, pulling a portion back while the rest cascaded down her bare shoulders in thick, healthy waves.
Today, she wore a stylish white chiffon blouse with long, billowy peasant sleeves that gathered gently at her wrists.
A small soft fabric ribbon was tied into a loose bow at her throat — a charming echo of Irina's style — paired with a high-waisted, pleated long skirt in a faint muted check pattern.
The entire high-processing analysis took Akane mere seconds. Narrowing his eyes, he pursed his lips and let out a sharp breath as his aunt quietly sealed the door behind her.
'Now… what must come, will come.'
As she turned around, her elegant wardrobe betrayed her actual height, making her look surprisingly small — indeed, technically 158cm. He thought this with mild amusement.
A faint, palpable nervousness radiated in the air around her. She remained entirely silent, her shoulders raised in defensive tenseness.
Her sky-blue eyes flinched noticeably at the sight of Irina sleeping curled up beside Akane's spot on the mattress. Registering the look, Akane kept his expression completely flat.
Stiffly, she walked over to the study desk by the window.
Shrrukkkk.
Pulling the wooden desk chair back, she sat down. Internally, Akane groaned at the sheer awkwardness of this sequence of events. It was awfully silent.
This rigid, uncomfortable atmosphere was suffocating him — and combined with the emotional breakdown he had just endured from Irina, his mood was thoroughly exhausted.
"So… what do you want to ask me first, nee-chan?"
He was far too tired to beat around the bush or play word games. He went straight to it, staring directly at her as she leaned back against the headrest, her hands resting nervously over her lap.
Startled by his bluntness, Riscia visibly panicked. She too was clearly uncomfortable — her lips moving like anxious waves.
Both of them were hiding massive secrets from each other, but now that Akane had casually flipped his cards onto the table, it completely derailed the script she had prepared in her head.
Caught entirely off guard, she pursed her lips and desperately tried to compose herself. Parting her lips, she took a long deep breath and exhaled slowly, forcing her racing mind to loosen up.
Once she felt she had reclaimed her dignity as an adult, she locked her crystalline blue eyes onto his, steadying her voice.
"Do you want to hear about my side first… or yours?"
'Ahhhh! What the hell am I even saying?!' she screamed internally, her cheeks instantly flushing a furious pink at her own fumbled delivery.
Akane tilted his head, the corner of his lips twitching slightly at the sight of her trying so hard to look serious. He had given her a free pass to interrogate him, only for her to throw it back clumsily.
Still, from a tactical standpoint — since she didn't know the full extent of his hidden truths — it made more sense to extract her information first. What she did was right, actually.
"Well… how about we start with your side first, nee-chan?" Akane murmured, his complex gaze narrowing as he prepared for whatever she was about to drop.
Neither of them truly knew the other's depth. At this point, trying to guess what lay beneath the surface was a meaningless exercise. Akane had demanded an answer, and Riscia was trapped in her own long-standing confusion.
Trying to reclaim her slipping composure, she stared down at her clasped hands. Her head was bowed, the intricate silver braids of her hair catching the dim light of the bedroom. She fell entirely silent.
After thinking for a while, her lips quivered — perhaps her background was too ordinary for this, no? There was nothing special to note, so what was there to share? Family? History? Everything seemed so worthless in front of him, she guessed.
"You know, Akane-kun…" she murmured, her voice carrying a heavy, self-deprecating weight. "From the very first day I met you, I don't think I ever truly understood you."
Akane listened quietly, his left hand resting at his side, his body leaning slightly toward the headboard as he took in her murmured words through her lowered head. This time, he didn't know where this confession would go.
"And an inability to understand inevitably leads to fear," she continued, her knuckles turning white as she gripped her own fingers.
"That fear completely paralysed me. Combined with the crushing weight of the family name, I simply… lost my way. I didn't know what to do anymore."
She finally lifted her head, her crystalline sky-blue eyes locking onto his with a chillingly dim, flickering gaze.
"It's entirely my fault, isn't it? I'm supposed to be your legal guardian. Your protector. Yet all I can do is sit back and watch helplessly as you walk straight into the jaws of death. It's a pathetic irony."
She stopped, taking a sharp shaky breath. A single heavy tear escaped her lash line, tracing a path down her pale porcelain cheek — but her expression didn't crumble into wild sobbing.
It remained rigid. And composed. For a moment, she was every bit the adult she wanted to be. She really didn't want to cry in front of a child.
"The day you vanished… I regretted everything. I spent months drowning in my own incompetence. I already lost my sister to the dark, and now, due to my own sheer stupidity, I almost let the same thing happen to you."
Her voice dropped into a whisper so quiet it barely cut through the heavy silence.
"When I realised a mere child was making more progress investigating her murder than I ever could… a part of me truly believed it would be best to end it all."
The dark suicidal thought she had kept buried for nine long months had finally sprouted — ugly and raw in the open air. She felt an overwhelming wave of self-loathing.
She was glad he was alive, yes — but the absolute disgust she felt for herself, for being a useless adult who idly waited at home while a teenager bled for the truth, was entirely suffocating.
Thud.
Thud.
"Eh…"
Quiet footsteps echoed in her ears. By the time Riscia snapped out of her spiral, a small gasp escaped her parted lips. She suddenly felt a firm pressing weight directly in front of her — a pair of slender arms wrapping tightly around her back.
"That is certainly a dangerous thought, nee-chan…"
A whisper drifted right beside her ear — heavy, quiet, and laced with an unshakeable gravity that instantly broke her trance. The arms around her tightened, pinning her to the chair.
"Please. For a moment, try to compose yourself. Throw that thought away and never look back at it."
Shivering violently, Riscia's sky-blue eyes trembled as she caught her breath. The hands locking her in place refused to let go.
Beneath the layers of her panic, she felt a profound hint of warmth radiating from him — and with it, the distinct metallic smell of rust drifted directly into her nose.
The stark scent of his blood brought her mind screaming back to reality, forcing her to fully realise the weight of the dark admission she had just blurted out.
"I— I'm sorry, Akane-kun… that was—"
Startled and deeply mortified by her own weakness, she hastily tried to correct herself. She wiggled her body in a panic, trying to turn her head within his embrace to look him in the eye — but before she could utter another excuse, her plea was gently silenced.
"—Shush… now you have done it, so… before we continue our talk, I want you to promise — I can guess some of your mind from the time we've spent together, so there's no lie…."
He took a slow, anchoring tone.
"No matter what happens… You must never give up on yourself, no matter how agonising it gets. Everything I have done, and everything I continue to do, is entirely of my own volition. You have absolutely no right to feel guilty for my decisions."
Resting his chin slightly against her shoulder, his eyes remained firm.
"No matter how hard it is… no matter what the world throws at us… for my sake, and for the others, you are never to harbour that dark thought again. Do you understand?"
Feeling her nod against his shoulder, Akane glanced down at her features in his peripheral vision. Once he was certain she was back, he slowly loosened his grip and pulled away, stepping back to stand directly in front of her.
Crossing his arms over his chest, he quietly evaluated her. Riscia sat there gasping softly for air, eventually tilting her head back up to look at him. Akane offered a small, slightly sheepish smile in return.
"In the end, I believe you are much stronger than you think, nee-chan… if you don't possess the power for it right now, you can always build it from the dust."
Now that the emotional storm had fully passed, she returned his smile — though hers carried a trace of self-deprecation. Still, she had successfully gathered her scattered wits, and this time, she prepared to dive into her side of the story.
Her eyes narrowed as she shifted her gaze back down to her own hands. The tense stiffness left her shoulders all at once, leaving her slumped back in the study chair like a thoroughly exhausted, lazy kitten.
'Family blood runs deep — you are mirroring Irina, you know?…' Akane thought dryly.
"On the day the disaster occurred," she began softly, her tone turning fluent and sharp as the memories flooded back, "a massive crater was left in its wake. It was roughly the size of Chiba City itself… entirely hollowed out. There was absolutely nothing left."
Just as it had happened yesterday, those figures that had greeted her were very strange in themselves — perhaps this accident was linked to the extraordinary, no?
"The authorities told me they found you unconscious at the absolute edge of that ruin, buried beneath a heap of steel wreckage and covered in horrific wounds."
"It was also on that exact day that I encountered three incredibly bizarre individuals guarding your hospital ward."
Her clear sky-blue eyes trembled slightly as she recalled the memory. Even now, those figures remained burned into her mind as something completely incomprehensible. But Akane's mind was already racing down an entirely different logical path.
"Heh… perhaps it seems like a coincidence — did they say if there were any survivors?"
Asking it casually, an image began to ferment in Akane's mind. Despite the gravity of the situation, the corner of his mouth couldn't help but upturn into a faint, grim smile. He knew for a fact that his father's final, cataclysmic attack was no small matter.
Since Serpent had said that all destinies would rewind — with the sole exception of the Indescribable as another variable, then—
'Something is missing here. Let's hear more.'
"And that's where the real problem lies, Akane-kun," Riscia replied with a heavy, frustrated huff. "From that day onward, every single scrap of information was systematically erased. Everything. There is nothing on the internet."
Aggressively ruffling her carefully braided silver hair into a chaotic mess, she let out an irritated sigh as the strands fell in a wild cascade down her back. Akane's eye twitched slightly at the sight.
At the very least, her mood was back, no? He turned his gaze back to her — unconsciously pouting and puffing her cheeks, perfectly the same as Irina or his mother. Another involuntary twitch spiked across his face.
"I don't know what kind of strings those people pulled, but they are incredibly thick-skinned," she grumbled, crossing her arms and rapping her fingers against her elbow.
"Despite the massive wave of public protests and rumours of foreign military intervention, they managed to completely bury it and keep a straight face. That's why I knew this situation was profoundly unnatural."
She let out another weary sigh. "But first, let's go back to those strange individuals. According to their official credentials, they belonged to a branch called the Special Affairs Department."
She looked back up at Akane, only to find his expression far more exhausted and world-weary than before.
Seeing his usual deadpan mask actively crumbling under the sheer weight of her explanations, Riscia's cheeks instantly flushed a vibrant pink. Realising how much she was rambling, she shrank back with a thoroughly embarrassed smile.
'What a bigger Irina. Truly, a little sister of my mother's — carved from the same mould, thoroughly the same.'
Shaking his head faintly, he let out a breath and waved his hand with a deadpan expression and half-lidded eyes, gesturing for her to skip the fluff and continue.
"Ukhumm! Right… anyway," she cleared her throat, trying to look professional.
"The paperwork is practically just waiting for my signature."
"They are prepared to legally hand over your mother's entire corporate assets to me, along with this apartment complex in Osaka, and… a level of unspecified government protection that I can't even begin to fathom."
Hearing this, Akane's composure nearly shattered entirely. How could she look at a document that so obviously screamed 'government trap' and casually think about signing it? 'How could you fall for something so blatantly dangerous, nee-chan?!'
"Now, now! Don't look at me like that, Akane-kun!" she yelled in a panic, waving her hands wildly to defend herself as she read the rare, expressive horror flashing across his face.
"They threatened me a little bit, obviously! But I thought about it carefully first! Since I don't understand the true nature of their department, their aggressive actions could be interpreted in a lot of different ways, right?"
She waved both hands in a panic, afraid of being misunderstood. Akane, who usually maintained a deadpan expression, was more expressive than she had ever seen — and even if it didn't look like a good sign, at least she could now read him.
"Yeah, yeah… and then everything magically went back to normal, and here we are," Akane muttered, rolling his eyes as he rubbed his face with both hands.
Yet, re-evaluating the data amidst her clumsy delivery, he had to admit her intuition was terrifyingly sharp.
'Now… I'm becoming far more curious about our family tree than I originally intended.'
Crossing his arms again, he reflected on his father. The man was undoubtedly an alien entity — how else could anyone explain a human wielding the primordial authority of a Dragon? That question remained a complete black box.
But on the other hand, he had never actually heard a single detail about his mother's side of the family either.
'What a thoroughly bizarre family I've been born into.'
A dry, intentional cough snapped him back to reality as his aunt desperately tried to compose herself for the fourth time. She sat up remarkably straight, resting her hands neatly over her lap.
Clearly, whatever she was about to disclose next was highly sensitive.
"As for the background of your mother and me… it seems she really didn't tell any of you the truth before she passed, did she?"
She paused, tilting her head. "Though it would take entirely too long if we started discussing a family lineage that dates back to the 10th century, so let's keep it simple, okay?"
For a split second, Akane genuinely doubted his own hearing. His eyebrows jumped up a full two inches.
'What the hell? The 10th century? What was this, a high school history lecture?'
Was she being serious right now? But her instinct to 'keep it simple' immediately forced his internal brakes to lock.
"My sister and I are half-European and half-Russian," she stated cleanly. Closing her eyes, she began reciting her formal introduction like a textbook.
"And by the way, if you're leaning into the traditional Russian pronunciation, it's Risha, not Riscia. And your mother's true name was Alisa, not Alicia, you know?"
Opening one eye to peek whether he was actually paying attention, she slipped the linguistic trivia into her monologue before closing it again. Akane internally subtracted another competence point from her mental tally.
"Our father belonged to an incredibly influential oligarch lineage known as the Mikhail Family. Our mother eventually decided to permanently relocate the household to Russia, so from that point onward, we lived under the banner of the Mikhail Family. Got it?"
Akane didn't even bother to react. The sheer volume of sudden lore drops and historical pivots was thoroughly wearing out his patience, leaving him with zero energy to retort or correct her delivery.
Riscia let out a proud, haughty hmpf through her nose and continued.
"Well, to be perfectly honest, as I learned more about the inner workings of our family, I was utterly paralysed by the shock. It's hard to put into words… terms like 'wealthy' are simply too plain to describe what we own."
She leaned forward, a confident glint appearing in her eyes.
"Oh, and to explain why I know how to handle military-grade firearms? I am actually the General Director of a massive ground arms manufacturing corporation in Russia."
Akane's deadpan gaze remained completely flat. "Oh? And exactly how big is it~?"
He openly taunted her on the spot. He had endured enough of her dramatic setup. He wanted to see if this clumsy, pouting aunt of his actually possessed the solid facts to back up such an absurdly high-profile claim.
Feeling challenged, Riscia raised her perfectly groomed eyebrows and flashed a smug, triumphant grin. Reaching into the pocket of her checked skirt, she pulled out her smartphone.
Under his watchful, critical gaze, she rapidly pulled up a corporate network registry and typed out a specific industrial title.
Spinning the device around, she thrust the screen directly into his face with an intensely proud smile.
Akane lazily squinted his eyes, looking down at the display.
…
'What?'
The analytical, high-processing symphony of his transcendent mind ground to a violent screeching halt. His eyes widened — his sombre deadpan mask instantly crumbling into pure, unadulterated shock.
Staring back at him from the screen was the global digital profile of a world-famous, state-sanctioned military defence contractor and heavy weapons manufacturer.
Right across from him, his aunt leaned back in her chair — a smug, highly satisfied grin plastered across her face as she giggled quietly, thoroughly delighted by the rare, shattered expression on her otherwise emotionless nephew's face.