The impromptu interrogation was arranged quickly and simply. While Tyr averted her eyes and pretended not to notice, Shei dragged over a desk and chairs, sat opposite him, and rested her chin on her interlaced hands.

"All right. First things first. I haven't had a chance to ask you this until now."

Faced with Shei's piercing gaze, he looked anxiously toward Tyr, but she merely pressed her lips shut and lowered her parasol to hide her eyes.

Now left to face him alone, Shei stared straight at him and asked,

"What's your name?"

Intimidated by her overbearing manner, he glanced around nervously before managing an answer.

"Tyr."

"Hm? Did you call me?"

Tyr raised her parasol slightly. Shei waved a hand.

"No. I think he misunderstood the question."

She glared at him again and enunciated more clearly.

"No, I mean your name."

"Tyr..."

Once could be a mistake, but twice made it no accident. After he introduced himself as Tyr two times in a row, she approached in puzzlement.

"Do we perhaps share a name? Tyr? What a remarkable coincidence."

"I doubt it. He must be confused because he just heard the name Tyr. Hold on."

Shei gripped Sky Cherry Blossom and held it upright, turning the flat of the blade forward.

Heavenly Sword Art: Sky Mirror.

A mirage was the earth's shadow reflected in the sky. Uneven air extending over a sufficient distance bent light this way and that.

Sky Cherry Blossom, compressed space itself, refracted the light to reflect his face exactly. Shei pointed at his reflection in the mirror.

"Here. Look! Not Tyr. This person! You, in the mirror!"

"Me... My, name."

His eyes suddenly flew wide. It was the first drastic change to appear on his face. He covered his pain-stricken face with his hands and drew a sharp breath.

Shei watched him quietly without hurrying him. Unable to bear watching any longer, Tyr intervened.

"Let us stop here. I think we have been too hasty. If we have questions, let us take our time finding the answers."

But Shei shook her head firmly.

"Wait. He'll remember. Even if he's lost his sense of self, information as old and frequently used as his name isn't easily forgotten. If he'd forgotten even the name he'd had all his life, he'd have forgotten language too."

"But..."

"Besides, we need to ask his name to recover his other memories. A name is the most important part of what makes up a person's identity."

Knowledge brought certainty, and certainty bred confidence.

Shei's words were unexpectedly logical and assured, leaving Tyr unable to argue. She backed away, clasping her hands tightly and fretting as she wished for his well-being.

A long time passed, his groans continuing in broken gasps, while Tyr's heart burned black like a fuse.

At last, he broke the long silence and forced out a single word.

"... Hugh."

Neither could tell whether it was a word he had finally arrived at or merely another sigh. Realizing that his groaning had stopped afterward, Tyr asked,

"Did you say Hugh?"

He nodded. Belatedly realizing that it was a name, Shei looked puzzled.

"Hugh? That's your name?"

Another nod. Shei studied his face for a moment, lost in thought.

'No surname? Oh, he said he was an orphan. Still, high-ranking people in the Military State usually make themselves a surname... Though surnames have lost much of their meaning since the kingdom fell. Is he not attached to it because he made it up himself?'

As Shei fell silent in thought, Tyr approached cautiously and called his name.

"Hugh?"

Hearing his name, he turned toward the voice. He had responded to his own name.

Tyr answered him with a warm smile.

"Hugh. So that is your name. I learned it far too late. Had I known sooner, I would have called you by it more often."

Unlike Tyr, who accepted it without a shred of doubt, Shei still could not shake her suspicions.

'Judging by his reaction, it does seem to be his name. It isn't an alias, is it? No. If I start thinking like that, there'll be no end to it.'

Shei furrowed her brow and turned the name over in her mind, searching her memories of past regressions for even a similar name.

"Hugh. Hugh. Hugh, huh..."

"Is it a name you know?"

"Wait. Humanist, heuristic, Hugh... It couldn't be."

"Couldn't be?"

After a long moment of thought, Shei shook her head.

"Never heard it before. I couldn't find any particularly similar names either."

Tyr answered flatly.

"Then why drag it out so? You could have said you did not know from the beginning."

"That makes it even more suspicious. A name I don't know? If he were anyone important, especially a Military State Instructor, I'd know practically all of them..."

From Shei's perspective, it was a reasonable point.

She had already experienced thirteen regressions and clashed with the Military State in roughly half of them. She remembered most of its prominent figures. If he were an Instructor with such extraordinary abilities, there was no way she would not remember him.

'Assuming he didn't die in the bottomless pit, that is...'

Hearing Shei mutter, however, Tyr glanced around uneasily. The golem's remarks had informed her that he was not an Instructor.

She herself cared nothing about that, but she was uncertain whether she ought to tell Shei. She forced a change of subject.

"The world is vast. There must be many people you do not know. Now, more importantly..."

Tyr folded her parasol and approached with quick little steps.

"Hugh."

He turned to look at her. Sounding delighted, she called his name again.

"Hugh."

"Yes."

"Hugh."

Twice, she called his name for no particular reason. Once on a slightly higher note, once in a slightly lower register.

As she called his name as though singing, he tilted his head and said the name of the person calling him.

"... Tyr."

"Hehe. So this is your name, Hugh."

Apparently satisfied simply to know his name, Tyr was absorbed in calling it. Left alone, she seemed likely to spend the entire day doing just that.

But Shei could not wait until Tyr, who knew no boredom, had enjoyed herself enough. She stopped her before she could call his name again and asked,

"All right, Hugh? I don't know if it's real, but at least I know what to call you now. So, what's your rank?"

That question wiped the smile from Tyr's lips and made her glance about uneasily. He looked bewildered by Shei's question.

"R...ank?"

"If you're really an Instructor, you must have a rank."

"Uh..."

When he faltered without answering, Tyr hurriedly stepped in to defend him.

"Rank? Does such a trivial thing matter? It will only confuse him, and it is not important."

"But nothing matters more than rank when it comes to figuring out his position in the Military State."

"Ranks are liable to change, are they not? He may have forgotten so unstable a memory. Let us move on to something else. Hugh?"

Having swiftly brushed the question aside, Tyr called to him before Shei could ask again. But she had not thought of a question in advance, so she blurted out the first one that came to mind.

"Do you have a favorite food?"

Everything was relative, so that might be a matter of great importance to someone, but it certainly did not interest Shei. She voiced her displeasure.

"What kind of question is that? You said rank wasn't important, and now you're asking something even more pointless."

"You are not the only one asking questions."

"But, technically, I haven't really asked anything besides his name..."

"Enough of your noisy chatter. Will you quibble with everything your teacher does?"

"You're only my teacher when it suits you..."

Having silenced Shei through sheer stubbornness, Tyr waited quietly for his answer. After thinking deeply, he uttered one word.

"Beans."

"Beans?"

Beans meant the canned food piled high in the dining hall. Tyr was delighted. At least she could make him plenty of the food he liked.

Then a question arose from an unexpected quarter.

"No matter how I think about it, that's strange!"

"What is?"

"Him liking beans! That makes no sense!"

"How odd. Why should liking beans be a problem?"

As far as Tyr knew, beans were an exceedingly useful crop.

Shei, however, spoke as though everyone hating beans was common knowledge.

"The Military State's canned beans are made from one of its seven great inventions: a fertilizer you plant, called 'chimera beans.' You plant them in fallow fields, and one planting makes the soil so fertile that you get bumper harvests right through the year after next."

"Bumper harvests? Then surely that is a very good thing?"

"Right. They're good as fertilizer. But those beans... No. Absolutely not as food."

Apparently shuddering at the mere thought, Shei cried,

"You might be better off eating actual fertilizer. Plant chimera beans and the field fills with enormous beans, but for all their size, they taste like shit. They've got the texture of mud, a rank, overpowering smell, and they stick to your tongue so badly you can't swallow them without water. There's even a saying that a cow starved for three days would turn them down!"

For something even a cow starved for three days would refuse, there were mountains of cans in the dining hall.

Tyr tilted her head.

"And yet everyone seems to eat those canned beans quite often."

"That's because the Military State collects those enormous quantities of chimera beans and distributes them as rations! Canning them at least makes them taste a hundred times better. Otherwise, the Military State would have been overthrown several times by now. They're a great invention, but as food, they're torture!"

"... Is that why you alone have never eaten the canned beans?"

"Huh? Well, yes."

Tyr sighed deeply and reproached her.

"I did not know either, so perhaps I have no right to say this... But hearing that, I find it rather cruel. Shei, you had food and did not share it?"

"Huh?"

In other words, she was demanding to know whether Shei had enjoyed tasty food all by herself while everyone else ate beans.

Shei blinked, then waved her hands and tried to explain.

"No! I asked Azi to eat with me over and over! It's just that my food items have strong spices or lots of salt, so they weren't right for her!"

"Then you never once offered any to Hugh."

"Huh? No..."

Shei nodded meekly. Tyr's gaze grew colder still, and Shei shrank back with a little jolt of fear.

With a small sigh, Tyr set down the parasol resting on her shoulder and stood before him.

"Let us stop. Trying to wring answers from someone whose mind is suffering... We should never have done this in the first place."

"Huh? I haven't even finished asking about his abilities..."

"Have you forgotten what the note said? Did he not emphasize that you were to leave him alone even if his condition became strange? You were too distant even to share food with him. What right have you to demand answers?"

"He did, but we don't necessarily have to follow..."

"This is a matter of trust. If you will not even follow the note he placed in your hands, how can you face him? Will you keep facing him from behind a mask?"

Tyr's argument was sound. So perfectly sound that there was nothing to fault.

But Shei had something to say too. In a rare outburst, she raised her voice at Tyr.

"He's the one wearing a mask!"

As he blinked at being singled out so suddenly, Shei spat out her words, eyes blazing.

"Has he ever actually opened up and told us anything? Until he told us today, I didn't even know his name! Be honest. If we're supposed to do what you say and face each other without masks, shouldn't he have told us that from the start?"

"Shei."

"Besides, he's hiding something right now! I feel like I could finally relax if I cleared that up! When I get curious, he chases me out. When I ask, he says it's a secret. When I try to dig a little deeper, he's lost his memories. How am I supposed to not be suspicious?"

Shei did not want to doubt him either.

They had argued a few times. He had teased her. They had even fought together.

Through it all, much as she hated to admit it, she had grown rather fond of him.

But to someone who had seen the future, someone who had peered beyond the curtain... the present was a powder magazine with fuses stretching in every direction, liable to explode at any moment.

Because the man she knew only as "him" was a Military State Instructor, Shei always had to keep her guard up around him. He might be the very person who had corrupted all these pieces of the apocalypse.

"If he didn't want me to suspect him, he should have been honest from the start! After doing every suspicious thing imaginable...! I want to trust him too!"

"If you wish to trust him, should you not approach him gradually and earn his trust, rather than interrogate him like this?"

"There's no point! In the end...!"

'I'll go back anyway.'

Shei swallowed the rest of her words.

Tyr looked at Shei anew. Though their outward appearances were not so different... that body was far younger.

She had thought Shei young before, but Shei was young both objectively and in her eyes.

Calming herself, Tyr spoke to Shei in a gentler, more composed manner.

"Everyone has something they find difficult to speak of. Judging by what he wrote in the note, he did not want his identity revealed. Could you not give him a little time?"

"... Hmph. Forget it. Nothing we've learned is reliable anyway. He called himself Tyr, and he says his favorite food is beans."

Shei spun around.

"I'm leaving. Do whatever you want with the rest."

She disappeared into her room.

SLAM

The door shut violently behind her. Firmly closed, it showed no sign of opening again.

All they had learned was a single name: Hugh. And, along the way, that he liked beans.

Tyr was quite satisfied with that alone... Yet one unanswered question lingered in a corner of her mind.

"Hugh. Why did you tell such a lie from the very beginning?"

That was what Tyr asked "Hugh."

Naturally, he could not answer.