IPDT 43

“Yul, are you breathing okay? You don’t feel nauseous or dizzy, do you?”

“What nonsense is that.”

“If there’s poison in the smoke, it will hurt, so that’s why I asked.”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

Yul answered curtly and turned his head away. I felt a needless anxiety because I couldn’t see his face in the hazy smoke. It felt like Yul might disappear somewhere. I unconsciously grabbed Yul’s fingers. Yul looked at me again.

“Wh-what is this!”

“Find the hero! Quickly!”

I thought he would immediately swat my hand away, but Yul just looked at me for a moment before turning his eyes away. As if he would tolerate something as minor as holding his fingers.

I stared blankly at Yul’s back. The boisterous noise created by the humans grew distant, and I felt as though Yul and I were the only ones left in this space.

“Whoa!”

A human who suddenly appeared through the smoke wedged himself between the two of us. Thanks to that, I lost my grip on Yul’s fingers.

…How dare someone. As I turned my head, full of anger, I saw a human in strange attire. He was wearing several layers of thin clothing and had large goggles over his eyes.

The anger quickly subsided and a strange curiosity welled up. It was because a couple of tin cans were stuck in the man’s belt. It seemed like this human was the owner of the can that had fallen at my feet.

“Pant, haah. Damn, I finally found you.”

The human male said as he whipped off a long-brimmed hat. The sandy-colored bobbed hair that had been hidden by the hat scattered with a soft swish. And…

“B-but, hey. Could you maybe put that sword away, Hero-nim? This sword is incredibly scary, you know…?”

Yul’s pitch-black sword was hanging below his chin. The bob-haired man shot both his hands up in the air, as if in surrender.

“I’m someone who came to rescue you and your companion. So let’s put the sword down and talk… no, why are you pushing it closer? I-I’m telling you, I came to rescue you guys!”

The bob-haired man pleaded urgently, but Yul only set the blade with a cold expression. His intention to kill, regardless of whether the bob-haired man came to rescue us or not, was conveyed with simple clarity.

“Yul, wait a minute!”

I was the one who stopped Yul. I still had unanswered questions about the bob-haired man, and it would be a problem if he died.

“I’m curious about that human, can I ask him just a few things?”

“…”

Yul looked at me without a word, then put his sword away. The bob-haired man, who had been holding both hands up, let out a sigh, phew, and crept over to my side. It seemed he thought it would be safer to be on my side rather than Yul’s.

“Haha, I really almost died… thanks, for now? But you’re someone who wasn’t in my intel. Are you the hero’s girlfriend? Hero-nim, you like them young, huh?”

Yul, with a cold expression, gripped the hilt of his sword tightly. The black blade began to vibrate again with a low hum. The bob-haired man’s face turned pale.

“Wait, wait! If the answer is no, you can just say no, you’re seriously aggressive!”

The bob-haired man, who had hidden behind my back at some point, shrieked. I glanced up at the bob-haired man who was using me as a shield.

“Who are you?”

“Ah, me? Who I am is…”

It was at the moment the bob-haired man opened his mouth. We could feel the urgent movements of humans in the hazy smoke.

“Bring water! We need to settle the smoke!”

“Looks like we don’t have time to chat.”

The bob-haired man made an anxious face as if this was a disaster, then snatched my arm. My mood instantly plummeted. Contact with a human other than Yul was, as expected, not pleasant.

“We need to run, quickly. That is, if you don’t want to get caught by the humans here and become a living corpse!”

“Excuse me, this hand is very unpleasant, could you please remove it?”

“Hero-nim, your girlfriend… or not, whatever, anyway, take care of this one!”

The bob-haired man shoved me toward Yul. I walked to Yul, pretending to have been pushed feebly. There was no grand reason, I just wanted to be next to him.

“Huh?”

But unexpectedly, Yul caught me as I came toward him. My head touched Yul’s chest, and he wrapped his large hand around my back, holding me. Surprised, I lifted my head, and Yul casually pushed me away as if nothing had happened.

“I said we have to go quickly! Gosh, this is so frustrating!”

“Be quiet.”

“Hey, Hero-nim. I’m the one who came to help you…!”

“If you’re going to run, then get lost by yourself.”

Yul, who had barked coldly, tried to walk into the smoke. Toward where the humans were. I urgently grabbed Yul’s sleeve.

“Yul, what are you trying to do?”

“Clean up.”

As soon as he finished speaking, the black sword began to vibrate with a low hum. It was clear Yul intended to kill all the humans here. Was it a relief that he wasn’t doing something dangerous? I carefully let go of the hand that had been holding onto Yul. Yul disappeared into the smoke.

“Aaaargh!”

A scream was heard not even a few seconds later. The smoke, which had been colorless and odorless, began to be tinged with red, and the smell of blood started to mix in.

“Haha… is that the hero?”

The bob-haired man, who had been standing quietly nearby, said in a trembling voice. His face beyond the goggles was pale as if terrified. Aargh, as another scream followed, the bob-haired man covered his nose and mouth with his clothes.

“He’s no different from a murderer.”

“Watch your mouth. Yul isn’t a murderer, he’s a hero.”

“…Right, it has to be that way.”

As I jumped in, annoyed, the bob-haired man’s eyes scrunched up.

“Because if we didn’t have a murderous hero like that, the world would really be destroyed.”

When the fog lifted, the sight of a village turned into a sea of blood was revealed. Yul, flicking the blood dripping from his sword, walked from the center of the village toward us. The bob-haired man stared at Yul as if he was fed up, then muttered to himself.

“He really killed them all.”

The closer Yul got, the more the bob-haired man seemed to shrink, hiding his body behind me. Then he kept chattering on like Fleabag.

“Aren’t you scared of your boyfriend?”

“Do Yul and I look like a couple?”

I knew that the ‘boyfriend’ the bob-haired man mentioned was not short for ‘pet human’. He must be referring to a person one loves, in other words, a couple in a relationship. That meant that Yul and I looked as intimate as lovers. It was only natural that my mood soared.

“Your boyfriend is glaring at me.”

The bob-haired man, who had nudged my side, whispered urgently, then darted away as if he had never whispered in my ear. Just as the bob-haired man said, Yul’s expression was faintly scrunched.

“I thought there was something on your hair here, but looking closely, there isn’t?”

The bob-haired man, making excuses as if for someone to overhear, glanced at Yul and then shivered.

“Hero-nim, I get it. I get it, so stop talking with your eyes. Your whole body is saying, ‘Why haven’t you gotten lost yet.’”

Yul’s brow furrowed noticeably. The bob-haired man hid behind my back again.

“I want to get lost too because Hero-nim is scary, but. There’s something I have to say.”

“What is it?”

I asked the question in place of Yul, who showed no sign of opening his mouth. The bob-haired man scanned the blood-soaked surroundings and swallowed a groan.

“I don’t think this is something to say here… haha, right. Let’s just get to the point.”

The bob-haired man’s minor rebellion was suppressed with a single glare from Yul. The bob-haired man had a freewheeling mouth, but he seemed to be a human who knew the value of his own life.

“Hero-nim, you’re planning on passing through the Eastern Continent, right?”

Yul’s gaze fell on me. After all, since I was the one choosing the path on this journey, I was the only one who could answer. I nodded my head.

“Yes. We plan to go through the Eastern Continent.”

“As I thought. I figured a real hero would pass through this place.”

“What do you mean?”

When I tilted my head and asked, the bob-haired man let out a smirk.

“I figured a real hero would seek out a continent with destruction right around the corner. You’re a hero chosen by God, after all. I thought that if God hadn’t abandoned this continent, you would surely come. Hero-nim, to explain it briefly, the Eastern Continent is all in this state now. No matter where you go, you’ll only meet crazy humans like these. If you were expecting something, you’d better give it up. Because everyone has really gone mad.”

“And you?”

“Me? I’m sane. You can tell by looking.”

The bob-haired man shrugged. Indeed, compared to the humans who had clung to Yul, asking him to be their guardian deity out of the blue, he seemed sane.

“Hero-nim, I know this is an unreasonable request. But please save the Eastern Continent here. This place wasn’t originally like this. Haha, this is all because of a flower that appeared one day…”

An incongruous word caught my ear in his self-mocking mumble.

“A flower?”

“Yeah, a flower. That damned flower that suddenly started growing all over the continent one day.”

The bob-haired man continued as if chewing on his words.

“It’s a flower of disaster. If you eat that flower, you become a monster, and just being near it makes you go insane. It doesn’t matter how upright a knight a person who has lost their mind was in the past, or if they were a scholar full of conviction. From the moment they fall under the flower’s influence, they become fanatics, saying they must serve a new god.”

“A new god?”

“Yeah. I told you about the living corpses, right? A human who goes mad and becomes a fanatic tries to make a slightly less mad human their god. And then, to make that person a ‘god’, they feed them the flower of disaster. Until they become a monster. Isn’t it funny? The fact that they create a disaster themselves in order to create an absolute god who will protect them from disaster. It’s something only truly insane humans would do.”

The bob-haired man had a pretty good grasp of the cause of the disaster happening on the Eastern Continent. That made me even more curious.

“But hey, who are you to know all this so well?”

“Ah, come to think of it, I wasn’t able to introduce myself earlier? Then I’ll introduce myself again.”

The bob-haired man grinned.

“I am the prince of the most powerful kingdom on the Eastern Continent, which bordered the Empire.”

“A prince?”

Yul, who had been listening to the conversation for a while, asked in surprise. A bitter emotion surfaced on the bob-haired man’s lips.

“—was who I was. Now I’m not a prince or anything else.”

The bob-haired man, who had been making a gloomy face, soon looked at me as if nothing was wrong. Then he rummaged in his clothes and took out a crumpled handkerchief to show me.

“Still, want to see? This is the symbol of our kingdom.”

“A symbol?”

A picture was drawn on the handkerchief the bob-haired man took out. A shield, a sword, and a fire-breathing… huh?

“What is it.”

“It’s just… this drawing.”

As I blinked in bewilderment, Yul looked at me as if asking what was wrong. I pointed a finger at the great intelligent being that was breathing fire.