---
He looked at him with eyes bloodshot and swollen. No one could tell if this was due to anger or if he simply wanted to cry.
He gripped his sword tightly, almost piercing the body of the person standing above him.
"Dain, why are you...?"
He muttered weakly.
"Why did you betray me? Were we not friends...?"
His trembling voice carried many complex emotions—pain, sorrow, anger, and hatred.
Dain looked at him coldly and spoke.
"Friends... Hahaha... Don't make me laugh. I was never a friend to someone like you."
His hands holding the sword trembled at his friend's cold words.
"Dain... Please... I-I don't want to kill you... Let's go back to how things were... Please."
He didn't want to kill him... He didn't want to kill his only friend... He didn't want to kill the one person he had in this world, the one who had always stood by him, the one who understood his pain and never recoiled because of his mixed heritage. After everything that had happened, how could he kill him...?
Dain noticed his hesitation and opened and closed his hand several times. At that moment, a small knife appeared in his hand.
"You want to go back to the way things were? Don't make me laugh. You destroyed everything! How can you expect things to go back to normal?!"
"Dai- ah!"
He tried to speak and justify himself, but a hand wrapped around his body to restrain him, and his friend's knife had already pierced his heart.
What came next were the final cold words he heard from his friend.
"A pathetic creature like you doesn't deserve this life."
He smiled bitterly. To him, this was the last warm embrace from his friend, and the last cold words he would hear, meaning "you don't deserve any of this."
He couldn't bring himself to hate him. How could he hate someone so considerate?
This was the last thought he had before closing his eyes forever.
"Ahh."
A strange sound escaped Dain's lips, and his cold expression slowly crumbled, as if it had never existed before. His trembling hands removed the knife from his friend's corpse and embraced him.
"It's cold..." he muttered weakly.
His friend's body was no longer warm like before. It was cold and pale... Now, after his friend had closed his eyes, he could no longer hold on to that cold, indifferent face he had been pretending to show. It was replaced by a broken and painful expression. His eyes were bloodshot, and warm tears began to fall as he looked at his friend's lifeless body.
"He's closed them."
He's closed his eyes forever. Now, they would never open again. They would remain like this forever. And now, with his friend's eyes closed, he could never speak to him again. He would never argue with him again... He would never train with him again... He would never eat with him again... He would never call him "my friend" again...
"Ughhh!"
A cry of pain escaped him as all those thoughts filled his mind.
'Should I have agreed to his request? Should we have run away and started over?'
But how long could they keep running before they were caught? Maybe three days... or maybe a week?!
After all, his friend was the villain... the one who almost led both races to destruction, the one who caused the bloody war between humans and Flynns that lasted for three whole years, and the one who forced them to unite to fight against him.
So how could he have escaped...?
'I should have taken her...'
He should have gotten his friend's body. He wouldn't let anyone touch his friend or hurt him. He knew that if anyone killed his friend, they would cut off his head and hang it on the kingdom's gates with something written like:
"For anyone who dares to meddle with humans or Flynns."
He was sure they would do that to calm the masses and let them know the war was over.
That's why he agreed to betray his friend and kill him, in exchange for getting his body. Both races had no objections since he was dead—nothing mattered after that...
"What a pitiful creature I am... All I can do for my only friend is give him a proper burial..."
He muttered, his voice trembling, as he lay beside his friend's body. He wanted to stay there for hours, maybe months, maybe years. He wanted to talk to him more, to tell him how he felt. He wanted to spend the rest of his life by his side. He wasn't ready to part with his only friend yet.
He knew it was foolish, that he couldn't do that.
'If I can't give him a proper life, at least I'll give him a proper burial.'
His friend had been a great person, dying on the battlefield, so he deserved to be buried like the brave knights.
That was the only thought in his mind at that moment.
---
"Dammit, what is this nonsense? Why did it have to end like this?"
Raelyn almost threw his phone, cursing.
This was the third time he was reading the novel "Sword of Deconal", and every time he read the villain's tragic ending, he felt endless anger.
How could he not be angry? His favorite villain had led two of the world's strongest races into a great war with just his intelligence.
And now you tell me that he was killed by betrayal from his stupid friend?!
"Man, you shouldn't have killed him or run away with him. All you had to do was let him finish his plan to destroy the world!"
I mean, he led two of the strongest races into a three-year-long war. If this war had lasted a few more years, the world would have been destroyed!
"I can't blame the villain's friend. After all, it was the hero who manipulated his mind."
"Man, I don't even know why I keep reading this novel. I'm going to sleep. After all, tomorrow is Saturday!"
That was the only thing that cheered him up after reading that disappointing ending.
With that thought, he closed his eyes, hoping for a full night's sleep!
---
The faint sunlight fell on his bright crimson hair, and his eyebrow twitched as the warm sunlight touched his face. He felt something strange. Unlike the past few days, he wasn't disturbed by the noise of his neighbors' kids waking him up. Instead, the warm sunlight was...
'Hmm... Maybe they finally listened to my complaints.'
It was the weekend. He had spent the whole night reading his favorite novel and didn't want to wake up early on his day off!!
Saturday was the best day of the week, especially for a busy student like him in his last year at university, because of course, it was his day off... He used it all to sleep and recharge for the exhausting week ahead.
So, he had warned his noisy neighbor kids not to be loud and wake him up in the end...
Well, it seemed more like a plea than a warning...
Ahem...
Who cares? He was able to sleep, so nothing else mattered.
Since he knew his neighbors' kids well, he knew they wouldn't listen to him no matter what. So, he closed all the windows and opened the door in his small apartment to keep the annoying kids' screams away.
'It's strange that sunlight managed to sneak in despite me making sure the windows were properly closed.'
He didn't have the luxury of curtains, but he made sure to close the window properly with a blanket. After all, it was summer, and he didn't need them.
'Who would think sunlight could penetrate through a heavy blanket?'
Well, there was a possibility the blanket might have fallen, but he didn't think much of it and decided to get up and move the bed away from the window to sleep again.
"Ugh."
A painful cry escaped his mouth as he tried to get up. He felt as though a knife had stabbed him in the side, and suddenly, a foul smell invaded his nose. It smelled like iron, specifically blood.
He was shocked when he looked at his left hand that touched his side. It was covered in blood. The warm red liquid dripped from it. Not only that, there was a large wound on his right side, and the bed was filled with blood. He felt intense pain where the wound was.
"Damn it...! Is that why they were quiet? Did those crazy kids finally decide to kill me?!... Maybe I'm dead, that's why I can't hear anyone!!"
He screamed in frustration and pain.
"Wait... can the dead feel pain...??"
Those few moments of emotional confusion made him forget his pain for a while.
"Ah?!"
When he looked at the wound again, it seemed to shrink. He blinked several times, unsure if the wound had truly shrunk or not, because even if it had changed, it wasn't the kind of change Raelyn would notice.
"Ugh."
A painful scream left his mouth.
His breathing became heavier, and his body started to heat up and sweat profusely. He clenched his teeth tightly, feeling as though thousands of knives were stabbing his body, thousands of molten knives specifically in the wound. He endured this for a few minutes until the pain finally subsided.
"Heh."
He took a deep breath, trying to calm his erratic breathing after this session of agony. He couldn't distinguish if he was really alive or not.
"...!!"
Surprisingly, when he looked at his wound, he found it almost healed, leaving only a scar about 4 cm long. He tried to touch it to see if it would hurt, but when he touched it, he felt nothing. It seemed like he was touching a scar from a few years ago
It was both terrifying and fascinating at the same time, to the point where he momentarily forgot to question how this wound had appeared on his body. Instead, he began wondering if the scar would disappear as well.
His thoughts were interrupted by a faint headache—perhaps a side effect of losing so much blood. He brushed away the long, red hair stuck to his face, damp with sweat.
"Wait... long red hair?!"
Panic crept in. Since when did he have long hair? No, since when did he have red hair?!
He jumped out of bed and hurried to the nearest mirror he could find.
There, a pale and exhausted-looking teenager with long crimson-red hair stood staring back at him. His dark black eyes were barely visible beneath the strands that fell over them. He blinked a few times, feeling as though his mind was blank. Was the person in the mirror really his reflection?
He started touching the mirror repeatedly, hoping his appearance would suddenly change back to normal.
"Could this be because of the blood? Yeah, that must be it."
He convinced himself that some blood must have splattered into his eyes, making him see his hair as red. With this thought, he began vigorously rubbing his eyes with the sleeves of his dirty white shirt.
"...."
Nothing changed.
His hair was still the same length, the same crimson color. His height hadn't changed, nor had the scar vanished from his body. Everything was exactly as it had been.
Only then did he notice that the room he was in wasn't his own. Since when did he have a mirror in his room? No—since when was his bed located beside a window? Or why was the room so clean and organized?
"This is a dream... It has to be."
He smiled nervously, biting his lip as he walked back to the bed and lay down, hoping that he would wake up and laugh about this strange dream.
'Will I remember this weird dream when I wake up? I always forget my dreams, though.'
Still, this was the clearest, most vivid, and painful dream he'd ever experienced. He thought he might actually remember it.
Ten minutes passed... Fifteen... Thirty... Forty-five minutes.
Nearly an hour went by, but he couldn't fall asleep—or wake up—because of the awful stench of blood that filled the room.
"The ***! I'm going to lose my mind! Why can't I wake up from this crazy dream?!"
He began yelling hysterically. He didn't know where he was, why he was there, or why he was in the body of a stranger he didn't even recognize...