Ouka
OUKA and the kids walked Chest Island’s midnight roads back to his factory. Kiriko lolled on Dram’s back, still unconscious.
Lovel looked at her and asked, “Ouka, aren’t you going to take Kiriko to a hospital?”
“I will. After I’ve told her what I need to tell her.”
Lovel nodded in vague agreement.
“But,” Cliff joined the conversation, throwing in his own question. “…why was Kiriko so afraid?”
“Why wouldn’t she be afraid?”
“Well, it’s not like I know her well, but…why’d she breakdown like that when she saw Gandolf going berserk? She doesn’t seem like the type to panic.”
Ouka knew the answer. The red, sinister glow must have triggered her raw memories of freshly spilled blood. “…I bet it reminded her of the traumatizing past.”
“What past?”
“Four years ago, we created a monster at Torah Church—me, Kiriko, and a man named Alita did.”
The floodgates holding back his memories opened, and he let them wash over him. Ouka began to retell what had happened only four years before, yet felt like a millennium ago.
“Kiriko, Alita, and I joined the Church the same year, and we were eager to bring Golem manufacturing technology and techniques to new heights. We thought that was the right thing to do. We believed in the path we aspired to.”
Cliff and Lovel listened to his story without interruption. Ouka immersed himself in his recollection.
Kiriko used to be a woman who smiled often, someone much more cheerful than she was today. And then there was Alita, who Ouka was fairly certain Kiriko loved. Ouka loved and adored them both. He wanted to do something to congratulate them if they ever got together.
But the relationship between the three of them never changed, no matter how much time passed. The days went by peaceful, unchanging.
“After several years passed, we started to distinguish ourselves from the rest. That’s when our boss Spinoza invited us to participate in researchin’ the cubes.”
“So you do know what this is,” Cliff finally interrupted him. He pulled an object out of his pants pocket—the red cube Lovel should’ve had on her.
“You’re the one who had it…?”
Fissures ran through the cube’s shell. This cube had once been buried in Sephiroth’s chest.
His hand clasped around the cube, Cliff asked, “Please tell me what this cube is.”
“It’s called Sehem-hamphorasch. It’s something that can move a Golem from the inside.”
“It moves a Golem from the inside?”
“Engrave Incantations are generally inscribed into the exterior of a Prime Body, which the Tamer controls from outside, yeah? But there are limits to how much you can do with that. It’s incredibly difficult to maintain control over several Golems at once, and their intelligence is practically nil when you do. But what if there was something that granted a will to the Golem, making it move autonomously?”
Cliff and Lovel frowned at his question. Ouka supplied the answer for them. “That red cube can take an infinite number of Engrave Incantations. Not only for controlling the exterior, but Engrave Incantations programming the interior as well. Memories, emotions, principles governing their conduct—you can program all that through incantations using the ancient language.”
“Memories…? Isn’t that like the human brain?”
“Yup, it comes frighteningly close to what we call a brain or a soul. Well, the black cubes Jair’s got are more finite though… At any rate, burying the cube in the chest of something with a human shape and naming it will bring the puppet to life. Here’s the catch: Golems with the cube aren’t mentally linked with their Namer. They move and act according to their own will.”
Ouka’s research team and Grinzam had spent years searching for the ancient words to input. They had to find the elusive Engrave Incantations capable of restricting the interior because they were completely different from what they engraved into the exterior. Discovering those words would mean dispelling the secrets surrounding the cubes.
“We learned several things from our years of research. First, you can write Restrictors into the shell surrounding the original cubes. Second, if you fail to input the Restrictor ‘can’t kill people’ into the shell, the body you embed that cube in will instantly act like a Berserker Golem… But once we learned those two things, the Church elders declared, ‘Now is the time to create a holy warrior who can protect the country from heretics.’”
“…And that was Sephiroth.”
Ouka nodded to Lovel. “Yeah. The strongest militarized Silver Golem, powered by the red cube—Sephiroth. The development team was formed from the twelve best, handpicked Rabbis. We poured the Engrave Incantations we’d successfully discovered after many years into a Prime Body we built to be as combat-ready as realistically possible. After a year of trial and error, we finally completed it.”
He could never forget that day. For the rest of his life, Ouka would never forget the overwhelming joy he had felt and the living hell he witnessed soon after.
“We were ordered to unveil it for the military, right away. Naturally, the Restrictor ‘can’t kill humans’ was engraved in the shell of the cube embedded in its chest. We even went a step further, to ensure we were ready in the off chance it went berserk, by making the armor plate over its chest extremely thin… Alita was chosen as the Namer.”
Four years ago, in that underground research facility, the culprits had gathered. It was to be a historical moment, where a new generation of Golems came to life. The day should’ve been one of joy, of celebration.
“But…Sephiroth went berserk the instant he was named.” Ouka heard Cliff and Lovel draw in sharp breaths beside him.
A torrent of tragic, traumatic memories rushed through him. Spinoza, shouting something at the top of his lungs. Kiriko trembling uncontrollably in a corner of the laboratory. And in her moment of paralyzed fear, Sephiroth attacking her.
“We still don’t know the reason for it, but…the Restrictor preventing him from killing people didn’t function that day—and only on that day—despite all our successful tests. Sephiroth stormed around the laboratory massacring every Rabbi on the development team.”
Ouka couldn’t believe it then, and he still couldn’t believe it now. They had tested it hundreds, thousands of times; they only conducted the naming because they were absolutely certain Sephiroth wouldn’t go berserk as long as the Restrictor preventing him from killing people was engraved in his cube.
Yet, he’d gone berserk—the cause still unknown. Ouka had come up with a theory of why, even if it went untested.
When Ouka removed the cube from Sephiroth’s chest after the tragedy, fissures were webbed through the shell. Had they overlooked cracks that had already been there when they embedded it for the unveiling? Had the fissures formed when he removed it? He didn’t know the answer.