RSHTV 08

Chapter 8

Bellona pulled her hand free and lightly pushed against his chest.

I won’t betray you, so don’t worry.

It was only a promise made with words, but apparently, it was enough to give him a momentary sense of certainty.

Instead of stopping Bellona again, Deminic caught the hand she had placed against his chest.

Their fingers intertwined, as though he were afraid she might slip away.

His eyebrows rose instinctively at the way she acted as though she might run away, but Bellona said nothing. With her other hand, she grasped the doorknob and turned it, opening the door.

“Miss! You really don’t look well at all.”

Perhaps it was fortunate that she’d had such a troubled dream. Even Rose thought she looked awful.

Bellona glanced to her right and once again confirmed that Deminic was standing behind the door, looking down at her with languid eyes.

“…Yeah. I’m going to rest today.”

“Do you need any medicine?”

“No, I’m fine. Just leave that and go.”

She needed both hands to take the tray holding steaming soup and appetizing-looking bread, but Deminic remained completely unmoving, still holding one of her hands.

Bellona unconsciously frowned sharply and glared at him.

Deminic looked displeased, but reluctantly released her hand.

“Miss, there’s something—”

“I want to rest until late afternoon, so please come back much later. Thank you.”

The moment Bellona rattled off the words and stepped backward, Deminic quietly closed the door. He then leaned against it with his arms crossed, looking like a guard standing watch.

He slightly turned his head and listened, apparently checking whether Rose had really left.

“What exactly were you worried about? Did you think I was going to scream that there was a strange man in my room and ask her to throw you out? Once I make a decision, I don’t go back on it.”

As soon as Bellona carelessly set the tray down on the table with a thud, Deminic’s cold, subdued gaze swept over her.

“Good. If you’d shown even the slightest sign of intending to tell her immediately, I was going to kill both you and your maid.”

His tone was casual, but his words were chilling.

Yet Bellona actually let out a short laugh, feeling something she couldn’t quite identify—perhaps relief—at seeing a side of him that was so familiar to her.

“If you have enough strength to do that, why are you still here?”

Exactly. If he had recovered enough to do something like that, shouldn’t he simply leave?

“I went to my temporary residence to retrieve that with the little strength I’d recovered. For now, I can’t travel by entering the shadows again. You wouldn’t know, but it consumes a considerable amount of power.”

Bellona noticed an unfamiliar bundle lying on the floor, one she hadn’t noticed before, and was overwhelmed by disbelief.

“…I never said you could move in and start living here.”

“I’m warning you, you’d better not touch it. They’re things related to black magic.”

“…Are you lying about not being able to use your powers?”

Deminic took a small object from his pocket.

The silver chain wrapped around his hand was familiar.

When he opened his palm, the transparent jewel hanging from the necklace glowed ominously, its gray color noticeably darker than it had been yesterday.

“To faithfully follow your advice, complicated types of magic are beyond my limit for now. Honestly, even going there was pushing myself a little. But I had to go while I’d recovered at least some of my strength.”

“…Does using black magic really not affect you at all? It’s still your own soul. Don’t you feel anything?”

As the soul became corrupted and shattered, eventually causing one to lose one’s reason, did the person truly not even realize that they were going mad?

“Not at all. If anything, the more power I use, the stronger I feel. Strong enough to obtain anything I want.”

His blood-red eyes, filled with a strange longing, stared straight through Bellona.

“So that’s how you lose control. Without even realizing that the power has become something you can no longer handle.”

Perhaps the Bellona from the life immediately before this one would have scoffed at her current self for feeling even a little sorry for Deminic’s situation, mocking her concern as nothing more than a carefree luxury.

“Someone close to you must have died from carelessly using black magic. Or gone mad.”

Deminic wore a strangely concerned expression.

Anyone looking at him might have thought he was actually worried about her feelings.

“Think whatever you want.”

Bellona replied sharply to Deminic, who was practically introducing himself through his words.

As expected, emotional conversations like this were awkward.

“Why don’t you ever try to tell me anything?”

“Because there’s no point in telling you.”

Bellona shook her head and gave a helpless smile at Deminic’s persistent attempts to figure her out completely.

After all, Deminic was excessively curious about Bellona—the Bellona whose memories he wouldn’t even retain in his next life.

“If you ever decide you can’t trust me, just kill me at that moment. Then it’ll be over. Stop trying to get close to me like this.”

“Whether it’s meaningless or not is for me to decide.”

Deminic’s red eyes stared intently at Bellona, as though he intended to uncover every secret she kept.

“You’ve been surprisingly casual about my saying I’ll kill you. It’s been bothering me ever since…”

From the outside, Bellona behaved more vibrantly than anyone else, so there was no way he could have noticed that she actually possessed a far more intense desire for death than anyone.

And yet Deminic had struck remarkably close to the heart of the matter.

“Do you actually want to die?”

What expression would he make if he learned that the very death she had been hiding was also her strongest trump card?

Bellona looked at her archenemy—the man who had killed her countless times, yet had never truly managed to kill her.

“At least not right now.”

Although Deminic could be rather irritating, it was true that because of him, she had begun to want to continue living this life a little longer.

She had become curious about the direction this version of him would take, in a life that seemed both different and strangely unchanged in so many ways.

So, without realizing it, she spoke with a little sincerity.

“So don’t die either. Don’t be arrogant. The holy knights you’ve fought so far were only the beginning. There’s one exceptionally talented holy knight who will become a thorn in your side. He has incredibly sharp senses, so you really need to watch out for him.”

Davien’s divine power wasn’t actually much of a problem.

She had originally been an ordinary noblewoman, not someone who possessed divine power, so it had taken her quite a long time to fully draw out her abilities.

However, there was one holy knight born with overwhelming blessings, almost as though he had been chosen to protect Davien, the messenger of God who had appeared in this particular timeline.

Even Bellona, who had grown skeptical of the Temple, couldn’t help but acknowledge that particular kind young man, who was overflowing with genuine goodness.

“Do I merely need to be wary of him? Is there anything else I can do?”

“You can’t kill him in advance. It’s already too late. His talent awakened long ago, and he’s on the verge of being formally knighted. He’s been wandering outside the capital as a trainee knight… but he’ll be returning soon.”

After living through roughly twenty lives, Bellona had learned that there were some things that simply couldn’t be changed, no matter how drastically the future was altered.

Like the scenario involving Ruiles, the greatest holy knight of this era, whom the Temple took away when he demonstrated divine power as a child and raised as a holy knight, eventually turning him into a loyal servant of the Temple.

“So be careful. Do whatever you can to make sure you never run into him. He’ll either be at the Temple or frequently sent far away on missions to track traces of black magic. For now, at least.”

She hadn’t expected an answer.

But before long, Deminic said something completely unexpected.

“Fine. I’ll properly acknowledge you as my collaborator.”

“…What?”

Bellona, who had been deeply lost in thought while reading her book and reflecting on the dream she’d had that day, was a moment too slow to react to Deminic’s words.

Perhaps he had been watching her all this time, because she immediately met the eyes of Deminic, who was sitting across from her.

He had been idly rolling a dagger around in his hand.

The shape was extremely familiar.

When Bellona looked at it, he placed it on the table with a soft thud.

“Consider it a token of trust.”

The dagger of Yekaros.

It was the sacred artifact Bellona had used at the Temple to prevent Deminic from hypnotizing her.

Hypnotizing someone required a high level of concentration, so all she had to do was avoid maintaining prolonged eye contact with him while they were alone together.

More importantly, she had never expected to encounter Deminic again so quickly, which was why she hadn’t bothered taking it with her when she left the Temple.

“As you said, if things go wrong, I can simply kill you.”

As he said those words, Deminic stood before her wearing an expression Bellona had never seen across all the lives she had lived before.

An expression that seemed to say he didn’t want her to die.

Bellona suddenly remembered what Deminic had said about coming here because he had nowhere else to go.

Perhaps he both suspected her and, at the same time, wanted to believe her.

If so, she decided to give him the certainty he needed.

“As long as you trust me, and as long as you don’t touch the people around me like you said you wouldn’t… I will never betray you in this life. I’ll take responsibility for my decision to help you.”

In the room where the late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the windows, Deminic suddenly froze, as though time itself had stopped.

He seemed particularly shaken by words like these.

Even though he trusted her to some degree and was here because of that trust, even though he himself had just declared her his collaborator, it was as though he still believed she would betray him at any moment.

No—as though that was simply what he expected.

“It doesn’t matter if you keep questioning me. I can prove it to you as many times as necessary.”

Becoming the one and only person Deminic could completely trust was a little more extreme than Bellona had anticipated.

Still, it didn’t feel bad.

To her, this was merely one of countless lives, so the decision had actually been made quite lightly.

A life in which, either way, it didn’t really matter.

But Bellona overlooked one crucial fact.

Unlike her, Deminic had only one life.

And because of that, she had no idea just how deeply she had already shaken him.

Nor did she realize that this would completely overturn her current life in a direction she could never have predicted—not even after the twenty-one lives she had already lived.