Chapter 61
I lay there staring at the notification message, hoping another one would appear.
How long had it been? A few minutes?
Saessak prays that they will arrive safely.
Unfortunately, no other notification appeared.
Then again, the nonhuman being had said it had found the World Tree from a very long way off.
It had said the long journey was only just beginning, so there probably wasn’t any more information it could give me.
Flap....
I picked up the event dungeon entry ticket I’d set aside for a moment.
To enter, I pinched the top of the ticket with both hands.
Just as I was about to tear it in half,
“Huh...?”
I heard movement outside the door.
Careful, sneaking footsteps, one slow step at a time.
For an instant, the sound made me think of Banum.
I wondered if Crowd had sent another assassin.
But I shook my head almost immediately.
Banum had been subdued by Saessak, and he was an A-class assassin.
If anything, they ought to have sent someone even higher ranked, not an assassin who couldn’t even hide his footsteps like this. More important, no one with impure intentions could enter this place thanks to Do-hee’s magic.
That left only one possibility: the children.
The cold-eyed children who had stared at me in front of the orphanage.
“....”
What on earth had brought one of them here?
Curiosity got the better of me, and I set the ticket back down.
Every time I tried to tear it, something like this happened.
There was only one set of footsteps outside the door.
The doorknob turned softly, and the door opened.
Just as I’d expected, the one who came in was a child.
A boy who looked to be about ten.
He was holding a kitchen knife in his hand.
There was no doubt he’d come here to hurt me.
“....”
“...!”
Our eyes met as the boy slowly closed the door.
He bit down hard on the cry that had nearly escaped him.
He couldn’t quite restrain his body, though, and stumbled backward hard enough to bang against the door with a thud.
“Hi.”
The boy didn’t answer my cheerful greeting.
He only raised the knife he’d taken from inside his clothes and pointed it at me.
His hand, gripping the blade, was shaking violently.
I could feel fear and terror in that hand.
He’d come to kill me while clutching fear in his chest.
A tiny thing who looked barely ten years old.
“If you don’t sleep at night, you won’t grow tall, you know?”
“Sh-shut up, you monster!”
“Look at this kid, calling me a monster.”
I slowly pushed myself up.
“I’m not exactly handsome or anything, but I’m not ugly enough to deserve being called a monster.”
As I said that, I reached out my hand.
I was going to turn on the attic light.
The motion seemed to scare him; the boy took another step back.
There was already a wall behind him, though, so he couldn’t retreat any farther.
All he could do was thrust the trembling knife out in front of him.
What the hell happened to you?
“...Are you hurt?”
When I turned on the light, I saw gauze wrapped around his neck.
The white gauze had already picked up dark red blood where it had shifted.
He looked pretty badly injured.
Saessak says it can faintly sense an unpleasant aura from the child.
“What?”
“...Hieek?”
When I frowned, the boy made a strange sound and swallowed hard.
An unpleasant aura? Was this kid connected to Crowd somehow?
Saessak says the aura is hard to detect and asks me to come closer.
“Oh, right.”
I held my smartphone out toward the boy.
The boy looked terrified, as if the phone itself were some kind of weapon. “Hiiik!”
Even while he was scared stiff, he kept the knife trained on me.
I considered snatching it away, since it looked awful to see a child holding a weapon like that, but... if I did, he’d probably get even more frightened, so I left it alone.
For now, the knife in the boy’s hand was both a weapon and a talisman to keep him safe.
Saessak says the unpleasant aura is definite.
It says the energy is flowing through the child’s mana circuit, so it’s hard to sense, but it definitely exists.
“Don’t tell me this kid is one of the Followers of the Demon Race?”
“....?”
The boy stared at me with a face that plainly said he had no idea what I was talking about.
He was shaking so hard it was almost pitiful, almost cute.
Looking at that face, I could tell he wasn’t one of the Followers of the Demon Race.
He probably didn’t even know what Crowd was.
Then why was that aura clinging to him?
Saessak recommends removing the unpleasant energy from inside the child.
I’d better do what Saessak said.
It definitely couldn’t be good for the energy of those bastards to be circulating inside the child’s mana circuit.
I pulled a pine needle from my inventory.
“...!”
The boy’s eyes widened.
He seemed startled when a pine needle bigger than he was popped out of my hand.
I held it out to him.
“Here.”
“Wha...t?”
“Take it.”
“...You’re, you’re giving this to me and then planning to take the knife?”
“What are you on about?”
Maybe because I hadn’t snatched the knife away, thinking it might be a comfort, he’d mistaken me for someone trustworthy.
I gave the pine needle a light swing and bonked him on the head.
“Ow! Hey, you—!”
While he was yelping, I took the knife from his hand.
Then I put the pine needle in his grasp instead.
The boy looked back and forth between the knife in my hand and the pine needle in his own.
“I’m giving it to you because I’m thinking of you, all right?”
“Me?”
“Yeah. Just wait a second. That thing—”
“Ah! T-this!”
Blue mana burst from the pine needle.
The World Tree’s mana slowly seeped into the startled child’s body.
Once it entered him like that, it would purify the filthy energy inside his body.
The boy looked at me.
Why was he staring at me like a betrayed man?
“You bad guy! I know this! You’re just like them, trying to turn me into a monster!”
“What are you talking about, turn you into a monster?”
“I know everything! You people took my friends...!”
Suddenly, the boy closed his eyes and opened them again.
His gaze went glassy, like someone who’d been hit with a sedative.
His strength seemed to drain away as he slowly sank to the floor.
I reached out and caught him before he could collapse.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
“I-I can’t... This time I have to protect the other kids...”
He kept opening and closing his eyes as he spoke.
His head kept nodding forward, then jerking back up, over and over again.
Before long, he was breathing softly in sleep.
All the tension had vanished from his face, leaving only peace behind.
Saessak says the child has fallen asleep.
It explains that because purifying the filthy energy has worn the child out, it forced him into power-saving mode.
“Hm. Nothing to be done about it.”
I got to my feet, holding the child in my arms.
I’d been planning to wait until morning, but after seeing this, I couldn’t just leave it alone.
I’d have to find the sister and ask what in the world had happened to the children.
After putting the pine needle and the entry ticket back into my inventory, I left the attic.
***
The sister was sitting alone in her office.
For a moment I wondered if she was praying, but that wasn’t it.
She was leaning back in her chair, lost in thought, staring blankly at the desk.
Then she must have felt my gaze on her, because she looked up.
“Do-woon?”
“What are you doing?”
“You’re the one who’s still awake, Woo-hyuk?”
As she got to her feet, the sister looked down at the boy in my arms and tilted her head.
She seemed unable to understand why I was with this child.
To make things clear, I gave her a brief summary of what had just happened.
Which is to say, I left out the part about the kitchen knife.
“So that happened.... And after what happened during the day, I’m really sorry.”
As she apologized, she held out both arms to me.
She wanted to take the child from me.
I didn’t hand him over right away. “More importantly,”
“Mm?”
“I need to hear the rest. What happened to this kid? He said he had to protect the children this time.”
A child who should have been protected had grabbed a weapon to protect the other children.
That made me proud of him, and heartbroken for him, all at once.
And I was glad the blade had been pointed at me.
“....”
I dragged a chair from the office and sat down in front of the sister.
It was my way of showing I wasn’t about to back off.
If I gave in now and something happened later, I’d never sleep soundly again.
The sister looked at me for a moment, then began carefully.
“...There were a series of fire incidents at orphanages. Have you heard about them?”
“Of course I have.... Wait, don’t tell me?”
“That’s right. Woo-hyuk is the sole survivor of those orphanages.”
“A survivor of the fires?”
I looked down at the boy sleeping in my arms.
Something was off.
This child hadn’t acted like a survivor of a fire; he’d acted like a survivor of a murder case.
And he’d been carrying that filthy energy from those bastards, too.
There was no way he was a survivor of a fire.
“You’re right. The truth is that this child is the sole survivor of the orphanage serial murder case.”
The government had hidden the truth.
It was one of the things done by Crowd, the terrorist organization operating all over the world.
They probably hadn’t wanted to go around shouting that national security was under threat.
The sister gently stroked the boy’s hair and went on.
“...I think the shock was huge. He kept saying the culprit wasn’t human. He must have been so frightened that the killer looked like a demon to him.”
“No, I don’t think that was it.”
“Mm...?”
Looked like a demon?
No, he probably meant they really did look like demons.
Those bastards, the Followers of the Demon Race, must have been in transformed form.
One thing I couldn’t understand was why they’d transformed while attacking an orphanage.
It would only reveal who they were. Why go that far?
“They said... in the shape of demons... the children were stabbed in the neck and killed.”
“In the neck?”
“Yes. And here he had gauze over it, but oh. When did it start bleeding like this again...?”
She pulled out a first-aid kit.
It looked like she planned to replace the gauze that had seeped dark red with a fresh one.
The sister carefully peeled away the gauze on the boy’s neck.
Once it was off, she checked his skin and then said,
“Oh?”
She tilted her head.
“It’s healed already? That shouldn’t have healed this fast.”
The boy’s neck was spotless, without even a trace of a mark.
Thanks to the pine needle.
The World Tree’s energy inside the pine needle had cleanly healed the wound on his neck.
The sister looked up sharply and asked me, “How did you do that?”
“How did I do what?”
“Don’t play dumb. You didn’t give him a healing potion, did you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
A healing potion?
I’d given him something even better than that.
“Are you serious?”
“I told you, yes. And besides, if something like this happened, you should have told us right away.”
“Well, I was going to, but...”
“....?”
The sister stopped in the middle of her sentence and looked at me for a moment.
Ah, I see. Because of me.
She must have thought our situation wasn’t exactly easy either.
After all, we’d been dealing with some strange bastard and even ended up in the hospital.
She probably hadn’t wanted to pile one hard thing on top of another.
“Anyway, after you keep letting us get away with things like this—”
“Sister! Sister Claudia!”
A frantic voice came from outside the office.
The door rattled open, and a young nun came in, panting hard.
She was the same nun I’d seen in front of the orphanage.
She had been standing on the left side, and her name was probably...
“What is it, Sister Viviana? You’ll wake the children.”
Right, that was it.
The sister got up and walked toward the door.
Unlike the calm sister Claudia, the young nun was stamping her feet in place.
“Outside, outside there are monsters!”
Monsters?
Why would they suddenly appear?
There were no gates or dungeons anywhere near Bangju Orphanage.
I supposed a new gate might have formed, but there was no tremor in the ground, which usually accompanied one.
“Calm down, Sister Viviana.”
“But...!”
“This place is protected by magic from the White Saint. Monsters can’t dare to come close.”
“Ah, yes...!”
The young nun nodded slowly.
She seemed to relax at the mention that the place was protected by Do-hee’s magic.
The sister suddenly grinned and looked at me.
Huh?
“And besides, we also have Baek Do-woon, the Sword of Moonlight, here.”
“R-right!”
“Wait, what kind of sword?”
“Oh? You didn’t know?”
“....?”
“It’s the nickname attached to you. The Sword of Moonlight.”
“I had no idea. They gave me that?”
Why moonlight, of all things?
What did moonlight have to do with me?
Saessak says it doesn’t like that.
It insists that the Manager already has a proper title: the Manager of the World Tree and the World Tree’s companion.
“That little brat, judging by the way you’re smiling, I guess you like it.”
She was right.
I couldn’t stop a grin from spreading across my face.
I had no idea why the word moonlight had been attached to me, but...
The Sword of Moonlight.
That was a pretty decent nickname, wasn’t it?
Saessak emphasizes once again that it does not like it!
Sorry, Saessak.
I was going to savor this feeling just a little longer.