Chapter 114: Stalemate

The training room stretched about twenty meters wide, stripped of everything that had once made it grand, a space once fit for the queen of an aristocratic family.

In the center of the room crouched Haven, arms locked around her legs, holding herself together against the weight of exhaustion threatening to swallow her whole.

She had been in that room for more than a week. No sunlight. Not even a trace of it, and nothing around her suggested that was going to change anytime soon.

She had done nothing but train. Not just her muscles and her mind, her heart too. Ice had become her world. She ate in it, drank in it, breathed it, and slept in it as though it were second nature.

Haven had always gone along with whatever her father demanded of her, but this time was different. She didn’t know what to do. She had failed against her colleague, collapsing from the sheer exhaustion of sustaining her activated Emotional State.

Not long after, she faced the Gate God. It was the perfect opportunity, everything her father had asked of her within reach. And yet the moment she activated her Protector State, she collapsed again. This time, death had come close enough to touch her.

And worse still, she had sneaked out of the estate against her father’s direct commands just to attend Scar’s banquet ceremony. She had come back with nothing but a sickened and frozen heart and a failed proposal.

Scar was naive. He probably had no idea what his actions truly meant, and that was exactly what made her angry. Not at him. At the woman who had been lurking around him all this time. Purple.

She knew Scar’s actions were genuine. That much she was sure of. And yet she still yearned for a better proposal, even if she hadn’t fully made sense of what she was feeling yet.

Her family were doing everything in their power to ensure the marriage between her and Scar never came to be. And that was what struck her as strange.

She had never seen her father pour this level of effort into anything, not unless it had something to do with making her stronger.

And that was how the uncertainty crept in, about her father’s request, about the training, about all of it. Was cutting her off from others truly the right thing? Why did her father hate Scar so much?

She knew it was unbecoming of her. Questioning her father’s motives wasn’t something she did. It had never been something she did.

Everything he asked of her, she believed, was to make her stronger. To save the world. So that no one would ever have to face what happened to her mother ten years ago.

This time was no exception. She needed to control her Inheritance, that much was clear.

Without it, she wasn’t just a failure among all who had come before her. She was a failure to the Velanora name. And yet, even knowing all of that, she still couldn’t stop herself from questioning her father’s motives.

Ten hours of nonstop training, and still she crouched at the center of the room, hugging her knees tightly, going nowhere. The doubts toward her father’s judgment were growing, and she couldn’t quiet them.

“This feeling won’t go away… Scar is going to make another stupid choice. One that’ll get him hurt again. He’s weak. Painfully weak. And yet, he keeps pushing forward instead of quietly getting stronger.”

Haven didn’t know how to feel about any of it. She had made a promise to Isaac to protect Scar, and she hadn’t kept it. Whenever she turned her back, Scar walked straight into danger like a child who hadn’t yet learned what falling felt like.

Aside from her father, Scar was the only person who truly mattered to her. Saving a world where neither of them existed wouldn’t merely be a problem. It would be something she wasn’t sure she could live with.

But that only made everything more complicated. The realization was settling in; there was no version of this in which her father and Scar stood on the same side.

Which meant that if she was going to protect Scar, she would have to learn how to go against the one person she had never once questioned.

“But is it truly the right thing to do?”

Ever since Scar came back into her life, nothing she did felt like herself anymore. She had learned to lie her way out of Moon Killer duties just to see him and sneaked off the estate against her father’s direct orders. Now here she was, doubting the very man who had dedicated everything to making her stronger and saving the world.

“Father might be right after all.”

She muttered.

The more she thought about it, the clearer it became. Scar was a bad influence on her, and she was letting him be one.

“But…”

But that wasn’t all. Whenever she was with Scar, or even just in his presence, something felt different. The burden she had always carried alone didn’t feel so absolute. As if, imperfections and all, they could carry it together.

More than anything, she felt safe enough to laugh, to smile, to just be herself around him. If only for a moment. She never had to say too much for Scar to understand her.

She wasn’t sure if it was love. But she knew with certainty that it was why she wouldn’t hesitate to marry Scar. If it meant she could feel like this all the time. Like the world’s problems weren’t hers alone to bear.

“If that’s what it takes to protect that adorable little boy and make sure he never leaves me…”

She frowned.

“With his enthusiasm for bad decisions and cursed luck, he’s practically racing toward an early grave.”

Hmph.

“That would hurt… in the end, Father was right.”

No matter how she looked at it, staying away from Scar was the right thing for her. He had a gift for letting his misfortune follow him everywhere he went, and he would surely die for it one day. And that, that would break Haven entirely.

Maybe Karl Velanora had been right. Maybe Scar was exactly the kind of person she needed to stay away from.

What Haven failed to see was her own naivety. She had been trapped in that training room for more than a week. She was thrown in the moment she overcame her heart problem, as though that victory had only earned her a different kind of cage.

Once a day she was fed, and not once in all that time had her father come to see her. The only way she could bring herself to control that overwhelming power was to convince herself that he wanted her to become one with ice… that doing so meant she would never freeze her heart again.

She ate the ice, breathed it, and sometimes blanketed the entire room in it, trying to build immunity to what lived inside her. All of it was done without a guide or a caring father’s hand to help her through it.

Her naivety had taken root so deeply that she had come to believe this torture was something anyone who sought to save the world must endure. That it was simply part of the cost.

Even through the mental distortion, the confusion, and the uncertainty, she didn’t dwell on it long. She rose and trained again, shoving her doubts to the back of her mind where they couldn’t reach her.

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