Chapter 80
Seeing Felix look at him once again as though he were hopelessly lacking in common sense, Abel lowered the hand that had been absently combing through his hair.
“Why?”
That seemed to be the final straw.
“‘Why?’ is what you’re asking?” Felix shot back. “Then why are you so calm about this, Lord Abel?”
Was he supposed to cry? What was so terrible about cutting his hair?
“I didn’t really suffer any harm. Now that I know I was genuinely in danger, I just have to be more careful from now on.”
It had been a good opportunity to learn the limits of what the enemy was capable of.
More importantly, the entire Temple now knew that Abel had been attacked. His security would inevitably become even tighter.
No matter how dangerous their enemy might be, moving against him again would become far more difficult.
At Abel’s composed reply, Felix let out a hollow laugh.
“Weren’t you the one who told me I was being too complacent?”
Am I the same as Felix?
Felix was so fragile that taking his eyes off him for even a moment felt like it would be enough for him to collapse.
As for Abel, the worst that came from lowering his guard for a moment was losing a bit of hair.
Abel shrugged.
“I told you I’d be more careful from now on.”
“That can’t possibly solve—!”
The anger that had been about to burst from Felix died on his lips. Seemingly remembering there were people outside, he cut himself off, took a moment to steady his ragged breathing, then asked,
“Weren’t you supposed to be incapable of getting hurt in the first place?”
Of course not.
Abel recalled what Felix had said the day before. He had never claimed he couldn’t be injured. Even so, he patiently explained it again.
“I can be hurt. It just gets healed.”
“And your hair?”
So that was what he meant. Why hadn’t his hair returned to normal?
“It’s not as though being without hair causes any real problems. Is there any reason to restore that too?”
He had already been finding his long hair bothersome. It slipped inside his clothes whenever he moved, ended up beneath him whenever he lay down, and washing it was a nuisance besides.
So he had decided this was as good an opportunity as any to cut it short.
“It’s more efficient. Cutting it off makes it easier to track whatever traces are left behind.”
Most importantly, once he had fully recovered using divine power, nothing would remain behind.
Abel pointed to a palm-sized glass bottle resting beside the cut hair.
Inside it lay white strands of hair that had crumbled halfway to dust.
Naturally, they were Abel’s.
The moment the hair completely disintegrated into ash, the traces of the curse quickly vanished with it.
But in the strands where the curse had only progressed partway, its lingering presence was still unmistakably strong.
Staring uneasily at the hair sealed inside the glass bottle, Felix asked:
“Do curses really exist?”
“They do. There have been quite a few members of royal and noble families who actually fell victim to them.”
Back when magic had still flourished, the greatest menace had been curses.
No one ever knew when, where, or by what means a curse might strike, and regardless of rank or status, they were what people feared most.
For that reason, even in those days, people had sought to ward them off through magic and divine power alike.
Divine power, in particular, excelled at repelling things that were impure or unholy.
So in the age when magic thrived, it was common practice to visit a mage for ordinary healing, while matters that belonged to more ambiguous domains—such as curses or blessings—were entrusted to priests.
After magic disappeared, however, even the field of ordinary healing came entirely under the Temple’s authority.
“They’ve become almost nonexistent in recent times. Magic has all but died out.”
It had been centuries since magic disappeared. Even so, remnants of that once-glorious age of magic, magic artifacts, still existed in the present day.
With no one left capable of wielding magic directly, maintaining them had become impossible.
As a result, the only magical items still functioning in the present were things that required very little magic to sustain: pens whose ink never ran dry, mirrors that never shattered, and the like.
Perfectly ordinary objects that did not truly need magic in the first place.
Even so, remnants of powerful magic occasionally surfaced like this.
“They used something rather precious on me.”
If someone had gone to the trouble of using an artifact like this, then it meant one of two things.
“They either intended to kill me in a single strike, or they have enough of these lying around that using one to test me wasn’t considered a waste.”
Hopefully it’s the former. That would be less troublesome.
As Abel stared intently at the glass bottle, Felix asked:
“Who do you think is behind this?”
“If the Commander is right, then Gregory or the Emperor would be the most likely candidates. But who knows? There may be another faction entirely.”
Either way, one thing troubled him.
Whoever it was had proven to be even more reckless than he had expected.
Would Gregory really do something this foolish?
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