Chapter 104 - The Rookie Everyone Talks About (1)

Riccardo headed down to the offices with Ska.

“If you won’t go to the hospital building, at least take a shower.”

His old friend nagged him on the way down.

Riccardo didn’t argue. He would have to wash up anyway if he was going to write his report in the office. He wanted to get it written and put this mission behind him as soon as possible.

He also needed to check on his juniors.

“Once you submit your report, I think I’ll head home too,” Ska murmured as he got off on the floor that housed the senior leadership’s offices. “Come up when you’re finished. We’ll leave together.”

Riccardo did as he said.

After washing in the communal showers, he went straight to a computer. Fortunately, the office containing the reporting computers was empty. He didn’t have the emotional energy to talk to anyone right now.

He quickly sat down and wrote his report, then headed for the senior leadership’s office.

Thankfully, Ska was the only one there. His friend gestured for him to sit and wait, and Riccardo sprawled on the visitors’ sofa.

“Achille will be all right.” Ska delivered the news without looking up from his desk. “He’ll have a rough time for a while, but they say he’ll eventually recover without any lasting effects.”

“Ah...”

Riccardo let out a long sigh, swallowing down the relief that welled up. Defeat, shame, worry—every kind of negative emotion had him in its grip. Amid all that, hearing something that stirred even a little positive feeling made it easier to breathe.

Bobby’s condition couldn’t improve, of course.

“They say Bobby seems to be holding up better than expected too.”

There was no need for him to explain, but his comrade had always been considerate. That casual thoughtfulness hadn’t changed even after he gained power.

“She wants to stay in the field. The phantom pain will give her trouble for a while, but she’ll adjust eventually. The technology’s improved a lot too.”

“Well... let’s hope so.”

He had no right to offer an opinion. Bobby had been his responsibility too, after all. Now, every time he saw Bobby Winter’s leg, sharp self-loathing would scrape across his heart.

He fell silent after that brief reply, and the silence returned.

Enveloped in the quiet, Riccardo stared around the spacious office.

The small hours of the morning. Only those on duty and those working late remained. The mission should have been over before midnight, yet here he was, watching the clock approach three in the morning despite not being on the night shift.

In this place he could never grow fond of, no matter how often he came, he began going over what had gone wrong yet again.

Ska looked up.

“Are you all right?”

“Fit as a fiddle.”

The aide gave a quiet snort.

Riccardo merely smiled faintly. He knew perfectly well the question wasn’t about his physical health, but he had no intention whatsoever of being honest about his mental state.

Knowing full well that pressing him would get no answer, his friend sighed.

“They’re putting a chest tube in Hilde.”

Riccardo frowned. His habitual smile vanished completely as he looked at Ska.

“Why?”

“A fractured rib damaged his chest wall, apparently. He heals better than an ordinary person, so it should heal well.”

“Ha.”

Riccardo let out a hollow laugh.

He should have stood firm and stopped him from following him to the arena. He’d only reluctantly allowed it because the kid had looked fine. Who could have known the little rookie was enduring pain behind that untroubled face?

No. Perhaps he should have known.

His brows knitted as he recalled their conversation in the narrow passage. The new recruit had smiled and told him he was completely wrong.

For that moment, he had looked not like some green kid but a wounded veteran worn down by life.

“Anything else?”

“Besides the hemopneumothorax? I haven’t heard anything, so I don’t know. If they only reported the ribs, the rest of him should be fine.”

“He was injected with a massive dose of drugs...”

The memory instantly soured his mood.

“And I doubt he volunteered that information.”

“Oh,” Ska said briefly. “I’ll let them know.”

Riccardo fell silent again.

What had happened while they were locked in the cell troubled him. He could still vividly recall the white-haired recruit huddled in a corner, groaning. How he had rolled into that corner, afraid that in his delirium he might hurt them now that their bodies were ordinary.

At the time, Riccardo had wondered what to do with this kindhearted, reckless fool.

Only now did he realize how much pain the kid must have been in. The same bastard who had run around with broken ribs and a perfectly composed face had buried his head and clawed at the floor.

The idiot didn’t know how to look after himself.

While he was lost in regret, Ska came out from behind his desk.

“Kept you waiting. Let’s head home.”

“Ska.”

Ska stopped.

In an office protected against eavesdropping, with Yehyeon and his second aide, Gilbert, absent, and Ska having set aside his authority, Riccardo looked at his friend.

He had no intention of letting this opportunity slip by.

“What is Hilde?”

Ska didn’t answer.

“How did he fall out of a portal?”

“Who knows?”

“So that’s not the important part...”

Riccardo was no fool, and he knew perfectly well Hilde was anything but ordinary.

Nothing about him had been ordinary, from their first meeting to now. His unusual enhanced body, the commander-in-chief’s strange reaction, his exceptional choice of training officer.

Those sunlike golden eyes, a color not found in nature.

And yet the kid seemed to think of himself as a perfectly ordinary new recruit.

“Looks like some of his memories have come back...”

“... Did he tell you that?”

“More or less... I only heard that he remembered some things.”

Until now, Riccardo had simply taken it in stride.

He hadn’t wanted to know the details either. He was old enough to know all too well that ignorance could be a blessing. He was curious about how Hilde had come tumbling out of a portal, and liked him enough to take him on a mission, but he hadn’t intended to get so attached that he would hear his whole story.

Unless he acquired a proper enhanced body, the kid could die at any moment. So even when curiosity about his past became unbearable, even when Riccardo wanted to keep this kind but resilient young man at his side, he had tried not to grow too attached.

He had reminded himself of the recklessness that had sent the kid rushing forward in the typhoon, and of those wounds that wouldn’t heal.

Teach him well, but don’t give him as much affection as you gave your comrades.

That had been the plan...

“Ask him yourself when his memories come back.”

Ska’s voice pulled him out of his thoughts.

“That would be the surest way to find out.”

“Ah... so you don’t have the authority to tell me...”

“It’s personal.”

His comrade, still looking as fresh as if he’d just arrived for work despite the hour, sighed.

“And I don’t know the details either.”

“According to him, he’s not someone you can trust...”

Riccardo still didn’t believe Hilde’s words. After everything that had happened, he found them even harder to believe. Surely the kid ought to give him something believable?

“Said I thought he was too good a person, or something... Maybe he survived a war or a disaster... Whatever it is, it looks like survivor’s shame to me...”

“The rookie said that?”

“More or less.”

“Is he doing that badly?”

Ska frowned as he approached the sofa where Riccardo sat. The aide thrust both hands into his pockets.

“I had no idea. Is he festering inside like you? I’ll have to have a word with the head of HR.”

“Why drag me into it?”

“You still reach for that revolver sometimes, don’t you?”

Ska looked down at Riccardo with a bitter smile.

“And I’m sure you’ve replaced the ammunition I threw out. How long are they going to keep making that stuff?”

Riccardo didn’t answer.

The revolver lay in the top drawer of the three-drawer chest in his living room. It was very old-fashioned. As Ska said, it was so old it was astonishing they still made ammunition for it.

His biological father had treasured it.

That man had always carried it close to his chest. He hadn’t let go of it even as a collapsing building crushed him to death. Beside a corpse flattened beyond recognition, the gun had retained its shape with eerie perfection, and Riccardo had kept it ever since.

And sometimes he reached for it.

On cold nights.

On nights when the images came flooding back: his younger sibling’s eyes staring up at him from the ruins he had dug through, the hem of his mother’s skirt, his father’s corpse. He would pull out a wooden chair at the dining table, sit down, and spin the revolver’s cylinder, staring into its muzzle for a long time.

The urge was always powerful.

Every time Jonathan Kudo and Ska Owen visited his home, they would find the revolver’s ammunition and throw it away.

But...

“I don’t think he’d kill himself...” Riccardo murmured, almost to himself. “Even if he has no intention of looking after his body...”

“Really?”

Ska’s voice brightened.

Riccardo nodded slowly. He was probably right.

He had survived the war and known several people who had been unable to endure its aftermath and taken their own lives. He also knew someone who always stood on the brink of that final choice. It had given him the unwelcome ability to pick up keenly on the particular air such people carried.

That precariousness that showed in fleeting glimpses.

Hildebert had none of it.

“I had heard he doesn’t take care of himself.”

“When other people are involved, sure. But normally...”

Instead, the kid had a strange sort of resolve.

A resolve to face the pain that came with self-loathing. A determination not to drown in his emotions, flounder, then abandon everything and run.

“I can see why you’ve got your eye on him as a successor in the senior leadership...”

Had the heroes of myth been like him?

“He has the makings of a good leader...”

“He does.”

Ska smiled wryly.

“In temperament, at least. An ideal leader, really. His abilities are another matter.”

“The problem is, the kid’s like that all the time.”

Riccardo tipped his head back toward the ceiling and rolled his eyes.

The kid always looked at other people’s wounds instead of his own, effacing himself to focus on who others were.

Revealing his own shame to Riccardo while he was hyperventilating had been so very like him too.

When he was only the rookie.

“But we have to teach him to show when he’s hurting.”

At Ska’s words, Riccardo lowered his head.

“He mustn’t die young.”

Huh.

So there really was something going on.

Riccardo caught the strangeness in Ska’s formal reference to Hildebert and his unemotional statement that he mustn’t die young. Ska Owen wasn’t speaking as Hildebert’s senior now. He was speaking as a member of Black Badger’s senior leadership.

In an official capacity.

As someone responsible for leading them to victory in this bizarre war.

“I’m stopping by the hospital building on my way down. Coming?”

“Of course.”

Riccardo decided he would have to find out for himself, since asking would never get him an answer.

“I need to work out when I can give him a beating.”

He rose with a smile and followed his friend, who was nagging him to go easy on the scolding.

As he did, he silently resolved to keep watching this strange new recruit. He would teach him how to show he was hurting, how to act like the rookie he was, and keep watching him for long enough to uncover his past.

He also decided to offer some advice to any Badgers who went on missions with Hildebert from now on.

A warning that the idiot foolishly looked out only for others, so someone else would have to look out for him.

Thankful he had enough seniority to give that warning to most Badgers, Riccardo headed for the hospital building.

* * *

“Oh.”

Lying there bored as I received pain medication, I blinked at the sight of Riccardo and Ska.

“You’re still here?”

They hadn’t gone home?

I blinked several times at the approaching men. I couldn’t believe my senior still hadn’t gone home.

It was nearly dawn.

Had visiting Achille’s and Bobby’s rooms delayed them? I’d heard both of them were doing better than expected. Had they spent all this time talking to them, or had something else come up?

Either way, seeing that he still hadn’t gone home made me uneasy.

I wanted him to go home quickly and get some restorative sleep.

“Sir.”

So, as soon as the two seniors stopped beside my bed, I asked him.

“You haven’t already rested and come back, have you? Please, go get some sleep.”

THWACK!

I got flicked on the forehead.

It happened so fast I couldn’t even see his finger, and my mouth fell open.

That had some weight behind it.

... And his smile was terrifying.

I pressed my lips into a straight line, studied Riccardo’s expression, and cautiously asked,

“... Are you angry?”

“You have a real talent for talking your way into a beating.”

“Oh, Yun just told me the same thing.”

At my reply, Yun looked up from his seat beside me.

My training officer. The man I was so grateful to for running straight up to the roof when I returned. A true senior who had stayed and watched the entire procedure, even though it had been an emergency operation in the small hours of the morning...

Choi Yun said he had been curious about how surgery would work on a body immune to Green Dream.

“Isn’t he just the best training officer?”

“This little shit gets ruder by the day, but only with me.”

Yun lazily uncrossed his legs.

“Proof that I really make him feel comfortable. Wouldn’t you agree, Aide?”