"However!"
Before the Vouivre could celebrate, Shiro suddenly raised his voice.
"If you want to stay here, you're not allowed to call me Mother anymore. Understand?"
"Why...?"
"I don't care whether you call me by my name or call me big brother. Either way, feminine titles are completely forbidden!"
"...Papa?"
"Are you trying to say 'Papa'? Wait, where did you even learn that word?"
Shiro rubbed his brow with a headache.
He could at least explain "Mother" as something she had heard from Alfia earlier.
But where had "Papa" come from?
Surely the adventurers who tried to hurt Wiene had not somehow been beaten badly enough by her that they started calling her daddy.
"In dreams."
The Vouivre's answer made Shiro pause.
"Lots of things... all red. Scary dreams."
She clearly did not know how to describe what she had seen, so she struggled to express it using the small vocabulary she possessed.
"In the dream, I was always angry. But then... slowly, it became very cold."
"Lots of people attacked me."
"It hurt."
"..."
Shiro fell silent.
Then, sensing the faint presence watching from somewhere nearby, he spoke to Alfia.
"Before I sent you to bring her back, didn't I say I wanted to know how the Dungeon created its so-called 'finished products'?"
He looked at Wiene with a complicated expression.
"After seeing this Vouivre, I think I understand now."
"The answer is a cycle."
"First, the Dungeon creates a monster without intelligence, something that acts entirely on instinct. Then it sends those monsters to attack adventurers."
"During those battles, the monsters learn the adventurers' behavior and ways of thinking."
"When the monsters are eventually killed, their souls are reclaimed and used to create the next generation."
"And then the same process repeats."
Again and again.
With each cycle, the monsters gradually became more like humans.
Eventually, the result was a monster capable of human intelligence and emotion.
A being like the Vouivre standing in front of them.
What Wiene called dreams were not really dreams.
They were fragments of experiences from her previous lives.
Before becoming a normal intelligent life-form, she had been forced through an endless cycle of killing and being killed.
If Shiro had never taken that shattered Divinity from the deepest part of the Dungeon, perhaps one day every monster within it would eventually have developed intelligence like Wiene's.
And when that happened...
The hatred carved into the bones and souls of monsters through countless previous lives might eventually have erupted into a devastating war against humanity.
Worse, monsters could continually be reborn through the Dungeon.
Until someone capable of reaching its deepest floor appeared, as Shiro had, that war might never end.
The disaster it caused could easily surpass even the Great Feud Alfia had triggered seven years ago.
"Cy... cle?"
Wiene tilted her head and nodded despite clearly understanding only part of what he said.
Previous lives were ultimately previous lives.
Aside from the intelligence engraved into her soul, the only way they could affect her current life was through dreams.
Normally, dreams faded quickly after waking.
Yet there was one thing Wiene remembered clearly.
"...So beautiful."
She suddenly murmured.
"Beautiful?"
"Mm."
Wiene touched her chest.
"There was a hole here. It hurt so much."
"But compared to that... the way those people protected someone... was beautiful."
Her speech was still halting, but Shiro understood what she meant.
In one of her previous lives, an adventurer had killed the Vouivre she once was while protecting a companion.
Yet instead of hating the person who had killed her...
Wiene admired them.
Shiro was not sure whether to call that innocence or stupidity.
"What's wrong, Papa?"
Seeing Shiro frown, Wiene tilted her head curiously.
"Nothing. And stop calling me..."
Shiro paused, then sighed.
"Forget it. Call me whatever you want. Just remember to call me Big Brother when other people are around."
At this point, he no longer had the energy to keep correcting her.
Papa was still better than Mother.
"Oh, right."
Shiro had originally been about to ask Alfia to help Wiene find some proper clothes, but another thought suddenly occurred to him.
"Do you have a name?"
"...Papa?"
"That isn't your name. That's what you call me... No, damn it, that isn't my name either."
Shiro sighed again.
"Anyway, since you don't have one yet, I'll take the liberty of giving you one."
"How about Wiene?"
"Wiene?"
"Yeah."
Shiro smiled faintly.
"The first part comes from the character used in 'rose,' and the second from one associated with affection."
"If you don't like it, we could normally change it..."
He paused.
"Though because of some rather complicated circumstances, names are a little special for living beings."
"So even if you don't like this one, I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to put up with it."
"Wiene..."
The Vouivre quietly repeated it.
"My name... is Wiene."
Fortunately, she seemed to love it.
The moment she accepted the name, an innocent and radiant smile blossomed across her face.
At the same time, countless points of light suddenly appeared in the surrounding air.
They gathered together and formed Alfia's figure.
Her human form, specifically.
After releasing her earlier, Shiro had also removed the restriction on the Magic supplied to Alfia.
Without Magic and without a physical body of her own, she would otherwise fall into a dormant state.
"What did you mean just now?"
"Hm? Which part?"
"The part about names being special for living beings."
For some reason, Alfia looked unusually impatient.
"It's a little complicated to explain."
Shiro thought briefly.
"Once you gain some ability related to fate, you'll probably understand it naturally."
"For now, you can think of it this way."
"Wiene is the name she was destined to have."
A name was a special symbol used to identify an individual.
But names were not nearly as simple as they appeared.
You could not point at a random weed beside the road, declare its name to be Water, and suddenly expect it to extinguish flames.
A person could invent countless aliases.
But only the designation that truly represented a thing could properly be called its name.
Under extreme circumstances, names could produce unexpected effects.
Certain special spells could use them to lock onto a target.
Other forms of magic could include them within chants to summon specific existences.
It sounded absurd.
But names were inherently mysterious things.
And Wiene was the name fate itself had chosen to represent the Vouivre standing before him.
"Then what about me?"
"You want me to give you a new name too?"
Shiro grinned.
Then he saw Alfia slowly raising one hand.
"Wait. I was joking."
His teasing expression instantly disappeared.
"You're asking what effect a name has on someone like you, someone who was resurrected, right?"
Shiro studied her face.
"You want to resurrect Meteria?"
"Is that not allowed?"
"It's not that you can't."
Shiro scratched his head.
"If all you want is for Meteria to come back to life, then we only need to wait a while."
"But judging from your expression, you want to resurrect her yourself eventually."
"Now is not the time."
Alfia shook her head.
"That child had no talent."
"The only thing she truly possessed was kindness."
Her voice softened almost imperceptibly.
"I don't want the first thing she sees when she opens her eyes again to be a world like this."
"That would be far too cruel for her."
In Alfia's own words, Meteria had been an ordinary person who possessed almost nothing except kindness.
Allowing someone like her to live in the current environment might not necessarily be a blessing.
Even so, Alfia had loved that younger sister deeply.
And so...
"Before that day comes, let us put the final period on Orario's age of turmoil."
A cold smile appeared at the corner of Alfia's lips.
It was a declaration directed toward the entire city.
…