Chapter 30 – A Little Tired, Perhaps–But One Good Sleep and Here I Am.

The Syn-Fibra medical lab in the Seldia Administration Bureau.

The same Letaria Adeniam who had once turned crimson to the tips of her ears and protested "I will only undress somewhere private!" now changed out of her examination gown and into spare clothes with practiced ease.

Holographic displays floated around her--heart rate, brainwave readouts, and something that functioned like a magical field signature, presented as an unknown type of vital data. To Letaria, these were something like magical mirrors: strange instruments that showed the inside of things she could never see directly.

"...There. Done, I take it. Really--staring at a lady's person so intently is a distinct failure of propriety."

She finished adjusting the last ribbon. The outfit she had settled into wasn't quite a dress--too plain for that--and not quite everyday clothes either. It sat somewhere in between. Sola had made her a handful of pieces like this: ordinary enough for daily wear, but quietly incorporating the design language of the gowns from Letaria's former world. She had grown fond of them.

She turned with the air of someone who had won something. The excessive self-consciousness of her early days was entirely gone. There was even a hint of satisfaction about being the subject of examination--as though it confirmed she was worth examining.

"Done, yes. Good work. All the data came through. ...Letaria--how do you feel? Anything heavy, anything off, any strange sensations?"

Milea Ichinose looked up from her terminal with an unusually intent expression.

Letaria tilted her head, mildly puzzled.

"Perfectly fine. Yes, I was a little tired toward the end of yesterday's battle--but one good sleep and here I am, as you can see. ...Is something the matter?"

"...No. If there's nothing to report, that's all I needed."

Milea turned back to her terminal and said, swallowing something:

"Yesterday's engagement was intense. Your pulse climbed significantly. There's nothing on the schedule today--take it easy if you like."

"Is that so? Then I shall gladly accept the invitation. My stomach has been requesting a rest as well. ...I shall go and take my time in the dining hall."

Letaria left with light steps. Milea watched until the door closed behind her--and then exhaled.

◆◆◆

A few minutes later, the lab's automatic door opened again.

Grain, captain of the Seldia vigilante corps, walked in. Heavy footsteps. He stopped beside Milea's desk.

"...The examination--is it done?"

"Yes. She reports feeling 'perfectly fine.' And for once, the data agrees with her. Vitals are completely back to baseline."

Milea turned her chair and brought up the main monitor. The recording from yesterday's Serpent defense operation filled the screen.

"Did you review the footage?"

"I did. ...That heavy-armor machine. Blang's. The behavior was wrong."

Milea pulled up a section of the display and overlaid the machine identification results.

"I believe the base frame is Escado. But almost no matching records exist. Possibly a prototype."

Grain paused before answering.

"It's Escado's Dien."

Milea's brow came together.

"You recognize it?"

Grain caught himself--a brief flash of something across his face--then folded his arms and returned to his measured expression.

"I've seen it in logs. A minor military model from Escado. Small production run, couldn't compete with its rivals, disappeared into history. No detailed records surviving is unsurprising."

He pulled up an image of the Dien on his terminal.

The colors were different from Blang's machine. The silhouette didn't match cleanly either. There was a family resemblance, nothing more. Manufactured twenty-seven years ago--an old frame, by any measure.

Milea accepted the gap with her own research. That resolved it.

"Blang's version is clearly custom-built. Old military stock--but military is military, even degraded. Properly operated, you could still run it in the field today, I suppose. Even so--those reactions were wrong."

Grain nodded.

"That's why I wanted your read on it. Blang's no amateur--his instincts are genuinely decent. Not in your corps' league, certainly--but those movements weren't purely his skill."

Milea ran the slow-motion footage of Arden and Blang's machine at the moment of direct engagement.

"Blang's heavy frame was keeping pace with Arden's impossible reaction speed. A single fluke moment--I could write that off. But he was tracking with the Gatling throughout the engagement. No raider with decent hands does that in a machine that size."

"Agreed. For a heavy frame, those responses are genuinely impossible on technique alone. I've been in Schuelle long enough to know. ...You think whatever's running in Arden's black box--the control system we haven't identified, the one that works through Letaria--has some kind of connection to the Dien's behavior."

"Yes. But yesterday's combat logs alone aren't enough. The enemy-side data was encrypted, and I only recovered fragments. I need that machine in front of me before I can tell you anything meaningful."

Grain gave a short shake of his head.

"Then it waits. ...You mentioned there was an 'anomaly' on Letaria's side as well?"

Milea displayed a set of graphs.

"Yes. During the battle, her brainwave readings showed a significant temporary disruption. The amplitude and intensity were substantial, but the nature of the signal is still unidentified. ...Within a day, however--completely normal."

Silence between them.

What both of them were quietly carrying--the possibility that Letaria Adeniam was something made rather than born. A military-engineered enhancement. A test subject of some program neither of them wanted to name directly.

"...No damage, no aftereffects, not even residual fatigue. Back to normal. If Blang's machine and Arden share a connection, then Letaria herself becomes part of that question. What do you think?"

Milea ran her fingers along her jaw and chose her words carefully.

"...Honestly--her behavior could fit that framework. The mannerisms, the way she carries herself, the title she insists on--it could be a form of conditioning. Identity programming, designed to stabilize the subject psychologically. The fact that it goes all the way to the bone, that she's never once broken the performance--that could be the point."

Grain nodded.

That was part of why neither of them had pressed her about her past. Push too hard on someone whose sense of self might be constructed, and you risked destabilizing the architecture. The right choice, for now, was to let her be--treat her as an ordinary girl and see what she built from that.

But Milea raised one hesitation.

"Except the possessions don't fit. The dress she arrived in--fabric and tailoring consistent with pre-spaceflight Earth nobility. Gold coins with markings that match nothing in the records. Those, I could explain away. But the seeds--unknown plant, pharmacological properties we've never encountered--and the dried rations: nutritional profile completely unlike anything standard-issue. Why would you give those things to a test subject?"

"...Yeah. That's been bothering me too. I don't have an answer."

"I ran a DNA analysis on the seeds. No match to any Earth-lineage plant species. Could theoretically be from another star system--but. Her physical age reads as approximately eighteen. Escado collapsed twenty years ago. The timeline doesn't work."

The more threads they pulled, the less the picture resolved. Both of them sat with it.

Precisely at that moment, while the two of them were deepening a set of serious and entirely mistaken theories--

◆◆◆

The administration bureau's shared dining hall was busy, as it always was.

Letaria had claimed her usual prime spot by the window. Steshia arrived shortly after, carrying a new tray.

"Letaria-san! You're back! I heard you went all the way to Cranea--and what a time you had out there!"

"Ohohohoho! Naturally. Anyone who imagines they can stand in my way has a great deal to learn about the universe!"

Steshia laughed with open delight and offered a roll of bread from the tray.

"This is today's new item! They brought in a new grain variety at the station--the texture is unusual, kind of dense and chewy, but in a good way once you get used to it. Would you like to try?"

Letaria took the roll with an elegant gesture and studied it.

Then she took a bite--and her brow furrowed, just slightly.

"...This is familiar somehow. It reminds me of the preserved food I had with me when I arrived..."

It bore a resemblance to the soldiers' ration bread that her lady's maid Chiara had pressed into her hands, in tears, at the moment of her exile.

"Wait--preserved food? Something this fragrant?"

"Yes. Though this is considerably better."

Letaria said it quietly, and bit into the bread again--her gaze somewhere between near and far, her expression unhurried and at peace.

Back in the lab, two people were debating whether she might be a weapon.

She knew nothing of it. She was simply eating bread, in a world not her own, and thinking of home.