The Boss Wants to Die - Chapter 23

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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The boss wants to die.
Episode 23
After that, he had acted differently, so there was no occasion for him to clash with Michael.
Thus, had Michael not come searching for Akt and the Evil God himself, they would never have met in this life either.
“The longer time passes, the harder it becomes to remember when it all began.”
“When it began?”
“You really think you were the only Player who ever tried to kill the Evil God?”
Akt shot the words out sharply, then abruptly furrowed his brow.
A terrible migraine had seized him.
He waited out of habit, pressing his temples, for the pain to dull enough that he could move.
This cursed headache grew worse with each passing day.
“The situation is complicated, but it’s not entirely hopeless.”
Akt pressed through the ache and continued.
“Why?”
“Because you’re the only one I ever confided in about this.”
……
“Back then, I was still young.”
Akt, looking back on those distant days, let the migraine slip away and exhaled softly.
“You know the situation well enough.”
……
“How much do you remember specifically?”
Michael lowered his head. He gazed down at his empty hands.
Calluses, hardened from grinding through endless Quests, marked his palms.
“My first memory is the moment I killed the Evil God.”
With these hands.
Akt leaned back against the chair, arms crossed.
It was a gesture urging him to continue.
“After I killed the Evil God, you appeared.”
Michael too remembered that moment vividly.
The day he had first killed the Evil God.
***
Ash and dust swirled across the Land, catching the sunset and gleaming red.
Each blackened heap of ash reflected the crimson glow like drops of blood, and on all sides the stench of char and the chill of death conjured the image of hell itself.
Michael stood in the midst of it all.
His breath came up to his throat, thick and labored.
Sweat traced rapidly down his temples, bearing witness to the brutal combat he had just endured.
He could not clearly remember what his Level was, what clothes he wore, or what the situation even was.
Yet one thing was certain: he had killed the Evil God Helrod.
“Hah—gasp—hah, hah——”
Crackle-crackle.
The sound of burning houses and Michael’s ragged breathing layered over one another.
Treading across that terrible silence, a white-haired man rose onto the crimson earth.
The man’s shadow wavered and rippled in the air.
Each step he took, forcing his nearly buckling legs to straighten, scattered his trembling breath across the pool of blood at his feet.
The man’s shadow soon reached the body sprawled on the ground.
“Ah, ah……”
Akt let out a thin, reedy moan the moment he caught sight of Helrod’s corpse.
It was a sound like an executed man with his tongue cut out, keening faintly from beyond death itself.
He could not cry out. Instead, he collapsed to his knees.
In truth, he was crumbling.
“No, no, no……”
Covered shamefully in dirt and dust, crawling like a beast toward the Evil God, Akt shook his head in meaningless denial.
His eyes, wide with shock, had reddened with burst capillaries and seemed dry—yet moments later they poured forth burning tears.
Michael, blessed with keen sight, could discern those delicate details from a great distance.
Even the bestial, choking sobs that wracked Akt’s frame.
“No, no. Sister. No……”
Akt traced the porcelain-pale face of the Evil God with hands smudged in soot and ash.
He drew great shuddering breaths through his nose, trying to regain himself, but it seemed beyond his reach.
He forced himself to speak to the Evil God with a pretense of composure.
“Just wait, sister. I—I’ll find a way. Just wait. Just……”
He wiped the blood from Evil God’s face with his sleeve, then pressed his ear to her chest.
There, he heard only the cold void—no heartbeat at all.
“Sister.”
He wanted to deny it, but that was the limit of what he could do.
He had no choice but to accept it.
“No. No, please…….”
When his Skill failed to heal Evil God, he began scooping up the blood that spilled from her wounds.
Spilled lifeblood would never be gathered again.
And yet Akt Hebgenia repeated the futile attempt again and again.
He grasped her cold hand and tried to warm it, seized her shoulder and shook her, tore strips from his own clothes and bound them around her wounds.
But there was one wound he could not cover with cloth—the mortal one in her chest.
Because Michael’s Holy Sword was still stubbornly driven through it.
Akt couldn’t bring himself to pull the blade free, and stood trembling violently with his hand half-extended toward it.
“No. No! Please, Sister…….”
That terrible despair, that grief rising all the way to his throat—Michael felt it with an almost unnatural clarity.
And as he dwelt on that anguish, Michael Irubel found himself seized by an irrational terror: he had made a terrible mistake.
It was a deeply strange experience.
Until the moment he killed Evil God, he had believed that this—and only this—was the realization of justice.
Helrod, the evil of this world, had to die, and he had killed her without a moment’s doubt, and he still believed that was right.
Yet somehow, he felt he had done wrong.
His heart and his mind had split apart.
Michael’s face, which had been perfectly composed, contorted as though he might weep.
The pain was unbearable.
He was a veteran who had successfully completed countless Quests that ended in death, yet this was a terror he could not face.
This was what it felt like for Evil God to die.
“Why……?”
Akt, upon seeing Michael, whispered the question in a hollow voice.
Something broken in his voice echoed through Michael’s mind like a haunting.
Michael Irubel stared at them both with unfocused eyes.
He was utterly dumbfounded.
He was so bewildered he could barely understand himself.
His soul screamed that he should not have killed Evil God, that he had made an irreversible mistake.
His heart pounded like madness. The world seemed to be ending; everything was stained red.
“Why did you do that, Michael?”
“Akt, I…….”
“Why? Why did you do it? Sister was already suffering, she didn’t want more pain, she just wanted to die in peace, and you drove your blade into that tender heart!”
So he had plunged a sword into that gentle soul.
So she could never rise again.
Never, ever heal.
“All of this is your fault, Michael! Your sin! Do you even understand what you’ve done?!”
Akt Hebgenia had been younger then.
If someone asked whether his appearance had changed, the answer was no.
His hair had been short then, unlike now when it was long. That was all.
Yet his presence was utterly different.
Whether because his frame had been more slender, or because his eyes had gleamed with such pristine vitality…….
Inside those dark eyes, indescribable emotion overflowed without measure.
Akt Hebgenia had been a man who could laugh more freely, weep more openly, move with greater abandon.
His emotions had shimmered with multiplicity; his youthful blood had made him bristle at the slightest provocation, and he had reacted keenly to every stimulus.
He had experienced the social turbulence that comes with first reaching manhood.
Nothing like the fully ripened atmosphere of now.
Akt Hebgenia had been closer to something bittersweet, something with an edge of tartness.
At least, that was how Michael remembered him.
“You ruined everything!!”
“What are you talking about?”
Michael asked, wiping his cold cheeks dry with the back of his hand, tears still clinging to his skin.
Akt seemed to have no intention of answering the question.
His anger had become hatred, and it strangled his voice.
“Why did you kill her? Answer the question.”
Akt wept so hard he could barely open his eyes.
Michael, confronted with the raw misery pouring into him, felt helpless and desperate, so he rationalized and cried out.
“I only eliminated the Evil God! What’s wrong with that?!”
“What are you even believing in? What are you following?”
Tears streamed down Akt’s face, which had grown cold and severe.
“Do you think everything you know is all there is to this world?”
Akt shook his head.
His short white hair, sunken and thin, trembled with anguish.
Watching him, Michael too felt the pain.
“Why do you think she used you? Why do you think she wanted to die? You knew it yourself! You knew the Evil God wanted to die! But you exploited that!”
Michael couldn’t make sense of any of it.
He felt wronged, yet guilt gnawed at him; he had been certain, yet Akt’s reproach cut to the bone.
‘Why did the Evil God want to die? Do you think I know?’
Michael didn’t know. Of course he didn’t.
He hadn’t even wanted to know.
He had only thought it had worked out well.
What had he done so wrong? The Evil God wanted to die anyway, so wasn’t it better this way?
He should have shouted it boldly, but his lips were sealed shut as if by a zipper, unable to move.
There was only pain.
The same pain Akt felt.
Holding the cold Evil God’s body against his own as her heart was pierced by a blade, Akt wailed.
“The Evil God will not return! This world, this world……!”
He seemed to want to explain something, but emotion choked him, and he couldn’t go on.
With every word that left Akt’s lips, sounds like a beast’s cry spilled out instead.
There could be only one creature in all the world who wept with such raw despair at the Evil God’s death.
The Evil God had died with a smile happier than anyone’s, and she remained cradled in his arms for a long time.
It was a contrast so cruel to Akt, who thrashed his body back and forth with all his strength, trying to shake off the sorrow.
And that he had brought this about with his own hands was the most painful, the most unbearable thing of all.
Michael Iruber had killed the Evil God, yet he felt nothing had been set right—nothing at all.
There was no justice there.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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