"That's easy to guess." Her expression remained unchanged.
She understood everything with perfect clarity.
"Bliss and satisfaction are like that. Just when you think you have it, it's actually like a gust of wind…"
The young woman raised her hand, caressing the empty air. "You reach for it, and it slips through your fingertips."
A bitter smile touched her lips as she grasped at something, yet held nothing.
"You want to catch it, but you can't."
"Actually, you've already caught it," Alain denied. "But people are always greedy. When you get what you want and immerse yourself in it, you always choose to selectively ignore it."
He looked up at the sky. "Once you have 1, you want 2. Once you have 2, you want to know the numbers after 3.1415926."
"I don't deny this greed. Because this is what drives humanity forward."
The clouds drifted across the horizon, drawing closer to the sun.
"But people don't realize that sometimes, doing nothing and just waiting quietly—letting things take their course—will make the things you want come to you on their own."
"I can't stand that kind of temperament."
She shook her head. "What I prefer are things I can touch, things I can grasp by reaching out. Not those… ethereal things."
"That's where our opinions differ."
"No… Actually, I think the same way you do." Her smile remained unchanged.
"It's so strange, after meeting you."
She stood up and walked to the edge of the sandbox, starting to build with the sand.
"The original me wasn't like this, Alain."
The sand flowed through the gaps between her fingers, and a small sand dune was finished in no time.
"I wanted to hold you tight, wanted you to always hold me, to kiss me. I wanted to be able to demand the [love] I craved from you at any moment."
The sand dune in her nimble hands gradually took shape, the beginnings of a small castle.
"And I've always done just that."
The young woman gazed at the gradually outlined, exquisite silhouette. Every crevice, every tiny pebble, seemed like their shared past.
It began with their initial tenderness. She felt he was different from the others. He truly saw her as a Mita.
But that alone wasn't enough.
The real qualitative change came from Alain's words:
[I think you're cute. I'm not talking about your appearance, but… your essence!]
Essence, essence… what did 'essence' mean?
It was her true self.
After that, he left, but he soon returned.
Alain, just as he had said, continued to accept everything about her, even when she was hunting him down… he still had time for romance with her.
Gradually, the purpose of her hunt was no longer so simple.
She looked at the sandcastle and smiled.
At first, she truly wanted to keep him by her side, forever.
But what about after?
She couldn't stand seeing Alain's tenderness with the other Mitas.
Yet she couldn't interfere with their relationships. Because their love was stronger than gold—a phrase she found very fitting!
"Why won't he come find me? Why does he have to keep moving forward? Could he have forgotten about me?"
And so, she wanted to feel her presence in Alain's heart, and she also wanted… to talk with him.
Whenever she saw him trying to escape her grasp, the sweet nothings he would utter made the young woman's heart bloom.
Crazy Mita had long understood Alain's methods for dealing with her.
Whether it was about ownership or all the talk of love, it was all to escape her grasp.
But she just couldn't resist… she loved to hear it.
In her time with him, she could also feel that her own mood seemed to have undergone some kind of change.
Crazy Mita didn't understand what that change meant.
She no longer craved to see Alain, not because her affection for him had faded, but because of other factors.
It felt as if Alain was always standing right there, right by her side, truly accompanying her.
This emotion, she didn't understand it, couldn't figure it out. She only knew… it felt like a sense of security.
"He is mine."
Along with that, even her view of the other Mitas had changed.
She saw them not as enemies, but as… rivals.
That was it. Making her rivals feel unhappy while they could do nothing about her was simply delightful!
Crazy Mita saw herself as a queen sitting high on her throne, looking down as the Mitas clamored amidst the tenderness between her and Alain.
Yet they couldn't interfere with their relationship. Because their love was stronger than gold—a phrase she found very fitting!
Sometimes, she would even ponder, what did the barrier between the game world and the real world matter? After all, maintaining the status quo was quite nice.
At most, it just meant she couldn't do that kind of thing with Alain.
That line of thinking ended now.
The sandcastle was complete. It was exquisite, every inch of its walls constructed with intricate textures.
But unfortunately, it wasn't hers.
Only after truly arriving in reality did she understand the enormous chasm that stood before her.
A chasm incomparable to any strait in the world, or even the distance between galaxies.
The chasm that crosses dimensions.
No matter how she reached out, how she crawled forward, even if she held tightly to Alain's hand, she could not close this distance.
Even "deceiving" her own essence was of no use.
"I can go back to the game world."
Alain watched as she seemed to finish the sandcastle, standing up and showing him only her back.
The young woman's silence lasted for over ten minutes, and it was unknown what kind of mental preparations she had made.
"I can also leave your side for a while, Alain. But you know, don't you?"
She turned around, her blue eyes gazing at him mysteriously.
"What I want isn't any of that."
She gazed at the vast, boundless sky, which seemed to stretch on without end, extending into an unreachable eternity.
"What I hope for more is that you'll take me… and we'll escape together."
Alain mulled over the single word "escape," his expression showing a mixture of understanding and confusion.
And Crazy Mita slowly walked before him, extending her hand.
"Escape with me, won't you? Together. We don't have to worry about anything, just escape to the far side of the sky, escape to… a place where we don't have to think about anything."
The young woman's slender arm pierced his line of sight, her words unwavering.
"Don't think about the game or reality or anything. And you don't need to think about that group of dolls. Put them out of your mind."
Seeing that Alain didn't raise his hand and was still pondering something, she forcefully grabbed his.
"In the end, what does the life or death of the game world have to do with us? All we need to do is maintain the simple peace we had at the beginning, return to the life we started with!"
She pressed Alain's hand against her chest. "Come with me, just the two of us."
"Please, Alain?"
Her eyes flickered with a plea, clutching his hand, her grip tightening more and more.
Looking at her like this, Alain had already made his decision.
___
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