Wave (2)
With the steady passage of time, Charybdis’s mind collapsed completely.
Peace, ironically, had proven to be his poison. He had no desire to live any longer, yet neither did he possess the courage to take his own life. Had he at least been permitted to pass his days in quiet isolation where no one could look upon him, perhaps his existence might have been bearable—but even that modest solitude was denied him. At rigid, regular intervals, he was forced to inspect his territory and travel to entertain high-ranking imperial dignitaries.
That, too, was undoubtedly the Emperor’s design: a calculated performance to demonstrate how lavishly he honored a decorated war hero, while subtly deflecting the populace’s simmering terror and fury straight onto Charybdis. Charybdis understood the scheme all too well, yet he was utterly powerless to resist it.
And so, on this day, he embarked upon yet another inspection of his domain—having long since lost count of which one it was.
"..."
The streets were almost entirely deserted. Even the folk of the Salos Territory lived in mortal dread of their count. And why wouldn't they? Today was the day a monster stalked their roads—a fiend rumored to butcher anyone whose eyes so much as crossed his.
Charybdis offered himself a hollow, self-deprecating smile, deliberately choosing paths where people were least likely to be found. In the end, all that mattered was demonstrating that he was still alive and well. It made little difference if he crept through desolate back alleys. Someone would glimpse him from afar; someone would scurry away at the sight of him, confirming his continued existence to the capital. If anything, the emptiness of the streets brought him relief. After all, wasn't he constantly tortured by the sickening terror that he might strike down an innocent bystander in a fit of madness?
Yet that day proved different.
"Urgh, hic..."
It happened just as he turned into a quiet, secluded alleyway. For the first time in an eternity, Charybdis sensed a presence that did not belong to his personal retinue. Had someone failed to hear that he was inspecting the town today? Or had an assassin finally come to end his wretched life?
Slowly, Charybdis turned toward the faint, trembling sound.
There, crumpled against the cobblestones, was a child.
A filthy, emaciated little girl lay collapsed on the ground—a wretched portrait of starvation and prolonged abuse. Left alone, she would not survive the day.
"How could this...?"
Charybdis hesitated. He wanted to help her, yet terror seized him. He felt utterly revolted by himself for experiencing fear before such a tiny, pitiful child, but the dread was suffocating. Steeling his nerves, he forced his trembling feet to take a single step forward—an act that demanded an agonizing amount of courage.
Yet...
"Stay... away!"
The child snatched up a stone and hurled it, desperate to drive him back. She was bristling with raw, feral vigilance—a child incapable of trusting a single soul in this world.
Looking at her, Charybdis felt an overwhelming sense of kinship. Shivering in sheer terror of the world and everything around her, she was like a mirror reflecting his own shattered soul. Perhaps that was why.
The hesitation melted away, and Charybdis closed the distance between them.
He paid no heed to the rocks she threw or the ragged shrieks tearing from her throat. Even when a jagged stone sliced open his brow and sent blood trickling down his face, Charybdis remained astonishingly, uncharacteristically calm.
"It's all right..."
Dropping to his knees before her, Charybdis gently extended an open hand, leaning forward with the utmost care.
"You are safe now... It's all right."
The child did not take his hand. She merely glared at him, her eyes brimming with vicious suspicion. But as the tense standoff stretched on, her head limply drooped. She had already been collapsed when he found her; her fragile body had passed its absolute limit long ago.
"You will be all right."
Charybdis scooped the unconscious girl into his arms and carried her back to his estate. A man who had spent his life doubting every living thing now found himself yearning to become someone worthy of trust.
It took a long time for the child to open her heart. Yet Charybdis never once grew impatient. How could he expect a child to blindly place her trust in him when he himself was crippled by paranoia and unable to trust a soul?
And so, for the first time in his life, Charybdis began to ask his servants personal questions. How should one approach children of that age? What did they like? What was the right way to care for a child?
Perhaps his clumsy, earnest devotion reached her. Little by little, the girl began to place her faith in Charybdis and follow his lead.
She ate the food he offered.
She wore the clothes he provided.
She absorbed the lessons he taught.
Slowly, step by step, the child became Charybdis's family.
And as he raised her, Charybdis’s own shattered mind began to mend. Instead of suspecting everything around him out of habit, he made a conscious effort to reach out and understand. The man who had been utterly incapable of adapting to the post-war world was finally learning how to live in it.
"Now, look closely. This is the Wave."
Charybdis understood it now: up until that point, he had been no different from a helpless child himself. He simply hadn't known how to live in this world; having received nothing but wounds from it, he had never learned how to love. With the girl as his mirror, Charybdis began to grow alongside her.
"Ahem."
Charybdis no longer feared death. Instead, what terrified him was the thought of the child left behind after he was gone. His notoriety was already infamous across the Empire. Even if he had recovered his senses, the atrocities he had committed in the past would not simply vanish into thin air.
He was not a good parent. Worse still, his dark reputation could cast a ruinous shadow over the girl's future.
"Now, let's see..."
And so, Charybdis sat down to write a letter. He addressed it to his longtime comrade-in-arms—the exasperating old friend who understood him better than anyone else alive. What would she think when she received this? Would she fly into a rage at a sudden request to become a guardian? No. Say what you will about her, she is a kind person at heart. Olga Hermod will grant my request.
Charybdis resolved to send a letter asking Olga Hermod to become Yuna’s guardian.
"Ah, wait."
Having finished the letter, Charybdis realized belatedly that he had forgotten to write down the child's name.
"My daughter's name is..."
With a sheepish look, Charybdis penned an addendum at the bottom.
"Yuna."
Tap.
He tapped his pen once against the desk, a faint, self-conscious smile gracing his lips as he added:
"Yuna Salos."
Olga Hermod visited the Salos Territory for the first time in years. Her old comrade had abruptly sent her a letter filled with utter preposterous nonsense.
The man has completely lost his mind.
A daughter, out of nowhere? Had that lifelong bachelor finally succumbed to total lunacy? As an Archmage on par with the continent's greatest monsters, a beast of his caliber suffering an unchecked psychological collapse was something she could not ignore; she had to assess his mental state with her own eyes.
The Salos domain, seen after so long, was as bleak as ever, yet it was evident that Charybdis had been diligently managing its affairs. The roads were neatly paved, and the infrastructure was sound.
"Hmph."
Taking in the streetscape, Olga Hermod made straight for the Salos manor. The atmosphere inside the estate had changed dramatically since her last visit. The servants, whose faces had once been perpetually veiled in gloom and dread, now went about their duties with ordinary composure. Only then did Olga realize that Charybdis hadn't gone off the deep end—in fact, quite the opposite: he had finally regained his senses.
It must be thanks to this 'daughter' of his.
Waving off the servants who offered to announce her, Olga headed toward Charybdis’s office alone. Coming to his senses was one thing, but she still fully intended to give him a piece of her mind for sending such an absurd, presumptuous letter. And whether for better or worse, that decision proved to be the right one.
"..."
As she drew near the office, Olga suddenly froze in her tracks.
The scent of blood.
Having spent virtually her entire life on the battlefield, it was a stench she could never mistake.
"That lunatic bastard."
Olga immediately assumed that Charybdis’s madness had flared up again and that he had slaughtered the very daughter he boasted of. The moment that conviction took hold, she threw open the office doors with violent force.
Yet the scene that greeted her eyes was unimaginably far from what she had anticipated.
"What...?"
Charybdis lay dead on the floor. And standing before his lifeless body was a young girl, clutching a small fruit knife.
The situation was painfully easy to deduce. Yet it made no sense at all. Why? Why had he been struck down by the very daughter he had bragged about? Utter confusion racked her mind. It was a scene so bizarre that Olga, a Grand Archmage of Illusion Magic, briefly wondered if she was hallucinating.
"Why on earth...?"
First, Olga shut the office door so no one outside could peer in, then murmured toward the girl. The pink-haired child in the fluttering dress was undeniably lovely, but her eyes were chillingly cold. This was no crime of passion.
Even as the question left her lips, Olga understood.
The girl hadn't killed Charybdis on an impulse. She had intended to kill him from the very beginning. Then since when? How long had she harbored such profound hatred for the man who had raised her like his own flesh and blood?
"Because he killed my family."
"..."
Those few words carried an unbearable weight.
Olga Hermod recalled words Charybdis had once uttered to her:
—We will all die. Karma always comes due in the end.
This was his karma. The retribution he had sown during the war had finally caught up to him.
The girl had planned for Charybdis to take her in from the very start. For a frail child to slay a monster on par with an Archmage, there had been only one way: she had to worm her way into his heart and draw close. And that was precisely what she had done.
Appearing so frail and pitiful that the thought of an assassin would never even cross his mind. Displaying overt hostility from the start so that he wouldn't suspect a deeper scheme. Conveying that she was just like him, and that perhaps they could understand one another.
She had approached him under that symbolic guise, slowly pretending to open her heart while biding her time for this very day. Until the moment Charybdis’s guard was so completely dismantled that he wouldn't even flinch if she drew a blade right before his eyes.
Had Charybdis sat there smiling until his final breath, watching his beloved daughter clumsily peel fruit with a small knife to feed him?
"Ha..."
Olga Hermod covered her mouth, a shudder running down her spine at the sheer, terrifying thoroughness of the child’s design.
Charybdis had been sincere. He had truly repented, choosing to change himself entirely for her sake. Believing even that was not enough, he had swallowed his pride to petition Olga Hermod, a woman of sterling imperial renown, to watch over her. Every action he took had been solely for the girl. And every single step of that journey had unfolded according to the child’s design.
"He was a pitiful man," Olga whispered.
"I know."
"Did you truly have to kill him? Did you hate him so much?"
"I don't really know. I don't hate him anymore. But... I had to."
"Why?"
"Because I promised."
"..."
"Because I believed it was what had to be done."
Olga Hermod gripped her staff tightly.
Charybdis had been a wicked man, and the day was bound to come when he would pay for his sins. It was an inescapable fate. And so, what drove the girl was not petty emotion, but a solemn cause. For that cause, the child had slain even her own feelings. She had chosen to butcher the one person who treated her as his own daughter.
Just as Charybdis had predicted, his accumulated sins had returned to claim him. In the very form he had feared the most.
"What were his final words?" Olga asked.
How had that madman died—a man who had clung desperately to life to escape death, even while drowning in guilt?
"He didn't say anything."
"..."
"He just... didn't say a word."
"I see..."
Olga Hermod knew. Charybdis had been an Archmage every bit her equal—or, in the days when his sanity was intact, perhaps an even greater mage than herself. The moment his heart was pierced, he would have understood everything instantly. Perhaps so many words had flooded his mind that he couldn't bring himself to utter a single one.
The last memory Olga had of Charybdis was of a raving maniac, screaming that he didn't want to die, butchering civilians in his terror. Yet the handwriting she had seen in his letter was that of an ordinary father whose thoughts were only of his daughter.
"...Go," Olga Hermod said softly.
She chose to believe that Charybdis had changed. She chose to place her faith in the humanity bleeding through that single letter and honor his final wish. As his old friend, the choice fell to her. Charybdis had entrusted his daughter to her care. If so, granting the child a chance at life was far truer to his will than watching her be dragged off to the gallows.
Was this the right decision? Charybdis was already dead; she would never know.
"On one condition: never appear before my eyes again."
Yet she wanted to believe that Charybdis had truly changed. That he had repented of his sins, accepted their price, and passed away as a father worrying only for his daughter’s future.
Olga Hermod chose to live inside that illusion.