Chapter 79

In the end, the boy said quietly.

“Tell me.”

Unlike Reyes, Ashton loathed that sort of posture. He hated and tormented the boy, but he didn’t want to see him submit. Seeing himself kneel in a mirror was never pleasant.

In the end, as if tossing him bait, he said,

“Fine, I’ll tell you. I want you to undo the Seal and surpass me.”

“……For your purpose?”

“Yes.”

Helio’s eyes shook. He was trying to undo the Seal to stop him, yet even the act of Helio undoing the Seal was part of his scenario—despair surged over him.

“You’d rather not have known, right?”

Ashton asked with a gentle smile. It was a voice laden with ridicule.

“Now, what will you do? If even you surpassing me is within the range of my plan, are you not going to train anymore?”

Poison filled Helio’s eyes.

“You bastard…….”

Ashton laughed savagely and held out his hand.

Helio didn’t refuse, and took it.

He hated being dragged along, but he had no choice but to build his ability. As Ashton said, the boy undoing the Seal and exposing it might be part of the plan.

However, if things stayed as they were now, Helio would be left with only the choice of ‘not being able to speak.’ To be in a position where he could choose between ‘speaking’ and ‘not speaking,’ he needed strength.

That day as well, Helio, shattered after charging for a long time with no particular gain, turned on a heatless lamp and fell into thought. His chest felt tight.

In the room where his roommates slept, Helio began organizing purposes and relationship lines on a large sheet of paper. He wrote the names of Reyes, Ashton, and Sabina at the three vertices of a triangle, and wrote down what each wanted from the others.

What Sabina wanted from Reyes was distance. She wanted Ashton to be her shield.

What Ashton wanted from Sabina was hard to know. He seemed to want to keep Reyes in check.

What Reyes wanted from Sabina was also hard to know. He wanted to remove Ashton.

After organizing that much, leaving Ashton aside, Reyes’s true intention became murky.

‘My master seems to be trying to keep distance because she doesn’t want to fulfill what His Highness the Prince wants from her.’

It was now hard to believe the claim that Ashton had driven a wedge between them. For a foreign young man to have split them apart with manipulation, the gap between the two looked as though it had been there for a long time. And because of Reyes’s oversensitive reaction when Helio pointed that out, Helio became even less able to trust him.

Then, even the claim that he felt hurt simply because Sabina seemed to have grown distant would be a lie.

Whether he liked it or not, Helio would have to keep facing Ashton. If he was lucky, he might be able to read exactly what Ashton wanted from Sabina.

‘The problem is His Highness the Prince…….’

Helio felt he could vaguely understand Reyes’s personality. His pride was strong, and when things didn’t flow the way he wanted, he became hysterical easily.

The boy didn’t think it had been wrong to point out the contradiction in Reyes’s statement that day. But…… it would have been better to act more cunningly. It had been a blunder born of inexperience.

Helio tried to judge Reyes as coolly as possible. What did Helio even know about him?

‘His Highness the Prince……. when he’s in a good mood, he becomes talkative.’

Reyes tended to be intoxicated with himself, and his desire for recognition was strong, so when others looked up to him, he easily fell into a good mood. And a talkative person was bound to make verbal mistakes.

Helio thought about his lessons with Ashton. He hated Ashton. But because he needed him, he didn’t refuse his offer and attended the ‘lessons.’

There was no reason he couldn’t do the same thing with Reyes. All he needed was to swallow his pride and offer flattery mixed with a little lie.

And if necessary, he could sell Ashton out and provide Reyes with practical help. With that, Helio could buy Reyes’s trust. He had no pangs of conscience. Reyes used him, so he would do the same.

Helio took out a clean sheet of paper. At the very top, he wrote this.

『To His Highness Reyes Brinita, whom I respect』

Below it followed an apology he didn’t mean, saying he was sorry for his last baseless guess.

As Helio slowly wrote the sentences, he hesitated, wondering if his letter was too servile. But he felt that with a dry letter, Reyes wouldn’t calm down.

The boy shut his eyes tight and wrote even this kind of line.

『Since I could no longer keep in touch with you, Your Highness, I have lost my sense of direction on how I should act. It pains my heart to think that, due to my rashness, I have lost a precious guide.』

He couldn’t trust either Ashton or Reyes.

After staring at the letter for a long while to let the ink dry, then folding it neatly and putting it into an envelope, Helio sealed it with wax and wrote the address, repeating the same words dozens of times under his breath.

‘I won’t get swept up. I will take control of the situation.’

If Ashton Bryant heard that, he would have sent ridicule and praise at the same time.

The boy tucked the letter between the pages of a notebook and turned off the lamp. Sleep didn’t come. He wandered through his consciousness, seeking the weak point in the Seal Ashton had placed.

Only when dawn deepened did his eyelids start to grow heavy. In his fading consciousness, it felt as though his fingertips—wandering in the dark—caught on something.