I hadn't heard anything about this. Was it claustrophobia, or something to do with collapsing buildings?

Whatever the case, Riccardo eventually brought his breathing under control. I sighed with relief as I watched it slowly return to normal. His color was still poor, but at least the immediate crisis had passed. I would have to take my time checking him for other injuries.

Only after he lowered his hand and sighed did I move. I sat straight up and cleared the rubble covering my lower body.

"Oh."

I spotted something at the far end of the rubble I'd cleared.

"Mari."

Riccardo, who had been sitting motionless, raised his head. I stared down at her half-crushed face. A wretched sight.

She was still alive. Her half-remaining eyeball rolled toward me. The collapsing building had been cruel to her. Everything below her ribs was buried out of sight beneath the rubble. A pool of blood had dried on the floor. Left like this, she would eventually die.

"She's alive..." Riccardo murmured. "A civilian would have died instantly..."

I said nothing. Jaeyeon's words had already made me realize she was the elder's agent. But I had no idea how much knowledge I should let on that I had. Ska seemed to be hiding everything from Riccardo.

I glanced over at my still-pale senior and met his eyes, listening to Mari's wheezing with half an ear.

"Are you all right?"

Riccardo ignored me. For a while, he sat motionless again, watching Mari. I neither hurried him nor spoke. There was nothing we needed to do immediately anyway. More precisely, I didn't know what we should do.

Would rescuers come if we waited...?

Lost in thought, I looked at Riccardo and recoiled. He was about to stab Mari in the throat with a sharp piece of metal.

"Sir!"

I lunged and snatched it from his hand.

"You'll actually kill her!"

"Don't you think that would be merciful?"

Riccardo smiled up at me, his eyes curving into crescents. I ignored the chill running down my spine. He wasn't in his right mind.

I looked him straight in the eye and shook my head.

"No."

"Why... Do you want to save her?"

"I don't care whether she lives or dies."

I meant it. I wasn't merciful enough to care about the life of someone who had harmed us. If I were, I could never have turned a blade on my own kind in the first place. Nor would I have handed my sword over to humans.

I simply didn't want to see Riccardo take a life. She would die if we left her alone anyway. After explaining how I felt, I added flatly,

"She'll haunt your dreams."

Riccardo gave a short laugh. It was unmistakably a sneer.

"You've never killed anyone, have you?"

I had. If my kind counted as people in the broader sense, that is. Of course, I couldn't answer him like that. And if he meant whether I'd killed a human on Earth, I genuinely didn't know, so I couldn't answer that either.

Instead of replying, I stared at my senior's pale, sneering face.

"She'll die soon if we leave her alone."

"Then let's end it before that... Oh, don't worry about me. I'm not good enough to have nightmares over killing one dying human..."

"I don't particularly want to see her die an easy death."

That, too, was sincere.

"I don't pity the spectators, but I don't pity a lunatic who blows up an arena full of them either."

Riccardo watched me in silence. Silence settled over the dark, cramped space. Mari's wheezing breaths, the sound of crumbling concrete falling, faint screams in the distance.

Whether from the drugs or the matches, I felt nauseous. I deliberately pushed the unpleasant sensation aside and waited quietly for him to respond. He still looked unwell. This place itself seemed to distress him. I needed to get him out of here quickly.

The green-eyed man, slick with cold sweat, slowly broke the silence.

"That's unexpected. I thought you'd insist on saving her, never mind killing her..."

"Thank you for thinking so highly of me."

"You're not just holding back because of me when you really want to save her, are you?"

Riccardo narrowed his eyes.

"Be honest... I don't want to hear rumors later about the white-haired recruit being wracked with guilt over a life he couldn't save..."

"Do I look that virtuous to you?"

He was persistent. Though I appreciated his concern. He didn't answer my incredulous question.

The floor trembled faintly. Without letting on that I'd felt it, I slowly rose. There wasn't enough room to stand upright, so I had to stoop.

"Shall I open it up for you?"

"... What?"

"The space. The ceiling or the passage."

I knew perfectly well how much he would hate hearing this, but I said it anyway. What else could I do in a situation like this? I knew that all of it grated on his pride: losing his strength and being captured helplessly, having a past he desperately wanted to hide exposed before a crowd, suffering an episode while trapped with a green recruit. I also knew he was forcing himself to hold back the urge to explode. He was proud and hated opening up.

But I couldn't respect those boundaries in a situation like this. Besides, I wasn't cut out to gently soothe someone's inner traumas. So I simply continued.

"You seem to dislike confined spaces."

Angry, just as I'd expected. At me and at himself. Riccardo shot me a blazing look.

"Quit your pointless meddling..."

Without answering, I turned away from my teeth-gritting senior.

"I'll be as careful as possible."

I had to choose tiles whose removal wouldn't hasten the collapse.

"Tell me if you think it's dangerous."

This was real-life Jenga.

Ignoring the searing glare boring into my back, I got to work. With my eyes adjusted to the dark, I moved anything that looked safe to remove into a corner. Fortunately, I was good at games in general, Jenga included.

Soon we had more space. Having more room to move made me feel a little better. Clearing the debris also gave me a better grasp of our situation, which helped.

It seemed best not to disturb the rubble piled toward the arena. I wasn't planning to move just yet, but if we had to, we would need to head in the opposite direction. The collapse looked less severe that way.

What was Jaeyeon doing?

My senior's sharp voice seized my wandering thoughts by the hair.

"Do my words mean nothing to you?"

His voice had grown sharper.

"Stop wasting your time and sit down."

I turned to look at him. An angry Riccardo. More precisely, a Riccardo on edge after having his trauma triggered.

I'd encountered similar situations before. I'd had a few comrades who, like him, were proud and hated showing what lay inside. Carrying a sword through all sorts of endeavors meant running into some terrible situations, too.

In those situations, when I found myself unavoidably confronted with someone else's trauma like this, I would offer up my own vulnerabilities first.

This is my fear. I've seen yours without your permission, so look at mine.

I slowly sank down.

"I..."

The problem was that most of my past was classified. I couldn't even tell where the classified information began and ended. If I'd known this would happen, I would have asked Yehyeon for more details. It was too late for that now, so I racked my brains before speaking.

"What frightens me most is facing what I've done in the past."

It truly frightened me. Enough that I often wished I were anyone but Hildebert Taleb.

"So lately, I've been avoiding the truth a little."

Riccardo blinked. He stared at me with widened eyes and remained silent for a moment, a strange expression on his face. He looked as though he was wondering what bizarre nonsense I had suddenly started spouting.

"Well, I'll have to remember eventually. But I've been avoiding it for weeks now. I want to keep liking myself for as long as I can."

"... You've remembered?"

"Some of it."

Everything so far was true. My hunched back began to ache. The nausea I'd been struggling to ignore returned, too. I let out a small sigh.

"Bits and pieces of my memory keep coming back, even now."

"... Is that how you've improved this much in just a few months...?"

"Oh, yes. That's right. Though my body still hasn't caught up with my memories."

"But why would that make you hate yourself...?"

Riccardo asked as he slowly sank to the floor. I felt a faint satisfaction that he was making himself at least a little more ready to talk. I listened to the sounds filtering through the rubble.

"I've done a lot of things wrong."

He didn't seem willing to accept that brief answer. He looked at me and scoffed.

"You?"

"Yes."

He'd been thinking far too highly of me this whole time.

"How much wrong could a bleeding heart like you possibly have done...?"

Still sneering, Riccardo draped one arm over his knee. His green eyes remained fixed on me.

"At worst, you probably failed to save someone..."

His voice was steeped in self-loathing.

"You're not the sort to hate someone with all your heart, or stab someone who trusts you in the back..."

Ah.

Ah.

His words flew at me like blades and struck home.

I couldn't help bursting into laughter. Convulsive laughter. Laughter beyond my control. I saw Riccardo's eyes widen in surprise, but paid no heed. I laughed for a long time before finally managing to rein it in.

"No."

I hated Colton as deeply as I felt indebted to him, and I had stabbed those who would have trusted me in the back. So Riccardo Sordi was utterly wrong.

"Unfortunately, that's completely incorrect."

He frowned slightly. I was satisfied that I could no longer sense signs of an episode in him. His face was still pale, and he was still breaking out in a cold sweat. But he would be all right for a while.

His ankle was swollen, though. I'd have to carry him on my back.

I slowly rose, approached my senior, and held out a hand.

"I can assure you, you're a better person than I am."

"Oh... Spouting whatever shit you like when you don't know a thing..."

"That goes both ways, doesn't it?"

At my smile, Riccardo shut his mouth and furrowed his brow. My own smile only widened.

"I think the same thing about you."

He raised one eyebrow.

"You're a good enough person that I doubt there's any valid basis for your self-loathing."

Apparently I'd crossed a line. Riccardo sprang up with astonishing speed and punched me in the face. It was something he would never normally do. Normally, he was levelheaded enough to know that hitting me would only hurt his hand, that he could inflict neither emotional nor physical damage on his insolent junior.

I felt bad for pushing someone who was already in a bad state. Wording made all the difference, and I had put it too strongly.

I caught the arm of the man staring at me with his bleeding fist clenched.

"Once we're out and you've recovered your physical abilities, beat me all you like."

"Crazy bastard."

"I'm sorry."

The vibrations coming from the passage near the arena troubled me. After apologizing in a somber voice, I pulled my half-standing senior closer. It seemed better to move. Nothing good would come of ignoring ominous signs.

I felt him resist, but ignored it. Supporting him, almost carrying him, I walked slowly away from the arena. I would go as far as the blockage and clear the rubble obstructing the passage.

"Let me know if you hear anything strange."

"Shameless bastard..."

"Yes, I know. But I'm trying to live a decent life this time. In my own way."

"And what counts as a decent life by your standards?"

His unspoken meaning was plain: how could I say shit like that while claiming to be trying to live decently?

After crossing the cramped space at almost a crawl, I carefully seated him beside the blocked passage, where I could quickly shield him if the rubble threatened to collapse as I cleared it. I crouched beside him and began round two of real-life Jenga.

Carefully clearing the blocked passage, I answered the question that hadn't needed an answer.

"Saving humans."

My apologies to Mari.

"And killing creatures."

The decision my past self had made. I couldn't undo the wrongs that had resulted from that decision, so I kept trying to save humans. Because, as Yun had said, I had drawn my sword. Because I had placed that drawn sword in Yehyeon's hand. And so...

"Though that won't make me as decent a man as the Hildebert Taleb you imagined."

Silence returned. I kept my hands busy and succeeded in clearing the rubble blocking the passage.