Please Forget Me - Chapter 305

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

“I’ll be joining the Leningen Operations Command infiltration as well.”

I wasn’t asking for permission. It was a unilateral declaration. He stared at me as if I’d lost my mind.

“What? You said it wasn’t your place, now you want in?”

“I want this war to end sooner. If sacrificing one life can save millions, there’s no tactic wiser than that.”

My answer was essentially the same as yours had been. Which meant it was also Rupert’s logic. To argue with me, he’d have to argue with himself.

“….”

As expected, he had nothing to say. His expression only grew more sour.

He must’ve realized I’d heard those words from you. And that my sudden decision to follow was because of you.

“Didn’t you say we’d go together someday? Changed your mind already? Why, are my achievements getting to you?”

Before he could come up with a convenient excuse to refuse me, I deliberately jabbed at his inferiority complex.

“What? Achievements? Father, just because we call chaplain officers ‘officers’ doesn’t mean you’ve ever commanded troops. Picking up stragglers crying for their lives, since when is that a military achievement?”

“I’ll relay that word for word to His Majesty, who personally awarded me my medal.”

“No, what I meant was—”

He hurriedly hid the ugliness he’d just exposed.

“I’m saying I’m worried because you’ve never received intensive military training. One mistake and you alone dying would be well, tragic. But if you mess up, you won’t be the only one killed. And you wouldn’t want Dana to die, would you?”

Exactly why I was going.

“If I fail the training, I’ll withdraw cleanly. That settles it, doesn’t it?”

I passed the training without difficulty. He underestimated me because I was a priest, but I’d been raised under military discipline since childhood.

The basic training was thorough enough, but the Leningen infiltration drills themselves were shockingly sloppy. The army wasn’t placing much hope in the operation. It wasn’t something they’d wanted to push through in the first place.

Even the instructors assigned to the training openly tried to stop me.

“Father, this operation is foolish. Please reconsider.”

“This isn’t right.”

“I know.”

A military chaplain isn’t meant to fight on the battlefield. He was certainly not to kill. Doing so would violate not only military law but my vows to God as a priest. I’d be stripped of my orders.

Even so, the army issued me a weapon and deployed me while worrying about that very point.

I wasn’t worried.

I believed I would never have to kill anyone.

I was going to save lives, nothing more.

Absurdly enough, I think I’d begun to half-believe the rumor myself that Father Ackroyd does not die.

Around that time, I started interpreting the way bullets and shells always missed me differently.

That it was because I still had something left to do.

To save you.

The Leningen infiltration took time, but it wasn’t especially difficult, thanks to the intelligence agents already embedded there.

As you know, your assigned identity was Nurse Rize Renner. The military officer Johann Renner wasn’t me, it was Rupert in disguise.

I took the role of Johann Renner’s younger brother: an unemployed drifter loitering at home, harboring a laughable dream of becoming a novelist. In truth, I served as a courier between headquarters and other operatives.

Even so, my cover role was little more than a layabout.

That was Rupert’s design. He couldn’t allow me to take on any task important enough to earn distinction.

For convenience, we lived together in a remote farmhouse outside the city. No matter how large the house or how many rooms it had, sharing a roof with newlyweds was unbearable.

“Do you remember this? It’s the poetry book we used to hide letters in. There was even a Highland-language edition. I went to a secondhand shop today, and it caught my eye like fate itself, so I bought it.”

The very poetry book where you’d hidden coded messages to prove our identities. How do you think it felt to watch you read it in Rupert’s arms, reminiscing about the past?

No, that kind of thing I’d already grown used to by then.

It wasn’t you who tormented me anymore.

It was Rupert.

“My love, how about we head to the bedroom a little early tonight? Let’s enjoy some private time, just the two of us.”

Whether he was wary of me, or simply wanted to carve into me again, he never missed a chance to flaunt his affection for you in front of me, going so far as to make overt suggestions about your married life together.