Now that she thought about it, none of them had ever remembered their parents.
Not a single child raised under Pascal’s wing possessed the slightest recollection of where they were born, who had brought them into the world, or what their lives had been before. It was strange, yet no one ever questioned it. They all shared the same aversion to digging up the past. Everyone insisted those forgotten days held only agony.
There were simply so many war orphans back then. She had never given it a second thought.
Life was far too brutal to waste on idle questions. When survival demanded everything, nobody had the luxury of brooding over old mysteries.
Yet now, a creeping doubt took root in Rita's mind.
Had Pascal purposefully selected children who lacked their memories? Or had he…
The thought made her blood run cold. Entertaining it felt like treason against the only father she had ever known. For more than a decade, she had lived as Rita Pascal, the freckled girl with unruly auburn hair. Never once had she doubted her identity.
‘If I truly am Lilietta… does that mean Rita’s body was never mine to begin with?’
No. That was absurd. She had inhabited that body for as long as she could recall, never once feeling like an intruder in her own flesh.
Or had she?
A forgotten conversation with Sarah Pascal, the medic for Beacon, resurfaced in her mind. Sarah had delivered it in her usual half-nagging scold during one of Rita’s regular medical screenings.
“All of Pascal’s kids suffer similar nerve strain. But Maple Candy, you’re an anomaly. You’re misfiring like a machine with a loose bolt. Do you get what I mean? It’s as though something doesn’t quite fit right. Od can only compensate for so much misalignment, so stop being so reckless.”
The sudden spasms. The peculiar spells of numbness that had struck her far more frequently than the others. Could those sensations have been her body rejecting an alien soul?
The suspicion swelled out of control. The very identity she had leaned on all her life began to fray at the seams, leaving her temple pounding. Solid ground seemed to vanish beneath her feet until she could no longer trust her own thoughts.
She gave her head a sharp, violent shake.
‘Damn it. Stop spiraling.’
She snapped the matchbox shut and set it back on the corner desk. Her gaze drifted across the stationary and the trimmed feather quill laid beside it.
‘Forget the riddles you can't solve. Focus on what’s directly in front of you.’
The earlier incident still burned hot in her memory. Above all else, she needed to awaken her Od. Lingering in this helpless state was dangerous—not only for herself, but for everyone around her.
‘I have to measure this body's affinity.’
Od was the fundamental energy woven into the fabric of the universe. To Rita’s understanding, any world governed by gravity, atmosphere, and lightning had Od coursing through it as well. How one received that energy varied wildly from person to person. Some drew it in like breath, while others rejected it entirely.
Rita caught up the quill and drove its sharp nib into her fingertip. When a dark crimson bead surfaced, she coated the tip and traced a rudimentary magic circle onto the parchment. Next, she threw the window wide, overturned an empty glass over the inscribed lines, and waited.
‘A crude field test, but it gets the job done.’
Gentle spring sunlight filtered across the sill alongside a fresh, fragrant breeze. Moments later, a faint luminescence stirred within the upturned glass. Od was coalescing.
‘It’s stable. Even across worlds, the basic laws hold true. Water still flows downward, and fire still burns hot. This world obeys the same principles.’
Rita dipped her bleeding finger directly into the shimmering veil of Od trapped beneath the glass.
‘Good. No rejection. No stinging, no discomfort at all. The body won't suffer an adverse reaction. Now to check the affinity…’
The fresh drop of blood slid free of her skin into the vaporous vortex. Yet instead of beading up like oil on water, it blossomed outward like pure ink in a pool, dyeing the gathered Od in vibrant crimson ribbons.
Rita's mouth parted in sheer disbelief as the hue deepened in an instant.
‘What on earth is this body? The affinity is off the charts!’
Rita Pascal's original flesh had never responded like this. When she ran the same test years ago, her blood had floated like a stubborn globule atop the mist, refusing to blend. She hadn't been incompatible, but her natural affinity was distinctly meager.
‘This can't be… This is on par with Gide.’
Gide Pascal possessed the highest Od affinity within the entire Beacon unit. His staggering sensitivity had allowed him to reshape vast swaths of the battlefield with raw, overwhelming might. It was why everyone called him the King.
‘No, it’s saturating even faster than his. If I take up a magic gun with this body, I could execute arts far beyond my old limits.’
A heady surge of excitement swept through her, instantly blowing away her lingering gloom. She turned the cup slowly, watching the brilliant crimson radiance swirl within the glass.
‘Incredible… I might actually be able to master the technique I never could complete. My old body locked up every time I tried to test the prototype.’
‘If this body truly were mine, think of what I could do.’
The unbidden thought struck like ice, freezing her in place.
‘…Don’t get ahead of yourself, Rita Pascal. What if you're completely wrong? What happens when the real Lilietta returns?’
Her mind flickered back to the dried four-leaf clover nestled in the matchbox. Leonhart had produced it with such desperate hope that it might jog her memory, yet looking at it had stirred nothing inside her.
Perhaps Pascal had altered her mind. Or perhaps it was mere circumstance. In any case, letting herself harbor foolish expectations would only make the eventual crash unbearable.
Rita knew all too well the fate of Pascal’s children who allowed themselves to be swayed by sentiment. She had watched one comrade convince themselves they had tracked down their blood relatives, only to be torn apart when the fantasy shattered into pieces.
Pascal’s disciples were bred as living weapons, with no purpose other than slaughtering demonic beasts. There was no room for family in such lives. Even if an ordinary family existed, they could never truly stomach what a Pascal had become. Only another Pascal could ever understand.
That was the hard, bitter truth carved into Rita over ten long years among them.
‘Do not hope. Do not deceive yourself. I am a Pascal. My duty lies with Beacon, and that is all there is to it. Treat this shell as nothing more than a borrowed suit of armor.’
Once her resolve was firmly back in place, Rita shoved the paper and glass aside and strode to the open window. Having confirmed there would be no rejection, it was time to awaken her internal Od.
She looked out into the endless expanse of blue, filling her lungs with the pristine air.
‘Such a peaceful world. Demonic beasts probably don't even exist here. Still…’
Snatching the quill once more, she dug the nib deeper into the puncture on her finger until fresh blood welled up. With steady strokes, she drew the sigil of oath across her palm, then pressed the marked hand flat against her throat.
“Od, hear my oath.”
A strange, resonant hum vibrated from her vocal cords. Wind whipped fiercely through the open casement—or perhaps it wasn't wind at all, but Od itself, rising to her call. It coiled around her limbs like a living current, winding through her flesh and bone.
“I swear to strike down every demonic beast that crosses my path.”
The influx of Od surged violently, the surrounding air warping with heat-like distortion. Strands of bright golden hair lashed wild across her cheeks, and a faint radiance ignited in her violet eyes.
Her hand firmly pressed against her throat, Rita pronounced the binding seal.
“In the name of Rita Pascal, I swear it.”
Fsshh.
A dull hiss sputtered out, followed by dead silence. The Od that had been churning violently in the room vanished as abruptly as a snuffed flame.
“…What?”
The murmur slipped past her lips in complete bewilderment. The oath had refused to bind.
Under normal circumstances, an oath delivered to Od would be accepted and woven into the very fabric of the caster's core, initiating the true awakening. Yet the energy had dissipated before the seal could take.
“This makes no sense.”
Everything had been textbook. The power had answered her summons, the winds had answered her intent, and all the signs of a successful rite were present.
“Why would it reject me?”
Rita glanced about the empty room in confusion, her fingers trailing down her throat until an old memory stirred from the shadows.
‘I’ve witnessed this before. A soldier at the Final Defense Line tried to bind an oath under an alias, and the Od instantly cast them out.’
No matter how flawless the invocation was, Od could not be bound to a lie.
Her ritual had been executed without a single flaw. The words of the vow were the very same ones she had lived by for years.
‘The vow couldn't have failed just because demonic beasts are absent here. The energy was answering right up to the final seal.’
Which left only one explanation: the name.
Rita slowly brought her bloody palm back to her throat. She drew in a breath, reciting the invocation word for word, altering only the final phrase.
“In the name of Lilietta del Nissa Laskail, I swear it.”
The reaction was immediate. Od crashed into her frame with terrifying velocity, pouring into her like a torrent bursting through a broken sluice. Her hair whipped violently in the brewing gale as her violet eyes flashed like brilliant stars.
Od saturated her vessel to the absolute brim, pushing her capacity to its limits. When the tempest finally broke, heavy silence settled over the room once more. She closed her eyes, letting the pulse stabilize, then slowly opened them.
“…Ha.”
A disbelieving laugh broke from her chest. The reservoir of Od currently thrumming inside her eclipsed anything she had ever possessed as Rita Pascal.
Yet what truly unsettled her was the inescapable reality of what had just occurred: the oath had bound.
‘Why did it recognize Lilietta’s name? Is it because the physical vessel belongs to her?’
She had always believed that vows of Od were bound to the soul, not the shell. Had she been wrong all along? Did the physical host take precedence?
Or was it…
‘Rita, do you honestly believe I wouldn't recognize my own sister? If you were truly a stranger wearing her face, do you think I wouldn't know?’
‘Just consider it, if only for a second. What if you really are Lilietta?’
‘No.’
Leonhart’s impassioned plea echoed through the chambers of her mind, shattering the fragile certainty she had just struggled to rebuild.
“No,”
she whispered aloud, as if speaking it might make it true.
“…That can't be possible.”