It had been six years since Yosho went missing. Since there was no information on Ryoko popping up, the leading theory among the Imperial Family was that they had perished at each other’s hands. It was then that it happened.
“Again?” said Seto, who had come to visit the executive office at House Kamiki.
“Now don’t say that, he’s worried about Ayeka in his way.” Before Utsutsumi were holographs of several young men. Shuzan had recently started to bring in prospective marriage partners, after the Emperor of Jurai officially declared the engagement between Yosho and Ayeka be annulled. Ayeka rejected every one of them, but after a conference with the heads of Houses, they selected some candidates for matchmaking interviews, the first steps to an arranged marriage. And once it was arranged, it could not be refused.
Even after six years of her brother missing, Ayeka’s feelings had not changed from the moment she last saw him. Rather, because she could not see him, her ideals grew all the more lofty, an unstoppable force inside her. Perhaps it was true that this was not genuine love but feelings that she had built up for more than a decade and could not forget so easily.
The day before the marriage candidate selected for Ayeka by Houses Kamiki and Masaki was announced, Ayeka decided to leave Jurai and go on a journey to find Yosho. She was a woman of Jurai’s Masaki House, who thought nothing of abandoning her home.
The hull destroyed in the battle with Ryoko was repaired, and when she exited Jurai “for final adjustments,” she was going to switch the bio- signature emitted from the ship (with which her position would be ascertained) with a dummy ship onto which a cutting from Ryu-oh was placed, to trick the surveilling eyes back on Jurai. The key she fashioned from Ryu-oh’s amber in the shape of a headband fit nicely on her forehead. The perfect plan (in Ayeka’s thinking) to run away from Jurai was complete.
The problem was Yosho’s location. Ayeka knew he could not be found by searching blindly, and she herself would quickly be found by Jurai and sent back home. These things were better left to the experts. Luckily, the search for Yosho had continued. The information was controlled by the secret network of Royal Trees, and since Ayeka’s Ryu-oh was a Second Generation Tree, it could receive information without directly accessing Tenju and could therefore do so without being detected.
“It’s perfect! ♥” she beamed. The thought patterns of a girl in love were simplistic.
On the day of the plan’s execution, Ayeka secretly departed Jurai, left her Guardians, Azaka and Kamidake, in control, and entered the hibernation chamber. She had no idea it would last seven hundred years.
An amateur could never evade Jurai’s surveillance network. However, Ayeka also did not know that they were able to successfully give them the slip through the power of Sasami (and thus Tsunami), who had stowed away out of concern for her sister.
Meanwhile, on Jurai, things were naturally in an uproar. Not only
Ayeka but Sasami had gone missing without a note. A search team was formed immediately, but it was impossible to locate Ryu-oh, once under Tsunami’s protection. The situation on Jurai was grave in a different sense. There was no way the methods Ayeka used could have deceived Jurai’s security. All the organizations from ground control to the intelligence department underwent a thorough review, in case the stunt had been performed under someone’s guidance, but nobody suspicious could be found.
The one with the most mixed emotions was none other than Seto herself. “Why, why, whyyyy?? I’m so tired…” Her secret detection mechanism, touted as the most powerful on Jurai, had been bested. No mastermind, not even a spy, could be found. There was no way this could have been done without so much as a trace. Scrutiny of the Imperial Family was supposed to be extraordinary.
“Could it be…Tsunami?” There was no other answer. “Were you worried about Ayeka-chan?” Those simple words were the answer to everything. Seto felt intuitively that Ayeka and Sasami were safe. But ever since the first leader of Jurai met Tsunami, there had never been a case of Tsunami herself taking action.
“What’s about to happen?” Seto felt a great fluctuation of fate. “Uh- oh…I had forgotten about her.” Considering the coming kerfuffle, she felt a headache coming on. “Funaho-dono… I hope she doesn’t keep things bottled up.”
There was one other person who most decidedly did not have peace of mind: Ayeka and Sasami’s grandfather, Utsutsumi. With his two most beloved granddaughters gone, he was in a panic. And it mattered that the whole thing was Azusa’s son, Yosho’s fault.
“That was when everything went wrong.” Simple but fearless, and highly trusted by others, Utsutsumi had a thing against Funaho (more accurately, Azusa). “This wouldn’t have been a problem if she had been Second Empress,” he muttered. He knew that it was selfish. But after Ayeka was born, and seeing his granddaughter so happily engaged to Yosho, his ill feelings had gradually faded away. Then Sasami was born. If this contentment had continued, Utsutsumi would have had nothing left to be desired.
Even he knew he was being stupid. What might have been the smallest thing, seen from someone else’s perspective, had ruined everything for him and even affected the future of an entire country.
“This isn’t good!” He sighed deeply and left the executive office to head to the meeting.
As everyone present in the meeting expected, there was great upset about Ayeka and Sasami’s disappearance. And it was a matter of course that all topics of discussion turned into criticism of Funaho. There was no help from Azusa, who had to remain neutral as Emperor. Funaho endured taking heavier criticism from Shuzan than ever before.
Then Shuzan made the crucial assertion: “The same as the First Prince… He had a First Generation ship, and yet he let that pirate escape. Now he’s missing. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
Funaho could put up with criticism of herself, but when it came to her son, she could not keep quiet. She walked over to Shuzan and dumped a cup of sake over him. This was a challenge to a duel. Until now, he could not bring himself to challenge a woman, much less someone from another world who had not received much combat training, as a victory would only reflect poorly on him. Being offered one on a silver platter was a different story.