Chapter 32
Summer weather was fickle.
For the past few days, it had been nothing but blazing sun, and I’d assumed today would be the same.
Even the weather report I’d happened to catch from one of the many media sources my retainer explored on her Device whenever she had a free moment said it would stay clear today.
What a load of nonsense.
It was a lie.
The sky I looked up at was dim and overcast.
It looked as if rain could start pouring at any second.
The scent of water wasn’t quite strong enough for that; it would probably stay nothing more than cloudy. Still, even if I scrubbed my eyes clean, I couldn’t have found a trace of brightness in that gray, leaden world.
It resembled the state of the girl standing there with my hand in hers, unmoving.
“Seo-ah.”
“...”
She didn’t answer.
The child who had never once done this before had her lips pressed tightly shut.
Her mind must be so tangled up that my voice can’t reach her.
Her head was slightly bowed, and her lowered bangs covered her eyes, throwing a deep shadow across the bridge of her nose.
I looked away from Lee Seo-ah and forward again.
The narrow passage I had searched so often it had become familiar. The old wall fence I always saw. The orphanage building that should have stood inside it.
There was nothing.
Not even a frame remained; everything had burned away, leaving only blackened ruins piled high, and in that gray backdrop the sight sank into the coldest kind of stillness.
What had been there until yesterday had collapsed into nothing in a single day.
The optimism I had always taken for granted had become emptiness in an instant.
A heaviness I couldn’t even tell apart from confusion, grief, or pain surged up to my throat.
It was Lee Seo-ah’s emotions, seeping in through my nose.
I knelt down and, unlike the turbulent feelings roiling inside me, carefully drew in the small body that did not stir at all.
I brought my mouth close to Lee Seo-ah’s ear as she yielded to the embrace without resistance.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t help.”
She flinched.
“I was told to pass that on to you.”
I didn’t say who it was.
The little body trembling faintly leaned fully against me.
Before long, one of my shoulders had been lightly dampened.
Holding Lee Seo-ah tight, not letting out even the smallest sound, I cried as well.
In her place, for the child who still couldn’t cry properly, I let the feelings spill out again.
There were no survivors at the orphanage where the fire had broken out.
The director and the staff were all dead.
As for the children, they were currently presumed missing.
That was because not a single child’s remains had been found among the bones recovered from the scene.
On top of that, a similar incident had occurred at Lee Seo-ah’s school, which had also been completely gutted in the same fire.
Several students from the school, which had already been closed, had disappeared.
Before the news of the fire had even been announced, reports from parents had started pouring in from dawn, and the investigation was still ongoing.
The cause of the fire was identified.
It appeared that a spark from a mana ignition array had combined with an amplification array and fanned the blaze before anyone inside could even notice.
For anyone who had studied magic circles, it was a basic application level technique that even an Academy student could manage.
Then came the confirmation that it had been triggered remotely, that at least a high-grade mana stone had been used, and that the high-risk mana defenders installed in both burned facilities had failed to activate one after another.
But with only those factors, it was difficult to identify even a suspect, let alone a culprit.
Since it had been a fire, there was no smell left behind, and with a mana stone used, tracing the residual mana was meaningless.
In the end, all I got was that explanation from Kim Su-hyun, and I came back with no clue at all.
That had been two weeks ago.
Fortunately, Lee Seo-ah had recovered some of her energy.
She still wore dark eyes at times, but perhaps because she had cleared away those long-set emotions twice over, her personality and attitude had become brighter and more alive than before.
I wanted to say it was all thanks to my devotion and affection, but since I knew that wasn’t true, it irritated me a little.
“Heh heh heh. To have come this far, you’re pretty decent, heroes.”
I couldn’t deny that the retainer, clowning around behind that transparent glass door, had played a huge part in it.
I could only cry for her, while the retainer actually empathized with Lee Seo-ah.
It was pretty absurd that a monster could understand human sensitivity and sympathize with it, but in practice her care had been remarkably effective.
Just look at her now.
The monster was busily acting the part of a monster, playing along at eye level with kids who didn’t know the first thing about the word mana.
“There it is, that beast!”
“Uwaaaah! Beast!”
“...”
There were three kids playing with the retainer.
First I looked at the girl whose energy was almost annoying in how high it was.
That girl with the mischievous grin, a little shorter than me and so well developed it was hard to believe she was fourteen, was named Ma Yu-ri.
She was Lee Seo-ah’s friend, the one I’d once considered killing.
On her right stood some scruffy-haired boy, Ma Yu-ri’s nine-year-old little brother.
Last came Lee Seo-ah, hanging back a little on Ma Yu-ri’s left and fidgeting shyly.
The three of them and the one monster were now inside a spacious room with one full wall of glass, each wearing headgear that looked like blindfolds.
Apparently it was called Beast Hunting, a virtual reality game that had become hugely popular among teenagers these days.
From where I stood outside, I could also see the in-game visuals through the Device mounted at the top of the glass wall, and they were so realistic that I sometimes startled without meaning to.
Like those things.
A huge, muscle-bound body over three meters tall swung a massive iron club, and two red horns jutted from its head.
The retainer had chosen the shape of the beast built into the game, and somehow it felt uncomfortably familiar.
Tch. No matter how I look at it, that’s a lot like the 6th Corps Commander.
I didn’t know the skin color since that was before I’d opened my eyes, but the face was a dead ringer for my former coworker.
Of course, the build was much smaller, and the weapon it used wasn’t a club like that.
There were several other differences too, but the longer I looked, the harder it became to shake the suspicion.
There was something else that bothered me too.
It was one thing that Ma Yu-ri’s little brother had been turned into a squat dwarf, but Ma Yu-ri’s own outfit was outrageous.
A holy knight in splendid gold-and-silver armor with a white mantle billowing behind her as she scattered blades of light.
That’s a saint.
One of the ten saints of the Continental Ten Holy Guardian Church Organization.
I remembered it clearly because one of those people had been among the bastards who trapped me and jumped me in a group attack back then.
She had definitely been the third sword of the Lord God, or maybe the fourth, and those blades of light had been a real pain in the ass.
Was it power that drove away corruption? For a corruption-lump like me, it had been almost the worst possible match.
Still, the moment they thought, even once, that they couldn’t kill me, they were already screwed.
They’d never have imagined I possessed an innate ability like my master’s.
And that appearance is probably a saintess... right?
I watched Lee Seo-ah, firing off holy spells with great energy behind the Ma Yu-ri siblings as they battled the retainer in a clumsy, swinging mess.
At first glance it looked like an ordinary black nun’s habit, but the more closely you looked, the more obvious it was that something was off.
A choker around her neck. A front slit that exposed her cleavage.
The open slit running from her waist down to the hem of her skirt was held together only by a thin belt embroidered with gold thread.
And her back?
It was a bold outfit that made no secret of the dynamic lines of muscle moving across her back every time she moved.
I had never met one in person, but it was exactly how my master had occasionally described the saintess’s appearance.
It was the job Ma Yu-ri had strongly recommended to Lee Seo-ah as the best support class, and she wasn’t wrong about that, so long as you ignored the outfit.
The Lord God’s blessing wasn’t a joke. As the most beloved existence, the power that came with it was outrageous.
There was even a time when the Demon King personally took action for the sake of killing the saintess, so what more needed to be said?
In any case, watching their in-game forms gave me a powerful sense of déjà vu.
Maybe I shouldn’t have set this up.
The house that had been destroyed by a villain attack not long ago had finally been restored, and we’d moved back in.
Lee Seo-ah still hadn’t been formally adopted, but since she no longer had anywhere else to go, she was living with us too.
In the middle of all that, the retainer had made one suggestion for the sake of the gloomy child.
Invite some friends over.
Honestly, I hadn’t been thrilled by the idea, but when I saw the expression on Lee Seo-ah’s face brighten at the suggestion, I couldn’t bring myself to say no.
That was how Ma Yu-ri and her siblings had ended up playing at my house right now.
For the children’s convenience, I’d bought and installed all sorts of miscellaneous things, and that virtual reality room was one of them.
“U. Uuuh.”
I’d been blankly watching that repeated sense of déjà vu for days when a babble that tickled my ears made me turn my head.
On the sofa beside me, an ugly baby was rolling around with bright eyes, sucking on a toy in its mouth.
It was Ma Yu-ri’s youngest sibling.
They said he was one or two years old, but he still couldn’t really talk and only managed to toddle around a bit.
Unlike the retainer, I didn’t have the confidence to play with kids, so I was stuck as an unlucky babysitter.
“Ma. Mama.”
When he made eye contact with me, he reached out with tiny little hands like a handful of bean sprouts.
“Hey. I’m not your mom.”
“Ma, aaah.”
Babies are strange creatures in a way.
When I first met this one, he cried so bitterly it felt like he was trying to send the Demon King away, but after a single day together his attitude changed completely.
Since he’d been glued to my side all day, it seemed he now thought I was his mother.
How in the world did that woman take care of a kid?
Not only did I have fourteen-year-old Ma Yu-ri in my house, but I also had a baby who couldn’t even speak.
Of course I’d met their parents and gotten permission. The retainer said that was the proper thing to do, something called common sense.
So when I met Ma Yu-ri’s parent, it turned out to be her mother alone.
There was no father in sight, and I hadn’t bothered to ask why. Since the only man’s scent in the place we visited was the nine-year-old little brother’s, I figured there had to be some circumstances and let it go.
That said, the smell only applied to the house.
As you’d expect from Ma Yu-ri’s looks, her mother was a striking beauty, but the scent she gave off was atrocious.
Setting aside the overpowering stench of cosmetics, she reeked of men, and not in any way I could have counted how many of them there were.
Combined with her visibly worn face, I was certain after hearing that she went out to work at night and came home in the morning.
Ma Yu-ri’s mother worked in the sex industry.
I had neither the intention nor the standing to condemn her for that, but it was hard to understand how she could be so indifferent to the children she had borne herself.
From the way things looked, the one who usually took care of the younger brother and the baby was the eldest, Ma Yu-ri, and when I said I would look after all three children, her mother readily agreed and headed back to the bedroom.
Even after several days after that, she hadn’t called once.
Judging from the retainer’s occasional complaints about it, this definitely wasn’t normal.
“Ma. Mammaa.”
“Hmm? Ah, it’s about time for dinner.”
This baby was rigid about mealtime.
When I checked the wall clock, it was a little past six in the evening.
At that moment, the retainer and the children came out of the virtual reality room.
They’d come out after hearing the alarm I’d set in advance.
They’d probably eat dinner and then go back to the game.
They’d done exactly that every day for the past few days.
When are these kids ever going to go home?
“Seo-ah’s mother!”
I flinched.
Ma Yu-ri had come bounding over, grinning at me with bright eyes and all the energy in the world.
I smiled back and spoke as gently as I could.
“Yes, Yu-ri.”
“Seo-ah says she wants a hamburger! Can we go eat one, Mother?”
I flinched. Again.
Mother.
At that word, the corners of my mouth lifted on their own.
“Y-Yu-ri. When did I say that?”
“You said you wanted one earlier, didn’t you? If you want something, you should eat it. Especially you, Seo-ah, you’re way too skinny, so you need to eat a lot. Right, Mother?”
“That’s right, that’s right.”
I laughed with a broad grin.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to keep them around a little longer.
“Heh. Your intentions are showing, master.”
Ignoring the half-lidded look from the retainer, I got to my feet.
I’d better get ready to go out quickly. Hehe.