Episode 14

Whether from the cold or from anger, my body trembled uncontrollably.

After everything I went through to get here…! After all that suffering! He broke the mirror? And as if that weren’t enough, he went and became the hundredth all on his own?

“…I’m sorry. It was my fault.”

The man apologized readily and held out his hand, as if telling me to get up. I pretended not to see it and got to my feet on my own, legs shaking.

It was too dark to see clearly, but I could tell a few things. The man was quite tall and well built. And he was not Daiwen Fergus.

Should I call that a silver lining? But, but…!

‘I have to slap you for the mission to succeed.’

“Are you hurt anywhere?”

“What are you going to do if you know? Because of you…!”

It seemed the fever had made me lose my mind. I swallowed down the surge of emotion and steadied my breathing. Get a grip, Rene. This man hasn’t done anything wrong.

“The m-mirror broke….”

As a result, what came out was a mess of informal and polite speech. With how weak my voice was, it almost sounded like I was whining.

It wouldn’t have been strange for him to find me odd, but the man’s attitude did not change. He looked down at the floor I pointed to, then apologized politely again.

“I’m sorry. I’ll compensate you for it.”

“This isn’t about money, right now… right now…!”

Ah, now that I thought about it, that belonged to Anastasia. What was I supposed to tell Anastasia? I felt so frustrated I thought my insides would burst.

Should I just shut my eyes and ask him to let me hit him once?

Overcome by gloom, helplessness, and irritation from the pain, I was just about to cover my face with my hands. The man seized my wrist and pulled it away.

“Don’t touch your face. There may be shards of mirror stuck to your hands.”

“….”

Only then, in the darkness my eyes had adjusted to, did I see the man’s face. Beneath hair strangely pale in color were eyes both indifferent and upright.

I stared as if bewitched at those eyes that gleamed like glass beads, and before I knew it, my face crumpled as if I were about to cry.

At the change in my expression, a flustered look appeared on the man’s face. He immediately let go of my wrist.

“I’m sorry. I touched you without permission.”

“It’s not like you’ll let me hit you….”

“Pardon?”

“So annoying… It’s not like you’ll even let me hit you…!”

Tears poured down my face as my pent-up misery exploded. I was in so much pain I could die, nothing was going right, and all I could feel was irritation.

Why did I have to suffer like this?

Why did I have to be tormented by these damn missions and do things I didn’t want to do! I just… I just want to live an easy life with no debt.

The man murmured in a low voice.

“…If hitting me will make you feel better, then it’s all right. Hit me, then.”

My vision was blurred by the tears that would not stop. Thanks to that, I could barely see the man’s face, but I could tell he had leaned toward me.

At the sight, my tears gradually stopped.

“What did you say?”

“I said that if you can only feel better after hitting me, then I’ll take it.”

…Could this man also be out of his mind?

When I blinked a few times, my vision cleared as though an opaque film had been lifted. And I met them again. Those glass-bead eyes.

With both hands behind his back, he had leaned slightly toward me, leaving little distance between us.

I barely managed to open my mouth.

“Really…?”

“Yes. Really.”

“…You’re not going to try to kill me because I hit you…?”

Because of the fever and body aches, my mouth moved on its own.

Indescribable things swirled in his eyes, which until now had been nothing but dry and emotionless.

“Me? Kill you?”

“….”

“There’s no way.”

He muttered low, as if the idea were utterly absurd, and then slowly half-closed his eyes. It looked as though he was telling me to hit him if I was going to.

If hitting him would make me feel better, then I could hit him. He really was not in his right mind.

But I could not back out now and say I wouldn’t do it.

He had given me permission. There would be no better situation than this. I was already having trouble standing properly; if I failed the mission and received another penalty, I might really die.

The only thing I regretted was that I hadn’t even lasted a month before ending up striking someone like this… I was bitter about it, but I had to live too.

“…You really mustn’t kill me. Got it?”

“Why do you keep saying such strange things….”

Before he could finish speaking, I struck his cheek.

A sharp crack of impact rang in my ears.

I felt no pain in my palm. Was it because of the fever, or had I hit him weakly?

Still, the mission succeeded, right?

At that moment, the surroundings, which had been pitch-black, suddenly brightened, and the man’s appearance entered my eyes like sunlight.

I’d wondered why his coloring seemed so pale. His hair was snow-white. Beneath it, his red cheek was visible….

Ding.

Today’s final mission succeeded!

-Reward: 100 gold-

With that transparent window that appeared out of nowhere as the last thing I saw, I lost consciousness again.

* * *

At the pain digging into his skin and the coppery taste in his mouth, Sion was rendered speechless. To be honest, he had not expected it to hurt this much.

‘She must have been quite angry.’

He was the one, no one else, who had told her to hit him, so he had no intention of resenting her now. He was simply surprised.

He was inwardly ruminating over the pain when the dark corridor suddenly brightened.

Blinking once against the flood of light, he sensed two presences, one on either side. The presence from the direction of the banquet hall was unfamiliar, while the presence from the opposite side of the corridor was familiar.

‘Why is that fellow over there?’

The moment Sion clicked his tongue at the familiar presence, he heard a sound so familiar it was startling.

Ding.

Sion turned his head without realizing it.

The first thing he saw was the woman who had slapped his cheek, her face flushed and covered in cold sweat.

Her abundant hair, whose color was impossible to define, was like a cloud. Sion, reminded of someone by it, was just about to open his mouth as if to say something.

The woman’s body gradually tilted.

Reflexively, he caught her. Her body, limp in his arms, was not merely warm but hot.

He had thought she felt hot when he grabbed her wrist a moment ago as well, but since his own body temperature was originally lower than others’, he had not considered it important.

‘But she had a fever.’

Frowning, he finally noticed something.

Translucent, angular, rectangular.

At that unreal thing floating in midair, Sion’s face hardened in an instant, and he glared sharply at it.

“What are you doing, Sion?”

Just then, the familiar presence he had sensed from the other side of the corridor came close and spoke to him. At the same time, the translucent window vanished without a trace.

Sion stared into empty air, then turned his head. The person who had come near acknowledged him.

“What, isn’t that Rene Blair?”

Unlike Sion’s snow-white hair, this man had hair as black as darkness, and purple eyes that made it impossible to know what he was thinking.

It was Daiwen Fergus.

Daiwen sighed.

“I swear, this damn banquet hall confuses me every time I come here. I got lost again.”

“This woman is Rene Blair?”

“Wow. How could you not know? She’s the representative lunatic of the Konia Kingdom.”

Sion was about to say that it wasn’t her reputation he hadn’t known, but her face, then muttered coldly.

“You’re one to talk.”

“That goes for you too, doesn’t it?”

As the two exchanged their meaningless war of nerves, Daiwen looked down with a face full of interest at the woman who was practically in Sion’s arms, then murmured softly.

“Ah, I need to kill her.”

Though he said it lightly, as if it were nothing, Sion heard every word and stared at Daiwen without the slightest change in expression.

Just then, the presence they had sensed from the banquet hall suddenly approached this way. It was moving quite quickly.

Wondering who it was, Sion and Daiwen lifted their heads. And they saw it: silver hair gleaming beneath the corridor lights.

It was Anastasia Solen.

“What did you do to Rene just now?”

Having hurried over, she asked with a face stiff and hard, unlike her usual self.

At that, Daiwen was somewhat dumbfounded. Sion was the one holding the woman, yet Anastasia’s cold gaze was fixed on him.

Sion, finding himself in an awkward position, spoke politely.

“This is a misunderstanding…”

“How unfair. I suppose you can’t see that this friend here was hit?”

Daiwen cut Sion off and interjected. Only then did Anastasia’s eyes turn to Sion.

After blinking a few times, she saw Sion’s swollen cheek and pressed her lips firmly together. Sion, on the other hand, clicked his tongue inwardly. He was displeased by the thought that Daiwen had seen him get hit.

‘He’ll tease me about this for months.’

At that moment, Anastasia snatched away the woman who had been practically held in Sion’s arms.

Her face turning cold once more, Anastasia recited icily toward Daiwen.

“If Rene struck you, Sir… then you must have done something wrong.”

“Ha…?”

Daiwen looked utterly incredulous, but Anastasia answered him with silence and walked away with the woman, whose fever was blazing.

Daiwen said indifferently.

“Was that woman always like that?”

“Who is that woman?”

“You don’t know Anastasia Solen?”

Daiwen sneered. At that, Sion furrowed his brow slightly.

“I know her. I just didn’t know her face.”

“Try socializing a little. What do you even know?”

“More importantly, you. Aren’t you going to kill her?”

Sion left out the subject and asked in a flat voice, but Daiwen seemed to understand.

Daiwen quickly lost interest in Anastasia and fell into thought with a hmm. But only for a moment. Narrowing his eyes, he sent Sion a suspicious look.

“Since when were you interested enough to ask?”

“Seeing you change the subject like that, I guess you’re not going to kill her.”

Daiwen fell silent. Sion stared at him, then looked toward the banquet hall where Anastasia had gone and murmured.

“The justification you’re so obsessed with is already laid out for you. A noisy banquet hall where no one knows what might happen, and where nothing would be strange no matter what did happen.”

“……”

“Most of all, the target is a villain everyone avoids. If you found fault and killed her, everyone would be surprised at first, but in the end, they’d defend you.”

Just as they always had.

His sunken blue eyes gazed into the distance before returning to Daiwen. Bewitching violet eyes and cold blue eyes clashed.

“It shouldn’t be difficult for you to find fault with her. And it certainly wouldn’t be because you pity her. Nor is she so spotless that your precious reputation would collapse over it. So why are you hesitating?”

“And why, exactly, do I have to explain every bit of that to you?”

Daiwen’s leisurely voice sank endlessly low. It was making one thing unmistakably clear: don’t meddle.

Unbothered by the pressure, Sion continued to stare at him as if observing him. In the end, Daiwen let out an irritated sigh.

“I don’t know either. For some reason, she didn’t annoy me today.”

“What do you mean?”

“Whenever I’d occasionally run into her at banquets… she irritated me so much I didn’t know what to do… and I wanted to kill her…”

As if reminiscing, Daiwen’s face sank into thought.

“But today, she felt different, like a completely new person. So I thought about it for a bit, whether to kill her or not.”

He spoke in the past tense, but he still seemed to be wavering. Soon, he clicked his tongue and reached a conclusion.

“Forget it. I won’t kill her. Somehow, I feel like I’d regret it if I did.”

“…Then are you rejecting today’s one?”

At Sion’s cryptic question, Daiwen shrugged.

“Might as well.”

“Hmm…”

“Thinking about being in pain for the first time in a while puts me in a foul mood.”

As he spoke lightly, something suddenly appeared before him.

Something like a translucent, rectangular window, floating in midair.

Written there were the words, “Let’s kill Rene Blair in the banquet hall.”

And Daiwen pressed his finger firmly on the Decline beneath it.