"Ugh..."
The young man in a water-blue robe at the table seemed to notice something unusual and looked down at his left hand.
A golden ring imprinted with a red tongue pattern on the base of his left index finger silently blossomed into a myriad of cracks along the tongue's tip, then suddenly split into two halves with a snap.
Nicole...
Gazing at the ring fragments on the table after it broke, the Aquarius Director fell into silence, a trace of reminiscence flickered in his eyes as he looked at the name engraved inside the ring.
He remembered finding the unconscious Nicole on a privateer ship of the Kingdom of Saio; back then, she was just a little girl not even as tall as the ship's railing. Since she looked somewhat like his daughter in her childhood, he brought her back to the Bureau, which was about twenty years ago.
