To You, Who Will Die Alone in Paradise Chapter 68

“Leon, are you feel…?”

But Dandeleon, who should have been waiting quietly in the basement, was gone. Kellewen was startled, then discovered that one of the basement walls was open.

There was another door. Though he had confined Dandeleon before, this was the first time in this basement, so Kellewen did not know about it. Recently, no matter what happened, Kellewen rarely got greatly flustered, but as soon as he realized Dandeleon was gone, a shock so great that his vision went blurry hit him.

“Leon!”

Kellewen ran to the open passage. He cursed himself for leaving Dandeleon alone.

He thought everything was going well, so why did he do such a stupid thing? If he lost him this time too, there was no guarantee he could return to this time again. He knew that, so why on earth….

“Aaaargh!”

Someone let out a pain-filled scream from a distance. Kellewen felt his heart drop. It didn’t sound like Dandeleon’s voice, but he wasn’t sure. His heart grew even more urgent, and after stumbling several times, Kellewen barely reached the end of the passage.

A door above was open. Kellewen climbed through the door to the surface. He looked around and was stunned by the unexpectedly gruesome scene.

Corpses were strewn everywhere. Judging from the scraps of clothing and weapons on the ground, they seemed to have been from Tuella Deum, but it was hard to be certain. It was because there were almost no corpses in complete form.

Arms or legs rolling around were on the better side of things. The corpses, damaged as if torn apart by an angry beast, were more aptly described as chunks of meat. The stench of blood added a nauseating color to the ghastly scene. Kellewen covered his nose and mouth with his hand. His stomach churned.

“Apsara!”

A tearing voice came from a distance. He was briefly flustered by the name, which sounded familiar, but then something bumped against his feet. Kellewen lowered his gaze.

“…Leon?”

Dandeleon, in his pajamas, was collapsed with a large arrow stuck in his shoulder. It was an arrow he had seen so much that he was sick of it. How many times had that arrow pierced Dandeleon’s neck, his heart, his legs or arms? How many chances had he lost so futilely like that?

‘This time too…?’

Kellewen dropped to his knees on the ground. When he reached out and embraced Dandeleon, he felt a familiar heavy weight. He could tell without checking his breathing or his heartbeat. Dandeleon was dead. This time too. This time too….

“Take your hands off him.”

A sharp voice rang out. A shadow fell over him. Another smell mingled with the stench of blood. It was a smell Kellewen knew well.

Whenever he seared a monster’s skin with a knife in the basement, it smelled just like this. A strange smell, fishy yet sweet, like boiling rotten flower petals.

“Give me Apsara.”

A tall woman was pointing a blade at him. Kellewen stared blankly at the woman’s hand before realizing that what was aimed at him was not a blade, but her fingernails.

Following the sharp, smoothly curved nails like a hawk’s talons, he could see a scaly hand. Unlike her large hand and thorny arm, the woman’s other parts were almost identical to an elf’s. The moment Kellewen’s eyes reached the woman’s face, the clouds covering the moon scattered, and the soft moonlight shone on her.

Seeing the face revealed under the moonlight, Kellewen was so surprised he forgot to breathe.

The woman’s eyes were a brilliant purple. Eyes that shone on their own in the darkness, but whose color deepened when they received light. The round eyeball he had once seen in Herma’s basement overlapped with the woman’s eyes.

Kellewen muttered without realizing it.

“Leon…?”

The woman’s fingernail plunged into Kellewen’s left arm.

“Ugh!”

“I don’t like to repeat myself.”

She said coldly and twisted her nail inside his arm. The pain was like his arm was being torn off, but Kellewen barely managed to hold back a scream.

The situation was taking a very strange turn. The woman’s appearance was a completely new event. He had made dozens of attempts, but this was the first time he had seen such a woman. Moreover, the name she had uttered was….

“Did you say… Apsara?”

Kellewen asked, looking straight into the woman’s eyes. She furrowed her brows and glared at him. Kellewen once again found a trace of Dandeleon in those eyes.

It was all a mystery, but Kellewen, who had lived through repeated time for so long, was actually glad for that fact. A strong premonition close to certainty struck his heart.

Perhaps the woman before him was the very answer Kellewen had been searching for all this time. Perhaps this woman could explain Dandeleon’s endless deaths.

“This person… is not Apsara.”

The woman silently pulled her hand back. The nail that had dug into Kellewen’s arm came out haphazardly, tearing off a chunk of flesh.

“Kugh…!”

No matter how accustomed to pain Kellewen was, this was hard to endure. He curled up, groaning. Blood streamed from his forearm, soaking his clothes.

“If you wish to die, then so be it.”

The woman muttered lowly. Just before she plunged her nails into his neck, Kellewen shouted.

“Dandeleon is Apsara’s son!”

Something sharp flew and touched his neck. The tip of a nail lightly pierced Kellewen’s neck and then stopped. A wound formed on his skin, but Kellewen did not flinch. He turned Dandeleon’s body slightly to show his right ear. An earring with a purple jewel embedded in it glittered.

“It’s true. Look at the ear… the earring. He said he got it from his mother.”

The woman lowered her head very slightly. Kellewen held his breath and observed her expression. As luck would have it, the moon hid behind the clouds again, and her face was once again shrouded in darkness. However, Kellewen noticed that the nail stopped before his neck trembled faintly.

“…Show me his face.”

The woman said after a long while. Unlike before, her voice was hoarse.

Kellewen repositioned Dandeleon’s body so the woman could see him better. The wound in the middle of his neck was deep, and the blood below it that hadn’t yet dried was sticky. But fortunately, his face was clean. At a glance, he looked as if he were just sleeping. It seemed like he would open his eyes and speak to Kellewen at any moment.

Saying that he had that dream again, that an unknown woman was looking for his mother.

“So that’s why there were two directions.”

The woman muttered. Her tone was extremely dejected.

He couldn’t understand the meaning of her words, but he could guess from the situation that she had come here looking for Apsara. Pieces of memory clicked into place in Kellewen’s mind like a puzzle being solved.

Dandeleon’s dream, the voice crying out for Apsara, the woman with arms as huge as a monster’s, Herma’s charred corpse that had been shouting that it was a monster until the moment of his death.

“What was this gift for?”

The woman recited bleakly and withdrew her arm from Kellewen.

Then, a surprising thing happened. The nails that were as sharp as knives began to gradually shrink. It wasn’t just the nails. The huge arm shrank like a deflating balloon, and the scales that had densely covered her arm disappeared as if melting snow.

In just a few seconds, the woman’s arm changed to look the same as her left. Now, she looked like an ordinary elf in every way.

“Give me the child. I will take him.”

The woman said. Kellewen, who had been distracted by the woman’s transformation, belatedly understood that she was speaking to him.

Kellewen hugged Dandeleon’s body to his chest again. The woman’s expression turned fierce.

“What are you doing?”

“Who are you?”

“What will you do with that information?”

“What if I could save Dandeleon…”

Even as he said it, he didn’t have high hopes. She would probably get angry, saying he was talking nonsense. Perhaps she would even attack Kellewen, saying she would take him even if she had to kill him. Having assumed the worst, Kellewen circulated the magic in his body and finished his question.

“Would you help me if I could save Apsara’s son?”

The magic surrounding Kellewen resonated with the magic inside his body and trembled unstably. He planned to attack with magic immediately if the woman showed even the slightest aggressive attitude. This was a new development he had finally encountered after hundreds of attempts. He couldn’t let it pass without getting any clues.

The woman’s shoulders tensed slightly. It seemed she had read the movement of his magic. Her purple eyes turned to Kellewen. Unable to read any emotion in her gaze, Kellewen grew anxious. Was it anger or contempt, or….

“So it was you.”

Joy?

The woman’s eyes widened, and the corners of her lips rose. In the darkness, the purple light burned eerily. Kellewen stared blankly as her pupils dilated, as her white, dense teeth formed a creepy smile. Her mouth opened, and absurd words, words Kellewen had never expected to hear in all this immeasurable time, flowed out of the woman’s mouth.

“You’re the one who tore through time, aren’t you?”

“What does that mean?”

Dandeleon asked, frowning deeply. Kellewen smiled faintly and opened his mouth, then suddenly clamped it shut. He hastily covered his mouth with his hand, but that alone could not stop the cough. A deep, harsh cough followed a couple of times, and finally, blood gushed out between his fingers.

“Kellen!”

“I’m all right.”

Kellewen spoke calmly as if nothing was wrong and wiped his hand on the ground. The blood fell onto the white sand, leaving a stain. Dandeleon, his face pale, watched the red mark on the sand, and the incoming wave swallowing the mark and returning to the sea.

“It seems we don’t have time to be leisurely.”

Kellewen said, wiping his bloody hand on his clothes. Dandeleon couldn’t bear to look and turned his head.

The blue sea sparkled like jewels in the morning sun. When the wind blew, the familiar smell of salt wafted by. The sea water before them was blue, but if one looked up at the horizon, one could see a shimmering purple.

The only place on the continent where one could see a two-colored sea. And the place where Dandeleon was born and raised.

They were in Roalanthe. Just as they had once before, Kellewen had told a long, long story while they rode a huge demonic beast to this place. He held Dandeleon, who was sensitive to the cold, tightly and whispered in a low voice in his ear.

The painful and desperate journey to prevent Dandeleon’s death, in a gentle tone as if reading a fairy tale to a sleeping child.

“I’ve heard quite a lot. There are things I understood, and things I didn’t.”

The story that began on the demonic beast came to an abrupt end on the beach of Roalanthe.

“But we don’t have enough time to tell the whole story, so….”

Kellewen said, looking up at the sky. It seemed he was gauging the time by the sun’s position. Dandeleon, too, naturally followed his lead and retraced the events of the previous night.