“I’m doing just fine, Mother. Really. I lived well, made plenty of friends—look at me, didn’t I grow up wonderfully?”
Rita gave a warm smile and wrapped her hands around the Duchess’s. Taking in her radiant, unblemished daughter, the Duchess offered a fragile, tearful smile of her own.
“Thank heavens… My darling girl, you’re so beautiful. You turned out so lovely. Thank you… thank you for growing up so well, even without me there. I should have been by your side… but I failed you…”
Her voice broke. Pulling Rita tight against her chest, the Duchess dissolved into weeping.
“Lili… oh, my baby… I’m so sorry. You were only a child… I should have kept you safe. But I lost you. I let you slip through my fingers…”
“No, Mother. It wasn’t your fault. Please don’t cry. Look, I made my way home. I’m right here.”
Rita remained still in her mother’s embrace, holding her until the Duchess’s tears finally yielded to exhausted sleep.
Leonhart had kept a quiet vigil near the doorway. As Rita stepped out, he turned toward her.
“Were you telling the truth?”
“About what?”
“Living well.”
“Of course. Why, do I not look like it?”
Leonhart stayed silent, rubbing his thumb along the corner of his lip. Rita tilted her head at the gesture, then remembered what had happened with the scent of patchouli.
“Is this about what happened outside the dressing room?”
“….”
“Right. I never did explain that, did I? Do you want to know?”
“Only if you’re comfortable telling me.”
“It doesn’t bother me. Let’s head to my room, Leon.”
She turned toward the guest wing, but Leonhart reached out to catch her shoulder. Pure reflex took over: Rita slapped his hand away and dropped into a low, defensive stance.
“….”
“…Oh.”
Leonhart stared in shock at his deflected hand. Rita rubbed the side of her cheek, sheepish.
“Sorry. Old habits… When someone reaches for me from a blind spot, my body just moves.”
“…Lili, why don't we go to your old bedroom instead?”
“My old room?”
“You can’t linger in the guest quarters indefinitely. Let’s get you settled back into your own space. It hasn’t been lived in for years, so it still needs a proper renovation, but I had the servants air it out and clean it this morning. It’ll do for now.”
“All right.”
Leaving the annex behind, the two crossed over to the main residence.
For ten years, Lilietta’s childhood bedroom had been sealed under preservation spells. Only this morning had those wards been dispelled and the chamber dusted on Leonhart’s orders.
Stepping through the doorway, Rita saw the space in a completely different light. When she had glanced in a few days ago, she had viewed it with the detachment of a stranger; now, every corner pulled at the strings of memory.
Brushing past layered curtains of pink and yellow, she sank onto a pale yellow settee adorned with rabbit-ear backrests. Even the rug beneath her feet was a delicate pastel pink. She let out a small laugh.
“Right. I used to be obsessed with pink and yellow.”
“And rabbits.”
Leonhart nodded toward the bed, where an enormous plush rabbit the size of a child was propped up.
Rita glanced around, amused. The giant bunny was flanked by a whole litter of smaller stuffed rabbits; the settee bore sewn-on ears; and nestled in the corner was an opulent dollhouse overrun with more rabbit figurines.
“Yeah, I really did love rabbits back then.”
“Not anymore?”
“I don’t know… I suppose I just stopped thinking about things like that.”
Across the low table by the sofa, colored pencils lay strewn beside an open sketchbook. Rita remembered how fond of drawing she had once been.
‘I was never any good at it, though. I can’t even tell what this was supposed to be.’
Absentmindedly, she gathered the scattered pencils and began tucking them into the gilded wooden box beside the pad. Leonhart gave a subtle start across from her.
“What is it?”
“…Nothing.”
Rita glanced down at the pencils in her hand.
They had kept everything exactly as it was.
Her eyes drifted back down to the drawing pad. Suddenly, the memory surfaced of what her child self had been trying to create.
‘A graduation card.’
Little Lilietta had stayed up late into the night, sketching a card to celebrate Leonhart finishing his academy studies. Exhausted, she had fallen asleep with the pad open on her desk. And that very night, she had vanished.
For all these years, her family had refused to move a single pencil. What kind of grief had made them preserve the room like a mausoleum? The sheer weight of it made her chest ache.
Rita reopened the box, pulled out a pencil, and set the lead to the clumsy picture from her past. Beneath the scrawl, she wrote:
[Congratulations on your graduation!]
“This is what I was trying to make.”
She tore the sheet from the sketchbook and offered it to him.
Leonhart fell silent. For a long time, his fingers traced the uneven, colorful strokes without a word. At last, he spoke in a low voice.
“What were you drawing down here at the bottom?”
“Our family welcoming you home.”
“…”
“Too messy to recognize, isn’t it?”
“No. It’s wonderful.”
“Liar. You couldn't tell until I told you.”
“…Fine, you caught me. I had no idea.”
He managed a soft laugh, his gaze lingering over the paper, the corners of his eyes softening with quiet melancholy.
“I spent years wondering what your last drawing was… Now I finally know.”
Rita watched him silently as he stared at the crude picture, his eyes heavy with emotion. She picked up another pencil, flipped to a blank page, and began sketching something entirely different. A grotesque, malformed shape took form under her hand.
“What on earth is that?”
“A Mimic. A Named demonic beast.”
“Named?”
“Yeah. When a demonic beast gets powerful enough to set itself apart from the rest of the herd, they give it a title. That’s what we call a Named.”
She traded the pencil for a crimson one, shading in the creature’s maw as she spoke.
“This one earned its name because it could imitate humans so well. By the time it was first identified, it had already claimed a hundred and seventy-two lives. Over the next three years, it devoured thousands more before we finally put it down.”
“That’s… monstrous.”
“Eight of those first victims belonged to my squad. One of them was a friend.”
Rita drew a round shape wedged inside the creature’s gaping jaw.
“I can still see it. How the Mimic rolled his severed head around on its tongue like hard candy.”
All color drained from Leonhart’s face. Setting the pencil aside, Rita pressed on.
“That was the first time I ever encountered the smell of patchouli.”
“Patchouli? From a monster?”
“When demonic beasts digest prey, they vent aura. Most people can’t pick it up unless they have sharp senses, but a high-tier Named gives off a stench so thick anyone can smell it.”
Rita wrinkled her nose in distaste.
“A Named’s aura smells uncannily like patchouli. If that scent hits your nose out of nowhere, it means one of them just fed nearby.”
“…Is that why you struck the maid?”
“Just because something has a human face doesn’t mean it’s human. Beyond the Mimic, there were plenty of beasts that wore human skin. But almost none of them could disguise the stink of patchouli. So we were drilled to kill on sight the second we smelled it.”
She shrugged, tore the drawing of the Mimic from the pad, and crushed it in her palm.
“I’m fine now, though. I can tap into my Od again. It lets me discern human from beast right away, so I won’t go hurting innocent people anymore.”
Leonhart picked up the crumpled ball she had tossed aside and smoothed it flat. After staring at the sketch for a long, quiet interval, he lifted his eyes.
“Lili.”
“Hm?”
“In that other world… did you spend your life fighting things like this?”
“It was my trade.”
“You mentioned a Beacon squad. Was it some sort of mercenary guild?”
“Something like that. A cross between mercenaries and regular army. We had the freedom to pick contracts and take private commissions, but we were still bound by high command’s orders. When the line buckled, they deployed us to hold the Final Defense Line.”
“From what age? You say you’re twenty-two now. How young were you when it started?”
“Basic training started at ten. They threw me onto the front lines shortly after that. Around twelve, I’d say.”
Leonhart’s jaw clamped shut, the grinding of his teeth audible in the quiet room. Rita gave a faint, wry smile.
“Don’t take it so hard, Leon. I know how it sounds, but out there, it was completely normal. Plenty of recruits were twelve or thirteen. Everyone in my unit enlisted around the same age.”
“Dammit… Sending children to butcher monsters? What kind of twisted hell was that—”
Leonhart cursed, his composure cracking, but Rita’s tone stayed calm and steady.
“A world where the sun went dark. Where two-thirds of the continent belonged to demonic beasts, and seasons and clear blue skies were fairy tales from old books. Inside the defense perimeter, people starved until they turned on each other. Outside it, the air itself was venomous enough to melt your lungs.”
“….”
“The rules of this peaceful world simply didn’t apply there. Honestly, I was one of the fortunate ones. So please, Leon, don’t be angry.”