At first, I had only been curious.
I had never seen an Awakening description like that before. Curious about what was so special about him, I came to his side in the form of a data soul.
And because of that, by a twist of fate, I became bound to him.
At first, in my eyes, he had merely been an ordinary, unremarkable person.
As an Origin, his aptitude in every aspect was inferior even to that of ordinary Participants.
Mediocre, insignificant, with no special talents; naive and innocent, having never seen the world. Any slightly larger occasion exposed his immaturity.
And on top of that, he always seemed like an idiot—lazy, lecherous, and hopeless.
Until he unbelievably won back a Night Gear.
Only then did that impression begin to change.
A-rank Number Nine—no matter how convoluted and bizarre it had been, it could not all be explained by luck alone.
I slowly discovered that he occasionally revealed a different side of himself.
The most obvious example was when he had desperately tried to save that girl. Only days after Awakening, he faced an interception by a C-Rank opponent, yet he resolved the crisis entirely on his own.
He avoided the worst outcome: me forcing myself to act in my weakened state and falling into hibernation.
It was only then that I still did not know what he had paid for it.
The times afterward were the same. Whether it was the pentagram scenario, the concert attack, the Night Pearl incident, or the Night Bureau crisis on that late-summer night—
I gradually discovered that he could sometimes become serious and calm, displaying abilities and results beyond my expectations.
He could become inexplicably unrestrained in a scenario, ruthlessly cold and furious toward enemies, and suddenly possess an absurd sense of justice.