Black Badger

My heart dropped.

I hadn’t expected Kysis’s name to come up. And I still wasn’t immune to it. Every time his name was mentioned, my body flinched.

All the more in a situation like this.

In the space overflowing with data, there were only the Emperor and me.

A silence so deep it made my ears feel like they might fall off. The only reason I could steady the nausea rising inside me while looking at the materials was because I had gone through them alone a few days earlier.

Footage the Badgers who had infiltrated the enemy lines had brought back, filmed when the leaf veins were damaged.

Whether by misfortune or by luck, Kyle wasn’t captured anywhere in the materials.

The high command might have selectively provided what to show me.

The data was covered in flowers.

Brushing my thumb over the flower captured in a massive photograph, the Emperor began to explain.

「You went looking for Kysis, who had been unaccounted for for ten years.」

「Yes.」

I answered politely.

It would’ve been impossible without intuition.

I reflected on the past. Several years after contact with Kysis was lost, I suddenly began to sense his presence. At the time, I didn’t realize that meant Cecil’s absence.

I’d only thought he didn’t even have the leeway to use concealment magic because he was pouring everything into purifying the contamination.

But that wasn’t it.

When I arrived, every mage—including Cecil—was already dead.

Where is Cecil now?

As I was recalling the drawing of Cecil that Simon Diamond had made, the other party spoke.

「I didn’t think it necessary to tell you, but for ten years, Kysis sent documents to the Imperial Court at irregular intervals.」

「Pardon?」

「Documents on dimensional travel.」

The Emperor filled in the gaps.

「You know that until the world burned, no mage had successfully achieved dimensional travel.」

Of course I knew.

In fact, hadn’t we ourselves only succeeded at the very last moment? Before that, they’d been devoured, or failed to input the destination correctly, or the mages had collapsed mid-casting....

To begin with, even by the time I became Captain of the Knights, dimensional travel magic was still treated as something out of legend.

At some point, it began to be researched in earnest, but still.

「Even before leaving the capital, Kysis insisted that we had to leave this world.」

The Emperor’s voice pulled me out of my memories.

「It was something he told only me. He was a child who’d never asked me for anything since he was young, so I remember being surprised when he suddenly asked me to drink alone with him. I waited from sunset, but Kysis didn’t appear until near midnight. And the moment he sat down, he said it. That dimensional travel would be the only answer.」

So that was when it started....

He had seen the end of the world that long ago. Yet he told only the Emperor. Because countless people—including me—were desperately holding back the spreading contamination. Because he didn’t want to break their morale.

Then, over ten years, he must have looked into dimensional travel while fighting the contamination on the front lines.

If it weren’t for my ➤ NоvеⅠight ➤ (Read more on our source) position as Captain of the Knights, I would have followed him.

I remembered what Kysis had said to me when he came to see me a few days before disappearing.

‘I knew you’d be able to handle those blockheads.’

He’d said it with a crooked smile.

‘You’ve grown a lot, hatchling.’

「Do you know what the flower is?」

The Emperor’s sudden question snapped me back.

I looked at the side profile of my former lord, who hadn’t lifted his head from the photograph.

So that’s why he’d called me here.

I answered respectfully.

「My knowledge is shallow. I know nothing at all.」

「Do you know about dimensional travel magic?」

「I have almost no knowledge of magic.」

「You have no mana at all.」

「Yes.」

Not a single drop.

I’d never thought deeply about it. To begin with, people with enough mana to become mages were rare.

Most had so little mana it was useless, and there were quite a few people like me who had none at all.

In other words, those with abundant mana were the odd ones out.

I was just an ordinary person.

「Repairing the leaf veins will be troublesome, then.」

...What?

What does that mean?

I couldn’t ask.

The Emperor continued smoothly.

「To get to the conclusion first: this flower is a medium for dimensional travel. Once the flower blooms sufficiently, dimensional travel becomes possible through the water it holds. That’s why black mages favor this flower.」

My mouth fell open.

And I tried to process the bombshell that had been dropped on me out of nowhere.

But it wouldn’t settle properly.

So I started with a question.

「What do you mean, dimensional travel becomes possible? Didn’t it take several archmages working together just to barely succeed at dimensional travel? And even then, I remember there were several disastrous failures.」

「The fact that dimensional travel is possible through the bottom of the flower’s pond became known because an unfamiliar lifeform emerged from a puddle.」

The Emperor gave an answer that didn’t seem to line up with my question.

But in the end, he would address my doubt.

Trust him and wait. He continued.

「It was a phenomenon witnessed several hundred years ago. For centuries it remained only a rumor, until black mages confirmed it by pouring magic into fully bloomed flowers. If you apply the appropriate spell to a flower in full bloom, a passage to another dimension opens at the bottom of the pond.」

「Then why wasn’t this used when escaping the world?」

「Because you can’t choose the destination.」

Ah.

「The amount of magic required is no small thing either. Even with flowers, attempting dimensional travel still requires an archmage. In the case of flowers, one archmage is enough, but there’s no guarantee your body will remain intact after entering. A dimensional array, on the other hand, allows you to specify a desired destination through sufficient calculation.」

「A desired destination....」

Earth.

「How do you think Duke Jacques suddenly managed to calculate the coordinates of this place?」

The unexpected question made my eyes widen.

I’d never thought about that.

The Emperor tapped the flower in the photograph with his finger.

「How do you think he immediately found a dimension with oxygen, water, a civilization, and no risk of freezing or burning to death the moment people crossed over?」

「I haven’t thought about it.」

When I answered honestly, the Emperor blinked.

He looked momentarily surprised by the unexpected reply, then quickly composed himself.

He let my pathetic answer slide.

「Kysis and Cecil bloomed hundreds of flowers and checked various worlds. Of the hundreds of dimensions they encountered, this was the most suitable for us to migrate to.」

「You mean they confirmed it directly? How...」

「Can’t we command monsters? It seems they sent controlled monsters beyond the opened dimensional gates to check, after layering them with various spells.」

Ah.

「Of course, the process wasn’t smooth. Some burned to death in flames that devoured contamination, others fell into the flower’s pond and vanished. But there were gains.」

Why didn’t he tell me all of this?

Even as resentment rose, I was already anticipating Kysis’s answer.

Because nothing would have changed even if he had told me.

Because there was no time to go into all the details.

Fine.

I can understand keeping silent up to that point.

I can even understand hiding it. He always hid many things from me anyway. Even now, he never spoke plainly about his relationship with his own father, the one standing before me.

After I became Captain of the Knights, our conversations grew fewer. We were both so busy there was never time to share a drink.

So I can accept that I’m only learning all this suffocating information now.

But....

「One of the final reports he gave to Duke Jacques concerned the existence of this very dimension.」

Then why did he shove me into the dimensional array?

After going to such lengths to find the destination we had to reach.

I don’t think I’ll ever forgive Kysis for that choice.

Never....

「It was immediately shared with the mages as well.」

Kysis.

「That’s why escape was possible. While I was clinging to false hope and trying to purify land that would ultimately be consumed by contamination, that child steadily sought another path.」

I want to turn back time.

To go back to just before the dimensional transfer. No more, no less—just that moment. When only a few of us remained before the shining dimensional array.

I want to go back to that moment and push Kysis into the array.

And I would stay behind.

If that had happened, so much would have changed.

「Cecil must have vanished beyond the flower as well.」

The Emperor’s words, spoken like a murmur to himself.

Hearing that, I pulled myself out of the worn, overused fantasy—of turning back the clock and returning to just before the dimensional transfer.

「I don’t know the details of why Cecil went missing.」

Then his words replaced my tired assumptions.

As if they were the perfect key, Kysis’s voice popped out of a drawer in my mind.

‘She was dragged in while opening the dimensional gate. I couldn’t bring her back.’

Ah.

So that’s why he said dimensional gate instead of dimensional array.

Because she didn’t disappear while opening an array.

「However, I did receive documents investigating in detail the dimension she was dragged into.」

I knew nothing about that either.

He hadn’t said a word to me.

Even about Cecil’s disappearance, he only spoke after I cautiously brought it up several days after we reunited. After that, Kysis never mentioned Cecil again.

The situation had been too urgent for me to ask in detail.

Of course, even if it hadn’t been so urgent, I might not have dared to ask.

Kysis was always tight-lipped about Cecil.

A man who didn’t blink at any rumor would fly into a rage over gossip about himself and Cecil.

So even I, called the knight closest to Kysis, didn’t know much about her.

Why she became his escort mage. The precise circumstances of her disappearance.

「He said it was a world reminiscent of the Voice of Dreams. A place where fragments of memories burst out here and there.... A world where the memories of complete strangers appear as if they were one’s own. A world of ash-gray.」

Wait.

Doesn’t this match Kairos’s and Shu’s descriptions somehow?

「He wrote that it was a dimension where, as if dominated by a massive Voice of Dreams, fragments of countless memories appeared and vanished like heat haze.」

Could it be that Kyle is trying to find Cecil?

Or is he simply trying to connect, by chance, to the dimension she fell into while searching for a dimension other than Earth?

Either way, I felt like I could now vaguely understand why Shu had been kidnapped. Maybe because dimensions open more easily when she’s involved.

A senior with a peculiar constitution....

But then how did her father end up falling through a portal into the same dimension Cecil was in?

I sat there, caught in a feeling of half-understanding, half-confusion.

At least I was relieved that the purpose of the flower Kyle’s faction was blooming didn’t seem to pose an immediate threat to the people inside Center Core.

Still, the feeling that I was missing something wouldn’t go away.

I understand kidnapping Shu—but then why transfer her beforehand?

If they just wanted to use Shu’s unique constitution, wouldn’t it have been enough to simply submerge her in the flower?

And if the plan was to move to another dimension entirely, why was Kyle’s side expanding territory so aggressively?

Because it’s a long-term plan and they desperately need food and land?

...If they plan to find another haven, there’s no need to wage war at all.

I knew it was foolish of me to still cling to possibilities.

Even so....

「Perhaps they haven’t let go of their lingering attachment yet.」

I flinched at words that sounded as if my thoughts had been spoken aloud.

Carefully hiding my reaction, I turned toward the Emperor and saw him gazing down at the center of the flower in the photograph—the pond. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

Clear water rippling in sky-blue eyes.

「Perhaps they are still waiting.」

「Who....」

「Cecil.」

The short answer came back.

「For rescue.」

For a very long time now.

「For Kysis.」

***

I wrapped up the report quickly.

“Meta-meta.”

And now I was at Yun’s and Ami’s place.

“Mongmong.”

Ami hummed.