“Yeah. You want me to?”
“I’m asking you to.”
Luman frowned, but he still nodded.
He clearly didn’t want to, but he was going to do it anyway.
So that’s what a real friend looks like!? You ask them for something, and they just do it right away.
“......”
Brother and Luman really must be close. All my brother said was that he needed to make contact, so how did Luman know he was asking him to do it for him? Does Luman know my brother better than I do?
Ah, well...
They’ve been together for a long time, so I guess that’s obvious.
“Ren. How are you feeling?”
As soon as Luman stepped outside to make the call, my brother strode over, folded himself down beside the bed, and started checking me over here and there.
“I’m fine. I think I could move around as soon as tomorrow.”
“Don’t push yourself.”
“Okay!”
Maybe it was because the priest had treated me, but my body felt way better.
My usual exhaustion and weakness, that dull throbbing muscle pain, were creeping back in, but compared to when I was really sick, this was nothing. At this level, I can move. For about a week after a fit, I’m at least close to a normal person—or a weak one, anyway!
Since I answered without hesitation, my brother looked a little relieved.
But then he didn’t leave. He just stayed standing there quietly beside my bed.
What’s with him...?
I looked back up at him just as quietly.
Wow...
When it’s just the two of us like this...
it feels nice. Like I’ve got my brother all to myself!
Those thick brows and that high, straight nose.
He’s my brother, but seriously, he’s handsome.
My brother will get married someday too, won’t he? Maybe once this mission is over...?
“Ren.”
“Huh?”
“I... killed people.”
“What?”
Is he talking about that traitorous bastard, Dell Belkerman?
“But, Ren. They were bad people. The kind of people a Hero has to kill. Trash like that.”
Brother Temar’s voice sank dark and low.
Why is he saying this all of a sudden? If they were bad bastards, then of course they had to die!
For a second, severed heads and blood bursting out like fountains flashed in front of my eyes.
That was an illusion, right?
My chest dropped hard. My heart started pounding wildly.
Yeah... I guess scenes like that really aren’t great for the stomach.
My brother lowered his eyes and looked down at me. His dark brown eyes looked even deeper than usual.
“Brother Temar.”
I held out my hand.
But my brother stayed in the same position. When I waved it a few times, he slowly offered me his hand, like he was thinking it over. I grabbed his thick, rough hand with both of mine, the one split open and covered in scars. The heat burning through his skin felt like it pulled my own temperature up in an instant.
“You’re a Hero! Of course you kill bad people.”
I-is it okay to say that? He won’t scold me for saying something awful, right?
Dell Belkerman had tried to kill Coco. And that wasn’t even all—he’d betrayed her feelings too.
Ah! Wait. Earlier, my brother said “bodies,” didn’t he. So he wasn’t talking about Dell Belkerman.
Then who?
Oh... I get it. He meant the masked men who attacked the carriage.
Then when my brother admitted he’d killed people, was he talking about them?
My eyes shot wide open.
Because a fire flared up in my chest.
“People like that deserve to die!”
I suddenly got so worked up I clamped down hard on my brother’s hand, and his eyes went wide.
Because of those bastards, my brother and Luman got badly hurt.
My memories from inside the cave were spotty, like whole pieces had been cut out, but I remembered perfectly clearly how my brother and Luman had looked, soaked in blood.
Ah, maybe a Hero’s little brother isn’t supposed to think things like this. Will my brother be disappointed in me?
But I don’t know.
In my heart...
I want everyone who hurt my brother to die.
“Yeah.”
My brother smiled faintly.
***
Temar stepped out into an empty garden.
In the winter-struck garden, dry branches trembled in the wind. The Gannion family garden, which supposedly prized natural beauty, always turned bleak as a winter forest once the season came. If it snowed, maybe it would look soft enough to lighten the heart a little, but all that blew through it now was a dry wind. It was dry enough to be shocking the place hadn’t gone up in flames.
‘Brother! I’m always on your side, no matter what!’
Ren’s eyes had seemed to say exactly that.
Those green eyes fixed on him so directly. Eyes as clean as first snow.
When Temar met them head-on, he felt stunned. It struck him how long it had been since he had truly looked straight into Ren’s eyes.
Back when...
when Ren had only come up to his knee.
It felt like the first time since then.
Temar scrubbed a hand over his face.
And because of that, he hadn’t asked the thing he had really wanted to ask.
Aren’t you afraid of me?
That was what Temar had wanted to ask.
To begin with, Temar had never really been a human sort of man. Was there even such a thing as a Hero with enough humanity left to feel guilt or fear over killing? Ah, maybe that one who died young might have been like that. But Heroes who had gone through years of brutal war, Heroes whose lives had been stained through with blood from beginning to end—there was no way they could keep feelings like that. If they had, they would already be dead.
Temar’s humanity had already been lost—
back when he had swung his sword under the name of war and cut down enemy after enemy,
back when he had hacked apart even the unborn life inside a womb because it might become a threat.
It had fallen there to the ground with the corpses, shredded to pieces among them.
“......”
Temar tipped back the last of his drink.
The harsh liquor sliding down his throat burned as if it would scorch his insides. But it did nothing. If he could have gotten drunk, even a few long nights might have been bearable. A Hero’s body was cruel to anything human.
Though whether he could still call himself human was another question.
He was afraid.
For the first time, Temar was afraid of Ren.
He was afraid because Ren, unlike him, was a “human” who could die at any moment.
But the fear he had just felt ran on a different track from that.
It was the fear that Ren might be afraid of him—
of someone inhuman,
someone called a monster,
a butcher of the battlefield,
someone whose entire life was stained with blood, someone to whom killing meant nothing.
That fear was terror. Like a ghost appearing out of nowhere and stealing the senses from your mind in an instant, Temar felt something cold creeping up his back.
He and Ren were different.
He was a monster that had lost its humanity, nothing more than a sword.
Ren was a human being with a soft heart.
Can a human and a monster be family?
Can they stay close?
Wouldn’t fear settle between them?
To Temar, even the trembling of Ren’s pupils, the slightest flicker of his lashes, had been visible down to a tenth of a second.
When he had said he killed people, Temar had felt with perfect clarity the way Ren had trembled for that instant—whatever it was he had pictured.
Maybe that fear had already started growing.
The truth of the brother who had once seemed too far away to know.
The one reborn as a monster.
“I have to hide it...”
Temar let out a short, hollow laugh.
The smile that rose on his hard face was close to self-mockery.
When ✪ Nоvеlіgһt ✪ (Official version) they were this different, was it really all right for him to call Ren his little brother?
Laughing at himself for having told Luman, “He’s my brother,” Temar scrubbed a hand down his face again.
When he lifted it away, every trace of pain had been wiped clean from his expression. His face was the face of the brave, unfeeling “Hero”—hard as rock, as if it could never waver, not a single strong feature disturbed.
***
“Mm! You’re looking good again today!”
“So I can move around now?”
The physician my brother had brought, the physician who stayed at Lady Coco’s castle, and Priest Kirky—
the three of them had me surrounded in a circle.
Behind them, my brother, Coco, and Luman were watching.
This is suffocating.
And my heart’s shaking.
What if they find some clue in my body?
‘But they won’t figure it out easily.’
It had taken nearly three years for the old apothecary and me, examining my body together, to finally uncover that it was an “incurable disease.” At first, even the old man had only diagnosed me as beyond frail—seriously weak, that was all.
Coco was only making such a fuss because I got stabbed with a sword in her place, and she felt guilty about it.
To begin with, she’d already asked under the assumption of “even if it’s not a fatal illness!”
As long as I stayed calm, no one would notice.
“Can’t you just heal it cleanly?”
Coco pointed at my chest.
The deep stab wound had healed a lot, but there was still a raw sting and a mark left behind. Honestly, at this point, you could basically call it healed!
Seriously, I don’t know why Coco is making such a huge deal out of this.
“Lady Coco! If we do that, his natural healing ability will weaken!”
Kirky shook his head with a stern face. His gaze bounced back and forth between the two physicians like he wanted them to back him up already.
“That’s right. And he’s still young.”
The physician attached to the Gannion household nodded too.
The young physician my brother had brought kept answering while sneaking glances at me.
‘Why do you keep looking at me like that? The exam’s over, so why the hell are you still staring?!’
The second I glared at him, the physician startled and dropped his eyes.
Quit screwing around, asshole!
Kirky planted his hands on his hips and puffed out his chest. Then Coco clenched a fist, and he quietly relaxed his arms again.
Come to think of it, Coco was dressed all in black today. So were Brother Temar, Luman, and even the physicians.
Priest Kirky usually wore all white, but today he had a strip of black cloth wrapped around his neck.
“So it really won’t leave a scar, right?”
“Of course! As long as the bandages get changed properly and the medicine gets applied properly, there won’t be any problem. Ah, and he has to take his medicine properly too. Got it, Ren?”
“Got it.”
I bit the inside of my cheek.
This much attention is suffocating...
More importantly, why are you talking to me so gently? I’m not a baby! Ugh. I feel like I’m getting goosebumps on my arms. When I rubbed at them, Priest Kirky tilted his head and pulled the blanket over me. I couldn’t be bothered to say I wasn’t cold, so I just let him.
Brother Temar and Luman looked at each other. The two of them exchanged a glance, then looked away.
“We leave this afternoon, Ren.”
“Huh? Okay.”
Coco crossed her arms, looking like she didn’t like that one bit, and called out to my brother.
“How about leaving Ren behind?”
“......”
“What the hell are you talking about!”
