"W-what?"
The word fell out of Bell's mouth before she could stop it. She sat on the fake grass with her hands pressed against her chest, and she could not move. The golden lights swayed above her. The moon hung over the rooftops. Somewhere far below, the last of the fireworks smoke was drifting away. But none of it felt real anymore, because the name Max had just spoken was still ringing in her ears.
Laurentina Farnese dei Acquaviva y Aragona.
She had never heard it before. She was sure of that. It was long, formal, and old-fashioned, a name that belonged on a marble tombstone or in a history book about dead kings. And yet, the moment it reached her, something deep in her chest had turned over. It felt like hearing a song from her childhood, one she had forgotten until the first three notes. She knew it, and at the same time it was too foreign to touch. It was a word in a language she had once spoken and could no longer remember how to read.
Max watched her face carefully. He saw the shock, and he saw the strange, hungry look underneath it. He had been prepared for tears and for anger, but he had not been prepared for this.
"That's your name in that world, Bell," he said gently. "At least, that's the name you told me. You never told me your name from here, from this world, so I had no way of knowing. But when I saw your face tonight, and when you saw that vision, I put it together. You're that girl. You're her."
Bell frowned and lowered her eyes to the grass.
So she had transmigrated. It was true, or at least it was true enough that her heart believed it, even if her head was still fighting. She had been somebody else, somewhere else, in another body and another life. She had walked through that world, eaten its food, and breathed its air.
But the question that rose in her mind did not go away. It hung in the air above her like a cloud, heavy and gray.
How could she not remember any of it?
She had read Kill the Villainess, the manhwa that she had finished in a single night last winter, under a blanket, with a cup of tea going cold beside her. In that story, the heroine returned to her original world at the end, and she kept all of her memories. She remembered the dungeons and the sword fights and the kisses under the moon. It was the same in half of the other stories she had read. The girl always went home, and the girl always remembered.
So why couldn't she?
If Max was telling the truth, then she should remember. Some part of her should be able to reach back and touch that other life. She should be able to see the faces of the people she had known and hear their voices. But when she tried, there was only a thick, soft darkness, like a curtain pulled across a window.
And there was something else. Something that did not fit.
Shouldn't she have come back when she was ten years old?
She had been ten when it happened, in the beginning. That was the age at which her story had broken in two. If another world had taken her at ten, then surely it would have given her back at ten. That was how it worked in the stories. That was the rule.
Bell had a hundred questions, and they were piling up in her throat, pushing against one another like people at a crowded door. Who were those people in the vision? Why had she been wearing rags? What had happened to her there? Why had Max been so frightened? How had he found her?
But in the end, only one of them was strong enough to climb out. It was a small, strange, practical question, and she asked it in a quiet voice.
"How old was the body I was in?"
Max blinked.
"What?"
"The body I transmigrated into. When I went to that world," Bell said. She looked up. Her eyes were red, but they were steady. "How old was it? The one I was in, in that world, or whatever the fuck the name of that world is."
Max stared at her.
It was not the question he had been expecting. He had spent weeks preparing for this conversation. He had written scripts for it in his head, and he had practiced every possible reaction. He had been ready for her to ask what had happened to him, or what they had been to each other. He was ready to explain how they had met, or why she had been wearing a commoner's clothes, or what the red-haired man had done to her.
"Umm," he said. "Why is that your question, Bell? Shouldn't you ask what happened to you in that world? Or how we met? Or why you were wearing a peasant's dress?"
"Please answer me," Bell said.
She did not raise her voice. She only looked at him, flat and still, and waited.
Max sighed. He knew that look. It was the look she wore when she wanted to measure a number twice before she trusted it.
"All right," he said. "Let me think. As I remember..." He rubbed his chin. "When I asked you, the transmigrated version of you, I mean, you told me that you had gone into the body of a ten-year-old. A ten-year-old girl."
Bell nodded slowly.
"And that confused me back then," Max went on, and a tired smile crossed his face. "Because if you had been born as a baby, and grown up without any memories of another life, then it should have been called reincarnation. But you insisted that it was transmigration. You said you had no knowledge of that world at all, not like me. I had played the game, so I knew everything. You hadn't even known there was a game. But when I tried to explain the difference, you wouldn't listen. You said you had been dropped into a stranger's body at ten years old and that was that."
He shook his head.
"You were really stubborn about it, you know."
He stopped. His eyes had drifted over to her face, and he was looking at it with a strange, soft expression, as if he was looking at something that he had not seen for a long, long time.
Bell shifted uncomfortably. "What are you looking at?"
"Nothing," Max said quickly. "Where was I? Ah, yes. Your question. How old was the body you took over? Well, you took over a ten-year-old girl. You had no knowledge of the world, and you had to survive in it. And you did survive, as a noble. A noble of the Holy Nation, which was worse."
"Worse?" Bell asked.
"You'll see. Anyway, don't worry," Max added, and he raised both hands. "I know it sounds strange, but by the time I met you, you were already twenty-seven."
Bell let out a very long breath.
Something heavy slid off her shoulders. She had not even realized how tightly her muscles had been clenched until they let go.
"Good," she said. "Thank God. I thought you had groomed me. I was literally about to call you a pedophile right now."
"Hey!"
Max jerked upright as though she had slapped him. His cheeks went red from his collar to his hairline.
"I'm not a fucking weirdo!" he said, a little too loudly. "And I'm not a fucking pedo! You think I'd..." He sputtered and waved his hands. "My type of women are older than me! That's even the reason why I'm still single until I met you! All my life, I've looked at women my age and thought, 'too young.' Do you know how hard it is to find someone who's older than a thirty-two-year-old?"
"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard," Bell said.
"It's the truth!"
"It's still sad."
Max opened his mouth, closed it, and finally gave up. He rubbed his face with both hands. When he lowered them, he was laughing, but only a little. Bell was smiling a thin, tired smile, too. It was not much, but it was the first one she had managed in the last ten minutes, and Max felt something in his chest loosen a little.
"Anyways," he said.
His laugh turned bitter at the edges, and it faded.
"Fuck. As I remember it, you told me that you were an atheist. You really hated the way the Holy Nation of the Goddess Emilianias pressured people and forced their religion on them. You said that when you were a child, they would drag you into a cathedral every morning, and you had to kneel on a stone floor for hours."
Bell raised an eyebrow. "Wait. I said that?"
"You said that," Max said. "And you thanked me for destroying that nation. You said it was the best thing that anyone had ever done. But at the same time..."
He trailed off.
"At the same time, what, Max?"
Max looked at his hands. For a moment, he seemed to be searching for the right words, and then he gave up.
"At the same time, you hated me," he said quietly. "For killing your friends in front of you."
The terrace went very quiet.
"You hated the Holy Nation so much," Max said. He spread his arms wide, palms open, as if showing her the width of something. "This much. And you hated me even more than that." He stretched his arms out even wider, as far as they would go. "This much. You told me once that if I ever lowered my guard, and if I ever trusted you, you would kill me with your own hands."
Bell's eyes widened.
"You weren't even a warrior in that world," Max went on. His voice was soft now, and there was something almost fond in it, like a man remembering a battle he had lost. "You were a noble girl who had never held a sword. So I trained you myself. I taught you how to stand and how to hold a blade, how to breathe through the pain. I wanted to see if you could do it. I wanted to see if you could actually kill me, and finally put a stop to my regressions."
"Regressions," Bell murmured.
She whispered the word to herself, and her brow furrowed. It was another piece that did not fit. But she did not ask. She wanted to let Max finish first, and she clamped her mouth shut and waited.
Max did not notice. His eyes had gone out of focus. He was no longer on the terrace. He was standing in a stone courtyard, under a gray sky, with a wooden practice sword in his hand.
"Remember this, you bastard!"
The girl was lying on her stomach on the cold flagstones. Her knees were scraped bloody. Her dress was torn at the hem, and her hair, a mess of dark strands, had fallen across her face. In the distance, a bell was ringing from a cathedral tower.
She had lost another duel. It was the hundredth that month.
She lifted her head. Her eyes were burning with a hatred so pure that it looked almost holy, and she spat dust from between her teeth.
"You may treat me as a slave now!" Laurentina screamed. "You may ridicule me and act like a winner, just because you and this goddamn nation Ravenia, the Holy Nation, and that bastard they call the Pope, have crushed me! But... but I will have the last laugh!"
Her voice cracked. She dragged herself forward on her elbows and seized the toe of his boot with both hands.
"I will kill you with my own hands, after I kill that goddamn pope who murdered my grandfather and my auntie!!! I swear it! I swear it from the deepest hatred in my heart!!! Do you hear me?! I will kill you with my own hands! I will choke you to death, and I will get my last laugh!!!"
She bit down on the toe of his shoe. It was a ridiculous thing to do, and she knew it. She had no other weapon left.
The man looking down at her did not move. He stood with the wooden sword hanging loosely at his side. His hair was red like wine, and his eyes were like fresh blood. He watched her for a long moment, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
"Again," he said.
"...and that was how you were," Max said softly. He had come back to the terrace, and his voice was warm and rough. "Every day. You lost, you screamed at me, you got up, and we did it again. You didn't care how many times I knocked you down."
Bell had turned very pale.
The image was still glowing in her mind, as bright as a photograph. She could feel the cold stones under her knees. She could taste dust. She could feel the rage burning in her chest, and it was the strangest thing in the world, because it did not feel like her rage. It felt like an old coat that had been hanging in her closet for years, and now someone had put it over her shoulders.
"It seems I really was stubborn," she said weakly.
"The most stubborn person I've ever met," Max said, and he smiled. "And I've met a lot of people."
His smile slipped away, and he turned his eyes up to the stars.
"But it's a shame," he said. "Because in the end, you didn't get to kill me. It wasn't you who did."
Bell's heart skipped.
"The one who killed me was a pope," Max said. "A pope who was believed to be dead. He had been killed by that Corrupt Pope, the one I killed in that round. But he was resurrected. And he was the one who crushed my heart and ended me."
"Wait!" Bell held up a hand. Her brain was working again, scrambling to catch up. "Wait, wait. You said 'pope' twice. You said a pope killed you, and you killed a pope, and one of them was dead and then he wasn't? Can you explain that to me? That wasn't in the game."
"Of course it wasn't," Max said. "It happened after I transmigrated. It didn't exist before I came. That's the thing about this world, Bell. When I entered it, things started changing."
He shifted on the grass and turned to face her.
"Do you remember the Corrupt Pope? The one that the heroine fights, with her harem of male leads, at the end of the fifth arc?"
Bell nodded. She remembered him perfectly. He was a gaunt, smiling man with a huge golden hat and a staff like a snake. Her mother had cursed at the screen every time he appeared.
"That's the one," Max said. "Now. In my seventeen thousandth regression..."
"Seventeen thousandth?" Bell cried.
Her voice broke into a squeak. She clapped her hand over her mouth and then lowered it again, and she stared at him as if he had just announced that he was made of cheese.
"Seventeen thousand?! Max, how many times did you regress?! Does that mean you and I met each other seventeen thousand times?!"
"No, no, no," Max said. He raised both hands in a calming gesture. "Not at all. That round was the first time I ever met you."
Bell's mouth stayed open.
"I know. It's confusing. I'll explain." He rubbed the back of his neck. "You were the first transmigrator, before me. But you transmigrated into that world when you were ten. And I transmigrated into it when I was thirty-two, and I was shot dead. By the time I got there, you were already living there. You had been living there for years. So even though you were the first one to come, I only met you late. Somewhere around that seventeen-thousandth round."
Bell sat very still. It was a lot to take in. A man who had lived seventeen thousand lives, and had not once found her until he was well over the halfway mark. And she had been there all along, in the same world, in a different corner, going about her own small life.
"Anyways," Max said. "That Corrupt Pope reached what he called 'godhood.' Some kind of ascension ritual, a monstrous thing. And he was killed in the end. But not by me. You killed him."
"I did?" Bell said faintly.
"You did. With your own hands. You used the sword Black Blight."
"Black Blight."
"It was my father's sword," Max said. "Revan's sword. He made it himself, from scratch, ten thousand of years ago. And I didn't even expect you to be able to use it. I had read the journal of Emperor Aurelius the Greatest, and it said that only a certain kind of worthy person could hold that blade. The rest would die. Or a direct descendant of Revan Van Valraven could hold it, and live."
"Woah, woah, woah." Bell raised both hands and waved them in front of her face. "Stop. Wait a moment. Hold on."
Max stopped talking.
"Who the fuck is this Emperor Aurelius the Greatest?" Bell demanded. "And who is Revan Van Valraven?! And what do you mean, 'my father'? Why are you calling him your dad?!"
She was nearly shouting. Her voice cracked in the middle, and a hysterical little laugh climbed out of it.
Max scratched the back of his head. He looked exactly like a child who had been caught in the middle of a lie that he had not meant to tell.
"The thing is," he said, "I am Emperor Aurelius the Greatest. That was my first and original life. And Revan was my dad."
For a second, Bell did not seem to process it.
Then her eyes grew very, very wide.
"WHAT?!" she said. "H-how does that make sense? You were an emperor in your first life? And you were called the Greatest?!"
"Yeah."
"The Greatest?"
"Don't say it like that."
"I'm saying it like that because it's ridiculous!" Bell clutched at her hair. "You're an anti-social man who lives in a rented apartment! You complain about the humidity in expensive hotels! You were the Greatest?!"
"That was a different life!" Max protested. "A very long time ago!"
"I'm going to need a minute."
"Take two."
Bell breathed in and out. She put her head between her knees. She counted slowly to ten, the way she had been taught to do in the lab when an experiment went wrong. Max sat patiently and waited. After a moment, he reached out and rubbed her back in slow circles.
"I'll explain it all later," he said. "I promise. I swear on everything. But we're going too far from your question. If I start now, we'll be here until sunrise."
Bell lifted her head. She had the glazed, exhausted look of someone who had run a marathon and then found out that there was another one waiting at the end.
"Fine," she said. "Just continue. If you explain any more, and we go any farther away from my question, my head will literally explode."
Max nodded, and a trace of tenderness crossed his face. He took her hand, and she did not pull away.
"Then listen," he said. "Because this is the part that matters."
The wind rose, and the strings of golden lights shivered. Far away, a car horn sounded, and was swallowed up by the night.
"When you struck that final blow against the Corrupt Pope," Max said quietly, "the sword did what it was always going to do. It took its price."
Bell's fingers tightened.
"You were dying in my arms," he said. "I felt it right away. Your skin was cold, and your breathing was shallow. The sword had drained something out of you that couldn't be given back. I tried to heal you. I poured everything I had into it. I begged. But it didn't matter. It was all useless."
He said it plainly, with no drama, but his voice shook on the last word.
Bell stared at him. She was the one who had died. It was her death that he was describing, in his arms, on a battlefield she could not remember. And yet she felt a terrible tenderness for him, for the man who was telling her about it, because she could see that for him it was still happening.
"And then," Max said, "the air changed."
He lifted one hand and made a slow circle in the air.
"A huge magic circle opened above us. It was black and silver, the size of a house. A man came out of it. He wore a black robe, and his face was hidden under the hood. I couldn't see his eyes, but I could feel them."
He lowered his voice and spoke in a flat, cold tone, as if he were reading from a page.
"As I remember it, he said this to the dead body lying in front of us. The Corrupt Pope's body."
"He lost to a goddamn mortal. And worse, to a woman who wields the Black Blight itself? How is this possible?"
Max paused. He let the silence stretch.
"It doesn't matter. Even if he lost, our plan will continue. We will complete this mission."
A chill ran down Bell's spine.
"Then he raised his hand," Max said. His fingers closed into a fist. "And the magic circle began to turn. It spun faster and faster. It was making a sound like a thousand voices singing in a language that I'd never heard. And he said four words. Four words, and that was when the nightmare began."
His voice dropped to a whisper.
"Summoning: The Pope of Qlippha."
The wind stopped.
Even the golden lights seemed to hold still. For a moment, the terrace was completely silent.
"Your eyes widened," Max said. "Even though you were nearly dead, even though your blood was on my hands, you lifted your head and looked at the circle. You looked at what was coming up out of the dark. And you said a name."
Bell's lips parted. Her heart began to pound, slowly and heavily, like a drum in a deep cave.
"You said," Max whispered, "'G-grandpa...'"
The word struck her like a hammer.
Bell's eyes grew wide and wet. A cold, strange tingling spread through her whole body, and the world seemed to tilt. She had a grandfather. She remembered him, in this life, as a kind man with a gray mustache who used to give her peppermint candies. But that was not the one that Max was speaking about.
It was another grandfather, in another life. And she remembered his hands.
Not his face. Not his name. Only his hands, huge and gentle, with a ring on one finger, holding hers on a cold morning in a place full of candles.
"The Black Robe man used the Corrupt Pope's corpse," Max went on. His voice was heavy now. "He used it as a vessel, and he pulled your grandfather out of the dark with it. The Pope who had been called 'The Great and Wisest Pope.' The one who had died before I ever met you. The one whom the Corrupt Pope had murdered."
Bell pressed her hand against her mouth.
"But he didn't come back as an ally," Max said. "He didn't come back as a ghost, or a guardian, or anything that you might have hoped. He came back as a monster. Something that crawled up out of the depths of Qlippha."
He looked at her with infinite sorrow.
Author's Note: Qlippha is the Hell, or the Abyss, in the world of "The Adventures of Emiliana, Searching for Truth."
Bell did not hear the end of his sentence.
She was no longer on the terrace. She was somewhere cold and dark, with a taste of blood in her mouth and a pair of arms around her, holding her up. She was looking at a huge shape rising out of a spinning circle, and it had a face she had once loved. She felt the old, forgotten grief, the kind that does not fade because it has never been allowed to speak.
A tear rolled down from her right eye. It trembled on her cheek, and then it fell onto the back of her hand, and it was followed by another.
She did not wipe it away. She did not even seem to know that she was crying.
She only whispered a single word, so softly that the wind nearly took it.
"Grandpa..."