I Became the Damn Bodyguard
The Rung Duchy. One of only five ducal houses in the Rupa Empire, the colossal nation boasting the largest territory and the longest history on the continent.
Beftting that rank, the lands ruled by House Rung were vast enough to rival a small nation on the empire's fringe. And just as light casts a shadow, so too did the sprawling domain of the Rung Duchy harbor an underworld of its own—and at the very peak of the countless organizations crawling through that shadow world stood a mafia known as Serpe.
"Hey. You hear about that?"
"If you open with 'you hear about that,' I'm not gonna bite. Just say what you want to say."
"Those slave traders across the way. Our boys walked past this morning and said the whole place got flipped inside out."
"By the peacekeepers?"
"You ever seen the peacekeepers do actual work? Word is some raving lunatic walked in with a blade and swept the place clean."
"Again? Slave markets have been getting hammered a lot lately. Same guy?"
The guards posted at the front gate of Serpe's headquarters, unable to beat back their boredom, had been whiling away the hours on gossip and underworld news when one of them spotted a figure staggering toward them.
"Huh?"
"Who goes there... whoa."
As his superiors had drilled into him, the gatekeeper leveled his blade at the stranger to bar his approach—then choked on his own words. What was shuffling toward them was a blood-soaked child who looked ready to drop dead on the spot.
"That's... that's a kid, isn't it? And look at the state of him..."
"Doesn't look like he's even fifteen... what the hell is he doing here..."
"Where are they...?"
"What?"
The boy was murmuring in a voice so faint it barely carried, like a ghost, or a corpse with its soul already gone. Gul's rambling made the gatekeeper tilt his head.
"Where are my mom and dad..."
"Mom and dad...?"
"Sorry, kid, but why would your parents be here...? More importantly, you—"
"Don't play dumb with me...! I did my homework before I came, you gangster bastards!"
The instant the boy—who had clearly been fighting for every breath—seized the gatekeeper's shoulder, a strength no child should possess wrenched the man downward, and the blade sank into his back.
"Wh-what the—!?"
"Bring my parents back, you fucking bastards!"
"...So let me get this straight. This brat is the one who turned a whole handful of our boys into half-cripples, and painted that slave market across the way red?"
"And going by the rumors lately, every blade incident in the other territories was his handiwork too."
Karma said nothing.
Naturally, Gul's assault—an attack he himself couldn't have guaranteed would succeed even at full strength—was put down before long. Just as the boy had expected, word of his raid on the slave market had already spread across the territory's entire underworld while he was busy fighting off the kidnappers who'd tried to abduct Peri, and Serpe had been bracing for exactly this kind of visit.
"Ha... a kid like this... is really the murderer who's been walking around lopping off arms and legs?"
Gul's journey—interrogating every enemy he met in his search for his parents by carving off their limbs—had hardened into an urban legend known as the Limb-Severing Demon, quietly spreading through every corner of the empire. Karma, boss of Serpe, looked down at the boy sprawled face-down on his floor, drained of every last scrap of strength barely moments after barging in, and found himself unable to string a sentence together. The star of that famous rumor was a child whose voice hadn't even cracked yet.
"Good lord, this... is he even ten... yeesh."
He kept opening his mouth to say something and shutting it again, then fished a cigarette from his coat. His right-hand man—the confidant who might as well have been his other arm—had a match struck and ready before he could ask.
"So... why'd you come? Why'd you hit the slave traders, and why'd you hit us?"
Having taken a long drag to settle his chest, Karma pressed the question on the man who'd lit his cigarette—Galing, the capable enforcer who had personally put Gul down after the boy carved through Serpe's ranks.
"Something about handing over his mom and dad. As far as we can tell, he believes his parents are in our custody..."
"Parents? Mom and dad? Why would he come looking for those here?"
Karma's brow twisted at the notion that the boy had come hunting for his parents.
"You remember that married couple we bought as slaves about half a month back? Could it be them? The market we purchased them from happens to be the very one the kid wiped out today."
"Oh, that! So he really did come looking for his mom and dad...!"
The mystery was solved, but Karma's unease only deepened. He cut himself off and took another slow pull on his cigarette.
"So what do we do with this brat..."
Karma was a father himself, and it pained him to look at a boy who'd stained his own hands with blood for nothing more than the chance to get his parents back. But with the brat having picked such a conspicuously loud fight, some measure that wouldn't shame him as head of the underworld was non-negotiable. Miraculously, no one had died—yet five of his men had lost body parts to that frail-looking child's blade or were lying in comas, and Karma agonized over what sentence to hand down.
"Killing him's a bit much... maybe just take a finger and... send him home..."
While sympathy and reason warred inside him, one of his men came sprinting up, face tight with urgency.
"Boss, we've got a problem! The young miss!"
"What?!"
At the words young miss, the haze clouding Karma's eyes honed to a razor's edge. He lunged at the subordinate and seized him by the collar.
"Peri?! What about her!?"
"Some sons of bitches attacked the young miss!"
The news that his only daughter—the child of his late wife—had been ambushed sent Karma's head spinning, and for one terrible moment he nearly went down where he stood.
"Wh-what happened, is Peri—! Is my daughter safe!?"
"Sh-she's safe, for now! The guards we posted on her are all dead, but somehow she managed to make it here on her own!"
"..."
"Boss!"
Thud. The moment he heard his daughter was alive, the tension bled out of Karma along with the strength in his legs, and this time he truly collapsed to the floor.
"...You son of a bitch. Your own daughter's precious as all hell, but other people's parents don't mean a damn thing, huh."
"If you want to walk out of here with your body in one piece, keep your mouth shut."
Gul felt a wave of disgust wash over him at Karma's two-facedness—a man leading a den of criminals, putting on the face of a worried father. Galing caught the jab, let out a soundless sigh, and shut the boy's mouth before Karma could hear a word of it.
"Daddy..."
Just then, a young, lovely voice—utterly wrong for Serpe's headquarters, packed wall to wall with hardened criminals—drifted in from beyond the room, and a girl even younger than Gul, the youngest soul present, peeked her head through the door.
"Daddy..."
"Peri! Oh, my baby girl! Are you okay? You're not hurt anywhere, are you!?"
The sight of his daughter—more precious to him than any fortune or power—sent Karma running. He swallowed the cigarette he'd been holding whole and swept his eyes over her body, hunting for a single mark.
"I'm fine. Some boy saved me—oh! It's him! The boy who saved me!"
Calmly soothing her father—more composed than even she herself expected—Peri was just about to confess that a passing boy had come to her aid when she realized the person lying collapsed in the room was him.
"...What?"
The worthless intruder who'd attacked them was, at the same time, the benefactor who'd saved his daughter. Karma's brain simply stopped.
"That brat... saved you from the kidnappers? He wasn't trying to abduct you?"
It would have made far more sense for the boy to target Peri out of a grudge against him, which was why Karma asked—but Peri shook her head hard.
"No, that boy saved me. These men I'd never seen before were fighting our men, and then they came chasing after me, trying to grab me, and that boy threw his knife from behind and saved me from them, bleeding the whole while."
"Ah, I... I see..."
The dizziness pained him enough that, if his daughter hadn't been standing right there, he'd have pulled out another cigarette on the spot.
"But Daddy... is that boy hurt right now?"
"Huh? Ah, well... that's..."
"Are you... going to hurt him? He saved me, so why...?"
"No, no, it's just..."
His daughter gazing up at him with pure, innocent eyes, worried sick over Gul's condition—Karma could do nothing but turn his head away, wearing the expression of a man about to weep, and appeal to Galing for rescue.
"Ahem. For now, let's get the young miss to the hospital, just in case."
"R-right! Of course, she could be hurt somewhere we can't see. Hospital first!"
"Daddy, what about him? That boy looks hurt too..."
"He has some business to discuss with us, so he'll follow along a little later. Don't you worry, young miss."
The sly, cold-hearted boss of the mafia turned into a gentle lamb who couldn't tell a single lie in front of his daughter, so Galing stepped in and talked Peri around in his place.
"Whew..."
Having dispatched his men to escort Peri to the hospital, Karma sank into his chair and looked down at Gul, who was still glaring up at him from the floor.
"I'm grateful, don't get me wrong. But why'd you save my daughter? Did you know whose she was?"
"You think I would've saved her if I knew she was your daughter? If I'd known, I'd have put her down myself."
"Quite the bluff... Fine. So you want your parents back? Well, tough luck, kid. Your parents aren't here."
"...The fuck?"
At those words, the scowl Gul had been wearing crumbled in an instant.
"We run a few operations of our own. We shipped them off to one of those. So—you want your parents back?"
"Why? Feeling charitable because I saved your daughter?"
Gul asked, nursing a quiet hope, but Karma shook his head.
"Might've been, if you hadn't stirred up such a goddamn mess."
"..."
"And even if I did hand your parents back, you really think that solves anything? Look at how many men you killed. Do you have any idea how big the players are among those slave traders you crossed?"
The only reason they hadn't already come for him, Karma explained, was that they knew too little about Gul to move. The organizations he'd touched were giants whose influence reached across the entire empire.
"Say you do get your parents back like this. The moment they figure out who you are, you spend the rest of your life running from them. Sure, you can fight a little. But what about your parents?"
"..."
Call him mature all you like—Gul was still too green to know how the world truly turned, and he had no answer to Karma's cold, practical arithmetic. Karma studied the boy in silence for a long moment, then made him an offer.
"From what I can see, you don't much value your own life, but your parents' lives are another story. How about you do a job for me?"
"...?"
"I'll keep your mom and dad safe."
"...Seriously?! ...No, wait. Nobody offers that out of the goodness of their heart. What's the condition?"
Excitement flared in Gul at the promise to protect his parents.
"That girl you saw earlier. You protect her, the way you did today. She's worth more to me than anything else in this world. You put her before your own life and protect her. No exceptions."
What Karma was offering, in other words, was for Gul to put on a collar and become a dog that guarded Peri.
"...How long."
"I won't even demand forever. My daughter's ten now, so... six years. Guard her until she turns sixteen and enters the Academy. Understood?"
"...Deal."
And so the first wave that would decide the boy called Gul's life settled into stillness—he had become the bodyguard of a girl he'd saved by pure chance.
But he didn't know it yet. Even now, the second wave was gathering somewhere far beyond the reach of his eyes, closing in on him slowly, steadily.