“I’m really, truly sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“It’s really okay.”
I’d seen it in a video somewhere.
It was a door-breaching video, an instructional one about how you shouldn’t just shoot at things like padlocks.
Why had I watched that when I wasn’t even going to be breaching doors?
Padlocks are much thicker and sturdier than they look.
If you shoot one, you could get hurt by a ricochet, or even if the lock breaks, the fragments can be dangerous.
I never thought I’d end up experiencing that in this way.
“Is your face all right?”
“I’m not hurt much. It’s just a scratch.”
“I’m not all right…”
Still, I was glad Ailee hadn’t gotten hurt.
What Ailee had fired was a revolver with shotgun shells loaded into the cylinder.
The fragments hadn’t flown toward Ailee either, but from the recoil, her wrist had almost been wrenched back.
It was the kind of emergency weapon only the southern liberation forces would use.
I get that it’s effective, but even so, giving something like this to a patient is way too thoughtless.
No.
Since they didn’t know what kind of person they were dealing with, maybe it was right to arm her.
Besides, it was more effective for Ailee to be armed.
If someone saw me and Ailee together, they’d be wary of me first, not Ailee.
“It’s really okay.”
Still, I’d have to confront Kaya about this.
If she was going to give her a weapon, she should’ve told me first before handing it over.
This part of her was similar to Ian too.
“Deep, do you know you’re actually on the fairly handsome side? I’m shocked I put a scratch on that face. Honestly, if you changed your image, it’d be amazing.”
“Should I cut my hair?”
“Absolutely not! Right now, you look just gloomy enough that no one else would ever covet you!”
I had no idea what she wanted me to do.
Sound hummed and echoed along the walls.
“Ailee, it’s already too late, but let’s be a little quiet from here on.”
“Understood…”
Strictly speaking, we were the intruders right now.
When we moved the carpet and pulled the sofa all the way forward, the door beneath the sofa opened.
I lifted the sofa and peered down, but there was only darkness.
It was a cave so dark I couldn’t even find a real light source.
At least the way down was made of stairs, not a ladder. That was a relief.
I was a little uneasy about making Ailee climb down a ladder in this darkness.
“You were too overprotective earlier.”
“You’d get hurt if you fell.”
“It wasn’t even that high?”
Judging by the ladder right next to it, the stairs had definitely been added later.
They must have been built out of necessity.
Maybe the original Dolores had grown old and become unable to climb the ladder.
So that adopted daughter of hers had built stairs for her mother to use instead of the ladder.
Beep.
At the sound, Ailee and I both stopped.
It was the sound of the smartwatch detecting an electronic device.
There was still a path ahead.
The remaining path was a trap, and that meant there was some secret passage around here.
“Did you find it?”
“I think so.”
At a glance, there didn’t seem to be a door, but the door we came through had been the same.
They’d even made the outside analog so it wouldn’t be detected as an electronic device.
If they’d gone this far, there was a chance this passage had been in use since the old war.
I stepped forward and slowly felt along the wall.
“Usually, with things like this, there’s some kind of secret button somewhere.”
“How do you know that? Where did you see it? What kind of work were you doing when you saw it?”
I’d seen it in movies and games.
“Did you see it in that world from before?”
Ah, right.
Ailee knew I wasn’t originally from this world.
“Something like that. Over there, passages like this usually had secret buttons.”
“I understand. Deep used to find secret passages like this too. Impressive.”
I’d wondered what she’d think if she found it strange, so I was glad she understood.
Though it seemed like some odd misunderstanding had formed.
Ailee came over to the wall too and started feeling around.
“Still, sometimes I do think it might really be an otaku fantasy.”
“You said Levan came from over there too.”
“That’s right. That’s why I believe you. But honestly, things like reincarnating in another world are seriously otaku-ish ideas.”
Click.
My hand caught on something.
It looked like an ordinary stone, but when I pressed lightly, it gave way.
“Ailee, come closer this way.”
“I can’t see well.”
“Follow my voice.”
I couldn’t see well either.
Ailee groped her way over and placed her hand squarely over mine.
“You said you couldn’t see.”
“I can’t? I just moved by following the light of the smartwatch?”
“Don’t lace your fingers with mine. I have to press this.”
“You’re the one lacing fingers, Deep?”
“My hand is underneath, so how would I be doing that?”
“But didn’t you say we had to be quiet earlier? You’re not being quiet at all? We’ll get caught at this rate?”
“I said it was already too late anyway…”
Rumble.
The wall vibrated.
Ailee and I both jumped in surprise and stepped back.
“Did it press?”
“It didn’t press.”
“It opened, though.”
“I didn’t press it.”
“I didn’t press it either.”
The vibrating wall slowly moved.
A gap appeared on the left side of the wall, and light seeped through.
“Then there’s only one possibility.”
“They opened it from the other side.”
Robert had said the other party was a sister.
If she’d beaten them to stop them when the siblings fought, she must be pretty strong-willed, and considering she’d stayed with Dolores, her love for her family must be quite strong too.
On top of that, she was someone with incredible talent for Titans.
What kind of person would she be?
Clack.
“Huh.”
Bang!
“Eek!”
Ailee flinched and clung tightly to my arm.
Dust and dirt rained down from the ceiling.
“…Ain’t Clan boys, then.”
Clack.
The muzzle was aimed at us again just like that.
“Who are y’all?”
White hair.
And truly rare violet eyes.
But there was something that caught my eye before that.
“…Who are you?”
“You come into someone else’s house and ask who I am?”
It was an old person.
An old woman.
“Didn’t ya see it out front? I even put a nameplate on this house.”
She was nothing like what we had expected.
“Dolores. So, who are y’all? Where’re ya from?”
***
“So you’re from the Empire, huh. Then how’d ya get in here? Are ya deserters?”
“Well, uh.”
“That’s right. Something similar.”
The moment we said we were from the Empire, Dolores’s attitude changed.
It was strange.
I could understand her not being hostile to people from the Empire.
“You look young, so how’d ya end up desertin’? Hurry on back. I’ll talk to Daniel for ya.”
But why was she so hostile to people from the Clan?
My stomach felt uneasy, somehow queasy and itchy.
It felt like loaches were swimming somewhere around my duodenum.
It was unpleasant.
“Um.”
This was strange.
“What is it?”
“Who controls the Banshee?”
“The Banshee? Why’re ya askin’ the obvious? I control it. Did ya just come here to see the Banshee?”
“Pardon? Ah, yes.”
“You deserted just to see the Banshee? You’re a bit of an odd one, ain’t ya?”
Dolores smiled brightly.
It was the kind of expression you’d expect from a young person in their twenties rather than an old woman.
Dolores pressed a switch beside her.
Thump. Thud. Thud-thud-thud.
With the distinctive sound of old lighting, my vision suddenly brightened.
Only now could I see everything around us.
It was a hangar.
An old, worn-down hangar.
A hangar where you couldn’t find so much as a spare part no matter how hard you looked.
In the very center of it stood a single Titan.
It was purple, but different.
A Titan rusted, broken, with paint peeling off all over its armor.
As though it had been almost entirely cut off from maintenance for the last forty years.
“But I can’t blame ya for understandin’. The Banshee. The Empire’s latest Titan. Pretty slick, ain’t she?”
“Yes. It’s cool.”
“Well, ain’t it nice that a girl your age has the same taste as me.”
Cold sweat ran down my back.
If this was the hangar where the Banshee was, then this entire place might be contaminated with radiation.
Of course, I wasn’t sure.
The current Banshee was still operating fine.
If there had been a major problem with the generator, or an issue bad enough for radiation to leak, it would’ve been normal for there to have been a nuclear explosion already.
The problem wasn’t the nuclear generator.
“Right now I’m just usin’ this to bash in Clan bastards’ heads, but I’ve got a dream too, ya know.”
“A dream?”
“Yeah. I’m good enough to pop ’em right in the head, but not every Empire kid can shoot as well as me. So if they’ve got no choice and end up bang-bang shootin’ the core, then all those Clan kids die, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
The problem was Dolores.
“What do ya think happens to those kids? They’ll try to get revenge on the Empire, won’t they? To stop that chain of violence, I’ve got no choice but to open an orphanage or somethin’ and raise those kids right. That’s my dream.”
But the chain of violence had not stopped.
Now those children were pointing guns at one another.
“Um, Ms. Dolores.”
“Yeah?”
“Where is the daughter you live with?”
“What’re ya talkin’ about? I’ve never been married, and are ya askin’ a woman in her early twenties about a daughter?”
This person was living forty years in the past.
“Deep, this person…”
“I think so.”
Dementia.
More than cancer, it was the illness I least wanted to have.
“What’re y’all talkin’ about among yourselves?”
“No, nothing.”
“Yes. We weren’t talking about anything!”
“Is that so?”
She didn’t suspect us at all, even in a situation where she could have.
She couldn’t properly grasp time either.
According to Robert, this house was Dolores’s orphanage.
That meant this building had only been made after Dolores founded the orphanage.
Even though she was living in that very building, she was saying she was going to found an orphanage.
“Um, Ms. Dolores.”
“Yeah?”
“We got a good look at the Banshee. Like you said, we should head back now.”
“Yeah. Good thinkin’. Hurry on back.”
“Thank you for showing us.”
“Yeah.”
I grabbed Ailee and quickly left the place.
The whole time we were leaving the cave, I kept holding Ailee’s hand.
Because of the cold sweat, our hands nearly slipped apart several times.
Back outside, we pushed the sofa into place and roughly fitted the lock back in, leaving it loose.
Ailee sank down onto the sofa.
“What do we do…?”
Before coming here, we had made a huge number of assumptions.
This had not been one of them.
Cold sweat beaded on me.
“First, um…”
We had done about half of what Daniel had ordered.
“Should we at least tell him the Banshee’s location and let him handle the rest himself?”
“Then the old woman might die? Wouldn’t it be better to leave it to Robert?”
“We came here prepared to kill if there was truly no other way from the start.”
I had regretted not killing Levan.
I couldn’t afford to be lenient again this time.
I didn’t want to be the one to kill her, but I could leave it to Daniel.
Ailee pressed her lips tightly together for a moment.
“I think that would be best.”
There was no other way.