Seventy-First Chapter
Flight of the Dead
It felt like I was wandering around in a hot, sludgy cauldron.
Time spent living brings about experiences that change a person, and those experiences accumulate within the soul.
Likewise, my heart is covered in a shell of experience to protect it from the outside world.
Surely everyone else protects their hearts from the outside world with such a thick shell too.
Yet my feet were stepping on such a shell stripped from the soul...
◇◇◇
She walked down the street with vacant eyes.
The night air made the sweat on her skin uncomfortably cold. Her body felt like it was burning, every part of it searing hot. The cold sweat stung from time to time.
She continued to wander barefoot and without direction, dragging her legs as though escaping something.
Despite the pain, her body was trying to distance her from her home.
Beneath her ripped clothes, welts on her back emitted heat.
“Haah haah haah haah...” She couldn’t even tell where the sound of breathing was coming from. Was it something she was actively doing or just something echoing inside her mind?
Perhaps it was the sound of the shell that had been protecting her falling apart along with her life.
Without support from her soul, Lilisha just continued walking. She didn’t know how many times she’d almost fainted or how far she’d walked.
Despite her blurry mind, the heat from her back wouldn’t let her forget what had happened several hours ago. With a look of dread, Lilisha turned around.
She’d been abandoned, disposed of, relieved of the only duty she wanted, and branded as a failure. Her back continued to sear.
“I no longer have a place where I belong...” she murmured as she continued to wander like the dead on the road to Hades. Having been exiled from the Frusevan family, she couldn’t think of a single reason to exist.
She had been dominated by and dependent on her brother, desperately preserving her own existence within the meritocracy that was the family trade. But just being able to secure the name of a place where she belonged had granted her relief.
She had been a part of Aferka. That just made her all the more dependent on her role there.
It had been the only way her brother would acknowledge her.
Her oldest brother had disappeared from Aferka. His departure had come about for more reasons than just his repeated failures at missions, the primary being that he rejected killing. That was the same as rejecting the meaning of not just Frusevan but Rimfuge as a whole.
In truth, Lilisha had considered her eldest brother despicable from the moment he’d joined the military. Abandoning the duty of Frusevan to walk down a bright path by himself was no different from spitting on the entire Rimfuge clan.
But at the same time, she had not been surprised it was the inevitable path her kind brother would choose... Indeed, she’d already known he would.
Pain and exhaustion clouded her mind, but for some reason she was thinking of her eldest brother, Gill, whom she had pushed into a corner of her mind a long time ago.
She both understood and scorned him. However, Rayleigh said that, just as he had done to her, he had exiled Gill and branded him a failure.
It was selfish, but she felt like she could now understand how Gill felt. Her eldest brother must have also tried his best to become part of Frusevan but ultimately failed.
That said, the family trade exceeded the realm of what was normal. In their family, they were taught mana control and dark skills, learning what they would need to kill from childhood.
Perhaps both Gill and Lilisha had just had some defect from the start that kept them from remaining within the family.
Lilisha had done everything she could to make up for that failing. She’d never skipped her daily training, had tutors give her extra lessons, and had desperately practiced her techniques.
As a result, she had gradually gotten better at killing. But all her targets had been scum that not even the military wanted to stain their hands with. So it hadn’t been difficult for her to write it off as a form of justice.
But as a member of the main branch, Lilisha’s talents had been lacking. Even compared with the other branches, she had been weaker than anyone. When she would think about that, she felt beyond inexperienced and even sorry for herself.
That was why she had wanted to be of at least a little use.
She had considered Rayleigh her god. Being acknowledged by him would have been the highest honor and was her foremost wish.
She had devoted her everything to that, yet that altar of her faith had crumbled so easily. The shell she’d spent more than a decade building had been ripped off...and now an unbearable pain assailed Lilisha with every step.
Dragging her body and pain with her, Lilisha walked.
And finally, she arrived...
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