Chapter 194
Chapter 194
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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 194
Chapter Title: A Dysfunctional Family (1)
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“……”
The atmosphere turned ice-cold.
At the venom that dripped from Isabella’s lips, Oh-jin and Ha-eun froze, their mouths agape.
To tell her own father, who had flown in on a helicopter the moment he heard his daughter was in danger, to get lost because he stank of sweat.
The scorching insult to her father left them momentarily stunned.
“Haha. It seems my princess is feeling quite shy.”
Paolo forced a hollow laugh, as if this were a familiar occurrence, and reached out to pat Isabella’s head.
*Smack!*
Isabella coldly slapped his hand away.
She glared at him with sharp eyes.
“What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean? I came because I was curious about my princess’s condition!”
“Is that so?”
*Smirk.*
A bitter smile formed on Isabella’s lips.
Listening to their conversation from the side, Oh-jin felt a sense of dissonance.
An unpleasant feeling, like gears grinding against each other instead of meshing.
It didn’t take long to identify the source of that feeling.
‘Not because he was worried, but because he was curious?’
For a father who had flown in on a helicopter for his daughter, it was a strangely detached choice of words.
“Well, now that your curiosity is satisfied, you can go back, can’t you?”
Isabella said, her voice chillingly cold.
Paolo shook his head as if he didn’t understand.
“How could I just see your face and leave when my princess has been through such a dangerous ordeal! By the way… who are those people over there?”
Paolo’s gaze shifted to Oh-jin.
Isabella stepped in front of Oh-jin, as if to block him, her eyes sharp.
“They are my guests.”
“Ah! I see! It’s a pleasure to meet you!”
Paolo moved past Isabella and approached him.
He extended a hand with a cheerful smile.
Oh-jin stared at Paolo’s outstretched hand for a moment before taking it.
‘He’s not Awakened.’
As they shook hands, he discreetly channeled a bit of mana, but he felt no stellar mana from Paolo.
“I’m Kwon Oh-jin.”
“The Lightning Wolf! The Apostle of Vega, was it? I believe I’ve heard your name.”
Paolo shook Oh-jin’s hand vigorously, beaming.
“What is your relationship with my princess? Could it be…”
“Father.”
Isabella cut Paolo off.
“Mr. Oh-jin must be exhausted. Don’t you think it’s rude to keep him like this?”
“Ah, you’re right. Haha! This is the first time my princess has brought a guest home, so I got a little too excited!”
*Too excited,* he said.
When the Dragon Vein had gone berserk and tens of thousands of monsters had attacked the resort where his daughter was staying.
Was this really a situation to be ‘excited’ about?
“I’ll take care of the cleanup! You go inside with Isabella and get some rest!”
Paolo patted Oh-jin on the shoulder as he walked past.
“……”
Oh-jin watched his receding back with a steady gaze.
“Let’s go inside, Mr. Oh-jin.”
Isabella took his arm and led him in.
Ha-eun followed behind her and asked.
“You don’t seem to get along with your dad?”
“……”
“He seems like a nice enough person. Did something happen?”
Ha-eun, who had been tilting her head curiously, let out a small gasp.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
Prying into Isabella’s family affairs when they weren’t even that close was crossing a line.
“…He’s not.”
“Huh?”
“He’s not a good person.”
The words were bitten out.
Her fist, clutching the hem of her blood-stained dress, trembled.
“……”
Ha-eun didn’t ask any more questions and quietly followed her.
After showing Oh-jin and Ha-eun to their room, Isabella gave a slight bow and turned to leave.
“Please, both of you, get some rest. Let me know if you need anything.”
*Click.*
Isabella closed the door and left.
“Wow… talk about a dysfunctional family. The tension between them was so thick I could barely breathe.”
As soon as Isabella was gone, Ha-eun clicked her tongue and shook her head.
Oh-jin stared at the firmly shut door, recalling the conversation he’d had with Isabella while tracking the Living Armor.
‘She said her sister was exiled from the family when Isabella was named the successor.’
Was that what had ruined her relationship with her parents?
If so, a few questions remained.
‘I need to talk to her about this.’
Oh-jin stroked his chin, lost in thought.
Perhaps.
Following this thread of inquiry might lead to a clue about the current incident.
“Eh, whatever. It’s not my place to meddle in someone else’s family drama.”
Ha-eun leaped onto the bed and stretched languidly.
She kicked her slender legs as if she were splashing in water.
“Haaaaah~ I’m so damn tired.”
“At least wash up before you sleep.”
“Hmph.”
Ha-eun spread her arms wide, a grin playing on her lips.
“Your big sis is too tired to get up.”
“Oh, the poor thing.”
“Can’t even move a muscle.”
Oh-jin let out a chuckle and approached Ha-eun, who was sprawled on the bed with her arms outstretched like a newborn looking for its mother.
After hours of intense battle (though it was more of a one-sided slaughter), her body was smudged with soot in several places.
He slid an arm under her back and carefully lifted her.
Since she was only in a swimsuit, the soft texture of her skin was transmitted directly to him.
Ha-eun giggled and wrapped her arms around Oh-jin’s neck.
“Oh-jin.”
“Yeah?”
“That Isabella girl… can we really trust her? She’s an Executor of the Black Star Society, isn’t she?”
“…I don’t know.”
It was still difficult to say for sure about Isabella.
“But I think… she’s worth trusting.”
The glimpse he’d had of her ‘true’ self in the alley.
He felt that, at the very least, she was different from the Black Star Society he knew.
“Really?”
Ha-eun nodded from his arms.
If Oh-jin, of all people, said she was trustworthy, then there was no need for further suspicion.
“In that case, we need to do whatever it takes to make her our ally.”
Her unexpected words made Oh-jin’s eyes widen.
“…Are you okay with that?”
“Huh? With what?”
“You two didn’t exactly get along.”
“Ah, that.”
Ha-eun clicked her tongue and scratched her head.
“Well… I don’t like her hitting on my man, but I can’t let something like that make me miss such a great opportunity.”
How often would an opportunity to win over an Executor of the Black Star Society—the third-ranked Executor, no less—come by?
If the favor Isabella was showing Oh-jin now was genuine…
The benefits of bringing her to their side would be immeasurable.
“We could get inside information on the Black Star Society… or use the power of the Colagrande family. There are a lot of possibilities.”
But more than anything else.
“If that woman is as strong as they say, she can protect you when you’re in danger, right?”
Many dangers would surely lie ahead for Oh-jin as he played the part of the ‘Star of the Apocalypse.’
Among them, there would be threats he couldn’t possibly handle with his power alone.
If she had her way, she would protect him with her own strength, but…
‘That’s… probably not possible.’
She had experienced it several times already.
Her power alone was not enough to protect Oh-jin.
As long as Oh-jin could be protected, what did one more woman matter?
“Besides… you’re already head over heels for this big sis, right?”
Ha-eun raised her chin with a smug expression.
Oh-jin let out a hollow laugh and nodded.
“You’re right.”
Just as she said.
He had fallen for her so deeply that there was no escape.
He had been, since a past so distant he could no longer even remember it.
“Then you should try to win her over. Now’s your chance.”
“A chance?”
“Yeah. I don’t know, she… she felt a little fragile.”
Ha-eun touched her lips, her eyes narrowing slightly.
She recalled Isabella’s expression when she was speaking with her father.
“Fragile?”
“Back at the orphanage, there were a few kids who had that kind of vibe.”
Children who hadn’t been abandoned by their parents, but had ended up at the orphanage because their families had fallen apart.
Children who tried, with their small, delicate hands, to somehow fix what was already irrevocably broken.
He felt that same profound despair from Isabella.
“Well, I don’t have any real proof.”
“A woman’s intuition?”
“Hehe. This big sis of yours has sharp instincts, you know?”
“For someone with sharp instincts, you’ve been an airhead more than a few times.”
“Sh-shut up, you brat!”
Well, anyway.
‘Fragile, huh.’
Oh-jin carried Ha-eun toward the bathroom, mulling over her words.
***
Moonlight streamed in through the window.
It was enough to make the bloody massacre that had taken place today feel like a dream.
The moonlight in the night sky was beautiful beyond compare.
Isabella sat on the terrace, looking up at the moonlit sky.
“…Haa.”
How did things ever get to this point?
As she mulled over the unanswerable question again and again.
—*Knock, knock.*
A knock came from the door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me.”
It was Oh-jin.
“Mr. Oh-jin? Is there something you need?”
“No. I was just thinking we could talk for a bit.”
Oh-jin held up a bottle of wine he had gotten from the kitchen.
“Oh my, I never thought you’d be the one to initiate a secret rendezvous, Mr. Oh-jin.”
Isabella smiled with her beautiful eyes and took out two wine glasses.
*Glug, glug.*
The fine wine, easily worth hundreds a bottle, filled the glasses.
A fragrant aroma spread through the room as the two glasses clinked together with a clear sound.
“In Korea, they say *geonbae* at times like this, don’t they?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Hmm? You don’t do it, Mr. Oh-jin?”
“I’ve rarely ever had a drink with someone else.”
When he was surviving on two calorie bars a day, there was hardly an opportunity to drink leisurely.
“Fufu. Then I get to be your first, Mr. Oh-jin?”
Isabella’s eyes sparkled as she smiled alluringly.
Well, it wasn’t technically his ‘first,’ as he’d had drinks with Ha-eun at home a few times.
Oh-jin didn’t bother to correct her and took a sip of wine.
Perhaps because it was expensive.
Just one sip sent a striking aroma all the way up to his nose.
“Did things go sour with your father because of your sister?”
“…I knew you came to ask about that.”
Isabella smiled faintly, as if she had expected it.
“Yes. That’s right. After I was confirmed as the next head of the family… I fought with my father over my sister. In the end, she was exiled from the family.”
A battle between a girl who wanted to protect her family and a father who tried to uphold the family’s rules.
She probably hadn’t been Awakened back then, so she would have had no way to defy her father, who held the family’s power in a tight grip.
“Well… at the time, I was nothing more than my father’s puppet.”
“Looking at you now, that doesn’t seem to be the case at all.”
“Fufu. I didn’t just stand by idly, you know. I can be quite proactive when I need to be.”
He knew that all too well.
The position of an Executor in the Black Star Society wasn’t something one could obtain by simply following orders from above.
“Then why are you letting him be?”
“Pardon?”
“You could push your father aside and take over as the head of the family anytime you wanted, couldn’t you?”
Oh-jin asked, his eyes deep and沉 down.
She couldn’t know it, but.
This was a question directed not at Isabella as the ‘Saintess of Rome,’ but as the ‘Leech Queen.’
‘With that much power, ousting Paolo, who isn’t even Awakened, from his position as family head would be child’s play.’
Even as she looked at her father with such hateful eyes.
Why hadn’t she done anything to Paolo?
“…I wonder.”
Isabella tilted her wine glass, looking up at the night sky with bitter eyes.
“Could it be because… no matter how much I hate him, he’s still my father?”
As if she herself didn’t know the answer.
Isabella asked back with a bitter expression.
‘Because he’s her father.’
It was a sentiment Oh-jin, who didn’t even know his parents’ faces, couldn’t understand.
“Perhaps, in a corner of my heart, I’m still clinging to a thread of hope.”
“Hope?”
“The hope that one day… like a miracle, all the resentment and misunderstandings will be resolved, and we can go back to how things were.”
Before she turned ten, when the succession competition began in earnest.
She had lived a happy life, just like any other ordinary family.
With a father who loved his two daughters, a gentle mother, and a frail but caring older sister.
She had spent a time that felt like a sweet dream.
“Even though I know it’s too late to go back… for some reason, I can’t seem to give up easily. Fufu, isn’t it foolish?”
Isabella shrugged with a self-deprecating smile.
“……”
Oh-jin looked at her with conflicted eyes.
A woman who held such tender love for her family became a witch who massacred tens of millions in the first timeline?
‘Could this all be an act?’
As he thought that and met Isabella’s eyes.
“Ah.”
Was it because Oh-jin himself was a natural-born swindler?
Or was it because her pupils, reflected in the moonlight, were wavering precariously?
For some reason, he could tell.
The person before him now was neither the Saintess of Rome nor the Leech Queen.
It was ‘Isabella Colagrande’ herself.
“Hm? What is it, Mr. Oh-jin?”
“…It’s nothing.”
Oh-jin let out a hollow laugh and shook his head.
‘Of all people, I’m in no position to talk about what happened in the first timeline.’
If she was a witch who massacred tens of millions in the first timeline…
Then he was the Heavenly Demon who had driven billions of humans to their deaths.
‘Depending on the choices made, one could become the Heavenly Demon who destroys the world, or the Star of the Apocalypse who saves humanity.’
He, at least, had to believe those words.
The moment he stopped believing, he would be denying his very self.
“I hope your wish comes true.”
“Fufu. Thank you.”
*Clink.*
The glasses met with a clear sound.
Though he said he hoped her wish would come true, Oh-jin knew.
No, perhaps Isabella knew as well.
That hope…
Is called hope precisely because it cannot be fulfilled.
***
*Trrrrring.*
On the moonlit beach.
On the shore still covered in pools of viscous blood that had yet to be cleaned up, Paolo was on the phone with someone.
“Ah, it’s a pleasure. Lord Damian.”
Paolo’s voice was exceedingly polite as he spoke to the person on the other end of the line.
“The reason I’m contacting you is…”
On the small tablet in his hand, a video was playing.
“It’s about my daughter… no, about that blood-crazed ‘Witch.’”
The video showed…
Isabella, wreathed in a crimson aura, brutally slaughtering thousands of monsters.