Chapter 75…………………….
When the bugle sounded quickly, the three men inside the barracks all turned to the entrance at once. But instead of the Asterios they’d been waiting for, a neat, unfamiliar face appeared. He gave a brief, awkward sweep of the barracks as if saying hello, then immediately turned and left.
They didn’t say it outright, but since all three had been waiting for Asterios, they exhaled silently.
It was fully daylight now and bright outside.
The chance of getting lost on the mountain had gone down—so why hadn’t he come down yet?
“Maybe I should have gone with His Excellency even if it was dangerous…?”
While Jezip mulled that over, Mephisto and Edwin beside him were still growling at each other.
“Daniel was babbling that he passed the fourth checkpoint because he stopped to help someone on his way down. Who did he mean, you think?”
“Hah! Daniel help me? Ridiculous. It was probably that kid who just peeked his face in a little while ago.”
“You can’t say you’re the tower’s master now. Didn’t they say the owner of the tower crossed the Mountain of Hallucinations in six hours? You’re not that.”
“Hmph! I just had poor night vision.”
“Not just a little poor. If it took you nine hours, did you sleep three of them midway?”
After their petty taunts—how could anyone arrive so late?—and childish back-and-forth about who was so great, Jezip rose to leave the barracks.
“Where are you going?” Mephisto called.
“I’m worried, so I’m going to go meet him,” Jezip said.
Edwin and Mephisto were quiet for a moment, then opened their mouths calmly like men who had just regained their senses.
“There’s still plenty of time left until the end. He’ll be inside by then.”
“Right. That Asterios isn’t fragile enough to fall and die out there.”
Their unexpectedly matter-of-fact reactions made Jezip’s brown eyes widen slightly.
“When he comes down, I’ll mock his weak body to my heart’s content,” Mephisto said, a pleasure showing on his face. He had been the one most fired up to watch and eliminate him; it would be boring and meaningless if Asterios disappeared so pathetically in the first round.
He wanted to face Asterios tooth-and-nail to enjoy the victory prepared for him, since he confidently believed he could compete for Roziana and win.
But intermittent short bugle calls sounded and others kept coming in—yet Asterios did not appear.
Only the sun in the sky rose brighter and brighter.
Asterios stared quietly at the illusion before him.
He had passed the summit a while ago, and the day was bright.
The magic stone that was only at the peak was already in his possession, and he could descend the mountain anytime.
So why had he stayed up on the mountain so long? It was because of his curiosity.
You could call it gathering clues.
This endless hallucination that seemed to target only him might be a clue about whoever was strangling his life.
The Secret Fog’s mist was clearly different than before. The phantasms that spread out to him and Roziana didn’t vanish once broken; instead, new hallucinations unfolded immediately, as if they had another purpose.
The danger vanished, only for one illusion, once dispelled, to be replaced by another that swallowed him whole.
It felt as if someone had prepared this, deliberately and meticulously, for him.
He sensed the oddity when, after confirming Roziana had descended the mountain, he hurried toward the summit.
Amidst the thin, drifting smoke came a faint sob. The space between his thick eyebrows twisted instantly.
‘Is the hallucination starting again?’
At first he thought, well, so it could happen like this.
Caught by a strong hallucination again, he chastised himself for underestimating the Secret Fog.
But he soon realized the pattern of these visions had nothing to do with his inner self.
They weren’t probing the intruder’s weakest spot to make him give up climbing; instead, they persistently prodded his heart, wearing it down, as if trying to exhaust his emotions.
‘Maybe it’s actually encouraging me to use greater power,’ he thought.
Regardless of its purpose, each step forward was delayed by hallucinations that caught at his ankles, and he felt the endless waste of time.
The hallucinations continued relentlessly, as if designed to be a trap.
A trap meant both to prevent him from leaving the mountain within the allotted time and to destroy his mind and emotions.
Watching hallucinations and dispelling them repeatedly without rest brought crushing fatigue. Asterios pressed his furrowed brows.
Erica or Roziana always appeared in the visions, in varying scenarios.
Once it was their parting; then it was the pain that followed her departure.
Another showed their happy days together, while yet another showed her desperate cries, alone.
It was as if the visions sought to deny the time and affection they had built together. The malice was obvious.
These were phantasms conjured by someone to make him suffer.
That was the real force blocking Asterios’s path.
‘Who would do such a thing?’
Who would go this far.
Their goal clearly wasn’t simply to make him drop out of the contest.
‘Do they really want to destroy me?’
Was it excessive to feel hatred directed at him through this trap?
Asterios gazed at the woman who had appeared again. The trap aside, perhaps the reason he still hadn’t left the mountain was himself.
Even knowing it was an illusion, seeing her shape tightened his chest without fail.
Knowing it wasn’t real didn’t stop his heart from reacting—like a machine designed to respond automatically to her.
‘Maybe it’s natural. After all, she is the owner of my heart.’
Awry laughter escaped through his lips.
The Erica before him quickly shifted from a beautiful face to a ruined one and turned her back.
Her turning away—even if fake—filled his chest with pain.
If it hurt this much when it was only a virtual image, what about the real thing?
Just imagining that made his forehead crease, his heart melting with suffering.
Asterios summoned his power with restrained movements and shattered the hallucination.
Each time he did, a wrenching mana surged inside him and contorted his face with pain.
The emission had to be suppressed due to a choke; forcing himself to hold back while using power caused internal wounds.
As this cycle repeated, his body grew battered, but somehow the shock of colliding with the illusions dulled. Tasting metal in his mouth, he ripped through the sixth phantasm.
As if waiting for that moment, the seventh illusion began.
This time it was Erica alone.
An Erica aged and exhausted from waiting for him looked at him blankly.
“…I don’t need you anymore. Do you know what kind of wound you left me?” she said.
Asterios’s eyes trembled slightly.
Her weakened voice was thin and ragged.
Her once-lovely red hair had lost its luster and was brittle.
Though pale and gaunt, her purple eyes remained—yet even those had lost their shine, appearing hollow, and his emotions surged, breaking him.
She was telling him she no longer needed him only when life had been stripped of all meaning.
‘Maybe when I left, her heart was much like this…’
Imagining and guessing her feelings was one thing; actually witnessing her spending time in sorrow and killing time while living was entirely different.
There’s a difference between thinking you understand and experiencing and accepting it.
He had only guessed her pain and tried to understand it intellectually.
Watching, up close, every single sorrow and loneliness she endured made him painfully aware how foolish and arrogant he had been.
Even this wasn’t truly experiencing her point of view, so he realized he couldn’t claim to fully understand her pain.
And he finally understood why she had been so petty and fearful with her feelings.
Why she’d reacted so sharply and sensitively.
Her loneliness, finally arriving in full force, stabbed and sank into his heart.
“…I regret meeting you and falling in love with you, Tenebres.”
The old, false Erica murmured in a dying voice.
Her tiny words and short lines gouged at his heart.
Being abandoned by someone spreads from the heart through the whole body, slowly destroying both body and spirit.
Besides, Erica had already carried the wound of being abandoned by her father the moment she was born.
Asterios watched the illusion and clenched his dry fist.
“…I will leave you now. Forever.”
As if freed, the old Erica quietly closed her eyes. Her bony hand on her knee dropped to the ground.
Seeing that, Asterios’s gaze trembled mercilessly.
The moment she rejected him and departed alone, he felt like a speck floating in the middle of the universe.
He, who had once been the master of a star, felt worthless as dust.
All because she wasn’t in his life.
Even though he knew it wasn’t real, it hit him like that.
It felt like someone gripping his heart tightly and strangling it; he could barely breathe, wracked with pain.
If she actually disappeared from this world—
Despair instantly filled his golden eyes. A tear fell from one eye.
Suddenly, for the first time since he had come into existence in this world, Asterios understood what he feared most.
“!”
A thunderbolt-like realization struck his mind.
The one strangling him and threatening to cut off his breath—the one showing him these endless illusions—flashed into his thoughts as the sender of this warning.
“No.”
Black Breath flared in his eyes, and without hesitation he shattered the seventh vision.
It was time to descend this filth of a mountain to reach her, to reach the point where all of his being converged.
