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Because I was not allowed to know the reality, it was all I could do.

Truth.

Escaping the Playground.

Marcus Lynton.

Luck.

How did it all come together? No, was it even all linked in the first place? I could only assume as much as if I thought otherwise, then there\'d be no end to the speculation.

I recalled the final day of the Aurigan Fighting Festival.

Avon Laura\'s words.

"Unfortunately... My power was unable to foresee what eventually occurred."

After asking about the incident, she replied like so.

That\'s right.

It wasn\'t only me.

I wasn\'t the only one prevented from knowing the truth.

Just as how I, the Concept of Truth, am unable to know the truth.

The Concept of Destiny, too, was unable to see the very future she represents.

"To this day, I still don\'t know if that was because the future changed, or due to the... \'nature\' of the incident."

Then, what did she mean by the incident\'s \'nature\'?

The fact she held some sort of knowledge about it was evident, but I knew she wouldn\'t be willing to tell me just like that.

That\'s the primary reason why I let her live on that day, after all.

So that, at some point, she will tell me.

Perhaps, next time we face each other, I should try to force it out of her. No, I will.

Just as I was thinking this, my train of thought was interrupted when something poked my left cheek, causing my head to tilt to the right.

"...?"

Rotating my head, my eyes landed upon Sophie Asanami\'s intrigued expression, her finger moving around as she pressed my face repeatedly.

"...What are you doing?"

Staring intently at my face, her brows furrowed.

"What\'re you so busy thinkin\' about when you\'ve got such a pretty girl sittin\' right next to you?"

"...Excuse me?"

She continued to mush my face with her finger as if playing with dough. I thought that her statement of calling herself \'such a pretty girl\' was rather narcissistic, albeit not necessarily wrong.

Ignoring me, she frowned.

"Hey, why are you so soft?"

"What?"

"Your skin, it\'s so smooth. Now that I think about it, your hair is suspiciously nice, too. What products do you use...?"

With wonder, she widened her eyes and asked me. \'Suspiciously nice\'? What is she talking about now, all of a sudden?

"What\'s wrong with you? I just use whatever\'s available. There\'s like twenty bottles of things I\'ve never heard of in the bathroom, so I either use the all-in-one bottle or just take one at random and use it."

Before leaving the Playground, I never had to take care of myself or my body in such ways as there were always people whose job was to clean and look after me. Since the escape, I\'ve had to learn about things like \'shampoo\' and \'conditioner\'.

After moving into Minami\'s mansion, however, the number of strange things spotted in the bathroom appeared to have multiplied, and I have no idea what anything is any more.

I didn\'t know if it was a girl thing, but even the twins seemed oddly adamant that I purchase the correct type of oils or serums for their hair.

I, quite frankly, couldn\'t care less about using ten different products for my hair and five more for my body, so I just used the three-in-one bottle. If we ran out of it, then I\'d simply pick any one of the seven or eight bottles that had the word shampoo or conditioner on it and used that instead.

I\'m not sure if my answer came as a bombshell out of the blue, but Sophie\'s reaction clearly displayed her astonishment.

"All-in-one?! Random?! You ain\'t kiddin\' me, right?!"

"What? Do you have a problem with it?"

Her eyes, which seemed about ready to spill over with a dam full of tears at any moment, glistened with refracted light as she grabbed both sides of my face with her hands and cried out.

"You little...! Son of a bitch! Do you know how hard I work to get my hair to look this good!? And you...! You use the damn all-in-one! And it still looks damn fine!"

Was it like that?

I didn\'t understand why it was something to get so riled up and mad about, but what can I do if I was born like it?

"What\'s wrong with your hair?"

Asking that question out of genuine curiosity, my gaze in the meantime flickered to the Festival once more. Observing all the bobbing heads of people walking around the stalls with expressions of glee, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.

"What do you mean \'what\'s wrong with it\'? Okay, what do you think about my hair, then?"

"..."

Ignoring her, my eyes narrowed on something in the distance. My vision honed in, I slowly stood up from my seat.

"Hey, don\'t ignore me! Where\'re you goin\'?"

Not moving my gaze, I ordered in a low tone.

"Protect me."

Sensing that something was off, Sophie also warily took a stand. Following my gaze, she wasn\'t sure what exactly I was looking at because of the busy Festival grounds, but she at least gathered that it wasn\'t the time to be joking around.

"What\'s going on?"

"Just stay close to me and make sure you don\'t drop your guard."

"..."

She gulped, not understanding what was happening all of a sudden, but knew that any further questions were pointless.

"Fine. I\'ll keep an eye out, so let\'s just go."

Making our way down the hilltop, the two of us entered the bustling Festival atmosphere once again. Grasping our hands tightly to ensure we don\'t get separated in the herd, we gradually walked over to a less crowded area with more freedom of movement.

There, we stood face-to-face with a man I hadn\'t seen in ten years.

"You\'re here. Cipher."

"..."

His face having aged significantly, grey-black hairs sticking out from his head, Marcus Lynton stood in front of me.

"...You look like shit even more than before."

His emaciated cheeks and hollow, baggy eyes with dark circles beneath them were enough of an indication to show that he was going through some rough times, but seeing such a look on him brought me only a sense of satisfaction.

"Ahaha," He chuckled with an eerily warm smile, "Come now, Cipher. That\'s no way to treat your old man, is it?"

I frowned at his words. Casting a glance at Sophie\'s face beside me that seemed to ask \'Dad...?\', I refuted him.

"We both know that isn\'t true."

Marcus Lynton was not my father, but this rather vile reunion reminded me that he liked to think of himself as such.

"Well, yes. We may not be related biologically, however, am I not like a father to all those subjects in S.C.? After all, who else could you say fits the bill more than I?"

As the Head Administrator and Manager of the San Cinelia branch of the Wardens\' Playground, Professor Marcus Lynton seemed to take pride in the fact that his authority was the highest of any Wardens\' official in that place.

Just as he was the head of the branch, he likewise thought of himself as the head of the so-called \'family\' he oversaw.

Said \'family\' means, \'subjects\' kept in captivity by the Wardens. Everyone they had secured who they thought could pose a threat to humanity, they locked up and stored away for eternity.

It wasn\'t something known to the public, but the Wardens are in fact the main reason why people born with rare Measurements appear enormously scarcer to the wider world than they are in reality.

Because even Measurements with the slightest possibility of causing harm will be thrown into containment, those that are uncommon or exceptional in nature are especially watched with wariness.

Of course, rarer Measurements naturally possess a higher capacity for danger and are thus the ones most likely to be hunted down.

Compared to someone who can sense the level of purity of water with but a touch, for example, someone who knows exactly how much TNT-equivalent of explosives will be enough to blow up any building they look at is going to be classified as a far more dangerous threat, despite the latter being an arguably much more useless ability than the former.

Part of it is just a precaution; no matter how minor the risk of letting them live freely, a hazard is still a hazard, and if potential harm can be prevented, no matter how small, then they will do their best to snuff out that potential.

Another part of it is to study these more unique Measurements; because Measurements are something science does not and cannot explain, they do their best to research them in secret from the world in an attempt to aid humanity\'s betterment.

Although the currently most accepted theory is that Measurements are simply part of our brain, developed through evolution, and are what separates us from other creatures, the human brain has not yet been fully understood.

I and the Wardens are aware that the truth isn\'t quite like that, but that\'s a topic for another time.

In any case, Marcus Lynton\'s words were unfortunately correct that no one aside from him could be the \'father\' of S.C.P. - San Cinelia Playground.

That was due to his tendency to get deeply involved with the subjects themselves, as in, he would personally conduct research experiments to see how far each of us could go.

I, in particular, seemed to have been his favourite to toy and experiment with.

Two years before my escape, he was transferred to the San Cinelia branch and replaced the then-head because apparently I was "causing too much trouble" and it was getting hard to deal with.

"You, on the other hand, appear to have grown significantly."

His mysterious gaze alternating between me and Sophie, even glancing down to our hands that were still connected, he chuckled.

"Look how far you\'ve come since those old days when you would play all sorts of games with the Professors, even managing to get yourself a girlfriend."

That sinister smile on his face didn\'t go away as he spoke.