Chapter 75
It felt as though something in his mind snapped cleanly. Promeon stared down at the girl with a face from which all expression had been perfectly erased, then opened his stone-stiff lips and quietly acknowledged it.
“Fine.”
He nodded calmly. But instead of relaxing, the girl looked at him with an even more frightened expression.
“So that’s how it is.”
Promeon muttered. He briefly dragged one hand down his face. It was a face that had remained frozen without the slightest change from hundreds of years ago to the present.
“So you’re saying it’s over with me now.”
He lowered his hand again. The gaze he fixed on the girl was filled with fierce emotions that hadn’t fully surfaced before. The blazing intensity was close to a kind of madness.
“But that’s just what you think.”
“Kyaah!”
“I’ve never ended anything.”
Promeon reached out and snatched the girl up. Startled by the rough, sudden motion, she struggled in shock, but Promeon ignored the feeble thrashing of this small soul and only pulled her closer into his arms.
“You’ll realize it soon too, Hermane. Just how cruel the nonsense you spouted just now really was.”
“Let go of me… Promeon!”
“We were really happy, weren’t we? The two of us were truly happy together. Those days are something we can get back the moment you’re reborn.”
The girl writhed and screamed, but the broken hero did not budge.
Rather, as if he found her violent reaction to him intoxicating, he smiled brightly and pressed a kiss to her forehead.
“Come with me, Hermane. I’ll make you happy in this life too. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.”
“Don’t lie! If you could really do anything for me, then put me down right now!”
The girl screamed, but the hero ignored her. Holding Hermane in both arms, Promeon lightly kicked off the ground. He leapt easily into the air, and a breathless escape began.
When the king of the underworld and the gatekeepers learned that an intruder from the living world had abducted a soul from paradise, they chased him with all their might.
Because the path back across the river to the living world was blocked, Promeon had to take a long detour. The longer the route, the harder it became to shake off the gatekeepers’ pursuit.
Even in such a desperate situation, Promeon felt good thanks to the sensation of the girl in his arms.
Unlike a living person, she had no body heat and little weight, but still, the Hermane he loved had substance and was held in his embrace.
Her constant crying, begging him to stop, and sometimes cursing at him in anger all looked lovely to him.
Whenever she grew angry, he merely placed gentle kisses on her forehead, her cheek, or her hair—ignoring the fact that each time, her sobs only grew louder.
After crossing wastelands, passing through marshes, and pushing through forests, the gate leading to the living world finally came into view. Promeon ran toward it in rapture, and the girl screamed more sharply than ever before.
“Promeon!”
At first, he thought she was simply angrier. But in the next instant, a massive shadow fell over him, and only then did he realize that Hermane’s scream had been a warning.
Promeon rolled along the ground, wrapping Hermane protectively in his arms. A monstrous creature roared threateningly as it slammed a gigantic forepaw down on the spot where he had just been.
“Damn it.”
Promeon lifted his head and cursed under his breath. The creature, which looked larger in bulk than a decent-sized house, had the form of a massive horned lizard.
‘A dragon guarding the underworld.’
Promeon ground his teeth. A sense of impatience he had never felt before churned inside him.
He wasn’t in a body that could die, and he had long grown numb to pain, so facing that monstrous serpent itself wasn’t particularly frightening.
What irritated him wasn’t the fight, but the fact that obstacles kept appearing. The underworld itself, which repeatedly interfered with his reunion with Hermane, was unbearably infuriating.
Promeon glanced down at the girl in his arms. She was trembling, covering her head with both arms. A sharp pain throbbed near Promeon’s heart.
“I’m sorry for dragging you into this. I’ll end it soon. Don’t be too scared.”
Promeon whispered gently. Hermane jerked her head up and glared at him with a look of utter disbelief, but he forced himself to ignore the blatant reproach in her gaze.
Promeon knew well that if he hadn’t forcibly dragged Hermane out of paradise, she wouldn’t be facing a situation like this.
It was all his fault. It was his twisted, broken desire, a wrongful obsession he would never have dared harbor in his human days.
Rather than pure love, it was closer to a desperate, selfish struggle to escape loneliness.
He knew all of that, and yet he couldn’t stop. He had come too far to stop. Even if there were still a chance to turn back, he felt an instinctive certainty that he would never take it.
After gently setting Hermane down on the ground, Promeon took off his own cloak and draped it around her like a blanket. When his fingertips brushed against her as he fastened the collar, the girl flinched.
“Please don’t do anything foolish, Hermane. All right?”
Promeon pleaded sincerely. Hermane did not answer. Unfazed by her silence, Promeon added desperately,
“Don’t try to run away from me.”
With hook-like fingers, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pressed a shackle-like kiss to her forehead. The girl remained silent.
Even as this happened, the dragon was drawing closer by the second. Promeon stood up, took a short deep breath, and kicked off the ground.
His physical abilities, long since beyond the realm of human limits, were truly transcendent. He leapt like a beam of light and came down atop the dragon’s head, bringing his fist down with enough force to shatter its skull.
The dragon howled in agony, but Promeon showed no mercy. With eyes as flat and indifferent as if he were bored, he trampled the dragon even more brutally. The dragon roared and counterattacked.
“Ugh…!”
As a thick tail studded with spikes as large as a man’s arm lashed out at him, Promeon barely leapt down to evade the strike.
Landing lightly on the dragon’s knee, Promeon made a cold, casual gesture, and star-like blue flames blossomed and engulfed the dragon. The massive dragon writhed in agony as its flesh burned.
“Stop it, stop it! Don’t torment it anymore!”
Hermane screamed. Hearing the girl’s desperate cry, Promeon hesitated for a moment. The dragon did not miss that opening.
“Ghk!”
“Promeon!”
The girl screamed again. Even as pain surged through his body as if it were being torn apart, Promeon foolishly felt happy that Hermane had called his name.
A heavy forepaw, blazing like a torch, struck Promeon and sent him flying like a pebble. He sprawled across the rough dirt.
The flames that transferred from the dragon burned his sleeves and collar, but when Promeon hurriedly murmured as if soothing them, the fire was extinguished at once and the scorched clothes returned to their original state.
Promeon staggered to his feet. No matter how immortal his body had become, it didn’t mean he felt no pain. He clenched his teeth, clutching his left shoulder, which throbbed especially fiercely.
“Promeon.”
The girl was crying again. She looked at him with clear, pale blue eyes like a sunlit stream, as though she were about to lose her mind with pity for him.
Even in his broken, twisted state, Promeon did not welcome the girl’s tears. He felt grateful and happy that she was crying because of him, yet at the sight of her face twisted with sorrow, it felt as though his own heart were being torn apart.
Trying to comfort her, Promeon reached out and staggered toward her. But before he could touch her, the dragon roared again, and this time he heard other footsteps.
“Ha, seriously, please….”
Promeon let out an irritated breath and raked a hand through his disheveled hair. While he had been distracted by the dragon, the gatekeepers of the underworld who had been chasing him closed in with fierce momentum.
But Promeon did not give up. Giving up—such a thing was impossible.
His long-desired goal was right before his eyes. With just a little more, he could return to the living world with the person he loved. He couldn’t collapse into empty resignation now, of all times.
Like a madman, he reached out and pulled the girl into his arms. The girl struggled, trying to keep from being forcibly torn from the underworld to which she belonged, but Promeon refused to let go of his beloved to the very end.
“It would’ve been nice if you’d just come with me willingly.”
Promeon whispered sadly as he crossed the gate to the living world. The moment he burst out, the gate connecting the underworld and the living world closed.
Promeon collapsed beneath a moonless night sky. A pitch-black forest shrouded in darkness surrounded him.
“Ah, haha, hahahaha….”
He lay face-down on the ground, laughing breathlessly. It was laughter close to sobbing.
Rather than wailing aloud, he chose to laugh like a madman, because this was better—because his tears had dried up and could no longer flow.
He had found the one he longed for so desperately in the underworld, yet she had refused to return with him. In the end, what he had done was kidnapping. The reunion he had dreamed of so fervently was twisted into a mess.
The soul he had seized seeped into his heart in the form of a sparkling light. A soul belonging to the underworld could not take on a human form in the living world, nor could it engage in ordinary conversation or communication.
Even so, Promeon did not falter. He had already gone too mad to collapse here. A madness-tinged hope sustained him.
He had succeeded in bringing back his beloved’s soul—so it was fine. It had to be fine. Only then could he endure the rest of his long immortality without breaking any further.
The cursed hero wandered for a very long time, through very many places, holding his beloved’s soul carefully to his chest.
Then one day, Promeon discovered a woman on the verge of giving birth. He realized that she would bear a stillborn child, for he felt no life within her womb.
No matter that Promeon had stepped into the realm of gods, he could not call back a life that had already departed. But to secretly plant an entirely different life instead…
“I’ve found a suitable body, Hermane.”
Promeon whispered as he gazed at the soul of the one he loved. The soul he drew from his heart blinked quietly before him in the form of a small, silvery-white sphere.
One night, Promeon slipped into the woman’s bedchamber, opened the sleeping pregnant woman’s womb, and carefully pushed the soul inside.
For a while, unable to adapt to the unfamiliar body, the soul wandered here and there within the womb, but at last, reluctantly, it settled into the body of the dead fetus.
As the soul was grafted on, breath gradually returned to the fetus’s body, and within the woman’s womb, life began to grow once more.
