Chapter 30

Chapter 30 : The Traitor Under the Lamp (6)

「(Excerpt omitted)……Standing before the arched lattice window, Karon twisted his mouth as he looked at the glass gleaming with the round moonlight.

The rain that had fallen all day had left the air heavy with dampness and eased the tropical nights that had gone on for days.

And on top of that, the news that had just flown in sent a chill down the back of his neck, making it perfect for washing away the heat for the first time in a while.

“So he was there.”

Karon unfolded the crumpled paper before his eyes once more and narrowed his gaze.

Only one short sentence stood written on the paper: 〈It appears that He has survived.〉 Yet that alone was enough to know who it had come from and whom it referred to.

“So they did find out where he’d gone. If I’d known he was there, I would’ve gone to pay my respects long ago.”

Contrary to his words, the dark shadow stretching out long behind Karon twisted into something vicious.

Sek, the Former Underworld Lord, had to be found.

If his survival could not be guaranteed, then his corpse had to be retrieved and brought back at the very least.

And above all, the things he possessed—his Frame most of all.

“You remain troublesome to the very end. Quiro.”

“I answer your call.”

“I should send a personal letter concerning the nonaggression pact. It will be useful for suppressing the old men’s objections.”

The deepening shadow that had swallowed the floor and walls alike soon turned into a darkness no light could penetrate, and in an instant it erased every trace of them.

When the shadow withdrew and the gentle moonlight shone over the window again, only a faint forest scent remained, utterly out of place with the city’s night view……(To be continued)」

I had no time to hide how coldly my face had stiffened.

The Original Work had advanced.

An Original Work scene with a title had poured out before me.

And worse, it was the Original Work as altered because of me.

It was no longer a story already completed from beginning to end, but the Original Work changing in real time according to my actions. That alone was enough to deal a severe blow to the mind.

‘This is insane…….’

The moment time, which had stopped for the Original Work reading, resumed, I folded in on myself as though exhaling the breath that had been trapped in my chest and dropped to the ground.

It felt as though the sentences spinning around in my head had turned into chains, binding my whole body.

He has survived—retrieve even the corpse—his Frame most of all—

At last, bitter fluid rose in my throat.

And even in the middle of that, my mind dragged the order of events in the Original Work before my eyes and forced me to see it.

At this point in time, the nonaggression pact had not yet been made.

On the day of the negotiations for the nonaggression pact mentioned in the Original Work, Pan had caused trouble—and at that time, Pan had believed Sek to be alive.

And the moment I met Pan, my Contribution to the Original Work had shot up in a great surge, almost like charity.

Through my dimming vision, I looked up at Pan as he approached, my face hard.

‘You…… do you really think I’m Sek?’

My head swam and my stomach churned.

Grinding my teeth, I forced my trembling legs upright.

“You’re not the sort to be shocked just because one person died, so why are you pretending to be weak?”

“Ha, damn…… my head’s pounding. Shut up for a second.”

Leaving the bewildered Pan behind, I staggered along the narrow path.

It wasn’t anything else.

It was because the text that appeared after the Original Work vanished had unsettled me.

[The next 【Epic】 Quest requires initiation conditions.

Acquire a Fragment of the Original Work.

〈Tip〉 Don’t forget that treasure hunting is made of dreams and hope∼☆]

The system openly mentioned the Field Quest in the Record Archive, bestowed a throbbing chronic headache and a wave of nausea on me, then fell silent again.

---

Contrary to my vague assumption that only the interior would have suffered a little damage, the office looked far worse than expected when I saw it the next morning.

The wall split by Timol’s whip gaped wide enough to expose the inside completely. Every window had been shattered, leaving broken glass strewn everywhere. One side of the roof had a hole in it, and the floor was so thick with bloodstains that I doubted they could ever truly be scrubbed clean.

“Wow, did magic explode or something?”

Konu, who had faithfully spread rumors to keep the children away all this time, stared at the half-ruined office with wide eyes and chattered away.

‘What am I supposed to do with this heaven of curiosity?’

I pressed a hand to my forehead, sighed, and handed Konu a few candies.

“Where are the other children?”

Since I knew they usually moved around in a noisy cluster of four, I asked because I didn’t want them charging in and getting hurt on the wreckage.

“They said they didn’t want to come because mister is scary.”

“Ah…… perhaps you shouldn’t come either, then.”

“But mister isn’t a scary person.”

“Mister made all this.”

“Why would it matter if a person breaks his own house?”

“A person died too.”

“I don’t think mister did that.”

Watching Konu continue in such a firm tone, I let out a hollow laugh.

Perhaps that commission last time had planted an unwavering trust in him. My fingertips prickled at the thought.

All the more because his approaching goodwill stood in such stark contrast to the blind killing intent of last night.

“If you trust me like that, you’ll regret it later.”

“I’ll deal with that later.”

“A little thing like you ought to know when not to talk.”

“The library clerk asked me to bring the books.”

“Ahem. I’ll bring them over soon.”

“……I could bring them instead. It’s not like you’ve looked through them yet, right?”

I rubbed Konu’s head a few times, then quietly withdrew my hand when I saw a few Surface Folk coming to gawk from nearby.

I didn’t care, but Konu would probably get an earful when he went back home.

“Wait here. I have to rescue the books over there.”

“Hmmm. Should I come back another time?”

“Will you? Ah, take some more of these.”

I pulled out another handful of hard candies from my pocket, piled them into Konu’s hands, and ruffled his hair again.

The round little head fit neatly into my palm, and somehow it soothed my troubled mind a little.

Konu stuffed as many candies into his pockets as he could, then, when even that wasn’t enough, held the rest in both hands and waved them over his head as he said goodbye.

I gave him a small wave back, but the gesture turned bitter on the way out.

I truly did not know what that elder bastard had been thinking, leaving children like that behind and choosing war. The still-unrevealed bastard behind him was the same, and so was Karon, whose intentions regarding the nonaggression pact were impossible to predict.

And the thing that confused me most was, as always, the system, which was fiercely asserting its presence in the corner of my vision.

A pair of [!] and […] blinked one above the other as though sparkling and telling me to hurry up and get on with it.

I sat down on the nearby wooden steps of the tree stair and buried my head in my hands.

I had no idea what more it wanted from me. In the end, was it asking me to stop the war? And how exactly was I supposed to do anything about a current that vast?

Ding!

[It recommends how to read the Original Work.]

[It is curious because it cannot understand why you are acting so stubbornly.]

[It says there is no point blaming yourself for going ahead with a trap that was clearly dangerous.]

I glared at the text, which crackled as it sprayed script into my vision, and then laughed at the crooked impulse blooming in one corner of my heart.

‘Keep sneering like that. I’ll just give it a ruin ending.’

---

The more I thought about it, the location of my room in the ruler’s castle really was superb.

The terrace opening out to the view, the broad, open outlook, and the way the route let me eat, do chores, or go about my business without ever running into people—it was all ideal.

That was why I found myself somewhat flustered as I tore at a piece of bread smeared with jam.

“Hm, is today some kind of special day?”

“Riwin. That’s a poor excuse for breakfast.”

When I woke up, I had already run into Pan, then Ru, then Pering, then Pol, the head cook, the person who delivered the ingredients—and now Ochel as the finale.

I had been standing there with a slice of bread in each hand, leaning out over the corridor window in a corner where no one ought to have been, so naturally I was thoroughly thrown off.

On a day like this, I really should have stayed shut up in my room and never come out.

“Weren’t you on vacation today?”

That was what Pering had told me earlier, which was why I’d been eating on my own.

“I am. I was just on my way out.”

How did our routes overlap this perfectly?

“A week, was it?”

“Yes. You’ll have to manage well even without me, won’t you?”

“Ahaha, what sort of trouble could there possibly be?”

“You can’t brush it off like that. Eat with Lord Pan when he eats, at least.”

“Are you trying to make me choke?”

Ochel’s words made even the remaining bread unappetizing, and I frowned.

The thick jam dripped slowly and at last reached my fingers.

Well. That was the end of breakfast, then.

“Have you heard about the spy?”

“Ochel heard about it too, so of course I, the person involved, heard it as well.”

I stuffed the rest of the bread into my mouth at one go and licked the jam off my fingers.

There was no way not to hear about it when every single person I ran into brought it up.

For now, Pan had personally dragged the elder in and interrogated him, while Pering was apparently working himself ragged trying to suppress the elders’ backlash.

Since Timol’s cause of death was the dagger embedded in his head, I had naturally been removed from the list of suspects.

And as it turned out, that dagger had been made of a metal mined only in the Domain of the Desert.

The Domain of the Desert lay the farthest from the Underfolk’s territory, and the metal itself was supposedly unpleasant for the Underfolk even to handle, so it simply wasn’t compatible with the idea that I had used it.

That argument, that it was unlikely I could have possessed it for long, had carried surprisingly well.

Thinking back now, since the elder had meant to frame me, there was no way he would have used that himself—so perhaps Pering had played some sort of hand after dealing with the corpse.

Then again, since Pan himself had witnessed the elder kill Timol, the backlash probably would have been crushed quickly regardless.

I checked the rain beginning to pour outside and started walking toward the castle’s main gate.

“I’ll walk you as far as where you’re headed.”

“That’s unexpected kindness.”

“Yes, yes. Let’s say it is.”

It wasn’t as though there was nothing I wanted to hear from Ochel.

Since she belonged to the Domain of the Mist, she ought to have something to say.

“Go on, then. Continue what you were saying earlier. I heard that elder died.”

Apparently they had not even been half as rough with him as what I myself had gone through, yet whether he was weak-minded or not, the elder had given up his life very easily.

They said he had been unable to speak.

He had been terrified.

He acted as though some formless something would kill him the moment he opened his mouth.

He had screamed, shaking in fear, and only cowered in a corner, babbling incoherently.

Then, after ending his own life, the elder had been handed over to the Ruler of the Mist, Retu.

“That’s the version I’ve heard. Is any of it wrong?”

“You’ve heard it correctly. Ah, so you’ve been going around gathering all sorts of information?”

“I can’t deny it.”

“Well, when it concerns something you’re entangled in, curiosity does arise.”

“It’s not so much that. Since repairs to the office are going to take at least ten days, I didn’t have anything to do anyway. I was bored.”

Perhaps because of the rain, the sound of our footsteps echoed all the more loudly through the empty corridor.

The dampness brought an unpleasant stickiness with it.

Ochel stretched a hand out toward the raindrops falling in steady patters beyond the window beside one of the arched pillars, and smiled faintly.

“My lord…… ah, I mean Lady Retu. My lord is someone who contemplates death.”

“Contemplates?”

“It’s difficult to explain precisely, but simply put, she influences the dead.”

A necromancer?

That was the image that sprang to mind. Even during our first meeting, the splitting sound of her voice and the aura she exuded had felt distinctly different.

“So she really is someone who handles death itself.”

I stepped a pace away from Ochel, who was lightly smiling with a hand around her own neck.

“Seeing your reaction, Riwin, makes me want to invite you there sometime.”

“I’ll decline.”

“Pfft. If you came to the Domain of the Mist, you’d see quite an unusual sight. The reason it was named the Domain of the Mist is because there’s a rumor that the mists there are actually spirits.”

“That makes me want to decline even more.”

“Of course, that’s only a rumor. The mist is real mist.”

I took another step away.

“When I said the elder had been handed over to my lord, I meant not his body, but his soul.”

Should I mourn the fact that he couldn’t even die in peace, or pity the fact that he was now suffering after death, since he’d clearly spent his life buying suffering too?

By the time we reached the castle’s main gate, the rain had become much heavier.

For a moment I found myself a little worried, since Ochel had no umbrella, and when she stepped forward into the downpour just like that, I caught her by the arm.

“It’s raining.”

“Ah, it’s all right. Members of the Mist—”

It happened slowly.

Starting from the arm I held, her form gradually blurred, and before long Ochel had dissolved into the rain like mist itself, until her presence became difficult to distinguish at all.

“—don’t get wet in the rain.”

“Apparently not.”

“Ah, and I’m taking that elder’s soul with me. That’s why I was given vacation.”

At the low voice by my ear, the back of my neck prickled.

Was she seriously telling me I’d been together with a ghost this entire time?