“Close the door.”
Rita knew he wouldn’t, even as the words left her mouth. She didn’t wait. She lifted her firearm.
A gunshot shattered the air. Reacting on sheer instinct, Gide slammed the basement hatch shut and ducked low, letting the reinforced iron catch the slug exactly as she had calculated.
At the same time, Rita turned her focus to the shimmering ribbon of aurora gathered in her other palm. She compressed it down, transmuting its essence until it grew volatile as black powder. The foreign magic bent smoothly to her will, far more easily than she had anticipated.
The sheer volume of it flared violently in her grip. Power raged through her, shredding flesh and splitting the skin along her fingers. A searing heat chewed into bone, yet she felt only cold relief.
A blast of this scale would level every demonic beast crawling over the ruins. Those sheltering below ground would live.
‘The star doesn’t even have to reach the sun. Even if it falls short, this alone will buy their survival.’
With blood streaming down her wrist, Rita thrust her ruined hand toward the suffocating sky—straight toward the ash-choked disk offering its faint, lifeless light. The ribbon of aurora surged around her forearm, whipping upward like a war pennant against a gale.
The star was the projectile. The aurora was the powder. Her Od was the hammer, and her mortal flesh was the barrel.
The kick of such a shot would devour everything behind it.
Through the rising distortion, Rita glimpsed Gide thrusting the door open once more, his features warped with raw horror.
“Stop! Dammit, Rita, don’t!”
He had finally pieced together what she meant by the “optimal choice.” Yet before the door could swing wide enough for him to lunge through, she pulled the trigger against the sun.
“Rita! No—!”
Gide Pascal’s scream was the last sound she took into the dark before the world went white.
An unbearable flash swallowed her sight, followed by a tide of fire that swept across the plain. In an instant, the demonic beasts around her were consumed by the blast.
Her limbs felt torn from their joints, yet through the roaring storm she saw it: a streak of blazing light breaking from her fingertips, climbing high and true. It ripped through the ashen gloom, racing straight toward the dying sun.
It worked.
The thought came without effort. She might have even managed a brief, faint smile, buoyed by a sudden swell of pride.
Then everything vanished.
***
When consciousness returned, she was sinking in cold water inside a stranger’s flesh. Just like that, Rita had awakened in this world as Lilietta.
She hadn’t shared every single horror. Even stripped of trivial details and personal regrets, her account still spanned twelve brutal years. There were simply too many pieces to lay bare.
‘Did they make it out…?’
That final moment never failed to stir an ache in her chest. She wanted desperately to believe she had carried the day, but she hadn’t remained behind to witness the outcome.
What if the shot fell short? What if none of them survived?
‘No… Even if the light missed its mark, the detonation itself was catastrophic. No beast could have crawled away from that ruin. The squad must have pulled back safely to the Final Defense Line.’
By now, Beacon Squad might have grown into the very symbol its name promised—a true guiding light heralding the end of their long war. Perhaps the scattered remnants of humanity had rallied around that fallen star, arming themselves for a final campaign.
‘Even if I’m no longer there to fight with them…’
She had been certain of her death that afternoon. Yet here she sat, returned to her former home in a world untouched by ash. That alone was an unearned mercy.
Even if she could never stand beside them again.
‘I wish they could have come here too.’
The wish rose uninvited.
They would have been breathless with wonder. Ollie would have lost her mind among stacks of books taller than herself. Sarah would have spent days marveling at the endless silks and trinkets. Is, with an abiding love for growing things, would have wandered among the lush gardens for hours on end, while that insatiable Luka would have busied himself devouring anything set before him.
‘Ethan, though… Who knows? The man is completely unhinged.’
Even so, he would have loved the skies here. Back then, whenever the horizon darkened into an impenetrable murk, he would climb atop the barracks roof just to pick out the one or two frail points of light struggling through the black.
And Gide…
“Look at this, Rita. It’s an old recipe compendium. Almost entirely pastries and confections, mind you.”
“Why show it to me? It only makes the hunger worse.”
“Give me enough practice and proper provisions, and I could probably turn out one or two. Which strikes your fancy?”
“…That one. I wonder what it tastes like.”
“A cream puff?”
“The description claims it resembles hardtack, only soft and sweet on the inside. Actual hardtack could crack a molar, so I have my doubts.”
“Is that right?”
“…Why did you tear that sheet out?”
“Just in case. If the world ever yields the right ingredients, I mean to bake it for you.”
Gide had always harbored that quiet fascination with sweets. Were he brought into a realm of such plenty, he would likely have taken up baking with deadly seriousness.
‘Gide in an apron, dusting flour… It’s absurd to even picture.’
A breath of a laugh slipped past her lips.
Still, the longing remained deep and sharp. She missed him, just as she missed Ollie, Sarah, Is, Ethan, and the youngest among them.
She missed the comrades who had guarded her flank, the ones who had slept pressed together against the freezing dirt, the ones who had drawn the same fouled breath through gore and mire.
‘…It doesn’t matter if I never lay eyes on them again.’
There was no promise that dying on that side would carry their souls to this one. It was far better that they were breathing, whole and alive, somewhere out there.
They had to have survived. They were likely shaping a new dawn at this very moment. Rita chose to anchor herself to that faith, knowing that without it, she might come undone.
Setting her empty porcelain cup onto the rug beside her feet, she finally lifted her gaze to the parlor where the family sat in stunned silence.
The Duchess appeared on the verge of collapsing. The Duke kept his chin resting on his hand, jaw set so hard the muscle leaped beneath his skin.
Leonhart remained rooted in place, his face entirely bloodless. Richard blinked repeatedly, attempting to still the tremors in his gaze before words finally broke past his throat.
“So… Lili. You’re telling us… you were drafted into training over there when you were ten. Sent to the lines at twelve. And from then on… you endured all those horrors… hunted those beasts… spent your whole life bleeding through mud and ruins… until you blew yourself apart at twenty-two to save your squad? And then… you just woke up here?”
A faint, tired smile touched Rita’s lips.
“Yes. That sums it up rather well, Ri.”
“…This is madness.”
Richard dragged both hands through his hair, his voice dropping into a ragged rasp. A string of vicious curses followed. “Those utter bastards… Those sick lunatics…”
Rita took in the room once more. Every face carried the same stunned disbelief.
‘Of course they look like that. Over there, such an existence was simply how one survived. Here, it must sound like an impossible nightmare.’
Not even frontline soldiers or beast hunters in this world had known an ordeal like hers. Peace had been their birthright for so long that they rarely considered its fragility—just as the people in her former world could not conceive of a life without slaughter.
‘Even having lived both realities, the dissonance threatens to swallow me whole. How could they, who know only this quiet haven, ever make sense of it?’
Two incompatible pasts tore at each other within her: the grim end of Pascal’s fosterlings, abandoned and discarded, alongside the tender memories of growing up as the cherished daughter of Laskail.
She pressed the inward turmoil down and spoke in an even, unhurried cadence, giving no sign of the fracture underneath.
“It feels unnatural, doesn’t it?”
“What does?”
Leonhart asked, his pallor still sickly. Rita smiled faintly, with an edge of quiet resignation.
“Me.”
“What are you saying?”
“I am not the Lili you remember.”
Leonhart’s brow furrowed sharply, but before he could protest, she carried on.
“Yet this is who I am. I am Lilietta of Birch Castle, but I am also Rita Pascal of Beacon Squad. I cannot erase the decade I spent as Rita. Nor do I wish to.”
She dropped her chin, turning away from their faces. Her sight settled instead on the dried ring of dark dregs clinging to the porcelain rim.
“I know it seems strange. I know I must feel like a stranger in this room. But nothing can undo it. Ten years have elapsed. I cannot simply walk through the door and pretend to be the very same Lili who vanished, as if not a single day had passed.”
She had held nothing back. She had laid bare not only the slaughter of beasts, but the people she had executed, the wretched compromises she had struck, and the feral tenacity required to stay alive in that bleak place.
To Rita, those actions had been nothing more than daily routine. To Lilietta’s family, they would sound monstrous. It was only natural they would look upon her with dread.
One world treated violent death and sudden absence as trivial facts of the morning; the other was shaken to its core by the loss of a single soul.
One world saw men devour their own kind to stave off starvation; the other kept well-fed livestock to dress a supper table.
Even among the desperate survivors of that ruin, Pascal’s children had been branded freaks and monsters, shunned and discarded. What would people raised in gentle luxury think of her?
‘Of course they find me foreign. It would be unnatural if they could still treat me as their little girl…’
‘I am not that child anymore. How could I expect them to love me as they did?’
Rita turned over the coming days in her mind.
They would likely walk on eggshells around her, cautious and bewildered, keeping a polite, awkward distance. But they wouldn’t wield her as a tool of war. They wouldn’t sell her out or leave her to die. She believed that much of them. Her family was not made of that kind of cruelty.
‘…And even if I am mistaken, it changes nothing.’ She had never assumed she would regain a family in the first place. If they chose to shut her out, she would not break over it.
She had learned across far too many battlefields how deadly it was to grant unearned trust—how perilous it was to place one’s hope in another’s grace.
So she drew a quiet breath, bracing the walls around her heart to keep from faltering.
“Lilietta.”
At last, the Duke spoke.