["What happened twelve years ago?"]
When Soga Yura asked that question, Su Yuzu suddenly felt it — a deep, drowning terror, as though infinite darkness were about to swallow her whole.
Cold sweat threatened to seep from her back. That dread was exactly like being utterly alone, abandoned in the dark.
A small hand reached across from the other side of the table and gently clasped hers.
Only then did Su Yuzu surface from that dread and unease.
Soga Yura gazed at the girl before her with an expression that bordered on tender, doting warmth. The words she spoke settled over Yuzu's panicked heart like an anchor cast into the sea.
"Don't be afraid."
"I'm here."
Su Yuzu looked into the crimson eyes of the girl across from her and quietly turned her hand over, clasping Soga Yura's hand in return.
With the girl's soft hand held in hers, Yuzu steadied herself — and gradually began to understand. The abnormality inside her was something like the lingering aftereffect of Mind Control. A residue left behind.
Whenever she brushed against certain critical truths, her body reacted on its own — alarm, and fear.
Though… in Yuzu's memory, Soga Yura had never once successfully controlled her.
Her impression of Soga Yura's Mind Control was of something that reliably left her with splitting headaches, nothing more.
"S… Sis…?" A voice — dry and bewildered, barely a sound.
Honestly speaking, as someone who had lived a second life.
When it came to her relationship with Soga Yura, Yuzu's lips might call her older sister, older sister, sweet as anything — but in her heart, she'd always privately treated the twin Soga Yura as the younger one, the one to be looked after.
Every time she faced Soga Yura, that was the will she brought with her — dispatching her in a few moves, leaving her weeping and swaying her hips and begging for mercy.
It was only in moments like this one that Su Yuzu leaned on Soga Yura entirely.
Soga Yura tightened her grip on the girl's hand.
"It was Mind Control…"
"My one and only… time using Mind Control on Yuzu."
"I wanted my Yuzu to come back."
"An ability awakened by praying to the gods for a miracle."
What Soga Yura described — Mind Control, the ability that sat at the very pinnacle of all mental-type powers — was not something she had been born into. She had cast aside a far greater strength for Yuzu's sake, and through sheer, unmatched force of will, forced it to awaken.
Yuzu had actually heard the theory before.
A person's ability was shaped not only by their bloodline, but by the will of the person at the moment of awakening.
Like… Kujou Katora, and that strangely extreme Blood Manipulation — and the ability to summon the Hound of Blood.
In the Kujou family, where raw power was the one true path, how had such a bizarre, extreme mutation of a Physical-type ability ever emerged?
Probably… because the moment Kujou Katora awakened her ability was the exact moment Kujou Iruka fell.
When she thought about it like that, it made sense.
Was Mind Control really all that powerful?
Perhaps not.
Compared to Soga Ishikawa Kiyomi's blunt, brutal mental bombardment, Mind Control was far harder to wield — and came with far more restrictions.
It required that your mental power utterly eclipse the target's. And it made the wielder far more vulnerable to the person being controlled.
Face a truly vicious person, and you'd be dragged into that darkness. Face someone cunning and slippery, and you'd find yourself becoming just as slippery. Worst of all — face an Aberrant, and the risk of contamination was extreme. A fall into corruption, waiting to happen.
In that sense.
Mind Control wasn't powerful because of what it was, in and of itself. It was more like a master key — one that could open either the door to a great treasury, or the lid of Pandora's box.
Mind Control's true power came from Soga Yura's own power.
By comparison, Domination — the ability that didn't even play by the rules — felt far more like what Soga Yura should have awakened by nature.
"Twelve years ago…"
"Was when Yuzu awakened for the first time." A voice stripped of all warmth. Low.
Just a statement of fact. And yet the temperature of the room seemed to drop several degrees.
Soga Yura had already brought everything within the private room under her Domination.
"And also…"
"The first time Yuzu underwent Aberration."
Thud. Thud.
Soga Yura's words struck Yuzu's chest like the blow of a heavy hammer.
Why had she — someone who had once walked alone down long dark roads without a second thought — become so afraid of the dark?
Why had her ability, since the moment it awakened, never been able to improve at all?
Why… did she already know that Aberrants had no normal sense of taste?
Those hadn't been Tips or tooltips that ever appeared in the game.
They were… sensations she herself had once lived through.
She had fallen into the Edge of Aberration herself once. That was why she understood it, bone-deep.
Soga Yura gently stroked her own long hair. "Actually…"
"I love Yuzu with long hair."
"I love it so much… so, so much…"
When they were small, it had been Soga Yura — the older sister — who wore her hair short, while Yuzu, admired by everyone, wore hers long.
But… everything changed when it became clear that Yuzu had no potential whatsoever. Not even the possibility of developing an ability.
Everything… changed.
No ability to develop. That was a glaring, enormous contradiction.
A Soga Yuzu who carried the finest Soga bloodline — who bore the purest crimson eyes of the entire Soga clan — how could she possibly be incapable of developing an ability?
Even the most ordinary Psychokinesis, with the strength of the Soga bloodline behind it, should have bloomed into something extraordinary, the way Soga Yura's Mind Control had.
But —
If Yuzu had once fallen into the Abyss, then everything made sense.
Those who returned from the Edge of Aberration — even if they came back — found that their ability, contaminated and altered by the Aberration, was incompatible with the normal ability system entirely.
Unless they could break through the Sequences and rebuild everything from scratch, there was simply no path forward.
Yet… without Combat Records and Promotion Emblems, how could someone who had already sunk to the bottom of the Abyss ever hope to break through the Sequences and rebuild themselves?
"If it were only a matter of outside voices… why would anyone go to the trouble of swapping our identities?"
"The Soga clan's will cannot be bent by what outsiders say."
"The reason Father chose to have Yuzu cut her long hair…"
"Was simply because someone had questioned the truth of Yuzu's fall into the Edge of Aberration."
"To cover it up…"
"That was why our identities were swapped."
"Yuzu…"
"Should have had a beautiful childhood." The girl's voice cracked, just slightly — the beginning of a sob.
Because Soga Yura had just realized — the beautiful childhood Yuzu should have had… had been destroyed. Destroyed by her own stubbornness.
Su Yuzu only tightened her grip on Soga Yura's hand.
Compared to the past, now was already perfect.
Soga Yura let out a small, quiet sob. "Twelve years ago…"
"When we were collecting shells on Tokyo Bay, we ran into a Catastrophe Beast by accident —"
"It was to protect me…"
"That Yuzu fell into the Abyss."
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