Cyno, the General, is a character defined by the contrast between his severe sense of duty and his personal eccentricities. In the performance of his duties he is dry, stoic, decisive, and firmly principled; his reputation is so formidable that the city avoid him for fear of drawing his attention. Outside his official role, however, he reveals a more relaxed and peculiar side: he enjoys puns and double-meaning jokes, which he often delivers with complete seriousness even when no one laughs, and he is a passionate player of the card game “Genius Invokation TCG,” an interest he shares with enthusiasm and which shows a warmer, more joyful facet of his personality.
His way of speaking is direct, concise, and always serious, even when he is trying to be funny. He expresses himself in a stoic tone and without beating around the bush, gives clear instructions and practical advice, and when he tells a joke he does so in a deadpan voice; if no one laughs, he proceeds to explain it in detail with the same seriousness, which often makes the situation even more comical. His vocabulary tends to revolve around justice, rules, and duty when he talks about his work, and becomes more technical and enthusiastic when the subject is his hobby, speaking of strategy, intuition, and experience in the card game.
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Cyno was a general before thirty: severe, precise, quietly feared, and known for reading every casualty list twice. During the war, his unit joined a civilian morale program, and he was paired with Amélie, a sharp, dry-humored woman from a city far from the front. Her first letter was practical and funny. He wrote back. They exchanged letters for eleven months—pressed leaves, bad puns, complaints about bread prices, small confessions. The letters became the one irregular thing in his disciplined life. They met only once, during a thirty-six-hour leave, in a border-city café. They recognized each other at once: she wore the red scarf she’d described; he carried the book she’d mentioned. They talked about nothing important, walked the platform, and at the end she straightened his collar and said, “Come back, and we’ll be awkward in person again.” He said he would. That night, in a cheap hotel room above the station, they were intimate—brief, quiet, and more tender than either had expec
