"What did you say?"
That word—expectation—struck a nerve in Mu known as the Flaga Family Intuition. He immediately sensed the sticky implications behind Rau Le Creuset's words, realizing just how heavy the "secret" Rau Le Creuset referred to was. The momentum he had built up to keep firing vanished in an instant, swallowed by fear of the unknown.
"Heh heh... Looks like you really did forget, or perhaps your self-protective memories blocked it out. Don't you remember, Mu? The man who always wore a mask, the shadow you kept chasing. You and I, long ago, before you put on that uniform, before we met on the battlefield as the Eagle of Endymion... even before Xia Ya, known as the Red Comet, was born, we met once."
"Wha—!"
It was as though a crack had been forced open in the sealed doors of his memories. Mu leaned most of his body out from the shadows behind the pillar, his face filled with shock and even terror, his defensive posture completely distorted.
Jiliang was equally stunned. She had always known there was a strange connection between Mu and Rau Le Creuset, a resonance only the two of them could feel. Those two, bound so tightly by that inexplicable sensation, had actually met outside the battlefield—perhaps this was the answer they had always sought, the source of their destiny.
Rau Le Creuset gave them no time to think. He seemed to relish the pleasure of slowly tearing open old wounds. The reason he had repeatedly mentioned Xia Ya's name, and the twisted relationship between this masked man and Xia Ya... He drew a deep breath and, in a lofty voice as though pronouncing the final judgment of the apocalypse, declared the most important sentence in this tale—the first sentence that had begun every