Yehyeon's mother had died giving birth to him.

Apparently, Lee Seunghyeon had thought of Lee Yehyeon as the son who had killed his mother coming into the world. He had never been able to feel affection for his own son, even as a newborn. Yehyeon said he had learned the real reason his father hated him in his final year of middle school.

In those troubled adolescent years, he had rebelled, demanding to hear about his mother, and received a savage beating for it.

I couldn't hold my tongue.

"How does that make any sense?"

"Still, he only hit me when I talked back."

That was no help at all.

Beside him, Yun rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. Judging by his reaction, Yehyeon must have used that excuse often.

I barely suppressed the urge to roll my own eyes as Yehyeon continued with an "Anyway."

"That was also the year I realized my father wasn't aging. It was eerie."

Lee Seunghyeon had always been young.

Until his final year of middle school, Yehyeon had been too afraid of his father to look him properly in the face. (Apparently, he was also frequently left alone for days on end.) He hadn't noticed anything strange. Only when he began rebelling in earnest had he noticed that peculiarity.

Naturally, Lee Seunghyeon hadn't given him a proper explanation.

Yehyeon had defied him several times in an effort to get an answer, but Seunghyeon remained unyielding. At some point, Yehyeon had given up. He stopped talking back in tears or frustration and getting slapped for it. He stopped scouring books and the internet for accounts of people who didn't age. He abandoned the fantasy that Seunghyeon wasn't really his father, and the wild notion that he might be something like a vampire.

Resigning himself to reality hadn't been difficult.

In silence, Yehyeon accepted Lee Seunghyeon's cold indifference, his irritable nagging, and his capricious flashes of warmth, so rare he could count them on his fingers.

Until just before the war broke out.

"Just before?"

"About six months before?"

Yehyeon sliced through the walnut pie's crust with his fork.

"Or was it seven? Less than a year, anyway."

Lee Seunghyeon had turned up unannounced while Yehyeon was attending college in the United States, and begun putting him through hell.

Again, there was no explanation. Yehyeon said he simply did as Seunghyeon ordered: ran, took hits, struck back, then ran some more. He had to learn survival techniques and assorted martial arts he thought he would never have any use for. It was a terrible time. Lee Seunghyeon was an excellent soldier, but not a merciful teacher.

That was also when Yehyeon first witnessed Lee Seunghyeon's inhuman healing ability.

He stopped moving his hand and stared down at his plate of walnut pie, then abruptly dropped his fork.

"I found out by stabbing him."

"I don't know why that traumatized you," Yun grumbled quietly beside him.

"I'd have felt better for it. Weren't you covered in bruises back then?"

"I stabbed someone in a fit of rage. And that someone was my own father."

Yehyeon murmured so softly I could barely hear him, then gave a sudden little shudder. His brow creased, something it rarely did.

"It was truly horrifying."

The war broke out in the midst of that physically and mentally grueling period.

Yehyeon received an enhanced-body transplant and was pushed onto the battlefield. Only then did he realize his father was neither Dracula nor some supernatural monster, but someone with an enhanced body. Apparently, Lee Seunghyeon had even known in advance that war would break out.

Many of the things he had taught Yehyeon proved useful.

My seniors didn't go into detail about what the war had been like.

They wouldn't have wanted to revisit those terrible memories. Nor was it particularly necessary.

What mattered was that Lee Seunghyeon had occasionally visited Yehyeon's unit, perhaps unwilling to see his son die after all. He had an uncanny knack for finding Yehyeon, though he usually just called him out, subjected him to some uncomfortable nagging, and disappeared again. Then, one day, he dragged Yehyeon away from the front lines.

Yehyeon resisted, insisting on staying, and was beaten within an inch of his life.

"No explanation, of course."

"No. Oh, he did say one thing when I fought him and said I intended to die on the front lines."

By now, I understood perfectly why my training officer had insulted his father. Yehyeon explained:

"If I was so eager to die, he'd arrange somewhere for me to do it, so I needn't worry."

Why the hell would he put it like that?

Yun let out a long breath beside him and rolled his eyes upward. This latest revelation of Lee Seunghyeon's cruelty didn't seem to surprise him. I was beginning to struggle to keep my expression under control, too. Yehyeon recounted his past in a monotone, but I wasn't too stupid to grasp the reality behind those matter-of-fact sentences.

How had he grown up with no one to turn to?

Amid neglect and abuse, without a single warm embrace.

Whether or not he noticed the darkness gathering in my eyes, Yehyeon continued. This, he said, was where the important part began.

Lee Seunghyeon had slung the beaten, battered Yehyeon over his back and returned to an area inhabited by civilians.

Then, without preamble, he had put a greatsword in Yehyeon's hands.

A greatsword.

"The one in the video?"

At my quiet question, Yehyeon's lips stretched into a smile.

"He didn't give me that one right away."

But he had sparred with a sword of exactly the same width.

He said he hadn't been allowed out of the unidentified building until he had perfectly mastered the swordsmanship Lee Seunghyeon was teaching him. He had made several attempts to escape and return to the front, where Yun, Ami, Zhu, and his other comrades were, but failed every time. People he assumed were Seunghyeon's colleagues also prevented him from escaping.

They had all told him the same thing.

They would arrange somewhere for him to die soon, so he needn't worry.

True to their word, it wasn't long before that place was ready.

"You said you saw the video."

I nodded at Yehyeon's question.

"It only captured the end of the battle. Hundreds of Badgers died fighting that one thing."

A disaster that arrived just as they gained the upper hand in the war.

Apparently, neither bombing it nor sending Badger units against it had been able to end its life. It revived over and over, slaughtering everything in sight.

That single being inflicted such devastating losses that every available force was concentrated there.

Several familiar names came up in the account.

The unit led by Richard Green: wiped out, with only three survivors, Richard among them. The unit Choi Yun belonged to: wiped out, with only four survivors, Yun among them.

Both Richard and Yun had been seriously wounded and evacuated to the hospital. Neither had witnessed its end.

The fighter jet Choi Ami piloted had crashed, and the impact left her in a coma for two years. Zhu's unit was caught in an explosion that left most of its members unable to fight.

Lee Seunghyeon and his colleagues hadn't witnessed its end either. He had managed to sever the creature's arm, but suffered a life-threatening injury in return. Eric's red-haired agent, the one called Shashinsky, hadn't seen its end either. Many of the elders' agents had lost their lives there.

But those who had received enhanced bodies long before ordinary people had dealt it a heavy blow.

And then there were Jason Tvein and Lee Yehyeon, who had seen its end with their own eyes.

Tvein was wounded, but hadn't left his post. If Yehyeon failed, he was to take a bomb and die with the creature. On the day Seunghyeon finally allowed Yehyeon to leave and return to the battlefield, Yehyeon was assigned to Jason Tvein's unit.

They were the last force left.

If even Tvein's unit failed, an atomic bomb would be dropped.

Defeat hung heavy over that place. Before they plunged into the ruins where it ran rampant, Jason Tvein was given a high-powered bomb, and Yehyeon a sword.

That was when Yehyeon first met Jaeyeon.

A woman with long, foxlike eyes and swaying, bobbed hazel hair.

She held a sword in her arms.

["It's sickening how much you look like Lee Seunghyeon."]

["Pardon?"]

The woman had come up out of nowhere and scrutinized his face. At his bewilderment, she smiled.

She thrust the sword she was holding toward him.

["A gift from Hilde."]

["What?"]

["He said we should pin our hopes on this."]

The woman with the bobbed hair kept saying things he couldn't understand.

Just like Lee Seunghyeon and his colleagues, who never gave him a proper explanation.

["Good luck. Though I don't care which side wins."]

["... Excuse me, but who exactly are you?"]

["Don't look at me like that. You're no different, are you?"]

Jaeyeon reached out a hand with red-painted nails and tucked Yehyeon's hair behind his ear.

Their eyes met. A man who hadn't even been able to wash amid the fighting, and a woman so immaculate and beautiful it was chilling.

Jaeyeon quietly studied his eyes, then smiled brightly.

["You wish the world would just trample you and move on, don't you?"]

Yehyeon succeeded in killing the creature.

* * *

The story was over.

When the soft, measured voice fell silent, stillness settled over the high-ceilinged living room. I stared at Yehyeon for a long time, at a loss for words.

It was midnight. Before I knew it, the day was over. Ebony darkness had settled beyond the living room's floor-to-ceiling windows, and the scent of night mingled with the cool breeze in the room. A silence heavy enough to weigh on my shoulders. The ticking of the clock's second hand hammered at my ears.

The weight of that silence choked off my air.

I took in Yehyeon watching me with unreadable eyes, and Yun watching Yehyeon with a look that concealed his thoughts. My lips moved.

My voice didn't quite come out whole.

"My sword."

"Yes," Yehyeon replied in his husky voice.

"The sword you gave me."

"I..."

The one I had named hope and handed over.

"My greatsword."

"Do you want to hold it again?"

The pale man asked as though he hadn't heard me stammering.

"Do you want to hold it again, Hilde? I have it."

I couldn't breathe.

I was spilling tears before I knew it, and began gasping, unable to control my own breathing. I clutched both hands over my wildly heaving lungs. I coughed in a futile effort to steady my breath.

Tears blurred my vision. My breathing grew faster and faster.

My heart hurt.

"Hilde!"

"He's hyperventilating."

My seniors' voices buzzed in my ears.

"I'll get a paper bag. Stay there."

"Cup your hands over your mouth, Hilde. Cover your mouth with both hands."

Memories burst forth.

I sobbed through fits of coughing. My sword. The sword I had always carried, the one I held whenever Kyle and I swept across a battlefield. There had been no use for swords on Earth. Humans used guns, bombs, and robots instead of long, heavy hunks of steel.

So my sword had slumbered in its sheath for a long time, gathering a rust called precarious peace.

I had treasured it like a part of myself, and had never intended to let it go.

"Yehyeon, the paper bag."

"Hilde."

A white paper bag came toward me.

"Hilde, take the bag."

In the end, I would hand the sword over.

To a human.

To the allies I had ultimately chosen. But to someone whose identity I didn't even know.

On a day I couldn't precisely recall, I had left my sword for an unknown recipient, along with a short video message, not even knowing whether it would ever be used.

The memory sprang out.

["Take this."]

I recorded the message alone in a room.

["If the worst comes to pass, if mutual destruction seems the only way left, take this and charge in before you press the nuclear button.

And hope he has a shred of feeling left. Hope he recognizes the weapon of a longtime comrade, and that it makes him hesitate, even for an instant.

Hope you're coldheaded and capable enough to drive the blade through his heart in that instant.

And if he has no feeling left, hope you're prepared to hold him close and die with him, or that you have no attachment to life."]

A message left for some pitiful human among the last remaining forces who knew how to wield a sword.

["Let's hope for that. Slim as the odds may be."]

Lee Yehyeon takes up my sword.

My sword. Something that had been a part of me. Something my kind recognized at once. Something I had treasured and brought all the way to Earth. It had passed into the hands of a human with no desire to cling to life, yet who, ironically, had remained standing on the battlefield to the very end. A human who had developed judgment and courage despite abuse and neglect.

To the boy kneeling before me now, desperately trying to steady my breathing.

"Hildebert."

"Yehyeon."

I forced his name out through my ragged breaths.

"You were the one who received my sword."

Humanity won the First War.