“You’re subconsciously avoiding the reality that Grandfather is dead.”
Faust spoke calmly, but behind the haze of cigarette smoke, his expression grew solemn. The eyes he fixed on Ode held a faint glimmer of shared suffering, as if he had once gone through the exact same ordeal himself—and in looking at Ode, he was peering back through time at his younger self.
“You don’t want to bury him. So even if it means putting him on an operating table, you’ll grasp at every excuse to delay laying his body to rest, as if that could somehow prolong your connection to him just a little longer.”
Elder Zhong sighed. “We reviewed your file. If everything you’ve told us is true, then from the moment Grandfather died until now, you probably haven’t had a single chance to stop and sort through your feelings properly, have you?”
“—Or is it that you just don’t want to?”
Faust’s words always cut sharper than Elder Zhong’s. “I’ve seen countless soldiers just like you, unable to accept the death of a comrade. They refuse to stop moving, always chasing the next target to fill the void in their hearts.”
“That’s why you took the Old Madman’s commission before you’d even collected Grandfather’s body. Isn’t it?”
“That’s why, the moment Old D dropped you off at the dorm last night, you bolted straight to the library. Isn’t it?”
Faust’s piercing gaze cut through the smoke like the blade of an icy scalpel.
“You’re afraid to let yourself idle. You need objectives to fill the emptiness. You don’t care if you live or die—as long as it keeps your mind off these deaths, you’ll do anything.”
But there was no blame in Faust’s tone, only pity, as if he were pitying his past self as well. “Have you heard of the five stages of grief? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Before you said ‘I can bury him later—priorities first,’ I thought you were stuck in the anger stage. But after you said it, I realized you haven’t even fully crossed into the second one.”
“One foot of yours is planted in anger, while the other is still rooted in denial, refusing to let go.”
Faust puffed on his cigarette for a long moment before speaking again, his voice so flat it seemed to conceal even deeper undercurrents. “Your grandfather must have been a truly good man to linger in your heart like this.”
“You’ll face down any brutal reality, even take a bullet without flinching. But you alone avoid confronting his death… After surviving so many brushes with mortality, you still hover between denial and anger, unwilling to take that final half-step forward.”
“…” Ode’s chest began to heave faster and faster. He clenched his fists in silence, fighting back the burning in his eyes.
“Partings like these… they’re the hardest knots in the world to untie.” Elder Zhong looked at him, his amber eyes filled with gentle light. “You don’t need to force yourself to move on so quickly—that’s not the goal of tonight’s chat. We observed your fighting style last night, and we can confirm your berserk power is impressive. You’ve clearly had systematic training, so even unconscious, your attack instincts remain sharp. But—”
“Instinct isn’t skill,” Faust interjected. In the span of a second, any trace of that fleeting empathy vanished from his face, and he leisurely crossed his legs. “The way you handled that battleship last night was so sloppy, it gave Chief Eva a heart attack—she didn’t sleep a wink.”
“No strategy, no accuracy, just brute force. Let me put it this way: If Pharaoh had been piloting the battleship last night, she could’ve wiped out every last Giant Phagocytic Worm in half a minute without a scratch on the ship.”
Ode, who was already feeling down, flushed with shame and wanted to bury his face in his chest. He’d never been called into a teacher’s office and scolded like this his whole life. As a model student from a respectable family, even scoring a ninety-nine out of a hundred on a test would keep him tossing and turning all night, reflecting on where he’d gone wrong.
Elder Zhong couldn’t bear to see such a well-behaved young man looking so dejected. He quickly swatted Faust away with his fan and patted Ode’s fluffy head. “There, there—that’s why we called you here today. So, what do you say? Would you like to train under me? I can teach you how to harness that beastly power with a clear mind.”
“And one more thing,” Pharaoh added from her spot by the window, where she’d been idly playing with her hair. Her voice was so gentle it sent chills down the spine. “Explain yourself. Why is a guy with maxed-out charisma like you charging in to trade blows with the enemy? Not enough holes in you already? Don’t like seduction? Think it’s beneath you, some underhanded trick unworthy of a noble heir like yourself?”
Ode, who had just jerked his head up at Elder Zhong’s words, immediately started stammering again. “N-no… In the heat of the moment, it just… didn’t occur to me.”
Pharaoh’s lips curved into a smile. “Then rest easy. By the time you leave this outpost, I guarantee the first instinct that hits you in a life-or-death scrape will be to play to your strengths.”
Ode: “…………”
He couldn’t rest easy at all!!
But Pharaoh had already moved on to the next topic. “Alright, business is done—now we can talk about last night. Hey, kid, why’d you attack me? Did the way I grabbed you trigger some bad memory?”
“…” Ode couldn’t exactly say that last night he hadn’t realized this was just an instructor on night patrol catching a truant student. When that mass of tentacles had burst out of the lab, he’d thought some test subject had escaped. “I… saw some bad hallucinations. So, what was up with that attack? From what I overheard in your conversation, a huge swarm of Giant Phagocytic Worms showing up in one spot like that is really unusual, right?”
“Just Nyarlathotep stirring up trouble again…” Elder Zhong gave a rough rundown of what he’d sensed the night before, cause and effect, kindly explaining to the new student what the Black Pharaoh was.
“Nyarlathotep is one of the Three Pillar Gods. It has countless avatars—some say It claimed to have over ten million walking the earth alone. The Black Pharaoh is one of Its most infamous avatars, and what showed up at the logistics outpost last night, dumping all those Giant Phagocytic Worms, was just a projection of that avatar.”
“Even so, it took both me and Elder Zhong working together to handle It. So next time you see one of Nyarlathotep’s avatars, don’t try to go toe-to-toe like you did tonight.” Pharaoh chuckled midway through, the kind of hellish joke only a seasoned veteran could make. “Go ahead and ‘try hard’—maybe you’ll die a little slower.”
“…” Ode sank into a silence half embarrassment, half hesitation.
The embarrassment was obvious. The hesitation stemmed from… “Do you think the projection sounded the alarm for El out of sheer malice?”
“What other explanation makes sense?” Faust shot back, a hint of scrutiny in his eyes.
Ode fell silent.
Those fragmented memories had indeed rattled him badly, but he didn’t think they were useless. For instance, during last night’s raid, when El’s parents’ question pierced him with shame and self-loathing straight through the heart, he couldn’t help suspecting the whole thing had been aimed at him.
But why?
The only connection between him and Nyarlathotep was Cavendish. It couldn’t be that this great deity was unhappy with Its brother choosing someone like him, and wanted to break them up, could it?
Carrying that doubt, he bid farewell to the instructors. Just before stepping out the door, he nearly forgot something important and turned back to Pharaoh, who was yawning as she walked him out. “Instructor… haven’t we met somewhere before? You seem really familiar.”
“Oh, maybe.” Pharaoh’s response was nonchalant. “I only came to Egypt nine years ago, and when I arrived, I had nothing—no memories. Name, age, where I was from… all gone.”
“I fight dirty, so I quickly made a name for myself under the local bosses. Later, I got dragged into an anomalous incident and joined GORCC. If I look familiar, maybe you saw me nine years ago, before I lost my memory.”
They strolled to the dorm entrance. Ode paused in the doorway. “You’ve never wanted to recover your memories?”
“What’s the point?” Pharaoh snorted. “When I woke up, my body was covered in knife wounds, fingers half rotted off—like I’d barely escaped some desperate fight. Things are good now—why dig up a past that was obviously miserable? You’ve gotta keep moving forward in life.”
She waved him off casually. “Go on, get inside. See you on the training field tomorrow~”
Pharaoh sauntered away with her usual carefree stride, leaving Ode with nothing but the image of her casual wave goodbye.
Still puzzling over that nagging sense of familiarity, Ode pushed open the door and found his roommates—the ones he’d briefly met in the infirmary—sprawled across their beds in every direction, snoring up a storm.
He glanced at the window, which was inexplicably open despite the late hour. Ever the considerate one, he crossed the room to close it, sparing his roommates any excuse to fake sick and skip training come morning. He had just sat down on the edge of his own bed when something felt off.
The night wind tapped insistently against the glass. The desolate moonlight of the desert shone on the nightstand to his left, illuminating a pair of bright, gleaming eyes.
“…” Ode’s body hair stood on end in an instant. He forced his rigid neck to turn slowly, degree by agonizing degree, and saw that a small wax doll had appeared on his nightstand at some point.
It was only the size of a palm, but its face was carved with startling realism, as if someone had sliced off his head, shrunken it down, and grafted it onto the doll’s neck.
The wax doll was dressed in the same clothes he’d worn on his nocturnal escapade the night before. A proportionally tiny Giant Phagocytic Worm coiled around it, covering its mouth—but the worm’s segmented body curved in place of lips, forming a wide, grotesque grin.
“…………” Ode’s breathing grew erratic for a moment before he forced it back under control.
Ode didn’t believe his roommates—drilled into such a dog-tired state by their training—had any energy left to churn out a handicraft like this in just a few hours.
When he combined it with the guilt he’d sensed earlier in those echoes of the past, the identity of the gift’s sender was obvious. It had to be Nyarlathotep.
But that still left the same nagging question: why?
Under the moonlight, the little wax doll smiled mysteriously. Its translucent eyes were clearly made of lifeless plastic, yet they gave Ode the uncanny illusion that the thing was alive—that it was watching him.
He stiffened for a moment before rising to his feet again. This time, though, he didn’t leave the dorm. He simply ducked into the attached bathroom.
Without turning on the light, he sat down on the toilet and clicked the lighter to life. The flame instantly licked at the wax doll’s body.
“—!”
The searing pain of the burn shot through his own body in an instant.
Ode’s breathing grew ragged, cold sweat beading on his forehead, but the hand clutching the lighter didn’t tremble in the slightest.
He sat there ramrod straight, staring coldly into the wax doll’s translucent eyes until they sagged and melted, finally dissolving completely into the flames.
Meanwhile, deep within a certain desert tomb…
Nyarlathotep—dressed in opulent Black Pharaoh garb—lounged on a plush, comfortable chaise. In the darkness, he watched that pinpoint of firelight flicker and die. After a long moment, he let out a low whistle.
Damn, that packed a punch.
