Chapter 73: I Know You Are Searching for an Answer

"What a coincidence, I was looking for you too, Mr. Kirisaki." Yuki had no intention of letting Tregear steer the conversation; he decided to take a risk. Seeing that Tregear seemed to be in a good mood, he cut him off mid-sentence and tried to seize the initiative.

Tregear was taken aback. He had only meant to tease this young man for a bit, but hadn’t expected Yuki to confront him so directly, leaving him momentarily at a loss for words.

If he was to pick up the conversation, the only thing he could say was, "What do you want with me?"

"Hmm..." Yuki weighed his words, glanced at the manager—who had now gone to the register to ring up a customer—then reached into an inner pocket and pulled out a red recruitment card. He laid it flat on the table and pushed it toward Tregear.

Perhaps the lighting at the bar was too dim, for Tregear had to bring the card closer, resting his chin on the back of his hand as he scrutinized it. Yuki simply sat in silence, his gaze drifting across the rows of gleaming bottles on the opposite wall.

"What is this supposed to mean?" Tregear pushed the card back toward Yuki, a note of uncertainty in his voice. He was curious—very curious.

Yuki had already been preparing his answer, but hadn’t expected the opportunity so soon. He replied, "Consider it... a thank-you gift."

"A thank-you gift? This is a present?" Tregear picked up the well-made card, set one corner against the tabletop, pressed another with his fingertip, and gave it a gentle flick, setting the card spinning between his finger and the table.

Watching the card spin, Tregear seemed momentarily lost in thought. He didn’t understand what Yuki meant. To him, the card looked like a recruitment notice, the kind that lures in the willing, so how was it suddenly a gift?

"Because I know you’re searching for an answer. Who knows? Maybe what you’re looking for is there." Yuki propped up his head with one hand, trying to keep his tone as even as possible.

From this point, the conversation was entering dangerous territory. One wrong step and it would veer into "You don’t understand anything," and the discussion would end right there.

As expected, Tregear’s spinning of the card slowed noticeably.

"You know what answer I’m looking for?"

"I don’t. If I did, I’d just tell you." Yuki sighed inwardly. Who could he blame for this uncertainty? Perhaps the screenwriters of the R/B movie, the Taiga series, the Taiga movie, and Tregear’s official novel, all stabbing each other in the back.

Since the writers hadn’t settled on a final outcome, Tregear had been killed off in the Taiga movie. It was said that, given Grimdo’s nature, he might be resurrected in another dimension, but no further stories ever followed.

Just what answer was Tregear seeking?

For now, Yuki could only reach one conclusion—maybe even Tregear himself didn’t know.

"I only know... the answer you seek isn’t in the light."

At these words, Yuki could feel Tregear’s eyes on him. Since entering the bar, Tregear hadn’t looked at him directly, but now his gaze was open and searching.

"Nor is it in the darkness."

At this, Yuki seemed to recall something and gave a soft laugh. "Sometimes, I really envy you, Mr. Kirisaki."

"Envy?"

"Yes. Because of your race, your kind lives a very long time. That means your cost of making mistakes is very low."

"You see, if you’re searching for an answer, you can exhaust the light first. If you don’t find what you want, you can try the darkness. If you were from a short-lived race, you’d have to be extremely careful, looking for patterns, searching for methods to get a highly credible answer before acting. Any small mistake could cost your whole life—the price of error is too high. But your kind is different. You can use the process of elimination, try every possible path, because you have all the time you need."

Yuki exhaled softly. "I can’t guarantee the answer you want is here."

Better to emphasize that up front, just in case he was blamed later.

"But what if, by chance, the answer is here?" Almost immediately, Yuki saw disagreement in Tregear’s eyes. It was like a reflex—Tregear instinctively rejected the idea that the answer he wanted could be found in any human military organization.

This reflex made no sense, as if it was born not of careful reasoning but of some kind of prejudice. Seeing an opening, Yuki pressed on, trying to persuade him.

"If you don’t have anything important going on these next few years, why not take a look? If you decide your answer isn’t there, you can leave whenever you want. Who could stop you?"

"Spending three to five years to rule out a wrong path—what do you think?"

It shouldn’t be a loss. Tregear had already wasted so many years in both light and darkness; surely, three or five more years, a mere blink of an eye, wouldn’t matter to him.

"Perhaps, in those three to five years, you’ll find the answer you’re looking for."

If you let a stereotype eliminate the right answer, wouldn’t that be a shame?

Yuki understood one thing: miss this opportunity, and it would never come again—for both him and Tregear.

The momentum of the story was slowly but inexorably pushing the plot forward. Even as Yuki prepared to leave Earth for his interstellar journey, the script would hardly pause to wait for him.

Or perhaps, he had never truly left the stage of "Taiga"; this universe itself was a vast stage, and his journey among the stars was just another scene in the play.

Tregear was undeniably one of the main characters upon this stage. But if, by the end of the Taiga series, he still hadn’t found the answer he sought, then after the final curtain, the odds of him ever finding his answer beyond the script—by coincidence or fate—would be vanishingly small.

Perhaps he would simply be lost.

Perhaps he would be gone forever.