After Annie spoke the words "Warrior candidate," time in the sea of sand seemed to have been infused with lead.
A colder, more tangible weight pressed upon her shoulders and spread between them.
She still appeared on time.
But the razor-sharp wariness she had possessed at first had now settled into a deeper, almost numb exhaustion.
She no longer immediately entered training mode every time.
Sometimes, she simply sat with her knees drawn up, her chin resting on them, her icy blue eyes fixed upon the eternal tree of light.
Yet her focus seemed to lie in a distant future filled with gunpowder and missions.
Aeternus did not try to comfort her with words.
Any frivolous words like "Don't worry" or "There will be a way" would have been an insult to a girl burdened with such a concrete and cruel fate.
He chose another approach.
He no longer simply waited passively for her training instructions.
He began to recreate fragments of life Inside the Walls in greater detail upon the sand, showing Annie scenes she had never seen before.
He used grooves of varying depths to depict the rises and falls of furrows.
He used little stones to mark the locations of woods and houses.
He scattered finer, whiter sand into a streak that represented a path.
He worked slowly and with complete focus.
Like a geologist drawing a map, or a researcher documenting specimens.
It was, in truth, the state he was most familiar with.
At first, Annie watched indifferently.
Then, one day, Aeternus attempted to depict wind sweeping across a wheat field. He drew broad, wave-like lines all running in the same direction with his fingers, but his poor grasp of perspective and scale made the result look messy.
"The direction is consistent, but the pressure doesn't gradually change." Annie's voice suddenly rang out. It still carried no warmth, but it held a technical judgment. "The lines in the distance should be lighter and blurrier. What you're depicting is a bird's-eye flat map, but the effect of wind is three-dimensional. It has depth."
Aeternus stopped moving his fingers and looked up.
At some point, Annie had moved to stand a few steps behind and to the side of him, her gaze resting on the "wheat field."
Her critique had nothing to do with emotion. It was concerned only with accuracy.
Perhaps this was the form of communication that made her feel safest.
"You're right," Aeternus admitted. "I don't really understand how to show three-dimensional movement on a two-dimensional surface."
Annie was silent for several seconds before crouching and extending a finger.
She did not touch the lines Aeternus had drawn. Instead, on a blank patch of sand beside them, she swiftly traced several arcs.
Her lines were clean and decisive. By taking advantage of the subtle shadows formed by naturally piled sand, she truly created the sense of closer details being sharp and distant ones blurred, the flowing sensation of wind sweeping through the field.
It was a talent for turning observation into precise expression, born from long-term training in tactical terrain analysis and predicting attack trajectories in Marley.
"Like this," she said briefly. Then she withdrew her hand, as though she had merely completed a casual demonstration.
"That's incredible," Aeternus said with genuine admiration.
It was not flattery.
He studied her "work" carefully, then tried to imitate its essence and correct his own portion.
As he worked, he explained softly,
"This is the largest wheat field east of our village. Near the end of summer, when the wind blows, it looks just like this—like a golden sea."
Annie did not respond to the poetic image of a "golden sea."
But neither did she leave.
She watched Aeternus make his corrections. Whenever he once again failed to control the pressure properly, she would offer a brief word.
"Lighter."
"Break it here."
A peculiar, wordless collaboration unfolded amid the silence.
One of them strove to recreate the beauty in his memories with limited "materials."
The other offered technical corrections through absolute rationality, filtering out every sentimental description and retaining only the question of how to make it more accurate.
When the "wheat field" finally took on a more vivid form, Aeternus let out a breath.
Annie rose to her feet, brushing nonexistent grains of sand from her hands. Then, she suddenly asked a question entirely unrelated to the image.
"After that wheat is harvested, what do you do with the straw?"
Aeternus paused before answering,
"Some of it is fed to livestock. Most of it is dried and stacked into heaps to burn as firewood in winter, or to line animal stalls."
"Is its burning efficiency high? Compared to firewood?" Annie pressed, sounding as though she were evaluating a fuel source.
"It doesn't burn as long as wood, but it catches fire easily. It produces a bit more smoke, though."
Aeternus answered truthfully, while realizing that she was once again collecting "data" through him.
Trivial but real data concerning the foundations of survival Inside the Walls.
None of it concerned specific locations or secrets. It was simply the way Annie preferred to communicate.
It was her camouflage.
After that exchange, the pattern of their interactions subtly shifted.
Annie still led their combat training, but during breaks, she would ask seemingly abrupt questions.
"How do you determine whether well water is safe to drink?"
"What edible wild plants are common, and what are their characteristics?"
"Before a winter blizzard arrives, what changes usually occur in the clouds?"
Aeternus answered as best he could.
Sometimes he drew upon Diablo's knowledge, but more often, he relied on Aeternus's own rural experience of farming and animal husbandry.
In exchange, when Annie taught him combat techniques, she began unconsciously incorporating more explanations related to survival.
How to modify a particular move when physical strength was exhausted.
How to adjust a certain footwork pattern in mud or snow.
How to use sound and shifts in the airflow to determine an enemy's position in the dark.
"The things you teach are becoming more... practical," Aeternus remarked after one lesson in nighttime stealth techniques.
Annie had demonstrated how to move continuously between cover without making a sound.
"The purpose of fighting is survival." Annie wiped away nonexistent sweat from her brow, her voice flat. "Every technique must ultimately serve the goal of staying alive during the mission."
She paused, and her icy blue eyes turned toward Aeternus. An immensely complicated emotion flashed within them.
"At least, you have to stay alive until you see the person you want to see."
The words fell lightly, yet they shook Aeternus to his core.
He vaguely felt that the person Annie wanted to see might no longer be limited solely to her father in Marley.
It might include other... more indistinct expectations as well.
Through their calm exchanges about "structure," "data," and "survival," the bond between them quietly grew stronger.
It was built upon practicality, stripped of hollow emotional outpourings.
Yet because of that, it could better convey warmth beneath the crushing pressure of the sea of sand.
Until one day.
As Annie demonstrated an extremely difficult escape technique designed to instantly break free from the grasp of multiple enemies, the force she simulated was too great, and her mind had remained tense for so long—
Her movement showed the faintest, almost imperceptible hesitation.
When she landed, even the outline of her phantom body rippled, revealing the instability of her consciousness.
"You're tired," Aeternus stated. It was not a question.
Annie immediately straightened, her coldness restored.
"Continue."
"We're done for today." Aeternus did not yield. He looked at her. "There's no point collapsing from exhaustion in 'here.' Your training is meant to keep you alive 'there.'"
He had used her own words.
Annie stared at him, as if she wanted to argue.
But in the end, she merely pressed her lips tightly together, walked aside, sat down, and hugged her knees.
It was a posture that rejected conversation while tacitly accepting rest.
Aeternus did not approach her. He sat down a short distance away as well.
Silence descended once more.
But this time, it was no longer a suffocating vacuum. It was like a wordless respite shared by two people bearing a crushing burden side by side.
The light of the sea of sand was eternally dim and uncertain. It fell upon them, casting long, phantom shadows that almost seemed to merge together.
Just as Aeternus thought this meeting would end in silence, Annie's low voice reached him.
"Aeternus."
"Yes?"
"You said there are fragments of someone else's memories in your head." She did not look at him. "Are there... any fragments about the 'future'? Even some vague... premonition?"
Aeternus's heart lurched.
He answered carefully,
"There are some... extremely vague impressions of massive conflict and catastrophe. But I can't be certain they're the 'future.' They might only be chaotic nightmares."
He could not reveal specific information about the Rumbling yet. He did not know what consequences such information might bring.
Annie was silent for a long time.
So long that Aeternus thought she would not speak again.
"Lately... I often have a dream." Her voice was so light it was nearly buried beneath the sound of shifting sand. "Not here. I dream that I'm falling endlessly. Beneath me isn't the ground. It's... a lightless, viscous darkness. No matter how I struggle, it doesn't help."
She paused.
"Father says that is the weight one must bear to become a Warrior. But I think... that darkness feels as though it lies ahead of the mission."
This was the first time she had described her fear so specifically.
Though she had wrapped it in the guise of a dream.
Aeternus's throat went dry.
He looked at Annie's profile, which seemed especially fragile in the faint light.
The Warrior candidate who was sharp and decisive on the training field now seemed like nothing more than a girl struggling to breathe beneath the weight of a dreadful prophecy.
He had to do something.
He could not simply watch her walk toward that "viscous darkness."
A thought that had gradually taken shape through their countless conversations in the sea of sand, their discussions of survival, became incomparably clear and urgent at that moment.
It was no longer merely a vague notion.
It was a plan that had to be proposed and confirmed.
He needed to give her a vector other than "falling."
A concrete "anchor" she could grasp tightly.
Aeternus did not immediately respond to her description of the dream.
He simply spoke in the same calm tone.
"Annie, everything you've taught me—whether fighting or observing clouds and finding water sources—is fundamentally teaching me one thing: how to find the path that lets you survive when you're at the end of your rope."
Annie tilted her head slightly and glanced at him from the corner of her eye.
Aeternus met her gaze, his voice steady and firm.
"Then, the next time we meet, I want to discuss something with you. When you feel that the road beneath your feet will eventually lead into that darkness... perhaps we can try calculating a new route together, one that diverges from it."
He did not say "save" or "promise."
He used "calculate" and "route."
That was language she could understand beneath her camouflage.
In the eternal twilight, Annie's pupils contracted almost imperceptibly.
She did not answer. She neither nodded nor refused.
She merely slowly turned her head back and returned her gaze to the void ahead.
But Aeternus saw that the arms wrapped around her knees seemed to tighten slightly.
It was not a defensive posture.
It was more like she was confirming the existence of something heavy and unfamiliar that had just been placed in her hands.
The sensation of being pulled away by the sea of sand arrived at precisely that moment.
At the hazy edge where his consciousness returned to reality, Aeternus seemed to hear an exceedingly soft response, nearly swallowed by the void.
"...Mm."
Comments (0)
Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register