Chapter 46
“…Red eyes.”
Kael muttered.
Rea was looking at him beneath the alley’s dim light.
The eyes that had glowed red moments ago were gradually returning to black, but their afterglow had not yet completely faded.
The first red-eye phenomenon he had seen had belonged to Pale.
He had not thought much of it at the time, but he had later heard an explanation.
It was a temporary symptom that occurred in some high-tier ACU users when highly concentrated mana pressed against the nerves and surrounding blood vessels.
In other words, anyone displaying this phenomenon was a mage capable of handling magic of that caliber.
Kael glanced over the fallen thugs.
Corpses with their joints grotesquely twisted.
Even if he had not intervened, Rea Valenkroft would have been able to protect herself.
Kael holstered his pistol and said,
“Looks like I went to unnecessary trouble.”
Rea narrowed her eyes.
“Oh my.”
She lightly brushed her disheveled hair back with her fingertips.
“I seemed just like a knight saving a lady, didn’t I? Men have a duty to protect women who look this fragile.”
Kael quietly looked at her.
“Fragile….”
“Hehe.”
Rea laughed like an innocent child who knew nothing.
However, Kael no longer played along.
“Why are you here?”
Instead of answering, Rea looked around before turning her gaze back to Kael.
“This doesn’t seem like a conversation to have on a night like this, in a dark alley like this.”
Kael looked at her for a moment, then sighed softly.
“Then let’s go inside.”
When he turned and headed into the building, Rea followed him as though she had been waiting for him to say that.
They arrived at the door to the second-floor office.
The sign beside the door simply read [Kael].
And beneath it was a message Mira had added as well.
[No entry without business]
Rea smiled when she saw the message.
“You must have a good secretary?”
….
Kael opened the door.
Aside from the temporary workspace concealed behind a partition in the corner, it looked like an ordinary office.
Rea’s gaze naturally drifted toward it, but she then entered the center of the office and slowly looked around.
“Still, it’s not bad. It has only what’s needed, without any waste.”
Rea sat in the chair comfortably, as though it had been hers for years.
Kael did not sit across from her. He stood beside the desk instead.
“…For the record, I don’t have any coffee to offer.”
“Oh my. Then couldn’t we get some from the fourth floor?”
“I don’t want to.”
She continued to respond playfully to Kael’s remarks.
“Your hospitality score is going down.”
“Haa…. Let’s get to the point.”
His voice was serious.
“Why did you come here?”
Rea smiled as though she had been waiting for that question.
“I came to ask you to be my escort. This is a freelancer office, isn’t it? You need work, don’t you?”
Kael stared at her.
Intently.
When silence briefly filled the office, Rea did not bother holding back her laughter.
“Why are you making that face?”
“You don’t exactly look like someone who needs an escort. You must have plenty of people around you to begin with, so why me?”
Rea lightly placed her fingers on the desk, and her fingernails tapped against it.
Tap.
“Kael.”
She slowly called his name.
“You recently converted to full citizenship. Before that, you were issued temporary citizenship under Seraph’s special endorsement. You passed the combat-response test on the day you registered as a freelancer. The evaluator’s opinion was… further observation required. A lot more of it.”
Kael’s eyes narrowed, but Rea continued without concern.
“You took down numerous Black Ring remnants in Graveblock. The exact number is unknown. But the crime rate in the area suddenly dropped, and a ridiculous rumor started going around about a masked hero. Conveniently, not long after you arrived here.”
“It’s just a rumor.”
“Well, I suppose it is.”
Rea folded down one finger.
“The Seraph transport escort incident. The official announcement said it was a joint response by the internal escort team and supporting forces, but the assessments posted on the freelancer network say otherwise, don’t they? A-rank freelancers Sena Vark, Brick, Maras, and Yudin.”
She studied Kael’s expression.
“They all said roughly the same thing.”
His expression remained unreadable.
“That you were very strange.”
“You talk too much.”
“Mercenaries who survive hard-fought battles tend to be talkative. Dead mercenaries can’t talk, you know?”
Rea smiled gently as she continued.
“And Raul Kesk, alias Cutwire. A high-risk wanted criminal. He was a major figure the Public Safety Bureau had been watching closely…. The person who captured him alive and dragged him to the City Hall Public Safety Services Building was also….”
Rea’s eyes fixed on Kael.
“Kael.”
Kael looked at her.
“It might be faster to find what you don’t know.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“I didn’t realize City Hall employees were so loose-lipped.”
“They’re people too. Aren’t you overestimating them a little?”
Rea leaned back against the chair.
“Isn’t this enough to explain why I chose you?”
“I still don’t understand.”
“What part?”
“That doesn’t explain why you want to hire me as your escort now.”
Rea’s smile deepened slightly.
“More precisely, I don’t need an ordinary escort.”
“Then what?”
The corners of her eyes were not smiling.
“Someone to pretend to be my lover for a day.”
***
Rea Valenkroft was the only daughter of the Valenkroft family.
Looking only at that fact, she might have seemed like someone who had possessed everything from the moment she was born.
Education, capital, connections—all of it was beyond the reach of an ordinary citizen’s fingertips for an entire lifetime.
However, in the Valenkroft family, being a daughter did not mean being an heir.
To them, Rea was a child who carried the family’s blood, but not the person who would inherit the family.
The family had never intended to place her at its center.
The heir they wanted was a son, and if there was no son, they could bring in a man through their daughter.
They could preserve the Valenkroft name while handing the actual authority to a son-in-law chosen by the family.
It was an old, convenient solution that families commonly called prestigious had used for ages.
Rea hated that arrangement.
And she had been intelligent from a young age.
She had always achieved results worthy of her family’s expectations, but.
-She has Valenkroft blood, all right.
She realized very early on the contradiction that she could never become the heir.
If showing ability did not earn her the qualifications, then those qualifications had never had anything to do with ability in the first place.
So she left the family.
Instead of taking the safe position her family had prepared for her, she took on fringe projects at Archeon Genetics.
Research projects on the verge of being scrapped, and failed cases in which corporate executives had no interest.
Rea gathered them together and achieved remarkable results.
As a result, her name gradually grew within Archeon Genetics.
At first, she was labeled merely as the chairman’s only daughter, but.
From a certain point onward, people began, cautiously, to call her an executive.
Rea had risen to that position on her own.
No one had lifted her up by the hand, and much less had anyone paved the road for her.
Most of them had instead waited for the moment she would misstep and fall.
But she did not fall.
Rea believed that fact alone was enough to prove herself.
I’ve worked this hard.
I’ve achieved results.
I have the ability.
I….
I’m not a decorative ornament bearing the Valenkroft name.
That was what she wanted to say.
Just once, she wanted everything she had achieved to be acknowledged.
Not as an only daughter, but as a person.
However, the Valenkroft family did not change its policy.
The more Rea achieved at Archeon Genetics, the more the family coveted her.
Not as an heir, but as a better commodity.
A beautiful commodity that would not tarnish the family name, with an impressive record of building a corporation.
The status of the husband candidates the family could bring in through her only grew higher.
To Rea, that reality was no different from being offered up as a sacrifice.
Regardless of what achievements she made, she always had to walk around wearing shackles.
Because if the family exerted its influence, even the position she had painstakingly built could be shaken.
That made it even more miserable.
The time when she believed hard work would earn her recognition had ended long ago.
She had already abandoned the naïve belief that things would change if she showed results.
So Rea decided to go all out.
She had no intention of obediently moving across the board the family had set for her.
At the gathering where the family intended to present her with candidates for a son-in-law, she planned to say that she already had a lover.
She needed someone the family could not easily dismiss.
Then, recently, someone who met those conditions began to emerge.
A man of uncertain identity who had received Seraph Industries’ special endorsement and recently achieved major results in several incidents across Magitera.
Kael.
He was the perfect candidate.
Of course, the claim that he was her lover was a lie, but that part was not particularly important to Rea.
If he stood beside Rea, the Valenkroft family’s plans would suffer at least a minor setback.
It would be enough to ruin the marriage arrangement the family had prepared for a day.
And Rea had another reason as well.
She wanted to observe Kael up close.
She wanted to know who he was.
Rea liked things that could not be explained in ordinary terms.
Even when faced with risks that an ordinary person would avoid, she always wanted to open Pandora’s box.
That was her strength, and in another sense, her weakness as well.
Therefore, her visit to Kael was not motivated by impulse.
Defiance against her family.
And the desire to observe the strange existence known as Kael up close.
Even as Rea acknowledged that she had been cornered, she had no intention of bowing her head.
As she always had, she chose to overturn the board.
And this time, the card she had picked up was Kael.
..
..
“…So?”
Rea leaned back against the chair.
A relaxed smile lingered at the corners of her mouth, as though this entire story were nothing more than an amusing joke to her.
“Are you going to accept the commission?”
Her voice did not waver, and her smile was natural.
At least on the surface.
However, uncharacteristically, Rea knew that she was more anxious than she had expected.
Normally, she would have laid several layers of safeguards before making an offer like this.
So that it would not matter if the other person rejected it.
Or so that the person who rejected it would eventually come looking for her of their own accord.
Arranging the board that way was Rea Valenkroft’s style.
But this time, her opponent was different.
The Kael before her was not drawn to ordinary things.
Kael was silently looking at Rea.
His expression was still difficult to read.
He did not seem particularly interested, but neither did he seem intent on refusing outright.
The longer the silence continued, the more Rea felt tension building in her fingertips.
To hide her anxiety, she slowly folded and unfolded her fingers.
And finally, Kael opened his mouth.
“Answer just one thing.”
Rea answered,
“What is it?”
A moment later, Kael continued.
“How large a stake does Archeon Holdings hold within the White Society?”
Rea briefly looked puzzled.
The question was different from what she had expected.
However, that expression quickly disappeared behind her mask.
“…A fairly substantial one.”
At Rea’s answer, Kael slowly nodded.
He looked as though he had already reached a conclusion.
Rea maintained the smile at the corners of her mouth as she watched him, but inwardly, she held her breath.
She disliked realizing that she was waiting more eagerly than expected to hear what Kael would say next.
He said,
“Then I’ll accept.”