9. People Who Change Suddenly Die

We called it rehabilitation, but that was only the name we’d put on the training, and it got more brutal with each passing day.

A week after I’d started the exercises, I could run through the garden with a fair degree of fluency. Elli was at my side, no longer out in front of me but matching my stride.

“Young Master! Your condition’s looking great today!”
“As long as you don’t sing that cursed song of yours, my condition is always great.”
“Aww, but it’s thanks to my song that you’re running faster!”

We bickered the whole way, and we actually looked like a halfway-respectable workout pair.

“Doesn’t he ever get tired of it?”
“Forget it, let’s go.”

The servants cursed and pointed at us, but even then I didn’t react.

Never give them a response.

I’d drilled this into Elli over and over, and it had worked. They cursed at us far less often now when they saw us.

Elli must have felt the change too, because she murmured at my side, “Lately, they’re definitely doing it less.”

She seemed genuinely puzzled that their attitude had changed so suddenly.

“The way to dodge people’s attention, you see…”

I stopped walking, picked up a stone, and casually dropped it on top of my own foot.

“…is to not react, even when a stone hits you.”

The stone bounced off the toe of my shoe and rolled limply to the ground, and I didn’t so much as blink.

Elli tilted her head, as if to ask what on earth that was supposed to mean. “That’s hard to understand. If it hurts, you should say it hurts.”

“That’s exactly what they want. For me to hurt, and rage, and grieve.”

I gave the stone a light kick where it had stopped.

“A toy’s only fun because it goes squeak when you squeeze it. Push one that makes no sound and it’s just trash, right? To them, we’ve become broken toys. And nobody bothers playing with a broken toy.”

Beings who torment and toy with the utterly powerless, and giggle about it amongst themselves. That’s what humans are.

“Their interest in me has died down for now, but they’ve always got their eyes and ears pricked my way, waiting for me to do something, anything interesting… anything they can curse me for.”
“…”

I wiped the sweat from my forehead, and Elli, whose own forehead wasn’t even damp, dazedly pressed a towel to hers too. I laughed at the sight of her.

“Tonight, something interesting’s going to happen.”
“Something interesting?”
“Curious?”
“I’m curious.”
“Then stay by my side tonight.”
“Huh?”
“You said you were curious.”
“…Yes.”

Somewhere in that conversation, Elli’s ears had gone red. I didn’t know why…

…until I read Eve’s line and caught on.

“…From now on, I’d better think a little more carefully before I speak.”

The kind of “something” Elli had imagined did not, of course, happen. Instead she was staring down in shock at the man kneeling before me, his head pressed to the floor, unable to lift it.

The man was Leo.

“You look awfully unharmed for a guy who, rumor has it, got dragged off to the dungeon.”

Leo gave no answer and held his kneeling posture in silence, so I let Elli in on the truth I’d been hiding all this time.

“Leo never went to the dungeon in the first place.”
“…What? B-but Senior Leo was clearly…”

Elli looked at Leo, but he kept his mouth shut tight and his eyes on the floor. I gestured at him with my chin and began explaining.

“Listen carefully, Elli. To this guy, I was nothing but a card in a gambler’s hand.”
“A card in a gambler’s hand?”

The shockwave that single word “gambling” gave off was tremendous. Of every expression of Elli’s I’d ever seen, this was the deadliest.

Eve knit her brows too. Either way, I went on with the explanation.

“You’ve been faithful about the hospital visits, but your one and only little sister’s illness shows no sign of getting better, and by now her body’s built up a resistance to the medicine she’s been on.”

At the mention of his younger sister, Leo finally raised his head. His expression said, more or less, how on earth did you know that?

“I summoned you when you were already so stressed you were about to burst. You even slipped up and tore the head of the house’s letter to shreds. But then, completely out of the blue, you heard about your sister.”

Singling out Leo had been pure chance. Every one of this manor’s servants was burned into the inside of my head, so whoever happened to get caught, I’d planned to dig my fingers into whatever weakness they had.

“You served me with real diligence. You treated me so well I had to wonder whether you were really the same person.”

I’d been watching him for weeks. He’d played the excellent senior to Elli and handled everything assigned to him crisply, the perfect servant.

“But there’s a saying. I wonder if you’ve ever heard it.”

And yet he’d never asked for a reward or demanded any compensation.

“They say if a person changes suddenly, they die.”

Besides, going by how he’d treated me from the very beginning, Leo wasn’t the type to turn into that kind of saint. So he’d been swallowing his real intent the whole time.

When I’d finished, Leo let out a hollow laugh.

“You saw through my lie over something like that?”
“You could say that.”

He looked utterly drained, but he went on.

“That nonsensical hunch of yours was right. Yes, I never went to the dungeon at all. In fact, the day you ordered me to go to the herb storeroom, I came up with a plan of my own.”

I’d had my say. Now it was my turn to listen, so I listened in silence and gave his words my full attention.

“I went to Young Master Valerian. And I told him… that I’d kill Young Master Arden for him.”

For Valerian, that offer would have carried nothing to lose. To him, the existence called Arden was a disgrace upon the family, and he wanted it gone as soon as humanly possible.

“How could you say something like that!”

Elli, with a face like an enraged goblin, was about to launch herself at Leo.

“Stop.”

I raised a hand to block her, and she huffed and puffed, forcing her riled-up heart back down.

“Keep talking.”

Leo deliberately avoided Elli’s gaze.

“Young Master Valerian granted me permission to use his name.”
“Oh-ho.”
“But he set one condition.”

Leo’s eyes drifted into empty air, as if he were back in that moment.

“If I failed, for any reason whatsoever…”

He swallowed dryly.

“…he told me to take my own life.”

Leo drew a dagger from inside his coat.

Clang.

“That was your last chance just now, you know. Your one shot at killing me and surviving.”
“Now I’ve thrown even that away. No… I never had the courage to drive it home in the first place, did I.”

Leo stared with hollow eyes at the dagger lying at his own feet.

“Young Master! Let me at him!”

Elli looked ready to pounce on him at any second, and I had to block her with my own body.

“Calm down. He didn’t stab anyone.”
“But still—!”
“Leo. Keep going.”

He opened his mouth without taking his eyes off the dagger on the floor.

“I drew up the plan together with Rel, the keeper of the herb storeroom. When the sudden shift in patrol rotations had the maids’ complaints boiling over, we borrowed Young Master Valerian’s name to shut their mouths. And at the entrance, we burned Dreamveil.”

So the objective, most likely, hadn’t been to keep me from getting the herbs. Leo’s gaze slid to Elli, cradled in my arms.

“Elli was the target.”

Leo nodded.

Elli was no fool either, and she realized that the heart of this conversation, right now, was her.

“I was the target?”

I gently released her from my arms.

“If they captured you, I’d lose the only eyes and ears I have left.”

Stunned, Elli stopped making a fuss. I decided to leave her be for the moment and pressed on.

“But did it need to be that elaborate? Slipping poison into a glass of water would’ve been so much faster.”

I’d remembered Elli’s earlier story about Rel handing her some pill, which she’d thrown away on the spot, so I put the question to Leo.

“Poisoning leaves traces. The corpse turns black, or a magic poison-check exposes it instantly. No matter how much Young Master Arden is treated as the family’s disgrace, if a rumor spread that a direct-line blood relative had been poisoned, it would crack the family’s honor. There might be an outside investigation, too…”

Leo paused, then went on.

“The same applies to the poison Rel handed to Elli.”
“Naturally.”

I didn’t need to be told what came after that. The plan would have been to isolate me and then let me die of “illness.”

But I had Eve.

Even if they did abduct Elli, so long as Eve’s Possession Stabilization buff didn’t disappear, I had no intention of dying that easily. So what I was curious about now came down to one thing.

“Does my brother know you’re here right now?”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“That’s a surprise. If you came here because you wanted to live, you could’ve at least grabbed my throat and tried to negotiate, or even fed me false information and played both sides.”
“Because I knew it would be meaningless.”
“Meaningless?”
“Because in the end, even Young Master Valerian is just dancing on the palm of your hand.”

A heavy silence settled over the room. Leo, looking resigned, lowered his head and awaited his sentence.

I picked the dagger up off the floor. Its edge was very, very keenly honed.

“More than sharp enough to cut, anyway.”

Holding it, I closed the distance until I was standing right in front of Leo, and then, without warning, I swung my hand.

Slash—!

“Ngh…!”

Leo swallowed a short groan and flinched. A thin line had been drawn across his left cheek, and a moment later red blood beaded along it and began to trickle down. A fraction deeper and it wouldn’t have been the cheek. It would have been the carotid artery. In all likelihood, this wound would leave a scar that never faded for the rest of his life.

“Did you know?”
“…”
“On a continent very far from here, they say there’s a punishment where a brand that never fades is carved into the criminal’s body, so he remembers his crime for the rest of his life.”

Whether such a continent actually existed, I didn’t know. It was just my own otherworld version of the scarlet letter.

“Remember this. From this moment on, your life is no longer yours. It is something I have decided to let live. My possession, nothing more.”

Leo didn’t even have the presence of mind to wipe away the flowing blood. He trembled violently and pressed his head to the floor.

A physical brand. This much was enough.

In the silence that followed, I took a worn letter out of the drawer and handed it to Elli.

“Read it.”

She took it hesitantly, and tracing the lopsided, childish handwriting, she slowly opened her mouth.

“‘Hello, Young Master Arden. My Big Bro is a really wonderful person.’”
“…!”

At that very first sentence, Leo’s shoulders, bowed as if he were dead, shook violently. But Elli did not stop.

“‘I heard he’s working hard for the family day and night. I want to hurry up and get better too, so I can be useful to the family, just like Big Bro.’”

Her voice rang through the room and pierced Leo’s heart like a verdict being read.

“S-stop… please, stop…”

Leo muttered it, almost a groan, but I signaled to Elli with my eyes to keep reading.

“‘Big Bro has a soft heart, so sometimes he gets clumsy or makes mistakes. If he ever upsets you, Young Master, please, please be kind and forgive him. Because Big Bro really is such a good person.’”

I smiled coldly and looked down at Leo as he crumbled. His face flushed red, then turned dirt-gray.

From inside my coat I drew the most recent letter Rio and I had exchanged, and handed it to Elli.

“‘Young Master, I’m really sorry, but I have a favor to ask. Could you let Big Bro come home, just for a short while, on his next leave? I — I miss Big Bro so much.’”

Up to here, it could still pass for a sick child’s ordinary plea. But Elli’s voice suddenly thickened on the next sentence.

“‘Just this once. If you let him come just this one time… I won’t bother you again next time. I really mean it. I promise.’”

Elli clamped a hand over her mouth and looked at me. She’d felt it too, on instinct: the chilling resignation buried in that one sentence.

I spoke quietly to the dazed Leo.

“‘I won’t bother you again.’ Do you know what that means?”

There was only one moment when a child swore, as a tantrum-promise, that she would no longer ask to see someone she missed.

I dropped Rio’s letter at Leo’s feet, and with violently trembling hands, he picked up his younger sister’s letter.

“Ah… aahh…”

The groan tore free of him as he read.

Drip. Drip.

Heavy teardrops fell onto the letter.

He was drowning in grief, and to him I gave the brutal reality.

“Rio will die soon.”

That brutally cruel reality.