Looking down at a spread-out memo pad on her desk, Ithea made a complicated face.
She grumbled and held her head, a pen dangling precariously between her nose and lips. The woman turned her eyes up at the ceiling, emitting otherworldly sounds, then collapsed on her desk as pieces of paper scattered all over. The gap between her adult appearance and her childish behavior was amazing to behold.
“…What are you doing?” Tiat’s question was half out of bewilderment and half out of a sense of duty, with just a little of her own concern mixed in.
“Mmph… Ahhhh…” Ithea raised her head. “There’s something I’ve wanted to know for a while now, so I secretly nabbed these papers back from the First Officer yesterday, see? But the number of things I don’t get just keep getting bigger and bigger…”
She sighed, then swiveled her whole chair. It made a horrible squeaky noise. “Though I’ve not met the kiddies yet, I did run into that boy by chance. Y’know, the one we talked about back then. Feodor? Seems like a nice guy, doesn’t he?”
“…Just on the outside. His actual personality is beyond terrible.”
“That so? Well, if you’re buddies then you’d know.”
“No, we don’t get along. We’re always at each other’s throats.” Tiat shook her head. “But how did it go? Did he seem fine?”
“Hmm? Maybe a bit tired, but he looked like he was doing alright?”
“I see.” Tiat turned away. Feodor’s fine. That means Lakhesh, Pannibal, Marshmallow, and Apple are all fine too. If even one of them was feeling sick, he would’ve gotten all down about it. In that regard, he’s strangely easy to understand. Even though he’s a liar, he’s really easy to figure out…
“Hmmmmmm…?”
…Ithea is looking at me with her irritating smile. I’ll need to change the subject. “So what was the information you got?”
“Oh, that. About the big fuss last month—you know, when you guys dropped the port district.”
Tiat winced. Did I dig my own grave? No, this feeling…it’s more like I plunged in at terminal velocity…
Ithea tapped her pen to her lips. “Because a Beast got into that annoyingly big airship, the whole island would’ve been doomed if we dilly-dallied too long. That’s why there was no choice but to have everyone work together and drop the ship… Geh, it was already a strange incident from the get-go, but, as I look at these documents it’s like the stuff I can and can’t figure out is piling up more and more, y’know?”
“Um…” Somehow, it didn’t seem as if the subject of her fight with Feodor was going to come up. “What do you mean?”
“What…mmm…let’s see… First off, after eliminating the possibility of the Beast somehow building a nest within the airship under its own power, I can start by assuming it was a crime committed with the use of a Bottle.” Ithea seemed deep in thought for a bit. “Hey, Collon.”
“Huh? What’s up?” Collon peeked over from the top of the bed, where she’d been amusing herself by bending herself into odd shapes.
“Let’s say you wanted to destroy this island by using this particular Bottle. Where’d you think you’d plant it?”
“What?! U-uhh…” Collon was obviously flustered from having such an unimaginable question thrown at her. “I’d…I’d break it at…the middle of the island! I guess?”
Not bad, Tiat thought. After all, Croyance was what the Bottle had contained. A product out of the deepest and darkest nightmares, which couldn’t be destroyed nor burned. Once released, only one solution existed—to sever all places or things it had spread to and dump them onto the surface.
In other words, if its encroachment began somewhere that couldn’t be broken off, the Beast’s victory would be decided in that moment.
“Yup, that’s the best way to do it. If that was the objective, even I’d do that. Speeding up the encroachment by shocking it with an explosion was excessive in and of itself. Even if you didn’t bother to do that, the island would certainly be devoured before long if it was left alone.”
“…So in other words…their objective wasn’t to destroy the whole island?”
“Bingo.” Ithea nodded firmly. “At least, it’s a strong chance that wasn’t their main objective.”
“But then what did they want to do?” Tiat mused. Could their aim have been the Utica?
Dropping the greatest, most powerful airship owned by the Winged Guard?
…No, if that was the case, they could just get in and fill it with explosives. There’s no point in using an ultimate trump card like a Beast for that sort of purpose…
Ithea cleared her throat. “There’s two things that are key. First, whoever it was took control of the port district. Second, the explosion set a time limit for resolving the incident.” Tiat nodded, her arms crossed. “So then, was it an experiment…or maybe they were collecting data?”
She blinked. “What do you mean?”
“On the day of the incident, the Winged Guard pursued an almost perfect course of action and kept the damage to a minimum, all thanks to that Feodor guy.”
Yeah. It frustrated her to admit it.
“Now try thinking about a situation where that didn’t happen, where our unseen enemy’s plan progressed favorably for them. How do you think it’d go?”
Tiat did as she was told; she closed her eyes, trying to recall the sequence of events from then.
First there had been chaotic explosions, a disturbance serving as a smokescreen intended to delay the discovery of Croyance. If Feodor, who claimed subterfuge like that were his forte, hadn’t figured out the truth of the smoke and mirrors, the Winged Guard’s response would’ve been delayed for roughly half an hour.
Thirty minutes. With so much time, how much would the damage be magnified? Given time, the Beast’s encroachment would certainly progress. In that situation, it was likely for the whole port district, not to mention part of the adjacent factory district to be abandoned and dropped…
“Wait…”
“Got something, Tiat?”
“The island…won’t fall?”
“That’s right.” Ithea shrugged. “It’d be a close call, but if the 5th Division exhausted its full might as expected, then the island would live. That’s probably what the mastermind’s aim was.”
“But then why did he go and do something like that…?”
“I see. So that’s what happened.” Having entered unnoticed at some point, Nax Selzel was there all of a sudden, standing with his back to the wall.
“Nax?”
“I had a real bad feeling back then, y’know. Even after all that setup for the first blasts and that other bomb which blew up later, the enemy still failed at capturing one key city. How should I say this…it’s kinda like they tried to tick off the Winged Guard, yeah?”
He plucked off a brightly-colored hair and looked at it idly. “Yeah, that’s it, then. They really wanted the Winged Guard to go after ’em. Their aim was to set up a crisis where the whole island would sink unless the Guard threw everything they had at it. They wanted to see how the Winged Guard would move when facing an emergency situation.”
“…Well, that’s probably right.” Ithea sighed. “My thoughts are the same on that point.”
What…what…
“What the hell?!” Tiat spluttered loudly, having forgotten about her position during the crisis. No…no, that can’t be! If that’s what they wanted, then I—I—
“Could be that they were watching you guys fight from a distance,” the older faerie said. “We’re lucky Tiat was able to finish it off without needing to open the gates to the faerie homeland.”
What? What’s with that? Seriously, what the hell’s with that?!
Even though—even though I really was prepared to die there! Even though I thought I needed to use all my life-threatening power to save (almost) everyone around me—the people on Island No. 38, my little sisters at the warehouse!
Was that…what our enemy hoped would happen?
“Maybe they didn’t have enough info ’bout the Bottle and the Beast inside,” Nax was saying. “So they needed field data on how well they could use both?”
“It’s likely.” Ithea grumbled to herself a bit. “Although, if they were securing the Bottle with at least some part of another explosion in the same area…then if you consider our enemy’s twisted logic so far, they must’ve wanted us to not even suspect it was just a bluff, huh?”
She looked back at Tiat and Collon. “Did that guy say something like this too? We have calculations and guesses, but actual impressions would be nice too.”
“Huh?” Even if she were to be asked, nothing in particular came to her mind. Tiat looked at Collon, who shook her head.
Ithea glanced at Nax, the falconfolk who was Feodor’s personal friend. He shrugged his shoulders, a bitter smile on his face.
The older faerie rocked back in her chair, making it squeak again. Bad manners. “If his insights were the same as what the materials say, then it wouldn’t be a surprise if he presented the same conclusion we’ve just come to as well. But there wasn’t anything of the sort on that day. Is it possible that he’s hiding some deep secrets, I wonder—?”
“Ithea,” Collon said strongly as she performed her off-putting calisthenics, “Feodor’s a good guy.”
“Hm.” Ithea’s smirk had a sharp edge to it. “I suppose.”
Looking at her toothy expression, Tiat remembered something from that day.
That moment, when the two of them confronted each other alone and crossed swords.
That guy, who removed his glasses and abandoned his mask of a weak person.
“You know, my big brother said something to me once: ‘You shouldn’t give up on this world yet.’”
“When the world murdered my brother, I decided to abandon it anyway.”
That’s right. Feodor…had said that.
Was he angry? Delusional? Full of hatred? Or was it something else? He had screamed something like a promise, his voice full to overflowing with intense, complex, entangled emotions.
Honestly, at the time she hadn’t listened. Her head had only been full of stuff about herself, and she hadn’t bothered herself with what he thought about. However, if his words back then were the exposement of a passion he had hidden up until then…
“If you say you want to stage your inspiring tale with all the races making appearances and holding hands, if you say you’ll protect the bastards who shouldn’t be protected, then all of you are my enemy!”
“I’ll make myself a problem for all of you!”
At the time, he had been angry. Angry at Tiat, ready to die. Angry at everything she’d decided to protect through her death. And angry at the world itself, for allowing such an exchange of life. If that was his real face, with nothing to hide, then…?
Is it something like a great cause he supports?
Is it something like justice he believes in?
Or is it something like a future he seeks?
In pursuit of those things, the way of life he chooses is somehow—
“Tiaaaaaat? You home?”
“Hmm? Oh, sorry.” Tiat gently pushed back Collon’s hands. The other faerie had been waving them in front of her eyes. “It’s nothing.”
“Ahh, my bad, my bad. It’s not as if I want to doubt him, y’know? He’s your dear friend, after all.” Ithea’s eyes were kind as she said it, even though she definitely wasn’t smiling anymore. “But geez, from the start, we were supposed to be beings who only fought against Timere. We were all raised for that purpose and died for it. That’s what was natural for us. Now here we are, before we even knew it, fighting on a completely different battlefield against a completely different and invisible enemy.”
Her next words came softly, like a whisper. “But I’m planning on doing something to bring it all to an end…so I’m not going to die so easily, ’kay?”