“I thought you had no sense of the situation at all — but I suppose that’s not quite right.”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind. You said you were disappointed too, so it works out well. I’ve found it rather trying when the only one drinking with me ends up drunk while I remain perfectly sober — tonight, it seems I’ll be able to drink at ease.”
Avelos filled the glass in front of Uriel to the brim. He filled his own just the same, then smiled that pretty smile once more and raised his glass.
Is this really all right? Uriel hesitated, glass raised to meet his. The feeling that he had somehow been maneuvered into this was difficult to shake.
Through the glass, his eyes met Avelos’s again. Avelos held Uriel’s gaze steadily and drained every last drop from his glass. He set the empty glass down on the table and offered Uriel a small, pleased smile — and though no words were spoken, it felt like nothing less than a prompt to drink.
Uriel gripped his glass tight and squeezed his eyes shut. When the Emperor went that far, there was no way to refuse.
By nature, he’d had a condition from birth and had never once drunk alcohol. But in the original novel, there had been a lore element that those who worked with mana did not get drunk — and since Avelos had just said the same thing, it seemed like it would be fine.
Even if I personally can’t handle mana, the body I’ve possessed is that of the mage who made the Eight Rings — it won’t get drunk.
So this uneasy feeling of being led along is probably just needless worry. Besides, the first sip of alcohol burned at the back of the throat, but it wasn’t as bad as he’d expected.
Well — it is the Emperor’s own liquor, after all….
When Uriel emptied his glass, Avelos, who had been watching, tilted the bottle and refilled it. The scent had struck him as sharp and harsh before he drank. But now, at the tail end of that sharp, heady smell, there seemed to be just a faint thread of something sweet.
One glass, then two — Uriel’s glass was filled and emptied again and again. At first Avelos had been drinking alongside him, but at some point he had stopped. He was only pouring now, and Uriel was drinking the strong liquor entirely alone. The Uriel of earlier would certainly have noticed something was off and stopped — but the Uriel of right now didn’t seem to sense anything wrong at all.
Uriel’s face, which had been pale white, had flushed a deep red before he knew it. The corners of his eyes, reddened from the drinks he’d downed one after another, looked far more flushed than they had when they were wet back at the stables earlier.
“Hmm~”
Pulling his reddened cheeks wide in a smile, Uriel laughed.
“Ave… los.”
Uriel’s lips moved. It seemed like there was something he wanted to say to Avelos. His lips parted and closed several times as though he was trying to say something, but all that managed to come out was the start of a name and laughter.
Avelos, apparently finding this interesting, settled back against his chair. The way he leaned back with that unhurried expression — it was exactly the look of someone intending to watch and see just how far things would go.
After parting his lips several more times, Uriel simply laughed without saying anything at all.
“Didn’t you have something you wanted to say?”
“Mm… did I…?”
He was clearly well and truly drunk. Uriel’s eyes, looser than usual, had curved soft and gentle. Uriel seemed completely unaware of how unguarded and vulnerable he looked right now — like easy, defenceless prey.
His words weren’t slurred exactly, but his tongue seemed to lack its usual strength, and his answers came flowing out in a slow, sluggish drift.
At that sight, Avelos’s violet eyes gleamed.
The strangely guileless look of him made me wonder if it might work, so I offered the drink on a whim — but I never expected him to accept every glass without a hint of suspicion.
Unlike a Sword Master, whose very body is reconstructed to the point of being entirely immune to intoxication, a mage’s body was no different from an ordinary person’s.
The only difference was that the mana constantly cycling through them allowed for recovery. He had considered that Uriel, being a Grand Mage, might be somewhat different — but watching him get drunk like this, it seemed that wasn’t the case.
He doesn’t even know his own body is no different from an ordinary person’s, and he’s just been drinking away whatever was handed to him. Avelos was struck by how absurd it was. He let out a hollow laugh at the thought of whether it was really possible for a person to change so completely just from losing part of their memories.
No wariness. No tension whatsoever. Avelos clicked his tongue quietly and let his gaze drag slowly down over Uriel. Even under that gaze, Uriel smiled on, utterly unbothered.
“Ha ha, was I really…?”
“This is a different side of you. I like it. I won’t hold anything a drunk person says against you — so feel free to speak your mind.”
Avelos crossed his arms in earnest and settled in to watch Uriel. In the middle of laughing, Uriel seemed to wince — either his stomach was bothering him, or something else was uncomfortable — his expression kept shifting between a frown and a smile.
“Mm….”
As Avelos waited with that unhurried air, as if he truly meant to hear everything Uriel had to say, Uriel blinked slowly, both eyes closing and opening again.
Avelos’s gaze was still on him. Beneath the table, Uriel’s two hands, folded neatly together in front of his stomach, fidgeted. Strangely, heat seemed to be rising from his fingertips. Uriel’s lips moved in a slow, halting way.
“…me… Uriel….”
Now that he was actually trying to speak, his lips kept moving but the rest of the words wouldn’t follow easily. He raised his head and met Avelos’s eyes. The expression on Avelos’s face as he looked at Uriel — depending on how you read it, it could look like a pleased, amused smile, or it could look like something cold and settled. Strangely, that ambiguous expression was what eased the tension rather than heightened it. After several more moments of hesitation, Uriel finally let the rest of the words come.
“…why didn’t you just kill me right away?”
“…….”
“…why… did you come looking? …weren’t you coming… to kill me?”
“…….”
“…just forget it… and live well… with Franche….”
Avelos simply stared, looking as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Why, of all things, was Franche’s name suddenly coming up. He had no idea what Uriel had seen to make him link the two of them together — it was beyond him. Uriel, by now, had stopped caring about Avelos’s reaction and was murmuring as if talking to himself.
“Franche — I heard he’s beautiful.”
It was the sort of thing someone said when they’d heard it from someone else. Being in the imperial palace, that was plausible enough — it was forbidden to speak of those one served, but stopping it entirely would be impossible. Even so, it was no less baffling. What on earth did Franche being beautiful have to do with him — what made Uriel so certain they belonged together? Avelos exhaled a quiet breath.
“If we’re talking about beauty, then you, Uriel—”
Avelos stopped mid-sentence. His violet eyes stirred softly. In the dark, the vivid golden hair that seemed to catch the light, and those gold eyes that looked moist perhaps from the drink — they were striking, it was true. The same went for that pale, fine skin that hadn’t been damaged despite more than a year of working as a slave.
The corners of Uriel’s eyes, flushed from the alcohol, curved softly. There was something to it — the guileless eyes, the small but straight-bridged nose, the rosy cheeks, and those lips that made you want to reach out and touch them. Pretty, yes.
But is it really all right to think that about another man — and one who is practically an enemy at that?
Avelos furrowed his brow. Uriel was clearly the drunk one — and yet somehow, it felt like he was the one losing his head.
Whether Uriel knew anything of Avelos’s complicated inner state or not, he just kept murmuring to himself.
“The drug… I even… gave him the drug…. How does he still remember? That’s strange…. Uriel couldn’t have… made a mistake….”
Though it had been mentioned in only a single line in the original story, Uriel’s potion-making abilities were without question the finest there were. It seemed Uriel himself was aware of that, too.
The cabinets and storeroom of the manor had been stocked full of potions Uriel had made in preparation for every possible situation. He had gone so far as to fill several separate notebooks with detailed notes on each potion’s effects, side effects, and precautions — that was how much care Uriel had put into potion-making and management.
Knowing that level of skill, Yuri had felt confident giving Avelos the memory-erasing drug and then setting him free. And yet — how much thought had gone into guarding against any threat that might still remain.
In possessed-body stories, the standard outcome of just letting someone go was getting a knife in the back — or getting entangled with them regardless. So Yuri had built in double, even triple failsafes.
He had given Avelos the memory-erasing drug and spent a month attempting to repair their relationship. But recognizing quickly that it wasn’t working as well as hoped, he had changed his approach. He had taken a boy with an empty memory and spent well over a month crossing the entire continent with him.
He had taken him to a trade city far from Uriel’s manor, somewhere with a high flow of people. There, he had sought out the most trusted mercenary company he had researched in advance, and placed the commission under a false name.
He had briefly considered sending him directly to the imperial palace, but then changed his mind. Since this was the male lead of the original story, even the smallest risk felt like something he should reduce. So instead, he had set the destination as the ducal residence — the maternal family home of the Empress, Avelos’s mother. He’d also changed his mind about the clothes he’d packed along and brought them back with him.
The outfit Avelos had been wearing when he was abducted — fitted with jewelled buttons. Just looking at it, it was clearly something only someone from the imperial household would wear. Even with a highly trusted mercenary company, he had judged it too risky to send an amnesiac Avelos together with such costly possessions.
