Chapter 314 Volume V – Chapter 32: A Meaningless Unease

?It’s the same thing again… Again and again and again… I don’t know how to approach Adrian Caleo. I feel like my brain has stopped working…

There shouldn’t be a problem. Sometimes he even smiles at me when we’re in the same space. I don’t think it backfires when I try to approach him as a friend, but… why is this happening?

There’s something wrong with me. I’m afraid to approach him myself. Am I… scared? No, it’s not fear. There is nothing to be scared of.

Then… what exactly do I feel?

Lying on my bed, I continued to stare at the ceiling, as I had been doing. Seconds passed by with me doing nothing. Then minutes…

Bring Adrian Caleo to the manor without killing him. This is my current mission. But… it’s way more difficult than killing him.

Why did I stop my dagger when I saw that necklace and called the manor? Why didn’t I just ignore it and simply kill him? Just because he was an elf didn’t change the fact that it was my mission to kill him.

When did I… when did I become so loyal to the Laute Family in the first place? Why did I feel the need to tell them such a detail instead of just doing what they told me and leaving?

I took a deep breath, held it in for a while. Then I let it out slowly and long.

Silver hair, emerald green eyes. His appearance was reminiscent of a Laute in itself. I had seen it myself, but I refused to believe it. I just thought it was a simple coincidence. So… did I want to confirm it after seeing that necklace?

Eventually… I stopped staring at the ceiling, and as I slowly rose from where I was lying and stood up, I looked in the mirror.

There was no difference. My black eyes were the same, my expression was the same, my gaze was the same… But there was also this strange, foreign feeling inside me that I couldn’t shake. No matter how ‘the same’ I looked when I looked at myself in the mirror, when I ignored this reflection and looked at myself, I was just as… different. There was an uneasiness inside me that I couldn’t make sense of.

I took my eyes off the mirror, raised my hands, and looked at them this time. Then I closed my fingers and clenched my fists slightly.

I’m not acting like myself. If I keep doing this… they’ll eventually think I’m ignoring my mission and reduce the amount of medicine they send me to tell me to come to my senses. If I want to go on with my life, at least for now, without real suffering… I have to do what they say.

I have to come to my senses. Even if I can’t… I have to pretend to be.

So, I turned on my watch, opened a holographic screen in front of me, and opened the chat application. There were dozens and dozens of academy groups with dozens and dozens of people in front of me.

One by one, I went into each group and started searching for the name ‘Adrian’. Since there wasn’t a single person in the academy whose name was Adrian, I could come across things I had no business searching for. However, when I did the same search again in the third group I entered, the message that appeared at the top of the results was the message I was looking for.

It was a message sent about seven minutes ago. A girl, who had misspelled a few letters as if excited, had seen Adrian coming out of the training building in a sweat. Not content with that, she had taken a picture of him and sent it to the group. Just below it was another one saying how handsome he was. In between, someone wrote that he had gone into one of the woods. And just below that… someone else had appeared out of nowhere to say how dishonest he was.

The two sides were soon engaged in a dispute. But the side arguing that he was dishonest outweighed the other side. The dispute soon progressed to the point that he should be expelled from the academy.

Ever since Adrian revealed that he was an elf, the academy had been split in two. This dispute was a consequence of that split.

Sighing, I turned off the holographic screen and my watch.

The wooded area, huh… I can guess where he is, so what I have to do is ‘accidentally’ run into him…

As I walked out of my room, I started heading toward the wooded area where I had been a few times, while… I said something simple to myself in my mind.

That’s enough. I have to start being myself.

*******

I walked through the branches, ignoring the bushes that I stepped on and disfigured. Finally, after a short while, as the trees began to thin out, I came out into a clearing. It was quite close to the boundaries of the academy, and I could see the tall walls not far from me. But the most noticeable thing in the area, instead of the high and thick walls that marked the boundaries of the academy, was the huge boulder in the middle of the area.

It was not easy to find such a boulder in the academy. It even looked as if it had been placed in this particular spot. It was also a boulder that I visited at least once every few days to relax.

The sun was slowly setting and soon it would start to get dark. And when it got dark… the stars would appear. That was the view that was what I was looking for. The bonus of coming here when the sun was setting was that I could watch not only the stars but also this sunset. It was a really good spot to relax.

I jumped on a tree, climbed up another one and from there, I landed on the boulder. After two more steps on it… I just let myself fall on the hard surface.

The sun was approaching the main building, the tallest building in the academy, right next to a mountain that didn’t look too close but wasn’t far away either. It had colored the sky orange, and its brightness had diminished enough that I could look at it without squinting. With the clouds around it, as always… it was breathtaking.

My lips curled upward. I watched the sunset peacefully, undisturbed by anything except the rustling of the trees and the sound of a few birds.

‘Lithoa, are you awake?’

I asked in my mind and received an answer from my mind again.

‘Yes, what happened?’

When I heard the calmness in his voice and the simplicity in his words… it reminded me of the first time I met him. He was always angry with me, always yelling at me. He was always emphasizing my need to get stronger, but sometimes he wouldn’t even let me speak. He was like that even when I started at the academy, actually.

But, especially lately… he was different. He sounded calm, not angry or impatient. Instead of shouting and swearing at me like before, he spoke more clearly.

I really wondered what had caused this change, but I decided to keep it to myself. Instead, I asked the first question that came to my mind, again in my mind. I had been a bit hesitant before, but… it was time to ask.

‘A few days ago, the day they asked me questions, they asked me a few things about you because of the red spear I took from your house.’

He had no idea what had happened that day, since I had lost contact with him when they restricted my mana. Strangely… he didn’t ask anything. He didn’t even talk about it. He was just… quiet these days. Yes, Lithoa has been strangely really quiet lately.

‘They said you were the most dangerous man in the world. They were almost obsessed with whether I had a connection with you. What exactly did you do… to make them so wary of you?’

Lithoa was silent for a moment. But the silence he had created was broken by a sudden and loud laugh that made me jump in my place for a moment. I had not expected this sudden change…

‘It’s quite simple, actually. At that time… You can say that I was an angry person, and I took it out on people who were not on good terms with me, and when a few of them turned out to be important people… the whole of Lunerra declared me a terrorist. And when a few cities were destroyed trying to catch me, something like this happened.’

Oh, that… certainly didn’t sound as ‘simple’ as he said it was. But something else stuck in my mind this time.

In my early days at the Academy, I asked Aiden a question about Lithoa. Then he told me that… Lithoa was exiled by a king into a dungeon because he asked for an important item from him.

Does the exile take place before the years when he was called a terrorist…? But if Lithoa was as powerful as feared, why didn’t he make a fuss about this exile…?

‘Wait a minute, there are things I don’t understand… Aiden told me befo-‘

But I could not complete the question in my mind. Rather… instead of the chirping of birds and the rustling of trees, a completely different sound suddenly entered my ears. It was as if… someone was walking toward me through the bushes.

I didn’t go into shock. I also didn’t jump to my feet. After all, if I could find this place, it wasn’t like anyone else couldn’t. That’s why I just slowly straightened up and turned in the direction of the sound.

But the figure slowly emerging from the trees was no random person. Instead… it was someone I did not expect to see here. With her dark brown hair down her back and purple eyes like an amethyst, it was Celine.

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