Chapter 26

"Feeling a bit accountable, are we?" I said, feeling very cool. This girl... Whatever her name was, I didn't catch it. She had quite the look on her face from listening to Zeik and Annabelle's conversation.

"Wha-" She stumbled, and ran into the door that she had just closed behind her. I caught her by the wrist before she could fall and make more noise.

"Shh! You'll get in the way of their touching reunion." I shushed. "Let's talk elsewhere. You seem to know your way around?"

She nodded, and I motioned for her to lead the way.

---

After a few flights of stairs and many twists and turns, we ended up in a really fancy and huge bedroom, with an embroidered carpet, curtains, bedsheets... Heck, even the wallpaper looked the part.

"This is the room that I'm staying in. We should be free from interruption here..." She looked at me, and immediately her eyes filled with fear. "O-of course, don't try anything funny, the guards can hear me through this door."

I looked down at myself. In this world, I looked like a perfectly normal, albeit a bit albino girl. She couldn't have been talking about assault in that sense. Was it something about my appearance? Did I resemble some sort of monster? Nobody else had pointed it out before, though...

"Don't worry, I'm not going to try anything." I said just in case. "I just want to know a few things."

She didn't look like she trusted me. Oh well.

"First, introductions. I haven't caught your name just yet." I said. "My name's Aris. I'm a traveler, I guess. I don't have a surname."

"Juni." She replied in a small voice. "Juni Aures."

"This room's huge. Does everyone here live in such a nice room?"

"No, these rooms are reserved for high-ranking positions of the Emperor's own choosing." Juni replied.

"So you're some really important person? That's so cool."

"..."

Well, I guess she didn't exactly seem like she wanted to be all friendly with me just yet. All was well, it wasn't like I was looking for idle chit-chat either.

"Let's start with what just happened, then." I decided after a fitting pause to change my tone. "You had quite the guilty look on your face. Tell me, what happened to Zeik's memories?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Don't play dumb here. You had a reason for walking out of the room with such an expression. You felt responsible, didn't you?" I pushed. "What did you do?"

"N-nothing. I'm hearing nothing but baseless accusations. Is this what you pulled me aside for?"

I wasn't one to get easily annoyed, but this was getting nowhere. She seemed a little afraid of me for some reason, so I took advantage of it.

I materialized one of my "wings" and pointed it towards her.

She opened her mouth to yell. I hadn't tried this before, so I was really praying that it would work, but I made the wing vibrate in the hopes that it would cancel out her voice before she reached the guards. It seemed like it worked, since her voice didn't even reach me.

A few seconds passed, and nobody came. A look of dread settled across her face.

"I'm not going to do anything to you, honest." I said. "I just want to know what you did to my friend."

"Didn't you just meet him today? Why does it matter to you?"

"If you tell me what I want to know, maybe I'll respond to that."

"F-fine! I don't care anyway. I'll be leaving now." She tried to hurry past me. I summoned another wing to block her way.

"I never said I was willing to make this a trade."

She glared at me, and a spike ice materialized and flew towards me. I summoned a third wing to intercept it, the green, blade-shaped, glass-like object shattering the ice upon contact.

"Your tricks don't work on me. Talk, and we'll be done."

Juni still refused to speak. Suddenly, she pulled a knife from under her skirt like an assassin, and lunged towards me. I found myself unable to move for a second, like I'd been frozen in time. She buried the knife up to its hilt, right in my chest.

I expected it to hurt a lot, but there was more just discomfort that there was a foreign object in my torso. I started panicking, but soon realized that I didn't seem to be dying. No blood came out, I didn't start losing consciousness, I stood there until I un-froze, and then stumbled a bit to regain my balance. The knife was still stuck there when I looked down. Still no blood.

"What in the world..." Juni stared at it with wide eyes.

"That's a new one." I was surprised at myself. As we watched, the knife crumbled to bits and my skin mended, leaving only a cut in my shirt.

"What the hell are you?" She took another swipe at me with another knife, this one making a gash across my throat. Once again, no blood, no wound, and the knife came away cracked and crumbling.

"I'm not even sure myself..." I admitted. "More importantly, can you talk now? Holding these things up is mentally stressful."

It wasn't actually, I just felt like saying that.

"..." Juni looked like she was considering her options. Having found no others, she gave up. "Fine! I was the one who froze his memories! You happy now?"

"'Froze?'" Was that her power? If so, I could see why she was so high-ranking at such a young age. "I want details. Why? What's the relationship between you and him?"

"I-" Her gaze flicked from one of my wings to the rest. So she wanted to keep the details secret that much?

"I won't tell anyone if it's something top-secret." I said. "You probably can't trust me, but what choice do you really have?"

She stayed silent for a good while, staring right into my eyes for the entire time. Seeing I wasn't giving up, she opened her mouth again. "It's a long story, can you put these down?"

The wings shattered, disintegrating into little glass-like shards that bounced off the floor and shattering more and more each time, until they were gone from sight.

"Try something else and they're coming back." I warned. "Start with the story. Take a seat, if you want."

---

"I had an uncle named Duke, and he's the ruler of the biggest kingdom in the empire, Azria. Their family is known as one of the most powerful - the Vincents."

I nodded to let her know I was with her.

"Their family is known for their dazzling blue hair and potent magic power. And his son, Prince, was born with both."

Prince? Wasn't that what Annabelle was about to call Zeik? Thinking back on it, she called herself a maid working for Zeik, right?

"But at a young age, Prince became unbearable. He used his talent to torment other kids, even killing their animals at one point. He even assaulted his female maids at night, stuff a kid that young had no business even thinking. The Vincents decided to keep him indoors, and hire a private tutor to teach him proper values before letting him out again."

"Let me guess, he never learned?"

"Up until recently, nothing had changed and he was still living the same way after all these years." Juni continued. "But then something strange happened. One morning, he just woke up, and told his parents that he gained memories of another world, and another life. He called himself "Zeik," and started learning about the world, and requested to leave the house. They let him out with one of his maids - Annabel. The same one that he picked as his favorite to..."

"I got that. So did he never come back after leaving?"

"No. Annabel returned to their home, but Zeik was nowhere to be found. I was called in to help track him down. They told me that I could kill him, even."

That's... Okay, Prince probably deserved about that much. I didn't blame them.

"So I hired a group of Adventurers who specialized in tracking people, and they found him in a neighboring town, with two escaped Half slaves. They took the slaves and brought Zeik back to me. I spoke with him a bit, and realized that he was nothing like the Prince that I used to know. In fact, he was like a completely different person. I didn't want to bring him back to the Vincents after that, so I froze his memories of his family, his past, and everything he'd done. After that, I left the room to wait until he woke up again, but he wasn't there when I returned."

"And you thought you failed to freeze his memories correctly, and that he was on the loose as Prince again?"

She nodded. "The next I heard of him was when he showed up in town. I was so scared he was looking for me, that I panicked and tried to kill him with magic..."

"Sounds like a really dumb reason to try and kill someone..." I put my hand on the cut in my shirt. "Actually, that sounds perfectly in-character. Go on?"

"He had a different hair color, and after hearing him talk, I think I did the job properly. But that was strange, though. Normally, most people wouldn't be able to even wake up until a day later, but he was up and gone in the time it took me to grab a book from the next room over."

"Main character powers, probably..." I muttered to myself jokingly. "But now you've confirmed that he's not a bad guy anymore, right?"

"Yea..."

Makes sense why she was looking so guilty. She probably didn't even need to remove all those memories.

"Well, I've got my answer." I said, satisfied. "But I got to ask you one more thing."

"What?"

"Earlier, when we had first met." I looked her in the eyes. "You looked genuinely scared of me. Why?"