Editing City Series:Volume5b Chapter14 (section)

===Letter from Sword Lady #11: To Beretta who Inherited my Name===

Are you reading this, Beretta who inherited my name?

The dawn of August 1, 1998, will soon arrive for me.

That is precisely 54 years after the Resistance uprising in Paris. If you are reading this 11th letter, it must be June there. I am writing all of these letters in a single night, but you will read them over the course of a year. After I write two more, I will wake you up and have you prepare for your journey to Paris.

But June, huh? So is the Normandy Landing over?

I imagine you will have found my mother’s home by then and you will probably have done one thing you shouldn’t have. And you know what that one thing is, don’t you? Women keep a lot of secrets and most of those are things they should not have done.

Now, will you listen to an old lady’s old story about something she shouldn’t have done? You might not believe it, but I was quite popular when I was in Paris. I turned a lot of heads at school. (Trust me.)

There was someone I cared for then, but I was worried about my mission and the importance of the information I was acquiring at the time, so I was never able to be with them. There were a few misunderstandings, but I eventually fled to the US and that person was Formatted.

It’s all a nostalgic old memory now. They must still be living in Paris to this day, but they will be so much younger than my 54 years and they will not remember me.

You may not remember my husband who died of Words Warn. He was a kind soldier who looked after the spies like us when we returned to the US and he worked harder than anyone to liberate France after it closed itself up. Soon after France closed up, I told him I wanted to meet that person who was still inside France.

But that wish was never granted and, as our age diverged further and further from France’s, attempting liberate it was forbidden as it would destroy our world.

When it was discovered how to send things inside of France, I learned my presence had been erased as I was not caught in the Format. That meant I no longer had any real reason to enter France.

I feel so bad for grumbling about that just a month before my husband died of Words Warn.

I wanted to meet that man as he was in ’44, but that can never be. He no longer remembers me and I have grown old.

This story is not especially sad. Thousands or tens of thousands of similar stories can be found all around the world. And not just among the French. The soldiers deployed to Normandy for Operation Overlord and the soldiers who entered France from the south for Operation Dragoon did not return either.

Our present era exists by rejecting them all instead of protecting them.

It’s hard to accept sometimes. Am I really a Knight Striker, Beretta?

This has gotten gloomy, hasn’t it? But this paper and ink are valuable, so I’m not going to rewrite it all.

Have you met my mother? Like we discussed before, she and I had not seen each other for more than 14 years at the time. If you pretend to have forgotten what she looks like and play the delinquent daughter – with a focus on asking why she abandoned my father Jack McWild and me – you should manage.

Make sure to give her my letter.

Also, Beretta, are you going to Bourgogne like you always wanted? That land gave birth to a “strongest” that should be quite familiar to you. You like to pretend to act recklessly despite how cowardly you really are, so I suggest taking a look at that area and thinking about some things.

I hope you find the beginning of your journey in the French outdoors I never visited. I hope you find what it is you can do in France. At this point, you can start acting based on what you want to do. Once you finish the task I set for you, you only have your own wishes left to guide you.

So try to take it easy.