Chapter 152
The guard’s footsteps sped up noticeably.
Haah, now what? Would the hallucination ability work?
Backed into a dead end, just as I tentatively raised my hand, someone grabbed me around the waist, and the world spun.
By the time I regained my bearings, I was falling.
“Eeeek!”
“Shh.”
A cold, large hand clamped over my mouth.
After landing, I raised my head and the first thing I saw was silver-white hair catching the faint moonlight.
We were outside the prison building at the incinerator. I stood with my back pressed against the wall, pinned close to someone.
As they say, the darkest hour is just before dawn apart from the faint moonlight, everything around us was pitch black.
“Enrique?”
“Where did you sneak off to without a word?”
His eyes tracked every strand of my disheveled hair.
So he’d whisked me out on his ice slides.
Wait, was this going to be misunderstood?
I quickly made my excuse.
“I went to see Lize. I had questions about spirit abilities.”
He tapped at my bangs lightly.
“Your bangs are cut. They were fine earlier.”
I pulled at my bangs and confirmed a chunk had been sheared off.
It was barely noticeable at a casual glance, but he must have been looking quite closely.
“There’s a Wielder in the punishment cells. Got ambushed on my way past.”
“Number 3? Be careful. He’s not the eccentric kind of crazy, he’s genuinely insane.”
“How did he end up locked in there?”
Enrique peeked at the building interior and pressed even closer.
“You know the Grand Ducal House of Iaroph? The Archdemon of Lust’s house.”
“So the Wielder’s eldest son supposedly bedridden at the estate was him. I hadn’t been sure because of the childlike appearance.”
The House of Iaroph had a hereditary tendency toward madness, so rumors circulated that their sole heir was being hidden away due to mental illness.
“It would be more accurate to call it confinement than bedridden. He’d occasionally escape and go on a rampage. Johann and I were usually the ones dispatched to subdue him. Eventually, they sentenced him and locked him up here.”
Enrique closed his eyes for a moment, then continued slowly.
“I heard that when he was young, it was only auditory hallucinations. The Grand Duke took him to the Order for treatment, but after that, he went mad and started killing people. Something must have gone wrong back then.”
Come to think of it, in Uncle Claude’s memories, my mother had also taken baby me to the Order.
Could that have been when my soul was swapped?
As I mentally assembled hypotheses in a Venn diagram, hot breath brushed against my cheek.
“But why are you so interested?”
A cold voice, accompanied by darkened golden eyes boring into me.
If I said I was interested, he looked ready to morph into a savage beast and bite.
What possessiveness he has over his charger.
“I was curious about Number 3’s ability.”
If he was the type to harbor murderous intent without reason I could strip his abilities without worrying about karma like I did just earlier.
He nodded with understanding.
“It’s an airflow manipulation ability. Lize, who was studying his ability at the Grand Duke’s request, defined it as a ‘geometric transporter.’ It’s primarily specialized in cutting, destruction, and defense. Most likely, he manipulated air currents to slice your bangs.”
Geometric transport? Wouldn’t that be vector manipulation?
I didn’t know its upper limits, but if properly developed or combined with other abilities, it could potentially rival El.
“Earlier, I ran a little test with Johann.”
To explain and demonstrate my theory, I pulled him into an embrace just as I’d done with Johann.
“When I did this, the purification effect increased. It seems like there’s potential for ability growth—”
Enrique blinked and looked down at me in silence.
The atmosphere was drifting somewhere more awkward, so I hastily took Enrique’s hand and placed it on my shoulder.
“So it was a mutual hug, like this.”
“Okay.”
He obediently pulled me tightly into his arms.
“And then he brought his face to my neck…”
Soft lips pressed against the curve of my neck.
The hand cradling my back slowly trailed down to wrap around my waist.
Then warm breath and a gentle bite made me flinch and hunch my shoulders.
“Ah, it wasn’t quite like this…”
“Do you prefer it rough?”
He chuckled low, lips still lingering against my skin, as one hand cupped the back of my neck.
“I’m good at that.”
His voice was husky now, our breaths mingling, and his warm exhalation curled around my ears.
The instant his fingertips grazed the bare skin exposed between my uniform top and pants, my cheeks blazed and my vision went hazy.
With Johann, the atmosphere hadn’t been anything like this.
It had definitely been soft, fluffy and the comfort-and-healing genre.
When I just stood there rigid without answering, he whispered in an even lower voice:
“And… what comes next?”
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