WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Hydrogen B

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 83: What's Your Name

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The impromptu interrogation was quick and simple.

While Tyr pretended not to notice and avoided his gaze, Shei dragged over a desk and chair, sat across from him, laced her fingers together, and rested her chin on them.

"Now then. First. I've been meaning to ask this, but I never had the chance."

Facing Shei's sharp stare, he looked anxiously at Tyr. Tyr pressed her lips together and lowered her parasol to hide her eyes.

Now alone with him, Shei stared him down and asked,

"What's your name?"

Overwhelmed by Shei's intimidating presence, he glanced around nervously before answering with difficulty.

"Tyr."

"Hm? Did you call me?"

Tyr raised her parasol slightly. Shei waved a hand.

"No. He must have misunderstood my question."

Shei glared at him again and spoke more clearly.

"No, your name."

"Tyr..."

Once might have been a mistake, but twice was a pattern. After he introduced himself as Tyr twice in a row, Tyr approached with a puzzled look.

"Do we share the same name? Tyr? What an incredible coincidence."

"I don't think so. He must be confused because he just heard your name. Wait."

Shei gripped Skywarbler, held it upright, and turned its side toward him.

Heavenly Sword Technique, Heavenly Mirror.

A mirage was the reflection of land in the sky. When uneven air spread far enough, it bent light in every direction.

Skywarbler, compressed space itself, refracted the light and reflected his face exactly. Shei pointed at his reflection in the mirror.

"Look! Not Tyr, this person! You in the mirror!"

"Me... My name."

His eyes widened at once. It was the first intense change in his expression. He covered his pained face with his hands and sharply sucked in a breath.

Shei did not hurry him and simply watched. Tyr could not bear it any longer and stepped in.

"Let us stop here. It seems our eagerness got the better of us. If there is something you wish to ask, we should take our time and learn it slowly."

Shei firmly shook her head.

"Wait. He'll remember. Even if he's lost his sense of self, information as old and frequently used as a name won't be forgotten easily. If he'd forgotten the name he'd used his whole life, he'd have forgotten language too."

"But..."

"And asking his name is necessary if we want to find his other memories. A name is one of the most important things that makes up the self."

Knowledge brought certainty, and certainty created confidence.

Shei's words were unexpectedly logical and assured, so Tyr could only step back without another word. Instead, she clasped her hands together and worried for his well-being.

After a long time had passed, while his strained groans continued and Tyr's heart burned black like a fuse, he finally broke the long silence and forced out a word.

"...Hyu."

The two of them could not tell whether it was a word spoken after much thought or merely a groan. When Tyr realized his groaning had stopped, she asked again.

"Did you say Hyu?"

He nodded. Only then did Shei realize it was his name, and she looked confused.

"Hyu? That's your name?"

He nodded again. Shei studied his face for a moment, lost in thought.

'No surname? Ah, he said he was an orphan. Still, if he's a high-ranking officer in the military state, they usually make themselves a surname... Surnames did lose much of their meaning after the kingdom disappeared. Maybe he has no attachment to a name he made himself?'

As Shei fell silent in thought, Tyr cautiously approached and called his name.

"Hyu?"

At the sound of his name, he turned his head toward her. He had reacted to his own name.

Tyr smiled warmly at him.

"Hyu. So that is your name. I learned it far too late. If I had known earlier, I would have called you by it more often."

Unlike Tyr, who accepted it without a trace of doubt, Shei still could not let go of her suspicions.

'Seeing how he reacts, it probably is his name. It isn't an alias, is it? No. If I start thinking that far, there will be no end to it.'

Shei frowned and repeated the name to herself for a while, searching through her memories of regression for even a similar name.

"Hyu. Hyu. Hyu..."

"Do you know that name?"

"Wait. Humanist, heuristic, Hyu... No way."

"No way?"

After thinking for a long time, Shei shook her head.

"Never heard it before. I couldn't find any similar name either."

Tyr answered in a deflated voice.

"Then why did you drag it out for so long? If you don't know, you should have said so from the beginning."

"That makes it even more suspicious. A name I don't know? If he were an important figure, especially a military state instructor, I would know almost all of them..."

It was a reasonable point from Shei's perspective.

She had already experienced thirteen regressions, and during about half of them, she had clashed with the military state. She remembered most famous military state figures. If he were an instructor with such extraordinary abilities, there was no way she would not remember him.

'Unless he died in the Abyss...'

Tyr heard Shei's muttering and hesitated. Through the golem's words, she had learned that he was not an instructor.

Tyr herself did not care about that at all, but she was not sure whether she should tell Shei, so she forcibly changed the subject.

"The world is vast. There must be many people you don't know. More importantly."

Tyr put away her parasol and hurried over.

"Hyu."

He turned his head and looked at Tyr. Tyr happily called his name again.

"Hyu."

"Yes."

"Hyu."

She called his name twice for no reason. Once in a slightly higher tone, then once in a slightly lower one.

As though she were singing his name, she called to him. He tilted his head, then said the name of the person calling him.

"...Tyr."

"Hehe. So this is your name, Hyu."

Simply knowing his name seemed to satisfy Tyr, and she could not stop calling it. If left alone, she looked as though she would spend the entire day saying his name.

Still, they could not wait for Tyr, who did not know boredom, to have her fill of it. Shei stopped Tyr before she could call him again and asked,

"All right, Hyu? I don't know if it's real, but at least we know what to call you. So what is your rank?"

The question wiped the smile from Tyr's lips and made her wary. He received Shei's question with an expression of utter confusion.

"Rank...?"

"If you're really an instructor, you must have a rank."

"Uh..."

When he failed to answer and fumbled for words, Tyr quickly jumped in to protect him.

"A rank? Are such trivial things important? It would only confuse him, and it isn't important anyway."

"But nothing is as important as rank if we want to know his position in the military state."

"Ranks can change at any time. He may have forgotten such unstable information. Let us move on to something else. Hyu?"

Tyr swiftly skipped the question and called to him before Shei could ask again. Since she had not thought of anything else to ask, she blurted out the first question that came to mind.

"Do you have a favorite food?"

The world was relative, and it might have been a very important question to someone, but it was not one Shei cared about. Shei complained.

"What kind of question is that? You said rank wasn't important, but this is even more useless."

"You are not the only one asking questions."

"No, apart from his name, I haven't asked anything that important either..."

"Stop chattering. Must you nitpick everything your teacher does?"

"You only call yourself my teacher at times like this..."

After using forceful logic to shut Shei up, Tyr quietly waited for his answer. He thought hard, then gave a single word.

"Beans."

"Beans?"

Beans meant the canned food piled high in the cafeteria. Tyr was pleased. At least she could make plenty of the food he liked.

Then a question burst out from an unexpected direction.

"The more I think about it, the stranger it is!"

"What is?"

"That he likes beans! It makes no sense!"

"How strange. Why is it a problem to like beans?"

The beans Tyr knew were an extremely useful crop.

Still, Shei spoke as if it were common knowledge that everyone in the world hated beans.

"The raw material for military state canned beans is Chimera Beans, one of the military state's Seven Great Inventions. It's a plantable fertilizer for fallow fields. Plant it once, and the land becomes fertile enough for abundant harvests through the year after next."

"A plentiful harvest? Then it sounds wonderful."

"Right. It's good as fertilizer, but those beans... No. Never as food."

Just recalling them appeared to give her chills, and Shei shuddered as she cried out,

"Fertilizer might actually be better food. If you plant Chimera Beans, huge beans grow all over the field, but despite their size, they taste awful. Their texture is like mud, they smell fishy and harsh, and they stick to your tongue so badly that you can't swallow them without water. There is even a saying that a cow which has starved for three days would refuse them!"

A cow that had starved for three days would refuse them, yet there had been mountains of canned beans in the cafeteria.

Tyr tilted her head.

"Despite that, everyone seems to eat the beans in those cans often."

"That's because the military state collects those enormous amounts of Chimera Beans and distributes them! Canning them makes them taste a hundred times better. Otherwise, the military state would have collapsed several times over. It's a great invention, but as food, it's torture!"

"...Is that why you alone have never eaten canned beans?"

"Uh? I guess so."

Tyr let out a deep sigh and scolded Shei.

"I did not know either, so I cannot say much, but after hearing this, it seems too cruel. Shei, did you not even share food?"

"Huh?"

In other words, had Shei eaten delicious food alone while everyone else ate beans?

Shei blinked, then waved her hands in excuse.

"No. I asked Azzy to eat with me many times! It's just that my items are food heavily seasoned with spices or salt, so they didn't suit Azzy!"

"Then you never offered any to Hyu."

"Uh? Yeah..."

Shei nodded weakly. Tyr's gaze turned colder. Shei flinched and shrank back.

Tyr let out a small sigh, set down the parasol she had been carrying, and stood before him.

"Let us stop. To pry answers from someone whose heart is hurting... We should not have done this in the first place."

"Huh? We haven't even finished asking about his abilities..."

"Have you forgotten what the note said? Did it not emphasize that we should leave him alone even if his condition became strange? You were distant enough that you did not even share food in normal times, so what right do you have to demand answers?"

"That may be true, but we don't necessarily have to follow that..."

"It is a matter of trust. If you cannot even follow the note placed in your hands, how can you face him? Will you continue meeting him with a mask on?"

Tyr's words were correct. So perfectly so that there was no need to point it out.

Still, Shei had something to say. Rarely, she raised her voice at Tyr.

"He's the one wearing a mask!"

While he blinked at being suddenly singled out, Shei spewed the words with blazing eyes.

"Has he ever properly opened up and told us anything? Until he spoke today, I didn't even know his name! Be honest. If we were really supposed to see each other's faces without masks, like you said, shouldn't he have told us from the start?"

"Shei."

"Besides, he's hiding something right now! I think I would feel more at ease if we solved that! If I get curious, he drives me away. If I ask, he says it's a secret. When I try to question him, he says he lost his memories. How can I not be suspicious?"

Shei did not want to doubt him either.

They had fought a few times, he had teased her, and they had even cooperated in battle.

And though she did not want to admit it, she had grown rather attached to him.

But to one who had seen the future, one who had peered beyond the curtain... the present was an arsenal full of fuses, explosives that could go off at any moment.

Because the man known as 'he' was an instructor in the military state, Shei had to stay wary of him at all times. He might have been the one who had corrupted every piece of the coming end.

"If he doesn't want to be suspected, he should have been honest from the beginning! He does all kinds of suspicious things himself...! I want to trust him too!"

"If you wish to trust him, should you not approach him step by step and earn his trust rather than interrogating him like this?"

"It's pointless! Because I'll...!"

'Go back anyway.'

Shei swallowed the rest of her words.

Tyr looked at Shei anew. Though Shei's outward appearance did not differ greatly from Tyr's... her body was still far too young.

Tyr had thought of Shei as young several times, but Shei was young both objectively and subjectively.

After calming herself, Tyr spoke to Shei in a gentler, more composed manner.

"Everyone has at least one thing that is difficult to say. Judging from what was written in the note, he did not want his identity revealed. Could you not wait a little?"

"...Hmph. Forget it. Nothing we learned now is reliable anyway. He called himself Tyr, and he said his favorite food was beans."

Shei sharply turned around.

"I'm leaving. Handle the rest yourselves."

Shei disappeared into the room. The door slammed shut with a bang. The tightly closed door showed no sign of opening again.

All they had learned was one name, Hyu. And, incidentally, that he liked beans.

Tyr was completely satisfied with that alone... but an unanswered question still lingered in a corner of her mind.

"Hyu. Why did you tell such a lie from the very beginning?"

Tyr asked Hyu that.

Naturally, he could not answer.

Footnotes:

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