The ripples of the recruitment campaign Inside the Walls spread through the Reiss territory for a time before sinking into the mud of everyday labor.
Most people forgot about it.
Aeternus's life continued along its fixed course.
Yet because of Annie, the vague and dangerous world beyond the Walls had gained a more concrete, weightier presence in his mind.
That impression became especially clear when he entered the Paths that night.
Annie was already there.
She was not training. She merely sat on the sand with her knees drawn up, her chin resting upon them.
Her ice-blue eyes stared vacantly at the eternal tree of light in the distance.
Not even Aeternus's arrival made her shift her gaze.
She was like an exquisite doll drained of every last bit of strength.
An exhaustion deeper than ever before, nearly numb, hung around her.
Aeternus sat down not far from her without speaking at once.
Silence spread across the sea of sand.
But it was no longer filled with the hostility of their first encounters.
Instead, it felt like an unspoken understanding born of shared exhaustion.
After a long while, Annie was the first to break the silence.
Her voice was utterly flat, without the slightest inflection, as though she were describing something that had nothing to do with her.
"They conducted the first aptitude test."
She paused, then added, still without emotion,
"I did the best."
There was no pride, no excitement.
Only the immense hollowness that came after completing an assignment.
As if all her effort had been thrown into a bottomless black hole.
Aeternus remained silent. He did not offer some empty "Congratulations."
He could tell those words would be nothing but noise to her.
He studied her profile carefully.
There was not only the exhaustion of training upon it, but a deeper depletion of the spirit.
"You did the best... and then what?"
Aeternus asked in a voice nearly a whisper, afraid of disrupting some fragile balance.
"What does being the 'best' mean to you?"
Annie's body stiffened almost imperceptibly.
Slowly, she turned to look at Aeternus. In her eyes was a rare confusion, nearly bewilderment.
As though she had never considered the question before.
Several seconds passed before she looked back into the void, her voice so soft it seemed ready to scatter in the wind.
"It means... I can continue. Until... the next training session, the next test, the next mission."
She paused, as though repeating words carved into her bones, or searching for something to anchor her existence to.
"...That is the path that has been laid out for me."
"A path that has been laid out..."
Aeternus turned the phrase over in his mind.
He could feel the cold shackles behind it.
He thought of Historia.
The girl who had likewise been "assigned" to the confines of the pasture fence.
Yet at least Historia's eyes still held a longing for the stream beyond that fence.
Annie's gaze, however, resembled stagnant water sealed beneath ice.
There was no trace of a ripple, no sign of life.
He did not directly argue with her. Instead, he tried another way.
During their next several "meetings," he deliberately began weaving more "useless information" from Inside the Walls into their conversations.
He told her how Sander could not hide his simple joy when he saw the heavy ears of wheat in the fields, thanks to this year's plentiful rains.
He told her how Luna secretly traded the eggs she had saved with a traveling merchant for a small piece of sugar, then slipped it to him that evening, the sweetness of her warm fingertips lingering with it.
He told her of Busch's carefree, hearty laughter that rang through half the village when he brought down an especially fat wild boar.
He spoke only of trivial things.
Light, ordinary moments that had never existed in Annie's world of reprimands, competition, and crushing expectations.
At first, Annie had no reaction at all.
But gradually, Aeternus noticed that whenever he mentioned these small, warm things, she still did not look at him—
Yet in those vacant eyes, a flash of light would sometimes appear, swiftly retreating before he could understand it.
Like a match briefly struck in the dark.
Until one time.
Aeternus told her about helping Busch repair a leaking roof, clumsily almost slipping off the ladder, and how Busch caught him in one swift motion. The two of them looked at each other's bedraggled state and burst out laughing—
"Meaningless."
Annie suddenly spoke. Her voice remained cool, but there was less numbness in it than before.
"Things like... that."
"Perhaps," Aeternus said without arguing. He simply smiled. "But after we laughed, the roof didn't feel nearly as difficult to fix."
He paused, looking toward the dark abyss in the distance, and his voice lowered.
"Sometimes, I feel like I'm on a boundless sea too, carried along by the tide. The unfamiliar memories in my head are undercurrents, and I don't know where they will take me."
He shared his unease with her again, trying to forge a deeper resonance between them.
"That feeling of having no control over your own path... is awful."
Annie did not reply.
But Aeternus could feel that she was not unmoved.
Her silence was no longer complete isolation.
"Your father," Aeternus chose his words with care, knowing this was the most sensitive place in Annie's heart, "what does he think about you walking this 'path that has been laid out' for you...?"
It was an extremely dangerous question.
It could instantly trigger her defenses.
But Aeternus felt that someone had to touch this frozen ground.
Annie's breathing abruptly stopped for an instant.
Her fists clenched tightly, her knuckles turning white from the force.
A long silence followed.
So long that Aeternus thought she would never speak again, or that she might lash out and attack him.
"...He only needs me to keep walking."
At last, she answered in a cold tone that was almost self-tormenting.
"To walk all the way to the end. As for me..."
She did not finish.
But the meaning left unsaid was more suffocating than any tearful complaint.
She was merely a tool with a predetermined program.
Her own feelings and wishes were insignificant.
Aeternus's heart tightened painfully.
He looked at the girl beside him, impossibly formidable in combat, yet now as helpless as a child inside the prison of her own mind.
"Annie," he said her name very softly, as though afraid of startling a butterfly resting on his fingertip, "if... only if... what lies ahead on that path is not an ending, but another, far greater vortex beyond your control—if the price of continuing is losing everything... including yourself, would you still go on?"
He could not openly speak of the Rumbling. He could not openly reveal the fate of the future.
He could only hint, in the most obscure way possible, that the end of that road might not be the glory she expected, but destruction.
Annie's body shuddered violently.
She raised her head, and for the first time, her ice-blue eyes reflected Aeternus's figure with such clarity.
They were filled with confusion unlike anything he had seen before.
And... a sliver of fear, forcibly pried open, alien even to herself.
The price of continuing... losing herself?
The question was like a cold chisel striking against the sturdy shell of her mind.
She had never dared to examine the end so directly.
Watching the confusion surge in her eyes, Aeternus knew the moment had come.
He no longer pressed her. Instead, he softened his tone until it became extraordinarily gentle, carrying the weight of something close to a promise.
"Annie, I don't know exactly where your future path will lead. But I want you to know that here—"
He pointed to the white sea of sand beneath their feet.
"—there is someone who does not want to see you vanish into that vortex beyond your control."
He gazed into her eyes, speaking each word clearly and slowly.
"If... if you feel that the path laid out for you has nothing but darkness ahead, then perhaps you can treat this as a... temporary, new signpost."
"Find a way to survive. And then..."
He paused, as though making a grave decision.
"Then come find me. Take me out of my 'here.' And take yourself out of your 'there'... too."
Those words were like a faint but stubborn beam of light, suddenly piercing the thick, inescapable void inside Annie.
Not for Marley.
Not for that hollow "honor."
Not even merely to fulfill the expectations of her father, so heavy they had become twisted.
But for a real person—one extending a hand toward her, sharing her loneliness and her secrets.
Someone who needed her, and whom she might also... need.
Come find him?
Take him out?
And take herself... out too?
Annie stared blankly at Aeternus.
The immense impact left her unable to react for a moment.
Beneath that dead, frozen ground, something seemed to awaken at the call of this beam of light.
It struggled fiercely, yet with absolute determination, to break through the soil.
She still did not answer.
But as Aeternus's figure began to blur with his return to reality, he clearly saw it—
The corner of Annie's perpetually tight, cold mouth lifted ever so slightly into a tiny curve.
It was not a smile.
Yet it held more life than any smile.
A tiny new spark, driven by "connection" and "salvation" rather than "obedience" and "emptiness," had quietly been kindled in the heart of this lost warrior.
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