Chapter 22

Isaac, hands clawing at his throat, turned to see Volkan approaching from only a few steps away. Only belatedly did he notice the swirling dark smoke extending from the man’s hand and coiling around his neck.

Damn it all.

“Who are you? What exactly were you doing here?”

Volkan’s voice held palpable, open hostility, his wariness sharpening into unmistakable killing intent. He had no intention of allowing Isaac to leave this forest alive. That, at least, was understandable. Isaac had witnessed things Volkan could not afford to have exposed.

“I am… a Royal Palace Guard. I was dispatched… to search for Lord Kaiyan.”

Isaac forced the answer out in fragmented gasps through his constricted throat, but as expected, the crushing pressure around his windpipe did not yield. Instead, it tightened with vicious force. He could see the red, flickering hunger for murder in Volkan’s eyes.

“How did you infiltrate this perimeter? Who authorized your arrival?”

Impatience bled into Volkan’s rasping tone. There was a barrier present. Which meant that behind this royal guard must be someone else—someone with magical prowess equal to, if not greater than, Volkan’s own.

Assuming this was the conclusion running through the traitor’s mind, Isaac wheezed, “I lost my way… it was merely… a stroke of misfortune.”

He offered the simple truth, knowing full well the man would dismiss it. He could hardly admit that a high-ranking official within the Magicians’ Guild had suspected him for months and dispatched Isaac to trail him—and that their suspicions had been dreadfully correct.

Damn it.

Predictably, Volkan did not believe a single word. Beneath his crimson, gleaming glare, the smoke strangling Isaac darkened, constricting until his vision sparked. “Hah. Who do you take me for? Speak, immediately—who sent you here?”

Isaac’s breath halted entirely. Heat flooded his face, and his sight began to warp and blur. No matter how he tore at his throat, it remained futile. The smoke throttling him was incorporeal, untouchable.

There is… truly… no one…

Even his desperate internal plea could not escape his strangled throat. The words died on his tongue.

Volkan glared at him with predatory eyes, then snorted, muttering with sharp finality, “So you choose silence. Fine. It makes no difference who sent you. In any event, you will not be reporting your findings to anyone.”

The instant Volkan finished, the smoke around Isaac’s neck turned as hot as licking flames. Simultaneously, the killing intent solidified into a physical weight.

He’s going to kill me. Right here. Right now.

Blood rushed to Isaac’s brain, and his vision plummeted into darkness. He saw Volkan beginning to chant. He could not surrender to this. He had to act.

“Are you Volkan?”

That was when an indifferent, languid voice cut through the air.

In that heartbeat, the smoke strangling Isaac slackened, if only by a fraction. Volkan diverted his gaze toward the prince, who had abruptly addressed him, and hurriedly bowed his head.

“Yes, Your Highness. I am Volkan.”

His reply, steeped in exaggerated, cowering courtesy and faint, misplaced expectation, became the final words he would ever speak in this world.

SLICE

Without a warning or a singular sign, the prince swung his blade, and Volkan’s head plummeted to the earth before Isaac’s eyes.

The head, still wearing a servile, frozen smile, rolled mindlessly, coming to a halt in the dirt. Isaac did not even register the moment the black smoke around his neck dissolved into nothingness.

“If you intended to propose a deal to me, you should at least have known better than to snatch away what my sword was aimed at.”

With a face as expressionless as that indifferent murmur, the prince gave his blade a sharp, rhythmic shake to clear the excess gore.

Watching the edge—thick with viscous blood and grease—Isaac felt his mind go blank. Ah, right. Come to think of it, that sword had been whistling toward my neck just moments ago. Is it my turn now? Having just witnessed a man’s head severed in a singular, effortless stroke, Isaac was reeling, his senses frayed to the point of dissociation.

Mom, I think this is finally the end, he murmured to himself.

Yet, even as he waited with his neck exposed in a posture of total surrender, the prince’s weapon showed no inclination to finish the job.

The prince seemed to have discarded his interest in Isaac entirely. He spared only a fleeting, bored glance at the mangled carcass of the magical beast—as if annoyed that prey worth the effort had perished so prematurely—before sliding his dark, red-stained steel back into its scabbard. His gaze wandered toward the horizon, languid and detached, as if the surrounding slaughter were no more significant than a passing breeze.

Perhaps because the magician’s death had collapsed the barrier, the sounds of the forest, which had been stifled into an unnatural silence, began to seep back in. The rustle of foliage, the scurry of small creatures, and the distant, muffled presence of humans resumed.

The prince emitted a sharp, resonant whistle. He was summoning the horse that had surely been waiting outside the perimeter.

Responding to the command, the heavy percussion of hoofbeats thundered from afar. With them, the clamor of the search party grew closer.

I suppose I managed to survive, Isaac thought.

Feeling strangely hollow despite the return of his life, Isaac stood, shoulders slumped, leaning heavily upon his sword as if it were a walking cane. Nearby, three cats meowed in high, melodic tones, chirping “medium-well, medium-well” like opportunistic thieves as they trotted past with chunks of snake tail clamped firmly in their jaws.

Isaac decided, with firm resolve, that he had seen absolutely nothing.

“Your Highness!”

“Lord Kaiyan!”

The search party crested the rise just behind the charging stallion.

Their initial relief at finding the prince quickly curdled into visceral horror.

They beheld him covered from head to toe in arterial spray, surrounded by the grotesque, twitching remnants of magical beasts and the cooling, headless corpse of the court magician.

The sheer carnage and the iron-thick stench of blood hanging in the humid air proved too much; two or three of the guards doubled over and retched.

“Isaac! We were frantic wondering where you had disappeared to! …What in the hell happened here?”

Chico finally spotted Isaac and hurried over. Perhaps fearing the consequences of speaking too loudly in the presence of such a volatile figure, he leaned in to whisper.

Isaac, feeling as though he had aged a century in a single afternoon, lacked the fortitude for conversation and merely shook his head.

The others hovered, clearly desperate to demand answers about the bizarre catastrophe, but with the prince standing mere paces away—the undeniable architect of the massacre—they dared not offer a word, instead tracking his every shift in mood with terrified eyes.

They had expected to drag home a haul of mundane game, not to stumble into a nightmare. Magical beasts appearing within a stone’s throw of the palace? It defied all reason. And what were they supposed to do with the carcasses of these aberrant, nightmarish creatures that none of them could even identify?

Worse still, upon closer inspection, that corpse was undeniably a court magician. The corpse in question had been cut down with cold, clinical precision; it was all but certain the prince had executed him. The Court Magicians’ Guild would be baying for blood by morning. How were they supposed to survive the fallout?

While the guards and attendants spiraled into their own private anxieties, the prince mounted his horse with the nonchalance of a man heading out for a leisurely afternoon ride.

“Your… Your Highness, where are you—”

“I am returning to the palace.”

The prince delivered the command with clipped brevity, pivoting his reins toward the palace gates.

His personal attendants scrambled to fall in line, while the royal guards, relieved to be spared further time in the cursed woods, busied themselves with the grisly task of cleanup. Isaac let out a shuddering breath and pushed himself upright, his muscles screaming in protest as he prepared to assist his colleagues.

Then—

“You.”

The indifferent voice sliced through the air toward the back of his neck, and Isaac froze. He turned back with jerky, mechanical movements.

The prince sat high atop his horse, his eyes locked onto Isaac as if lost in deep contemplation.

When those piercing blue eyes met his, Isaac felt his soul plummet.

“…Yes, Your Highness?”

“Have I seen you somewhere before?”

“…I serve as a royal guard, and I have seen Lord Kaiyan from a distance on several occasions, but I do not believe Lord Kaiyan has ever had cause to notice me personally. …I occasionally stand guard at the Blue Shadow Palace, so perhaps I caught your eye by happenstance.”

A chaotic whirlwind of thoughts battered Isaac’s mind as cold sweat erupted along his spine.

As Isaac bowed his head to deliver his answer, the prince continued to stare, his brow furrowing as if something remained unsettled in his memory. Apparently, nothing concrete surfaced, and at last, he turned away. He flicked the reins, and the horse, agitated by the lingering scent of blood, surged forward with a powerful kick of its hooves.

The sharp rhythm of hoofbeats faded, and the prince vanished into the tree line in an instant.

Isaac remained paralyzed for a long while.