Chapter 36

The light the ‘Sun’ scattered crept in through the window.

Quilbion wiggled his bound hands and looked at Drich sitting across from him.

“Stop staring at me, I’ll get attached.”

Drich said.

“You think I want to look at you? You’re in front of me so I see you. If you hate it that much, turn your head away.”

Quilbion turned his head slightly and looked outside the room. Lil was humming while preparing food. Geron was nowhere to be seen.

He moved his ring finger to form a seal. The nark moved according to his will, but it didn’t radiate outside his body.

The rope binding his hands and feet was blocking the release. Was this also a magical instrument?

He tried forming other seals to use sorcery, but it was useless. The nark only circulated inside his body.

“Is anything working?”

Quilbion asked quietly. Drich shook his head.

“It won’t budge. The nark won’t listen.”

“Really?”

So Drich couldn’t even move nark?

“What about you?”

“Similar.”

He didn’t share the fact that he could move nark. They’d reached a point where it wouldn’t be strange for a knife to be stabbed in his back.

If it would help with escape, he could tell him anything, but looking at how things were going, that didn’t seem to be the case.

“Are you upset?”

Drich said while looking at the floor.

“I told you yesterday. I can’t die with you, so I understand.”

“That doesn’t look like understanding eyes.”

“There was some expectation involved. Trust, friendship. That thing you habitually talked about.”

“It’s funny to say this now, but I don’t actually dislike you. I still think of you as a friend. It’s just that there was no choice.”

“Yeah, there was no choice.”

He answered while looking into Drich’s eyes. Drich’s pupils, exhaling a bitter breath as if upset, were terribly cold.

“This bastard is really something.”

Quilbion held back the laugh that threatened to emerge and spoke.

“What?”

“Of all the humans I’ve seen, I thought the most vicious one was the employer’s daughter. Her father was, well, like that, but that girl was really… But seeing you changed my mind.”

“What are you talking about?”

Drich’s eyes twitched.

“We’ve got nothing to do anyway, so tell me a story.”

“What story?”

“The story about stabbing your father.”

Drich snorted and spat out a quiet “fucker.”

“You’re curious about that in this situation?”

“If you don’t want to tell me, shut up and sleep. It’s not like we can do anything anyway.”

Lil, who’d been visible in the living room, disappeared. Seeing how she wasn’t even providing minimal surveillance, she seemed to trust the rope wrapped around their hands and feet completely.

Thinking it was an opportunity, he bit the rope with his teeth. He chewed hard enough to crush his front teeth, but not even a single thread loosened.

“Damn it.”

Drich also bit the rope, then spat.

“Al Terua, that bastard tricked us. He made it sound like we could easily catch a Yellow Form.”

“He never said we could catch one. We saw and guessed that ourselves.”

The Yellow Form goblins were the ones that died burning whenever Al Terua gestured.

They’d seemed so easy.

“You couldn’t even scratch him with that dagger, could you?”

Drich asked.

“Yeah.”

“There was no chance of winning from the start.”

“I couldn’t use the talismans either. Whenever I tried to activate sorcery, Geron’s nark would intervene and interfere.”

“Fucking hell, really.”

Drich leaned his head back against the wall and let out a long sigh.

“According to that damn fatalism, we’re supporting characters, so do we die like this?”

“Looking at the current situation, that’s how it’ll turn out.”

“What about the possibility of Twella coming to rescue us? You two were close, weren’t you?”

“She’d have to know where this place is to come.”

“That girl sees the future! So she must’ve seen us ending up like this.”

Drich grumbled.

“Whether she sees everything, how far she sees, how accurate it is—I don’t know any of it. More than anything…”

Whether our relationship is tight enough for her to come all the way here while risking danger—that’s questionable too.

Quilbion swallowed the words that surfaced in his mind.

After experiencing Drich’s change, everything felt futile. He couldn’t know how Twella, who’d overcome hardships with him, might have changed either.

The last time he saw her, Twella was definitely different. According to Al Terua’s explanation, ‘that’ was a completely different being wearing Twella’s form.

If Twella’s ability was real, she would have experienced countless unimaginable times and events.

“More than anything what? Is there something?”

Drich asked nervously.

“You changed like this too, so how much has she changed? When I think about that, it’s sad, sorrowful, and also…”

“What are you saying? Hey hey, snap out of it. We’re not dead yet. We need to find a way to live.”

Drich crawled along the floor and pressed himself against the door. After quickly scanning outside, he spoke.

“Nobody’s there.”

“There isn’t.”

“You should’ve said that sooner. You saw everything but didn’t say anything.”

“There isn’t anyone, but we’ll get caught if we go out.”

“What?”

Quilbion could tell. Lil had also left, and Geron wasn’t visible either, but escape was still impossible.

He raised his head slightly.

He could see nark flowing along the ceiling.

It was Geron’s. The moment they left the room, information would be transmitted to Geron in some form.

With hands and feet bound, even if humans crawled for hours, Geron could catch up with a few leaps.

Escape was impossible.

“Don’t you see that?”

Quilbion gestured at the ceiling with his chin. Drich looked up with furrowed eyes.

“What’s there?”

“If you can’t see it, forget it.”

There was a clattering sound. It was Lil. She set down a tray with bowls on the floor and approached them.

“Are you hungry?”

He glanced at the bowls. They contained a disgusting porridge. Not black, though.

“I’m hungry, but my hands are like this so I can’t eat.”

Quilbion showed off his hands bound behind his back.

“I’ll feed you, so don’t worry. Drich, wait a bit.”

Drich kicked the floor with his foot. Lil turned her head to stare at Drich.

“It’s not too late even now, so let us go.”

“Why should I?”

“You’re being deceived too! Goblins are destined to eventually eat humans.”

Lil let out a faint laugh.

“Goblin, goblin—you keep saying that… How much do you actually know about goblins?”

“They’re monsters that tear apart and kill innocent humans. That’s all I need to know—do I need to know more about those bastards?”

“See? You say things like that because you don’t know anything. I told you, didn’t I? Goblins are similar to us too. They all have their own circumstances and different desires.”

“Circumstances my ass. I wasted my breath talking to a crazy bitch bewitched by a monster.”

Drich spat out rough words with indignation, but his eyes were calm. He was probably provoking her on purpose.

Lil set down the bowl. She turned around and approached Drich closely.

That’s when it happened.

Drich kicked off the floor with his bent legs. Just before Drich’s torso collided with Lil, Quilbion saw it.

The nark contained in the rope squirming.

Thud—Drich slammed into the floor along with the sound.

“Kuk.”

Drich let out a murky groan and curled up. The impact must have been considerable, as he only twitched like a stepped-on worm.

“You can’t do anything. Kill Geron? That’s impossible.”

“Fuck… you.”

Lil lightly pushed Drich’s face with her foot.

“So please just stay still.”

Quilbion watched Lil return.

Resistance was impossible, so he had to extract something with words.

“Where’s Geron?”

“He went to bury the children.”

“Should I call that thoughtful?”

“You can keep being sarcastic. I’m not hoping for understanding. And the fact that you’ll die won’t change either.”

“If you feed us to Geron, he’ll definitely get stronger. The goblins in the dormitory got stronger by eating students. But is that enough? Can you really escape from here?”

“I haven’t been playing around for four years. More than anything, because kids like you appeared, I was able to move the schedule forward.”

“Schedule?”

Lil scooped porridge onto a spoon and blew on it gently. Quilbion accepted the porridge without complaint.

“Good, eat well.”

“I’m hungry, after all.”

“Right. You’re so good for listening well.”

“Since I’m going to die anyway, how about satisfying my curiosity—is that possible?”

“As much as you want. I tried to tell everything and persuade you when you were someone I could communicate with.”

“That we needed to be sacrificed?”

“Yeah. That your lives are needed for all the other children trapped here.”

The words ‘then why aren’t you included in those necessary lives’ almost came out with a sneer. Quilbion moved his head and opened his mouth.

“Is Geron a special goblin? How did you gain the confidence that you could get out of here?”

“Geron isn’t special. He said so himself. That all goblins are the same. But… I can make Geron special.”

“And that’s by eating humans like me?”

“The expression ‘eating’ doesn’t fit. If you’ve learned sorcery, you know, right? Consuming isn’t necessary. What’s needed is the nark contained within.”

Lil’s spoon pointed at Quilbion’s torso.

“The children Geron brings to this place fundamentally have excellent sixth sense.”

“Sixth sense?”

“The sense that perceives nark. I call that the sixth sense.”

It was information Al Terua hadn’t told him. No wait, Lil might just be spouting nonsense, so he had to filter what he heard.

“If your sixth sense is good, learning sorcery becomes easier. Kids like that have sturdy seeds inside their bodies.”

“Seeds?”

“The source of nark. You know that nark is generated inside the body, right? I call the organ that creates nark a seed. It’s not a formed organ like the heart or lungs, though.”

“…You talk as if you’ve confirmed it directly.”

“It was a necessary process.”

Lil continued with a calm face.

“The seed might be a part that’s fine to remove like hair or nails. I told you, didn’t I? That I’m not a murderer. I wanted to save those kids too.”

Quilbion swallowed nervously with tension.

“But when I looked inside directly, the seed wasn’t a single organ. It was more like blood—spread throughout the entire body.”

She was calmly stating a nauseating truth. Just how many had died by that woman’s hands…

The spoon containing porridge moved. Quilbion looked at the spoon that had come right up to his lips.

“Won’t you eat?”

A foul fishy smell suddenly surged up. It was as terrible as the stench when pig manure rotted.

The source of the smell was Lil’s fingertips.

He knew. That no smell actually came from those hands. The stench was an illusion created by his imagination.

Quilbion opened his mouth and swallowed the spoon in one go.

“That’s right, you need to eat well.”

Bile surged up his throat. As he dry heaved, the porridge he’d been holding in his mouth spilled out and fell to the floor.

Lil said it was okay and wiped his mouth with her clothes.

The contradictory kindness made all the hair on his body stand on end.

She had said it. That the cruelest thing to humans was other humans.

There was no better living witness. Because she was directly practicing what she’d said herself.

“When they eat that seed thing, do goblins change?”

“Yeah. But just any seed won’t work. There had to be a seed that matched Geron, that he needed.”

Lil’s hand touched Quilbion’s cheek.

“You’re special—Geron said so, so it’s an undeniable fact. The seed that’s sprouted inside you will transform Geron into a different being.”

“Then wouldn’t it be better if I stayed alive and helped? What’s needed is nark, so if I keep living and supplying it…”

Lil’s eyes filled with sadness.

Seeing that expression made curses well up in Quilbion. There was no mercy in that sorrow. Only the determination to kill no matter what was visible.

“We need the seed. Not nark, but the seed that’s the source of nark.”