He knew he could not fool her-the woman before him understood him too well, better than he cared to admit.
There was something else Mu could not let go of. Something that mattered to him more than Rau Le Creuset, more than his father's arrogance, more than all the nauseating experimental records in that document.
Xia Ya.
In that underground laboratory on Mendel, Rau Le Creuset had exposed everything to Jiliang-she was a humanoid weapon grown in an artificial womb, the product of Ulen Hibiki and Via Hibiki's experiments.
And when Xia Ya emerged from the shadows with a pistol in hand, Rau Le Creuset had used that same mocking tone to tear open Xia Ya's past and lay it bare before everyone.
Xia Ya was Al Da Flaga's legitimate heir.
The little boy who had struggled to breathe beneath the mountains of textbooks in the study, the tiny child who had padded barefoot to his brother's bedside with a pillow in his arms and curled beneath the covers without a word, the Unicorn Gundam pilot who had grown up to grip his controls and stand before everyone else-at the genetic level, he and Rau Le Creuset came from the same father.
What troubled Mu was whether Xia Ya was now wondering-what made him different from Rau Le Creuset?
Rau Le Creuset was a discarded failure, while Xia Ya was a meticulously calculated legitimate heir. But where, exactly, was the line between them?
Was it a stamp marked "passed" on some test report in Yulian's laboratory? Was it the fact that Al had placed more textbooks and a harsher schedule before the latter?
Stripped of all their outward labels, both were merely beings that arrogant man had created to satisfy his own selfish desires.
For as long as Mu could