Chapter 15
Ethan pressed his back against a tree trunk.
The fingers gripping the ax handle were slowly losing their strength.
When he pressed his hand against the wound in his side, his palm grew sticky and wet.
It was blood.
Having barely eaten properly for days, he had been unable to heal.
His body creaked whenever he moved.
He did not know how long it had been since he had fallen into a trap during the final operation.
After entering the forest, all the survivors who had endured the enemy's endless pursuit scattered in every direction.
His poorly fed and unrested body, along with the wound in his side, continued to wear away at his weakened spirit.
Every night, he dreamed of the collapsing castle walls and the last image of his daughter burning black within them.
Ethan looked up at the moon.
The Lumidian bastards' hunting dogs had all vanished from the forest.
He had to return to the castle.
Even if all that remained there was his daughter's corpse, he could not let go of the hope that she might still be alive—that she had escaped safely.
Ethan quietly left the forest.
The walls of Lugdu, which had once seemed capable of stopping anything, had now collapsed grotesquely, like the carcass of an animal mauled to death.
The northern wall had fallen, just as he had predicted before setting out.
He crossed the ruins of the collapsed wall and entered the bleak city.
The sound of crows came from somewhere in the distance.
The smell of death dominated the castle.
The once-vibrant market had become a vast graveyard of corpses and collapsed ruins.
Even the Lumidian soldiers had withdrawn, and not a trace of the living remained.
“The ossuary. I have to go to the ossuary.”
His first destination was clear.
The hideout his daughter had made, where she had surely left some trace of herself.
Suppressing his worst thoughts as much as possible, he ran toward the ossuary.
“Ella! Noah!”
The door to the ossuary stood open.
A bad sign.
Calling out both their names, he rushed inside the ossuary.
The ossuary was neat inside.
There were no broken jars, and only black soot remained in the oil lamp's dish, cold now.
There were no footprints on the floor that could have belonged to an outsider.
Only the smell of lime lingered; there was no fishy scent of blood.
He picked up the wooden doll lying on the floor.
“Ella… Noah… Did you escape safely?”
Food had been neatly arranged in the corner, and one spear and one sword were missing from the weapons propped against the wall.
His gaze turned toward the door.
‘Signs that it was opened from inside, not broken open from outside.’
“…So you left on your own.”
Hope began to rise within him.
“Ella, you came out to look for me…”
His expression hardened.
“If you came out and were captured. If you died.”
Her corpse could be somewhere inside this castle.
There was something he had to do immediately.
‘I’ll search every corpse, even if I have to go through them one by one, and find Ella.’
If Ella had gone into the castle to look for him, there was no way she could have survived amid that chaos.
It meant putting an end to her life.
He could not bring himself to do it.
Even so, he had to.
“Ella… If I find you… I’ll bury you, then follow you soon after. We’ll definitely meet again.”
He stepped out of the cemetery.
Hundreds of corpses had been flung carelessly aside, growing cold as they rotted.
He wanted to close his eyes, but he could not.
There were far too many corpses to examine.
According to Bishop Nelson, there was no telling when the reinforcements would storm the castle.
He had to find her before then.
With hands that barely moved, he began checking the corpses, frozen cold, one by one.
He approached the first corpse.
It was a woman.
Her face had been crushed.
“…It’s not Ella.”
The second corpse.
A man whose belly had been split open, his intestines spilling out.
Nausea rose in his throat.
But the stiffness settling into his joints and the searing pain in his side could not stop Ethan's determination.
The dried black blood on his palm split open.
The faces of the corpses were all hideously distorted.
Living off the food in the ossuary, he searched every alley thoroughly.
But he could find neither Ella nor Noah in the streets.
He headed for his next destination.
The buildings.
Since searching them took longer than searching the streets, he had put them off until now.
He began breaking down closed doors with his ax and searching the buildings one by one.
A broken door.
Two Lumidian soldiers' corpses impaled on a spear.
Signs that furniture had been used to build a barricade.
Inside the house, he saw someone familiar.
A young man with wheat-colored hair and a small build.
The only person who had approached his daughter, even when she pushed everyone else away.
Though timid by nature, he was dependable—the man who had hoped to become Ella's partner.
“Noah!”
He approached Noah, who lay facedown on the floor.
He lay in a pool of blood.
A deep slash and stab wound had torn into his back.
Ethan's hand trembled.
Noah's face held relief rather than pain.
As he lowered Noah's eyelids, he whispered briefly.
“I'm sorry, Noah. You protected my daughter.”
His voice trembled.
“Thank you… truly.”
After holding Noah's cold hand and observing a brief moment of silence, he rose.
Traces of a struggle remained throughout the house.
And a posture as though he had been trying to protect someone.
Several people's hair lay scattered across the floor.
There was no sign of Ella's corpse inside the house.
“Ella. Are you really alive?”
A small hope bloomed in his heart.
With that small hope held in his heart, he searched for several more nights.
Alleys, warehouses, and wells.
Ella was nowhere to be found.
No matter how thoroughly he searched, the face that had smiled at him—his daughter—was nowhere to be found.
The smell of corpses had seeped into his entire body, but his eyes were no longer clouded.
Ethan organized the results of his search over the past several days.
His gaze turned toward the northern gate.
‘Wheel tracks. Warhorse hoofprints.’
“A prisoner convoy…”
He rose.
‘There’s no sign of Ella’s body, and Noah protected her until the moment he died. And there are traces of a prisoner convoy.’
There was no time to grieve.
“…She’s alive.”
The last trace of sorrow remaining on his face evaporated, replaced by an icy fury.
The ax in his hand glinted coldly, fixed on a single objective.
He would take his daughter back.
No matter what, he would do it.
Before leaving the castle, he stared one last time at the wheel tracks stretching far beyond the northern wall.
But he did not follow them immediately.
“Strength. Connections. I have to acquire anything that might help me. Wait just a little longer, Ella.”
Even if he pursued that very carriage immediately, he would never catch up to it.
And even if a problem with the convoy allowed him to catch up, the guards would kill him like a dog.
He knew all too well that there were limits to what he could do alone.
He needed not only to build his own strength, but also to find people who could help him.
_____
Meanwhile.
The vast plains of the eastern front.
Two groups of soldiers were clashing.
“Sir Kaelan. Orders from Count Daker.”
A soldier approached a knight who had withdrawn from the battle.
“That miser wants me to bring him a crown without giving me even a handful of dust.”
“He orders you to return to the battlefield immediately.”
The knight known as Sir Kaelan did not spare the soldier a glance. He merely held what was in his hand up to the sunlight.
The bloodied blue eyeball reflected the sunlight and shone brilliantly.
“You know, I really like navy blue. This color is the only thing I own that the count didn't give me. At least this color is mine.”
At his feet, an armored man writhed, clutching the empty sockets where his eyes had been with both hands.
“But this… Now that I look closely, it's not navy blue.”
He hurled the eyeball he had been holding to the ground as though trying to crush it.
His foot crushed the man's head with a revolting burst.
“I'll return at once. How could I refuse the count's command?”
His platinum-colored hair, shining coldly, disappeared beneath his helmet.
Leaving behind a fleeting glimmer, he began running faster than a horse.
“I'm getting bored. It would be better to finish this quickly and head back.”
He leaped high and began sprinting across the shoulders of the allied soldiers who had formed a wall.
Like an acrobat, he ran over the heads of the allies, who stared in horror at this unexpected turn of events, while the soldiers' screams echoed behind him.
“Is there no one among you who can add a beautiful melody to this tedious battlefield? Leaving only dissonance behind on such a fine day is terribly rude, don't you think?”
Having run over the allies without a single obstacle until he reached the enemy's front line, Kaelan shouted.
“You crazy bastard!”
“A refusal? How exceedingly rude.”
He landed lightly on the shoulder of the soldier who had shouted.
A leg shining brilliantly.
The soldier watched blood and flesh scatter like rain from where his shoulder had been, and a scream burst from his mouth.
With the soldiers' death throes forming a melody beneath his feet as he stepped to a particular beat, he reached the enemy commander.
“I really love this moment.”
He drew the sword from his waist and pointed at himself.
“The moment when the noise of battle stops and every gaze, friend and foe alike, fixes solely on me. The satisfaction of being the protagonist onstage, rather than part of the backdrop.”
Ignoring his words, the knights beside the commander drew their swords and stepped in front of him.
“How boring.”
With those words, Kaelan's sword began to dance.
No discernible pattern could be seen in his movements.
Kaelan's blade scraped across the knights' armor as it passed.
The sound of his footsteps, the friction of iron against iron, and his humming formed a harmony.
Not a single drop of blood appeared, and only the melody he created grew faster and faster.
Kaelan drew in a deep breath.
“Cutoff.”
A single step, planted hard enough to make the earth tremble.
Unlike before, a blade shining white cleaved through the air.
For the briefest moment, silence fell, as though every sound in the world had vanished.
Then a faint, eerie sound, like something being sliced apart, reached their ears.
The bodies of the knight and commander, split in half, slowly toppled to the ground.
Against a backdrop of blood spraying like a fountain, only Kaelan's low humming echoed grotesquely.
“That was a perfect finale.”