Orb's Meeting

Xia Ya.

La.

Flaga.

When the final surname left Cagalli's lips, Canard felt everything around him freeze in an instant.

The hangar lights, the smells hanging in the air, the distant hum of machinery...

Everything lost its color and sound, becoming a gray-white void.

His entire world seemed to have been put on pause.

Time stopped for him at that moment.

Fla... ga...

That surname was like a rusty, bloodstained key, violently thrust into the dark door deep within Canard's memories—the door he had deliberately sealed shut.

With a boom, the door was smashed open, and the memory fragments he had desperately tried to forget, filled with bloodshed and despair, surged forth like floodwaters bursting through a breached dam.

His pupils contracted to their limit in an instant. A chill so cold it pierced his bones shot up from his tailbone, raced along his spine, and instantly tore through his entire mind.

His body stiffened beyond his control, his muscles taut as stone. Even his fingertips began to tremble faintly, uncontrollably.

Flaga...

How could it be that surname...

How could it possibly be that surname?!

He stared fixedly at Cagalli, as though trying to determine from her still-relaxed, smiling face whether he had misheard her.

But Cagalli's clear pronunciation mercilessly shattered his last shred of hope.

That Flaga... that criminal family that should have been buried forever beneath the dust of history... actually...

Someone from it had appeared here.

And that person had met Jiliang and Cagalli.

From their description, their casual tone, and the natural way they addressed him, it was clear that they had already grown quite close to the man named "Xia Ya La Flaga."

They trusted him. They even... relied on him.

An indescribable black emotion, mingling fear and rage, exploded violently in his chest.

*If