13. The Invincible Legion Commander, Valerian (2)

I was standing inside the memories of Arden, the owner of the body I now inhabited. Right in front of me, a young Arden and a young Valerian were playing chess.

So this is how it felt for Eve.

Just like Eve, I was drifting around Arden in a kind of out-of-body state.

Maybe this is what going to space is like.

In any case, just as Eve couldn’t get far from me, I couldn’t get away from Arden.

What is he trying to show me?

My heart prickled, my vision cut to black, and then Arden’s memories played out in front of me like a movie. There was nothing for me to do but stand there as a member of the audience and watch the two of them talk.

“Checkmate.”

“…Hngh.”

Valerian propped his chin on his hand and glared at the chessboard, brow furrowed. His thick, blunt fingers hovered in midair with nowhere to go. He didn’t look angry so much as he looked like a man wrestling with a flaw in himself he couldn’t accept.

At last, Valerian slapped his knee and spoke.

“I lose.”

His sullen face loosened, and he shot Arden a sidelong look. But his eyes held no irritation or anger.

“I can’t beat you even once, can I.”

“In return, aren’t you skilled with the sword, Brother?”

“Your body hasn’t been well, and I took advantage of that opening to get a brief edge, that’s all. Once you’re healthy again, the position is going to be taken right back, so the strength I have now means nothing.”

Arden didn’t argue back, didn’t agree, didn’t offer some flattering line of lip service. The usual response would have been something like “Still, Brother, you’re the greatest”, but Arden just went on studying the finished board.

“How should I go about earning Father’s recognition?”

“His recognition?”

“Yes. After all, the one who’ll shine brightest as a knight isn’t going to be me, and it isn’t going to be Lucius.”

Valerian was serious.

Even though Arden was the youngest brother, nine years his junior, Valerian already seemed to acknowledge the gap in talent between them. And yet his eyes were shining as he said it.

“You’re going to shine as the greatest knight of the house, and I can’t just sit there sucking my thumb watching you do it.”

“…”

“My question is: what should I devote myself to, so that I can shine brighter than anyone? You’d know.”

Arden was silent for a moment, then began setting the chess pieces he’d just cleared away back onto the board.

“When a battle ends, everyone focuses only on win or loss.”

“That’s natural. There’s nothing more important than that.”

“No.”

Arden shook his head and pushed one of the pawns toward Valerian, the first soldier Valerian had lost to a misstep in the game they’d just finished.

“A commander shouldn’t be like that. When the battle is over, while the soldiers are drunk on victory or drowning in grief for the comrades they’ve lost… the commander alone has to be different.”

Arden’s eyes settled into a deep, quiet stillness.

“Watch carefully now.”

Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.

Under Arden’s hands, the chess pieces moved in perfect, disciplined order. Valerian and I both stared blankly at the sight. Without a single moment’s hesitation, from start to finish, Arden was reproducing the game the two of them had just played, exactly.

Whoa.

My mouth fell open and stayed open. Every move his brother had made, every move he’d made himself, even the exact intervals of hesitation between them. It was as if someone had rewound a videotape, replaying every part of it perfectly.

Goosebumps prickled along my arms as I watched, but Valerian, the one it was all being performed for, looked unfazed, like a man watching something he’d seen many times before.

“Where you made a mistake, whether there was a misplacement of forces, how many more men you could have saved if you’d issued the correct order—”

The replay had reached its final moment, the king falling.

“Trace it through until your bones ache. More than the joy of victory, remember the weight of the pieces who died for your mistakes.”

Valerian laughed dryly at Arden’s words and said,

“Looks like I won’t be making the most brilliant commander, either.”

Arden, still putting the chess pieces back in order, shook his head.

“No. You can do it, Brother. I have no desire to be a commander myself.”

“You’re yielding the position to me?”

Arden looked Valerian in the eye and grinned.

“Yes. I’ll yield it to you.”

At that, Valerian began to laugh too. A moment later the two of them were sitting there, smiling at each other.

To think a thing like this had happened.

And I, wedged awkwardly in the middle of that laughter, was trying to work out whether this had really happened at all.

The developers went to this much trouble to render a single NPC’s childhood?

A few lines of text, I could understand. But Valerian’s shifting expressions, the texture of the chessboard, Arden’s own emotional arc were all too much. This was overdone. Far too much detail.

Was this discarded data, abandoned mid-development over storage problems? Or unreleased hidden story not yet available to players?

Whatever it was, I was confused.

Whoosh—.

Before I could even sort my thoughts, the brothers’ laughter faded, and my vision lost all its light and cut to black. The fireplace, the chessboard, the laughing Valerian, all of it vanished in an instant.

Pitch-black darkness.

The place felt like a long tunnel with no end in sight. And in that darkness, the only thing I could see was Arden.

Arden began to walk silently into the dark. Or rather, what Arden saw and what I saw were probably different things, but to my eyes it looked like he was walking into darkness. The sensation of walking through a tunnel, perhaps.

Unable to escape him, I followed behind.

How long had we been walking?

The way behind us was filled with a world of pure black, but one step forward and it would cross over into a world of pure white. Like a borderline between dark and light.

Without hesitation, Arden stretched his foot into the light.

FWASH—!

“…Hah, hah!”

My vision flashed white, then found color again. The sound of ragged breathing reached my ears.

In place of the scent of oak, the iron tang of blood and the smell of earth pricked at my nose. The occasional waft of sweat was acrid.

“Your wrist is bent too far.”

It was Valerian’s voice.

When I turned my head, I saw Arden drenched in sweat and gripping a wooden sword, with Valerian behind him correcting his form. The genius who had ruled the chessboard the night before was nowhere to be seen. A frail-bodied child was straining just to swing a wooden sword that weighed as much as he did.

“Is the sword heavy?”

“…Yes.”

Arden bit his lip and answered.

Valerian propped Arden’s trembling arm up with his own hand.

“You don’t learn to hold a sword with your head. You swing it until your body remembers.”

Valerian was grinning mischievously, but he was also bracing Arden’s back firmly so the boy wouldn’t lose his center.

“I’ll remember the deaths of my chess pieces, so you’ll need to remember the weight of the sword.”

Arden dropped the sword along with a bead of sweat.

“…Is this your revenge for the chess game?”

“That’s a matter of perspective.”

“You’re going to regret this when I grow up, Brother.”

“All the more reason to enjoy it now, isn’t it?”

Arden wiped the running sweat from his face and raised the sword again. But once again, the sound of his swing was followed by the brothers’ laughter.

From the point of that laughter, the flow of time began to lurch and skip about as it pleased.

Whish-whish-whish—.

Like film being fast-forwarded, fragments of countless memories flashed past in front of my eyes.

Their backs, walking through the woods together, hunting.

A blunt, awkward hand secretly placing candy at Arden’s bedside when he was sick.

The brothers’ profiles, watching the rain in silence beneath the eaves on a rainy day.

The arrogant, haughty Valerian I’d met inside the game was nowhere to be found. Behind the gruff speech and the rough manners, there was always a clumsy affection and warmth aimed at the youngest brother.

A heavy weight tightened in one corner of my chest.

Why on earth are you showing me all this?

How brothers who had been this close had ended up worse than strangers, or whether it was simply a plot twist the developers had hidden away, I had no way of knowing.

And right then, with my confusion still piling up, it happened.

Click—.

The fast-rolling projector of memory snapped to a stop. The pitch-black darkness returned.

In that dark tunnel I should have been getting used to by now, I was left standing alone yet again. And, as before, the back of Arden’s figure was walking forward.

Determined to see this through to the end, I set off after him again.

Step, step. Halt.

Arden’s quiet footsteps in the dark came to a stop. And then he turned slowly around and looked me precisely in the eyes.

“…!”

In the pitch-black dark, only Arden’s eyes glowed, vivid and bright.

I really do show it on my face when I’m thrown.

My own face, reflected in those eyes, was filled with bewilderment.

Arden, looking at me, spoke.

“I failed.”

And then he smiled bitterly. The smile was wholly unlike any I’d seen from him before, the look of a man who had given up.

I wanted to say something, but no voice came out.

“But you…”

There were so many things I wanted to ask. I wanted to ask what had happened.

But Arden was fading further and further into the dark.

I stretched out my hand to grab him. Even though I knew I had no physical body and couldn’t possibly touch him, I did it without thinking.

To my astonishment, my hand reached his shoulder.

And then, over that shoulder, I saw his face.

KRA—BOOM—!

Tears were running down it.

And with that, a violent shock slammed my consciousness back into reality.

When I opened my eyes, the first thing to greet me was Eve’s face, pressed in so close that her breath was practically on my nose.

When I nodded, she finally pulled her face back.

“…I’m back.”

The familiar sight of my own room came into view.

Phew.

For now, I pushed aside the worry I’d been carrying.

What if I come out of the memory and find myself awake in Valerian’s study?

Eve was still staring at me, her face plastered over with concern. But for me, getting a handle on the situation took priority.

“How long was I out?”

“…Two days. You’re kidding.”

The Crown Prince’s coming-of-age ceremony event was, roughly, one year away. Until the birth of the Lord of Lamentation, there was only one year left.

Time was gold. In that sense, two days lost to doing absolutely nothing was a bit of a waste.

That said, it wasn’t as if I’d come away with nothing. What Arden had shown me through his memories had revealed something new.

I sat up in bed.

“It’s a waste, yes, but the time wasn’t spent for nothing.”

Having heard the whole of my story, Eve was still mostly worried. She was afraid that somewhere down the line, Arden’s soul might swallow me up again. To her, that seemed to be the greatest terror of all.

“He won’t, not for a while.”

I shook my head firmly.

At that, Eve’s eyes visibly widened, and she asked,

The usual me would have been the first to dismiss a baseless certainty like that. Data, numbers, strategy guides. Only solid, visible information was the key to clearing it, that was what I’d always believed.

But funny enough, this time was different. I couldn’t explain the reason logically, and yet I was sure.

Arden hadn’t been trying to swallow me up. He’d only been trying to tell me something.

“Yeah, moving on a gut feeling really isn’t my style.”

So what on earth had he been trying to tell me?

I went back over the memories Arden had shown me. Just like he himself had done.

“Valerian and Arden were close. They laughed together, they teased each other, they were the kind of brothers it’s hard to find even in real life, sharing a genuine affection for each other.”

At first, I’d thought of it simply.

Back when I’d first been dropped into Arden’s body, there’d been the day they came to my room and poured insults on me. Eve had told me Valerian’s DV was 42. Lucius’s was 47.

“I’d just decided that they were people born evil, that once their DV climbed to 100, they turned into demons.”

Their characters were already shot, I’d thought, so the baseline was just naturally high. That’s how it had actually worked in the game.

“But DV isn’t a gauge that climbs honestly from zero.”

The initial value itself could be set high, depending on the negative tendencies and nature the subject already carried. I’d been deceived by the blind spot of that system.

Valerian was not the kind of man who would spit those venomous words at a sickly younger brother. The premise itself had been wrong.

“There must have been some decisive event that shook Valerian to the core, first.”

If so, the reason Arden had shown me that memory was clear.

“I need to find the truth of that day.”

Uncovering it, that was going to be the key to clearing this twisted house.