“Love…”
Even in his hazy consciousness, the word love settled in his mind. Their lips overlapped several times as their breaths intermingled.
The soft tongue focused on ravaging his mouth explored Cairens’s mouth even more intensely.
Abrisius, who had been caressing Cairens’s cheek with his fingertips, cupped his face with his palm and pulled him toward himself.
His lips were crushed by the clumsy, hasty action.
Tilting his head diagonally and gently brushing each tooth, Abrisius penetrated deeper into Cairens. With the feeling of his mouth being violated, Cairens couldn’t come to his senses.
Even in the midst of this, the only word holding onto his sanity was ‘love.’
“Haah, mmm… ha.”
“Ah… haah.”
When their lips parted, their moans crossed and echoed. Their breathing was so tangled that he couldn’t even tell whose was whose.
Cairens’s eyes, soaked in excitement, sank. The thing called reason disappeared from his head.
“Abrisius… don’t tell me you…”
The hypothesis he’d been entertaining felt like it was becoming clear. Cairens, who had been pinned beneath Abrisius the whole time, gazed at him with hazy eyes.
“Do you love me?”
Love.
Perhaps the reason Abrisius was acting this way was love directed at him.
“Is that why you’re saying you’ll help with my revenge? Is that why you’re revealing everything about yourself to me first?”
Doubt spread into certainty. If the reason Abrisius was doing this was because he loved him, then everything would fall into place. Was he ignoring Seianes’s warning and doing this because he loved him?
If it were true, could there be a more reckless love than this?
While grateful for that nobility, if it were really true, he had no idea what to do about his relationship with Abrisius going forward.
Abrisius, who had been silently looking down at such a Cairens, opened his mouth.
“No.”
The word that burst from his mouth was denial. His voice was gentle, but his expression looking at Cairens was cold.
“I don’t love you. What I love is…”
Still with Cairens lying beneath him, Abrisius’s gaze turned forward. Cairens’s gaze followed toward Abrisius as well.
“Seianes.”
His cold face took on a radiant light. Seeing Abrisius’s expression brighten like a flower in full bloom, Cairens’s face hardened.
* * *
How much time had passed?
Seianes, who had been searching for Abrisius, stopped walking for a moment and looked up at the sky. The morning dew had long since dried. As he felt the cool afternoon air, his dizzy head cleared for a moment.
‘Underground energy. What could it be?’
The energy he had felt strongly from Abrisius was still vivid. Abrisius’s sudden change and his bold actions were completely different from the child he had raised himself.
‘Did he meet Ircadeon, or… did he receive some bad energy from the contaminated earth?’
Lost in thought, Seianes walked along looking for Abrisius. It was closer to a walk under the pretext of searching for Abrisius. If he used his abilities, he would find him quickly, but if they met again, he didn’t know what to say first.
You are my child? I’ve never seen you that way?
Not knowing how to broach it from the first word, various phrases passed through his mind.
‘Where on earth is he?’
How long had he walked like that? A familiar energy was felt in the distance. Underground energy… and even the unwelcome energy of a demigod.
When Seianes scanned the surroundings, in the distance toward the contaminated earth, Cairens’s red hair fluttered in the sunlight, shining brilliantly. However, what captured Seianes’s gaze was something else.
“Abrisius? What are you doing there?”
Seianes unconsciously frowned. Next to Cairens was none other than Abrisius. Why was he in the contaminated earth that he had told him not to go to? And not alone, but with Cairens.
‘I told him to be so careful.’
He couldn’t understand Abrisius being with Cairens, the demigod who had to fight the beings of the underworld.
Cairens was dangerous to Abrisius. And he had explained the reason to him sufficiently, and Abrisius clearly knew that fact.
Yet Abrisius had broken that promise and appeared here, disappointingly.
Unable to just watch, Seianes strode forward. His expression, full of worry and concern, gradually hardened frighteningly.
The more he thought about it, the angrier he became. His disgust toward Cairens fueled that fury even more. He was also angry at Abrisius for breaking his request.
In fact, what made Seianes angriest was the sight of Abrisius, who until this morning had been whispering that he loved him, stuck close to Cairens.
‘When he said he loved me.’
An emotion he himself hadn’t recognized kindled more anger in his chest.
The further he walked, the deeper the underground energy felt. Even the places Cairens had restored were in ruins.
However, deeply angered Seianes’s eyes didn’t see that fact. What filled his vision was only the sight of the two.
The two seemed to be saying something. They also seemed to be arguing. But soon after, at the shocking scene that unfolded before his eyes, Seianes stopped walking and stared blankly ahead.
“…Huh…”
Abrisius had pushed down Cairens. As their faces overlapped and their lips met before his eyes, his head rang.
Like someone who’d been struck, Seianes’s expression went blank. He couldn’t believe the scene unfolding before his eyes. He wondered if what he was seeing was real, but even when he closed his eyes and opened them again, it was reality.
A cold fury stabbed at his mind. Pain like flesh being torn reached inside his heart.
“Why, of all things?”
Complex emotions wandered. His unfocused eyes fell to the ground. Questions he didn’t know where to start correcting tightened his chest suffocatingly. Even as his thoughts became complicated, there was one clear feeling.
‘Why are you doing that when you said you loved me?’
Clearly, until this afternoon, it was Abrisius who said he loved him. He had covered his lips, begged for love at his ear with a desperate voice, asking to be loved. Was all of that a lie? Or…
“Ha, haha…”
A bitter laugh escaped for a moment.
‘Why am I thinking like this?’
He was dumbfounded at himself for having such worries. Just moments ago, he had been trying to persuade Abrisius that he was his son and make him abandon those feelings.
Why, the moment he saw that sight, did he feel betrayal rather than embarrassment and anger?
It wasn’t an emotion he should dare have. No, rather, it was a situation where he should feel relieved. It was a situation that could prove that what Abrisius felt for him was just a prank or a trick to tease him.
If he were normal, he should scold Abrisius for playing pranks and teasing him.
‘But why…’
Why did this situation, which could perhaps be dismissed as a simple accident, make his heart ache? The more clearly the scene before his eyes was captured in his vision, the more unbearable nausea he felt. He couldn’t understand why he was acting this way.
Perhaps, as Abrisius had said, he himself…
[You love me.]
The breathing he’d heard during the day still felt like it was lingering in his ears. Feeling unbearable nausea, Seianes tried to leave.
‘I’m… I’ve gone mad.’
The emotion called love that Abrisius had spoken of.
That love, it seemed, wasn’t simply warm affection toward a child but disgustingly, sticky affection toward a romantic interest. The moment he recognized that fact, his insides were unbearably noisy.
Tears flowed down his cheeks. Tears welled up in the eyes of one who hadn’t cried since birth.
‘You said you loved me… No, I shouldn’t be feeling these emotions.’
He hated and was confused by both Abrisius, who had whispered love yet pushed down Cairens, and himself for feeling such emotions.
Just as Seianes was about to leave like that.
“Seianes.”
Abrisius’s clear voice caught his ankle. Without hesitation, when he turned his head, Abrisius was smiling at him.
“Where are you going?”
He was smiling brightly as if he knew nothing. Cairens, who had been pinned beneath him, was looking at him with a complicated expression. How was this situation unfolding? For some reason, Seianes carefully opened his mouth toward the smiling Abrisius.
“Abrisius?”
“Let’s go.”
And at that moment, with a tremendous rumbling from the ground, the contaminated earth centered around Seianes collapsed.
