CLIFF and Lovel cried over Jair’s body for some time after he had passed. Once their tears had dried, they laid Jair on the ground, shut his eyes, and wiped their tears.
“…Cliff.”
“Yeah!”
Cliff put his hand over his chest pocket, where he had placed the revolver Kiriko gave him. He confirmed it was still there and turned his eyes on the tower door. Grinzam was waiting on the other side. Lovel lent Cliff, who was severely battered, her shoulder. He leaned on her for support to the tower and opened the door with his unbroken hand.
Deep inside the dimly lit tower, the man behind it all stood leaning against the spiral staircase railing.
“So you’re the ones who came… I find it hard to believe, but it looks like Sephiroth lost,” Grinzam commented, looking at the two beaten-up children leaning on each other for support.
Cliff returned his gaze and answered, “Yeah. Your plan failed, in exchange for a great number of sacrifices and victims.”
“I prepared everything over eight years to make it happen, too,” Grinzam said softly, his eyes gleaming with an air of confidence.
“Tell me, Grinzam, what did you mean by, ‘I’m going to bring back two lost lives?’” Cliff demanded in a sharp, biting voice. It was the last question left unanswered.
Grinzam sneered. “You haven’t heard about it from her yet?”
“From Lovel? Heard what?”
“You just asked the wrong question again. The woman beside you isn’t Lovel.”
“…Excuse me?” Cliff instinctively looked at Lovel. She averted her eyes from him.
“Stop it, Grinzam!” Lovel said, pain lacing her words. He didn’t heed her request.
“In that case, I’ll be the one to tell you our story that began eight years ago and continued until today. It’s the least I can do to reward you for defeating Sephiroth,” Grinzam said, beginning to narrate. “I ran away from the Church with Jair after Catalina died. I told Jair to go to Chest Island, while I remained on Head Island… I had unfinished business. My deep-rooted desire to bring Catalina back and get revenge on the Church, that is.”
Grinzam had a distant look in his eyes. Cliff and Lovel listened to him without a word.
“I changed my face and name, and chose the Academy dormitory as my hiding place, because Lovel was there. I became friendly with Catalina’s daughter and collected information on Catalina through the stories Lovel told me about her mother.”
“You collected…information?”
The unsettling hunch that had been nagging at Cliff surged to the front of his mind. What had he done with the information he collected? What did it mean to bring a person back? Grinzam was answering those questions for him now. While he wanted to know the answer, he wished he could cover his ears.
“Eight years passed like that. I had gathered the necessary Engrave Incantations and information to input into the cubes. All that was left was to find a body to house Catalina’s soul… But that was the one thing that seemed beyond the bounds of possibility to artificially create.”
But what about the body? Where does it come from? Those were the very questions Kiriko had asked Lovel on the train.
But there was a body, a perfect body that looked so very much like the woman Grinzam was trying to bring back to life.
“Then about a week ago, Jair appeared before me. I was shocked to see him for the first time in eight years. I asked him what he had come to the Academy for. He told me, ‘I always wanted to enroll in the Academy Lovel attends.’”
“…No way!” Cliff gnawed on his lower lip.
“He apparently spotted Lovel at the dormitory. And then he dared to speak of his joy to me…! My disciple had been harboring feelings of love toward Catalina’s daughter ever since they met as children! He loved the girl who had the same face as the woman I loved!” Grinzam’s voice trembled from anger, and most likely, sadness.
“Can you comprehend the outrage, the bitterness I felt in that moment? I had lost my face, my name, and my youth! Yet Jair had obtained the life I yearned for from the deepest depths of my heart.”
Grinzam’s face contorted into an ugly expression. Venom and something dark and sinister flashed in his eyes. “I made up my mind when I realized his feelings! I decided to take back what I lost, to start over with Catalina on this island, and to use Jair and Lovel’s body to make that happen!”
Grinzam looked at Cliff as he spoke. Untold loneliness and insanity burned in his eyes. “Don’t you get it yet? Inside the chest of the woman you call Lovel—”
“Stop it!” Lovel screamed to cut him off.
He spoke over her screams, “—is Sehem-hamphorasch, engraved with the personality of her mother, Catalina.”
He laid the truth bare for Cliff.
“…No…” Cliff’s vision swirled. It was the truth he had purposely turned away from. He looked to his right, to her face.
“I’m sorry for deceiving you…” Lovel, no, Catalina said, with tears in her voice. “I had every intention of removing the cube from my chest and disappearing without anybody noticing when this all ended… This body is Lovel’s. I don’t want to live again by sacrificing my daughter’s life,” she whispered and dipped her head.
Cliff couldn’t find the words to say to her. She had hidden the truth from him because she knew Cliff would try to stop her if he found out.
Grinzam continued speaking in place of Cliff’s silence. “I inserted Catalina’s soul in Lovel’s body and my soul in Jair’s body… Doing so would allow us to take back the lives we lost. I put Lovel into suspended animation with the tranquilizer and embedded the cube in her chest. Then I summoned Jair to me, and did the same to him.”
“…!” Cliff blanched
“He cursed at me the entire time he was still conscious. ‘How can you sacrifice Lovel for such a thing? I’ll never help you!’ he shouted at me, but it was too late. Jair’s conscience eventually faded, and I embedded the cube in his chest… He was born anew—as my other self.”
Cliff saw no traces of guilt or regret for what he had done in Grinzam’s expression or voice. At the end of a life filled with absurdity and hatred, the man who had once been the greatest Rabbi in history lost his heart. He had transformed into a real demon in the time he was called the Heinous Traitor.
Yet for all that, he still spoke as if he had hope. “Catalina and I will be reborn. We will live together on this archipelago without Golems. Everything was supposed to go according to plan for our happy ending. But she went out of control, making my plans go awry.”
Grinzam shot a menacing glare at Catalina. “I put the Restrictor ‘can’t kill humans’ along with a second Restrictor, ‘love and obey Jair’ on Catalina. But for some reason, the second Restrictor failed to take effect, and she betrayed us!”
Grinzam trembled violently. He raised his voice with an enraged expression. “Why didn’t the Restrictor work?! If only it took effect, everything would have worked out perfectly!”
“…Master Roche did it,” Cliff said, as soon as the answer hit him. Catalina and Grinzam looked at him stunned.
They all realized the answer. There was only one person who could have removed the Restrictor under those circumstances. Only one person in that room would try to remove the Restrictor engraved in the cube embedded in Catalina’s chest that would have forced her to “love and obey Jair.”
“Master removed her Restrictor! He did it in the seconds before he fell into suspended animation after being administered the drug. He mustered the last of his strength and used Remote Engrave Incantation to do it!”
“That’s it!” Catalina breathed as if she came to the same conclusion.
Surprise colored Grinzam’s features. Cliff leveled him with a fierce glare and asked, “Can you understand how Master Roche felt, thinking of his loved one up until his final moments? Nah, there’s no way you could understand…”
But Master Roche would have. Cliff had no doubt the man he admired and looked up to would. Cliff felt the deepest, greatest admiration for Roche’s determination. Roche had saved Lovel from blind love, even in the face of his own demise. He had removed the Restrictor binding her and gave her a chance at a future.
“Grinzam, you were just jealous of Master Roche and Lovel. You were willing to sacrifice people left and right to bring Catalina back. Do you think she wanted that? Do you think this kind and gentle Catalina would want that? Like hell she would!” Cliff slapped the truth at the speechless Grinzam. “Listen to me very closely, Grinzam! You might’ve spent nearly a decade gathering information, but you learned nothing! You don’t understand a thing about Catalina!”
“Cliff…!” Catalina called his name in a quivering voice. Cliff held her hand, the hand of the woman he fought alongside for survival these past few days.
“Who you are doesn’t bother me. Tell me what you want me to do. I’ll fight for you no matter what you say.” Cliff knew the answer to his question before he asked it, and that was exactly why it made him want to cry.
Catalina’s face shimmered with the tears she held back as she answered him. “Defeat him.”
Those were words of resolve. They turned their eyes to Grinzam, who seethed at Catalina with the glaring wrath of a demon.
“You foolish child, you dare to defy the will of your Maker…!” The strongest Rabbi in Church history cursed at them. But Cliff wasn’t afraid of him. As long as she was by his side, he’d fear no one.
Cliff drew the gun. Catalina smiled beside him and resolutely said, “Let’s do this, comrade in arms.”
“Yeah!” Cliff shook off his sadness and answered in the liveliest voice he could manage.