Chapter 40

“Ugh, ngh!, cough, cough!”

Covering her nose and mouth with the water-soaked piece of shirt, she looked up. That once-verdant pine forest was burning with a terrifying ferocity, spewing out ash-gray smoke.

“Hayden! Hayden, where are you!”

Fearing her voice would be swallowed by the crackling roar of the burning trees, she pulled the handkerchief away from her mouth. Though her hands and feet trembled uncontrollably as trees burned right above her head, she managed to conquer the bone-deep terror in order to drag him out.

“Hayden, Hayden! Hayden!”

Walking step by step, Isu soon broke into a frantic run. After running deep into the forest for several minutes, her sense of direction dissolved completely.

“Haah, haah, haah.”

Flaming trees surrounded her on all sides, and ash and embers scattered like blooming flowers. She had no idea where the path leading out was.

The moment she realized that, a jolt of pure terror struck her.

Is this it… am I really going to die like this? With my past still completely forgotten…?

“If you were going to die tomorrow, what would you want to do?”

Suddenly, Hayden’s question from a few hours ago flashed through her mind. She never imagined that the distant future she had vaguely imagined back then would crash down upon her instantly.

Isu breathed in ragged confusion. In the face of death staring her straight in the face, what she desperately wished for wasn’t recovering her forgotten past.

A single man rose up in her mind, filled with a crushing longing. Hayden Wyatt. If she had known it would come to this, she would have answered that she wanted to go see him…

Hayden was inside the building where he had rescued her. He had gone back to search for records relating to her.

However, the computers were all waterlogged, and the documents consisted solely of reference copies like academic papers. Naturally, Graham Bio—obsessed with absolute security and storing all data digitally—wasn’t about to leave behind a paper trail.

Stepping back outside, he looked down toward the foot of the hill.

The place that should have been peaceful, with four men and a roe deer sitting together harmoniously, had turned into absolute chaos.

One man stood with his feet in the seawater, waving frantically up at the sky. Above him, a helicopter circled with its searchlight on, broadcasting something through a loudspeaker.

Two other men stood at the edge of the pine forest, tearing at their hair in despair. To top it all off, the roe deer was darting back and forth across the white sandy beach.

The woman who acted like the roe deer’s owner was nowhere to be seen. The pupils that had once resembled a calm lake shook instantly like crashing, churning waves.

With long, eating-up strides, he ran and stopped right at the entrance of the pine forest.

“Where’s Isu?”

His face was as cold and blood-cold as ever, but his actions were unnatural. He fiddled meaninglessly with his watch, then wiped the cold sweat from his palms straight onto his chest. Manuel, watching Hayden’s panicked demeanor, ruffled his own hair in frustration.

“Hayden? Where the hell have you been this whole time?”

Hayden felt the urge to smash Manuel straight into the sandy beach for wasting several seconds with a useless counter-question. Forcing his rigid mouth to move, he asked again.

“I asked you where Isu is.”

Jan stared into the burning forest and answered.

“Thinking you hadn’t come out of the forest, she went in to rescue you. She vanished like a flying squirrel before we could even stop her!”

“What?”

The impossible had happened. The idiots who couldn’t even measure up to the tip of her toes were just wringing their hands in panic, while the woman who had always been smart enough to make sound judgments and protect her own life had thrown herself directly into the soaring flames.

She had lost her capacity for judgment. She had forgotten that finding a grown man in the pitch-black smoke and dragging him out was an absolute impossibility.

Imagining the woman wandering through a living hell of fire, his eyes bloodshot. There was no time left to waste. Hayden glanced back and forth between Manuel and Jan.

“You two. Three minutes from now, take turns shouting at the top of your lungs. So she can find her way back by following the sound.”

“Sound?”

The inside of the forest would be utter madness due to the murderous smoke and pillars of fire, so his plan was for her to escape by following the voices of Manuel and Jan.

Nodding as if to say they could manage at least that much, Jan and Manuel complied. There was neither gratitude nor trust in Hayden’s eyes as he looked at them.

His style was to reward those who proved useful and cast the useless ones straight down to hell. His sharply gleaming eyes warned them to choose their own fate.

“It’ll be better for both of us if you don’t spare your vocal cords.”

Without a shred of hesitation, he plunged headfirst into the forest.

His legs convulsed as if ready to sprint in every direction, but he forcibly reined his body in.

He had to stay calm. In a forest as vast as a sports field, where on earth could she have gone?

He scanned the woods through a vision blurred as if viewed through a red filter. Though his exterior remained icy, right now the creature drowning in the most absolute anxiety on this entire island was none other than himself.

“Isu, Isu!”

Deadly smoke poured straight into his roaring, open mouth.

Ash-gray smoke choked every direction. Fireballs raining down from above served as a grim reminder that no one was getting out of this forest alive.

The deeper he stepped into the woods, the more stiflingly hot it grew. Yet, imagining the terrified woman cowering somewhere inside, his reason paralyzed entirely, leaving him completely blind to the danger.

Hayden’s mind was consumed by a single thought: find her quickly and get out of this forest.

If escaping the forest was truly impossible, his only desire left was to die right alongside her.

“I’ll kiss you. Until my lips were chawed raw.”

There wasn’t an ounce of falsehood in those words. Because this was the exact ending he had yearned for ever since the day he first met her, sixteen years ago.

Ever since then, he had prayed that right before he died, he’d be able to lock lips with her once more. He wanted to vividly remember the fact that he had met and loved her throughout his weary life. Because after that, he intended to brand her completely onto his very soul, scour the next existence from top to bottom, and find her all over again.

He ran and ran. His breathing grew ragged, and his consciousness, eroding away in the acrid stench of burning, faded into a haze.

Yet, unlike his corpse-like state of mind, his eyes burned bright, wide open, and bloodshot.

He never imagined she would plunge straight into the flames. Though she had a history of personally rescuing Manuel from the ocean, she wouldn’t even have considered it if the waves had been rough.

He had expected her to act with that same level of self-preservation this time, too. Assuming she was reasonably just and wiser than she looked had been his mistake. Now, realizing that had been a gross overestimate, it was far too late.

He searched frantically for a long time for the pit she had dug. Since she had asked him to check on the pit and headed into the forest, he figured she must be wandering somewhere near that area.

As time passed, the flames crawled down the tree trunks. Pushing his way fiercely through the blazing fire, he finally located the pit.

Every direction was dyed a blazing, incandescent red. It looked like a hell soaked in blood. The small, beautiful woman lay collapsed within that hellish landscape, as if drifting off to a peaceful sleep.

Though murderous smoke pierced his lungs, drawing it in felt like a breath of fresh air after finding oxygen. Stumbling over as he ran, he looked down at her.

She lay limply, like an animal taking a nap beneath the warm sun. Her body was curled up tight in a fetal position. Her face looked at peace, as though she had finally found sanctuary.

Realizing that even a burning hell would become paradise if she were there, Hayden swept her up in a frantic embrace. Then, scanning his surroundings, he strained his ears to catch the voices of Manuel and Jan.

From the left opening, Manuel’s trailing shout echoed out.

Hayden walked fiercely, pushing through the pitch-black smoke. He kept her body completely shielded against his upper torso, terrified that a stray ember might strike her.

In an environment so hot it made his skin feel like it was burning, her body was strangely lukewarm. Having lost his voice, he bit gently into her shoulder and stroked her cheek, desperately trying to wake her.

When she still didn’t budge, his anxiety crossed the line from panic into something far worse. His bloodshot eyes scanned her face without focus, desperately trying to assess her condition.

“Eila, Eila, Eila…”

With ash smudged across his cheek, the man staring down at the woman’s face from a mere inch away wore a completely expressionless face. At a glance, he looked like a barbarian who had scavenged a woman from the ruins, but the bulging redness in his eyelids betrayed the fact that he was drowning in utter turmoil.

His hurried footsteps guided him right to the edge of the forest entrance. Even as the murderous smoke lingered thick around them, she suddenly moved her arm.

Hayden stared down at her with a misaligned, hollow gaze. Her arm trembling weakly, she brought something she had been clutching in her hand right up to Hayden’s lips.

It was a piece of fabric soaked in water. That handkerchief dampened his nose and mouth, helping him breathe.

In a place where toxic gases poured in endlessly, that handkerchief was no different from a lifeline. And she had handed it over to him. Foolishly, stupidly. Hayden snatched the handkerchief away and pressed it firmly over her own mouth and nose instead.

“Don’t do anything useless.”

In that split second, through the sliver of her eyelids parted a fraction of an inch, he caught sight of her pitch-black pupils. The pupils within were dilated wide, as if trying to catch even a glimpse of a beautiful paradise before the end.

Only then did he vaguely guess why she had handed him the handkerchief. It was her way of saying she was heading off to paradise first, so he should stay alive and well. The man chewed bitterly on his words.

“Eila, you’re not going anywhere.”

“……”

“You’re not going.”

The man holding onto her burned with an obsessive, frantic white in his eyes.

“Ms. Eila, can you hear me? Eila, Eila?”

“Her vitals have plummeted.”

“Oxygen saturation is low, too.”

“Transfer her straight to the hyperbaric oxygen chamber immediately.”

The voices of people echoed dully. Struggling to pry open her eyes, she saw people moving like clockwork from a distant, elevated perspective.

Her whole body felt languid and hazy, and she didn’t care to join in their conversation. She merely scanned her surroundings through a blurred field of vision.

A hospital bathed in stark white light. The hallway walls were painted a dull yellow. She hated the color yellow more than anything…

“Ms. Eila, Ms. Eila? You’re at St. Elizabeth’s General Hospital in Dublin, Ireland. If you can hear me, can you blink your eyes?”

A nurse brought her face close and spoke, but Isu ignored her completely, staring only at the yellow wall. A deeply ominous and anxious feeling gripped her. Because he wouldn’t ever go anywhere where there was yellow.

She thought it mindlessly, then suddenly stopped herself.

He wouldn’t go? Who on earth was he? He felt like someone important in her life, yet…

In that fleeting moment, exhaustion washed over her as if she hadn’t slept in hundreds of years, and she simply closed her eyes.

Why did she end up hating yellow in the first place? Who was he? Obsessing over that single thought, she barely noticed her consciousness slipping away.

In an instant, her ears went numb, as though she had been plunged deep into the crushing depths of the ocean.

“Ms. Eila? Ms. Eila! Code blue, emergency kit, hurry, hurry!”