* * *
“Those bastards aren’t even worth killing just once…!”
Thud!
The wall cracked open with a sharp noise, scattering fragments across the floor where his temper had landed.
Annoyed by the clatter of his high heels, Roilnia was about to kick them off—only to remember he was missing an arm.
His irritation spiked, and he shook his foot more roughly.
The discarded shoe rolled soundlessly along the carpeted hallway.
The heel was filthy, scuffed, and beyond repair—much like his current state.
Defeat.
A complete defeat, with the loss of an arm to boot.
No word could sum up his situation more neatly.
Every loss in his life had come from that man, and the thought made Roilnia seethe.
Even the plush carpet couldn’t smother the tension rising from his toes, burning through him like a lit fuse.
“If it weren’t for that damn Guide…!”
The fact that Haimar Eilec now had a Guide was something he absolutely refused to accept.
And yet, the thought almost made him laugh.
‘You’re no different. Just another useless fool who can’t do a thing without a Guide.’
To Roilnia Lanilgraph, the world had always revolved around him.
Anything he wanted, he took.
Anything he desired, he made happen.
Consideration? Selflessness?
That was just self-justification for weaklings who couldn’t stand on their own.
Those so-called Guides—people with no real ability—were nothing but crutches for the incapable.
So he had never needed one.
Even when his Esper instincts sometimes craved a Guide, he saw it only as a step toward perfecting himself.
The world might say every Esper needed a Guide, but to him, that was never an absolute truth.
He would prove such “laws” false.
Why should a mere Guide—a primitive, ordinary human—stand on equal ground with a superior being like an Esper?
Never.
Yet both instinct and reason coldly agreed: the cause of his defeat lay with the Guide he despised so much.
Roilnia couldn’t stand it.
The sensation was as unbearable as insects crawling all over his skin.
With a rough scratch at his leg, his nails tore through the weave of his stockings.
He wanted to wrap both arms around himself and shake off the crawling discomfort—only to feel the charred, dried stump of his shoulder under his fingertips.
His rage exploded. Every glass window in the hallway shattered under his power.
The pain radiating from his missing arm was nothing compared to the hatred pulsing through every vein.
‘It’s fine, Roilnia Lanilgraph. This isn’t over.’
If it were going to end here, he wouldn’t have hidden himself away for years.
Unforeseen obstacles were nothing but hurdles to be overcome.
He would surpass that man—crush him underfoot for the world to see.
He would sweep away every obstacle, doing whatever it took for victory.
Even if the path led straight to hell, the moment of triumph he sought would turn even hell into heaven.
Thinking of that future, Roilnia’s overflowing fury slowly eased.
“…Hoo.”
With a long exhale, the last dregs of unspent rage scattered.
He strode down the hall with measured steps, typing on a keypad with his broken nails before stepping into his hideout.
[Door opening.]
After the dry mechanical voice, the door slid open to reveal a room cluttered with all manner of items.
A messy desk, countless scattered beakers and droppers, and humming machinery filled the space.
Yet amid it all sat a luxurious sofa and well-stocked bookshelves, giving the place the feel of both a laboratory and a private lounge.
Kicking aside a machine, Roilnia opened a drawer and pulled out a transparent pill bottle.
He bit off the cap, poured the contents into his mouth, and crunched down without flinching at the pungent taste flooding his nose.
Swallowing it all, he collapsed onto the sofa, using the papers scattered there as a cushion.
Beep—
The room had no windows, and the lights were off.
Only the glow from the machinery illuminated the dim space—until a sudden beam of light appeared, projecting onto a blank wall and breaking the silence.
– Roilnia.
A voice like rusted hinges.
An uninvited guest.
The name, spoken in that grating tone, made Roilnia suppress the irritation clawing at him.
On the screen, an old man with a frail body and deeply lined face looked back at him, his hair a faded reddish hue not unlike Roilnia’s own.
“What is it, dear grandfather?”
– …You’ve caused quite a stir.
Roilnia forced a calm, almost generous tone.
But the man’s next words snapped what patience he had.
“Oh, what’s this? Suddenly want to play the doting grandparent?”
The hand toying with the empty bottle stilled, and Roilnia snorted.
Even as he said it, the thought was ridiculous.
The old man—Renato Lanilgraph—was nothing to him but a coward and a useless relic.
Yet that pale red hair, streaked now with white, was proof of their blood tie, the shared family name.
– A long tail always gets caught, Roilnia.
“Oh please. You’re just worried your name will get dragged into this, aren’t you?”
Crack.
The glass bottle shattered to dust in his clenched fist.
Brushing the shards from his fingers, Roilnia leaned his head on the sofa’s armrest and glared at the old man through the screen.
– You’ve been officially “dead” for two years now. So keep your head down…
“Dead? That’s just what you want to believe. You think I don’t know you’ve been hoping I’d sit quietly like a good little corpse?”
Pathetic, dying old man. What’s blood worth, anyway?
The old man didn’t see him—he saw the shadow of his dead daughter, who had birthed Roilnia and promptly died.
Not that Roilnia cared.
The only reasons the man tolerated him were that resemblance… and fear of the overwhelming power that put him beyond human limits.
And now, after keeping silent all this time, he dared to say this?
“Haimar Eilec, Hoaphilen Regis, even [Integra]—none of them believed your lie that I didn’t exist. I’m not stopping. And if you try to get in my way, I won’t spare you.”
Before he knew it, Roilnia was on his feet, leaning toward the screen with a glare like it might devour the man inside.
His red eyes gleamed, the whites bloodshot, burning with a mix of madness and obsession.
Renato Lanilgraph had always known his granddaughter-by-blood was like this—endlessly hungry, greedily devouring whatever she set her sights on, using any means necessary to reach her goals.
It was why he feared her.
It was why he worried.
But there was nothing he could do. Roilnia had been beyond his power from the moment he was born.
– An Esper without a Guide is incomplete, Roilnia. A perfect human can’t exist.
If only he had somehow taken the place of the parents who had vanished so long ago…
Would the granddaughter—so much like her daughter—have turned out any different?
A depth of grief beyond words lay in those sunken eyes, but in the end, it was nothing more than a futile “what if.”
“Ahaha.”
A dry, hollow laugh replaced his answer.
The sound that escaped her lips was unmistakably laughter, yet her mouth was set in a cold, rigid line.
Crossing the room at an unhurried pace, Roilnia laid a hand on the machine with its tangle of complex circuitry.
After staring at the thickly reinforced casing, she wrenched a fistful of the circuitry free.
Crack—!
Sparks spat from the torn wires, grazing the empty space where her left arm should have been.
She swept away the dead, snake-like cables that twitched and fell still on the floor.
Then, opening the panel, Roilnia retrieved a small flask from inside.
She held it up to the light, letting the gleaming liquid inside catch the glow, and only then did her tightly locked mouth ease into something resembling a smile.
“You should be grateful I’m not coming for your throat right now.”
The flask swayed lightly in her hand.
The liquid inside sloshed and shimmered, black as ink with specks of dust adrift like distant stars, as if she were holding a piece of the far-off night sky.
The grains whirled and drifted in time with her motions, until she lifted the flask to her lips and drank.
Her gaze drifted inward.
The medicine she had crafted—perfect medicine to make her whole, flawless in every way.
How many years of endurance had it taken to bring this into being?
Her touch on the flask was almost reverent, like handling a treasure, and she smiled with all the warmth of a doting mother.
—…Medicine can’t replace everything.
“No. In the end, everything will go exactly as I will it. This is only a means to an end.”
The drifting motes slowly sank to the bottom of the flask.
Roilnia’s fierce conviction reached even the old man on the screen, urging resignation from him.
His timeworn eyes quivered between hope and surrender, his brow knit for a long moment before he exhaled something closer to a sigh.
* * *
