Chapter 226: Driving Someone to Madness…?

“Y-You…”

The man’s hand shot to his holster. In one smooth motion, he drew a gun and leveled it at my head before I could even blink.

He was skilled.

Unexpectedly so.

But in the end, it still wasn’t enough.

“Not gonna happen.”

I grabbed the barrel of his revolver and squeezed, metal groaning as it warped under my fingers. At the same time, I drove my foot into his chest, slamming him into the mansion’s outer wall and pinning him there with tendrils of darkness that wrapped around him, cutting off any chance of escape.

Now…

It was finally time to experiment.

“You look trained, you know… so why are you wandering around like a lost rat, struggling to find a way in? Did you seriously not plan this out?”

“Like I’m ever going to tell you—”

The shadows coiled tighter around his arms, wrapping and twisting like a vise.

“You don’t have a choice. Tell me—is this your first time here?”

CRACK!

POP!

Bones shifted out of place the longer he stayed silent. My tendrils tightened, slowly crushing his arms every time he tried to resist. I watched the resolve in his eyes flicker and weaken as the seconds dragged by.

Still, he held on.

At least, until…

CRACK!

Another bone snapped.

“Y-yes! It’s my first time here…!”

“Oh? So you really didn’t plan this out at all?”

He ground his teeth at my question, but beneath that, I could see it—the confusion, the doubt. Why hadn’t he planned this? Did he honestly think he could just walk up to our mansion without a plan and somehow succeed?

Had he… always been this rusty? No. That couldn’t be right. There had to be a reason.

“My bosses were in a rush. They wanted me to take you out before you got any bigger.”

Interesting. He was holding up better than I expected. Time to start asking the kind of questions that might really pull his mind apart.

“What about your shop? This isn’t your first operation, is it? How did you pull off the others on your own?”

“H-huh?”

At the mention of his past successes, a smug grin tugged at his lips, but it crumbled the moment he actually tried to remember the details of those missions.

Wait… how did he succeed?

Assassination? Infiltration? Blackmail?

Worse than that, though, was the context of those jobs. In every memory, he swore he’d done everything himself— the reconnaissance, the bribes, the preparations, all of it…

So…

“W-What…?”

Then why did his memories show him standing alone in huge rooms that looked built to hold dozens more? The oversized couch, the long boardroom table, the rows of lockers…

“What…!? Y-you… what is this supposed to mean?!”

He shouted, thrashing with a surge of desperate strength as his mind unraveled. But a breakdown wasn’t going to help him slip free of my grip.

He wasn’t Julius…

“I don’t know what you’re talking about…” I replied with a curious smile.

Even this monster’s power had a flaw. There was a gap in its memory wipe, and he’d slipped right through it, no special resistance, no protection. If I hadn’t tested it beforehand, I would’ve walked straight into that blind spot and regretted it fast.

“There’s no way I worked alone all these years… no way…”

His mind was coming apart right in front of me. His eyes went wide, then wild, as he tried to force everything to make sense.

It wasn’t just the missions he was forgetting. It was his entire life wrapped around them.

If I had to guess, he hadn’t just had coworkers — he’d had friends. People he joked with between jobs, drank with after hours. People he trusted enough to waste time with. And that seemed to be exactly where his thoughts kept circling back.

And every time he reached for those memories… there was nothing.

That empty space in his life, that jagged hole where people should have been, was what finally broke him.

“W-what…?”

He said it again, for the third time, a shaky, ugly laugh spilling out of him as he failed to stitch his thoughts together. Every time he got close to a conclusion, it just slipped away, like someone yanking the floor out from under him.

Like he really was going insane.

There was no way he’d just forgotten them, right?

Was he misremembering? Had he imagined entire years of his life? Whole relationships?

“T-that can’t be it. That can’t be it.”

His laugh rose in pitch, turning sharp and hysterical. His body jerked with it, ignoring the pain in his mangled arms as the last of his sanity snapped.

BANG.

He started slamming the back of his head into the mansion wall, again and again, desperate to shut it all off.

“Guess we’re done here.”

I flicked a finger to the left.

CRACK.

My shadows twisted and snapped his neck. He went limp instantly, dropping like a puppet with its strings cut as my tendrils loosened and slid away.

[Command]

FWOOSH.

The hydra surged forward and swallowed his body whole. A second later, the courtyard looked untouched, no blood, no body, no sign anyone had ever forced their way in.

“That was more productive than I thought,” I murmured, lips curling. “And a lot more fun than I expected.”

I’d seen people break before. In my old line of work, watching sanity crack under torture was practically routine. But watching someone perfectly stable unravel in under an hour, just from the weight of their own missing memories?

That was new.

And…

“Heh…”

I realized how much I’d missed that feeling.

And after having that much fun, there was no way I could stop now. The itch to push this power further was crawling under my skin.

And I already knew exactly who I wanted to use it on next.

“I’m sure Evelina won’t mind if I erase an entire company’s worth of people from existence, right?”

[Dark Step]

Sorry, Evelina. Just let me have this little bit of fun, okay?

“I’ll just make it up to her, hopefully.”

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