I'm Fighting Kal'tsit? Seriously?

Judging by her age, she had to be at least seventy or eighty, yet she wore a flawless face beautiful enough to be terrifying.

If she appeared in some folk legend, people would definitely suspect she stayed young by eating children.

But this was Terra, after all. Stories of long-lived races were hardly uncommon. Besides, that was not the issue here. Even if she had lived for millions of years, it had nothing to do with him.

"Fine. Let's say I came from the future."

Gerald sighed. What should have been a simple matter had suddenly sprouted a side branch, leaving him thoroughly irritated. "The last time I saw you, you came at me without a word and tried to kill me, so I got ready to kill you too."

"Then I lost and died. But after I slept, I came back."

"From my perspective, maybe every time I sleep, I travel back into the past. Or maybe my dreams are connected to yours, ma'am. Otherwise, I can't think of any reason why the armies behind you didn't charge down and gang up on me, but deliberately left us a stage for a one-on-one duel."

"Or maybe some supreme power spun a trial ground for me, and the you standing before me is merely a vessel with memories." He held up his fingers, leaving a tiny gap between them. "Or perhaps I can jump to another timeline while asleep. That's a classic novel trope too."

"See? There are way too many possibilities here. Why don't you tell me exactly what kind of answer you want, and I'll do my best to satisfy you?"

Silence spread between them.

For a moment, Kal'tsit could not even respond to Gerald's questions. Perhaps she had learned something too shocking, or perhaps she had simply grown tired of his rambling and did not want to speak at all.

Meanwhile, the Originium Arts around Gerald grew heavier. Wind clung to the soles of his feet. He was already prepared for the next attack.

"Now, let me ask you a better question."

"Even if we've laid everything out now—does it matter? Does it affect the outcome at all?"

He looked at her, blood dripping from the sword in his hand.

"You brought a three-nation allied army here. You wouldn't stop just because I'm the descendant of some child you picked up, or some mysterious person who came from the future, would you?"

"And me? I dreamed of you yesterday, I'm dreaming of you today, and tomorrow will probably be the same. Maybe I'll even see you every time I take a nap. But I have no reason to waste the time I should spend honing my skills on explaining myself every single time."

Gerald had no desire to say much more to this ancestor-level figure before him.

Dragged into grudges from nearly a century ago? He did not have the strength or standing for that right now.

The best solution was to let things take their course. Once he could defeat her someday, it would not be too late to talk about it then.

Not even being able to seize the initiative in a conversation was torture to him.

And now, the woman's expression was hidden beneath the shadow of her hood, impossible to read. Yet that very appearance made Gerald feel that everything he had just said had been pointless.

So he raised his sword.

"So compared to talking, slaughtering each other suits us better—wouldn't you agree?"

The sound of the fence slowly opening echoed through the empty C Section, followed by the crisp click of heels against the ground. A stern figure appeared outside the cell.

Saria's gaze lingered briefly on her target. This former rich young master named Anthony had developed quite a few good habits in prison. He was polite, cautious, and self-disciplined. Even toward the prisoners of A and B Section, he treated everyone equally. Before most prison guards, he maintained the manner of a perfect gentleman. She was no exception.

She pressed her fingerprint against the lock and said coolly to the person inside, "Roll call first. Then you can have breakfast, prisoner."

Anthony had just finished his morning exercise. He wiped the sweat from his body with the towel in his hand and nodded to Saria outside the door. "Thank you. Are you a new prison guard?"

Saria did not answer, and Anthony treated that reaction as normal. He merely greeted her briefly. "I didn't mean anything by it. I won't make things difficult for you."

"But this prison is not friendly to most people. I hope you can hold on here."

Heavy footsteps receded from C Section. Saria did not linger and headed straight for the innermost cell.

The transparent glass exposed nearly all the prisoners' secrets. After all, the two esteemed gentlemen in C Section might not need the guards to watch them so closely, but the other serious criminals were not so easy to handle.

One moment of carelessness might truly make them pay an unimaginable price.

But when Saria passed Anthony's cell, the sight before her left her silent for quite a while.

"...What are you doing?"

Compared to the state Gerald had been in yesterday, his condition today was clearly worrying.

The man had propped his long legs against the wall, pressed his back to the floor, and stared motionlessly at the notebook in his hands, his face filled with exhaustion.

From outside, he looked like a giant lizard that had just crawled out of an abyss. Even his ears and tail radiated dejection.

"Hm? Nothing. I ran into a problem I couldn't solve no matter how I thought about it, so I spent about the whole night thinking."

Gerald lightly poked the paper with the tip of his pen, quickly turning the surface into a mess of ink. Beside him lay a longsword barely pieced together from assorted parts and screws.

"Contraband is prohibited in prison." Saria only gave the sword on the floor a token glance before looking away. "You do not appear to be troubled by a medical issue, but regardless, your body still needs to come first."

"You're right, so I'm planning to catch up on sleep later today." Gerald casually flipped his notebook to the section he had written last night and accurately tossed it to Saria standing at the door. "Here. You can check my homework."

As Saria silently leafed through the notebook, Gerald, still lying on the floor, gently picked up the "sword" beside him and aimed its tip at the ceiling.

His battle with that Feline general had not gone well.

Simply put, his words had produced the opposite effect.

That ancestor-level figure had been willing to keep fighting him... but this time, she was truly trying to kill him, without holding anything back.

Even without bringing that monster into the fight, their exchange had not lasted more than ten moves. When she used that swordsmanship she knew by heart, Gerald had almost no ability to resist. He could only parry again and again, dragging out time as much as possible.

Still, there was good news.

Her sword techniques came from the same source as his. With enough thought, he could see the patterns in them, making it much easier to break down her movements.

If Gerald's own swordsmanship was a killing art honed through slaughter after receiving guidance, then that Feline general's swordsmanship was like its ultimate form.

There was no flair to it at all. From beginning to end, it was rigid and precise, relying on the same move to overcome everything.

That move was the upward deflection.

She guided the enemy's sword toward the direction she wanted, seized the initiative in the attack during those few milliseconds, then gradually enlarged the openings she chipped out again and again until the enemy could no longer maintain their defensive stance. It was a technique well suited for duels.

The problem was not how to break that move. The key problem was her physical strength.

It was like having a small nuclear bomb fly toward your position in an unpredictable manner. Even if you came up with a theory capable of cracking its trajectory, the blast radius would still leave nothing of you behind.

That was the problem Gerald faced now.

Her sword was heavy, and so fast that even a Pegasus like him struggled to identify where the attack was coming from. Her instinctive feints were even harder to guard against, not to mention her combat intuition, precise as computer code.

After thinking for most of the night, Gerald could only reach one conclusion:

He could only meet force with force.

And he had to block one of the moves she often used in close-quarters combat. If he could block it once, then he could practice until he could block it every time.

She still had that monster she had not used, and he had not yet brought out the full extent of his Originium Arts either. With day after day of training, someday he would defeat her through pure technique.

And the prerequisite for doing that was—

Gerald's legs, braced against the wall, suddenly exerted force. His whole body spun through the air like a top, and the sword tip followed the imagined path of her strike, knocking aside the blade rushing toward him.

Then he swiftly thrust at the wall before him, stopping at the very instant before the sword tip touched it.

—he had to learn that Feline general's techniques.

"Hah!" Gerald relaxed completely and let out a long breath. "All right! I need to study hard today too... uh."

His confident words came to an abrupt stop when he turned and saw the scene at the door.

The wind whipped up by his sword had blown Saria's guard cap from her head and into a corner of the corridor. It had also scattered the long hair she had carefully arranged that morning, sweeping nearly half of it across one side of her face.

After a long silence, Gerald put the sword back into the hiding place in his cell and obediently stood still.

Saria opened the lock with her fingerprint and slowly entered the cell.

She carefully placed the notebook beneath the pillow so that her next actions would not damage it. At the same time, she brushed aside the hair covering her face with one hand, then casually found a hair tie in her pocket and tied it up.

Gerald silently glanced at the increasingly solid Enamel on her hand, then looked up at her utterly emotionless face.

He sighed and slowly delivered his final words.

"Fuck."

The Hands of the Clock Begin to Turn

It had to be said that although Saria looked icy on the outside, she was genuinely a good person underneath. As long as one did not violate her principles or cross her bottom line, she merely gave verbal warnings for most things.

Between someone who smiled sweetly while hiding who knew what filth in their heart, and an ice-cold beauty who always wore a stern face but was easy to get along with as long as one followed the rules, anyone with half a brain knew which to choose.

Incidentally, the former was not Gerald.

After all, the expression on his face could only be described as a grimace.

"...Please do not talk during treatment, Mr. Gerald."

Mansfield's doctor always liked to lower her gaze toward the cold, uneven floor. That way, she did not have to meet the malicious eyes of others.

There were few people she could look at with ease. Her father was one, and Anthony was another. As for the person before her, he simply treated her as the most ordinary sort of friend.

So she would not avoid a friend's gaze.

But becoming friends with Mr. Gerald meant she always had to endure his endless chatter.

Duma felt it was about time she considered throwing some calming Originium Arts at him whenever he was not paying attention.

"—Hey, you haven't even heard the best part. I went whoosh and dodged that prison guard's deadly attack, then my fist shot toward her temple like lightning, only for me to stop just in time at the very last moment... Heh heh. If I hadn't pulled back in time, this cell would not look nearly so nice right now. The red and white would probably be mixed together like a dye workshop!"

"If you pulled back in time, why are you covered in bruises? Were you trying to open a dye workshop with her?"

Gerald carelessly rubbed his completely uninjured face. "One thing at a time. That still counts as me winning, doesn't it?"

He really was not making it up.

Ever since Saria had come clean with him yesterday and explained the principles of Calcification, Gerald had realized that his method was genuinely viable. The reason she had not suffered much in this regard before was mainly because she had never encountered a species faster than herself.

Though what he had not said was that if he had really landed the blow, it would only have made Saria stagger, take a while to recover, and bleed a little.

Vouivre physiques were just that overbearing.

Then red, white, blue, and purple would have all mixed together across the corpse that was him.

"That's very impressive, being able to fight a prison guard."

In Duma's memory, she had never seen Anthony fight a guard, so her judgment of their strength was still based on the most basic level of prisoners brawling. It was understandable not to be able to defeat a fully armed guard. "Still, you should be careful when fighting. The last time you secretly brought Anthony to the infirmary, you should have told me too."

"Okay, okay. Next time for sure, next time for sure." Gerald chuckled, only for Duma to fiercely twist his arm.

Once Duma had carefully applied ointment to all the bruises on his body, he stood up from the chair and stretched comfortably. As always, he thanked the doctor. "Thank you for everything, Duma."

Whenever he injured himself during training in the past, he had called on this little doctor to treat him. Setting aside certain old fellows who constantly fought in prison yet somehow never died, Gerald was probably the prisoner who came to the infirmary most often for treatment.

But today seemed different from usual. A trace of hesitation flashed across the little doctor's face, and the concern in her gaze grew beyond its usual gloom.

"If there's something you want to say, say it." Gerald directly exposed her thoughts. "Be brave. Be honest, Duma. Do you remember what I told you before?"

"...If someone gets impatient, throw Originium Arts at them?"

"Exactly. Violence isn't a good thing, but it really can solve most problems, including making people who don't want to listen to you shut up and listen." Gerald snapped his fingers, pulled the chair back out, and sat down again. "Come on. Say whatever you want. You have what it takes to make people listen obediently, so don't be afraid."

Duma opened her mouth, then lowered her eyes again. "I heard from Anthony that you'll be leaving prison soon."

"Yes. In a sense, that's why I came today." Gerald nodded. "I have an escape plan. Once I fill in the details, I'll tell you all about it—if possible, I want to take both you and Anthony out with me."

"But I grew up here. I've barely ever gone outside." Duma raised her head, her eyes filled with confusion. "What is it like outside? What would I do in the outside world? Where would I live... I don't know any of that."

"I figured," he said with a shrug, brushing the hair resting beside his shoulder. "If you want, Columbia would be a good place for you to settle down. You could learn a lot of new things. I have a very influential friend, and she definitely would not refuse an Originium Arts user skilled in medicine."

"Earn some pocket money, find your interests, try getting used to things you've never experienced in prison... it sounds exciting and frightening, doesn't it?"

"Is that... so?" Duma murmured softly. "When I actually meet people outside prison, I definitely won't be able to speak. My body will probably start trembling too... But by then, I don't think friends like you or Anthony will be there to help me."

"But you don't want to stay in this prison either." Gerald quickly understood the meaning hidden in Duma's words—this was a good change.

A very good change.

Once, in Gerald's eyes, Duma had always been like the protagonist of that old movie: a pianist who spent his entire life, from birth to death, aboard a ship, leaving his life frozen within a graveyard where even land could not be seen.

But now, time had gradually begun to stir within Duma as well.

"The last time I set foot on Columbia's land, I... I did what you told me. I handed a note to the fruit vendor, along with the gold vouchers."

The girl swallowed and slowly recounted what had happened. "I lied and told him I couldn't speak... though I really couldn't say a single word."

"But the green grapes were sweet, and the bananas were sweet too. I didn't have to wait for the people buying supplies to return before I could eat the freshest fruit... I thought, if I could grow some fruit myself, wait for the saplings to grow, and pick the fruit when it tasted the best, how wonderful that would be."

"But Mansfield can't grow trees." A touch of sorrow appeared between her brows. "Life cannot grow here. Even if you water it every day and raise it, it will never bear fruit, because there is no sunlight here."

Nor was there any trace of life.