The wind had grown colder on the terrace. The golden lights still swayed above the fake grass, but the music from the ballroom had faded into a faint, distant hum, like something playing in another life.
Max sat with his hands resting on his knees. He had been quiet for a while, and Bell had let him be. She sat in front of him, wrapped in his jacket, with her blond hair loose around her shoulders and her silver-grey eyes fixed on his face. She was waiting for him to find the next thread.
At last, Max cleared his throat.
"After I was reborn into that body as Sylan, we uncovered more than one piece of lore about Bethany's death," he said. "And about Bethany and Xavier's eldest sister."
Bell's shoulders tightened.
"Then what did you discover, Max?" she asked. Her voice was careful. "Because you told me earlier that their eldest sister was the one the Solanians attacked during the war. Geez, even I'm still shuddering about it. I know she was only a background character, just a name that got added to flesh out the lore. But to give her the worst fate imaginable? The game developer, or whoever made that game, wasn't in their right mind, Max."
Max nodded slowly. "Maybe. Maybe that's down to whoever made that world. But there's something you have to understand."
He lifted his eyes to the dark horizon.
"The Solanians did things like that long before the game ever started. They did it during my father's reign, too. If you knew how cruel they were, Bell, and what kind of pigs they were, you'd throw up at their war crimes. You'd throw up at whatever the gods only know they did to the slaves they captured, and to the women they dragged into their camps."
Bell's mouth tightened. She had told Max earlier that she had no compassion for strangers, and she had meant it. But sitting here in the cold, with the stars wheeling above her, it was strange how much more she felt for a nameless woman in a story than she wanted to admit.
"You didn't know what happened to them, then?" she asked quietly. "Back then, in your first life?"
"I did," Max said. "I knew exactly what happened to them. But only afterward. Because..."
His fingers curled slowly into fists.
He was not on the terrace anymore.
He was standing in a field outside a ruined camp, in the gray light before dawn, and he was a prince in a purple coat, not yet an emperor. His horse was blowing steam beside him. The air smelled of smoke and mud and something sweeter and worse underneath. He had ridden for two days without sleeping, because the messenger had said that the field hospital had been taken.
He remembered the tent flaps hanging open in the wind. He remembered the silence.
They had been doctors and nurses, all of them women. They had been his people, who had stayed behind to treat the wounded when the soldiers retreated. They lay in the mud where the Solanians had left them. They were too still. The marks of what had been done to them were on every one of them, and there was no way to look at it and keep looking.
Max had walked a few steps, and then he had turned, bent over, and been sick in the grass. Then he had been sick again. And again.
It was not because the bodies were dirty. It was not even because they were dead. It was the guilt. It rose up from somewhere under his ribs and sat in his throat like a stone, and it did not go away. It stayed with him for years. It followed him from battlefield to council room and from council room to bed. Even on his deathbed, when the fever had burned him down to nothing, he had still felt it. Each of those women had a face. Each of them had a name that he had learned from the casualty lists. And he had been too late to save a single one of them.
"Because I saw what they looked like after," Max said hoarsely. "After I arrived. They were already dead."
His whole body had started to shake. He did not notice. He was still staring at the ground in front of him, at a patch of fake grass that was not mud, thinking about what those monsters had done to his people.
A warm hand closed over his.
Then another covered the other one. Bell had moved closer without a sound, and she was holding both of his fists in hers. Her fingers were small and cold, but they did not let go.
"Max," she said softly. "It was never your fault."
He did not answer.
"I know that you blamed yourself. I know you always do, even for things that were out of your hands. I wasn't even there. But I can tell that you mourned them. You grieved for every one of them, and you promised them justice for what the Solanians did." Her voice was steady, and the steadiness was costing her. "I know you even tried to end your own life under the weight of all that you carried. And because of that..."
She paused and took a breath.
"I think I understand now why they called you 'the Greatest.'"
Max looked up.
"It wasn't because of your heroic deeds," Bell said. "It wasn't because you conquered land, or because you destroyed Solania and killed its tyrant. It was because you never ruled for glory. You never ruled on a whim. You ruled because it was your duty."
She tightened her grip.
"I'm not saying you're not emotional. Obviously, you are. But the way I see it, and I know I didn't see how you ruled, I only know what you've told me... if the four nations themselves acknowledged that title, then it was because you did your best. Not for power, and not out of greed for the throne. You might not have had a choice about becoming emperor. But you did the work anyway. And you did it as a duty, Max. Not as a prize."
Max stared at her.
For a moment, he could not speak. There was a strange, hot pressure behind his eyes. He pulled one hand out of hers and wiped his face roughly with the back of his wrist. When he lowered it, his eyes were red, but he was smiling a little, the first real smile he had managed in a long time.
"Thanks, Bell," he said.
"You're welcome."
"Anyways." He sniffed and straightened his back, and a little of his old dryness came creeping back into his voice. "Enough of this melodrama. Let's continue. But I'm warning you first. This is a short summary. I'm only giving you the major things that happened during my regressions."
Bell nodded. She knew that if he told her the whole story, it would take a month to finish. "It's all right, Max. If I were you, I'd do the same thing."
Max smiled, and then something moved across his face.
"Okay. So, this regression was around my twenty-fifth round," he said. "And in that round, I finally met the one I used to idolize."
The words came out in a different tone from the way he had spoken all night. There was no jolliness in it at all. Bell could hear the change, a thin undercurrent running under his voice, a tangle of anger and hatred and trauma and fear. And last of all, a deep, hollow loss, like the sound of a bell ringing in an empty house.
Max exhaled through his nose. "Haah. Sorry about that, Bell. As I said, I met her. Her name was..."
"Wait." Bell lifted a finger. "You said 'her.' Is she one of your lovers, Max?!"
Max blinked. Then he threw both hands in the air.
"GOD, NO!"
Bell flinched.
"If there's one thing I feel about her, it's PTSD and hatred!" Max said. "I'll admit that I had a crush on her once. A crush. But in God's name, she was never my lover. I hated her. I hate her a lot."
"I see, Max," Bell said. She nodded slowly, and the stiffness in her shoulders eased a little. She would never have admitted that she had been holding her breath.
"Anyways," Max continued, "her name is Avoinese Damserette El-Rath. And I'll admit she was beautiful. For a twenty-seven-year-old Solanian, I mean. But she is also the most evil person you'll ever meet. I lost my lover because of her. But don't ask me about that, because this is about the regression. All right?"
Bell nodded, and she did not say a word.
Max looked pleased with her silence. He cleared his throat and went on.
"When I first met her, do you know what she did to me?"
"What?" Bell asked.
"She bumped into me. And then she called me a fucking commoner."
Bell blinked. "That's it?"
"Goddamnit, that's how I knew it was her. That was Avoinese, in the flesh." Max rubbed his temples. His tone was not at all thrilled. "And it didn't end there, either."
***
It was a bright afternoon in the courtyard of the Academy.
Students in blue uniforms drifted along the stone paths in twos and threes. A fountain was running in the middle, and the sun glittered on the water. Sylan Armada Von Noctis, or the man who was wearing his face, had just finished a short and uncomfortable conversation with one of the heroine's suitors, a tall young man with golden hair and the posture of a prince. It's non-other than the Crown Prince of Solania himself
"Your cousin," the Crown Prince had said, in a low and meaningful voice, "should stay far away from Lady Emiliana."
"Sure," Max had said. "I'll tell him."
He had not cared. He had not cared at all. It was only another scene from a game that he had played a hundred times, before it became his life. He had said something polite and turned to go, and he had been halfway down the corridor when a pair of hands closed over his arms from behind.
A sack went over his head.
Bell had both hands over her mouth. "She kidnapped you?!"
"Not exactly," Max said. "It was more of an invitation. With a sack."
Beyond the sack, there was only a long, rolling ride in a carriage, and then the sound of stone steps under his feet. Then the sack came off, and Max found himself tied to a chair in a bright, elegant sitting room. The floor was white marble. A fireplace crackled in the corner. And on a velvet couch in front of him, with her legs crossed and a porcelain teacup in her hand, sat a woman who looked like she had stepped out of a painting.
"It seems you have some relations to that damn illegitimate child of Duke Emilios, Ser Sylan," she said.
She had silver hair that fell in heavy waves to her waist, and eyes of a deep, glittering purple. There was a small beauty mark beneath her right eye. When she smiled, it moved. Even Max, who knew exactly who she was and what she would do, could not stop himself from admitting that she was beautiful. She was more beautiful than Eunice and more beautiful than Emiliana herself.
But she was not more beautiful than Emhyria. And she was not more beautiful than Jeanne.
"Hold on," Bell said. She raised a hand. "Emhyria and Jeanne. How do those two compare?"
Max looked at her with the expression of a man who has been waiting for this question for his whole life.
"Emhyria," he said, "thinks of herself as a mature woman. In reality, she has a childish attitude. And she's a tsundere, too. A textbook one. I couldn't help but fall for someone like her, because she was the kind of woman who would sacrifice everyone for me, and only me. Everyone. The whole world, if I'd asked."
"Wow," Bell said flatly. "Healthy."
"And then there's Jeanne," Max went on, ignoring her. "Even the players agreed that she was the most underrated character in the game. She was consistently in the top two of every annual anniversary popularity poll. She even took first place in the poll for the most ideal wife. Because she was a femme fatale, but she cared about everyone around her. She was hated by most of the world, because she was a Saintess of Sanguinius himself, the same as my mother, Marriane Margaret. But she was also a great cook, and she loved telling bedtime stories to children."
Bell tapped her chin. "I'll give you Jeanne," she said. "She sounds amazing. But Emhyria?" She wrinkled her nose. "That's some straight glazing, Max. I'm not going to lie. Though it seems that she really was your first love."
"I guess so."
"I mean, I can understand your position. She sounds like the best woman you could possibly marry. But you should have married me first." Bell pointed to herself with her thumb, with a perfectly straight face.
Max opened his mouth, closed it, and cleared his throat. The tips of his ears had gone red again.
"Anyways," he said. "Let's continue."
***
In the bright sitting room, Max looked at the woman on the couch and nodded to himself.
She was beautiful in exactly the way he had idolized her. She was a real villainess, unlike the soft, scolded, misunderstood ones he had seen in manhwa and novels and web novels. Those girls always turned out to be kind underneath. Avoinese was not. She was the genuine article.
'What did you even see in this woman, Max?' a voice said inside his head. It was low, trembling, and horrified. 'How can you have a crush on a monster like her? She's a witch!'
It was Sylan. He had never left. Ever since that night in the bedroom, he had been living at the back of Max's mind, like a lodger who had not been invited but had nowhere else to go.
'Shush,' Max thought back. 'Let me cook, bro. You're just not a man of culture.'
'Just don't blame me when she kills you and we regress again, you fool.'
Max ignored him. He lifted his face toward Avoinese with the best polite smile he could manage, with his wrists still tied to the chair.
"I'm not that close to Lady Emilia, I believe, Your Highness," he said, in his smoothest voice. "I hope you'll believe me."
Avoinese's eyebrow rose.
"Highness?" she repeated. Then she laughed, a low, delighted sound. "Hah! At last. Finally, someone acknowledges me as the princess that I am."
She touched her own chest with her fingertips and tilted her chin up. She was a young duchess of the north, and she carried her bloodline the way other people carried a crown. She was proud of it, and she wanted everyone to see.
Max wanted to laugh.
It was ridiculous to watch her. He had seen this scene a hundred times, and every time she did exactly the same thing. She touched her chest, she lifted her chin, and she said the same words with exactly the same pause before the word princess. And yet, strangely, he was not tired of it. There was something about the repetition that was comforting, like an old song.
"Though I must apologize for kidnapping you and for this such treatment for a noble like you," Avoinese said. She lifted her cup and took a slow sip. "Guards. Please untie our esteemed guest."
Two guards stepped forward and cut the ropes at his wrists. Max rubbed them, and a maid in a gray uniform came to his side and guided him to a velvet couch across from Avoinese. He sat down and thanked her. The maid bowed deeply, lower than she needed to, and then took one step back.
"You don't have to thank them, Ser Sylan," Avoinese said, without looking up from her tea. "It's their job. They are servants."
She flicked two fingers, and the maids and guards bowed again. Then, one by one, they began to leave the room.
Max watched them go.
They did not leave together. They filed out in a perfect line, each of them stopping at the doorway, bowing, and walking through it before the next one moved. There was no sound. There was no hesitation. It was like watching a clock tick.
'Hey, Sylan,' he thought. 'Why are her servants leaving one at a time, in a line? I thought they'd all go out together. Was I wrong about how servants leave?'
'No, you're not wrong,' Sylan's voice answered, low and tight. 'And neither is what you saw. This is how she trains her servants. It's discipline. She's very strict about it. If one of them stepped out of line, they'd be punished.'
Max shivered.
"Mhm!" Avoinese coughed.
She had put her cup down on the table with a small, precise clink. She was looking at him with narrowed purple eyes and a tight little smile, the look of a woman who did not like to be ignored while she was speaking.
"I will get straight to the point of why you are here, Ser," she said.
Max pulled his attention away from the last maid and put on a respectful face. "I've been dying to ask, my lady."
"Good."
Avoinese folded her hands in her lap. The sunlight from the tall window turned her silver hair into a sheet of white fire, and the mole under her eye seemed darker than before.
"I want you," she said, "to spy on my fiancé."
"Your fiancé?"
"The Crown Prince of Solania himself." Her voice was calm, but there was a sharpness in it that cut like a razor. "I want you to report every detail of what he does when he is around that illegitimate wench, Emiliana. Every word he says. Every place he goes. Every time he looks at her."
Max stared at her.
He had heard it. He understood each word. And yet, for a few long seconds, the sentence would not fit inside his head. He had expected a threat, or a trade, or an order to murder someone. He had even prepared himself for a demand for his loyalty.
He had not expected this.
Inside his skull, he could hear Sylan sputtering. Outside, in the bright and elegant room, a log shifted in the fireplace with a soft crackle.
Max took a very deep breath, and then he screamed.
"WHAT?!"