Chapter 46

Isaac snagged the cats by their scruffs and quickened his pace to catch up with the prince.

As they drew nearer to the illuminated structure, his expression tightened. It was a two-story wooden edifice, clearly intended for temporary use. Despite the sudden influx of light, the interior remained deathly silent. Even as they reached the threshold, Isaac’s senses failed to register a single soul within.

It was as if the building were illuminating itself in a vacuum.

Isaac loathed the sensation.

His stomach twisted with the phantom tang of bile.

He wanted to bolt, but Kaiyan crossed the threshold without breaking stride. The heavy wooden door began to swing shut, its hinges emitting a long, agonizing shriek of rusted metal. Isaac lunged, catching the edge just before the latch clicked home. He clicked his tongue softly, steeled his nerves with a sharp intake of air, and stepped inside.

Total emptiness greeted him.

Jagged splinters of wood and drifts of shredded fabric littered the dust-thick floor, suggesting a vacancy lasting decades rather than months. Yet, the air was choked by a singular, overwhelming presence.

A hideous, cloying stench.

The reek of rapid-onset rot saturated the atmosphere, thick enough to taste. Isaac instinctively pressed a hand to his nose, his eyes darting toward Kaiyan, who stood several paces ahead. The prince had turned his back to him, appearing entirely unbothered by the nauseating miasma. He was locked in a steady, unblinking gaze at the far wall.

Isaac tracked his line of sight and felt his pulse hitch. Scrawled across the shadowed wall in large, jagged black letters were two words:

CAUGHT YOU

“…”

A glacial shiver traced a jagged line down Isaac’s spine. Simultaneously, he caught a ghost of movement behind him. He whirled around, only to witness the entrance door swinging shut with unnatural grace.

Where the hinges had screamed only moments ago, the door now sealed itself in total, stifling silence.

CLICK

The finality of the latch was deafening. Isaac understood in an instant that they were trapped, the warehouse having been transformed into a closed magical barrier.

When Isaac spun back, he found the prince already observing the door. Their eyes met, and Kaiyan held his gaze for a second before dismissing the threat with a negligent shrug and beginning his ascent up the staircase.

Isaac followed close behind. The ancient wooden steps flexed beneath his boots, yet they emitted no sound—a hollow, unnatural contradiction.

They reached the second floor in complete silence. This upper level was cramped, half the size of the ground floor and suffocating under a thick shroud of grime.

But there was one marked difference. The second floor was not empty.

“Ugh…”

A low, guttural groan clawed its way out of Isaac’s throat before he choked it back. Directly across from the staircase, a body hung pinned against the wall.

No—it was hardly a person anymore. It was a pulverized mess of ruin, a corpse reduced to a mass of crushed meat. Only the head remained remotely identifiable.

Isaac’s jaw locked. It was Kaiyan’s information broker.

The middle-aged man he had seen only days ago now hung suspended, his tongue lolling obscenely from his slack jaw. He could not have been dead for long, yet the carcass emanated the rancid, fermented odor of a body left to rot for weeks in the heat.

Kaiyan inspected the carnage without a single blink. Standing in his shadow, Isaac felt every nerve ending ignite in a state of high alert.

Something was hunting them. Something lurked within this barrier, waiting for the right moment to strike. Isaac’s hand hovered, anchored to the hilt at his waist.

Kaiyan finished his grim examination and pivoted. Facing Isaac, he tilted his head with a slow, feline grace.

“Then,” the prince said, his voice a smooth, casual ripple in the foul air, “shall we hear why you are here?”

The question drifted toward him, deceptively soft. Isaac struggled to find his footing, for he barely knew the answer himself.

“I thought… Lord Kaiyan might prefer to come alone.”

Kaiyan scrutinized the stuttering response, his expression unreadable, before his hand dropped to his sword.

SHRRING

The blade slid free with a razor-thin ring, gleaming under the dim light. Isaac clamped his mouth shut.

“You thought I would be easier to strike if I came alone?”

“That isn’t true. I came because I was worried about you.”

Isaac’s voice was rigid, brittle with adrenaline. Kaiyan seemed not to hear him, his focus entirely consumed by the razor edge of his steel.

“You possess a persistent habit of appearing in places like this,” the prince murmured, his tone dropping into a dangerous, introspective cadence. “And you irritate me.”

You keep irritating me.

Without a whisper of warning, Kaiyan erased the distance between them, his sword descending in a lethal, practiced arc. Isaac scrambled backward, but the tip of the blade kissed his shoulder. The cut was fortunately shallow, though blood immediately blossomed, staining his clothes in a vivid, spreading red. Kaiyan had not struck with killing intent—that was the only reason Isaac still breathed.

“I came because I was concerned,” Isaac urged, his voice desperate. “I feared you would walk into a trap alone.”

Whether the prince heard the plea was impossible to discern. His face remained a mask of cold, smooth stone. What Isaac could see, with chilling clarity, was the prince slowly raising the sword for a second strike.

The teasing had evaporated. The initial strike had been a mere diagnostic test, a measure of Isaac’s reflexes. The test was concluded.

“Wait! I understand why you find me suspicious, but it was purely coincidence! I have no intention of harming you.

There is not a shred of evidence! This is unfair! ” Isaac shouted, retreating as Kaiyan advanced.

The prince did not take an aggressive step, yet the small gap between them had become a lethal chasm.

“Evidence,” the prince repeated, the word rolling slowly over his tongue. “Yes. There was none.

Something kept nagging at me, but I found nothing. Yet, it continued to gnaw at me. ”

Kaiyan’s grip tightened around the hilt until his knuckles whitened. His eyes narrowed, burning with a singular, sharp clarity. “It keeps irritating me, again and again. It would be far cleaner to simply remove the source.”

Isaac locked eyes with the prince’s frigid, cerulean gaze. Like fragile prey paralyzed before a natural predator, his muscles seized; he could neither retreat nor avert his gaze.

Kaiyan struck.

His movement possessed the velocity of light, yet in a strange, heightened state of perception, Isaac tracked every infinitesimal shift with agonizing clarity.

No. You must not. Even for your own sake, you foolish bastard, you cannot do this.

A sweltering heat suddenly erupted in Isaac’s chest. It was not the hollow cold of fear or the sharp sting of indignation, but a profound, aching sorrow that rose unbidden, searing his senses.

Kaiyan stood directly before him, his eyes narrowing for a fraction of a second as the blade descended toward Isaac’s sternum—

“…!”

—A furious, feral shriek split the air.

A surge of searing heat flared across Isaac’s chest, and he squeezed his eyes shut. The agony was so blinding that his vision dissolved into absolute darkness, and his breathing halted entirely.

Yet, seconds bled into more. His consciousness remained, though shattered and swirling in disarray, and his body throbbed with a persistent, dull ache. He was not dead.

Slowly, Isaac pried his eyes open. The first thing that registered was the crimson tide blooming across his chest. A long, jagged laceration crossed his skin, drenching his clothes, yet the wound lacked the depth of a mortal strike.

When he raised his gaze, he found Kaiyan clutching his sword. Four deep, angry claw marks raked down the prince’s forearm; the cats had struck with enough ferocity to draw beads of dark blood.

Nearby, the three felines sat grooming their paws, performing a pantomime of absolute innocence. There was no way to discern which of them was the true culprit.

“I—I’m sorry. My cats…” Isaac stammered, his voice trembling as he stared in horror at the prince’s arm.

『Look at that utter idiot. He nearly met his end and he is apologizing.』

『How infuriating.』

『Muddlehead is not enough for him. We should call him Clueless.』

Even in this harrowing moment, Isaac felt a strange, conflicting sense of gratitude and apology toward the chattering animals.

Kaiyan glanced down at his forearm, then flicked his sword once. Several droplets of blood splattered against the floor.

Isaac fell into a heavy silence. The prince had truly intended to kill him, the blade’s path tracing a direct line over his heart. Instead of fear or rage, a profound melancholy washed over him. He did not understand why; he merely traced the wound with his trembling fingertips.

Kaiyan studied the blood sliding down his steel, as if weighing whether to strike again, before pinning Isaac with a clinical, predatory stare.

Isaac met his gaze, wondering if the next blow would finally shatter his heart. Why did that thought feel so unbearably desolate?

Both of them stood separated by only a few paces. The moment the prince raised the sword again, his life would conclude. Even so, Isaac regarded him with a haunting calmness, faint and inexplicably somber.

The prince’s eyes twitched. Then, something shifted at the periphery of Isaac’s vision. In a space that should have been hollow, an impossible thing stirred.

Both Isaac and Kaiyan snapped their heads toward the wall. The corpse, which should have been nothing more than a discarded vessel, began to shift. It was a sight so grotesque that every hair on Isaac’s body stood on end.

The body swayed, hanging limp for a moment, before slumping to the floor. It stood with jagged, unnatural movements. Then, it took a step.

SLAP. SLAP.

Wet, rhythmic footsteps dragged a smear of gore across the floorboards.

『Which one is it…? Which one…?』

A voice reminiscent of boiling metal bubbled from the corpse’s throat, sounding as though it emanated from deep beneath the earth. Its hollowed sockets rolled wildly, and its nose twitched with a hideous, sniffing motion before the vacant eyes locked onto the sword in Kaiyan’s hand.

『It was you. You harmed him. How dare a mere human injure a magician?』

Kaiyan watched the corpse bare its rot-stained teeth and responded with a voice devoid of emotion. “Then what are you? Human, or something else?”

『I am a magician. A magician is one who commands magic. Human, yet greater than human.』