Negotiations Break Down
"Vincent, let's have a little talk."
I cornered him just as he was returning to the parlor.
"What is it?"
"I hear you received some confessions yesterday."
Vincent's face collapsed into utter embarrassment.
"You heard about that? This is awkward..."
At the pity on my face, he dropped the sheepish act and spoke in earnest. "Don't worry—it's nothing for you to fret over. I turned every one of them down."
"That's not what I meant. Why did you turn them down?"
But he clearly hadn't anticipated that my reproach would come from that direction. He had no reply.
"Why on earth did you refuse Her Highness the Princess? Noble golden hair, those elegant blue eyes—her face and figure are first-rate on the entire continent. And she promised she'd change the whole world for you, didn't she?"
Vincent simply gazed quietly into my eyes.
"I know her personality seems stiff, but that's only because she's so terribly earnest. She's the type who'd get all sweet and clingy when it's just the two of you—so why!"
Met with his stony silence, I moved on to the Grand Duchess. "Then what about the Duchess? Fine, she's a little lacking in the chest, but her beauty is every bit the Princess's equal."
Even as the words left my mouth I knew how vulgar they sounded, and I felt a pang of guilt toward the poor woman—but there was no helping it.
"That slender waist, those hips, those long shapely legs! Bright crimson hair and clever green eyes—there isn't another combination like it anywhere!"
I'm sorry, my lady. Forgive me, just this once.
"Her personality is refreshingly honest, too. The way she can't manage even a shred of coyness around you? Marry her and you'd have a wife supporting you in everything. When it comes to marriage, comfortable beats everything."
I shook my head slowly.
"And what about Seongha? She'll be stepping down as Saint soon, so taking her in would be the perfect arrangement. A beauty who loses nothing to those two, with an air that just makes you want to protect her—has it truly never occurred to you that you might want that sensual charm of hers, coexisting as it does with the childlike innocence she shows now and then?"
Vincent didn't appear to be listening to a single word.
"Vincent, I've touched her skin myself—do you have any idea how supple and soft it is? That white hair has a mysterious beauty to it, and those golden eyes, brimming with kindness, look at you and no one else?"
My anger at being ignored kept climbing, and my voice rose with it.
"Every one of those women who loves you has the pedigree and power men dream of, beauty inside and out—and you're telling me none of them is enough?"
At last, Vincent opened his mouth. He appealed to me with eyes burning with devotion.
"Because for me, Adela, you alone are enough."
There it was again.
"I told you, you and I can't happen..."
"And why can't we?"
"Like I've said before—I'm your teacher and you're my disciple. Where I come from, a relationship like ours is counted among the gravest of taboos."
"Adela, this isn't the world you're talking about."
He had a point, I had to admit. The old doctrine that one's teacher stands in the place of one's parents was an ethic of the world I was born into, not a rule of this one.
"And the way you took me wasn't exactly normal, either."
I drove the knife into his sore spot.
"You do understand that abducting your teacher and forcing yourself on her is profoundly twisted, don't you?"
Vincent couldn't answer.
Good. So he does know. He knows this is wrong.
"The fact that you can't answer tells me you're well aware you're doing something you shouldn't."
"If I didn't, you'd leave me..."
He laid his heart bare, carefully, like something fragile.
"A child leaving its parents' embrace is the natural order of things, Vincent."
"I won't. Do you have any idea how much I agonized, all that time at your side?"
Vincent looked ready to work himself into another tantrum.
"That you might slip away somewhere and leave me behind. That you might fall into another man's arms and be gone. Do you know how much I resented it—how small and weak I was?"
For an instant, his words sent a jolt through my heart.
What he had felt was so like what I had once felt toward my mother. I never saw her as a woman, but oh, how I had suffered, terrified she would leave me behind and go off with Ma Cheonseong.
I had to soothe the anxiety Vincent had carried all this time and give him certainty about where he stood with me. If he was still so afraid of my leaving that he mistook one warped feeling for another, then I had to shatter that fear first—only then could I begin to untangle the rest of his distortions.
"Don't worry, Vincent. What we have won't break over something so small."
I embraced him—my one and only son and disciple, grown so tall now that I had to look up to meet his eyes.
"Even if you marry one of them, I'll stay by your side, as long as I'm not in the way."
I pulled his head against me, trying to give him some measure of security.
"Even if that recent... misfortune leaves me with child, things will never unfold the way they did before."
So much taller than I, he sank to his knees as I reached for him, receiving my embrace with something close to reverence.
"I'm sorry. You've worked so hard, and far from rewarding you, all I've done is frighten you..."
When I patted his back, Vincent wrapped his arms around me in turn.
"But that doesn't change the fact that I can't let things go on between us like this."
I couldn't bear to watch him come apart because of me. What I meant was: I refused, absolutely, to repeat my mother's mistake.
"So please—don't do anything as foolish as throwing away their hearts on my account."
"Why? What are you scheming now? No. This time I'm not letting you go."
The instant I began, ever so obliquely, to steer toward ending things between us, he grew petulant.
Apparently my vanishing without a word back then had shaken him far more deeply than I'd realized.
"I'm not going anywhere. Trust me. I have no intention of taking a man to begin with—and you know perfectly well the precepts of my Oath bar me from being with anyone."
"That's not enough."
What in the world did he want from me?
"Adela, I love you. This is no green confession, swept up in some passing feeling."
He drew back from me for a moment and produced a small box from his breast.
When he opened it, a pair of rings—elaborately wrought around enormous gemstones—glittered up at me.
Ah—!
Every instinct screamed it: this was a marriage proposal.
"I'd meant to do this somewhere with a proper atmosphere. Forgive me."
Still on his knees, he rose onto one and pressed his hand to the ground—
like a knight at his dubbing.
"Adela, my beautiful, my pure and graceful lady—"
No!! I have to refuse the moment he finishes—but if I do, there's no telling what this madman will do next!
"Please, be my partner for all the long years to come—...Adela?"
Just as I'd intended, I bolted from Vincent before he could see his formal proposal through.
Where? Where do I run?
I flung open the door that looked to lead to the entrance hall and burst through it. Behind me came the sound of Vincent in pursuit.
"Don't follow me, you lunatic!!"
I plunged headlong into the forest spread out before me.
The moment had finally come to call upon the special demonic energy I had stored up through all those times our bodies had joined.
Flitting between tree and tree, I layered applied lightness arts over my movements until I slipped clean from his sight.
Good. My body felt light—which made me think that surrendering it to him hadn't been nothing but torment and pain after all.
The presence of Vincent, hurtling after me, ground to a halt near the forest's edge.
I did it! I'd gotten away from him!
Once again I'd lied to him, gouged his wounds open all over again—but there was no helping it.
Honestly—what kind of lunatic proposes marriage in the middle of a moment like that? And the fact that this was the son and disciple I had raised and taught with my own hands left a bitter taste in my mouth.
Vincent, I'm sorry, truly. Let's both cool our heads and meet again.
Far ahead, the end of the forest came into view. I hadn't thought I'd run all that far, yet here it was already—smaller than I'd expected, I mused.
A man was standing there.
Strangely, even when I strained my eyes, I couldn't make out his features.
I considered calling for help, but appealing to someone that suspicious might only invite disaster.
Not that he posed much of a threat to me—the real problem was that Vincent could close the distance between us at any moment.
The man simply stood there, staring blankly in my direction.
As the distance shrank, his features finally came into focus.
Vincent was standing there.
What?!
I banked at full power and hurled myself in the opposite direction.
What—how—what is going on? Why is he there?!
To tear open the greatest possible gap between us, I spared neither internal energy nor stamina, sprinting until sweat streamed off my body.
I'd entered from the far side, so he must have circled back toward the house. I would have to pass it and keep running.
But by what means had he exited the forest ahead of me? He might be the Hero, but this bordered on the impossible. Short of Void-Step or taking wing through the sky, beating me there simply made no sense.
And then, at the forest's edge once more, I found Vincent waiting for me.
How does this make any sense?!
I wheeled around and ran again. This time I veered mid-course so he couldn't predict which exit I'd take.
But try as I might, again and again, every time I made a break for the forest's edge, he was there ahead of me.
Just now I had flown at my absolute limit, lightness arts maxed out, even invoking the technique of Soaring Flight. Even granting that he had reached the realm where one might tread upon empty air, he should never have been able to overtake me—let alone cut me off so utterly. However much experience he'd amassed battling the Demon Lord's armies, ascending to the realm of Void-Step should have been beyond him. Only mastery of that caliber could match the speed I was producing.
Or was this not lightness arts at all? Spatial teleportation magic? Or had he learned to fold space itself and fuse it into his footwork? I'd heard that Taoists of the highest realms could employ such tricks—and this world has magic, so perhaps he'd found a way to approximate them.
Running myself ragged through every theory I could conjure, I looked up at Vincent materializing before me yet again—and my legs finally buckled beneath me.
The internal energy I'd freshly built was spent. Somewhere along the way I'd begun drawing on my old demonic energy, and even that had reached its limit. If I pushed my remaining reserves any further, qi deviation would claim me. No—if anything, I might already be standing at its threshold.
Vincent had waited at his leisure, and the moment he saw me collapse, he closed the distance with an easy, weightless glide. Arriving before me, he hadn't shed so much as a single bead of sweat.
"Done with your struggling?"
He looked thoroughly satisfied with how things had turned out.
"So? Ready to accept my proposal now?"
Oh, wonderful. Judging by his eyes, the smile reached nothing but his mouth. I had made him very, very angry.
"...Just... tell me one thing. What... did you do?"
He scooped me up, sliding an arm beneath my knees.
"I used the formation you taught me, Adela—along with the precepts of your Oath."
"You... wretched man..."
"You tried to run. So you'll have to be punished, won't you?"