Chapter 104
Aiden Crossfell quietly stared at the thin beam of light filtering into the darkness.
Though the prison was spacious, the place where he had settled was a damp corner heavy with moisture.
The birdsong coming through the fist-sized window sounded especially grating today.
‘I’d like to pluck out every one of those feathers right now and burn them….’
Though tormented by such violent impulses, the bars of the prison, made of ice that would never melt, were not something he could break with his power.
At least for now.
Clomp, clomp.
Footsteps echoed through the prison as a cold chill seeped inside.
Aiden Crossfell did not bother turning his head toward the sound.
There had only been one person who had come to visit him over the past few weeks.
But.
It was difficult to endure the jeering voice as well.
“It’s all pointless, you know…? Did you think I’d reflect on my behavior if you locked me up here like this? Haha, don’t make me laugh.”
“…….”
As always.
No answer came.
He had always been like that.
Aiden Crossfell’s sharp invective could not put even a wrinkle on the ice-cold patriarch’s face.
Not when he realized the bitter cold at a young age, not when he first defeated his older sister, who was throwing her weight around with her clumsy talent, and not when he beat a family knight to a pulp in a simple sparring match.
Not even when the patriarch caught him with some “item” he had secretly brought in.
“You’re always like this. You act as though you know everything, yet you look like you don’t know a thing….”
“…….”
“Are you just going to watch like that and leave again today? Then why do you come all the way down here? Huh? Answer me.”
The master of the Crossfell family─the patriarch─was always expressionless, as though wearing a mask.
There was no praise, no discipline, and no affection.
As if he were looking at a statue made of ice.
And so, the moment Aiden Crossfell heard his father’s frigid voice,
he felt the cold emotion in its entirety, as though ice water had been poured over his head.
“Aiden.”
Not his full name, just Aiden.
“I’m expelling you from the family. You know better than anyone why, even if I don’t tell you.”
At the same time, Aiden suddenly dropped his head as if a heavy lump of metal had been hung from his chin.
“Ghk…!!”
It was not a voluntary action.
Rather, he strained the veins in his neck and tried to say something, but the tremendous pressure made it impossible for him to raise his head.
“You have sullied the justice of the Crossfell family. Ice mixed with impurities is no longer ice.”
“Ha, hahahaha…!!!”
Even so, the fact that Aiden Crossfell─now merely Aiden─lifted his head from the prison floor, even if only by a few centimeters,
was truly astonishing.
“─Right!! You should have just said that from the start! That I offended your eyes, that I should get out of your sight! Just like that!!”
Thud!!
Perhaps the pressure bearing down on his head had grown stronger, because he slammed his head into the floor again.
That was why Aiden could not see the gaze of his father looking down at him.
“This is my final act of mercy. From now on, never speak the name Crossfell again.”
The Crossfell patriarch turned his back and left the prison without even listening to his son’s final words.
The bars of the ice prison had melted away long ago.
Even as the patriarch’s back disappeared, the heavy pressure did not fade, and Aiden remained with his head pressed to the ground, but
he slowly tucked his chin inward, using his forehead as a support.
“…Justice? Hah, what does that crap matter! You’re the one who told me to pursue strength….”
Naturally, no answer came.
Even after the pressure crushing his head vanished, Aiden remained curled up and did not get to his feet.
It felt as though indescribable rage and remorse were becoming a single mess inside his body.
That only made him angrier.
The gaze of his sister, who poked her head out from the corner of the prison and watched him cautiously, at that very moment.
“Dad, I mean, the patriarch… What did he say? I asked him, but he didn’t answer me….”
That childish voice.
That drawn-out ending to every sentence.
More than anything.
“Anyway, he said he’d forgive you now, right? So I don’t know what you did wrong, but next time, make sure you say you’re sorry in advance─.”
“Get lost.”
“…Huh?”
“I said get lost!!”
The anger that suddenly burst forth had a perfectly valid reason.
Though Eleanor Crossfell, the one being told to get lost, reacted impassively.
“You shouldn’t say such mean things to your big sister…. Now, now. If you do it again, you’ll get in trouble.”
“…….”
Aiden rose from his crouch and slowly grabbed the back of his neck.
He hated the Purist body at times like this.
So this was what it felt like to get dizzy from high blood pressure.
Aiden realized that he had been wrong about everything from the very beginning and had made the wrong judgments as well.
‘…Right.’
Being shackled to a flimsy blood relationship in the first place had been a huge mistake.
Seeing that crazy woman made him feel that way even more strongly.
“If you don’t like me, then I’ll be the one to leave.”
Aiden walked away without hesitation.
And that day, Aiden left the family.
There may have been many reasons for it, but the biggest one was simply that he couldn’t stand the sight of his sister.
* * *
Personally, I’m not very good at sympathizing with younger siblings.
It probably had something to do with my memories of bickering with one pig I’d lived with at my family home.
Since there was a bit of an age gap, my younger sibling had seemed nothing but cute when they were little.
I realized far too late that every creature was cute when it was a baby.
Once it grew up, it evolved into a dark creature that barely listened unless I offered it an allowance.
For the record, I still haven’t gotten back the fifty thousand won it took from me when I was a student.
I was living off an allowance back then, too….
Anyway.
“Didn’t she suddenly grab me and threaten me, asking where I learned magic circuits, then ignore me and take the elevator all the way to the top floor when I told her to stop for a moment, and when the elevator fell, she─.”
“…We only stopped the elevator’s fall thanks entirely to my help.”
Look at him interrupting me again.
I gave Eleanor Crossfell another knock on the crown of her head.
“Ow!!”
Aiden’s eyes widened when he saw that.
As if it had been stopped entirely thanks to him.
If I hadn’t supported us by using ice magic and telekinesis at the same time, the two of us might have arrived at the fourth basement level of a building that only had three basement levels by now.
It sounded like something from a ghost story, but it simply meant we would have been flattened.
Only after using the ice magic I had learned not long ago, along with the telekinesis I wanted to keep hidden, had I barely managed to stop the elevator at about the height of the building’s first floor.
Eleanor Crossfell looked up at me with faint moisture in the corners of her eyes, as though her head had been split open.
I’m not falling for that pitiful look anymore.
“…Violence against a member of the family?”
Aiden seemed to ponder something as he watched our banter, then smirked and nodded to himself.
“Ah, is that what this is? In the end, that old man is just another member of the family. He’d already expelled one of his own children, so sending out another one probably wasn’t difficult….”
“…??”
If I remembered Troy’s words correctly, he was currently the only person expelled from the Crossfell family.
He must have gotten some strange idea after seeing me casually place my hand on her head.
“Then I don’t need to worry about watching myself for no reason.”
Aiden’s gaze turned toward me once again.
“You there.”
The nerve of him pointing at someone so arrogantly.
The Confucian dragon inside me is breathing fire.
Of course, I had also pointed aggressively at Eleanor a few times, but that had been strictly part of her moral education.
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
Let’s hear what he has to say first.
Aiden raised his head leisurely and adopted a posture that seemed to look down at me.
For the record, I was taller than him, so his gesture only looked a little awkward.
“You’re lucky…. I was planning to skin you and use you as a toy.”
“…Huh?”
Apparently, the concept of a toy that I knew had suddenly changed.
While I stared blankly at him for a moment at that insane statement beyond imagination, Aiden slowly walked toward Eleanor.
“And after all that, you’re the one who came looking for me…. Ha.”
As with most family matters, there seemed to be circumstances between the two that I didn’t know about.
For example, “only cooking one pack of ramen,” “only buying one ice cream when going out to get some,” or “secretly ordering fried chicken when one person went out.”
Eleanor looked at Aiden, who had stopped in front of her, and asked in a trembling voice.
“Aiden, what do you mean, expelled…? What on earth are you talking about?”
“Even now, with things like this, you’re going to innocently pretend you don’t know? I’ve hated that about you from the beginning. Your deceit. Do you know what I thought while watching you put on that pathetic act?”
Watching them both say only what they wanted to say, I was certain they really were siblings.
And then.
A strange heat slowly began to rise around us.
The atmosphere on the younger brother’s side was particularly ominous.
“…I want to grind that face into the ground!”
Boom!!
A right straight thrown without hesitation.
Deep cracks like a spiderweb spread across the floor in an instant.
We were on the third basement level, so the ground should have been sturdy, yet a circular depression had been gouged out like a small crater.
For a family quarrel,
that strike had been far too sincere.
“…What?”
Aiden’s glossy eyes, like glass marbles, shifted toward me.
“You hate this bitch too, don’t you?”
“I do, but….”
Hmm.
As far as I had seen, Eleanor had no particular talent for physical enhancement.
It wasn’t for nothing that the word mage had come to mind.
If she had been hit by the fist her younger brother had just thrown, we would have seen a horrifying result impossible to describe in words.
The moment I reached that conclusion, I instinctively extended my hand to the side and stopped Aiden’s fist midway.
I gripped his fist tightly and said,
“Even so, this is going too far.”
I had said several times already that I disliked my younger sibling─that pig.
But that was only from the standpoint of being family.
If someone else made our pig cry or hit it?
I would have immediately pulled out the Brooklyn series from the wardrobe I’d saved in preparation for a zombie outbreak.
“This isn’t just bickering, is it?”
Even my palm, which I had leveled up considerably, was tingling from the impact.
Aiden roughly pulled his fist free from my grasp and stepped back.
“Ha…, so this is why you came along, huh? What, are you her boyfriend?”
“If you say weird things like that, there are quite a few people who’ll come stab you….”
Things had been a little ominous around me lately.
But perhaps he took my words as some bizarre joke, because Aiden slowly spread both hands to either side.
…Crack!!
Ice rose from the empty floor and stretched out to both sides like thorns.
“What do you mean, stab you…. I suppose you thought I was joking when I said I’d skin you.”
“I don’t know why you’re so obsessed with skinning people…. Tsk, whatever.”
This guy was a jack-of-all-trades build too.
‘Let’s see if you can keep that smug look on your face after this.’
As I calmly circulated the magic circuits within my body, a cool chill flowing out with my exhalation slowly settled into the room.
And then.
Crack-crack-crack─!!
Thick frost began spreading across the floor, centered on the crater where I stood.
Strange astonishment appeared in the gazes of Aiden and Eleanor as they looked at me.
“……Crossfell?”
No way.
I’d simply invested in a trait.
Ignoring Aiden’s mutter,
I lazily beckoned him with my fingers.
“Thanks to you, I’m once again realizing that I shouldn’t share a table with my younger sibling─that you can’t eat at the same table as a pig. Today, let your big brother beat you up nice and thoroughly, then give you a fresh lesson in manners.”
First, put your head right here.