Published: March 21, 2026
Akira returned at a time when the morning sun was just beginning to rise.
I sat in the living room chair and watched the black slowly turn to navy, then to lighter colors.
As the sparkling morning sun hit my face through the window, a dark figure slipped into the room through the open window and I gasped.
I hadn't slept at all after all, but maybe because I saw his face I suddenly felt a wave of sleepiness.
Crow had gone up to the bedroom early.
He's old, so he'll probably wake up soon.
"Akira...!"
I moved to run to him, but the intense, metallic smell of blood hit me and I stopped just before reaching him, grimacing.
If you looked closely at his black cloak you could see a color that wasn't black clinging to it.
And it didn't feel like it belonged to Akira alone, nor like it belonged to just Gram.
"Sorry."
Akira said that to me.
What was he apologizing for?
That I had tried to stop him when he left and he'd pretended not to hear?
Or for killing a human, for killing Gram?
Emotions raged inside me, and for some reason tears welled up.
"Why... why..."
I murmured through my tears. Akira ruffled my hair more roughly than usual and began to speak in a calm tone.
He told me how, before killing Gram, he had killed a fellow professional—a different assassin who had been contracted to kill Gram as well.
And when he killed that human, he felt no emotion at all.
His expression was hidden by the window light, but it must have looked pained.
"I'd just been halfhearted as an assassin up until now. If I'd done it like this from the start, Commander Saran wouldn't have had to die."
What Akira was talking about was probably what happened after he was summoned—when he learned of the Reytis kings' plot.
Even in this world, although someone's designated profession might be "assassin," very few actually make a living as one. Your birth-given profession can't be changed until you die, but that doesn't mean people don't work in other jobs. There are people like Ringa, the guild master of Uru's Guild, who hold entirely different positions; most of the time they become adventurers.
Still, Akira chose to remain an assassin.
"No! It's not Akira's fault—"
"Even so, I could've killed them back then. The reason I didn't was because I was soft."
His quiet, dark voice cut me off and sent a chill through me.
I didn't know exactly when the "back then" he meant was.
I had thought that taking revenge for Saran Misurei would satisfy him.
And yet the look on Akira's face now was worse than when I had forcefully put him to sleep before.
But this time, putting him to sleep like that probably wouldn't help.
I had to do something.
I roughly wiped my tears with my sleeve, lifted my face, and looked up at Akira, backlit by the window.
"But if you'd always been like that, I might never have met you. In the Cantinen Labyrinth I might have been eaten by that slime and had all my magical power drained away. If that had happened, I couldn't have made up with Kirika. Akira, you can imagine all the if-onlys you want. But we're living in the present."
"We're living in the present."
I surprised even myself with the words that came out of my mouth.
I had once wanted to erase my past, erase what I'd done; I never expected I'd one day say something like this to someone else.
"I'm not telling you not to regret or not to brood. But please don't be trapped by it. The most important thing is what you do from now on. Isn't that right?"
In the dim room, Akira's hand moved lightly and gently touched my tear-streaked face.
Perhaps he'd washed his hands before coming back; they felt surprisingly cold.
"I'm not someone who's lived long like Amelia. I can't switch my feelings that easily. I'm scared of the fact that I feel nothing when I kill someone. I'm scared of the part of me that thinks I should have killed the Reytis kings then."
This was probably Akira's honest heart.
He regretted not killing the Reytis kings enough to say it aloud, and yet he was afraid of himself for thinking that.
Maybe because he's still young his heart is unstable. The way he spoke, as if vomiting everything out, was painful to hear.