Honey for the Servant Worm
He's sealed this place up meticulously.
I examined Raven's room and let out a low whistle of admiration.
At a glance, it looked like an ordinary door, the same as any other, but a closer inspection revealed mechanisms tucked into every corner. Each and every one of them was sophisticated enough to escape notice entirely.
Figures. Full Moon through and through.
Full Moon was an assassin syndicate counted among the Ten Enemies of the Empire.
Pay them enough, and they'll kill the Emperor himself.
That was the sentence most commonly used to describe them.
And it wasn't exaggeration—Full Moon truly never turned down a contract. So long as the fee was met, they would eliminate absolutely anyone, no exceptions.
The Empire and its nobles had tried, time and again, to crush the syndicate. Every attempt had failed, because Full Moon was a maddeningly insular organization.
How insular? Insular enough that they didn't recruit assassins at all—they raised their own from scratch.
Their method was simple. They snatched up promising orphans from every corner of the continent and threw them into training facilities.
It was training so brutal that one survivor emerged for every ten who were fed into it, but to Full Moon, that was no problem at all. If ten wasn't enough, they simply threw in a hundred, or a thousand.
Raising assassins that way, internal strife should have been inevitable—and yet Full Moon ran without a whisper of dissent.
There was one reason it could function that way.
The Servant Worm.
The master of Full Moon was a man so versed in poison that he was called the Poison King, and the Servant Worm was the parasite he had poured his very soul into creating.
True to its name, the worm reduced its host to a slave.
The worm clung to the host's heart, and when its master gave the order, it tore the heart apart. The agony was so severe that even the assassins who had survived Full Moon's horrific training shook and trembled at the thought.
That was why Full Moon ran so smoothly. And it was the Servant Worm that bound Raven to the syndicate as well.
Against an assassin like Raven, torture and curses were useless. The first training an assassin received was learning to endure torture.
But with the Servant Worm as leverage, Raven could be brought to heel.
The problem was that I had no way to erase the worm myself.
No—more accurately, I had no intention of erasing it.
Raven was a creepy, calculating assassin. If I freed him, he'd wipe his mouth clean and plant a dagger in my back the moment it suited him.
So instead of erasing it—
I'll just change the worm's master to me.
― I didn't copy it from the Poison King! I'm the one who taught the Poison King, I keep telling you!
For a moment, I thought I could faintly hear someone grumbling.
Damn it all.
Raven ground his lips between his teeth.
His current mission was to enroll at Elysium Academy, win the favor of key figures, and grow close to them.
The plan had been flawless. Full Moon had poured its heart into it.
The trouble began when strange rumors suddenly started to spread.
That Raven was a lunatic obsessed with women. That his debauchery had given him a venereal disease. That merely hearing his voice would rot your ears off. Bizarre, incomprehensible rumors, one after another.
With the new semester in full swing and gossip flying in every direction, the salacious stories spread like wildfire, utterly beyond containment.
He couldn't even speak to the key figures, let alone earn their favor.
For now, Raven focused on smothering the rumors. But a rumor, once loosed, was like spilled water—nearly impossible to gather back up.
Where did it all go wrong?
Raven retraced his memories, searching for the moment things had broken.
One man surfaced immediately.
That damned guard bastard.
The guard who had blocked him when he tried to approach Evangeline. That was the moment everything started to unravel.
I'll kill him. Without fail.
That was why Raven had gone to the trouble of filing a report with the guard corps. Once the man's identity was confirmed, he intended to deal with him personally.
Killing a single lowly guard wasn't the kind of thing that would ever come back to haunt him.
As he smothered his anger, a question suddenly occurred to him.
Wait—why was Evangeline the first target again?
Granted, she had once been high nobility, but that was the past. Now she was a thoroughly fallen daughter of a house that didn't have a single pillar left standing.
There were far weightier names on the list—the Crown Prince, a candidate for sainthood, the heir of the Magic Tower Coalition. Why Evangeline first—
At that instant, excruciating pain surged up from his heart. It felt as though hundreds of insects had sunk their teeth into it at once.
The Servant Worm.
Raven hurriedly crushed the question out of his mind.
I am an arrow. An arrow whose only purpose is to strike its target. An arrow has no will.
Only after chanting the words to himself, over and over, did the pain begin to recede.
Damned worm.
Raven was muttering curses as he rubbed his sternum when—
"Cell 54."
A dry, toneless voice called his designation.
He turned his head to find the door standing open.
He had planted more than ten devices on that door alone, just in case. All of them top-grade. And someone had dismantled every single one?
Only the Poison King himself, or someone of guild-master caliber, could have managed it.
Worse, whoever it was knew Raven's number.
The Poison King wouldn't have come in person. Which meant it had to be a guild master.
Raven scrambled to his feet, dropped to one knee, and pressed his forehead to the floor.
Clunk. The door swung shut.
Unhurried footsteps approached, followed by the creak of someone settling into a chair.
Poison King, or guild master? Raven swallowed dryly and lifted his head.
The first thing he saw was a blue shirt that seemed somehow familiar.
A guard's uniform.
Disguised as a guard?
A clever move. Guards could be found anywhere in the Academy.
Impressed despite himself, Raven looked up at the man's face.
Long, elegant brows. Eyes that were languid and sharp all at once. A mouth twisted in something like a sneer. For some reason, the man brought a wolf to mind.
He'd seen that face before.
That damned guard from back then—!
The guard who had interfered when Raven tried to approach Evangeline.
Why was he here? And how had he learned Raven's identity? This man, a guild master? Had Full Moon planted him here to keep watch on Raven?
Questions piled one atop another, but his body was already moving.
Raven kicked off the floor and twisted his wrist. A black spike shot up from beneath his sleeve, and he drove it straight at the man.
No—he tried to drive it at the man.
Right up until their eyes met.
A person's eyes carried a wealth of information. It was why people spoke of "reading" them. A seasoned assassin could gauge an opponent from nothing more than a meeting of gazes.
Raven was more than seasoned—he was exceptional. A single exchange of glances let him estimate not only the shape of the fight, but its outcome.
And the outcome Raven deduced was—
If I stab, I die.
His instincts seized his arm mid-thrust.
"Quick on the uptake. I like that."
The man curled his lips upward as he eyed the spike frozen in front of him.
Raven was certain: had he not stopped, he would be dead.
"...Who are you?"
"Asking a client for their identity is forbidden in Full Moon, isn't it?"
"Are you here to make a request? My apologies, but I don't take personal commissions while on assignment."
To be precise, it wasn't that he didn't take them—it was that he was physically incapable of it. And that was about far more than mere compensation.
"Because of the Servant Worm?"
At the mention of the worm, Raven's eyes sharpened.
"Well, let's start with the payment. I'll rid you of the Servant Worm."
Servant Worm. At that despicable word, Raven's brow twitched.
No—he's just probing me. There's only one way to escape the worm.
The only way out was to kill the master of Full Moon himself: the Poison King.
And this man claimed he could resolve the worm? Was he saying he'd kill the Poison King?
Raven swallowed a scoff.
As if he'd read the thought, the man continued.
"Killing the Poison King is a tall order for now. That creepy bastard burrows into his deep little den and never comes out. Well, I'll deal with him eventually."
Watching the man speak of the Poison King like some local errand-boy, Raven found himself almost speechless.
"Then how exactly do you intend to resolve the worm?"
Raven's voice sharpened against his will.
The man pointed his Guard Baton at Raven.
"Simple. I change the worm's master to me."
Change the Servant Worm's master?
It was a method Raven had never once considered.
Naturally. The Servant Worm was the parasite the Poison King had crafted with his entire being. Swapping its master was like trying to wrest a Sword Master's blade from his hands—no, it was harder than that.
Absurd. Utterly absurd.
"It has a grand name, but the Servant Worm is just a parasite. That's why holy power and magic don't work on it. How would you ever fix a bug with holy power or spells?"
"...Then what?"
"Do you know where the Servant Worm originally lived?"
Raven couldn't answer. The only person alive who knew the worm's true nature was the Poison King himself.
"You don't, of course. The Poison King kept it under lock and key."
"You say that as though you know."
"I do know. Or rather—precisely speaking, I know the one who first brought the worm in."
The one who first brought it in? Raven's brow twitched again.
Wasn't the Servant Worm something the Poison King had developed himself?
"The Servant Worm was originally a parasite living on the honeybees in the depths of Mount Arvandel, at the far southern edge of the continent. The Poison King modified it, but the core is the same."
Full Moon's most capable assassins had tried countless times, and not one had ever uncovered the worm's origins. Even the Poison King's confidants, his own executives, knew nothing about it.
And this man claimed to know?
That it came from a honeybee, no less. It was beyond absurd.
Then the man pointed at Raven's chest.
"It's quiet, isn't it?"
The Servant Worm was extraordinarily sensitive. Merely letting the word pass your lips was enough to send it into convulsions.
And yet here it was, calm as could be, while the man discussed it openly.
Nothing like it had ever happened before.
"The worm has a taste for honey."
The man drew out a glass jar and gave it a shake.
A sweet fragrance filled the room. It was a jar of honey.
Honey... the honey was the secret all along?
Raven stared at the man with trembling eyes. Hope, long buried, lifted its head without warning.
"So—how do you change the worm's master?"
"Easy. Mix blood into honey and feed it to the worm."
For all the man's casual tone, nothing about that was easy.
"...Feed it to the worm? The worm is attached to my heart. How would you feed it anything?"
"By opening you up and feeding it directly, obviously."
The man indicated Raven's chest with his index finger.
Raven's perpetually expressionless face contorted violently.
"You intend to open my chest? I'll be dead before the worm tastes a drop of honey."
"You won't die."
A pure white radiance bloomed at the man's fingertip. Dense holy power.
Holy power that potent could sustain him through having his chest cracked open.
But Raven was, if anything, suspicious by nature.
He would never permit a man of unknown identity to cut open his heart.
Just then, a dull ache rose from his chest. The Servant Worm had woken.
And its movements were deeply wrong. Several times more violent than usual. As if it were furiously enraged.
"Ah, it's up. The worm has a nasty temper, you see—smell the honey without getting any, and it turns absolutely vicious. Well? What do you think?"
As the worm thrashed wildly, a horrific pain surged up, as though his heart were shattering to pieces.
So this is his idea of a threat.
A foolish one.
Raven was a product of Full Moon. Mere pain would never break him.
I am an arrow. An arrow that needs neither questions nor doubt.
Raven chanted the directive through the pain, over and over. Even the furiously agitated worm slowly began to quiet.
The agony faded, little by little.
Then—sweetness crept close.
The scent of honey.
The worm, barely settled, went mad all over again.
What in the—
Raven lifted his head in alarm.
The man was shaking the jar of honey directly under his nose.
"Smells delicious, doesn't it? Want some? Can't stand it, can you?"
For the first time in his life, Raven felt the urge to kill.