He stepped out of the car and entered the hospital.
Before heading to the room where Brunhild Siegfried was staying, he checked his appearance in the mirror. Even if he was going to be speaking with the child of a dragon, she was still a girl.
He carefully adjusted his bangs, which were just long enough that they wouldn’t fall into his eyes. Not bad, not bad at all. Sachs had been a handsome man in his youth.
It was no exaggeration to say that he’d been quite the ladies’ man.
With age, the vitality and vibrancy of his younger days had left him, but he’d developed a face that gave a sense of his broad-minded character, and he had no shortage of secret admirers in the military.
But Sachs wasn’t in a relationship.
There was something he refused to forget.
There had been an incident that occurred during the winter of his twenty-fourth year. After being stabbed by a woman he was seeing, and rushed to emergency care, he had cut off all relations with women.
Girls were scary.
Finishing the final check of his personal grooming, he muttered, “All right.” He had himself psyched up.
He tucked a dagger, his favored weapon, into his pocket.
Just in case.
If she saw herself not as a human, but as the daughter of a dragon, there was a nonzero chance that he would be attacked. Even if he was more good-natured than Sigebert, though not as strong, Sachs was still a capable military officer.
Although, from what I’ve heard about her upbringing, it doesn’t seem like I’d stand a chance against her…
✦ ✦ ✦
He didn’t need the dagger.
The windows of the private room were wide open. The curtains fluttered and swayed in the breeze.
Brunhild Siegfried was sitting up in bed. Her silver hair appeared red in the sunlight. Her eyes were like a smoldering bonfire in the quiet dark.
Black flames lingered there, in the shape of a person.
That was Sachs’s impression of Brunhild Siegfried. Even noticing that he had visited the room, Brunhild didn’t give him so much as a glance.
“Brunhild Siegfried—is that you?”
She reacted. But the moment of her reaction was not when he called her the name Brunhild Siegfried, but when he said “you.”
“Don’t call me ‘you,’ human.”
Her reaction to the term of address confused him, but he wasn’t going to pry. From experience, Sachs knew that fixations and hang-ups about names were often due to reasons only that person would understand.
“So then… What should I say?”
“Who are you?”
Damn, he thought. It was common decency to introduce yourself before asking someone else their name.
Sachs raised his eyebrows and lifted the corners of his lips gently. His winning smile never failed to lower the guards of people he interacted with—at least, that’s how it went with humans…
“Apologies, my name is Johann Sachs. I’m a colonel in the Norvelland army and an old friend of Sigebert’s.”
He checked to see how she would react upon hearing Sigebert’s name. His idea had been to use a mutual acquaintance as a key to opening up the conversation. It seemed that had succeeded. Brunhild’s eyebrows twitched.
“Where is that man?” she demanded, hostile.
No surprise there. Sigebert had killed the dragon.
“At sea, I believe. I’m not sure, either.” Colonel Sachs had been ordered by Commodore Sigebert that under no conditions was he to give away his location.
Staring at Sachs with deep-crimson eyes, the girl declared, “That’s a lie,” as if she had read his mind. “Why are you lying?”
Sachs knew how to counter at times like these.
He put on an awkward smile, as if he were at a loss. “It’s not a lie. He travels the oceans of the world looking for Edens. I imagine only his fellow seafarers will know where he is.”
The eerie girl narrowed her eyes and looked at Sachs for a while, but she just said “I see” in resignation, then averted her eyes.
She was still again, like a doll.
“Sigebert has asked me to handle y—…matters, Brunhild.” Just as Sachs was about say “you” again, he caught himself.
She wouldn’t react anymore. So he continued to talk at her. “Sigebert is busy, and he can’t be in the capital for a while.”
He kept the tone of his voice as soft as possible so as to not irritate her. After all, this girl had already bared her fangs against Sigebert, a man lauded as the strongest in the Norvelland army.
“Isn’t there anything you’d like to ask about? For example, your current situation, or what comes next, or about being put on the military register, anything.”
“I don’t care.” She was blunt.
“You don’t have any problems—like maybe you don’t want blood drawn, or did it hurt to have the scales on your right arm peeled off? I could negotiate with the doctor.”
Brunhild, a living fruit of Eden.
Though they weren’t technically doing any human experimentation, every day they gathered and analyzed the components of all the substances that comprised her body. This was the reason she was still not discharged, despite her wounds being largely healed. Apparently, they were also doing tests of her physical and mental abilities as well, but she’d been extremely uncooperative, and things were not going well. She had endured a sudden attack by humans and been driven from her home. It was no wonder she didn’t want to cooperate with them.
“Examine and test me as you see fit, so long as I’m able to do the one thing I need to do.”
I must kill that man, she said.
Though Sachs didn’t affirm her desire to kill his friend, neither did he reject it. “I understand the feeling painfully well. Your family was killed. Of course you’d want to exact revenge. But…that kind of…open hostility isn’t a very good idea.”
“Not a very good idea…?”
“I mean, it’s not like everyone in the world is your enemy. It may seem like that right now, and there’s no helping that. But I want you to understand, bit by bit, that it’s not like that.”
There were some who had proposed that they toss Brunhild into a research facility, as if she were a lab animal.
But others had opposed that, and exercising the art of negotiation to the utmost, they had somehow reached the point where the military was taking her into custody.
That was Sachs’s doing. He wasn’t going to loudly declare that he was on her side, but he wanted to help out this sixteen-year-old girl as much as he could.
…He couldn’t help but see his own daughter in her.
“I’ll leave for now.”
Their brief meeting was at an end.
He had to take his time to carefully melt the wall of ice between them…
She was in a delicate state right now.
“Well then, till next time.”
Sachs began to visit the hospital regularly.