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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: FusionX
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“Ah…”
He didn’t know where to start.
It was perplexing, and more than that, shuddering at the feeling of betrayal, he was unable to sort through the chaotic torrent of confused emotions and was messily laying them out.
What should I do?
No, although their time spent together was short, even shorter memories of trivial moments spent together flashed through his mind like a kaleidoscope, and he couldn’t even define what this emotion was.
Betrayal, confusion, bewilderment, anger, resentment, sadness.
All kinds of emotions swirled together, creating a turbid whirlpool.
To the point where even he didn’t know what this was.
With trembling hands covering his face, he rubbed it dry repeatedly.
When he removed his hands, beyond them was Sylphia’s face, wearing an expression as bewildered as his own, as if to say ‘this isn’t right’.
“Um, Rudrick…”
Sylphia’s voice trembled.
Her expression was unable to hide her bewilderment, but while he could understand it intellectually, he couldn’t understand it emotionally.
He knew.
He understood.
The reason why he had felt a subtle sense of distance from the moment he heard the story, from the moment he intuited the truth.
That way of thinking, which was incomprehensible to him no matter how much he tried to understand, was for Sylphia a conclusion reached through a process as natural as breathing.
Even among humans, people who have lived in different environments and lifestyles can have different thoughts about the same thing, let alone the difference between species.
His reason understood.
For Sylphia, this incident was not one that she needed to go to such lengths to prevent.
Why?
Because naturally, if their mentor died as predicted, the position of court mage would naturally fall to him.
Because it would ultimately be beneficial to him.
Rather than going to the trouble of preventing it, it was better to let history take its course, even if it meant enduring a little hardship.
From her perspective, she must have judged that this would ultimately be more beneficial to him.
But his emotions couldn’t understand.
Even though his actions were a bit annoying during their short time, the position of court mage wasn’t worth letting their mentor, whom he had grown somewhat fond of despite his faults, die.
Naturally, if there was someone who could save him, it would be natural to save him even if they had no prior acquaintance.
It was a characteristic of humans as animals that even when they saw children in Africa dying from lack of medicine on television, some people would feel compassion and donate.
Especially when you considered that another term for compassion towards one’s own kind was philanthropy.
So.
“…For now, just leave. I don’t really want to see your face.”
“Rudrick…”
“I said get out!”
Without realizing it, he raised his voice.
The moment he heard Sylphia’s voice, his tone involuntarily heightened, almost like a conditioned reflex.
Honestly, he couldn’t bring himself to.
“…I told you to leave. I don’t want to see your face right now.”
“…”
Right now, he didn’t have the confidence to look at Sylphia’s face, and what emotion that stemmed from, even he wasn’t sure.
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Where did it all go wrong?
Her footsteps were powerless.
Literally like a duckweed drifting aimlessly, Sylphia’s steps finally came to a stop in front of her room after wandering without destination.
The moment she placed her hand on the doorknob, her legs gave out.
She almost collapsed unsightly on the spot, but barely avoiding such a situation, Sylphia opened the door and entered the room.
It was a bleak scene even more so than Rudrick’s room.
Literally, only the minimum necessary furniture was arranged, not deviating from the original form of a guest room in the detached palace, and she threw herself on the bed, which was relatively soft, though incomparable to the one in her lair.
More accurately, it was closer to collapsing rather than throwing herself.
And Sylphia, with her face buried in the pillow, gradually felt her eyes growing hot.
Not just her eyes, but her entire head seemed to be heating up.
From her perspective, she couldn’t fully understand why Rudrick was angry.
The opposite of Rudrick.
Like a reflection in a mirror that can only get closer but never touch no matter how much you reach out, they were running on completely parallel lines.
She couldn’t understand it rationally, but she could understand it emotionally.
“…Why?”
After a long, very long time had passed, the first word Sylphia muttered was the question, “Why?”
He was a human who was going to die anyway.
If Sylphia had set her mind to it, of course she could have prevented it, but in the most extreme case, she would have had to completely demolish the tower of obsession that Lorenzo had built up over nearly a hundred years in his mind.
Unless she manipulated his memories to the extent of erasing the goal of exploring the ‘origin’ and the ‘truth’ of the world from Lorenzo’s mind entirely, Lorenzo would have remained fixated on this task, continuing his indefinite challenge until his death, and rather than going to such lengths to save Lorenzo from his predetermined fate of death, Sylphia thought it was better to let him die and make Rudrick the next court mage.
Essentially, she was just living among humans for the sake of amusement, with no intention of truly assimilating, and was merely an observer who was out of place in the human group.
The only one who was considered to be fully in the same group as her was Rudrick, and naturally, her thinking was biased.
Her thoughts, which might seem extremely efficiency-focused to humans, were the most rational choice for her.
But when things turned out like this, Sylphia’s eyes suddenly welled up with tears.
“…I didn’t want to be hated.”
A murmur uttered in a weak voice.
A tear rolled down from her reddened eyes, soaking the pillowcase.
Useless thoughts cluttered her mind.
In the final moment of his life, how did Lorenzo feel when he finally reached the truth he had so desperately longed for?
Did he meet his death feeling relieved, having achieved his lifelong wish knowing everything, or did he die in despair, realizing that everything he had pursued was just a mirage, and the result was his own destruction?
Or would she forever be hated by Rudrick like this, never able to bridge the gap that had grown too wide now?
The other three might not care, but would Rudrick react so coldly to Arwen as well, who had agreed to her plan?
As various thoughts cluttered her mind, tears flowed endlessly.
A dragon who loved a human.
If the other dragons, now few in number on the continent, living among humans with their created identities and names, heard this, they would probably hold their stomachs laughing, saying they felt stimulated for the first time in their nearly eternal lives.
After laughing heartily enough to shed tears like that for a while, they would probably remind her of the absolute rule of amusement and advise her not to get too immersed.
They were essentially actors in a play.
They would say that a life spent in amusement was just a fleeting moment in the endless life of a dragon, and some would probably find it strange that she, not a young hatchling but one who had lived long enough, was behaving this way.
But clearly, this moment, which would be just a fleeting instant in the context of Sylphia’s long life, had now permeated her completely to the point where it couldn’t be separated.
To the extent that even living with a hope in her heart that might never be rewarded, with no guarantee of when it might happen, felt happy.
Originally, the death of a human she had come to know during her amusement, who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and succumbed to it, wouldn’t have been important enough to change her entire life.
There might be humans who took their own lives out of despair when a dog they’d raised for a long time died, but such cases were extremely, exceedingly rare, requiring several modifiers to describe how uncommon they are.
Moreover, given the relationship between a dragon engaged in amusement and a human, which was beyond even the simple comparison of humans and pets, the probability converged infinitely to zero.
All of the current situation was something that should not have happened to Sylphia originally.
Nevertheless, Sylphia still loved Rudrick.
She didn’t know if she would be rewarded, and there were formidable competitors all around, but still.
Just as Rudrick had poured out his emotions saying he didn’t know where to start while covering his face, Sylphia too had no idea where to begin untangling this tangled web.
Even now, she still couldn’t fully understand why Rudrick was angry, but despite that, sadness and despair were replacing the feeling of frustration.
A single human man, whom she would not have given a second glance in the past, had already become her entire life and world, and now, Sylphia’s world had collapsed.
Wiping away the tears that were still falling, Sylphia uttered an apology too quiet to be heard.
“I’m sorry, Rudrick. I didn’t know you would dislike it…”
Of course, if she had known, she wouldn’t have done it.
The distance between them was still parallel.
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[Wonder how they are gonna work it out cuz she damned fucked this one up]
ty for the chapter