The Boss Wants to Die - Chapter 67

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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 67
The White Space was covered in a semi-transparent, milky-white membrane.
Aktr’s Silver Chain wove across it like a serpent, hissing softly as it moved.
And beyond that membrane, the Demon God waited.
Hold on.
The Demon God?
Aerial’s eyes went wide.
‘So we’re inside the Cabin?’
The Demon God’s Chamber—the one Aerial had visited just moments before.
It was here.
He realized then that Aktr had warped the Cabin’s space, folding it into a new one.
A new room within the Demon God’s Chamber.
Like an onion.
‘I couldn’t create a High-Dimensional Magic Space of this caliber.’
The Demon God lay unconscious, collapsed.
The chains held her suspended without letting her fall, a graceful display of Aktr’s control.
‘He’s hiding his true strength from the Demon God.’
Aerial stared hard at the chains that cradled her form so tenderly.
“I’ve never heard of a skill like this…….”
“Still think it’s an illusion?”
Aktr asked with a calm, almost innocent tone.
“This is what an illusion really looks like.”
He flicked his thumb and middle finger together.
Snap.
A familiar figure materialized before them, wavering like a mirage.
Hair like seawater poured over stone, eyes the color of the deep.
“Siris?”
Aktr rested his chin against his crossed arms with a bored expression.
But Aerial couldn’t tear his gaze from the illusion Aktr had woven.
‘He recreated her down to every detail?’
Without having met her in life, there was no way he could be this precise…….
“Aerial.”
She whispered his name.
Even her voice matched perfectly.
That voice Aerial had yearned for even in dreams.
That smile.
Snap.
The moment Aerial turned toward her, Aktr’s fingers moved again.
Siris’s form dissolved into nothing.
“No, wait…….”
“That hurts, doesn’t it.”
Aktr murmured indifferently.
“Losing Siris again.”
“You bastard……!”
Rage blazed through Aerial as he watched Aktr toy with Siris’s memory.
He wanted nothing more than to land a hit—a punch, anything—on this hateful man.
But the Shackles binding his hands refused to budge.
“This pain should mean nothing to you.”
“What?”
“I’ll strip away every last memory of her you have left.”
“Do you have any idea what that suffering means?!”
Aerial broke. He couldn’t hold back anymore.
“Siris was my Soul Companion! Not some fleeting lover like humans know—a companion of spirit and soul! You could never understand that meaning, that depth!”
At those words, Aktr’s lips twisted savagely.
His nose, which had been still as sculpted stone, creased with sudden fury.
His voice came out rough, splintering.
“How dare you presume.”
“Free me. I’ll kill you.”
“You only ever think of yourself. You believe you’re the most wretched being in all existence.”
An anguished cry.
“I think no one could ever match you. Aerial Atlantis, so enamored with the role of the lonely and wretched that you don’t even flinch at wounding others.”
“How dare you——”
“Is it that you can’t hide being freshly adult, or are you simply stupid?”
Aktr’s eyes gleamed with open contempt as he growled the words.
“All you know is how to throw tantrums, is that it? Call yourself a wildcat enough times and you start believing you’re actually a beast? And look at the state of you after losing the treasure you prized most.”
The moment those words landed, Aerial’s face—which had been contorted with rage—went rigid as stone.
“The treasure I prized most? How could you possibly know such a thing?”
A hypothesis flickered into being in his mind.
From the moment Aktr had brought up Siris, he’d spoken as though he knew everything about Aerial’s circumstances.
The reason Aerial had fallen into ruin.
The existence of Siris.
The true nature of the Shell Necklace.
Even what would become of Aerial if he lost it.
“Surely you don’t mean——”
“……”
“You deliberately didn’t stop it, did you? The NPC destroying my necklace?”
The fact that Aktr hadn’t confronted him even after learning Aerial was a Demon God worshipper.
The fact that he hadn’t sent the surviving NPCs out of the dungeon at once, but had deliberately brought them before Aerial.
The fact that an NPC harboring resentment toward Aerial had broken his necklace.
The fact that Aerial, deprived of his treasure, had been consumed by hatred and fallen ill with fever.
All of it.
All of it.
‘Aktr Hevgenia orchestrated this?’
Aerial wanted to believe he was being paranoid.
Yet Aktr had known even who Aerial harbored his hatred toward.
‘He knew what Siris looked like.’
His breathing grew ragged.
‘Recreated it perfectly in an Illusion. As if from a photograph.’
Chills raced down his spine.
Aktr knew nearly everything about Aerial.
And knowing it all, he had deliberately provoked the NPC into breaking the necklace, inflicting fever upon him.
So that Aerial could never kill the Demon God.
Could such perfection in deception even exist?
He had fallen into a trap.
Only now did he see it.
“See? Stupid, as I said.”
Aktr smiled crookedly, his tone dripping with scorn.
There was nothing to refute.
Aerial let out a hollow laugh.
The elegance of Aktr’s scheme had robbed him even of the will to resist.
“Don’t blame me.”
Though Aktr had thrust Aerial into the abyss, his face remained unmoved.
“Whatever your reason, it’s your own stupidity for deciding to entangle yourself with the Demon God in the first place.”
“Hah!”
“If you’d never appeared, I’d never have needed to restrain you like this.”
Aktr drove the final nail.
“The Demon God wants to invite you into the party no matter what. So I simply accepted you by the safest method available.”
“Accepted me?”
Aerial’s eyes went narrow as slits.
“You call it accepting me when you’ve trapped me so I can’t harm the Demon God?”
“……”
“So you just watched, then?”
Aerial’s voice climbed higher, sharper with each word.
“Watched while the NPC destroyed my necklace?”
“Yes.”
Looking at Aerial’s eyes glistening with tears, Aktr answered with cruel simplicity.
“Once you lose your treasure, you won’t be able to bear it—you’ll fall ill with fever. Fever so severe you won’t even be able to cast your skills properly.”
“Then I’ll never be able to kill the Demon God, will I? That’s what you were after? With a method like that——!”
Instead of answering, Aktr simply gazed at Aerial with dark, unwavering eyes.
Aerial stepped backward, shaking his head.
He couldn’t believe it.
“You’re completely insane. You’ve lost your mind!”
Now he understood those black eyes of Aktr’s—the ones that radiated such ominous chill, as if peering into an abyss.
They were the eyes of someone who had abandoned their humanity.
Eyes that had sold their soul for a single purpose: to keep the Demon God safe.
“Why would you go that far? I never would have killed the Demon God anyway. Why were you so certain I’d hurt her!”
“You already have.”
Aktr’s lips twisted grotesquely.
Like the anguished shriek of a cursed soul, sorrow seeped through, and his voice emerged broken and raw between his teeth.
“You already killed her.”
Aerial’s breath caught, trapped in his chest where it had been building with his shout.
Aktr, sprawled across the throne, was suffering—his grip on the armrest so fierce it seemed he might splinter it.
His cold, mineral-like cheeks trembled violently.
From one of Aktr’s eyes, a tear rolled down slowly, parched and thin.
“In the most agonizing way. Burned her to death.”
……
“With nothing but your own selfish ignorance. Utterly convinced of your own misery, right until the very end…….”
Aktr bit down on one corner of his mouth and sneered.
“Mocking the Demon God’s pity for you—and that’s how you killed her.”
“I…”
“You only know how to whine. You never change.”
Aktr relaxed his rigid body back into the throne at an angle, letting his eyelids fall.
His face was contempt itself—a cold erasure of emotion.
“How much longer do I have to overlook your excuses?”
When someone who rarely showed emotion, let alone anger, revealed raw hatred, anyone would falter.
Aerial was startled by this transformed version of Aktr, his lips parting stupidly.
At that naive response, a deep breath leaked out between Aktr’s lips.
It was the look one gives a foolish, troublesome younger cousin—one who never listens and only causes problems.
Moments ago he had glared as if ready to kill; now there was only a faded, tepid hatred in his eyes.
As if centuries had passed and even his rage had weathered away.
Aktr, who had somehow returned to his former expressionless face, spoke slowly.
“I’ll give you one last chance.”
He extended his hand, and the chain moved, drawing the unconscious Demon God into the White Space.
The snow-white Aktr embraced the pitch-black Demon God in his pale arms and issued a warning.
“Don’t touch my Soul Companion.”
Soul Companion?
Again, Aerial’s voice could not escape his lips as sound.
“Don’t hurt her anymore.”
When I opened my eyes, I was back in the Demon God’s Cabin.
***
“Ugh, my head.”
I shook my dazed head a couple of times.
‘I was having a conversation with Aerial, wasn’t I…’
Just as my head began to swim, I’d drifted into a light sleep and then woken—that was the feeling.
When I lifted my head, it seemed my hunch was right; Aerial was standing before me.
For some reason, his face looked more gaunt than it had moments ago.
“Aerial?”
“Ah…”
He let out a vacant moan.
“You said you had something you wanted to ask. Why are you just sitting there? Ask me. I’ll answer you.”
He opened his mouth as if about to speak, then closed it again, his eyes squinting.
Now that I looked closely, his eyes were bloodshot and inflamed.
“Have you been crying?”
At my question, Aerial’s face crumpled even further.
His body trembled violently, as if he were bearing unbearable guilt, and he asked:
“Why are you helping me?”

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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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