Black Silence
How bitter.
“......!”
A chill raced down my spine and spread through my entire body.
There was no time to reason out who had attacked me, or why. What I needed to do right now was—
—Clang!!
“Whoa, that was close.”
I tore my sword from its scabbard and countered into empty air. The shadow blades hurtling toward me shot back the way they had come, as if returning to their master—only to bury themselves harmlessly in the ground. Not a single groan reached my ears.
Which meant my opponent was attacking from range.
Every nerve on edge, I poured my senses into Nature Realm. And then I felt it.
“Isn’t it boring, just sitting up there on the rooftop playing with shadows?”
I tipped my head back and asked, voice laced with mockery. No answer came, but he was definitely up there.
More shadow blades closed silently around my throat. But this was a cramped alley—perfect terrain for me to cut loose.
“Hup!”
I kicked off a building wall, launched myself into the air, used Tao Power as a foothold for extra thrust, and spun. A shadow blade skimmed past my side by a hair’s breadth. I landed cleanly and knocked aside another blade diving for my face with my sword.
“Whew. You really do love your shadows, don’t you?”
Twisting acrobatically out of the path of another blade, I closed my hand around the item I had just bought from the Achievement Shop. The magic stone flared with brilliant light and banished every shadow nearby.
“Guess you won’t be using those cute little blades anymore.”
The only shadow left in the alley was my own. The once pitch-dark passage was now flooded with light—the worst possible battlefield for an enemy who fought with shadows.
With a little breathing room at last, I dragged in rough gasps of air and forced my mind to work.
That attack style… it’s way too familiar.
Nature Realm was reading completely new information, yet I felt certain I knew the person on that rooftop.
His name was…
“Oh? Trying to run?”
I could feel the figure on the roof pulling farther and farther away. I couldn’t let him go. This wasn’t some idle game; sooner or later he would come back to finish the job. I had to end it here and now.
“Jeremy Dreamore. I never expected we’d meet again like this.”
The original protagonist who was supposed to save this world. The character I myself had once controlled: Jeremy Dreamore. Seeing him again like this… the feeling was strangely complicated.
Jeremy’s retreating footsteps stopped dead.
“They call you Black Silence, don’t they? Haha—the more I say it, the more I want that name for myself. Did you pick it out?”
Black Silence. The moniker born from his Hero-grade trait, Shadow Step, which left no sound in its owner’s wake.
The moment I spoke his alias, the figure on the rooftop began to fade. When he reappeared, it was inside my own shadow. Twin shadow daggers flashed toward me in both hands.
—Screeech!
I caught one on my blade and locked the other in place with Tao Power. Even so, the strain was obvious. A true 4-Star fighter—just holding back a pair of daggers was already pushing me to my limit.
“Those shadow techniques look incredibly useful. Mind teaching me?”
The blond man in the black mask—Jeremy—glared at me.
“…How do you know my identity?”
Still straining against his daggers, I flashed a grin.
“Who knows? Maybe the kid next door told me. Maybe I learned it in a dream. Or maybe I’m your long-lost brother.”
“In other words, you don’t feel like saying.”
“Wow, if everyone in the world were as sharp as you, life would be so much easier.”
I shoved him back hard with Tao Power, opening distance.
“So? If I had to guess… Sir Pascal hired you to kill me. Trying to murder his own brother—what a cold-blooded man.”
“I don’t discuss my clients—”
“Of course you don’t. You’re just trying to make a living as an assassin. Spill a client’s name and who’d ever hire you again? I get it completely.”
“…You’ve got a long tongue.”
Jeremy poured mana into the ground as he spoke.
“My original plan was to take my time—strike whenever the chance presented itself. That just changed.”
Black shadows began to crawl outward from his feet in every direction.
“Now that you know who I am, keeping you alive is a liability. I’ll kill you right here.”
At that icy declaration I let out a soft, derisive snort.
“You know, I’ve always wondered about something.”
I opened my normally half-lidded eyes wide and fixed them on him.
“Assassins like you are strongest at the very first strike. So why do you always wait until later to start spouting nonsense about finally getting serious?”
My black pupils locked onto Jeremy, and his body gave a brief tremor.
“….”
“Well, consider yourself warned. Don’t regret it later.”
I closed my eyes again, slipping back into my usual frivolous air, and leveled my sword at him.
A beat of silence stretched between us.
“…There’s one thing I’d like to ask.”
“….”
Taking his silence for permission, I continued.
“This assassin work of yours. Is it really something you wanted to do?”
Jeremy had originally been a boy who pursued justice almost as fiercely as Sheena. The one who should have become the world’s savior had been forced onto the assassin’s path by a certain player’s whim.
“…Half a year ago I still dreamed of being a hero. A truly empty dream.”
“No. That dream wasn’t empty.”
I shook my head, rejecting his words.
“The road you’re walking now doesn’t suit you. The path you were meant to walk… was never this dark one.”
Guilt twisted in my chest. All because of a stupid whim—because I’d wanted to try raising an assassin character—Jeremy’s life had been spun a hundred and eighty degrees. If not for me, he would be shining brighter than anyone right now. Instead, my idle curiosity had left him thrashing forever in filthy water.
I felt endless guilt for leading a talent like Jeremy into the darkness… for ruining one person’s life so thoroughly.
“What if… you could attend the Academy again—”
“It’s pointless.”
Jeremy shook his head and cut me off.
“Both my hands are already stained with the blood of countless people. Trying to wash the past clean and walk the hero’s path now would be nothing but the worst kind of deception.”
“…I see.”
So that was it. Because of me, you had been dirtied beyond any chance of return.
“That’s a shame. I thought I might make a new friend out of this.”
I forced a smile onto my face as I spoke. Jeremy studied me for a moment, then asked quietly,
“…Have we… met somewhere before?”
The question stabbed straight into my chest. I shook my head with difficulty.
“No. This is the first time we’ve met.”
“Is that so.”
Jeremy answered in a low murmur. Then he dropped into a crouch and came at me in absolute silence, closing the distance at terrifying speed—movement that truly lived up to the word “shadow.”
I shoved the thoughts aside, stamped on Tao Power, and leapt hard, dodging his charge. But as if he had been waiting for exactly that, Jeremy stomped the ground. Sharp spikes erupted from the broad shadow carpeting the floor and speared upward toward my midsection.
I formed another Tao Power foothold in midair, kicked off it, and floated free of the spikes. Yet he had anticipated even that. A massive shadow spear shot toward my predicted landing point at blistering speed.
According to Nature Realm, the spear would hit me in roughly two seconds—perfect timing to summon a clone.
Still drifting in the air, I called a clone into existence at the expected landing spot and met the onrushing spear head-on.
—Clang!!
“Sorry, but I’ll have to pass on that.”
I countered with a heavy strike. Ink-black sword energy erupted from the clone’s blade and wrapped around Jeremy. Caught in the blast, he couldn’t move—and his own shadow spear punched clean through him.
“Ghk…!”
A hot groan tore from Jeremy’s throat. At a glance it looked like the fight was over. That assumption would be fatally wrong.
Let your guard down against Jeremy for even a second and you would never see the light of day again. That was how the assassin I had raised, Jeremy Dreamore, hunted.
Which was exactly why I planned to turn his own hunting method against him.
Jeremy was a top-tier shadow assassin who had reached the 4-Star realm. For a mere 1-Star like me to bring him down, I had to exploit his habits.
“Haha. For someone who talked so big, that was a pretty dull ending, don’t you think?”
I deliberately swaggered forward, acting as if I had dropped every shred of caution—walking straight up to the Jeremy “clone” skewered on the shadow spear.
“In your next life, please walk the proper pa—”
“You dumb bastard.”
“Huh? What do you m—”
I felt them. From the rooftop, Jeremy and seven of his clones hurled themselves downward, daggers in hand, all aimed at me.
This was his favorite pattern: use a clone to make the enemy drop their guard, then strike from every blind spot. No prey had ever escaped this hunting method.
Which meant Jeremy would already be certain of victory… and that certainty would make him lower his own guard.
Time to drop the idiot act and counterattack.
I slid my sword back into its scabbard and looked up at the sky. Eight Jeremys plummeted toward me in total silence, daggers gripped in both hands. I burned every single one of them into my eyes, clenched the hilt hard, and—
“It’d be a real problem if you dodged this one too~!”
Hollow Slash
—I drew and cut.