The Boss Wants to Die - Chapter 72

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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.
Chapter 72
At a high level, perhaps, but at this stage, there’s nothing that can wound me.
A Qi Shield was draped across my entire body like a curtain, causing attacks to simply bounce away.
‘Then why am I injured?’
The moment I thought it, understanding dawned.
I’d certainly bound my Wings to Aktr and Aerial.
‘I set it so that I’d take the damage instead whenever they were attacked, so this wound means…….’
Aktr and Aerial are in danger!
“……!”
I kicked off the ground desperately, launching myself skyward.
‘I couldn’t have been approached because of the Qi Shield—how did they manage an attack?’
Far away, the Civilian Dwelling where I’d confined Aktr and Aerial had caved in on itself.
Aktr was pulling Aerial from the wreckage of the collapsed structure, struggling to escape the Dwelling.
I plummeted toward that spot with violent force.
Whiiiii—!
The air, unable to withstand the speed, tore sharply with a piercing sonic crack.
‘They couldn’t touch the Qi Shield, so they brought down the building instead.’
My eyes flashed with cruelty.
‘To force the people inside out on their own feet.’
Vicious creatures through and through.
“You two—not of the Water Clan?”
The Pirate noticed Aktr and Aerial and shifted into a defensive stance.
“Who are you? If you don’t speak up now, this woman’s head comes off.”
The Pirate pressed a blade to the throat of a woman he was holding, threatening them.
I stared directly at him and raised my hand.
Still suspended in the air, my body swayed wildly.
Without so much as blinking, I took careful aim at my target.
From a distance, I must have looked like a demon with crimson eyes.
Though I suppose a demon is preferable to a Demon God.
My eyes narrowed wickedly as I flicked my hand sharply.
[Demon God Helord has cast Toxin Under Nails!]
Screeeee—!
A purple poison dart flew at terrifying speed, piercing straight through the Pirate’s skull.
The Pirate fell forward in the exact posture he’d been threatening from.
“Aaaah!”
The woman held hostage screamed.
She’d been pinned beneath the corpse.
“Please take my hand.”
Aktr extended his hand to the panic-stricken woman, though it helped little.
With blood spilled everywhere and family members dying before her eyes, the woman could hardly be in her right mind.
“Kyaaaah!”
Crushed beneath the body, she only screamed.
With a sigh, Aktr extracted the woman himself.
Once grasped by the muscular Aktr, her body slipped free as easily as a light doll.
‘Aktr doesn’t seem affected at all.’
His expression was composed.
The illusion created by the Water God was so intricate it couldn’t be distinguished from reality.
‘Yet there’s no way a scene of slaughter like this would be familiar to him…….’
I frowned and descended near them.
Tap—.
Despite falling almost straight down from such a height, I landed with barely a sound.
The hem of my dress settled like butterfly wings, sending sand scattering.
“W-who are you……?”
The woman looked up at me with a dazed expression.
I didn’t respond, simply turning my head away.
‘I can’t see her face.’
This woman must be dead as well.
The thought made my heart recoil, and I found it difficult to meet her eyes directly.
I turned and approached Aerial.
Are you all right?
……
Sorry I’m late.
The wound on my cheek was damage Aerial should have taken instead.
My left wing shielded Aerial, my right wing wrapped around Aktr, but the impact struck my left wing.
Though it hung limp now, he must have fought fiercely to keep from losing the woman.
I checked the Staff he was gripping.
‘Soaked in blood.’
Whatever force he’d been clenching it with, the sunset-colored rod was stained crimson.
Can’t you cast skills?
At my question, Aerial gritted his teeth and bowed his head.
‘The fever’s gotten worse. He can’t even cast skills anymore.’
Magic consumes both Mana and a set amount of Stamina.
In a body wracked with pain like that, lighting a single candle would be out of reach.
Mom! Dad!
The woman, consciousness returning too late, crawled toward two corpses sprawled nearby.
Then came a wail that seemed to swallow the world.
Aerial lifted his head.
Mom! Dad! No! Don’t leave me alone! Don’t leave me alone……!
Perhaps because it didn’t feel like someone else’s tragedy.
Aerial watched the sobbing woman for a long time.
Then he lifted his gaze and surveyed the surroundings.
Having hidden in the Civilian Dwelling all this while, witnessing this carnage with his own eyes must have been a first.
The distinctive fishy reek of Water-tribe blood and acrid smoke.
The groaning earth, shocked by loss of the beloved and seized by the terror of death.
Don’t look.
I raised my hand to cover Aerial’s eyes.
Beneath my palm, a scalding heat radiated.
Aerial was weeping.
Pride-filled as he was, he crumbled weakly.
His tear-dampened lips trembled.
You don’t have to cover my eyes.
……
I’ve seen it countless times. In dreams.
Aerial gave a laugh that sounded like crying.
‘So Aerial is a survivor after all.’
I bit my lower lip.
Now that I think about it, maybe it wasn’t a dream at all—maybe those Cursed visions showed me the Water Ruins. I must be an idiot. Truly, hopelessly foolish…….
His voice faded, hollow and without strength.
He looked like someone who’d given up entirely.
The somber resignation that arrived too late seemed to drain even his rage.
[Aerial Atlantis’s Favorability has been reset due to psychological trauma!]
[Aerial Atlantis’s Favorability: 0.
80 points required until Quest completion!]
―Though his Favorability dropping from 100 to 0 should have been fortunate, I felt no joy.
Now he didn’t even seem to have the strength left to hate anyone.
Aerial looked as though he were dead inside.
‘……His fever’s gotten worse.’
The shimmering heat-haze radiating from Aerial’s body was visible even to the naked eye.
‘At that level, his blood must be boiling with pain.’
Aerial gazed silently and helplessly at his kinsman’s corpse, voiceless.
The woman still lay prostrate over her parents’ bodies, weeping.
‘If I’d arrived sooner, could I have stopped it?’
The feeling sat wrong with me.
Truth be told, it had felt wrong since Aerial insisted on going to the Water Ruins.
Dim and dreary.
This place suffused with yin energy was like the Demon Palace itself.
A Cursed space where people die and die again, repeating endlessly.
Aerial’s eyes, mineral and void of all feeling, stared into emptiness.
As if he had no tears left to shed, he hung helplessly aware of the terrible tragedy unfolding before him.
Strangely, I found myself thinking that Aerial’s expressionless face resembled Aktr’s.
A drained visage, too exhausted even for grief.
Only the heat from the fire the Pirate had set licked across Aerial’s pale blue skin with a cruel crimson tongue.
“Demon God Helord.”
Aerial, who had been staring at the corpse all along, called out to me.
“I’m sorry for becoming useless baggage after you went to the trouble of making me your retainer.”
I glanced backward without turning my head.
Aktr seemed bewildered, his trouser leg seized by a wailing woman who looked as though the world itself was collapsing.
“Please save my friend. She must be nearby somewhere……!”
Aktr’s face twisted with discomfort, his brow furrowed.
‘He wouldn’t have heard me call him a retainer, would he?’
I felt a flicker of unease and bared my teeth in a low growl.
“Don’t talk like that.”
Aerial showed little reaction.
He simply lay there, limp and drowned in despair.
“A retainer like me isn’t worth keeping. You can discard me. Or better yet, just throw me away.”
……
“Leave me in these ruins, abandoned.”
I pondered his words, my eyes burning with sudden intensity.
‘Throw you away?’
At those words, something like an ember kindled in my chest.
I know, at least dimly, the fierce life Aerial has lived until now.
I know you—who showed such vivid emotion, more clearly than anyone.
‘You’re giving up like this? You, Aerial?’
Why did I make Aerial my retainer in the first place?
I had hesitated before doing so.
Because I was wary of that mindset—that power alone decides everything.
Betrayal would be a headache.
And yet I made him my retainer because I felt that Aerial’s burning passion was genuine.
Resentment and rage, and yet still struggling to somehow change what had already come to pass.
That image resembled me.
Sympathy through shared suffering.
Yes, I felt that for him.
Though his level grew high enough that I secretly hoped he might one day kill me, I also wished for him to achieve his vengeance.
Just as I desperately wish to log out from this game, so did you.
You fought with such desperation.
So I’ve been cheering for you all this time.
‘And yet you want me to discard you like some useless thing……’
Aerial, you can’t speak of yourself that way.
You, who lives in this game world as though it were real—I couldn’t have been wrong about you.
You struggled so fiercely.
And yet……
‘Are you giving up? Giving up on yourself?!’
My fist clenched tight.
Six years have passed, and I can barely remember my life in Korea.
Still, I believed there was a ‘real’ me beneath the Demon God.
And I saw that same hope in you.
That there are those here who dream with genuine hearts.
That if you achieved your dream, perhaps I could achieve mine too.
‘I never saw you as a tool. ……I regarded you as an equal.’

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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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