What's Gotten Into You

Katya’s world had always come in two colors.

Black and white.

Not figuratively, either. The world her own eyes showed her held those two colors and nothing else.

The divinity that forcibly guarded her whole body had been throwing every one of her senses out of true, and this was simply one stage of that. Heat, cold, the movement of the air, the feel of cloth, taste, smell… Had she never known any of them in the first place, that would have been one thing. But they had been ‘taken’ from her ever since the day she first offered her vow, and that made the loss all the harder to bear.

Her body could feel nothing. Of all her ruined senses, only her eyes and her ears were left sound. Then even those had begun, at last, to wear away under the divinity coiled inside her. That was long ago now, yet she still remembered vividly how deep her despair had run.

Dead things looked black. Living things looked white.

And when she looked at herself in the mirror?

She was always gray.

A human who lived because she could not die. In a world halved into white and black, she alone stood wholly in between, as though she had been quarantined from the rest of it. The tedium was so crushing that nothing that happened mattered at all.

Until a moment ago, that was how it had been.

“Oh, hell, that’s insane—!”

Off to the side, the Lionhearted screamed.

A bullet flew at her, trailing a streak of white so vivid it clung to the optic nerve, and then it pierced her heart.

It hurts.

The ‘sensation’ she had forgotten for so long came to her as well. The divinity settled in her body was ‘pushed’ back by an outside force and held down, something nobody had ever managed until now, and her body’s senses regenerated along with it.

For the barest instant, only the short moment in which her heart was pierced through, color came back to the world. Every shade and hue of it.

A scene she had thought she would never see again in her life filled her eyes. The black night sky. The moon scattering its pale light. The expressions on people’s faces. Faces. The air. The blood spraying around her. Not black and white, but the world as it was, ‘the same as everyone else’s’.

And standing at the center of it, meeting her eyes, was a man called Aiden Kellermain, a revolver in his hand with the smoke of its discharge still rising off it.

“—”

The sight flowed and melted beneath Katya’s eyelids until it seemed to fuse there. She pinned it fast and clear in her vision, unwilling to waste even the time it took to blink.

As the divinity dwelling inside her vanished, her body lost the strength to stand, and she crumpled.

But even so.

On.

And on.

Until her consciousness went out and everything turned pitch dark, Katya kept that man held in her sight.

As though she would never, ever let him go.

The clean-up was carried out, as always, with remarkable neatness.

Rounding up the remnants, impounding the smuggled weapons, detaining the unconscious Katya: the whole job took barely a few hours.

Of course, however neat the clean-up, there is always bound to be one human left feeling distinctly odd about it all. In the present case, that human was Aiden, glaring at his status window with a deadly serious face.

Nobody had died, Noelle was unhurt, and Aiden himself had come through without a scratch, all of which was well and good. But for Aiden, this was only the beginning, and that was no exaggeration.

…It was water already spilled.

Aiden let out a wry laugh. He had never meant to do it, and in the end he had gone and done it anyway. Having come this far, though, he did not particularly regret it.

With no protagonist, everyone dies anyway.

So long as that one was absent, Aiden was the only person who knew the world’s future and could ‘prepare’ for it. Above all, the people who would be swept up in a future without the protagonist included Aiden himself, and his family along with him. He had every reason to act.

He slapped his own cheek with a sharp smack and took a deep breath. Now that he had settled what he had to do, it went without saying that he would have to move far more aggressively than before.

Above all.

Not one thing has gone the way the original did.

Starting with the protagonist not being here. Then Katya turning up out of nowhere, no way to tell who was behind the weapons smuggling, and the bad blood between the Emperor and the Second Prince. The ‘frame’ the original’s scenario rolled along in had not strayed far from what he knew, but the details filling that frame and the details in his memory were as far apart as heaven is from earth.

So what he needed right now was to close the gap between this actual world, its gears slipped out of true, and the world of the original that he knew. Only then would he be ready when ‘Act 1’ opened in earnest. He already knew its rough course; the figures tied to that ‘course’ would just have to be picked apart one by one.

Aiden narrowed his eyes at the window floating up in front of him.

Scene 1 would be…

That would be the imperial capital’s ‘Ghost Knight’ commotion, an incident the organization behind the weapons smuggling forced into being to deepen the confusion inside the capital. Every night at set hours, a ghost knight in full armor would appear out of nowhere and walk the city, leaving the citizens terrified night after night. Putting that ghost knight down and keeping the citizens’ peace was meant to be the protagonist’s role. As he recalled, this was about the point where the protagonist got entangled with Noelle and the scenario started in earnest.

“…”

Aiden, of course, had skipped that whole process and snatched the seat of Noelle’s fake husband for himself.

“Ah, Aiden.”
“…Thank you for all your work.”

And as they say the tiger turns up the moment you speak of it, Noelle came trudging into the room, looking worn out.

It took a great deal to leave this woman looking so drained, but given the size of the mess she had to put in order, it was no wonder. She must have had to clean up single-handed after a foreign royal had run riot on that scale, and he could not begin to guess how heavy the workload had been.

“How is Her Highness doing?”
“She is cooperating more quietly than expected.”

With a sigh, Noelle took off her hat and swept her hair back.

“Since there were no victims to begin with, the line being taken is that we should not blow the matter up needlessly, and that both sides keep quiet for now. For what that is worth.”
“Is that so.”
“It is fortunate, yes. Not satisfying, though.”

It had been the same with Prince Daniel before: royal authority was no joke. To be frank, both times had been close to self-defense, but Aiden had done harm to two of the Holy Kingdom’s royals, and it would surprise no one if retaliation of some kind came down on his head for it. If both sides were inclined to bury it quietly, that was not a bad outcome for him either, all told.

“They have said the Holy Kingdom will dispatch a further delegation to discuss the related matters.”
“A delegation?”
“Setting Princess Katya’s business aside, the question of custody over you, a man who handles divinity, has still not been settled. It will take a little time, but they said that this time they would follow the formal procedures and send a large party.”

Which meant someone who sat in a fairly high post, even within the Holy Kingdom, was coming over. They had sent a princess first just to take a look at one Aiden, and now a person like that was coming after her…

“…”

For a moment the abacus in Aiden’s head clicked over. He already had a rough grasp of which high-ranking figures the Holy Kingdom held. If one of those people came with the delegation later on, then what he had to do was…

“That’s good news.”
“I beg your pardon?”

Aiden answered through gritted teeth.

“Because I’m going to collect every debt that side owes me.”

He had, after all, been picked on twice running by the Holy Kingdom’s royals. If they were coming all the way here, the books would not balance unless he squeezed something out of them.

At the sight of his expression, the corner of Noelle’s mouth twisted slightly too.

“Do you have something in the works?”
“I do. Definitely.”
“…That is rather something to look forward to.”

Just let them come. He fully intended to show them a very entertaining time.

While he was chewing that resolution over, Noelle went on with a sigh.

“And… Princess Katya did set a condition, in exchange for staying quiet and not making a scene for now.”

…Attaching conditions to not making a scene. That woman really had nerve, in her own way. Still, he would have to hear it first.

“A condition?”

When Aiden asked back, flustered, Noelle scratched her cheek, which was likely her way of saying she was at a loss herself.

“…She has requested a meeting with you, Aiden. She says you must come once, without fail.”

Aiden scratched his head and looked at what was in front of him.

When he had heard Katya was shut up in a holding cell under the Capital Command, he had pictured a somewhat grim atmosphere. But the sight of her now, sprawled spread-eagle on the bed and rolling about, made him throw that expectation out on the spot. Not a fingernail’s worth of her earlier violence showed; she looked like nothing so much as a lazy cat…

“You look… freer than I expected?”

Given Katya’s character, nobody would have been surprised if they had restrained her by every means available. Yet apart from being shut in the room, she did not seem to be under any particular restriction.

Noelle answered with a bitter smile.

“…In fact, until just a moment ago the mood was considerably uglier.”
“Was it?”
“The moment we said we would bring you here, she turned docile like that.”

“…”

That a princess who had rampaged like a monster should turn this docile over nothing more than a meeting with him came as something of a surprise. Aiden kept the bewilderment to himself and only nodded slowly. It was not as if he couldn’t understand the reaction.

From the moment he received the quest, he had expected to end up more deeply tangled with that woman than before. He could not be certain, but give a human who could feel no sensation at all the ‘stimulus’ of pain, and she was bound to take an interest in whoever caused it.

I don’t know what the reward is, though…

Going by what was written, the way ‘Weaver of Fate’ applied would change. Most likely that meant what he had done was shifting the ‘relationship’ between Katya and himself, though which direction the shift would work in remained an unknown.

…As long as it isn’t something too bad.

He meant that in all sincerity. He had achieved the aim of making her feel sensation, so the reward should not come back in a form that harmed him, but then again, you never knew. You would not easily find a second person as capricious as Katya. For all he knew, she was nursing some grudge against him…

“Ah.”

While he was turning that thought over, Katya spotted Aiden coming right up to the front of the cell and shot upright.

“You came!”

At that voice, bright beyond all comparison, Aiden’s expression went strange. Not just the voice, either: Katya’s face wore a flawless smile, the kind that used every muscle she had. She had the air of a pet meeting an owner it had not seen in a long time.

“…”

What on earth was this? The scene was as grotesque as watching an enormous dinosaur act cute.

“You know, I’ve been thinking it over from every angle!”

Aiden stood rigid, but Katya chattered cheerfully on, paying him no mind.

“I’m not going back to the Holy Kingdom!”

“…”

Aiden turned a dazed face toward Noelle. He meant it as a demand for an explanation, but judging by her reaction, her mouth hanging wide open, this was news to her too.

“…”

No. Setting aside entirely how she meant to manage such a thing, what she meant to do, and whether it was even possible, he had to ask this first.

“…Why…?”

He had barely squeezed the question out when the answer came back, as though she had been waiting for it.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

Literally. She looked genuinely baffled that he would ask a thing so obvious, and went on, her face still split in a wide grin.

“You’re here, so why would I go back over there?”

“…”

Along with that sentence, which somehow raised the hairs on the back of his neck, a window abruptly floated up before Aiden’s eyes.

…Uh.

What?