No. 36 Zouteland Street, Black Thorn Security Company.
Leonard stepped down from the carriage and looked up at the building, now freshly repaired, his expression complicated.
The brutal battle back then had mostly played out in the street, with the surrounding buildings only caught in the crossfire.
Black Thorn's outer walls had been repainted, and the sections that had been damaged were now repaired.
The potholes in the road had long since been filled in, and the spot where the crimson inverted cross had once been drawn no longer showed a trace of red. And yet Leonard still felt he could smell that nauseating stench of blood.
He had once believed he'd lost many of his companions that day. But what if it hadn't been so simple? Could he still carry the same blazing fury as before, still seek vengeance for them the way he once had?
Carrying this heavy heart, Leonard stepped into the building.
The receptionist at the front desk was still Rosanne, newspaper in hand. At the sight of Leonard, her feelings seemed conflicted, part joy at seeing an old friend, part an inexpressible grief and distance.
In the end, Rosanne simply offered a brief greeting before introducing him to Tingen's newly appointed captain of the Nighthawks.
This captain didn't know Leonard at all, and only exchanged a few polite words with this elite from the Red Gloves out of courtesy, before summoning the company's veteran members, namely Royer, Siga, and Frey.
It had been a long time, and everyone was overcome with emotion.
"Is the work in Backlund hard?" Royer asked.
It wasn't just hard. Only today, right before coming here, he'd been working overtime to clean up the aftermath that damned devil had left behind...
"Pretty easy, actually," Leonard said with a smile. "See, I even had some free time to come back and visit you all."
"That's good then..."
Due to internal discipline, everyone tacitly avoided mentioning anything about the inner workings of the Red Gloves, sticking instead to reminiscing about old times.
But as the conversation went on, they inevitably found themselves circling back to what had happened that day.
"We tried hard to investigate afterward, but we still couldn't find any trace of Cecilia," Siga said regretfully.
The writer sighed over the misfortune that had befallen the Londor siblings. "It's such a shame. Their lives had only just started to get better..."
"Klein's brother and sister moved to Backlund too..."
"Captain Dunn..."
The once lively atmosphere gradually gave way to silence, and the Nighthawks fell quiet. The dead had already found peace, but those of them who'd survived were left carrying guilt and torment.
Ah... Leonard sighed silently to himself.
"So?" After leaving Black Thorn Security Company, Leonard walked to a secluded corner, lowered his voice, and murmured to himself.
"I checked. Your teammates are all fine," an old voice quickly answered inside his head.
"Are you sure?" Leonard pressed, refusing to let it go. "You also said back then that Silas and Klein were fine, and yet afterward..."
"All I can say is that, within the limits of my ability, I genuinely didn't detect anything unusual about them," the old voice said testily.
"You're of course free not to believe me, if you have some other means of confirming it."
The reason Leonard had come to Black Thorn was, of course, not only to reminisce, but more so to investigate his former companions.
Truth be told, he'd grown somewhat overly suspicious lately, eyeing everyone with a degree of doubt. He was becoming more and more convinced that what had happened back then wasn't as simple as it seemed.
And in order to resolve the biggest question weighing on him...
Thud. He stopped paying attention to the old man's chatter in his head, paused for a moment, then turned and walked into a nearby grocery store.
A moment later, he came out having paid for a shovel.
The crimson moonlight poured down, bright enough to see by, just right for doing this under the cover of night.
Silas wandered aimlessly through Tingen, recalling the time he'd once spent here.
The restaurant where he'd eaten, the shooting range where he'd practiced with a gun, the grocery store where he'd once bought things... they were all still there, only the person who had once accompanied him was gone.
This city no longer held any trace of that girl.
Before he knew it, Silas had reached the outskirts of Tingen. His eyes lingered over row after row of villas, and then, with a sudden start, he noticed a house that looked somewhat familiar.
This two story detached house had no tenants, and under the night's moonlight it looked dark and hollow.
This property belonged to Silas.
The house had originally belonged to Old Neil, but as a way of expressing gratitude for having his life saved, he'd gone through the paperwork to transfer it to Silas.
As far as his teammates at Black Thorn were concerned, Silas was already dead, so what would become of this house...
Silas stepped forward and pushed open the front gate.
Creak. The gate let out a stiff, grating sound, and the withered branches sprawling across it snapped with a crack.
Silas walked through the weed choked garden, where withered roses and golden mint lay sprawled across the cracked, hardened soil. He stepped forward, reached the front door, easily unlocked it, and went inside.
Click. The moment he switched on the coin operated gas lamp, the sight of the living room came into view.
For a moment, Silas simply stood there, stunned.
The living room was now piled with things, crowding what had once been a spacious room. On two coat racks hung a man's black formal suit and a woman's house dress.
On a nearby table sat a stack of white porcelain plates, with silver spoons, knives, and forks gleaming a pure white under the lamplight. Sheets and quilts were folded neatly against the wall, covered with a dust cloth...
These... these were all things from when he'd lived at No. 6 Daffodil Street!
There was no mistaking it. It must have been Leonard or one of his other teammates who'd packed everything up.
The house on Daffodil Street had, after all, been rented, so they couldn't just leave things there, and so they'd moved it all into the property under his name...
Silas walked over to the table and, among the piled up belongings, found a photocopy of a document.
It was the paperwork for an inheritance procedure, and from its contents, it seemed this property now belonged to Cecilia Londor.
He himself had been "dead" at the time, and his sister's whereabouts had been unknown.
His teammates had probably taken matters into their own hands, using some internal means to have Cecilia inherit the property first, so that once she was found, she wouldn't be left with nothing to fall back on.
...
A deeply complicated expression crossed Silas's face.
His teammates could never have imagined that in the end, it wasn't him who had died, but Cecilia.
He suddenly felt a wave of exhaustion, so he pulled out a chair and sat down. Then, under the lamplight, he gazed at everything that had once belonged to the two of them, brother and sister.
The decent set of tableware they'd saved up for bit by bit out of their weekly wages, the cooking pot his sister had loved and found so sturdy, a little lace trimmed hat, a cat shaped doll, the schoolbag she'd used, her textbooks... Silas picked up a textbook and looked at the notes Cecilia had left in its margins.
Silas stared blankly at the handwriting.
Once, a pair of warm, soft hands had moved across the page, leaving behind this lovely handwriting.
This was proof that she had existed, that she had once been alive.
Like him, she had a habit of lifting her pen upward on certain strokes of the Loen alphabet, and she had a bit of a little girl's willfulness too, the kind that liked to doodle on the faces of historical figures...
Wanting to see more of what Cecilia had left behind, Silas stood up and walked around to the other side of the table, when his foot suddenly knocked against something.
It was a battered old box.