13. The Invincible Legion Commander, Valerian (2)

I was standing inside the memories of Arden, the owner of the body I was inhabiting, and 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.

Either way, 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 started playing in front of me like a movie. There was nothing for me to do but stand there like an audience member and watch the two of them talk.

“Checkmate.”
“…Hngh.”

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

At last he slapped his knee. “I lose.”

His sullen face loosened and he shot Arden a sidelong look, yet there didn’t seem to be any irritation or anger in it.

“I can’t beat you even once, can I.”
“But aren’t you the better swordsman, Brother?”
“You haven’t been well. I used that opening to get ahead for a while, that’s all. Once you’re healthy again, you’ll take my place right back, so what strength I have now means nothing.”

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

“What should I do to earn Father’s recognition?”
“His recognition?”
“Yes. The one who’ll shine brightest as a knight won’t be me or Lucius anyway.”

Valerian was serious. Arden was the youngest brother, nine years his junior, and still Valerian seemed to be acknowledging the gap in talent already. 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.”

“…”

“So I’m asking what I should devote myself to, if I’m to shine brighter than anyone. You’d know.”

Arden was silent for a moment, then started setting the pieces he’d just put away back onto the board. “When a war ends, all anyone cares about is winning or losing.”

“That’s only natural. Nothing matters more.”

“No.” Arden shook his head and pushed one of the pawns on the board toward Valerian. It was 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.”

His eyes settled into a deep, quiet stillness.

“Watch carefully now.”

Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.

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

Whoa.

My mouth fell open and stayed that way. Every move his brother had made, every move he himself had made, even the exact intervals of hesitation between them: it was as if someone had rewound a videotape, and every part of it came back perfect.

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 familiar.

“Where you made your mistake, whether you placed your men wrong, how many more you could have saved if you’d given the right order—”

The replay 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 gave a dry laugh. “Looks like I won’t be making the most brilliant commander, either.”

Arden, still putting the pieces back in order, shook his head. “No. You can do it, Brother. I don’t want to be a commander myself.”

“So you’re yielding it to me?”

Arden looked him in the eye and grinned. “Yes. I’ll yield it to you.”

At that Valerian began to laugh too, and 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 all that laughter, was trying to work out whether it really had 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, the emotional arc of Arden himself? This was overdone. Way too much detail. So was it discarded data, abandoned mid-development over storage problems? Or an unreleased hidden story that players couldn’t get to yet? Whatever it was, I was confused.

Whoosh—.

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

Pitch-black darkness.

It felt like a long tunnel with no end in sight, and the only thing I could see in it was Arden. He began to walk silently into the dark. Or rather, what he was seeing and what I was seeing were probably different, but to my eyes he was walking into darkness, the way you’d walk through a tunnel. I couldn’t escape him, so I followed behind.

How long had we been walking? Behind us lay a world of pure black, but one step ahead it crossed over into a world of pure white, like a border between dark and light. Arden stretched his foot into the light side without hesitation.

FWASH—!

“…Hah, hah!”

My vision flashed white and then found its color again. The sound of ragged breathing reached my ears, and in place of the scent of oak, a raw, iron tang and the smell of earth pricked at my nose. Now and then came an acrid waft of sweat.

“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, and behind him Valerian, correcting his form. The genius who had ruled the chessboard last night was nowhere to be seen. There was only a frail child straining even to swing a wooden sword that weighed as much as he did.

“Is the sword heavy?”

Arden bit his lip. “…Yes.”

Valerian propped up Arden’s trembling arm with his own hand. “You don’t learn how to hold a sword with your head. You swing it until your body remembers.”

He 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 sweat running down his face and raised the sword again, and once more the sound of his swing was followed by the brothers’ laughter.

From that laughter on, time began to lurch and skip about as it pleased.

Whish-whish-whish—.

Fragments of countless memories flashed past my eyes like film on fast-forward. 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 as they watched 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 manner there was always a clumsy affection and warmth aimed at his youngest brother.

A heavy weight tightened in one corner of my chest.

Why on earth are you showing me all this?

How brothers 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 it was right then, as the confusion was piling up, that—

Click—.

The fast-rolling projector of memory snapped to a stop, and the pitch-black darkness was back.

I should have been getting used to that dark tunnel by now, yet there I was, left standing alone in it again. And as before, Arden’s back was walking forward, so I started after him again, determined to see this through to the end.

Step, step. Halt.

Arden’s quiet footsteps stopped in the dark. Then he turned slowly around and looked me precisely in the eyes.

“…!”

In the pitch-black dark, only his 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 full of bewilderment.

Arden looked at me and spoke. “I failed.”

Then he smiled bitterly. It was a wholly different smile from the ones I’d seen 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, so I stretched out my hand to grab him. I knew I had no physical body and couldn’t possibly touch him, yet 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 to mine that her breath was practically on my nose.

I nodded, and she finally pulled her face back.

“…I’m back.”

The familiar sight of my own room came into view.

Phew.

That worry of mine, what if I come out of the memory and find myself awake in Valerian’s study, I could set aside for now. Eve was still staring at me with concern plastered all over her face, but getting a handle on the situation came first.

“How long was I out?”

“…Two days. You’re kidding.”

The Crown Prince’s coming-of-age ceremony event was roughly one year away, which meant there was only one year left until the birth of the Lord of Lamentation. 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 there’d been no harvest. What Arden had shown me through his memories had revealed something new to me.

I sat up in bed. “It’s a waste, sure, but it wasn’t for nothing.”

Eve had heard the whole of my story, and she was still mostly worried. Somewhere down the line, Arden’s soul might swallow me up again, and 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.

The usual me would have been the first to throw out a baseless certainty like that. Data, numbers, strategy guides: only solid, visible information was the key to the clear. That was what I had 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 over the memories he’d shown me again, just as he himself had done.

“Valerian and Arden were close. They laughed together, they teased each other. You’d have a hard time finding brothers who cared about each other like that, even in real life.”

At first I’d thought of it simply. Back when I’d just been possessed into Arden’s body, the day they came to my room and poured insults onto me, Eve had told me Valerian’s DV was 42 and Lucius’s was 47.

“I just assumed they were born evil, and that once their DV hit 100, they turned into demons.”

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

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

The system could set the initial value itself high, depending on the negative tendencies and nature the subject already carried, and I’d been deceived by that blind spot. 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’ve been some decisive event first, something that shook Valerian to the core.”

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

“I need to find out the truth about that day.”

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