The cave was cut off from the world. A narrow fissure between rocks—a space barely wide enough for one person to sit with their knees drawn up. Light from outside slipped through the entrance in a single thread, casting a thin shadow across Setsuna's knees. Even past dawn, the angle of that light barely changed. Time's passage could only be measured by how the cave's air grew colder. Setsuna held both knees to her chest, the sealed letter resting on her lap. Paper caked in mud. Three months' worth of soil and rain and wind, layered on a friend's letter. Each time her fingernail scraped the surface, dry powder accumulated on her fingertip. The words were invisible. No matter how hard she strained her eyes, the mud had hardened like slate, refusing to let her reach the language beneath. The night she fled the scorched zone, her body had moved on its own. South to north, along the lake shore, past her usual spot among the rocks, deeper still—until she found this fissure in the shadow of overlapping boulders. She had crawled in. And then she had simply stayed. One day passed. Night came again. Dawn arrived again. She had tried to cry. Something had been grinding in her chest the whole time. Something had risen to her throat. But her eyes remained dry. Even when she squeezed her eyelids shut, nothing came. Three months of killing her emotions while excavating the remains had made her body forget how to weep. Each time she tried to sob, the sound caught halfway up her throat, and only the air trembled. The pain of not being able to cry lived in a far darker place than the sorrow of being able to. Setsuna wrapped the letter in both hands and buried her forehead against her knees. ＊ The small conference room in the Tempest government building was a square stone chamber. One long table. Three chairs. Through the window, the construction site of the memorial monument still showed its scaffolding. When Shuna took her seat, Raika was already standing against the wall. Bandages on his left arm, a wound at his ribs—his body not yet healed, yet still standing. Kei entered last and sat with the courtesy of a diplomat. Two days of solo searching had left a quiet exhaustion in the depths of his mismatched eyes, one gold and one silver. Setsuna had been missing for exactly two days. "[serious]Let us divide the search areas," Shuna's voice was calm, but beneath that calm, anxiety bled through. The fear that someone else would find Setsuna first—a carefully constructed composure meant to hide it. Raika pushed off from the wall. "[angry]Before we talk about your methods, answer me one thing," His deep crimson eyes fixed directly on Shuna. "[angry]I heard from Galf the other night. About what triggered you to corner Setsuna in the scorched zone. You passed that information to me indirectly—you were saying my words were the cause, right?" "[serious]What you said to Kei in the scorched zone also hurt Setsuna. That is a fact," "[angry]Then what about your methods?" Raika's tone dropped lower. Quiet and deep, which made it all the sharper. "[angry]Standing beside her every day, using your authority as a government aide to create a pretext for protection, inserting yourself into her range of movement—that's not about protecting her. You want to bind her," Shuna's expression froze without a sound. The words of rebuttal would not come. They would not come because they were true. Shuna knew it herself. Standing beside Setsuna wasn't only about protection—it was because she didn't want anyone else near her. That wasn't safeguarding. It was obsession. Seeing the silence, Kei stood. "[serious]What Setsuna needs right now is not for us to clash our emotions against each other. No one has actually asked what Setsuna herself wants," It was a fair point. Calm, orderly, correct. Which is precisely why a different emotion rose first in Shuna. "[cold]What would you know, an outsider?" Her voice was quiet, but the edges of her words were sharp. "[cold]You're not even from this country. You haven't seen what that child has carried for three months, the weight of the dead piled in the scorched zone—you see nothing of it," Kei's lips pressed into a thin line. His mouth moved slightly, but no words emerged. The word "outsider" had negated everything—Kei's involvement as a diplomat, his third-party perspective, all of it. Kei processed the weight of that word without letting it show on his face. Though he hadn't quite processed it completely. Each of the three held one truth. Each was driven by their own love. Each was aware of the precision with which their words had wounded the other. No one returned to their seat. No one apologized. No one could find the next words to speak. In silence, all three left the small conference room. Three people who should have been facing the same direction had, for the first time in that room, splintered apart. ＊ Raika ran from the outer edge of the southern scorched zone all the way to the lake shore, covering vast distances. Using his physical abilities, he covered in twenty minutes what would take a human an hour to walk. His arm wound ground with each movement. His ribs burned with each stride. He did not stop for the pain—the urgency of finding Setsuna temporarily outweighed his body's protests. The south shore of the lake. The north shore. To the edge of the rocky outcrops. Nothing. As he ran, Shuna's face filled his mind. That moment when she couldn't respond—the face she made when she heard the words "you want to bind her"—drained of all color. Those words had been accurate, but he hadn't been without hesitation in wounding her. He didn't know how to apologize. He didn't know what would change even if he did. He simply ran. Kei returned to the city and began questioning the goblin recovery workers at the Memorial Management Bureau. "Where does Setsuna go when she wants to be alone?"—he asked carefully, methodically, with certainty in each inquiry. He was using every information-gathering technique he'd cultivated as a diplomat, all of it now for private purposes. He had no room to consider whether that was proper for a diplomat. The word "outsider" that Shuna had thrown at him remained lodged in his chest, unremoved. He believed he was right. But if speaking the truth only increased the other's pain, then what was the point of being right? Kei thought this as he knocked on the next door. The rocky outcrops by the lake—Setsuna's usual spot—he checked first, but found no one. Deeper. It took time to arrive at that thought. Shuna used the government's telepathic network. Rimuru's communication system—she requested the goblin patrol units covering all of Tempest to report any figures around the lake shore. But every report that came back was "nothing sighted." The cave was hidden in a rock fissure, difficult to spot from above. Shuna waited for reports while gazing out the window. "You want to bind her"—Raika's words were still there. They wouldn't fade. They wouldn't fade because she couldn't deny them. Her desire to protect Setsuna was genuine. But coexisting with that desire was the truth that she didn't want anyone else near her. Shuna's eyes remained on the window as she quietly stood. Rather than wait for telepathic reports, she would search herself. Her feet began to move. ＊ As the sun began to tilt toward the horizon, Shuna had reached the most isolated part of the lake shore. Overlapping boulders. Their shadow. A single shoe, placed there. Shuna made no sound. She slipped her body into the rock fissure, knelt, and looked forward. Setsuna was in the cave. Both knees drawn up, forehead buried against them, the sealed letter pressed to her chest. The evening light slipping through the entrance softly illuminated her black short bob. Shuna said nothing. Setsuna did not raise her head. The evening wind entered from outside the cave. A long silence stretched between them. Shuna had considered what to say many times on the way here. What words to use. How to convey them. But now, in this place, she realized she wasn't searching for words. Just being here—Setsuna here, Shuna here. That fact alone carried weight in this moment. She understood then that this was the core of her own feelings. Time passed in immeasurable increments. When the light in the cave had shifted to the color of dusk. Shuna opened her mouth. "[whispers]I'm selfish, you know," Her voice was quiet, unadorned. All the elegance she'd cultivated as a government aide had stripped away. "[whispers]Standing beside you isn't just because I want to help you. It's because I love you. I don't want to share you with anyone," Setsuna raised her head. Shuna's silver eyes met Setsuna's blue ones directly. Unwavering. Unafraid. Just there—raw, unfiltered emotion. Setsuna couldn't speak. She searched for words, but found none anywhere. She had never imagined Shuna would voice her possessiveness so plainly, so unguarded. The shock of it, and the quiet ache of having no words within herself to receive it. ＊ Shuna's voice seeped out beyond the cave entrance. Raika emerged from behind the rock wall and stopped before the opening. "I don't want to share you with anyone"—he couldn't move until those words finished echoing. Someone else had put into language what he couldn't. Something deeper than jealousy. A pain. The thing Raika had been burning in his chest without being able to articulate, and Shuna's voice, were perfectly aligned. Those words should have been his. But he couldn't have spoken them. His bandaged fist trembled. Raika turned on his heel. He left the cave. But he couldn't leave completely. He pressed his back against the rock wall and remained there. The weight of the air inside the cave seemed to transmit itself outside. Kei arrived at the rocky outcrops moments later. Raika's back was before the entrance. The echo of Shuna's voice still reached him. Kei grasped the situation instantly. He stopped. He pressed his back against the rock wall near the cave entrance, slowly pushing his fist against the stone. He made no sound. He didn't move. He simply remained. He shouldn't intervene. His judgment as a diplomat kept his body still. But more than that—he couldn't process what he was feeling right now. The cold of the rock transmitted through the back of his hand. Three people, each in their own place, remained fixed with Setsuna in their awareness. None could stand before her. They were frozen on the rocky shore in the fading light. ＊ Time passed since Shuna's confession. The air in the cave had settled slightly. Only the echo of words remained, suspended between the stone walls. Setsuna still hadn't spoken. She couldn't find a response to Shuna anywhere. Her gaze naturally fell to the letter on her lap. She wasn't running away. She hadn't consciously turned her eyes there. It was simply there, always—a fact that pulled her back. The dry evening wind entered the cave. It caressed the surface of the letter. In that moment—a small piece of hardened mud, dried to brittleness, flaked away. And beneath it, words appeared. Just one line. —I'm so glad you're alive, Setsuna. Her friend's handwriting. Distinctive in its peculiarities. The way the brush stopped, the angle of the flourish, the spacing between characters. A hand she'd seen move a thousand times in her dreams over three months. That single line pierced directly through the center of Setsuna's chest. For three months, there had been a question Setsuna feared most in the depths of her heart. —Do you resent that I survived? That I came back alone, leaving you behind? No resentment. No blame. Only that she was glad Setsuna lived. That was all that was written there. Something frozen for three months shattered with a sound. Tears spilled from Setsuna's eyes. Not one drop, but a flood. It wouldn't stop. Before she could try to hold it back, a sound came from