“Ah… Master! You’ve come?”
As I stepped into the tent, Eleonora greeted me with a squeaky voice that made me want to slap her.
What’s this? She wasn’t just awake; she was waking up from sleep.
No wonder she was mumbling. Now that I look closer, she’s sitting but keeps wobbling side to side, her eyes half-closed.
She once claimed she could escape if someone attacked her while she was asleep.
I didn’t intentionally creep in, but I thought I was being quiet enough—yet she sensed me the moment I stepped in. She’s definitely from a cheat race.
A popping sound caught my attention from the back, and I glanced over to find the source. Something fluffy peeking out from the blanket behind Eleonora was slowly swaying back and forth.
Yup, that’s a pet. I was worrying for nothing.
“Wake up. Go back to sleep.”
That uneasy feeling faded, and my voice naturally became softer.
I always say, you should sleep well and grow up quickly. We need you to be enlisted soon.
But Eleonora seemed to drift to the side again, only to suddenly spring up.
What’s this? Could she sense the enlistment vibes?
If so, her Dragonkin senses are sharper than I imagined.
Feeling a little pricked, I hurriedly hid the anxiety in my heart behind my back, and Eleonora sprang forward after throwing off the blanket.
“Master, are you hurt?”
So that’s why. The security around the Aria Military Office was just fine.
How could she know unless she could read my mind?
Is she reacting to my tattered cape or blood-stained clothes? I recalled the spear-wielding guy who almost turned me into a kebab.
I expected to feel some fear or overwhelming rage, yet my heart was surprisingly calm.
Despite it being one of my closest encounters with death lately, it felt oddly trivial. I didn’t foresee that coming.
They say seeing someone express intense emotions makes you calm down. Maybe the inner sage I kept buried in my frontal lobe woke up when I saw her worried eyes.
In any case, she has a knack for revealing emotions without having any expression.
I shook my head in cool judgment. It was dangerous, sure, but in the end, I wasn’t hurt enough to be a big deal.
No need to fuss over something that hasn’t happened.
“I’m fine.”
“But your arm…”
Eleonora glanced at my arm.
She can see it in this dim light.
Is it because Dragonkin have physically superior bodies? Even though they’re not nocturnal, they still have sharp night vision.
Since it’s already visible, I have nothing to hide. I removed the torn cape to reveal my shirt, patriotically shredded at the shoulder.
From just looking at it, it looked like I got bitten by a shark. My arm didn’t even have a scratch, but with all the blood, it could look serious at first glance.
I squatted in the corner and pulled out a wet towel from the basin I filled before departure. After wiping away the dried blood, my white arm was finally visible again.
“See? No problem.”
“Really…?”
Showing my perfectly fine arm calmed down Eleonora’s fussing a little.
But in stark contrast, her tail started swaying slower, as if tension was creeping back in.
“Okay then. Sleep for now.”
“Yes…”
With the tension eased, Eleonora returned to her spot, draping the blanket back over herself.
Even less than a minute passed before her regular breath caused the blanket to rise and fall.
A sigh escaped me.
As time goes by, I just can’t figure out what she’s thinking.
I thought the relationship between Eleonora and me was built on mutual understanding.
Cast out from her clan with nowhere to return, Eleonora couldn’t survive alone and sold herself to me, and I took her in expecting quality blood and future labor.
One could say we had a debtor-creditor relationship, which made it easy for me to understand it—nothing bad about that.
Yet, just like earlier, Eleonora shows me feelings of clear affection lately.
It’s hard to be oblivious to this, given how openly she displays it. The way she follows me, even blindly, doesn’t feel like a debtor’s attitude toward a creditor.
And that makes me uncomfortable.
If she followed me out of a sense of obligation because I saved her life, that’s fine.
If that intense hatred toward the human who made her a slave drives her to obey my orders as a human enemy, I can understand and accept that easily.
Being hated is straightforward.
I’m a monster after all. But I still want to survive.
No one loves me in this world, so I won’t give my heart to anyone either.
I’ll do anything to survive. I’ll abandon anything to survive.
With that perspective, everything becomes clear regarding relationships and events.
Unnecessary emotions hinder survival. Conscience muddles the mind, and guilt breeds hesitation in critical moments.
So I threw it all away. I cast off my former foolish self who wanted to be human.
It wasn’t difficult. The whole world was my enemy—if I thought of it that way, it was enough.
Though I did come to learn through Martini and the Duchy Vampires that there were allies in the world, it didn’t change the survival policy, so I didn’t think about it.
Vampires and I are kin, intertwined through understanding, and they were stronger than me from the start, so I could be grateful for their choices without worry.
But Eleonora’s case was different. She’s not even kin, so she wouldn’t have any reason to show me goodwill beyond obligation.
Did I save her from the Slave Trader? Did I feed her?
Those aren’t good enough reasons. My relationship with Eleonora must strictly remain a transactional one.
She paid for saving her life by considering herself a slave.
In return for feeding and sheltering her, I receive blood and labor.
There’s no need for emotions to accompany the exchange of obligations. No one feels grateful or affectionate towards a merchant while buying goods with their own money.
So it’s awkward. I don’t know how to behave.
If she were an enemy, I could either kill her or run away—if it were a matter of interests, I could discard her the moment the loss outweighed the gain, but what about someone who completely trusts and follows me?
For now, she doesn’t seem like she’ll run away, so I’m somewhat trusting that, but that’s a concern on the peaceful side of things.
What if a moment comes when I have to weigh my safety against Eleonora’s life? Could I do it?
To survive, I must be able to. If I have to abandon someone to raise my chances of survival by even one percent, that’s the right thing to do.
And if it were right after I escaped from the Luminous Kingdom, I would have answered without hesitation that I could do it.
But why? It’s a question I shouldn’t need to think twice about, yet now I can’t easily find an answer.
*
Stepping outside into the cool air cooled my head.
I can’t believe I was worrying over something so silly. Trusting others carelessly after shedding blood like that? What nonsense!
Thinking about the memories of the talent show in the Luminous Kingdom’s dungeon snapped me back to reality. After all, I’m not some sage who can break down and categorize everything in terms of profit and goodwill.
Usually, we enter and exit a bathroom differently, and when you’re drowning, it’s all about saving your life, but once you’re out of the water, you start worrying about your belongings—that’s just human nature.
Now that things are calm, even if I try to be generous, no one knows how Eleonora would react if the decisive moment truly came.
People say you only see someone’s true nature when they face real danger. What someone does while at ease doesn’t matter.
Of course, it would be best to nurture Eleonora as much as possible for my benefit, but if a crisis appears where we both can’t survive before that time, I’ll only think about surviving myself. That’ll be the end of it.
I put aside my pressing concerns and took a stroll to clear my head. It was still night, so a few vampires wandered about, but they weren’t enough to be bothersome.
After walking a bit, I caught an unfamiliar scent.
It was Lowell. He must have returned safely.
Realistically, if you dash straight out of the castle into the woods, you really can’t go wrong, but still, it’s good to see him back.
I was planning to reevaluate Lowell’s worth a bit. I never intended to dismiss him, but the local’s street smarts are impressive.
No matter how it is, even in Pahera, that spear-wielding human shouldn’t be lying around everywhere. If that were the case, the safe zone would be useless, and fighting wouldn’t even exist.
But even considering how special that spear-wielder is, based on my experience, Pahera isn’t a place to be taken lightly.
In fact, calling it a war zone wouldn’t be an exaggeration, with bloodshed happening daily. It’s laughable to even think of calling it an easy place based on that.
However, considering that many vampires can’t guarantee victory even against a single soldier, their survival rates are impressive.
In a simple power comparison, it wouldn’t be odd for half of them to die and return after hunting each time.
Yet they always come back alive. Whether they evade the fight or resort to riding Beastmen and scavenging like hyenas, the method isn’t the point. What matters is that they manage to survive here.
In fact, the food they deliver to the Security Maintenance Force has to be captured alive.
If there are vampires alive after doing that kind of work, they truly deserve to be called survival specialists.
And Lowell is one of those survivors, knowledgeable, and someone I can communicate with. There’s no reason not to show him some respect.
In that sense, I once again tailed Lowell.
Feeling uneasy, I thought I’d gift him some bravery—no, it was my little goodwill.
I’ll say it twice because it’s important: it was genuinely goodwill.
“Everything okay?”
“Whoa—Lady Scarlet!”
Ah, that familiar and trivial reaction.
It’s more stable and pleasant than I expected.
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