#047
“Being so frail like that, he’ll die at the slightest thing. This time, if he dies, it’s really the end, isn’t it?”
“That’s why Carlisle-nim must stay close and protect Raon-nim well so he doesn’t lose his life. At the same time, you must leave him alone so he sufficiently feels the threat to his life. Though it may pain your heart.”
Carlisle snorted at the Priest’s last words.
“It won’t pain my heart. If anything, I might get irritated watching such a pathetic sight.”
“In any case, since this is a situation where Carlisle-nim reluctantly accepted him into the team at Raon-nim’s request, please handle it naturally without it seeming forced.”
Carlisle didn’t respond to the Priest’s words and crossed his arms while looking him over.
“Speaking of which, what about you? If you can’t hold out to the end, it’ll all be for nothing.”
The Priest smiled brightly.
“It’s fine. I’m much better now. Since you two found and brought me a fragment. The Sacred Tree’s power will continue to grow. Don’t worry about me and put all your strength into protecting Raon-nim and recovering the Fragment of the Sacred Tree. The survival of our world rests in both your hands.”
Now, recalling the Priest’s expectant words as he faced the desert night wind, Carlisle’s insides twisted.
‘The survival of the world and such.’
Carlisle felt a sharp pain climbing up his spine as he lit a cigarette. Thick, acrid smoke was sucked into his body through his respiratory system. His head became slightly numb and the pain subsided.
Usually, he thought mechanically about reviving the village like a programmed doll. But whenever his tension relaxed even slightly, other thoughts would tear through his mind.
After all, it was humans who made the world this way in the first place. Even if the world perished, it would be self-inflicted, so who could they blame? It wouldn’t be wrong to call it karma. Looking at it closely, there might be humans worth saving, but how many could there be? In the big picture, everything was meaningless.
And honestly, even if someone was worth saving, what meaning did that have for him? Nothing had ever been meaningful to him. He was just doing it because he was told he had to, but from time to time he had the twisted thought that it might not be so bad if everything just disappeared together.
They say God is sleeping, but perhaps God is actually dead and has already vanished. Even if God really was sleeping, the period of sleep would be eons or infinity by human standards.
They package leaving behind just one tree as God’s love, but in the end, how is that different from God abandoning this world? Moreover, humans couldn’t properly protect the one tree that was God’s gift and made the world this way.
Even if God really awakened one day, if he learned that his gift had been polluted and torn to pieces and scattered all over the world, would he feel sorry for the tree or for humans? He might want to directly destroy the human world with his own hands in anger. The destruction of a world that incurred God’s wrath wouldn’t be different from a scene of hell.
Perhaps humans should hope that God didn’t just fall asleep but actually vanished completely.
Carlisle stood in the darkness smoking while captivated by blasphemous thoughts. His eyes, unusually glowing red and burning unlike usual, pierced through the darkness and stared fixedly at one place. It was Raon sitting in the driver’s seat of the car. His face looking up at the sky ahead seemed somehow vacant. There was nothing special about him.
‘That thing is supposed to be the savior.’
Carlisle clicked his tongue while exhaling cigarette smoke.
He had worked with the Priest to find him and used the game to bring him to this world, but watching him adapt had become increasingly absurd. This was because his doubt that they had found the wrong person wouldn’t go away. No matter how much he had lost his memory and power, could the real one really be so pathetic?
Even when he met him collapsed in the forest, it was ridiculous. To think that someone who was supposed to be a savior was being bitten by mere rabbits and squirrels. He had even gone to the trouble of dropping him at a path the Potionist frequented so she could find and pick him up, but he seemed to think ‘Carlisle left me to die and went away.’
Carlisle didn’t bother to correct that misunderstanding. He had no particular desire to win his favor, and since he planned to leave him until just before death for some time anyway, it was better not to win his favor at all. For himself, he just had to fulfill his given duty.
‘Well, since someone like me is the guardian, maybe someone like that being the savior is a fitting pair in a way.’
Carlisle sneered as he took the last puff of smoke and put out his cigarette. His head spun and for a moment he felt his brain go numb. The burning pain throughout his body and his raging nerves calmed down a bit, so perhaps he could sleep a little more.
‘Come to think of it…’
Carlisle suddenly realized a fact he had acted on habitually without noticing. Until he woke up just now from Raon’s tossing and turning, hadn’t Carlisle forgotten his pain and slept deeply for once?
He had smoked before sleeping, but usually the painkilling effect would weaken after a couple hours and he would wake up in pain, yet tonight he seemed to have slept more than twice as long as usual. If Raon hadn’t woken up, he might still be asleep now. He had naturally reached for a cigarette upon waking, but thinking back, the pain didn’t seem greater than usual either.
“So the real one… is really real?”
Carlisle looked over Raon’s figure once more. The way he was vacantly staring at the sky with his mouth open didn’t look reliable no matter how you looked at it. A frivolous airhead who liked to play around with women attracted by his pretty face. That reputation fit perfectly.
‘Of course, I was equally stupid for floundering the same way, bewitched by that face.’
He just needed to manage him so he wouldn’t die, but the fact that he felt needlessly concerned and irritated – could it be that remnants of lost emotions remained in his unconscious?
Clicking his tongue at the situation that displeased him but which he couldn’t help, Carlisle turned his back and disappeared into the tent again.
***
Time flowed like water. Each day was the same. It was a daily repetition of fighting during the day and standing night watch at dawn. After battles ended, I would invariably fall asleep as if fainting and only come to my senses when night deepened. Though no one deliberately woke me to stand night watch, I woke up at similar times each night, and each time I had to face the situation of Carlisle pressed close on the narrow bed.
The embarrassment and awkwardness of that was only at first – later, fatigue took precedence and even when I woke up Carlisle was still asleep (though he might have been pretending to sleep to avoid talking with me, but anyway), so since I didn’t need to worry about it anymore, I naturally became accustomed to sleeping skin-to-skin with him on the narrow bed.
Anyway, desert nights were extremely cold, and even if the tent wasn’t cold, it wasn’t very warm either, so his unusually high body temperature was quite helpful. (I was still curious about the tattoo, but I no longer thought about stealing glances at it.)
The troubling thing was that my missing Tranquility Potion was never found in the end. Carlisle also said he hadn’t seen the potion. My future looked bleak. That alone was enough to bring on panic.
For now I was barely holding on thanks to my combat level rising, but the problem would be when I faced boss mobs later. Of course Carlisle would handle the boss mobs, but other monsters would have to be handled by Taro and me. And naturally, they wouldn’t be as easy as those in Wanderer’s Plains.
Actually, even the ones we’d dealt with since entering the desert had incomparably stronger attack power than mushroom mobs and such. Moreover, as I’d ominously predicted, more monsters were clearly drawn to aggro toward me. Every battle was beyond my strength, and even my level, which had been rising excitedly at first, began to stagnate after passing a certain point.
“This time it’s real, right?”
Taro asked, stopping the car briefly. The form of an oasis was visible in the distance. Shimmering in the midday heat, it looked like a mirage again this time. We’d already been through two oases without boss mobs and been fooled by three mirages.
“It has to be real…”
Taro muttered as if fed up, but I didn’t even have the energy to respond. It had already been six days since the first day, and six days was too long to endure without Tranquility Potions while fighting battles. We’d even already fought one battle this morning.
“It’s probably real. The color is different.”
It was Carlisle who responded. With an indifferent face, he gestured toward the front while cleaning the weapon he’d used in broad daylight. What made the distant oasis different from the mirages or oases we’d passed so far was the color around it.
The sand heated red under the scorching sun was all dyed pitch black. In a way, it was reminiscent of the Sacred Tree’s lake where the surroundings of the island had turned black. The color of the sand itself hadn’t changed. Something was densely covering the ground and writhing alive.
“They look like scorpions, don’t they?”
Taro muttered. I sighed. It’s a desert, so why wouldn’t scorpions appear? Just because monsters have cute appearances doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous, but at least my eyesight would be protected.
Anyway, seeing monsters densely surrounding the oasis like that, there was a high possibility this time was real as Carlisle said. They must be doing that to protect the boss mob.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
