Chapter 62 – A Voice From Another World, Reaching Across the Sea of Stars.

Letaria's eyes went wide.

From the day she had washed up in Seldia until this moment - not once had anyone asked her directly about her origins.

She had never intended to conceal it forever. That much was true from the beginning. And yet, in the instant the question was placed before her, she understood something for the first time: that Grain, Milea, everyone in the corps - all of them, despite the unease they must have felt at her inhuman abilities and her otherworldly way of existing in the world - had, until now, deliberately chosen not to touch the heart of it.

"I... I am..."

Her throat had gone dry. The words wouldn't come cleanly. Letaria fell silent before she could finish.

In the lab, wrapped in stillness, a silence stretched out that felt like it could last forever.

The Milea she knew - the Milea she had known until now - even if she had asked a question this direct, would have stopped pressing the moment Letaria showed this much difficulty answering. Somehow, she had always felt that. A sense she could rely on.

But this time, that rescue wasn't coming. The magic sleeping in Letaria's depths told her so, with certainty, before her mind could form the thought.

Milea held her gaze and didn't look away. When she spoke again, it was quietly - but with the steady precision of someone laying down facts that cannot be moved.

"The black box recovered from the wreckage of Blang's old machine - 'Dien,' or rather, 'Zodan' - had a mechanism built into it, both physically and at the programming level, for the forced reception of external special-frequency signals. But when I analyzed the black box installed in Arden, I found no such reception mechanism whatsoever."

"...?"

"Which is why it never made sense to me. There was no scientific explanation for how you could hear Restful's voice directly in your mind. There were no anomalies in the machine's communication systems, and none in the brainwave-link logs. And in all the biological data we were able to examine on your end - I found nothing in your body that would serve as a 'mechanism' for receiving unknown signals of that kind."

Milea's words dissolved into the air of the lab.

No receiver in Arden. Nothing of that kind in her own body. And yet - the voice of that colossus had reached directly into her mind. She had heard it clearly.

A silence.

Long enough for the steam rising from the herbal tea to nearly vanish.

Then Letaria made up her mind, and slowly opened her mouth.

-- She told her everything. That she was a lost traveler from a dimension, a place, entirely unlike this world. That in the world she had come from, there were no iron giants like Makinas - only flesh-and-blood humans and terrible monsters, shedding blood against each other. That in that world there existed people who could split iron with a sword and shatter rock with a fist, and bodies capable of withstanding such force were far from rare. That races beyond the human - elves, dwarves, countless others - existed as a matter of course. That "magic" was a natural law of that world. And that the very concept of "a sea of stars" - a universe such as this - did not exist there at all.

And she told her the rest as well. That the magic she possessed, the power she had - in her old world, it had been worth nothing. It could only "sense" the atmosphere and flow of things around her. She had carried it like a brand of uselessness. That she had been born into that world as a highborn daughter of a noble house, and that at a certain point, through the weight of her own accumulated actions, she had brought down the fury of her parents upon herself and been cast out from her home. And that when she had come back to herself, she had somehow found herself here - in the sea of stars.

When she finished, Letaria let her gaze drop and looked down quietly.

To a head researcher at Syn-Fibra - someone who had built her life on the scientific method - this was a confession that was, by any measure, preposterous. The stuff of fairy tales. She had prepared herself for scorn. Or laughter. The raving of a lunatic.

But Milea, who had listened through all of it without moving, was simply silent.

Her eyes might have widened slightly with the shock. But her reaction was far smaller than Letaria had braced for. Quieter.

Some amount of time passed.

Milea had been looking steadily at Letaria where she sat with her head bowed - and appeared to be turning something over deep in her mind.

"...It strains belief. It sounds like a fairy tale, or the plot of a poorly written science fiction novel."

A murmur.

"-- And yet. It all makes sense."

Letaria's head came up sharply.

In Milea's mind, every piece of the mystery that had been troubling her was connecting at once - one after another, forming a single unbreakable chain.

"The anomalous neural patterns in your biological data - completely outside every existing human standard. A body far more resilient than ours, capable of withstanding the g-forces of Arden's acceleration without harm. The way you evaded incoming death lines in the cockpit, as though you already knew where each one would pass - as though you could predict it. All of it. If that 'magic' of yours allows you to sense distortions in the surrounding space, to feel killing intent before it strikes - then every single piece has an explanation."

Milea pressed both hands flat on the desk and looked at Letaria with eyes that held absolute certainty.

"And that is precisely why Arden's resonance system showed an abnormal synchronization rate with you, and only you - where no existing pilot had come close. Arden took that 'power of sensing' you carry and amplified it through the machine's neural network. And it was through that channel that you were able to receive - directly, in your mind - the will of Restful, the voice of the Lunect Protocol. A signal that by any conventional measure you should never have been able to hear."

There was not a trace of doubt left in Milea.

Letaria Adeniam, daughter of another world. That existence - and no other - was the singular miracle that had truly awakened Arden: the pure and innocent knight born from Escado's ancient madness.