The next day, the streets buzzed with talk of the 13th Legion Commander. Rumors that no one could trace the origin of swelled and bloated on their own.
People pieced together the actions I might have taken one by one, straining to uncover the hidden intention lurking behind them.
The conclusion was always the same.
The 13th Legion Commander was an extraordinarily sinister and dangerous entity.
There’s a certain convenience to having planted a bad impression early on. Whatever I do after this, people will interpret it through the lens of malice all on their own. It was strange, almost amusing — I had become a villain far more formidable than I’d ever planned.
Storing the drugs in my inventory — that part was intentional. I’d wanted it to look as though obtaining the drugs was my goal. But the idea that I was engineering a scheme to seize and control the empire using drugs and their cure as leverage… what on earth? It seemed like I was the one who needed to take notes from the good side.
Theo fretted unnecessarily about whether the Legion Commander might lace my food with the drugs too. He asked after my physical condition two or three times an hour, and kept a close eye on my complexion whenever I was eating.
“I’ll grow stronger quickly. Strong enough to protect Lihen.”
He threw himself into sword practice in the courtyard. For someone only fifteen years old, his skill was already considerable. Compared to adult Theo, his movements were a touch rougher around the edges, but his resolve was unmistakable. Even when sweat beaded on him, he didn’t stop — and whenever his form broke, he corrected it right away.
The streets falling into this much confusion was certainly a headache for the good side. But the fact that Theo now had renewed motivation to train harder — that part wasn’t so bad.
There was one more thing to be grateful for. The citizens hadn’t descended into full-blown panic. That was thanks to Shasha reassuring them that she would produce the cure soon. Parents found relief in the fact that their children had returned safely, and drew on that to piece their daily lives back together.
I paused mid-step. I quietly watched as a couple — who had gotten their beloved child back — clung to each other crying and laughing, then unlocked their shop, welcomed a customer, and carried on with their day.
It was beautiful.
Having offered eleven organization members up in a single go had given me confidence. In the four days that followed, I offered up eight more souls, and the infamy points I’d accumulated had reached 2,000p before I knew it.
I had been selective — offering only those who could, by my own measure, be called even somewhat wicked. Of course, I knew it was absurd for someone like me alone to be drawing the line between good and evil. Even so, I couldn’t exactly offer up the souls of genuinely good people — people like Damian, or Luna, or Shasha — just because they’d net me a higher score.
Human traffickers, domestic abusers, swindlers…
Perhaps because people like that had been disappearing, the atmosphere in the neighborhood had actually improved somewhat. And strangely, criminals of that sort were uniformly weak in mental fortitude. The slightest pressure in a manner befitting a legion commander was enough to break them, making soul extraction surprisingly easy. Was it truly the case that good things are the strongest of all?
Tonight’s target was a corrupt tax collector.
His name was Lopez. A man who squeezed impoverished citizens with excessive taxation and pocketed the proceeds for his own gain. He had a fondness for drink and a taste for flesh — it was said he brought anyone pleasing to his bed, man or woman alike. Dealing with one lecherous drunk wasn’t going to be any trouble at all.
Lopez was sprawled across his bed, sunk deep in sleep. He was thoroughly drunk, his consciousness drifting far away, and his body gave off a nauseating mix of heavy perfume, liquor, powder, and sweat. The evidence of him having indulged freely with whoever he pleased — man or woman — still lay all around him, undisguised.
With no wind to stir them, the candles flickered — then went out all at once. In the darkness, a black shadow slowly took form. Lopez felt an uncanny wrongness even in the middle of his dream, and he scrunched his face and opened his eyes. A figure was standing before his bed. A robe covered the face, making it impossible to see.
“Wha — what…”
Lopez lurched upright. His heart hammered wildly. He didn’t know why, but instinct was screaming at him. Run.
He yanked the cord attached to the side of his bed — the signal used to summon his mercenaries. Against threats to his life, Lopez always kept heavily armed mercenaries on standby inside the house. All that was left was to hold on until they arrived.
Lopez fumbled for the sword propped beside his bed and gripped it. Drunk as he was, the muscle memory of swordsmanship he’d honed over many years moved his hands on instinct. Lopez leveled a threat at the intruder.
“Hey! Get out, right now! Do you have any idea whose house you’ve walked into—”
Before the words were finished, the man took one step forward. Just one step. That alone was enough to press down on the air inside the room. Lopez’s mind went blank, and an inexplicable terror crashed over him like a wave.
Lopez gritted his teeth and swung his sword. It was a reasonably precise strike, in its way. But the attack failed to leave so much as a scratch on the man. The intruder simply flicked his wrist — a casual, light motion. And yet in the next instant, Lopez’s sword lost all force and went skipping across the floor, embedding itself in the wall. A sharp, numbing pain radiated up through his wrist.
“Lopez! Are you alright?”
The bedroom door burst open. A crowd of hulking mercenaries came pouring in. Combat broke out at once. But the intruder didn’t even bother drawing his blade from its sheath. He faced twenty mercenaries with his weapon still sheathed.
The man deflected the mercenaries’ attacks effortlessly. He pressed the flat of the sheath against one man’s temple and dropped him, then struck the precise pressure point at the nape of another’s neck and sent him unconscious. Every movement aimed solely at incapacitation — clean, without a wasted motion. What followed was a one-sided beating that could barely be dignified with the name of battle. The mercenaries went down in twos and threes after no more than two or three blows, losing consciousness and crumpling to the floor.
As Lopez watched the scene unfold, his mental fortitude shaved away at a devastating pace. The unidentified intruder raised his hand as if he’d been waiting for this. A sweep of his hand split the air. A complete void — devoid of light and depth — yawned open. It was the passage used for offering souls to the Demon King.
“A — a demon? Damn it all…!”
Lopez made one last act of defiance. He grabbed the liquor bottle sitting on the nightstand and hurled it at the man. The man didn’t bother dodging. The bottle smashed against his shoulder and shattered into pieces. Strong liquor soaked thickly into his clothes. The man looked down at Lopez without so much as a flicker of pain. Not blinking once. And that, somehow, made it more terrifying. He looked like something that had no concept of what pain even was.
“Please… spare me… please…”
Lopez wept. But it was already too late. The soul that seeped out from his chest was sucked into the rift. Lopez, stripped of his soul, went slack and collapsed onto the bed. His breath still came — but his eyes held no focus.
At that same moment, a notification window visible only to Shane appeared.
Infamy Points +50p
Theo stirred awake to a chill that had seeped in from nowhere. Out of habit, he reached to the side and tried to pull Lihen into his arms. But what his hand found was nothing but a blanket, cold as stone.
…He’s not here?
His heart plunged.
Where did he go.
Not yet fully awake, a rush of thoughts crowded into his mind all at once.
Did I do something wrong. Is that why he left me. Or maybe — maybe he found another child, one more worth raising than me.
So rattled was he that Theo started to bolt upright — and in that very moment, he heard the sound of the door opening. He settled back at once, feigning sleep with his eyes barely open, as though nothing had happened.
Gray hair and red eyes. A tall frame and a lean, sharp build. It was Lihen. A strong smell of alcohol clung to him, and his left shoulder was damp with liquor. Just how much had he drunk, for it to have soaked through his clothes like that.
Theo sniffed. His keen sense of smell picked up something beyond just the sharp sting of liquor. A very faint trace of perfume — and something else, something rawer and more tangled, a messy mixture of scents that didn’t belong to Lihen. It was the smell Lihen had brought back from dealing with Lopez as Shane. Of course, Theo had no way of knowing that.
Lihen went into the bathroom. He washed quickly, came back out, and changed into his sleepwear. Then, without a sound, he lay down beside Theo.
What on earth was he doing out at this hour of the night.
Something churned in his chest.
An image came to him without difficulty — Lihen surrounded by people, drinking, laughing, talking. Lihen was, objectively, a handsome young man. His manner of speaking was warm, and his voice was gentle. There were surely people who had developed feelings for him.
Someone sharing that drink with him deliberately spills liquor on Lihen’s clothes, then grabs him by the collar in a drunken haze and pulls him in and—
And after that… Theo’s understanding of the world couldn’t quite carry the image further, but for some reason, his heart constricted.
Theo squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t want to be caught awake. At the same time, an emotion he couldn’t name lodged in his throat like a fishbone. He forced it down, swallowed it.
Whoever Lihen met at night, however much he drank — it was none of his business to presume. He was someone who had no choice but to lean on Lihen’s goodwill to get by. Asking what Lihen had been doing at this hour of the night was beyond what he had any right to do.
Lihen surely had his own private life. A hidden side of things that a fifteen-year-old like him wasn’t supposed to know about. It wasn’t right to judge people by appearances — but honestly, Lihen didn’t exactly give off a particularly wholesome impression.
From behind him came the sound of shifting. Lihen turned over and pulled Theo into his arms. His breathing settled into a slow, even rhythm — it seemed he had fallen asleep.
Theo lay there, feeling the warmth of Lihen’s body against his, unable to move a single muscle, and stayed awake with his eyes open through the rest of the night.
