Trash of the Count’s Family - Chapter 555

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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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Chapter 120. A Worthless Fellow

“What are you talking about?”

Choi Han heard a voice from behind him.
Alberu was standing there.

“…Who?”

Kaige, unable to recognize Alberu through his mask and altered voice, stared at him with guarded eyes.
Then Choi Han’s mouth opened.
His voice burst forth like an exclamation.

“That can’t be-!”
“Lower your voice.”

Alberu gripped Choi Han’s shoulder firmly.
His gaze flickered toward the closed War Room door.

Alberu had followed after Choi Han, who had left the War Room with a strange expression, and caught fragments of what Kaige had been saying.

‘…The Oath of Death with Kale has been severed-‘

That meant death?
Alberu whispered in a low voice to Choi Han, who was staring at him.

“Do you want Duke Fredo to hear everything? Would you prefer our enemies heard it all? In this situation?”

Choi Han’s open mouth snapped shut.
His gaze turned toward the closed War Room door.
Alberu whispered.

“The moment Kale was mentioned, the door closed immediately, so those inside shouldn’t have heard.”

Given Alberu’s words, Choi Han finally exhaled deeply.
At the same time, his face twisted.

“We must go to the Endable Kingdom. We need to leave for Endable immediately.”

Choi Han’s fingertips trembled. The same words kept spilling from his lips.

“We need to get to Endable quickly—”
“Be quiet!”

At Alberu’s irritated voice, Choi Han finally managed to see his expression clearly.
Choi Han’s eyes widened.

‘…Had Albert Crossman ever displayed his annoyance and anger so openly before?’

Never.
Choi Han realized that Alberu was also at his wit’s end.
Alberu muttered in a voice brimming with exasperation.

“I’m thinking. Thinking. What should I do?”

Kale Heniatus is dying?
Just like this?
With Erhafen and Bud right beside him?
Is that even possible?

Crash!
Alberu heard the War Room door burst open violently.

“Mm.”

He let out a soft sound.
Alberu could see the Black Dragon trembling uncontrollably.

“Y-you human!”

Raon approached with his front legs shaking, gripping the video communication device in his trembling grasp.
Crackle. Crackle.
Black mana oscillated irregularly around Raon.
Snap!
In response to that mana, cracks spread across the surface of the video communication device. Increasingly massive and powerful mana rippled around Raon.

Raon barely managed to open his mouth as he looked at Alberu’s hardened face.

“…The human, he, he disappeared, they say. That, the old Dragon grandfather- grandfather-”

Alberu drew a deep breath as he watched Raon struggle to continue speaking.
He peered past Raon into the open War Room beyond.

Inside the open War Room sat Lord Sherit, Duke Fredo, and the Dragon Hybrid.
Fredo stood with his arms crossed, regarding this scene with an enigmatic expression.

Alberu’s lips parted.

“Damn bastard.”

Kale Heniatus. What in the world are you doing? What happened to you?

‘…For now.’

Alberu recalled Erhafen’s words that Kale had vanished.

‘We don’t yet know if he’s dead or alive.’

If that were the case.

“Choi Han.”
“Yes.”
“Go to Endable.”

Alberu removed his mask as he regarded Fredo.
Simultaneously, his skin tone, eyes, and hair color shifted.

“…!”

Duke Fredo’s eyes widened and his mouth fell open as Alberu spoke.

“I’ll go to the Royal Palace first and catch up with you afterward.”

Choi Han and Alberu’s gazes met.
Choi Han’s lips opened.

“Then I’ll head out first.”

Choi Han and Alberu each took a step in different directions with those words.

* * *

Kale Heniatus felt his breath constricting.

‘…It’s so hard to breathe….’

I wanted to breathe, but I couldn’t manage proper respiration.
My eyes wouldn’t open, and my ears felt numb.
I couldn’t smell anything through my nose.

‘I remember being seized by the Black Hand and dragged somewhere.’

Beyond that, nothing came to mind.
Despite the suffocating sensation, paradoxically I was still breathing.
Within this contradiction, I strained with all my might to move my body.

‘Damn it! What kind of situation is this!’

I wished I could at least writhe, but my body wouldn’t permit even the slightest movement.

-Child who has escaped the hand of god, the grasp of fate.

At the chilling voice that suddenly reached me, my heart seemed to plummet.
Hearing was the first sense I was permitted.

Thump. Thump. Thump.
My heart pounded violently.

-Humans, all living beings—birth and death are their natural order, their fate. Yet you have escaped it.

Who are you?
Is the Black Hand speaking now?
What is the Black Hand?

-Moreover, even time itself has been twisted. You are yourself, and yet simultaneously you are not.

My body trembled.
In this situation, the second thing permitted to Kale Heniatus was to shake.
It was instinctive terror.

-Kale Berrow. I thought only that child was worthy of inheriting my power. Yet you are the same.

In that instant, Kale felt his ears perk up sharply.
A powerful urge to speak surged through him.
Then his mouth opened.

“Who are you?”
-Me?

A low chuckle echoed through the darkness.

-Just as the Celestial Race serves gods, the Demon Race too has an entity they serve. I am that which the Demon Race worships.

An entity worshipped by the Demon Race?

-I have been forced to sleep for long ages by the seal of the gods, awakening only in brief intervals.
“…So who exactly are you?”

Suddenly, Kale felt an enormous hand caressing his body.
Yet each time that touch made contact, terrible dread washed over him.
Then that voice whispered against his ear.

-I am evil.

What?
Kale drew in a sharp breath.
But the voice did not end.

-I am solitude.
-I am despair.

Evil, solitude, and despair incarnate.

-I am that which humans like you do not desire.

An entity that instills instinctive fear and dread.

-The very being whose mere approach becomes terror itself.
-Yet it exists somewhere nonetheless.

Kale Heniatus’s eyes snapped open in that instant.
His gaze met another’s.

-That being is me.

Crimson eyes stared down at him.

‘Gasp!’

For a moment, his breath caught in his throat.

-You were lonely and resigned before despair, you suffered, and you frequently encountered the evil surrounding you.
-You escaped fate and the hand of God, and even time itself twisted—you are yourself yet simultaneously not yourself.

The life of Kim Rok-soo, who lost everything precious and escaped the fate of death.
And a life that is both Kim Rok-soo and Kale Heniatus.

-Child.

The crimson eyes curved with laughter as they whispered.

-Do you desire me as well?

Kale Heniatus opened his mouth.
His lips trembled violently.
He spoke through the trembling.

“Are you insane?”

The corner of Kale Heniatus’s mouth quivered as he lifted one side into a smile.

“My dream is to be a rich man with nothing to do. You madman.”

A human who even the Saint of the God of Death rejected—that’s me.

-Hahahaha-
“Ugh!”

Kale Heniatus felt his eardrums on the verge of tearing from the laughter that shook the very fabric of space itself. It seemed they might rupture at any moment.
Yet his opponent appeared to be thoroughly enjoying this.

-How amusing. How delightful.

The crimson eyes drew closer to Kale.

-You are far more entertaining than the others.

Kale and the eyes locked gazes with one another.

-Given identical circumstances, why does your path diverge so differently from theirs?
“What do you want?”
-The way you resist without yielding to the end—that too is entertaining.

In that instant, the crimson eyes retreated backward.
Simultaneously, Kale felt his body being crushed from all directions.

“Ugh!”

Then a strange voice whispered.

-I shall make you desire me.

What?

-When you have need of me, call upon my name. For I alone can shatter your despair.

Kale felt his body being pulled into some distant void.
The crimson eyes receded further and further away.

‘Where am I going?’

Kale’s face contorted.

‘Cough!’

He squeezed his eyes shut against the violent pain that suddenly wracked his body.
His senses numbed once more.
Every connection to the world severed.
Kale Heniatus desperately struggled to breathe, moving with urgent desperation.

“Ugh!”

And when he could finally breathe again.

“Cough!”

Kale Heniatus felt a sharp pain strike his abdomen.
His body flew through the air before crashing to the ground.

Thud!
“Cough, hack!”

Kale Heniatus’s body tumbled across the floor, rolling backward.

‘What is this situation?’

The moment consciousness returned, I was struck in the gut and sent tumbling across the ground.

“Ugh!”

Kale Heniatus reached out and braced his hands against the floor.
As his vision finally cleared, he sensed something wrong.

‘Concrete?’

Cracked and fractured, but unmistakably concrete flooring.
A material that had no place whatsoever in Kale Heniatus’s world.

“Hey! Why won’t this punk stand up straight? Where’d that arrogant attitude go from before? Huh?”
“Hehehehe! Hey, hey, take it easy. If you kicked that hard, of course he can’t get up right now!”

Korean.

“Ugh…!”

Kale Heniatus stifled a groan and rolled his prone body over.
A gray ceiling came into view.

‘When was the last time my body felt this weak?’

His limbs possessed no strength whatsoever.
His wrists were gaunt and skeletal.

In that moment, Kale Heniatus could see the figures filling his gray-ceiling-bound vision.

“Hey, look at this bastard’s pathetic state.”
“I told you to just follow orders quietly, so why are you acting out like an idiot!”

People looking down at Kale Heniatus with mockery and contempt in their eyes.
Koreans.

“Ha!”

Kale Heniatus remembered.
Those faces. And this situation.
Those days when it would have been nothing strange for him to be beaten.

“…Those bastards.”

One of the ones who beat me back then.
Laughter spilled from Kale Heniatus’s lips.

“Heh… heheheh.”
“What? Did this bastard lose his mind after taking a hit?”

Less than a year had passed since the world turned upside down.
After enduring the winter of the great upheaval, spring and summer came and went, and now autumn had arrived.

That autumn.

That late autumn when an unranked monster appeared in Seoul for the first time, plunging the world into terror.
Simultaneously, the world descended into absolute chaos, and the greatest number of people perished.

“How dare a brat like you glare?”

Kim Rok-soo had always been unremarkable, and that autumn was the most unremarkable and weakest of all.
Kale Heniatus opened his eyes as Kim Rok-soo at the end of that autumn.
The blood trickling from the corner of his mouth told him that this moment was reality.

“…Damn it.”

Whether it was malice, despair, or loneliness.
That Black Hand bastard.
Fire ignited in Kale’s eyes.

“How irritating.”

At his words, the faces of those surrounding him twisted.

“What? What the hell is this lunatic spouting! Do you want to die?”
“You bastard! It wouldn’t be strange if you dropped dead right now, yet you dare look at us like that?”

Kale let their words go in one ear and out the other.

The place where an unranked monster first appeared.

Countless people died there.
A death that transcended fear, incomparable to any upheaval experienced thus far, engulfed the region where the unranked monster appeared.

As a result, the world began to unite once more.
Rather, that horrific incident became the catalyst for the world to rebuild society and rise again.

And among those who survived and returned from that incident zone, several became central figures in Korean society.

“…Team Leader.”

Team Leader Lee Soo-hyuk was one of those who experienced that incident.

‘Hey, you know where I actually saw our Team Leader? I was one of the survivors from that incident too. That horrific incident, you know. I survived it. And I saw the Team Leader fighting.’

Choi Jung-soo was there as well.
Though both men survived that incident, countless lives had to perish at the hands of the unranked monster.

In the past, Choi Jung-soo had spoken with a face that looked ready to cry.

‘Truly, when I witnessed that back then, I genuinely thought hell itself had manifested here.’

The inferno blazing within Kale Heniatus’s eyes surged with even greater ferocity.

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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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