Youngest 202

Episode 202
Ch. 21

The sky was overcast. Everything was shrouded in gray.

That was how I knew.

‘A dream? Suddenly?’

That this was a dream.

I was walking down a street. Even my shoes and clothes felt utterly unfamiliar. My body didn’t feel like my own.

What is this? A possession-type dream?

As I thought that, my reflection appeared in a puddle by the roadside.

Haggard cheeks, parched lips, lifeless eyes—a face as unsightly as could be, yet still strangely familiar.

Older, but not my own face.

‘It’s the seventh one from the original story.’

Impossible.

But why, and why now?

“Hey, Miss!”

Someone shouted at me as I drifted down the street like a ghost. I turned my head slowly. My mind was my own, but my body didn’t obediently follow my will.

“Here, take this.”

A woman with a kind, open face held out a small piece of cake, neatly boxed and wrapped.

On the white cream sat a strawberry candied in syrup.

Ah, I like strawberry cake! For my coming-of-age, our chef promised a huge strawberry cream cake.

“Business has been slow today, you see. I guess there aren’t many people with birthdays today.”

Me! Today’s my birthday!

But the shout was only in my heart.

My body stood there, dazed and unmoving. The bakery woman forced the cake into my hand.

Suddenly, I felt her start at the sight of my hand.

She cleared her throat gruffly and quickly added,

“If you like it, come buy something else tomorrow! Muffins are good, and the macarons are delicious! Actually, tomorrow starts our sale, thirty percent off… no, fifty percent!”

I walked on again.

Not a word of thanks.

The seventh one from the original story had no manners.

“Got it? You have to come back and buy something!”

The angelic baker shouted desperately at my retreating back. Her husband, or so he seemed, came out and scolded her at the commotion.

“A sale? Why are you giving away a perfectly good cake?”

“She just… looked so unsteady. She’s still so young… And…”

“And?”

“There was blood soaking the cuff of her sleeve.”

Oh, so there was.

That’s why she paused when she saw my hand. I’d thought it was because of the Crest.

I walked on, shrinking away from their faintly receding voices.

There really are good people in the world.

The thought struck me anew—someone giving cake to a complete stranger out of concern.

For every baseless cruelty, there are people with kindness they can’t explain either.

‘If I’d learned that sooner, would things have been different?’

I wished, if only for a moment, that the kind baker woman wouldn’t simply build up virtue, but would wake up tomorrow and suddenly be rich. And I kept walking.

Before I knew it, the road had turned into a steep, rugged mountain path.

‘A birthday…’

Come to think of it.

‘How old am I?’

I didn’t know.

Had I come of age?

“Run. Far, far away.”

Leviathan Zevert had said those words before he died.

Right beside the black headstone of his daughter.

I—

When I came to my senses, I was already fleeing.

Behind me, the Duchess’s blood-choked cries had echoed, I thought.

How many days had passed since then?

‘I have to go back to Father.’

I repeated those words hundreds, thousands of times, but for some reason my body wouldn’t obey.

My breath rattled in my throat. I was using all my mana to suppress the spread of the Crest.

Leviathan Zevert had been right.

“Aim for the heart. Don’t miss. Everything you’re looking for will be right there.”

There had been a time-magic sigil at the Babylon Imperial Academy, unknown even in the Mage Kingdom.

‘Though it was all but crumbling.’

The northern border’s defenses had been lax as I fled to the Academy.

Just then, the professor in charge of the archives had recently died. I disguised myself as his student and slipped in among the mourners. They said he’d taken his own life, unable to overcome the pain of losing his colleagues and the disaster at the archives.

Who could say?

In any case, there I found blank, empty books, a withered old tree, and a half-shattered headstone.

Everything in the archive was beyond repair, hopelessly ruined.

All I could do was steal the magic circle from the headstone and run once again.

‘The magic circle that moves time.’

It was so decrepit it no longer worked in the archive, but I used it to freeze the time of my Crest. The archive was filled with a strange magic, and that made it possible.

Like that, I’d stopped the Crest’s corruption.

But I knew. This was only a temporary fix.

My father’s power was overwhelming, and my Crest had already spread to cover nearly my whole body.

How long could I hold out like this?

‘So I have to go back.’

To the Mage Kingdom.

But my body betrayed my thoughts, always climbing, up the mountain, higher and higher.

The forest was black.

Now I couldn’t even find the way back. I must have lost my way, yet oddly, wandering this maze didn’t feel so bad.

The slope grew steeper and blood tinged my mouth. The cake box in my hand seemed far too heavy.

My head spun. Memories tangled into chaos.

“Still, the world is this wide. Isn’t there anywhere that would shelter even you?”

Overwhelmed, I clung to a tree and retched.

“Hh—huff.”

Why had Leviathan Zevert pierced his own heart with a sword?

I came to kill him, yet he looked at me with such longing, gentle eyes.

“To the Mage Kingdom… I have to…”

If I go back—

How old was I—what was my name—without a thing to my own, just a puppet for my father, drifting from one battlefield to another, hurting others anew?

“Who would force something like that on their own daughter? Isn’t being cherished the least you could do?”

‘Stop remembering.’

Please. Please!

Wiping the drool from my chin, I just kept walking by force of habit. Deeper, ever deeper. So no one could find me.

They said Leviathan Zevert had lost his daughter. Maybe that was why he pitied me.

If I were his daughter, that would have been wonderful.

He would have cherished me and poured out his love. Been endlessly kind.

‘Ah…’

I stopped in my tracks.

A barren cliff loomed before me.

Below my blood-soaked cuff, I was still clutching the pink cake box. Its contents had to be a mess by now.

‘I’m tired.’

Thud. Strength left my hand. The cake tumbled down, shattering completely.

I was too tired to stand again, just from the small kindness of a stranger.

The days ahead held no promise. I wasn’t curious about the morning to come—if anything, I dreaded it.

‘Let’s stop.’

Isn’t this enough?

Yes, maybe fleeing like this is an answer, too.

‘If only I had run sooner…’

Would things have been different?

Maybe then, Leviathan would have lived.

But that was a meaningless conjecture.

I drew the dagger from my breast. The one stained with Leviathan Zevert’s blood.

There had been so much blood from the man’s chest. I tried desperately to staunch it with both hands, but it was hopeless.

I’m sorry. Suddenly, I wanted to say those words.

To whom? Leviathan, already dead? Or… the Duchess, who would have found her husband’s body first? To his sons? To the old duke?

What was the point.

‘They’re all strangers to me anyway.’

I gripped the blade tightly with both hands.

As chill moonlight flashed off the edge—

“Hey.”

A man’s low, hoarse voice sounded from somewhere.

Somewhere beyond the steep cliff at my back.

Looking closely, I saw a black, dark cave nearby.

“If you’re going to die, why not go farther away and do it?”

Only then did I sense the blue mana I’d failed to notice before. The scraping, clinking sound of old chains being dragged.

But even more powerful than that—

Under a flood of narrow moonlight appeared—

“The smell of rotting corpses is godawful, you know.”

The eyes of a beast.