Chapter 540

For a moment, he leaves time behind.

He is no one, and only himself. Anything could have entered that place. The corpse that had been staring wide-eyed beside him and speaking to him had never truly been there to begin with, but now there was even less trace of it. Yet it was not that the corpse had disappeared from that place and returned to where it belonged. He was the one who had left.

The confusion and delirium in the Pleroma dioceses he had been sending away while barely conscious, and in Nuremberg, where the cleanup was still underway, fall silent.

Now he looks out at the fog from a blank page like a wilderness, no longer bound to the pages of religion through which he had wandered for so long in search of an answer, nor to the pages of philosophy, literature, science, or history, nor to the words of all mankind’s memories, proverbs, and aphorisms.

He looks at the tens of thousands of heads that make up the fog.

He knows those heads are crying out about him, “Crucify him! We must see him crucified!”

Even without looking or listening, he sees and hears them.

There had never been any need to cling to numbers that rose and fell in an instant. He already knew better than anyone what those who knew nothing about him were capable of doing to the world.

He thinks of the women who were burned alive as witches simply because they had lived as human beings.

He thinks of the lepers who, because they had fallen ill, were reduced to the living dead.

He thinks of peoples who were killed in locked rooms, in the wilderness, and in cities simply because they existed.

Sometimes, the principle behind it was no different from murder committed against an individual. That was why he wanted to know the cause.

He thinks of something that may once have been his own life, though he can no longer tell.

He thinks of everything those who knew nothing about him had said about him, his companions, and everyone else.

He had watched himself being killed by them as though observing someone else’s death, and perhaps he mourned it in much the same way.

Yet he staggers and lowers his head at the thought of the unseen selves scattered across the world, all of them killed by those people.

The waves of greed, devoid of tolerance or understanding, always spare themselves and their own groups from the harsh scrutiny they impose on others, no matter what they themselves believe. And so the integrity, righteousness, and impartiality that had once existed within them, pure as dew at dawn, are no longer right, no longer impartial, no longer just.

He hears the voices declaring that because he, who was often righteous even if never always so, and who unquestionably possessed an objective eye, had said they were wrong, they must be wrong; that because all of them joined their voices to say that he had grown into a wrongful being, he was still unquestionably wrong.

Voices that, judging a single person’s life, declared, “You ought to become human, and yet you ought not to become human.”

Already, without hesitation or restraint, those heads had declared that this person and that person were wrong, utterly wrong, and driven nails through their hands and hung them up, proclaiming that this was justice, this was righteousness, this was what was right.

How different are you and I when it comes to having the right to judge what is right and wrong in a life? Have you ever been able to say with certainty that you were doing something that would leave not the slightest trace of unease in your own heart or in the hearts of your neighbors—that you would not do to another what you would not want done to yourself, that you could look back after years had passed, after you had reflected on it, after your emotions had settled and you could look upon your former self as a third party, and still say, “Yes, perhaps that happened, but what I did was right”?

The voices of the past, present, and future answer.

Yes. With my hand on my conscience, I can say that I am acting for the greater good.

Then I must hurry and see what is wrong hung upon the cross. I must see with my own eyes the joy of watching what is wrong set right, what is evil destroyed, and justice cover everything in the world.

That was why he had come here.

He might die again, just as Pleroma intended. Could he really have any realistic hope? Was he wronged? Those who were burned to death, those imprisoned on islands and treated like garbage, those uprooted down to their very roots—all of them died without sin. The only guilt attached to their deaths was the lack of reflection on the part of those who killed them.

But it was only natural that those who burned people alive and stoned them to death, those who hunted people down and killed them as though they were evil spirits, and those who killed people simply because they were people would never think that they themselves were failing to think.

They believed they had removed what was wrong. They believed they had corrected those who had strayed from what they were supposed to be. They believed they were carrying out God’s will.

What was once God had become justice today.

That justice should be mistaken for something else was nothing more than a familiar cycle of history.

So he did not feel wronged.

After the two bitter cups he had drunk one day in the 21st century, there came a third bitter cup today, rushing toward him with a fierce determination as though the past had never existed. And now, he was looking toward a different path.

So he no longer speaks to corpses. He no longer wanders across the words of a god he was pushed into following while blindfolded.

Yet he still knows why God heard the fear of Cain, the murderer, and gave him a mark so that no one would kill him.

Why would a God who was supposed to be perfectly just help a murderer live?

A long-standing argument within him has finally reached its answer. Perhaps he had known it ever since the end of the first life he could remember. But he had turned away from it, and now he could no longer do so.

He takes hold of the thousands of reed-like hands reaching out from the mist and feels their wondrous pulse.

The flesh within his sight is utterly pure, yet the yellowed whites of eyes that have never truly cleansed themselves, the gleaming ‘I’ and the obsession that rest upon them, the sensitive ears and mouths that lie in wait for the day they can demand their own justice—all of it becomes meaningless beneath a pulse no different from that of primordial times.

To him, this steady, quiet pulse sounds like the universe settling into place as it has since the beginning of time.

His heart empties into the primal sorrow and joy contained within that pulse.

And so the anger he ought to have held toward others disappears.

Even if the flare of life that once burst forth with its first breath long ago, and the purity that stood before the unknown, cannot easily be seen in those yellowed eyes, he does not want other living beings to be driven down the same path as himself.

Even if one living being cannot truly feel compassion for another, and even if someone who was once murdered cannot be expected to feel compassion for those who may become murderers themselves someday.

He still does not want the same nail driven into the light of life that was driven into him.

Perhaps he is still confused, just as he was when he spoke to the corpse. But he still believes that he has finally understood why the brother-murderer who let his younger brother’s blood seep into the earth outside his body was cursed by Yahweh, yet was still given the assurance of life by Yahweh.

Even if he has understood Yahweh’s decision, which at first glance seems like mere whim, he is still not the Christ some people call him. Nor is he a saint, a clergyman, a believer, or even a theist.

He is an atheist because he calls everyone’s bitterness what it is: bitterness. He has never once thought that what he knows is an axiom.

He simply feels the many things passing through him.

The deafening wars and the silent wars, the one-sided and quiet massacres, the deaths of the flesh and the deaths of the mind. He hears the procession of death that has never once ceased since the beginning of humanity, the wails crying out in the wilderness, the purity and ignorance of those who killed others without getting so much as a drop of blood on their hands, never even realizing they had killed, and the veins standing out in the throats of those who shouted at the top of their lungs, ‘I am right.’

The screams he had already heard countless times here were still vivid in his mind today.

He thought of the people who had been reduced to lumps of clay simply because they had felt human emotions. He thought of how those same people had once been pointed at and condemned by those who had not yet burst apart and died themselves, even though they might one day become the same.

The person whose pulse he feels is that person, and that person is this person.

How empty causality and retribution, how empty everything was. The dead were killed, and the killers continued killing, yet no one heard the sound of mourning in the city.

Even when days came when they themselves might die, they looked at others first and declared them wrong.

They stayed silent, and silent, and silent again, only to regret their silence when the day of their death finally came. Yet the dead knew no way to speak except through the corpses they left behind…

It was the living who gave death its nobility, its sorrow, its joy, its meaning.

He thought of Ralph Huber, much like Gerda Assmann, and of the countless Assmanns and Hubers who existed.

Feeling the pain in every kind of death, he had nevertheless given Sarah Hohenfels the mark.

Because he did not want to allow the arbitrary justice of these countless eyes, hands, and mouths crying, ‘She must be crucified,’ to become an injustice running parallel to Hohenfels’s crime.

And even when these eyes, hands, and mouths one day faced their own turn on the cross, he would give them the mark.

If he had the power to do so, then at least in his world, he would.

In that way, a call to mercy and self-reflection could become a mark of salvation at the same time.

Not because he was Christ, as some claimed, but because that was what it meant for the individual life of a person.

Was society not made up of individuals?

Even if, somewhere in the distant reaches of his mind, he had become delirious with the Bible’s redemption, he still, even now, forever knew that he was nothing more than a human being, a sentient being.

He knew he had accomplished something impossible in battle. The people he had needed to defeat had stopped attacking him and willingly surrendered their decisions to him. That was how he had led his second country to victory. The country whose king and royal children he had promised to take responsibility for had achieved an overwhelming victory because of him.

If so, now that his final attempt—staking what remained of his life on rising once more and ensuring that no one would die in vain—had finally collapsed, was it not all right for him to accept fate for a moment, in this life that kept collapsing and endlessly repeating itself in the same way as his previous life?

So he decided to rest for a moment, lowering his forehead to the ground.

But if, at the very end of his gaze as it returned to the earth, a not-so-distant memory and a prayer had caught on, and because of that, something had been held back from descending for even a fleeting moment, then whose will was it that kept him from resting?

Move to Augsburg. That had to come first if he was going to meet Lukas.

Leonard thought this about fifteen minutes earlier.

And about ten minutes after that, just as he received the news of Nikolaus Ernst’s overwhelming victory from the Bavarian Royal Army Command Center, Leonard knew that his decision had been right and that it was time to make his next move.

Even after hearing Pleroma’s declaration, Lukas did not panic. He moved on to his next destination.

His practical mission was already over, yet he continued.

Because he had resolved to make this operation an overwhelming victory himself.

The operation to spread across Pleroma’s seven dioceses.

It had been an impossible, ridiculous proposition.

Realistically, Leonard had thought they would be fortunate if they managed to half-destroy two or three dioceses.

And yet Nikolaus Ernst had said he would make the impossible possible.

And he had.

The technology he had obtained through cooperation with others, the support Leonard himself had barely managed to secure by winning the Catacombs over, the detailed plans for each operation, his judgment of the situation in the field, the quick Atropos countermeasure medicine that had made all of this possible, and the systems Bavaria had built up over time—all of it had come together with tremendous weight to make this possible.

But the person ultimately in charge was Nikolaus Ernst.

In the long term and the short term alike, he had been the actual leader of the operation.

Even when every cog is meshing perfectly, there must be someone who oversees the whole machine. It is both a virtue and a duty for that person never to forget the responsibility of doing so.

Nikolaus Ernst had done exactly that in a situation where it was difficult even to remain conscious of virtue or duty.

It was not that he had not panicked.

Even in the midst of shock, he had found his duty and charged ahead.

The Lukas Leonard knew was that kind of strong person, and Leonard knew that interfering with the decision his friend and comrade had made was not a way of paying him respect.

It would not help him accomplish what he wanted.

It would only leave him trapped in that shock for even longer.

But someone who runs while squeezing every last ounce of strength from himself, having summoned his final resolve, is different in every sense from someone who remains composed. Once he had accomplished what he had set out to do, someone had to make sure he did not collapse from exhaustion. Leonard knew where he would go.

— [Your Highness.]

While he was still defending against the attacks of Pleroma pursuing him through the remaining Pleroma coordinate systems, he heard the voice of his childhood friend. Since they were in different units, there should have been no way for them to communicate directly, yet Elias had somehow ordered the strategy room to connect him to Leonard. His voice sounded different from usual as he asked.

— [Where is Sir Ernst?]

The sounds of attacks and defenses could be heard in the background. Leonard knew what was happening. They were dealing with the last remnants before the operation ended. He was doing the same.

Leonard told him the route he expected Lukas to take.

“Nuremberg. After that, I don’t know. I’ll tell you after I pull him out.”

What did he mean, he didn’t know? And what did he mean by pulling him out? Elias had every reason to be curious, but like the close friend he was, he did not ask anything more and ended the call.

Trust between friends could, in moments both trivial and important like this, unexpectedly make them conscious of each other’s existence. Once again, Leonard realized that he was not alone in the world when it came to something he had never had to endure before, and that realization gave him, however faintly, the strength to drive his body onward.

His friend must have felt the same.

His thoughts quickly returned to where they had been.

Lukas had won in a way no one could have imagined.

It should have been impossible.

Could it be that, under the influence of adrenaline today, he had been able to use his divine power without restraint, allowing him to wipe out eleven dioceses outside Bavaria? It was possible, but unlikely. There must have been Pleroma forces capable of counterattacking. Even if he could manage two, perhaps three or four at best, going beyond that would have been difficult.

Leonard understood.

The brilliance that allowed Lukas to make the impossible possible came, first and foremost, from Lukas himself. But secondly, it might also have been possible because of the Special Ability that remained in his core. Perhaps the two came from the same essence.

In any case, there was one thing that at least he and his childhood friend would have known.

Lukas had undoubtedly absorbed Pleroma’s power.

Power?

Did that mean mana and vitriol?

If so, had he absorbed it by killing them?

If he had shown that to everyone…

No. That couldn’t be.

Then—

Had he absorbed their will instead?

The moment the thought occurred to him, Leonard felt a chill spread from his heart to the back of his neck, then all the way to his head.

Thump—!

Leonard, sword in hand, planted his foot against the ground to stop his retreat from carrying him farther and began forming a strategy before the Pleroma mage who used fire as his Special Ability. He was sick of hearing requests for additional personnel. How much longer were they going to keep holding them here? How much more time were they going to waste? Should he use his Special Ability? He thought the time had come. Even with several Royal Army mages joining the fight, there were still several opponents.

Fire turned plants to ash. The matchup was not particularly favorable. If the flames spread beneath the plants and burned away the seeds, it would take Leonard a long time to make them bring forth their vitality again.

Even so, there was no reason to hesitate. Leonard thought this as the vitriol spreading with the flames scattered densely through the air, flying toward his clothes and skin. Thankfully, he realized that he had a favorable matchup against someone who relied on a Special Ability when it came to barrier defense magic.

Another deafening roar rang out.

Plants coiled in from all directions beneath Leonard’s descending foot. The flames began catching on the plants faster than he had expected. His opponent’s Special Ability probably did more than simply ignite things; it must also make the flames burn more readily.

No matter how he looked at it, the fact that Nikolaus Ernst had broken through the attacks of these high-ranking clergy in a single blow and emerged victorious was chilling. Had he not raised everything up and brought everything crashing down with nothing more than a movement of his finger? Leonard knew that was not what had happened, yet it also felt like an expression of a will that no longer wished to tolerate the struggles of human affairs.

By now, everyone who had heard the news would be frozen in astonishment at that unbelievable report, admiring him and cheering his name. Leonard knew without a doubt that it was a good thing, yet he still could not feel at ease.

Then…

Leonard’s plants turned to ash and disappeared.

Then the solution was simple.

Anyone who did not understand this simplicity and relied solely on the matchup between Special Abilities truly had no feel for combat.

What if he simply increased his output faster than the plants could turn to ash?

KRAAASH—!

Like a river raging beneath a storm-driven wind, the plants surged forward, filling his vision in an instant with greenery denser than the gray dust. They flew straight toward the enemy, then slipped past him on either side.

Keeping the plants clustered together lowered the odds of success. After all, wouldn’t an opponent have a harder time dealing with scattered strands than with a single mass—

Each individual stem, each individual branch, flew past the Pleroma mage’s body before wrapping around him from behind. The vitriol erupting from the clergyman’s body quickly began to put out the flames, and it would succeed before long.

But the moment there was a condition called before long, it was already over.

— Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin—

Leonard whispers.

— [Your Highness, I found the lever!]

The shout comes through the artifact. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees another subordinate pointing toward its location, and in that instant, he strikes at the hand of a Pleroma member.

— You who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted!

While the Pleroma member has his wrist in his grasp, Leonard’s sword pierces his heart. The same thing happens with the swords of his men.

Leonard kicks off the ground once more. A wall of tangled brush rises up, intertwining in a chaotic mass and blocking the way. He leaps as though flying, slips outside through the lever, then moves to a place the Pleroma cannot find.

After gathering everyone in one place, he counts their number and reports.

“Your Majesty, this is the 2nd Royal Bavarian Infantry Regiment reporting. At 6:32 PM on April 15, we have successfully annihilated the Diocese of Augsburg. Before receiving further orders…”

Leonard does not say that he will return. He thinks for a moment, and Oettingen speaks without waiting even a moment.

— [What is it?]

“I have something to ask.”

— [Go ahead, Your Highness. However, the entire continent has been thrown into turmoil over Lukas Askanien, Prince of Anhalt, so an emergency meeting will be called. Would you like me to give you the coordinates for your return first?]

Leonard does not say yes. Instead, he asks about the situation.

Oettingen begins listing the current situation in a solemn voice, one report after another. Leonard listens until he can take no more and cuts him off.

“What are the temporary coordinates in front of Nuremberg, where we came out of the Archdiocese of Bamberg?”

Oettingen sounds momentarily flustered before giving him the coordinates.

As soon as Leonard hears them, he moves there.

Oettingen’s proud voice comes through the artifact, telling him that Sir Nikolaus Ernst had already arrived there one minute earlier and was greeting the cheers of the people.

Leonard does not know whether he was actually greeting them. What he sees is a procession of people gradually converging on the center in a radial pattern, countless people standing on balconies and waving Bavarian flags, and, among them, a tall mage standing with his eyes fixed on the sky.

It is truly a scene from Easter.

The festive atmosphere restored, the movement of blessings—it leaves Leonard dazed for a moment.

Time slips away for an instant.

Even though he cannot make out the expression of the masked mage, Leonard senses that something is wrong. Even if it is only his imagination, that is what he thinks.

When the mage begins to lower his head, Leonard hears someone shouting from deep within him and kicks off the ground, running.

He sees the mage gripping his staff tightly and lowering it toward the ground.

Leonard lengthens the grass and stems, cutting through the crowd, and pulls his friend out from among them.

Wrapping an arm around his friend’s shoulder, he stops him from reaching the ground.

“Be angry.”

He did not know why those words had come from him, and yet he knew. This was a situation in which this person should have been angry, and he wasn’t. What Leonard had seen in that brief moment was far from someone simply collapsing from exhaustion. It was no different from the Buddhist ritual practices Leonard himself had learned as a child, or from the kind of oath of loyalty Catholic clergy offered to heaven when they chose that fate for themselves. Whatever the religion, this was not an act that should be performed now.

Of course, Lukas had no intention of devoting himself to a religion. That was obvious. Leonard kept repeating it to himself as though he needed to believe something so self-evident. Whatever Lukas was thinking, he should not be kneeling. He should not be pressing his face to the ground and closing his eyes.

That was resignation.

A visual manifestation of resignation, a declaration made with his entire body that he would live according to the will of fate.

Right now, his friend should have been angry. He should have been grieving. He should have gotten back on his feet and looked toward what came next.

That was the Lukas Askanien Leonard had known since last autumn.

It wasn’t that Leonard thought his friend had grown weak simply because he was not like that now. But when someone who had always been that strong began to collapse today—not because he had been brought down by some kind of magical attack, but because he was collapsing on his own—it made Leonard remain trapped in fear and anxiety, his heart tightening at the thought that perhaps this really was the beginning of the end.

Did Lukas know how the entire country was reacting right now?

He probably didn’t. But even if he didn’t know, he would have anticipated it. He must have known. He had spent his entire life being hounded by the reactions of others…

Was that really all there was to it?

Leonard remembered the day when they were still awkward around each other, sitting across from one another in a carriage and looking through the yellow papers. He remembered the day they had gathered at school and discussed the false rumors about Nikolaus Ernst.

Lukas had always been composed, accepting that suffocating air as though it were simply natural. He never became tense. He never made a big deal out of things.

And now, today, he would rather lie down on the ground.

Leonard knew how to save people by attacking them. And not long ago, he had also learned how to save people through medicine.

But he had never learned how to turn someone back when they were walking alone down a path opposite to life, despite having no physical problem whatsoever.

The words and writings of the sages he had read over the years scattered like bubbles inside his mind. They held no meaning at all when it came to saving a person.

The heel of Leonard’s shoe came down hard between patches of mud and dust.

He called for an arbitrary coordinate he did not know.

It was something he would never normally do.

But if he raised the Z-axis high enough and fell from the sky…

KABOOM—

In that instant, the two of them were somewhere else. The sound of air being torn apart was more chilling than expected. Leonard felt the barrier soften the impact and resistance as it came into contact with their bodies.

I’d rather you did. If you can’t do it for yourself, then do it for me, at least.

Leonard was being rude and unreasonable in a way he had never even been as a child. What could be more self-centered than telling someone to accomplish something for his sake? It certainly wasn’t something a child who hated even hearing himself called Crown Prince could have said. And it was even less fitting for the grown adult he had become. Even so, he buried his face against his friend’s shoulder and spoke.

“I’d rather you be angry. Do that…”

They fell onto the sloping roof of a red building behind the spire of a church somewhere in Bavaria, its roof leading back toward the tower.

What had Pleroma intended?

With a speech more direct than anyone had expected, they had actually succeeded in taking control of the entire continent, and, in the most metaphorical way possible amid that very directness, they had slyly confessed that they intended to become the villains who would personally hand Christ over to the executioners.

Their strategy had succeeded, and the Empire had been thrown into this mess.

Yes. So what came next?

They were openly declaring that they would become the ones who contributed most to nailing Jesus to the cross—that they would brand some human being as Jesus and kill him.

Yet no one thought that far.

Leonard thought of his friend and companion, of the person he had always believed with all his heart to be the axis of justice…

As some scholars had, and as one side of the duality that some of his friends sometimes questioned and sometimes could not help but admire had shown, the public, like most things in this world, possessed both light and darkness. They could lead an era with brilliant foresight, yet at times they could also force the people who made up that era down the path to death.

History remembers both.

As he stood before his friend’s fate, Leonard came to understand the darkness of his homeland in 1898.

It was because they had never truly thought, and therefore did not know when they were supposed to think. Because they did not understand that thinking fundamentally required self-reflection, they mistook being led astray by other people’s words accompanying whatever phenomenon was before them—being able to hear and see something and then declare it right or wrong—for thinking for themselves.

And most decisively, because they did not want to think.

For those who now called Lukas a wrongdoer, standing on the side of justice was not difficult or arduous.

It was pleasurable.

What a ridiculous age it was to tell people to think.

Only sensational information reaches their nerves. Facts and inevitability alike disappear from their understanding. Every one of them becomes a dilettante with a certain amount of knowledge about Pleroma, pretending to suddenly offer righteous criticism of the injustice that is Lukas Askanien, while ignoring the fact that Lukas Askanien is hardly as evil as they make him out to be, and that Pleroma itself has openly foretold murder. They act as though the people saying that each of us should be mindful of our own conduct do not exist.

What kind of influence will the darkness he had come to understand so painfully today have in 1908, in 1918, in 1928…?

He felt as though he were standing on ground made of glass set into the frame of an old, rotting wooden window. And he was not the only one there. Every human being was standing there with him.

With a ticking time bomb before him, all he could do was embrace his friend. He did not dare look him in the face.

A human being who does not laugh when he should laugh, who does not get angry when he should be angry, is not in a natural state. He has grown beyond what is natural.

To remain indifferent to everything, accept one’s circumstances, and force oneself to summon up every ounce of resolve just to be able to react strongly to one’s own situation—that is the choice of someone who has already endured far too much wear.

Leonard vaguely realizes.

There was a life his friend had lived that he knew nothing about.

Even if his friend had been faced with something that would have caused another person to stumble after their very first attempt, he was not someone who would easily fall.

The storms of life come differently to each person, regardless of age, and people grow stronger by weathering them again and again. The strength Leonard saw in Lukas was that kind of strength. It was not the strength of someone born powerful by nature, but the strength forged through endurance, through his own effort to hone himself.

But repeated attempts end in repeated failures, and today, instead of continuing, he chose to accept.

Leonard hoped he was mistaken.

Leonard realized that the shift in worldview that had slowly begun to emerge across the European continent long ago—the movement of thought that accompanied his own life, as Christianity, which had formed the entire foundation of his ancestors’ lives, gradually ceased to govern every aspect of life—had been unfolding alongside his own life, even though he had been raised beneath the Catholic world.

He did not want him to become a religious person.

Himself?

No. He did not want the friend he loved to devote his life to the path of religion.

In other words, if he dared put it into words, he did not want him to live a life bound to the will of God and fate instead of free will.

He dared to pray for blasphemy atop a cathedral.

Leonard used an artifact to relay their approximate location, then tore off every artifact he and his friend were wearing and crushed them in his hands.

At the same time, he embraced the cardinal and murmured as though reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

“Weren’t you upset? Weren’t you angry that all the effort you’d poured into this since last autumn ended like this? You’re wrong, Ernst. This isn’t the end. There’s still a chance. Is what remains really all there is?”

Truly, Leonard did not believe this was the end. Just as he had a plan he had prepared together with Elias for the sake of Elias’s victory, he was confident that he could do everything in his power for Lukas’s life as well.

But Lukas was exhausted.

“You always turn what I want into reality. There’s nothing we can’t accomplish when we join forces…”

His friend smiled. He had not fallen asleep. But keeping one’s eyes open did not mean one was awake, just as having breath in one’s lungs did not mean one was truly alive. Hearing something like the sound of the wind, Leonard continued.

“Why are you smiling?”

“I’m not trying to give up.”

The empty face wearing a smile answered him gently. He was speaking clearly, yet he was far away. Leonard twisted his lips, grateful at least that Lukas had regained enough awareness to speak coherently.

“Then what?”

“I’m just trying to think for a moment.”

Leonard didn’t need to ask what he was thinking about. He had something to say. Shaking his head, he whispered, “Don’t think.”

Leonard remembered that the mage he had seen was in no normal state at all. Even while standing in one place, he was in a dream; even while holding someone’s hand, he was somewhere else. As though he were standing in a wilderness made of human corpses, or perhaps standing on some day when he had been happy—or on a day as frustrating as today…

He had been alone and silent, yet he was communicating with someone. That someone was probably himself.

It wasn’t that Leonard simply dismissed Lukas’s thoughts as meaningless because of the state he was in. More than anyone, Leonard knew how someone easily dismissed by others as mad could look upon the world with such keen eyes and such a warm heart, and speak words born from such sharp insight that they could leave one coldly clear-headed.

He wasn’t saying that because Lukas was mad, all his thoughts were nothing but useless delusions. Rather, he had an intuition that the insights Lukas had gained through conversations with himself beneath the mask of madness were surely his truth—and that neither those thoughts nor the conclusion he had reached were things one could accept without feeling utterly terrified.

His friend lifted his head, met Leonard’s eyes, and spoke quietly.

“Listen, Leonard. I figured out why God gave Cain the mark.”

What on earth are you calling me? Under any other circumstances, those would have been the words that immediately sprang to mind. But today, they do not even occur to him.

Leonard closes his eyes at words that, on the surface, seem completely out of context and impossible to understand, yet clearly have meaning behind them. At last, his friend tells him that he has found the answer to a question often regarded as one of the great difficulties of Scripture. There have been countless theological interpretations of it. He is not saying that he has learned one of them in an academic sense. He is saying that he has come to understand it through experience.

Through what is happening right now.

No. You don’t know. You can’t know something like that. No one in this world can.

That was what Leonard wanted to say. Not because he truly believed Lukas could not know the answer, nor because he wanted to dismiss what his friend was saying, but because he wanted to stop him from putting his head to the earth.

He wanted him not to return to the earth like that.

“You really can do anything.”

Leonard looked up at the sky, feeling his throat tighten, yet he spoke with composure.

“If that’s true, can you do this too?”

No answer came.

“I always want you to win. National interest and everything else stopped mattering long ago. I only want you to keep living. That’s why I want you to win.”

Leonard swallowed against his drying throat for no reason and continued.

“But you have no strength today. So this time, I’ll make you win. So…”

Just as he had when he told him to be angry, Leonard makes another selfish demand. He repeats that same act of rudeness.

“Stay by my side.”