The Boss Wants to Die - Chapter 65

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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.
65
The Demon God brought a towel and dried away the moisture, then pulled the soft blanket up to his neck.
Aerial curled his body and his teeth chattered together.
“Damn it. The fever’s so bad I think I’m seeing things.”
“Hallucinations?”
“Rowan.”
Aktr cut in abruptly once more.
The Demon God turned to look back at him.
Aktr had walked close enough to speak to her directly.
“You haven’t gotten any rest, have you?”
Aerial startled.
He’d never imagined Aktr was the sort of man who could speak that way.
Indeed.
The Demon God would have easily mistaken him for a gentle soul.
He even offered a soft smile.
“Go inside and get some sleep. The ship will reach harbor soon.”
“Already? That’s fast.”
The Demon God gazed through the round porthole, which creaked softly with the ship’s motion.
The sea, stretching to the horizon’s edge, rippled gently as it pushed the vessel forward.
They were sailing toward the island where the Water Ruins stood.
“You’re right. I can see the peaks of land.”
“Once we disembark, we need to move immediately. You’ll be exhausted, so rest while you can.”
The Demon God nodded and took a step to leave.
But then something occurred to her, and she poked just her face through the doorway crack and glared at Aktr.
“Don’t bother Aerial.”
“I won’t.”
“He’s a patient.”
“I said I won’t.”
Aktr sighed and pushed her shoulder toward the corridor, then shut the door.
Click.
……
……
A heavy silence fell.
Aerial tensed to his limit and looked up at Aktr.
Aktr’s face was stern, his gaze cast downward.
A face devoid of any emotion.
A black stare that felt twisted.
His skin crawled.
“You’re wary like an abandoned cat.”
Once the Demon God had left, Aktr dropped the polite register entirely.
Aerial found it preposterous.
“Isn’t that taking impudence a bit far?”
Aerial, despite being bedridden, stiffened his pride.
“My legs may not move, but my voice works. I can cast Skills.”
Aerial pulled his arm free from under the blanket and conjured a flame in his palm.
Black fire.
Aktr read it back exactly as it appeared before his eyes.
“Your fire’s black.”
A slip.
Aerial panicked but skillfully dodged the trap.
“Ever since I tried to kill an NPC in the Dungeon, my Mana has been corrupted. What of it? I was never a Player inclined toward virtue to begin with.”
……
“Keep talking and I’ll burn you to death—make us a matching pair.”
Aktr didn’t flinch at Aerial’s threat.
He simply dragged a chair over and sat beside the bed.
“You’ve been seeing hallucinations lately, haven’t you?”
The unexpected strike froze Aerial solid.
Aktr’s lips remained pressed in a thin line, his eyes lifeless and trembling not at all.
It felt exactly like death closing in to swallow him whole.
Aerial tensed as if to spring from the bed.
Aktr’s sigh-laden voice followed, raw with frustration.
“You don’t know your place, hovering beside the Demon God like that.”
……
“You keep grinding on me.”
Aerial held his silence, eyes sharp and unwavering.
“But I can’t destroy you just to put my mind at ease.”
……
“I can’t afford to waste anything.”
Speaking in riddles, Aktr gathered his hair back.
The strands kept slipping free—an irritation he couldn’t abide.
“If you vanish suddenly, the Demon God will come looking. I can’t risk unnecessary suspicion.”
“You speak as though you could kill me. Do you truly think you could? At that Level?”
“Ha. No.”
Aktr laughed, draping his bound hair over his shoulder.
“I said killing you would be wasteful.”
Which meant he could do it.
Aerial wanted to believe it was hollow bluster.
“Either way, that’s not what matters.”
Aerial wrung out what courage remained and asked.
“What did you do to me? A Hallucination Skill? An Auditory Hallucination Skill? Both?”
“I did nothing. You simply came under my influence on your own.”
“Don’t lie to me!”
Aerial’s patience shattered into a shout.
“You want to brainwash me, but my mental defenses are maxed. While I’m being reasonable, you’d better tell me straight what you did.”
“There you are. That’s more like it—you were always a wild cat.”
Aktr suddenly laughed.
Aerial had witnessed countless villains, but never one who smiled so utterly black.
Those gaunt, shadowed eyes in particular—they promised a cruelty that made his skin crawl.
The gentle face Aktr wore before the Demon God.
If it fell through to damnation, it would look exactly like this.
When he spoke, his voice was like a bitter winter wind—each word sharp enough to frost the air.
“I never expected you to be compliant from the start.”
In the blink of an eye, Aktr reached out and seized Aerial by the throat.
Already starved for oxygen from the fever, with his windpipe crushed, the world spun before his eyes.
Aktr showed no mercy, tightening his grip.
“I didn’t come here to talk. I came to threaten you.”
“Wh—what……”
“I know what hallucinations you’re seeing.”
Aktr’s breath came thin and sinister, as if he’d just crawled up from the pit itself.
“Whatever you saw in that hallucination, don’t tell the Demon God. Don’t think about killing her.”
Don’t even look at her.
Don’t touch her.
Don’t be near her.
Don’t harbor affection for her.
None of it. Don’t.
Aktr’s low voice poured out like a curse.
“Why—should—I—obey—you?”
Aerial laughed, strangled and breathless.
He had nothing left to lose anyway.
If he could bite the hand of one who’d shown him malice, what did the Sanctuary matter?
It wouldn’t hurt to snap one photograph and get out.
Aktr did not waver at Aerial’s audacity.
He only leaned close to his ear and whispered softly.
“If you don’t obey, I’ll find every last photograph of Syrius that you hold so dear and burn them all. Your immortal life will be eternal loneliness.”
Thud!
Aktr shoved Aerial deep into the bed and rose.
Aerial lay stunned, unable to process what he’d heard.
It was a counterattack he’d never seen coming.
Never in his darkest imaginings.
“Wait!”
Thanks to pushing himself to the brink, Aktr managed to lift his head before the door closed behind him.
Aerial’s temples pulsed with visible veins as he screamed until his voice cracked.
“Are you the human involved in that incident?!”
“Do I look like it?”
Aktr asked flatly.
Aerial fell silent.
It made no sense.
Aktr was an ordinary human, and his profession as a priest hardly aligned with maritime crime.
And that pallid skin of his.
It bore no resemblance to the bronzed complexion of those kissed by the sun.
“I’m an outsider, unrelated to your tragic past.”
“Then how do you know about Syrius?!”
“Beats me.”
Aktr replied with an indifference that could hardly go deeper.
“If you’re curious, don’t ignore my advice—commit it to memory. Hallucinations aren’t mere delusions.”
“What?”
“They’re real.”
Click.
The door shut.
Aerial’s mind spun in confusion, his body rigid in the same position for nearly ten minutes.
But the fever wore him down, and he couldn’t hold out much longer.
He lay buried in the damp-soaked bed, breathing sharp, angry breaths, until he made a decision.
‘Those hallucinations aren’t just delusions?’
Then what about what the Demon God said?
The words that wounded her—my words?
‘I can’t stay like this.’
He tried to push himself up using the Staff as a cane, but his legs gave way beneath him.
The cool cabin floor drew him in like a flame, swallowing his burning body.
Aerial forced his dimming eyes open and hoisted his torso up again.
Red hair cascading down, red eyes, and fingernails spreading red like stains—he saw them all.
He was transforming into the very embodiment of hatred.
‘I’ll spend my entire life in a hellfire of rage.’
Aerial understood this too, somewhere deep down.
Wrath and hatred were like that.
Forces that dragged him toward destruction.
What the Demon God was warning him about in those hallucinations—Aerial grasped it in his very bones.
Because unlike the hallucinations, he in reality had already succumbed to ruin.
If all this pain and suffering were real, was the Demon God already living in such a hell?
For how long?
Since when?
If the hallucinations were truth, then the one most to be pitied was not Aerial, but the Demon God.
“Damn it. What the hell is going on?”
He clenched his teeth and pushed forward, one step at a time.
He couldn’t afford to be helpless against Aktr.
‘The way he shields the Demon God—the secret must lie with her.’
He resolved to do the exact opposite of what Aktr Hebgenia had warned.
Looking down on me like you’re better?
Aerial laughed coldly.
‘I’ll draw tears from those hollow eyes.’
Aerial had disliked Aktr from the start.
An unpleasant man.
Especially those lifeless eyes.
They were the eyes of a corpse.
They came alive like a lie when he was with the Demon God, but that made it all the more unnatural.
It was as if he’d embedded an abyss scraped bare of all feeling, leaving nothing but emptiness, right into his pupils.
That’s why Aerial’s spine chilled whenever he looked at Aktr.
‘If I can uncover the secret from the Demon God, Aktr won’t be able to act so composed.’

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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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