Is that-

Yes. Your old friend, Grandmaster Commander Haeswahl Nunderberg.

Old enemy, more like.

The tall and muscular dark elf wore a grey coat instead of the black Nadier had remembered from recent memories. It was that of Commander, not yet a Master or Grandmaster in rank. Her grey hair was shaved and showed most of her forehead missing the lines of age from 200 years of growth. Hunched over an alchemy table, the militant soldier wore a filtered copper mask over her nose and mouth as she concocted the potion, refining the solution in a beaker over a candle's flame. The cave walls of the makeshift lab were barely lit with the flicker of a pair of rushlight stands. Back in the stifling underground citadel of the dark elves, Arbor immediately began missing the free cold of the frozen north.

Arbor sat patiently on a chair opposite the room. He was not trained with the same alchemical knowledge as many other dark elves. He knew the basics. Gasses, poisons, and flammables, but not drugs. To extract the concentrate from the veruvian memoria required deft hands and ingrained knowledge.

“So,” he began asking, the last of the alcohol leaving his breath. “How does this work?”

“Injection will be done at a high temperature to ensure the chemical is at its highest efficacy,” Haeswahl answered, annoyance in her voice.

“And what happens afterwards?”

She bluntly stated, “You'll lose your memories.”

“I meant after-after.”

“Please stop speaking to me. The less I know about your past, the better,” she replied curtly, her voice muffled through her mask.

“I'm asking about my future, not my past. You made a deal with At-Tro-Pos, so I'm guessing whatever it is concerns me being alive.”

She took a copper-glass syringe and carefully leaned in into the beaker, drawing the concentrated extract into it. “Don't worry about it. You won't even be you after this.” With the drug, she walked over to him as he rolled up his right sleeve, ready for the injection. “You won't even remember the pain.”

“Humour me.” He did not really care, but simply wanted to talk to have the last moments of his remembered life be filled with more than just loneliness and self-hatred.

She placed the thick needle against his wrist and smoothly pushed it in, with him grunting in pain as it essentially tore his skin. “I'll have you retrained as an assassin under the House of Spaedruiner. Should not take long, given your natural talent. Atro clears his debt and rids you from his life, I get a new soldier, and you get to forget. Everybody wins.” The extract, still hot from the beaker, flowed into his veins, and he let out a quiet seething. “What's your name?”

“My name?” He could feel the drug working almost immediately. The concentrated form likely insurmountably more potent that its natural state. “Arbor... Winter... something. Urgh...!”

Unceremoniously, she pulled out the needle, but he felt no pain from the rushed job, even as his forearm continued to bleed from the wound. Numbed, he slouched to the side and fell out the chair, his body no longer responding, his descent only slowed by Haeswahl who caught him reactively. Probably not to damage her newly acquired product.

“Let it go,” she advised. “The longer you hold on, the more uncomfortable it will be.”

She wasn't talking about physical pain, for he felt none. But his memories being ripped out from his mind was causing no small amount of nausea and distress. In his mind, the bright silhouette of the dark knight slowly faded. His weapons were... sticks? No. Somewhere hidden. With the guy that had fire for fists. A guy? A girl? The dwarf that was a bird. What was her name? Sparrow? No. A bird. Which bird? What do birds look like? The wife. She had a funny way of speaking. A wife. What's a wife?

A cerulean woman formed, always in beautiful dresses. “Tri...Ni...?”

The alchemist, the person who drugged him, snapped a finger, producing a small flame. She held the fire up to his eyes. “Look into the light.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“What? Who?”

“Blink. Do you remember how to blink?”

He blinked.

“I told you not to blink!” Ierba exclaimed.

“W-what?” Nadier answered, confused as the light started to dim back into their cells' usual magic white.

The mountain stone of the room in was in had a smooth edge dissimilar to the ones of the dark capitol. The bright white cryst lamps stung his visions, or what's left of it, as his mind frantically attempted to regain contact with its left eye. There was blood where he sat, and remains of the undershirt from his guard disguised stained brown from being used as gauze to clean up the bleeding.

“It's fine. I was just done anyway. Surprised you weren't screaming in pain, to be honest. Photomancy surgery ain't exactly painless.”

That's right. Nadier had injured his eye after being blasted by the zombified Langsley and was getting it treated. He could feel the dull ache coming back to the wound. He held a hand over the side of his head and seethed.

“So,” Ierba asked. “How's the eye now?”

Nadier blinked. The injured side was still blind. No, not exactly. It was dark, as if it were the first few seconds of stepping into a black cave while his vision adjusted. But this time, it did not. With one hand, he covered his good eye, and he could see the very faint outline of Ierba with the damaged one, like a burglar that had sneaked into his abode.

“It's well enough,” Nadier admitted. He was more worried about the nagging ache at the side of his head. At the very least though, that it was subsiding. “It's severely darkened, but I have depth perception.”

Ierba sighed and took Zen's scarf. The wolf whined at being stripped back down to her cold chain but Ierba patted her reassuringly. “Here.” He handed the elf the piece of cloth. “Wrap it around your eye for now and keep it in the dark. Not stressing it with light might make healing easier.”

Nadier did as he was told, covering his eye with the scarf as Zen watched, worried. Immediately, he regretted the act as the darkness made the templed pain return. But doctor's - or in this case medic's - order was an order he should follow. The two began cleaning up as best they could, moving all the bloodied cloth to the toilet to be flushed, and Nadier's stained shirt to the basin to be soaked and washed. Finally finished, Nadier sat back down topless next to Zen and rubbed her nape to calm the girl before letting out a sigh of his own. There was a familiarity to the cold damp air of the cell on his skin that he swore was not there before. It was the sensation of returning to a home long abandoned.

“What's wrong?” Ierba asked. “I don't know why, but you look older to me.”

“I feel older,” he admitted. “I remembered what happened. To me. To Arbor. The major parts of it at least. What you- the other you, Langsley, did to me must have knocked some sense back.”

The Omniknight sat up, intrigued, and Nadier recounted the memories. Everything from the original plan to kill Atro, what Arbor did to betray his allies, and how it ended. For a moment, he hesitated to retell the accounts of what happened to Langsley, the gruesome act still fresh in Nadier's mind. Eventually though, the full story came out.

“Wygahn...” Ierba mused. “So we have a name for the Soul Arm, but what it does aside from turning someone in a puppet...”

Nadier affirmed in the interjection, “We have no clue. I've got some of it back, but it felt as if Arbor gave it to me. A different person, a different life. He's not letting everything go.”

“Maybe I should hit you again,” Ierba joked. “You have two eyes, right?”

“Very funny.” The jab at his eye though caused him to scratch at a suddenly developed itch under the scarf. “We have more information. So what's our plan now?”

“The original plan was good though. Use the explosion as a signal to set the gladiator free as a distraction. Catch Atro alone in his bunker to kill him.”

Nadier look at the pygmy camera. “He must have improved his security and changed instructions by now.”

“But we have Trini to update us on the new one.”

“It'll be harder now.”

“That's not what I'm most worried about, honestly.” Ierba clicked his tongue. “We are in a worse situation than Arbor, in terms of firepower at least. If we equate you, me, and Ratface to Arbor, Langsley, and Raven, we're down one Aramas and one Enthes. One powerful fighter and a talented archer with what you've told me. And At-Tro-Pos has an extra Omniknight now. If he was willing to betray his comrades with that much strength under their belts, how do I know you won't do the same when given even less?”

There was no sense of malice in Ierba's voice. Just cold calculated logic. He needed to know exactly what situation they were in to make any decision, and Nadier could not help but respect that. Still, the itch under his scarf and the ache in his head was starting to annoy the elf, and he could not think of a proper reply.

“Give me a moment,” Nadier requested.

He shifted his neck and took off the scarf to readjust it. The moment his injured eye was exposed to light, it felt as if his head was forcefully dunked into the ocean as he sunk into the bed.