The hollow light that illuminated Lostfon, though somewhat depressing at first glance, did have a nice benefit.

“Feels like an extra-cloudy day, doesn’t it?” Claud commented, putting away a misaligned pyramid.

“Sure does.” Lily looked around the place. “It’s like some deserted town at twilight, between the junction of night and day, where all hope is lost and no one turns back.”

“Couldn’t you have used a better metaphor?”

The two continued down the street, heading for the city square. No one, shadow or otherwise, noticed their approach; Claud had used Presence Nullification to hide their approach. Since they were going to take a walk around the city without making use of the Second Shadow, which actually carried far more dangers than they’d guessed at first glance, using Presence Nullification was the basic countermeasure.

“Too bad we can’t pick up those little guys, though,” Lily muttered. “Watching them waddle down the street is really adorable, but I wish they’ll make noise while doing that too.”

“Make some noise, eh?” Claud thought about it for a moment. “It’ll be livelier. Or deafening. Children can be very loud at times, you know.”

He thought back to his younger days, when he ran around with kids his age in alleyways and played make-believe games with them. Pretending that they were the legendary mana-users, capable of shooting out blue light and saving people…eventually, however, those days came to an end. The kids stopped coming one by one.

Some would stay home to look after their ailing parents or kin, supporting them by working madly or engaging in illegal means. Others simply vanished entirely without warning, an absent gap in their little assembly that would fill up the next day. In the end, one generation of laughing children vanished, replaced by a new generation. And some of the luckiest ones—

“Tell me more,” Lily prompted.

“Hmm?” Claud paused. He could swear that he’d been thinking so far, so what was with that particular prompt from Lily?

“When you have that faraway look in your eyes, you’re always thinking about the past,” Lily replied. “What memories did you recall?”

Claud eyed Lily, who truly knew him like the back of her hand, and then smiled. Even the saddest memories of his family had turned into a source of support, a groundswell of strength, so he didn’t mind talking about it, especially to someone really close to him.

“You know about my family, right? Dad never appeared, mum took care of me…well, she needed to work. When she was working, I would go out and play with the other children like me.”

“Like you?”

“Yeah.” Claud paused. “The family lacks money, so the parents go out and work. They tell their kid to look after themselves while playing with the older ones, and hope that nothing happens while they’re struggling to put food on the table. Most of the young kids and the toddlers that play together share the same set of circumstances; most parents have no choice but to let something like that happen. It’s good protection, but when kids band together, they turn fearless.”

Lily chuckled. “I can see that happening, yes. And they’re susceptible to bad influences too. Like delinquent students coming across a new batch of students and things like that.”

“Yeah, you get the rough idea.” Claud smiled. “When I grew old enough for school, things changed, but one thing remained constant.”

“What was that constant?” Lily asked.

“Her hard work,” Claud replied. “No matter what happened, she kept working and working. When I came back from school, when I was younger and came back from the alleyways and streets…she would return in the evening, pick me up and place me on her lap.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and recalled the sensation of his mum giving him pats and putting him to bed. “Sorry. Just lost myself for a moment.”

“Don’t worry,” Lily replied. “Happens to me sometimes too, really.”

There was a distant light in her eyes too, and Claud found himself understanding Lily’s emotions. Wrapping his hand around her shoulders, Claud drew Lily close to him, a gesture that she reciprocated immediately. Fingers intertwined, the two of them continued towards the city square in silence. Some things didn’t need to be said, after all.

After a while, the two of them stopped outside the entrance of the city square. A translucent grey barrier surrounded the venue, and Claud didn’t need to press his hand against the screen to know that the screen wasn’t going to let two humans into the venue. After all, the bunch of circles floating above the city square were spitting out tall, dark shadows that were holding onto equally featureless weapons.

Even a fool could see that this was where the Dark was producing more and more soldiers, although Claud really wanted to ask how such a thing was possible. Making soldiers that could fight in formation sounded like a huge investment of mana; even artefacts that were free to activate ran on ambient mana.

This thing, however, clearly worked on some really esoteric principles, since it was producing lots of combatants that could work together and everything. And if what he’d seen during Count Lostfon’s surrender of the Terra Jewel was right, these fellows were very much sentient and thinking too.

“How does one exactly create these soldiers?” Claud muttered. “They can fight, they can think, they can react to odd happenings…it just doesn’t make sense. The amount of mana or whatever energy is used to make those guys can’t be shabby at all, and yet the Dark is producing them this easily and quickly.”

“Maybe they aren’t being produced,” Lily suggested.

“Like one of those legendary portals?” Claud asked, thinking about how Farah and Dia had returned to Moon Mansion some time ago.

“Yeap. I mean, it sure doesn’t feel like they’re mindless soldiers who can only fight rigidly,” Lily replied. “Maybe the Dark has a few oceans of soldiers that are pouring out slowly into the continent, and they need the Terra Jewels to increase the pouring rate.”

There were a lot of possibilities, but for some reason, Claud had a feeling that Lily’s words were accurate. That opinion was backed up by the shadows inside, who were doing a whole bunch of different things. For instance, a few of them were doing push-ups in sync, their presumably muscular frames rising and falling as a single entity. Other shadows were sparring with each other with various weapons, but the most egregious display of individual will was how a whole bunch of shadows were arm wrestling.

“My eyes.”

“Yeah, that sums up how I feel too,” Lily replied. “Shadows arm-wrestling…”

His heart sank a moment later as the full significance of this particular event slammed into him like a runaway carriage. For a moment, the world seemed to spin, and Lily caught him as he staggered backwards, his heart pounding madly.

“Claud?” Lily looked at him. “What’s wrong?

“When I see them like this, I think they’re like us.” Claud looked at the shadows having fun inside, a sharp barb in his chest churning and turning. “If these shadows are sentient, alive and came here through that portal, they probably have families too, right? In that case, I…I…”

Lily looked at him, before placing her hands on his shoulders. “It would not be a stretch to say that the soldiers of the Moons aren’t all that different. Did I get that right?”

Claud lowered his head. “You…yeah. You guessed it. I…”

To assuage his fear, to get rid of that nagging feeling in his heart, Claud had killed a Moon Emissary, a Bearer of Destiny and an entire army of Moon soldiers. He’d done the same to an entire army of shadows too, wiping them out to protect the city. If they all had their own families, their own emotions, then the mass destruction he’d caused over and over again would have sent lots of people into the same circumstances as his own childhood.

Reason told him that they were effectively his enemies, and that he should feel no remorse for destroying anything that would have harmed the people he valued, but…

His head spun again, but this time, Lily held him tight.

She ran her fingers through his hair slowly, in what seemed like an attempt to comfort him, but even that failed to stop his heart from twisting. He had fought to protect those who were dear to him, but in doing so, Claud had ended up destroying an entire army. They were different, true, but the evidence he’d seen so far suggested that these armies were no different from the armies raised by the nobles.

The soldiers here were alive, in the truest sense of the word. They could think, feel, form relations, react to stimuli…and, if the myriad clues that pointed to this particular direction weren’t wrong, they also had families.

“It hurts,” Claud muttered.

Lily looked at him, and with a jolt, Claud remembered that they were still outdoors. Even if he wanted to address the whirling madness in him right now, this was not the right time or place.

“Come on,” said Lily, her eyes glittering with an emotion Claud couldn’t quite put a finger on. “Let’s go back to the inn first. We can work out the issues later.”

Holding her hand tightly, Claud submitted to her prodding and let her pull him to their room.