Story Reader / Interlude / Song of Flowers / Story
As the bass' song quiets down, drowning in the sound of the crumbled stones, Selena cannot help but raises a hand and salutes the veteran before her.
Then it hits her that she was not watching an opera in the audience seats. The story she just heard was not fictional.
The bass singer has steadily recited a mission report—except Pieter sang it with his old yet flexible voice as if he was performing a solo in a historical epic.
It was a story about the moments before a soldier died.
In that intense battle, the soldier activated the wide-area search radar alone for the decapitation operation on a corrupted signaling device. The search attracted the Corrupted to the soldier's location, leading to his demise.
This is more or less the same as what Selena has read in the reports.
—Except for the gruesome scene Pieter is showing her in his terminal of the soldier's fate.
I watched Florance die before my eyes to send me the location of the device.
Then the call was terminated.
The terminal shows a set of coordinates, followed by a string of garbled codes. It is almost as if the soldier was shouting out the coordinates in the comms before his voice was dispersed by corrupted signals.
Your expression tells me that you can imagine how he looked the moment he died, right?
I suppose there's nothing I can say that will describe how he looked.
His tear ducts probably burst from the volume of tears, and those tears would land on the pool of his vital fluid on the ground. You could grow a crystal out from his pain if his regrets were mixed in that pool of water.
His expression was frozen on the terminal as his call ended, branded on the monitor, staring straight at me until I received the coordinates.
If expressions are art, then he used his life to show me this artwork of regret and hate.
How affecting this art is that I wanted to hate as well.
I've seen so many men and women like him entering the service with enthusiasm, only to end in the same way.
The expressions and mourns before their deaths are all so similar, like a play performed over and over again.
How can a performance like that not make you angry and regretful?
Pieter turns his eyes toward Selena, his gaze heavy with pain.
Or perhaps what I should regret is writing that opera. Had I been a more mature writer...
He does not finish because that possibility is too far-fetched.
Selena sighs lightly.
She recalls Pieter's earlier chuckle.
It was not just dismissiveness... but helplessness as well.
That helplessness weighs heavier on her heart than how she was dismissed.
No—that chuckle is not that heavy. What really weighs her down comes from herself.
Before she decided to look for Flora, she had conjured an answer she would like to hear, the perfect image of Flora's father in her head.
She often imposes what she thinks onto others, applying her ideas and values to these sculptures that she shapes.
Now, this sculpture is shattered. Her pride and expectation have sunk her heart, making it difficult for her to breath again.
The veteran before her is carrying the same burden, but he has traveled much, much further. He feels powerless, seeing the same aspiration in her.
...I have to see her.
Selena finally speaks after a long time.
Florance's daughter. I have to see her.
