12. The Invincible Legion Commander, Valerian (1)

“Well?”

What was he asking me about? Whether I had any feelings about him taking Leo, the traitor, back in? Or what I made of his chess? I turned it over for a while, then decided not to answer. Tipping my hand this early would only have been reckless.

Valerian, for his part, didn’t press me for an answer. He simply went on with the game.

A strange sense of déjà vu settled over the whole thing. The faint smell of oak from somewhere, the afterimage of someone watching a chess match long ago, and laid over that afterimage, a slightly younger Valerian.

That was when I understood.

Arden used to play chess with Valerian fairly often.

This bone-deep ache of longing wasn’t mine. In my whole life, had I ever once smelled oak?

Damn it.

Getting the turmoil back under control, soothing this sentimental fog of borrowed nostalgia, was harder than I’d expected.

This was not on the schedule.

I looked up and silently begged Eve for help.

But Eve hadn’t picked up on anything wrong with me at all.

If anything, she was humming happily to herself, taking a sightseeing tour of Valerian’s room. One look and I knew she’d be no help at all.

I’m not Arden. Get a grip.

If I let my focus slacken even a little, Arden’s memories, those soft, swelling, overwhelming feelings, would swallow me whole. I scrambled for some kind of emotional sedative.

The surest cure for a smile, they say, is to dredge up something sad. So I forced up the single most tragic, most infuriating, most blood-and-tears moment of my entire life.

Five years.

The Lord of the East raid, the one I’d poured the whole of my youth into.

The boss at 0.1% HP.

The instant before the killing blow, when that goddamn blue screen swallowed my whole monitor.

And the acrid stink of burnt electronics rising off the rig.

“…”

The effect was magnificent.

The swelling brotherly admiration that had flooded my chest a moment earlier vanished in an instant, like ash gone cold. In its place came nothing but a gamer’s deep, dark fury and emptiness.

Yeah. That’s me.

The side effect was that I’d sailed clean past “calm” into “eyes dead like a man who’d watched the world end,” but whatever. By the time I’d scrubbed my face with both hands and pulled myself back together, Valerian was sliding the black pieces across the board to me.

“It’s been a while. I’ll let you teach me a move.”

.

.

.

Tap.

Valerian’s white pawn advanced, opening the match. I answered by bringing out a black knight, and soon both our hands were moving briskly. Like players who’d faced each other dozens of times, we read each other’s intentions and slipped into the gaps, a rapid back-and-forth that left no room to breathe.

Only a few minutes in, and pieces were already tumbling off the board thick and fast. Counting the casualties on each side, we looked evenly matched.

“You were waiting for me.”

I’d wrestled the turmoil down and finally opened the conversation.

Valerian had taken my sudden visit far too smoothly. Everything about it suggested he’d been prepared for it, at least to some degree. He must have gotten a report on Leo from the servants; otherwise none of this added up.

I’d assumed someone with Valerian’s personality wouldn’t have given it a second thought.

But the simple fact that we were sitting here playing chess out of nowhere made it clear: Valerian had been paying Arden some attention after all.

Just to be clear, though.

This was not on the schedule.

“What makes you think so?”
“Because if it weren’t so, the eldest son of House Arne would hardly be sitting around at his leisure playing chess, Brother.”

Tock.

I knocked one of Valerian’s pieces off the board as I spoke.

“Have you heard things about me?”

When I floated the probe, Valerian fell into a long pause. Whether it was about his next move or about how to answer me, I couldn’t tell. At last he moved a piece, took one of mine, and spoke.

“Are you referring to the part where you, who used to stagger about like a chick on the verge of dying, are now in good health and have begun training your body? Or are you referring to the part where, despite knowing of a servant’s betrayal, you took him in? You should determine clearly which proposition you intend before you open your mouth.”

Inwardly, I clicked my tongue. In trying to probe him, I’d lost the initiative.

That phrase of his, a servant’s betrayal, was the maddening part. Did he still think Leo was a spy planted to kill me? Or did he know Leo had come over to my side completely?

The man across the board from me was, without question, several cuts above.

It’s been a while since I felt my insides cooking like this.

Going too long without answering would only feed his suspicion. With no choice, I pried my throat open and dragged out something, anything.

“Illness, as we know, can come on suddenly. By the same token, it can also turn for the better in ways we cannot account for. All my life, every branch had grown in only the wrong direction — perhaps now the buds are finally trying to flower.”

Even under the cascading torrent of nonsense pouring out of me, Valerian’s expression didn’t change. He waved off my long-winded health excuse the way a player waves off the murmur around a board, lightly, dismissively.

“Is that so.”

Valerian dropped those two words and moved a piece, taking my bishop in a single stroke. I couldn’t keep my brow from furrowing; the bishop was a key piece, and losing it threw me onto the back foot all at once.

“That’s not everything you came to say.”

That one move had left my black pawns isolated, cut off from their lines. Before I knew it, our back-and-forth had collapsed into pure defense on my end, my only aim to bleed as few pieces as possible.

And just like that, both the initiative in our conversation and the state of the board were being eroded out from under me, bit by bit, by Valerian.

Valerian propped his chin on his hand and looked down at me.

“At this rate I should have just done my paperwork instead.”

His eyes, already losing interest, drifted down to my fingertips. Under that gaze, my hand froze in midair.

Eve had appeared at my side without my noticing, watching me with an anxious face.

That’s right. Of course.

“I can’t very well end it here.”

The character who wore Eve’s form, my character, had beaten Valerian down again and again. Again and again? Hell, I’d killed him hundreds of times. And here I sat, frozen up across the board from a man like that.

The opening skirmish had ended in my defeat, true enough. But that didn’t mean I’d failed.

“Brother.”

I stopped beating around the bush.

“About Leo. I took him in knowing he was a traitor.”
“…Hmm.”

Half-measures weren’t going to work.

My opponent was the Invincible Legion Commander. Valerian.

Looking back, Valerian wasn’t just a powerhouse in a fight; he was also a legion commander of formidable intellect. There was no chance a man like that would fall for clumsy acting or silence.

“You aren’t surprised?”
“Because I already knew.”

I lowered my shield, and Valerian set down his armor in turn.

“Then you understand that Leo’s existence still has a use, Brother.”

I advanced one of my few remaining pieces a single square. At that, Valerian let his displeasure bleed into his reply.

“What possible use could there be in a single common servant — and a marked traitor at that?”

House Arne was a proud knightly house, and by any measure betrayal was something they could never look on kindly. But that was Valerian’s view, not mine.

“Since ancient times, the single decisive factor in winning a war has not been overwhelming force of arms.”

Historically, what decides the outcome of a war is, in the end, intelligence.

“Leo can perform the role of a spy excellently — in multiple ways.”

As I’d said before, there was no such thing as failure for me. Only success, and the road to it.

I smiled and looked across at Valerian.

“And besides — Leo has already shaken your heart somewhat, hasn’t he, Brother? How could he possibly be useless?”

“Coddling a traitor is not the way of House Arne.”

Valerian devoured my advancing black pawn yet again.

…It’s over.

That one move had shattered the balance of the board completely.

I kept the smile in place and pressed on.

“And yet, was it not you, Brother, who was the very first to take him back in after he betrayed me?”

Valerian picked up one of my fallen black pawns. He turned it over in his fingers like a man appraising a sculpture, and then, between thumb and forefinger, crushed it. I watched the pawn snap in two and clatter to the floor.

“If a dog you’ve kept and raised bites you, is it the owner’s fault, or the dog’s? Whose fault would you say it is?”

Valerian was a man who would one day rise to the lofty rank of legion commander. Perhaps that was why his pride as a knight ran even deeper than I’d assumed.

But if so, then why would this man, who held betrayal in such contempt…

— Just as the Empire did, all of you, too, shall die.

…one day become the foremost blade to carve the Empire to pieces?

“A dog is merely a beast. The greater fault would belong to the master — the one with reason — who failed to control it.”

“That is sophistry!”

Bang!

Valerian slammed his hand down on the table, and the chess pieces rattled violently in place.

“If a beast bites its master, killing it as an example to the others is the way of a knight. Are you defending the traitor?”
“I am not defending him. I am speaking of efficiency.”

Sadly for him, a Valerian who’d lost his composure was no longer any match for me.

“A hunting dog is a beast. When a beast is hungry, it will covet its master’s food; when it senses a threat, it will bare its teeth. That is its instinct.”
“And that is precisely why you must kill it as an example! To plant fear, so that it will never again betray its master!”
“And what if that hunting dog is the only one you have?”

At the counter-question, Valerian’s brow drew tight. I pressed on without missing a beat.

“Picture it, Brother. You are caught in a blinding snowstorm. Your provisions have run out, and behind you, your child is starving and weeping.”

I looked him straight in the eyes and drew him into the scene I’d built.

“If you don’t find game at once, you’ll all freeze to death together. But your weak human eyes and nose can find no prey in this blizzard. The only hope you have is the keen sense of smell of the beast at your side. What would you do, Brother?”

“…”

“Even if that beast is the very one that — hungry — bit your hand yesterday.”

Valerian was silent for a long time.

“A dead dog cannot hunt. Rather than starving to death together while you stand on your pride, would it not profit you more to refit its leash by force and take it out hunting again?”

After a long silence, Valerian, with visible effort, opened his mouth.

“A dog that bites its master will, no matter the leash, in the end bare its teeth again. A traitor’s nature does not change.”

To the very end, Valerian wouldn’t bend his philosophy. It was the conviction he’d held his whole life, as the eldest son of House Arne and as a knight. And I had never intended to break that conviction itself.

Valerian’s gaze swept over my thin wrist and sickly shoulders, and then he spoke.

“Surely you don’t imagine that a child, simply by strapping on a sturdy leash, can subdue a dog larger than himself.”
“Of course not.”

It caught me off guard. He had no intention of denying the logic of my argument itself.

“What you say is plausible. But you, who lack the strength to control the leash, will in the end be torn apart by the very hunting dog you keep.”

That Valerian, Valerian, was worried about me. He was telling me the one who’d have to carry out the logic, namely me, wasn’t up to it.

It made me happy.

And so what was really inside me came spilling out, honest and unguarded.

“Personally, I find a Leo who puts his own interests first far easier to deal with. His desires are so perfectly transparent.”
“His desires — transparent?”
“That’s exactly why he’s easy to handle! Compared to misty feelings like loyalty or faith, the man whose hard desire you have a grip on is far easier to control!”

I rattled it off like a machine gun, and a beat later I thought, uh-oh.

…Why am I so excited just now?

The tone I’d just used was suspiciously close to a kid bursting to show his big brother some new fact he’d picked up at school. A corner of my chest was tingling. The fact that this strict, terrifying older brother was actually listening to what I had to say filled me with a strange satisfaction, a strange exhilaration.

Thump, thump, thump.

My heart was pounding. I was…

Along with the chat-log line, Eve’s form flickered and stuttered like static. As if the signal had slipped off its frequency, the senses of the real world were going hazy.

“Ngh!”

I clutched at my chest.

Over the scene in front of me, a dizzying, alien memory was being forced into place like an old strip of film. The pain shoved my eyes shut on their own.

The pain wrenched my eyes shut all over again.

“Are you all right?”

At a voice ringing close by my ear, I opened my eyes. It was unmistakably Valerian’s, but next to the deep baritone I’d just been hearing, it was far more boyish, far softer.

And when I opened my eyes again…

“Are you hurt anywhere, Arden?”

…a younger Valerian sat there, a boy who hadn’t yet shed the last of his childhood.