Alphard stepped closer and took the small stone in his hands. It glowed with a vibrant orange hue, and the instant it touched his skin, he felt an overwhelming current of power radiating from within it. He walked slowly toward Charlotte and showed her what he'd found.
"Look, boss. What's this supposed to be?"
At the sight of the glow, Charlotte shot upright, still sitting on the ground but now wide-eyed, a flare of pure astonishment lighting up her face.
"It can't be... Antonie, get over here!"
Despite his injuries, Antonie managed to push himself up and limped toward them with clear effort. Reaching them, Charlotte immediately held up the orange gem for him to see.
Antonie studied the crystal's surface and spiritual density carefully. Unwilling to rush a verdict, he decided the wisest move was to transport it back for Oliver to examine thoroughly. Charlotte's eyes returned to normal, though her expression still betrayed the intense hope of standing before the very treasure they'd spent so long searching for.
"I felt an incredible power coming off it. I'm guessing you all noticed it too. Is this the Lament Gem?" Alphard offered.
"It's still too soon to say for certain. It could be a mystical object, or it could be a sacred artifact — and honestly, we'd better hope it's the latter," Charlotte explained.
Meanwhile, the rest of the squad struggled back to their feet. Evelyn, aching and bleeding faintly from a cut on her head, brushed off the injury without a second thought and walked over to join the others. Philip did the same, his steps heavy with exhaustion.
The only one still lying on the ground was Didier; at first glance he looked unconscious, but the steady rise and fall of his chest confirmed he was still breathing. At that, Alphard approached, lifted him carefully, and carried him on his back toward the carriage.
Reaching the spot where the carriage waited, everyone climbed aboard and set off for home, not before offering their sincere thanks to the district's kind residents.
Charlotte, for her part, kept her gaze fixed on some distant point, visibly lost in thought, clearly troubled; it was the first time Alphard had seen her wear that particular expression. Still, he chose not to press the matter, aware it wasn't his place to ask.
The weather had settled back to normal, but even with the sun blazing overhead, an icy wind kept blowing, leaving the whole team, battered and worn from exhaustion and injury, shivering faintly.
Arriving in the Vauclaire district, the group climbed out of the vehicle and headed into the station. Didier had already regained consciousness, and despite the severe exhaustion still weighing him down, he managed to stay on his feet all the way down to the underground level. But the moment they crossed the threshold into Charlotte's office, he collapsed into a deep sleep on the sofa.
Charlotte took her seat behind the desk while the rest stood waiting in silence for their boss to speak. Antonie wasn't among them, having been sent ahead to track down Oliver so the gem could be analyzed right away.
Charlotte kept that same cold, severe expression she always wore. With composure and a firm voice, she broke the silence:
"We're likely looking at one of the greatest milestones in this organization's entire history. The Lament Gem — stolen by angels from a fallen god, according to the oldest records — is an extraordinary find."
"How powerful is it, exactly?" Alphard cut in.
"Far too powerful. Even without the god's full power behind it, it could rank well beyond Category 1, Axiom. To give you some sense of scale, it's roughly comparable to a Key 9 object."
It was obvious, honestly. Just touching it, I could feel a power that shouldn't even be possible. From how she's describing it, Axiom sounds dangerous enough on its own — but if this goes even beyond that, then there's a real chance we're not the only ones out looking for it.
"If it does turn out to be the Lament Gem, we're at even greater risk. There's likely someone else out there hunting for it too."
At that exact moment, Charlotte realized that keeping the gem stored on the physical plane was too great a risk to allow. Without hesitation, she ordered Philip to join Oliver in finding a suitable vessel capable of concealing it on the spiritual plane.
Still, Alphard found himself wondering whether an ordinary object could really withstand a burden of that magnitude, and he didn't hold back from voicing the concern out loud.
Charlotte's brow tightened, and she fixed Alphard with an icy stare, studying him with open suspicion at the impertinence.
"The object won't hold it on that plane permanently," she clarified sharply. "It simply transports it there, and returns it whenever it's needed. That's all there is to it."
At that, even as Alphard felt the sheer weight of Charlotte's judgment settle over him, he understood he wasn't in any position to argue over a subject whose basics he barely grasped. He lowered his head and nodded silently.
The atmosphere in the room grew heavy — not only from the coldness with which their boss asserted her authority, or the deep respect she commanded from the group, but because a crushing certainty hung in the air: this whole affair ran far more dangerous than any of them had imagined.
Alphard took up his cane and excused himself with a brief bow. He walked at an unhurried pace to the office door, in no rush at all to leave.
Inside, a flicker of frustration stirred at the thought that he hadn't contributed enough; for a moment, he'd assumed joining the group would grant him automatic access to all their information, but Charlotte herself had made it clear from day one that knowledge like that had to be earned. Far from discouraged, he began weighing the situation with a cool head as he made his way toward the elevator.
I should write this down in my notebook and try to connect the pieces.
After saying goodbye to Madeleine on the ground floor, Alphard caught a carriage home. The moment he arrived, he retreated to the privacy of his room; without wasting a second, he pulled out his notebook and began sketching out his first notes, determined to connect the dots and make sense of the flood of events he'd just witnessed.
What connection could the gem have to that old woman? Wasn't this supposed to be just a simple anomaly?
The gravity in the way Charlotte had described it made it clear this was something far more serious. But how had that monster gotten hold of the gem in the first place? Could it be tied to the God of Beasts somehow? Was there any connection to that note written in Japanese?
Alphard drew on everything he'd learned so far, focusing his mind to weave each piece together. The equation was beginning to take shape: if the monks had triggered his transmigration, their loyalty must belong to the God of Beasts.
If the note found in the cathedral had spoken of that very deity, then the old woman couldn't possibly be unconnected to that same cult. And if the gem stirred up such greed across so many factions, it followed logically that the monks had wanted to seize it as an offering to their god.
That, at least, explained the gem's immense importance. Still, at the very center of the whole chessboard remained a deeply personal mystery: why had Charlotte come looking for him, of all people, from the very start?
There's still no proof of anything, but... what if the Lament Gem is the answer to why I was transmigrated in the first place? There's only one thing that could confirm or completely break my whole theory.
Why was I brought here? Wait... that doesn't make sense. I remember the monks invoking the Goddess, not the God of Beasts. Hold on...
He closed his eyes for a moment as the images clicked into place in his mind. Invoking her in the Goddess's name hadn't been some random detail. If the gesture of that faith placed the womb at the sacred center of its worship, then that was the grim explanation behind the deep scar carved into his stomach.
Does Charlotte know about this?
The chain of events took on a chillingly coherent shape: the monks had transmigrated him in the Goddess's name; Noctis worshipped that very same deity and was searching for the Lament Gem; the gem had been in the old woman's possession, and she seemed tied to the God of Beasts.
That same entity mentioned in the Japanese note left by the other transmigrator... If that manuscript was right that the truth lay waiting in the ruins, then the God of Beasts held the answers. Alphard clenched his jaw; his arrival in this world hadn't been the simple whim of a sect of lunatics — and he was determined to find out the real reason behind it.
Without any certainty over whether Charlotte actually knew his true origin, Alphard couldn't ignore the ice-cold stare she'd fixed on him the moment the gem came up. He needed nothing more than that to stay on guard; that cold, measuring attention suggested Noctis's leader already suspected he was hiding something well outside the ordinary.
Adding to that was a memory even more unsettling: the moment he'd prayed beside Charlotte and witnessed that white-robed feminine figure.
The entity had made it perfectly clear that deceiving her was impossible, warning him too that he didn't belong among her servants. In the end, she'd granted him a glimpse of his own fate: sooner or later, he would come to rest in the lake she held cradled in her hands.
Most likely, that deity already knows I'm not from this world — through whatever ritual they used to bring me here — and somehow, Charlotte may have picked up on something off about me too. Some kind of anomaly.
Then again, maybe I'm just reading too much into this. Maybe Charlotte doesn't actually know anything about where I really came from.