The man suddenly showed an embarrassed expression at Laila’s serious attitude, but Laila could tell he wasn’t making frivolous remarks.

It was as if she could feel on her skin that he was truly carrying a great worry, like she had become an animal sensing an earthquake.

“Um.”

Laila, who had started to speak again, closed her mouth. Then the man said:

“Donovan. That’s my name. Call me Donovan. And my daughter’s name is Alice.”

Laila nodded to indicate she understood.

“What’s the problem with Alice?”

Donovan sighed.

“She was born a bit… different from others. When you meet her later, you’ll see her face is a bit, no, quite disfigured. As if she’d been burned. She has a very kind heart though. Like silk, I tell you. I’m not just saying that because she’s my daughter, it’s really true. But it breaks my heart to see her always so timid because of her face…”

Laila’s eyes blinked slowly. Her red irises reflected Donovan’s hunched shoulders and lingered on his twitching fingertips.

He’s lying, Laila thought. If what Donovan said was true, they could have found some solution using tink.

But the anxiety she had felt momentarily, the fear that had run down her spine when Donovan brought up his daughter, harbored something much more serious.

“You’re lying, aren’t you?”

Donovan stared blankly at Laila with a shocked face. His lips quivered, but he ultimately couldn’t refute.

As he fell silent, Eustar also looked at Donovan with renewed scrutiny.

Finding the sync that must be somewhere nearby was important, but if Donovan was hiding something more as Laila said, it was an issue they couldn’t just ignore.

“Mr. Donovan.”

Donovan’s gaze shifted nervously at Eustar’s words. His voice was low as if deep in thought, but there was an undeniable sense of pressure underlying it.

“Is what my colleague said true? Are you hiding something about your daughter?”

Donovan, his previous jovial and glib attitude now completely gone, let out a deep sigh. He even seemed to be feeling fear.

Eustar and Laila’s gazes crossed. The premonition was certainly ominous.

After hesitating for a long while, Donovan finally opened his mouth with difficulty.

“She… At night, she does strange things.”

“What do you mean by strange things?”

Eustar quickly asked. Donovan pressed his lips tightly together with a darkened face, then bit them inward. Then he roughly rubbed his face with his palm.

“I don’t know how to say it. Some nights she wears all her clothes backwards and runs through the hallways, other nights she hangs from the railing… swaying her body as if about to jump off. And once, on all fo- fours, like a dog. I saw her going up and down the stairs like an animal.”

For a moment, Laila couldn’t decide what to say. But if all of Donovan’s words were true, Alice clearly had a problem. A very serious one at that.

Eustar asked again.

“What did you do when that happened?”

Donovan looked up with a terrified expression.

His eyes suddenly seemed sunken as if extinguished, looking almost like those of a sick person, and Eustar was momentarily reminded of Ord’s face. For some reason, Donovan’s situation felt similar to that of Ord, who couldn’t sleep peacefully for even a day due to nightmares, auditory hallucinations, and visual hallucinations.

“I, I… I couldn’t do anything.”

Laila silently gazed at him. Her eyes held so many things that even Eustar found it difficult to decipher. A whirlpool of numerous emotions seemed to be swirling within – reproach, sympathy, anger, and more.

“You couldn’t do anything.”

Laila, finally speaking, repeated Donovan’s words as if echoing them.

Donovan then covered his eyes with his palms and furrowed his brow. There seemed to be a sound of sobbing, but it was an illusion. He wasn’t crying. He just looked like he was about to.

“How could I… What could I have done? She’s my daughter, my only daughter I’ve raised with my own hands since she was wrapped in swaddling clothes. I tried asking her gently why she did those things. But during the day, she doesn’t remember anything! She just laughs it off, asking if I had a bad dream, so what more could I have done? When night comes, I can’t even sleep. If I hear strange noises outside, I don’t dare open the door. It’s just like, it’s…”

Donovan’s words trailed off roughly. Eustar finished the sentence he couldn’t complete.

“It was like something other than your daughter. Isn’t that right, Mr. Donovan?”

Donovan remained silent. Even if Eustar’s words were true, he didn’t seem to want to admit it himself.

Laila, who had been deep in thought, spoke.

“We need to see firsthand what’s happening to Alice. We can’t find a solution if we don’t know what the problem is.”

“Th-then, then you’ll help?”

“That’s what Tentinella is for.”

Then Laila glanced up at Eustar. It was a look as if seeking agreement.

Eustar smiled faintly and nodded readily.

“Of course, Mr. Donovan. As my colleague, Miss Kristrad, just said, Tentinella exists for all citizens of Sierou. It’s our job to save those experiencing strange and incomprehensible things from their suffering.”

Tears finally burst from Donovan’s sunken eyes. He bowed deeply several times, repeating words of gratitude over and over.

Eustar first calmed him down. For there is an order to all things.

“First, the two of us have something to do. You said Alice’s problems occur in the middle of the night, so we’ll return before then. Tell us one thing.”

Donovan nodded hurriedly.

“Anything, I’ll tell you anything. What do you want to know?”

Green eyes glinted. Eustar said:

“Where in the village is the place where people are said to see hallucinations or go missing?”

The stares directed at the two strangers finally lessened once they left the main street of the village.

A few curious children followed quietly, but they would giggle among themselves and pretend to run away whenever Laila glanced back.

“It feels like I’ve become a father duck,” Eustar said.

Laila looked at him as if to ask what he meant, then glanced sideways at the few stubborn children still following before looking ahead again.

“Then do something about those ducklings following behind.”

“Maybe if the mother duck brandishes a poker, they’ll run away to avoid getting spanked?”

There was a thick layer of amusement in his words. Laila was silent for a moment before looking up at Eustar again.

“Are you saying I’m the mother duck?”

“Who else would it be? Don’t you like being the mother duck?”

Who would like being a mother duck? Laila furrowed her brows and suddenly stopped walking. This time, Eustar looked at her with puzzled eyes.

As Laila whirled around, the persistent little rascals froze in place, swallowing their breaths without even thinking of running away.

Black hair and red eyes. Faced head-on with an appearance exactly like the witches from stories, they suddenly felt terrified.

Laila made eye contact with each of the five or six children and said in an eerie voice:

“If you keep following, I’ll turn you into ugly ducklings.”

There was a moment of silence… Then one child hiccupped loudly.

As if that was a signal, the children shouted “Wah!” and scattered away. One child fell on the dirt road and started crying loudly, while another slid and hid in the grass.

Laila snorted and turned around triumphantly, only to find Eustar with his eyes closed, pressing both corners of his mouth.

“What are you doing, Eustar?”

Eustar cleared his throat with a peculiar sound.

“Nothing. Just… It was funny.”

“You find it funny that I scared the children?”

Laila’s voice as she asked back was very serious. If he answered “yes,” she seemed ready to give a lengthy lecture.

Unable to hold back any longer, Eustar burst out laughing and shook his head.

“That’s not what I meant. Well, maybe a little… But turning them into ugly ducklings? That’s such an adorable threat for a witch.”

“If I had made a harsher threat, their parents would have probably come to burn me at the stake.”

“You keep saying that. No one is going to burn you. They won’t even be able to bring a single match near you, so don’t worry.”

Laila liked those words. And once again, she was surprised at herself for thinking so.

For the first time, she felt genuinely pleased by Eustar’s words, without any guilt-inducing or baseless sense of indebtedness from the voice in her mind.

The two walked side by side in silence for a while. When they finally reached the entrance of the small path they had seen from the hill, Laila realized that the two desolate villages visible through the densely growing branches gave off very similar scents.

“I can smell it,” Laila whispered.

Eustar quickly understood that she wasn’t referring to a physically perceptible smell. What she smelled was the scent of emptiness and countless deaths. The scent of ghosts.

“There seems to be some kind of signpost over there,” Eustar said.

Half-blackened with rot and partially hidden by trees, they could make out two signposts pointing to a forking path.

The two of them brushed away the moss and mold-like growths on the signs and read the engraved letters.

“Vintosis,” Eustar read the letters on the left signpost first.

Laila immediately read the letters on the right signpost.

“Hoieris.”

Laila, who had been staring at the letters with an intense expression, said:

“It means left and right, doesn’t it?”

“That’s right. I’m not sure if these are village names or just directions. Which one should we go to first?”

After pondering for a moment, Laila dusted off her palms and removed one of her jacket badges. It was a flat badge like a silver coin with a short pin attached.

“If it’s heads, we’ll go to Vintosis. If it’s tails with the pin showing, we’ll go to Hoieris.”

“The classics are always the best. Go ahead, toss it.”

Laila flicked her finger, making a ting sound. The flat badge spun round and round in the air.