It was a rare night without missions. In the base, the campfire crackled, dispelling the cold dampness of the Yellow Zone.
The Boss leaned against the wreckage of a scrapped mecha while Marianne rested her head on his lap, already fast asleep.
Livia sat beside him, quietly wiping her sidearm.
“Boss,” she suddenly spoke, breaking the silence, “is the sky… really blue?”
The Boss shifted his gaze from the flickering flames to the young girl who was curious about the color of the sky.
Her profile looked exceptionally soft in the firelight. Those blue eyes, which were usually as cold as ice, were currently filled with a child-like, pure thirst for knowledge.
His heart was suddenly stung by something, and the feeling was quite unpleasant.
At her age, in the peaceful era where he grew up, she should have been in a bright, clean school making three or five friends, worrying about a vague future, and enjoying a mundane yet slightly bitter youth.
But now, she was forced to stain her hands with blood, piloting a cold killing machine across the ruins of civilization, fighting for a dream she had never seen with her own eyes.
The Boss was a thorough idealist.
Even in that peaceful era, he had once tried to sketch a bright future with great hope. It was not just for his compatriots, but for all of humanity.
He looked away from Livia and toward the settlement not far away, where small lights twinkled under the dim canopy.
In this Yellow Zone, occupied by radiation and mutated creatures and destined to be full of danger and death, people with ideals were still striving to live, attempting to use their hands to repair the wounds brought by war.
The soldiers of the Army Without Borders stood guard at simple outposts with a sense of pride and honor that was almost naive.
They were children of this declining era. Throughout their lives, all they had seen besides hardship and suffering was endless death and conflict.
Despite this, they still resisted unyieldingly. Even with wolves surrounding them, they remained indomitable.
And he, The Boss, was lucky enough to be born in a better era and had seen the most brilliant form of human civilization.
What right did he have to wallow in self-pity here?
He looked at Livia and Marianne, children born in darkness whose courage and strength had not diminished in the slightest.
The emotions in his heart, which had been hardened by war, quietly softened at this moment.
“Yes,” he said softly. “The sky is blue. Just like your eyes, it is very beautiful and very gentle.”
Livia was slightly taken advantage of, subconsciously reaching out to touch the corner of her eye as if she wanted to feel the beautiful meaning bestowed upon her.
“Ehh?”
A muffled mumble sounded. Marianne, who was resting on his lap, woke up in a daze and happened to hear those words from The Boss.
She immediately sat up, rubbing her sleepy eyes and pouting her lips in feigned dissatisfaction.
“Hmph! Master, your skill in flirting with innocent girls has certainly improved! When are you going to use words like that to flirt with me?”
The Boss ignored Marianne’s jealousy-filled teasing. He simply smiled and spoke to Livia in an incredibly solemn tone.
“Once we defeat all the remaining separatist forces on this planet, I will rebuild the United Nations. After that, humanity will become one big family again. We will concentrate all our strength to repair the environment destroyed by war and restore the blue planet. Livia, you will definitely see the blue sky with your own eyes. I promise.”
He lifted his head and looked at the gray, oppressive sky, but his gaze seemed to pierce through the thick clouds of radioactive dust, seeing the extremely distant sea of stars in deep space that existed only in memory and ideals.
Livia keenly felt that deep in the heart of The Boss, there was a grander goal that he had never told anyone and had never wavered from.
Unifying this planet and rebuilding civilization seemed to be merely the process for him to achieve that ultimate goal.
It seemed… ‘He only wants to go to that unknown territory that humanity once briefly touched but never truly reached.’
That was his true ideal.
“Mhm,” Livia responded softly. In those blue eyes that were usually as calm as still water, a light called “expectation” ignited for the first time. “I look forward to the arrival of that day.”
……
With the activity of the Gemini, the war had achieved phased victories, but it subsequently entered a long period of stalemate.
The Third Order retracted its defensive lines, and both sides engaged in a cruel tug-of-war around several key resource areas.
Because of this, Livia received a rare vacation.
One afternoon, she was carrying a steaming cup of synthetic nutrient solution and passed by The Boss’s temporary office. She saw him hunched over his desk, writing furiously.
She thought it was some new battle plan, so she leaned in closer out of curiosity.
However, the dense text on the screen was not cold tactical instructions or intelligence analysis. Instead, it looked like… some kind of story.
“What are you looking at?”
The Boss was startled by the sudden voice. He scrambled to close the document, but it was already too late.
Caught red-handed by Livia, his face showed an embarrassed expression completely different from the majestic leader he was on the battlefield. He confessed:
“Actually… I’m writing a script. When I was young, my dream was to be a scriptwriter for text games, but unfortunately, things didn’t work out…”
Before he could finish, a ghostly figure popped out from nowhere and directly exposed a shocking piece of news.
“Ehh?! Master! So that script locked in your safe called Regarding My Reincarnation as a Villain Young Master Who Accidentally Captured the OP Heroine and Formed a Harem was written by your own hand?!”
Marianne stood with her hands on her hips, an “I knew it all along” expression of triumph on her face.
“…” The Boss’s expression collapsed instantly, as if he had heard news of the sky falling. “You… when did you find out?!”
“Hee-hee, I know a lot of your little secrets! For example, your favorite genre is actually pure Yuri love, but the things you write yourself are all a mess of harems. Do you have some kind of misunderstanding about your own preferences?”
“Stop! Stop right there!” The Boss’s face turned red as he hurriedly stopped her from speaking so recklessly. “If you keep talking, what little leader’s dignity I have left will truly vanish!”
However, Marianne, the poison-tongued maid, clearly did not intend to let him off. She continued to twist the knife.
“And another thing, your eye was never actually injured, right? Yet you wear an eye patch every day. Are you some kind of middle schooler with Chunibyo who ran out of an old-era anime? Is it true that a man is always a boy until he dies? Judging by the taste of your work, you’ve probably lived for nearly a century, haven’t you?”
Facing this barrage of complaints, The Boss actually calmed down. He shrugged helplessly.
“Am I really a Savior? No, I’m just an ordinary person who has lived a bit longer. Besides, a revolutionary is forever young. You wouldn’t understand that, would you?”
“Chunibyo Master!”
“You sharp-tongued brat!”
In this dark, heavy era where tomorrow was never guaranteed, the lighthearted interaction between The Boss and Marianne—like “Otaku friends” from the old era—made Livia, who was watching quietly from the side, feel a hint of warmth and envy she had never felt before.
“However…” The Boss suddenly sighed, his expression becoming serious. “There is indeed a reason I cannot speak of regarding this eye.”
As he spoke, he slowly removed his iconic black eye patch under the curious gazes of the two girls.
The right eye that had been covered was actually emitting a faint, brilliant light like molten gold.
“Wow! So cool! This golden eye…” Marianne let out a cry of surprise, leaning in close to look. “Are you really a god descended to earth?”
“This isn’t a prosthetic eye. Even the best scientists at the base can’t explain why it became like this.” The Boss’s tone carried a hint of confusion that even he could not fully understand. “As for gods… I have indeed seen a similar existence. If I told you that the true Messiah, the prophet who led humanity out of ignorance, might have lived until now… forget it. You probably wouldn’t be able to understand such a thing anyway.”
The image of that strange man who called himself an Immortal and had a Central Asian face appeared in The Boss’s mind.
It was him who had appeared when he was most desperate, providing technology that surpassed the era, which helped him establish this Army Without Borders.
And since that mysterious meeting, his right eye had become like this.
Ending the discussion about Chunibyo and god-men, The Boss showed the new script he had written to Livia.
On the cover were titles written in beautiful font — Starlit Romance.
“Actually… the inspiration for this story came largely from you, Livia. I used you as the prototype to create the heroine of this story.” The Boss’s tone carried a trace of subtle tenderness. “I thought that perhaps in some fantasy world without war, you could be like an ordinary girl and obtain true happiness.”
“Eh? Partiality! What about me? What about me?” Marianne immediately became dissatisfied.
“You’re in it too, don’t worry.”
“Oh — I see!” Marianne immediately showed an expression of seeing through everything, saying with a wicked smile, “You wrote another harem story, didn’t you? Even though Livia and I are already by your side, you’re still not satisfied? You’re quite a greedy man.”
The Boss smiled helplessly and did not directly answer her tricky question. He only said to Livia:
“A long, long time from now, after you have experienced more things, perhaps you will understand what this story truly wants to express.”
Livia flipped through the script that still held some warmth. The words on the paper seemed to come alive in her eyes.
In a trance, she seemed to see some vague and distant future vision —
It was a galaxy she could not understand, shrouded in endless stellar storms, filled with long despair and never-ending war. It was an indescribable, terrifying picture.
Her heart trembled, and she woke up from that ominous hallucination. She lifted her head and asked softly, “Are you… the villain in this story?”
“Maybe.” The Boss gazed at her, his golden eye looking exceptionally deep under the light. “If I really am the villain, Livia, you must become the Justiciar Hero who defeats me and protects everyone.”
“Of course!” Marianne laughed, throwing an arm around Livia’s shoulder and shaking her fist at The Boss.
“A guy like you who goes around kidnapping the hearts of innocent girls is definitely the biggest villain! Right, Livia? When the time comes, we’ll join forces and beat Master to a pulp!”
The scent of the final battle drew closer every day as the Third Order launched a desperate total offensive.
And these daily lives, so warm they felt unreal, were like thin snow under the spring sunshine.
While they quietly changed Livia, they also signaled that their brief lifespan was coming to an end.
The girl who was once as cold as frost and viewed herself as a pure “weapon” was gradually having her heart illuminated by the light of idealism, melted by the warmth of her companions, and stained with the vivid colors of a “human.”
She began to deeply cherish every minute and every second she spent with The Boss and Marianne.
She began to believe from the bottom of her heart that as long as the war ended, she would surely be able to see that beautiful blue sky from the legends with everyone.
Only, none of the three people currently immersed in this hard-won warmth expected that this would be the last time they could gather together so easily and without any barriers.