~February 13th, 140 AH~
~Joint Base Akra, Kurator Corps HQ, Terminal One~
“What’s wrong, Zelen? You seem listless today.”
Silence filled the waves and the chasm within Asena’s chest. The voice that came back to her sounded as though it was already fading away—shrinking away from her presence.
“It’s nothing really. I know I shouldn’t complain.”
“I’m your Spiegel, Zelen. If not me, who else would you complain to?”
A heavy sigh. A sigh that carried the weight of multitudes.
“I know what we’re doing is important, and I want us to push on. But if I’m being honest, I already feel exhausted before we’ve even begun. Is that strange?”
There was nothing strange about it. Asena had seen the memories that had made Zelen feel this way: some that he re-encoded, and some that she had to help him [UNRAVEL]. And on this count at least, the feeling between her and her subject was mutual: exhausted before they’d even begun the session.
If anything, she might’ve had more cause to be reluctant. For while she could ensure that Zelen retained only his triumphs, she herself remembered everything else.
Pain, fear, defeat, doom, death. Everything still felt fresh upon her skin and seared into her flesh. A week had gone by since she’d been pulled into the General’s conspiracy, and she’d already reached something of a breaking point.
And to think that her father had done this for nearly four years! Instead of sympathy, she only felt a stab of dark anger. Then it occurred to her that she wouldn’t have had to suffer through this if Yuito had been more thorough and precise with his [UNRAVELLING] work. Shame compounded the anger.
She could share none of this with Zelen, however, and she’d already tarried too long. Hastily she said, “I’m told that the act of recalling certain memories can be an intensely physical experience in itself. So no, I don’t think it’s strange. Perhaps we could ease into this session by first simply taking stock of things. Do you think your connection to the Nexus has strengthened in any way? Especially given the latest of what you’ve recalled?”
Another sigh, though cut slightly short.
“Once you hear what I’m about to tell you, you’ll definitely think I’m strange. The things I did, the things I killed—the Kentavros, the Ildfugl—those memories don’t feel like… my memories. Which is crazy, I know, you don’t need to tell me. But it’s almost like… there’s another me… somewhere out there, that did all those things, and I’m just seeing into their memories. Maybe that’s why… I don’t feel the connection. Why I don’t feel like I could go back out there and do this again.”
Asena was stunned. In the silence that followed, she thought she could almost hear the wheels turning inside Yuito’s head, who’d be listening in on this and drawing his own conclusions. Before she could formulate a response, Zelen continued with a brief dismissive laugh.
“You know what else is crazy? I think… I think I’m scared. Maybe feeling tired is just an excuse. The truth is I’m scared. I’m terrified to find out more of myself that doesn’t feel like me.”
Asena too would be scared were she in Zelen’s position, but for a much different reason. Her most recent [EVOCATIONS] had shown that the solitary takedown of the colossal aircraft Ildfugl—a key victory for the Joint Forces that had since become a centrepiece in the lore surrounding Kingfisher—had come at great cost to human life. All of it Zelen’s, and none of it remembered.
The first death occurred before he’d broken through cloud cover, before he’d even laid eyes on the thing. He was just a fraction of a second too slow to react to Silon’s warning, and his consciousness disappeared into the blinding light from a railgun blast, before Asena herself was violently thrown back into darkness.
The second death came as he charged toward the obsidian behemoth. His entire being—even his Eidolon—shook with palpable fear as he flew, with the end of the Ildfugl’s giant barrel tracking his every move. Then the railgun fired again, and Zelen mistimed his lateral thrust. Blinding light, followed by darkness.
On the third death, Zelen had made it as far as the central cavity where the railgun was housed. Here, his progress was rebuffed by the invisible armour that coated Ildfugl, and as he scrambled to find an opening, he was gunned down by the small-arms defense systems embedded into the aircraft’s surface.
It’d taken Asena four [EVOCATIONS] in all before they finally arrived at victory: the events that matched Yuito’s reports and Akropolitan lore. She didn’t even want to find out how many more fragments her father had discarded this time three years ago…
For the first time since she’d taken on the role of Spiegel Delta-Upsilon, Asena’s voice shook slightly as she said, “I don’t think you’re crazy, Zelen. What you do is scary. What you’ve been through…”
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“Silon? Are you okay? Sounds like you aren’t feeling so hot yourself.”
“I’m fine. Thank you for your concern.”
“What we’ve been through.”
“Pardon me?”
“It’s what we’ve been through, Silon. Together. Even if I’ve forgotten the things I’ve done—the person I’ve been—I haven’t forgotten that you were there every step of the way.”
Asena winced, then choked back a sudden onrush of tears. Someone was with you every step of the way. But that someone wasn’t me.
“Zelen, may I propose a change of plans for today?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Would you mind terribly if we just talked? No recollections, no searching for the next key event. Let’s just… get to know each other. Just like old times.”
“Of course I don’t mind, but do you think that’s—”
“In my estimation, this is an opportune time to take things slow. We can pick things up again when you’re feeling… more refreshed.”
Silence filled the waves, yet Asena could somehow picture the smile that spread from the other side.
“In that case, I’d like that very much.”
So, Kurator and Reiter talked.
In many ways, Asena found the exercise to be even more strenuous than their usual sessions. She had to be careful to keep the conversation constantly flowing, and always centred upon Zelen, lest he turn to her with questions she couldn’t readily answer.
In the end, not much new was said: mostly rehashing the quieter moments from the fragments that had been [EVOKED] thus far, and filling in the blanks as needed. Yet, as the conversation wore on, Zelen smiled some more, and joked and laughed.
Through it all, Asena kept herself attuned to the Nexus. She wasn’t looking for new threads to pull. Instead, she helped the existing threads to attach and interweave among themselves, thus fortifying the web-like connections that expanded by the day.
[CONSOLIDATE]. This was the second core skill common to all Kurators, one that Asena found far more palatable than its counterpart. In her previous sessions with Zelen, she’d been so focused on all the negative emotions that she’d almost forgotten just what a joy Kuration could be…
She’d become so invested in the conversation that, when they finally said their goodbye-for-nows, she’d set herself up for another shock.
“Until next time, Silon.”
She nearly corrected him then. Nearly said: no, it’s me, Asena. She of course didn’t, instead mirroring Zelen’s words a tad more stiffly than she otherwise might’ve.
Afterwards, she took her time putting away the equipment and doing up her buttons. Private Aliyu, her assistant, watched her curiously, as though even she knew her senior had flouted protocol and gone wildly off-script.
Soon enough, the door to the darkened room opened with a loud bang, ushering with it the gangling figure of Yuito Shiranui.
“Leave us,” the Colonel said curtly to the private, who was only too eager to obey. Then after the door had closed again, Yuito rounded on his daughter. “What was that?”
“Kuration,” Asena said without meeting her father’s eyes.
“This is no time for your attitude, Asena! What made you think you could waste an entire session on… on chit-chat!”
“I don’t believe the session was wasted.” She did look up then, and held the gaze. “In fact, I full-heartedly believe it to have been a productive one, centred on [CONSOLIDATION]. Appropriate, given the fractured state of the subject’s Psychic—”
“You still don’t get it, do you? The subject will never not be fractured! That is the very core of his being, the very essence that makes his Einkunst so powerful.”
“His Psychic instability was exacerbated by the way he’d been used.” Asena stood her ground, even as her own temper flared. “Solo deployment after solo deployment. In missions of disproportionately high difficulty profiles. If the General had wanted to drive him insane, he certainly couldn’t have found a more efficient—”
“Hold your tongue!”
Asena did, not because of her father’s words, but the look in his eyes. Yet Yuito’s expression quickly recovered its usual stoicism as he went on, “Therein lies another of your fundamental misconceptions about the subject. If you’d just done as you’d been told every step of the way, we wouldn’t even need to be having this discussion. But, circumstances being what they are, I’ll try to make you understand. You say the subject was made more unstable by being sent out on solo missions, when in fact, the very opposite is true.”
Asena frowned. “You’re right, Father. I don’t understand.”
“You saw how the subject reacted to his former Instructor’s death during his first deployment. That later translated to a near Psychic collapse during a subsequent mission. Then take his first fight against a Kentavros unit. The… extraneous memory fragment you [EVOKED]. The death of his… team leader. Again, the subject reacted strongly, causing Psychic spillover onto a second iteration of that event. Don’t you see, Asena? For Lieutenant Athelstan, fighting solo is protective rather than hazardous!”
This did leave the younger Kurator momentarily speechless. As much as she hated to admit it, there was a certain twisted logic to her father’s assertion, one that had been borne out by her own observations.
In all of Zelen’s attempts against the Ildfugl, he’d never once experienced the Psychic instability that had marred his first kills of a Voras and a Kentavros. She’d sensed some spillover between iterations, but these had been defined, not by anger nor indeed heightened emotion of any description, but by a kind of fatalistic reckoning—Zelen’s acceptance that he could well die at any moment.
Could it be true? Was Zelen better off fighting alone? To shoulder all the deaths and failures by his lonesome?
“We have in our hands a soldier,” Yuito continued, taking his daughter’s silence as his cue to hammer home the point, “that’s capable of single-handedly turning any engagement into victory, even against seemingly insurmountable odds. Why saddle him with extra resources, when they could do more harm than good? When they could be put to better use elsewhere? It’s an arrangement that remained effective for nearly four years. You should know as well as anyone that all of Lieutenant Athelstan’s most famous contributions to the war were solo efforts.”
This made Asena look up sharply, temper flaring anew. She said pointedly, “That’s not true.”
Yuito had the grace to look slightly abashed, knowing immediately the exception to the rule his daughter referred to. He hedged, “A blip on the radar. Nothing to concern ourselves about. And I can assure you that, despite the… unpleasantness surrounding that mission, the subject pulled through just fine. In fact, there hadn’t even been anything for me to [UNRA—Asena? Where do you think you’re going? I’m not finished!”
“Well, I am,” Asena said without looking back, already halfway across the room. As she shot through the door, the last thing she heard was:
“Two weeks! We need to see real progress within the next two weeks. Or the General and I will have to—”
The door slammed shut behind her.