For Sarkaz mercenaries born in Kazdel, a name is a luxury. Since everyone expects to die or be forgotten anyway, they don't bother memorizing each other's names.

And yet, some names remain the property of the dead, passed on whole to whoever comes next. The day the sniper 'W' fell fighting from the rear, an unfamiliar woman appeared and picked up that name.

Years later, she loses the first person who ever asked for her real name, and comes face to face with the very things that took him from her.

1. Picking Up a Dead Mercenary's Name

Hoederer, who leads a company of Sarkaz mercenaries, and his vice-captain Ines have just lost the codename 'W' in battle. A sniper who fell buying time from the rear.

On the retreat, an unfamiliar Sarkaz woman follows on foot from behind. Dressed in rags, holding the dead W's sword and gun.

Ines wants to kill her on the spot, but Hoederer is thinking otherwise. He'd noticed she'd deliberately thrown stones at him several times along the way.

'Anyone in their right mind wouldn't take in some Sarkaz of unknown origin.' Ines snaps, and Hoederer laughs. 'Right, that's the difference between you and me.'

'You do know what it means to inherit a fallen soldier's weapon?' Hoederer asks, and the woman answers without hesitation. 'Of course.'

And so she inherits the dead mercenary's name and weapon, exactly as they were. A common thing in Kazdel—a nameless Sarkaz reborn under a dead person's name.

2. How Many Candies on Your Head?

A few months later, a note with a code written on it turns up on an assassin's corpse. Instead of real names, there are aliases and codenames, with a few candy drawings beside each.

'The candy count is the bounty. The one with the most candies has the priciest head,' Hoederer explains, and the new W finds her own entry. 'The last one—settled. New one—annoying, ten, plus more depending on circumstances.'

'Seems your reputation is quite generous.' 'Probably because I buried a bunch of arms dealers alive in the forest last month.'

Hoederer also tells her about the dead previous W. An oddball who arbitrarily declared the day he killed a Laterano man and took his gun as his 'birthday,' always grinning yet cutting deep with his words.

'That guy had a stubborn streak. The type who fell for traps other people dug.' 'That's just being stupid, isn't it.'

From that day on, W became W.

— Hoederer

3. The Tuition for Close Combat Is One Forearm

By the campfire, Ines quietly probes the new W. 'Where were you attached to before joining our team?' 'What, are you interviewing me now, after the fact?'

W pokes at Ines's weak spot. 'Heard you're pretty weak in close quarters, huh?' No sooner has she finished than Ines's blade grazes W's arm.

'I thought you were weak in melee—guess I let my guard down a little.' W admits it with a smile. 'A lesson learned for the price of one scratch on the arm—cheap, all things considered.'

The joking is brief—a new mission comes down. Escort an unidentified transport team. Neither destination nor cargo disclosed.

That's when Hoederer warns her in a low voice. 'Using your Arts to scan the transport team would be a breach of contract. Don't underestimate them.'

During the escort, Ines can't help herself and scans the transport team with her Arts. A massive shadow—not a ship, more like some kind of 'frame.'

4. The Birch Forest, and the Identity of the Frame

There's a birch forest in northern Kazdel. Born in spring and dead by winter, a land where only Originium crystals remain, glinting under the moonlight.

They're ambushed near that forest. The team scatters, and only W remains beside the unconscious Ines.

'What if I kept you alive to use as bait?' 'If you and I fought right now, who do you think would win?' Neither trusts the other, yet they fight back-to-back.

Unidentified elite soldiers keep pouring in without end. It felt like taking on the whole of Kazdel.

One of the elites grabs W and tries to win her over. 'The general will take a liking to you.' W scoffs. 'Isn't the more accurate word disposable—easy to use and easy to throw away?'

5. The Woman Unbothered in the Middle of a Battlefield

In the middle of the encirclement, a woman suddenly appears. An extremely strange person—not even Sarkaz, yet her expression doesn't change one bit even at the heart of the battlefield.

Ines was trembling. What made her tremble so, W couldn't tell.

6. A Queen Who Can't Even Fix a Broken Door

When she comes to, she's aboard an unfamiliar vessel. The main body of the transport team, temporarily taking in the wounded—called 'Rhodes Island.'

Wandering the corridors, W runs into an engineer wrestling with an automatic door, and beside her, an unidentified woman wrestling with the same headache. 'Call me Theresa.'

I don't want to forget anyone. And I shouldn't.

— Theresa

This Theresa—the one who fought the usurping Regent and united the Sarkaz—was fixing a broken automatic door. W can't help but laugh.

Theresa asks W her real name. 'W is one mercenary's name. What represents you is your name.' W has no name to answer with.

'It's common enough for a Sarkaz born in Kazdel.' 'If the day ever comes when you no longer have to live as W, you might get a new name then.'

Kal'tsit sends W back to the sickbay with a warning. 'Not everyone here welcomes you. I looked over your history—it's quite dangerous.' 'Isn't that mutual?'

Down the corridor, her eyes meet another figure with a hood pulled low. The one everyone calls 'Doctor.' W feels an inexplicable chill.

7. A Banner Must Fall

Hoederer confesses to Kal'tsit that Theresa was the only person who remembered his name and his family. And so, most of the Sarkaz decide to remain on Rhodes Island.

Only Hoederer, Ines, and a handful of mercenaries decide to leave. Of all the old comrades who started out together, only the two of them, in the end, remained alive.

In that old battle where they'd defended Rhodes Island's main ship and been decimated, the one holding the banner had been a child. Hoederer could have grabbed that banner, but he didn't. 'I never once liked that banner, not for a single moment.'

Ines sums up the three people she read with her Arts: Theresa was strong and gentle even amid sorrow, and Kal'tsit looked more machine than human, yet treated everyone equally.

Chess pieces just end up in the box, don't they. We're objects—lifeless objects.

— Ines

And the last person, the one called 'Doctor,' wasn't commanding the battlefield—he was commanding the war itself.

8. The War Ended Too Fast

A few months later, Kazdel's fortunes turn overnight. A war that had held on for half a year comes to an end far too quickly.

The place that brings this news back to W is none other than the very ruins where she was first born. Completely collapsed.

W had grown unrecognizably composed. Quietly disposing of the Sarkaz who'd betrayed them one by one, she flatly declares none of this against her is revenge. 'Just think of it as an unemployed woman venting her frustration.'

Theresa was already dead, and the Regent now sits on Kazdel's throne. The three of them have nowhere left to return to.

'Now's our chance to get out of Kazdel.' Hoederer tells W. The plan is to infiltrate Reunion, the rising Infected faction in Ursus.

9. Talulah's Two Shadows

A few months into infiltrating Reunion, W has already become a field commander in Chernobog. Outwardly calm now, but that very composure only made Ines more uneasy.

Reunion soldiers press W over a failure. 'We're only in a partnership. If I flip this table, do you think Talulah would be pleased?' W fires back, unfazed.

Ines looks into Reunion's leader Talulah with her Arts. Once a pure symbol of resistance, she's now tearing down with her own hands the very thing she'd built.

'Her shadow... there are two of them. Not a trace of Arts—it looked more like an old ruin.' Ines tells Hoederer. But it's already too late.

Saying they must tell W, Ines shakes off Hoederer's restraint for the first time and rushes out alone.

A Reunion soldier crosses her path along the way. 'Talulah would have it, surely.' The moment those words are spoken, the entire street explodes.

It was birches... everything, so much like that place, even the tangled shadows...

— Ines

Chernobog's roadside trees were birches. Exactly like that forest, where she and Hoederer had first picked W up.

10. Scattered

No one confirmed Ines's death. No body, no trace of an enemy remained. Hoederer cuts down, on the spot, the Reunion soldier who delivered that news.

He makes up his mind. To report all of this directly to the Regent, he decides to head for Londinium in Victoria.

'You're definitely going to die.' W tries to stop him, but Hoederer doesn't waver. 'Her Majesty Theresa remembered my name. Now, I finally know what I have to do.'

The one who greets him in Londinium is the Regent's confessor. The Regent already knew everything—Rhodes Island's return, and that W had taken over Reunion.

'There isn't enough chaos yet,' the confessor says. The Regent had no intention of destroying Reunion. If anything, his plan was to use it as an even bigger spark of chaos.

His feet held in place, Hoederer decides to secretly send a signal to W through a hidden transmitter buried in Kazdel's ruins, using a method prepared from the very beginning.

Before he left, W had once asked him a question. 'Can a mercenary's life be measured in money?' 'War decides that.' 'Is that so... but not anymore.'

Every Sarkaz mercenary has to set their own price for themselves. No one else needs to appraise it, and no one needs to be controlled by others' judgment.

— W

To Live

After the massacre, in the quiet ruins of Chernobog, W meets two children carrying weapons. A boy named 'Rublev' with an injured leg, and his timid friend.

W points out the medicine left in a hospital and eggs the timid child on to go there alone. Rublev desperately tries to stop it. 'He can't do anything by himself!'

As time passes and his friend doesn't return, Rublev begins to fall apart. Resentment, anxiety, and even the belief that he himself was indispensable.

'You saved him, so isn't he probably trying hard for your sake too?' W asks, and Rublev grits his teeth. 'He can't do anything at all! It's all his fault!'

In this world, there is no one who can live without others. Absolutely no one.

— W

'What decides a person's actions isn't where they're from, their status, or their past. It's the influences they've taken in through life, and how much they believe in those convictions,' W says.

In the moment he's dying, the friend comes running with a first-aid kit. Only then do the two children ask each other their real names for the first time.

Watching the two children smile, W murmurs quietly to herself.

Right? ...Talulah.

— W

A woman born without a name survived by picking up a dead person's name. Only after losing both the man who nearly gave her a name and the people who protected it, did she finally begin to set her own name's price.

A bond born in a birch forest faded away beneath the same shadow. But that shadow is still speaking to someone, even now.