Chapter 113 - Emergency Mobilization (1)

Yun came to take Yehyeon home. Greeting him with swollen eyes, Yehyeon silently held out the photograph to the expressionless man.

Yun studied it, then gave a small smile.

"You look like her."

He certainly did.

While I smiled silently, Yehyeon looked at the photograph again.

Even on the walk to the house directly opposite, he glanced down at it several times. Yet another delivery truck drove away after dropping off a gift. Yehyeon stopped in front of the main entrance, where boxes had piled up.

Still wearing a faint smile, I said goodbye.

"Go on inside, sir. Happy birthday."

"Hilde."

Yehyeon turned to look at me. I blinked.

"Yes?"

"Keep them from finding out for as long as you can."

It was clearly an order, yet strangely, it sounded like a desperate plea.

"I won't be able to shield you from the resentment and hatred once they do."

I smiled quietly.

So that was what had been troubling him.

But that was something I deserved to endure. If we hadn't come to Earth, these wars would never have happened. The lives of those around me would have been different, too. Riccardo's family, for one, would never have been buried under their home when it collapsed in an air raid.

They had reason to hate me.

And my comrades had more than enough reason, too.

"Will things be all right on the administrative side?"

"We can come up with some sort of justification for that," Yehyeon answered hoarsely.

"We can also apply pressure to keep it from becoming a public issue. But if it does, we'll publicly announce that you bore the greatest share of responsibility for that, too."

"Isn't that the truth?"

None of this trouble would have arisen if I hadn't suddenly appeared.

Of course, placing me under Colton had also been an option. But that would have given him too much influence. Sooner or later, he would have amassed enough power to upset the balance.

That was why Yehyeon had registered me as a Badger despite the risk.

I would have made the same decision in his place.

I was grateful he'd made it. I could kneel before Yehyeon and press my lips to the top of his foot, but I could never bow before Colton, even if my knees were broken.

"You can't undermine morale in the organization just to protect me. I trust you'll handle it as it ought to be handled."

Yehyeon watched me for a long time with bloodshot eyes. Hoping to ease the anguish in them, I added,

"In the past, I betrayed my own kind of my own free will."

Even if I wanted to deny it, I couldn't.

"Then shouldn't I bear the consequences?"

I had no right to complain of pain.

I smiled when I finished speaking, and Yehyeon gazed at me in silence.

The chill winter air.

The faint warmth of sunlight slipped through the cold, warming my body. Yun waited silently for our conversation to end.

Yehyeon broke the silence, softly and slowly.

"Thank you for the photograph."

He was like a child again.

With that thought, I bowed my head.

* * *

A few days later, Riccardo sent me a message.

[Will you only come to your senses after you've cracked your skull open and died?]

He'd heard I'd gone up to the roof after drinking.

I could practically hear his voice. My blood ran cold, and I hurriedly replied that I hadn't been out of my senses, that I'd had no intention of doing anything dangerous, and that I was sorry if I'd worried him.

No answer came.

Riccardo read my message and ignored it.

A response so very typical of him.

'W-well, any reply would have been scary.'

And so the year-end party was behind us. My brief vacation ended, too. The end of the year had gone better than my apprehension had led me to expect. As the new year drew near, Yun started putting me through my paces again. The intensity increased to make up for the muscle I'd lost to drinking and rest.

I didn't complain. I wanted to regain my full abilities as soon as possible, too.

I also liked being able to sleep without dreaming after a hard workout.

I liked the stability a simple, regular routine brought. So for a while, I forgot about the games. I cycled through training and sleep, completely forgetting both the one Yun had taken and the new one Jaeyeon had given me.

Until Yun showed up with 'From E' on the first weekend of the new year.

[My main function.

/copyright Copyright Eve. All rights reserved.]

There was plenty of text above and below it, but that was the only part I understood.

Eve's name was there.

Beside me, as I stood frozen, Yun explained in an even voice.

"It was made by a developer called Eve, one year after the First War ended."

My training officer folded his arms and kept his eyes on the screen.

"That's all I've found out. There's strangely little information to be had. It was a long time ago, granted, but it's odd that I can't find so much as a photograph or a short biography."

"She probably erased it all."

I murmured the words as I stared at the line with Eve's name in it. I couldn't look away.

"I think she said she'd erased everything before coming in to meet us."

I'd remembered her name while I was drugged out of my mind.

It was strange that seeing it on the screen now brought back another memory. Eve had been a scientist madly in love with her field of research. She'd also been an upright person by nature. I remembered how, even when conducting experiments on me, she'd always taken great care to check that they weren't harming my health.

In other words, she'd been very different from Choi Yun or John Mühlen.

"She was a good person."

"Are you picking a fight?"

"Just stating facts."

After answering, I quickly offered Yun an unopened bottle of liquor. It was both a belated birthday present and a bribe.

"Oh, this is your birthday present. Your birthday's January fourth, right?"

"That's right."

My training officer accepted the bottle. By now, he took my responses in stride.

He set it down on the desk and turned back to the screen. I gazed at it glumly, too.

One year after the First War.

When no one yet knew that the Second War would break out. She had made this game in a ruined city.

"So Eve definitely survived the First War."

"Assuming this information is true, yes."

"Where would I have been then?"

I tried to retrace a period of which I couldn't find even the faintest outline of a memory, no matter how hard I tried.

I could remember fragments of my life before the war broke out, and of the world I'd lived in before crossing over to Earth.

But I had no idea how, after disappearing to stop Kyle, I'd come tumbling out of the portal at headquarters decades later. I had no memory of seeing the war end. Though I did remember preparing for its beginning.

This mysterious gap had left my body horribly rusty, too.

"I don't even know if you were on Earth," Yun murmured in a low voice.

"Yehyeon and I were around thirty then... If you'd been alive inside the cores, Lee Seunghyeon would certainly have taken your sword back from Yehyeon."

"Yes. I think so, too."

"At the very least, Lee Seunghyeon and his lot didn't know where you were."

My training officer's low voice resonated through the cabin.

"And there isn't much they can't find."

Had I been living outside the cores like Jin?

Or had I been in a coma? Had I been hiding in someone's house, never going outside? The problem was that no theory, however plausible, explained how I'd fallen out of the portal at headquarters.

I let out an enormous sigh without realizing it.

Yun rose from his chair.

"Have you played K?"

"Not yet. I thought you might want to watch me play, like last time."

"Ah, good. Then I'll watch like last time. Start right now."

I didn't answer. Instead, I did my best to ignore his gaze and stared intently at the screen.

Then, before he could speak, I said,

"Do you think this game was made in my memory?"

"That's how it looks for now."

This time, my training officer cut in before I could add anything else. I'd thought he had no interest in people, but perhaps because we spent so much time together, Choi Yun now knew me far too well.

"If you don't want to start K, do it next week."

Sure enough, he'd caught on that I was deliberately changing the subject.

"But in the meantime, find the Easter eggs in E."

I turned my head. He was scrutinizing me with cold, dark eyes.

After looking into those chilly eyes, I nodded. This order was much easier on my mind.

K surely wasn't Kyle (Kyle thought 'computer games' themselves were pathetic), but even so. I wasn't ready to play a game when I had no idea what message it might contain.

Reaching out to turn off the computer, I mumbled,

"Thank you for looking into it."

He headed for the front door without much of a reply. I made a show of following him, awkwardly seeing him out.

I couldn't properly lift my gaze until his footsteps had faded.

* * *

It doesn't seem like there are any Easter eggs?

I started thinking that around the time another month had passed after the turn of the year.

It was two days before the first weekend of February.

I still hadn't found anything resembling an Easter egg in 'From E.'

"I know it sounds conceited, but I'm really good at finding this sort of thing."

"I'm sure you are. You're a gaming addict."

An addict?

I scowled reflexively, but continued without managing a proper rebuttal.

"Since I haven't found anything yet, there's a good chance there aren't any Easter eggs at all. Though I could just be missing the clues."

"Then drop it and play K first," Yun replied as we walked down a corridor at headquarters.

The day was drawing to a close. It was the time of day when the office staff left in droves.

We had closed up the firing range and were heading to the cafeteria.

"Couldn't there be an Easter egg you can only unlock by playing every game in the series?"

"Oh, you know a thing or two about games."

That was a little surprising.

"You even knew there were Easter eggs like that?"

My training officer raised an eyebrow at me. As ever, he was a man who conveyed his meaning efficiently without a word.

I matched his stride.

"No, it's just that I didn't think you'd do anything as unproductive as gaming..."

Hadn't he actually asked me last time whether this sort of thing was fun?

"I never imagined you'd have looked into Easter eggs..."

WEE-OO! WEE-OO! WEE-OO!

A deafening sound shook headquarters.

Conversations broke off.

People stopped in their tracks.

Everyone looked down at their phones at once.

It had been about half a year since I became a Black Badger. By now, I knew very well that this alarm meant a Mobilization order.