Shallow Hope
Shallow Hope
The blood-soaked traitor wizard lay sprawled on the office floor.
From the corner of his twitching mouth, bright red blood oozed out and spread across the expensive carpet.
Professor Walder, who had been looking down at that miserable sight, slowly raised his head and scanned me.
"Good work. A very clean hunt."
His mouth looked satisfied.
But his cold, murky snake-like eyes were flashing with an eerily sharp glint.
"However."
Walder's gaze pierced into my eyes as if to bore through them.
"Before the prey was caught... didn't it spout any nonsense to you?"
Silence fell.
Inside the dark office, only the second hand of the desk clock echoed like an irregular heartbeat.
Even though he already knew that the Order was investigating him from behind.
It was the old fox's chilling final test, thrown to sound out whether I, his hound, was hiding information from him or not.
My mind spun coldly and quickly.
'I didn't say anything.'
The moment I spat out such a flimsy lie, the old fox would immediately withdraw his trust from me.
He would judge that there was a possibility I was deceiving him or colluding with the Order, and would continue with tiresome and tedious additional verification and psychological warfare.
But what if I told the truth?
It would confirm that Walder's suspicion was correct, and at the same time perfectly prove that I, this hound, had no loyalty or lingering attachment to the Order.
The answer was clear.
Above all, right now I had no 'time' to play games of push-and-pull with this old fox.
Ines, left alone in the dormitory room.
Her slender shoulders, holding their breath in the darkness, relying only on one shirt stained with my scent—they were so vivid in my mind that I was going crazy.
I had to return even one second faster to let her hear my heartbeat.
Completely omitting any excuses or hesitation, I threw the fastest and most certain fastball.
"I hear the Order bastards took his family hostage."
"......."
"He barked to be spared, saying they instigated him to steal magical tools from the Magic Tower and investigate you, gyosu-nim."
At my dry and unabashed answer, one of Walder's eyebrows twitched.
Instantly, the tension that had been taut in the office air loosened as if by magic.
"Keu, heuheuheu... hahahaha!"
Walder, burying his chin in his clasped hands, burst into a grotesque and satisfied laughter.
"As I thought, they were rats of the Holy Imperial Office. Those disgusting hypocrites, putting on all sorts of noble airs on the outside, while behind the scenes they take a beast's family hostage and dig into others' secrets."
Walder rose from his seat and looked down at me with snake-like eyes.
"I like your honesty, hound. Your insolent tongue pleases me quite a bit today."
I had passed the final test.
In Walder's eyes, from which suspicion had been lifted, perfect trust and greed toward me intertwined.
"I'll completely cover up the matter of you cutting down my disciple with this incident. In other words, today's payment ends with that."
Walder gestured with his chin toward my sword hilt, beaded with blood.
"But from now on, I will often give you bloody commissions that suit you. Instead, starting from the next hunt, I will pay you a proper reward."
Walder approached the desk and leaned on his cane.
"It could be money. If you have no interest in petty cash, I'll give you the information you so desire or the 'knowledge' of my Magic Tower."
Knowledge.
That word struck my eardrum.
To understand Ines's damaged brain structure and to uncover the correlation between holy power and mana, I absolutely needed the knowledge of the Magic Tower that that old wizard had built with his lifelong dedication.
It was the perfect bait for revenge against the Order and for Ines's treatment.
"Speaking of which, the next prey is from the Holy Imperial Office..."
Walder opened his mouth to explain his schemes against the Order.
But I no longer had the leeway to listen to this old man's grand causes or revenge dramas.
"The conditions of the reward are to my liking."
I cut off Walder's words sharply, like slicing a radish.
"...What?"
A commoner who dared to cut off the words of the academy's top power, the master who held his leash.
Walder's eyes widened in disbelief, but I ignored him and turned around.
"But let's leave the rest for tomorrow."
As I moved my steps, I dryly tossed out a single remark.
"I have a place I need to return to right away."
Without even waiting for a reply, I swiftly opened the heavy oak door of the office and slipped out.
Behind me, I heard Walder's dumbfounded hollow laughter, but my entire focus was on that one shabby dormitory room inside the barrier.
Tadadadak-!
I sprinted like crazy through the dark academy corridors.
My muscles screamed.
The broken arm bone throbbed, and my stamina, depleted from dealing with the magical beast, signaled its limit and made my vision blur.
But I didn't slow down. Instead, I squeezed the limits of my immature body and split the darkness at extreme speed.
I had delayed too much time.
'Please.'
As soon as I reached the dormitory door, I roughly grabbed the doorknob and flung the door open.
Kkik-.
"......."
The room was pitch black.
Where I threw my gaze while gasping for breath.
It was empty.
On the old bed where Ines should have been lying, only the shirt I had left with her was crumpled and abandoned.
My heart dropped with a thud and sank to my feet.
"Ines."
There was no answer.
My lower abdomen turned cold. Just as I was about to hurriedly turn on the light and search the room.
Sak. Sak.
Under the bed.
From the darkest and narrowest corner, a grotesque and chilling friction sound came.
I reached out with a trembling hand and groped through the darkness under the bed.
"...Ah."
A despairing sigh escaped through my lips.
There, Ines was.
A slender figure, curled up tightly and trembling violently.
With my absence having been several tens of minutes longer than usual, the scent remaining on the shirt alone couldn't endure that terrible anxiety and withdrawal symptoms.
Completely panicked by the fear of the heartbeat sound disappearing, Ines had crawled under the bed and was swallowing her cries like a beast.
And.
Ttuk, tuduk.
Dark red blood was dripping from her white forearm onto the floor.
Her jade-like skin, which had barely been cleaned without a single scar by the holy power poured on by the Order's healing priests.
That tender skin—she herself was brutally scratching and tearing it off with her own fingernails.
Sak, sak.
A terrible self-harm, compulsively scratching her arm as if forgetting even the pain, even as flesh was gouged and blood beaded.
"Stop."
I knelt down and reached out, grasping her two blood-soaked wrists tightly.
"Aaaak!"
Startled by the unfamiliar touch, Ines screamed and struggled.
She buried her head like a beast, trying to bite my hand that held her wrist.
I didn't avoid it.
Instead, I wrapped my arms around her waist, forcibly pulled her out from under the narrow bed, and enclosed her in my wide embrace.
And I buried her struggling head deep into my chest.
Koong, koong, koong.
A familiar and heavy pulsating sound.
"Eu, eueung..."
As soon as her cheek touched my chest and that sound hit her ear, Ines's body, which had been thrashing wildly, stiffened as if struck by lightning.
As if she had never had a seizure, she steadied her panting breath and gripped my clothes tightly like a lifeline.
And like a beast confirming its master's scent, she began to lick the blood-stained hem of my shirt with her tongue and clung to me.
I tightly clasped her blood-soaked fingers.
My chest felt like it was being torn apart.
Self-blame and cold anger boiled silently.
All those actions of delaying outside, playing flimsy psychological warfare under the pretext of gaining someone's trust and extracting information.
For this girl, they were nothing less than a hell that tore her skin apart.
I slowly stroked her blood-stained platinum hair.
"Now, it's okay."
At my dry whisper, Ines's thin shoulders, which had been trembling, gradually calmed.
That was when.
Ines, who had been burying her face in my chest, slowly raised her head.
Her empty gray eyes, which always lost focus and wandered in the air or stared only at the ground.
Those eyes.
At this very moment, were staring straight into my eyes.
"...!"
My breath stopped.
One second. No, an extremely brief moment of less than 0.5 seconds.
It was a hazy and blurred gaze that seemed about to fade away, but it was clearly reaching toward 'me', not the empty air.
As if, from the depths of a very deep abyss, a fragment of a shattered soul barely rose to the surface and recognized the one holding it.
A strange and pitiful eye contact.
'No.'
My cold reason immediately whispered.
That girl's brain is completely burned out. Not a handful of will remains.
She merely reacted to the physical stimuli of my voice and breath, and unconsciously lifted her head like a beast.
Assigning meaning to it is just a weak illusion and an emotional luxury.
But.
No matter how coldly my reason presented the correct answer, the instinct and thirst deeply ingrained in my bones were determined to blindly believe in that cruel and flimsy hope.
'If it wasn't.'
My reflection appeared in Ines's empty eyes.
'If that gaze just now wasn't mere coincidence or reflex. If that shattered soul, even in its shell-like unconsciousness, recognized the real me and looked at me?'
Instantly, my immature heart began to race wildly.
A single handful of reward.
In this devastated hell stained with self-harm and blood, that one fleeting eye contact she gave me was completely turning my reason and inner self upside down.
I sat down on the floor and hugged the bleeding Ines tightly, as if my body would break.
A terrible and desperate dilemma choked my neck.
To gain Walder's trust and extract information about the Order, I have to constantly wander outside. But the moment I leave, Ines bleeds.
Yet I can't take this fragile shell with me every time to the bloody hunting grounds where my head could fly off at any moment, or to the old wizard's damp Magic Tower.
A perfect hell where I can neither take her nor leave her.
There is only one answer to smash this dilemma.
To the extent that I don't even need to read others' expressions or engage in psychological warfare.
To transcend limits and become more overwhelmingly and mercilessly strong.
Memories of the previous turn flashed through my mind.
Until I cut off the Demon King's head.
The world condemned our escape. The Knights Templar put a bounty on us, and the Order chased me as a fallen hero.
Driven to the end of the world, the most desperate cliff edge, I had to run desperately and bleed.
But this life is different.
I will never repeat such a helpless escape again.
Whether it's the Empire, the Order, or the Demon King that blocks me and threatens Ines.
Instead of wearing a leash while watching the leaders' eyes, I just need to slice off all the wrists of the insects holding that leash and make the world kneel under my feet.
Absolute force to slaughter everything that blocks my way, so that not a single drop of blood splatters on Ines behind me.
'Faster.'
I grasped Ines's blood-stained white hand tightly with both of mine.
'I must regain the power of my past life faster. No, I must become stronger than my past life.'
Enough to tear apart all the logic of the world.