Chapter 198: Could He Be...?
The heavy doors of the meeting hall opened, and the two girls stepped out, walking away at a calm pace, their expressions worlds apart.
On one side was Lirien, wearing an expression of relief, as though she’d just narrowly avoided some great disaster. On the other was Selena, whose face still carried that same serious, outwardly neutral look, one that seemed to be hiding a faint glimmer of murderous intent beneath the surface, something that didn’t go unnoticed by her friend, who couldn’t help but shake her head.
"I can understand why you hate that guy. He’s really a..." Lirien began, only to trail off into a string of curses, lowering her voice so the guards by the door wouldn’t hear her,
Selena’s ears, however, caught every single one of them, but she neither nodded nor denied the sentiment.
Seeing that she wasn’t going to say anything, Lirien let it drop too, but her gaze didn’t move from her friend’s face. She stayed like that for a while before Selena finally turned toward her and said, "Is there something strange on my face? Why do you keep staring?"
Lirien didn’t react much to the question at first. Her expression only grew more confused and curious, as if she had something on her mind and was trying to decide whether to voice it. In the end, she decided to.
"It’s nothing. It’s just... the expression you made when you saw Lucius in there reminded me of someone. Hmm... now that I think about it, you actually have a certain resemblance when you make that face," she said, an image of a particular person surfacing in her mind, one that, strangely enough, seemed to overlap with her friend’s in a way that even she found hard to believe.
"Hm?" Selena’s expression, neutral until now, shifted slightly, and she couldn’t help but look at her friend oddly.
"What do you mean?" she finally asked.
There was something about those strange words from her friend that seemed to shake her more than it should have.
"That way you have of showing no expression on your face, while your eyes look like they’re about to butcher someone alive, you know, your usual look whenever you’re beating Percival bloody during training, it’s strangely similar to someone else I met in that place," Lirien said, laughing a little as she remembered the boy she’d encountered there.
Terrifying as he’d been, he’d completely captured her interest.
Yet whenever she remembered how he had seemed to disappear into nothingness after his encounter with that strange plant, Lirien couldn’t help but be left with a bitter feeling.
’I wonder how he’s doing. I never even got the chance to ask his name. I hope he’s okay,’ she thought as she walked, only to stop short when she noticed something.
Hm?
Selena wasn’t beside her anymore. She’d stopped walking.
Lirien turned to look at her friend, ready to ask what was wrong, but the words never made it out of her mouth.
Because the moment she turned, she saw the look on Selena’s face.
"Hey, are you okay?" she asked, a little thrown by her friend’s expression.
Selena seemed to have frozen in place, rigid as she stared back at her, an oddly serious look on her face, her eyes carrying an intensity so deep it startled Lirien for a moment.
She was about to ask again if she was alright when Selena cut her off.
"What did you just say?" she asked, her voice carrying a subtle seriousness that Lirien couldn’t quite place.
"Hm? I said you resemble him in that way," Lirien said, confused by the sudden question.
An involuntary flutter of her heart struck Selena the moment she heard her friend’s words, so she asked again, as if trying to confirm what she’d just heard.
She knew Percival had attacked Lirien in that place.
When the two of them had talked about what happened to them there, Lirien had told her about a strange, incredibly strong boy who’d saved her and killed Percival.
At the time, Selena had been surprised to learn Percival was even still alive, since the last time she’d seen him, he’d been pinned to a tree by one of her attacks, on the verge of being torn apart by those strange creatures.
She wasn’t sure how he’d survived, but she assumed it had something to do with that strange transformation he’d undergone.
Lirien had described him becoming some kind of twisted, no longer human being, something Selena had believed easily enough, since even back when she’d encountered Percival herself, something about him had already seemed off.
Not just his sudden increase in strength, or that strange energy he’d used, but the way he spoke; he’d sounded almost unhinged.
It had been obvious that something had happened to him in that place, so she hadn’t put much thought into how it had ended for him.
Which was why she’d more or less ignored the detail about the strange person who’d saved Lirien, someone who’d apparently vanished afterward.
But now her friend’s words had dragged all of it back to the surface, and she couldn’t stop herself from fixating on what Lirien had just said.
He resembled her?
That piece of information, seemingly harmless on the surface, hit her far harder than she expected, because the details being described inevitably made her think of her brother, someone who, no matter how much she thought about it, shouldn’t have been able to survive that incident in Lirath.
And yet the way Lirien had described that boy kept echoing in her mind.
A certain thought began creeping into her head, one she fought with everything she had to push back down.
Because letting herself entertain it would mean facing something she wasn’t sure she was ready to handle.
But it seemed fate wasn’t done playing its cruel game with her yet, because in the next moment, Lirien spoke again, her expression that of someone who’d just remembered something.
"Oh, right. Now that I think about it, Percival seemed to know him. He was shouting something at him, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying from where I was. Even so, I saw the way that guy beat him to death. It almost seemed like he had a personal grudge against him."
She said this, then made a face.
"Well, I guess that’s not exactly surprising. Percival’s always been an ass, so it wouldn’t shock me if he had more than a few enemies. Hell, even I would’ve loved to beat him up back then." she said, laughing a little to herself.
"But I have to admit, that guy really did look a lot like you. Dark hair like yours, sharp features like yours, and that way of looking at someone like you’re ready to end them without blinking."
"Heh, I’d almost believe someone if they told me he was related to you," she laughed again, the very thought seeming ridiculous to her.
Unfortunately for her, the same couldn’t be said for her friend, who seemed to be visibly trembling at the words she’d just spoken.