It would be so easy to kill him. If she charged forward and swung her black blade now, he wouldn’t have time to react before his head hit the ground.

However, if she killed him here, everyone present would turn against her, the woman who had slain their hero. The spectators couldn’t harm her, but they would talk. Their stories would spread, and soon the lords, the Empire and even neighboring nations would raise their swords against her.

— “Then kill them all. If there are no witnesses, there will be no rumors.”

A voice whispered softly in her ear, honey-sweet and intoxicating, curling through her mind and tightening around her thoughts.

— “You’ve waited long enough. Wipe them all out, every single one here. Keep doing the same from now on. Richard, Sophia, Isabella, William, and every branch of the Blackwood line. If you kill them one by one and silence every witness, you can erase Blackwood without ever becoming the world’s enemy.”

That voice always came to her when she was consumed by hatred: gentle, tender, and almost soothing.

Had it not been for the village of Ernel, Lesta might have succumbed to it long ago.

It was the brief paradise she had found there and the warmth she had once known that stopped her from surrendering to her bloodlust. It was the only thing that had kept her grounded all this time.

But now, with Dominic Blackwood standing before her, the world went black.

Her hand moved of its own accord, reaching for the hilt of the black sword on her back, and then someone seized her hand firmly.

Instead of the cold, hard grip of the sword, her fingers met something warm and soft. The haze of hatred clouding her vision shattered in an instant.

“Lesta.”

Leonel’s voice, unhurried as always, grounded her.

“There are too many eyes here. They’ll distribute the Lumen after they enter the labyrinth.”

Something about his calm tone made the rage fade, as if the murderous intent had been nothing but a passing dream.

“We should move in soon, too.”

Lesta stared down at the hand holding hers, then gave a small nod.

“Yes.”

Only then did Leonel release her hand.

Her k*lling intent was fierce but quiet. No one could have sensed it, yet Leonel somehow seemed to know.

Leonel’s posture was composed, his expression unreadable as he watched the knights march into the labyrinth.

When Dominic disappeared inside, Eldrian said quietly.

“Let’s go too.”

✦❘༻༺❘✦❘༻༺❘✦❘༻༺❘✦❘༻༺❘✦❘༻༺❘✦❘༻༺❘✦ ✦❘༻༺❘✦❘༻༺❘✦❘༻༺❘✦❘༻༺❘✦❘༻༺❘✦❘༻༺❘✦ ✦❘

During their stay at the Marquis of Isden’s estate, they gathered all the information they could about the labyrinth. However, the moment they stepped inside, they found that the air itself was turned against them: it was thick and oppressive, and pressed down on their lungs with every breath.

This labyrinth was a swamp.

A heavy, grey-green mist coiled around their knees, and a murky mixture of water and mud stretched beneath their boots. It was impossible to tell where the solid ground ended and the bog began. Rotting lotus leaves and limp reeds floated on the surface, and bloated shapes resembling corpses drifted lazily among them.

The trees were grotesquely warped, their bark crawling with black moss and studded with blood-red fungi that reeked of decay.

Every so often, a faint ‘blop’ echoed through the mist, as if something unseen beneath the water were letting out a slow, deliberate breath.

No birds. No insects either. Only strange, eye-shaped plants, which slowly turned to follow them as they passed, grew there.

Above them was not a sky, but a suffocating canopy that pressed down on them as if it were alive. The faintest light struggled to get through, and even the torches fueled by magic stones were quickly engulfed by the mist.

Perhaps a flicker of fear had crossed Dominic’s face.

“Don’t worry, my lord. eye-like things don’t attack. They only… watch.”

The knights of Isden had been here before. They knew what it meant to be watched.

“Worry? I don’t do that.”

“As expected of you, my lord. Monsters don’t appear until we reach the inner marshes, so we should take the enhancement tonic now.”

Duke Blackwood had promised to send the Marquis an “enhancement drug.” It was a real potion, rare and nearly impossible to purchase even with gold. Yet Blackwood had sent two hundred bottles.

“Let’s do it, then.”

At his gesture, a knight brought forward a large chest filled with bottles of Lumen concentrate.

“So this is the enhancement tonic…”

One knight lifted a bottle, inspecting the liquid.

“The color’s different from the one we used before.”

That knight had tasted the real thing before, during a previous expedition into another labyrinth.

Without hesitation, he replied smoothly.

“We refined it using ingredients from Blackwood’s own labyrinths. The effect is far stronger. You saw what happened to the knight who tried it earlier.”

To avoid arousing suspicion, Dominic had brought along a few genuine tonics. He had even tinted one with dye to resemble Lumen concentrate and given it to one of Isden’s men to demonstrate its miraculous effects.

He had kept the rest, the true ones for himself, to be used only when absolutely necessary.

“I wasn’t doubting it. Just… curious.”

“Good. Then let’s begin.”

As Dominic urged his men on and the knights began distributing the bottles….

Flash!

A sudden burst of light flared up from the labyrinth’s entrance.

Nobody else was supposed to enter. The soldiers turned and their eyes widened in surprise.

Out of the light stepped a huge white beast, its fur shining like fresh snow. The knights instinctively reached for their swords, but froze when they saw who was sitting astride the beast.

“The Sunray Viscount?”

Even those who had never met Eldrian recognized him at once. Only one man in the empire rode a great white wolf.

The Marquis had said nothing about the Sunray forces joining them, so all eyes turned to him in astonishment.

But none were as shocked as Dominic.

‘What is he doing here?’

Irritation surged through him.

‘That meddling Marquis…’

Of course. The Marquis was uneasy about entrusting everything to Blackwood, so he had secretly sought Sunray’s help as well, keeping it from Dominic because he knew he would protest.

However, the moment he saw who was following Eldrian, Dominic’s anger towards the Marquis of Isden disappeared.

A woman with crimson hair that brushed the nape of her neck. Her skin was pale and almost translucent against the red that gleamed like freshly spilled blood.

Her narrow, feline eyes shimmered with a piercing turquoise light beneath long lashes.

A straight, graceful nose and full, blood-red lips completed a face so perfect that it seemed to have been sculpted rather than born.

The moment he saw her, someone he recognized, yet somehow different, the world around him shifted.

Others trailed in behind her, but he didn’t see them.

His vision, his thoughts, his very breath all were filled with her.

No—it.

Those turquoise eyes the same ones that had haunted his nightmares, glowing from the face of the black panther that had ripped his throat out were now fixed on him.

Dominic didn’t even notice that he had stopped breathing. He simply stood there, frozen to the spot, unable to tear his gaze away.

It — no, she — stared back at him, just as she had in his dreams.

For the first time in what felt like forever, a thought clawed its way out of the void in his mind.

‘How?’

Was this a dream?

Was he still trapped in the nightmare?

When had the nightmare started?

Or was this a hallucination?

Yes, that must be It. There were monsters in this labyrinth that drove men mad with illusions, weren’t there?

Then maybe all he needed to do was draw his sword and cut It down.

But could his blade even touch It?

Could something like that can kill It?

Questions battered his mind one after another, crashing like relentless waves until his vision blurred.

As he swayed, a nearby knight reached out and caught his arm.

“Are you all right, my lord?”

It was the same knight who had earlier questioned the potion. The sound of his voice, the touch of his hand, snapped Dominic back to reality.

It wasn’t a dream. But it was still a nightmare. Because it stood before him—smiling.

“Hello, Dominic.”

The lips of that thing parted, and a voice unlike any he’d heard before flowed out, bright and clear, light as a woman in her early twenties, stripped of the exhaustion and bitterness he’d known.

“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

When it stepped closer, Dominic forgot himself and stumbled backward, oblivious to the watching eyes.

Tilting her head, it smiled playfully.

“Oh dear. You don’t seem happy to see me.”

“Ugh—!”

The sight of it was so human and so unlike what he remembered that the unbearable humanity of it made Dominic double over and retch.