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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 32
Chapter Title: The First and Last Disciple
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“Helios, after a trial ends, don’t all the injuries, even the ones that feel like you’re about to die, just vanish as if they were a lie?”
After reaching the 20th floor, Helios had only ever faced trials with Mint and Ged’s group.
In other words, he’d had no time to get to know anyone else’s face. He had to train.
“Those who die in that tower are revived when the trial ends. As if by a miracle.”
“……”
“It’s something that happens from the 20th floor onward. You seem to have had no idea. They should have explained it on the 19th floor.”
They hadn’t. Because he never made it to the 19th floor.
As Ged finished speaking, Mint, who had been watching the people and the tower with her back to them, slowly turned around.
She was wearing the guise of ‘Garet’, but her eyes, the same mint-green as her name, stared intently at him.
“I was wondering when you’d find out. Now you know.”
“Why…”
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“……”
“That’s something only the 19th-floor guard can tell you. I wasn’t qualified to inform you, prisoner Helios.”
It was a lie.
In truth, she had hoped he would realize the most important secret on his own.
That’s how this prison was.
The more you learned for yourself, the longer the realization stayed with you.
Helios’s face, which looked ready to shatter, would surely become stronger.
A faint thrill crept onto Mint’s face.
Mint considered this tower to be like an ‘endless hell’.
Sinners who had committed crimes came here, climbed the tower, died, killed, and suffered.
But the moment the trial ended, everything returned to nothing. And then it was back to a time of dying, killing, and suffering.
Unable to truly die, nor to refuse the trials.
What was this, if not the most terrible punishment for wicked sinners?
“All sorts of villains from around the world gather here.”
Real criminals, unlike herself and Helios, who had been falsely accused.
As the trial ended, a sunset was painting the world.
Before Helios’s eyes, Mint’s brown hair was dyed in the light of the blazing twilight.
With an expression Helios had never seen before, Mint smiled and whispered to him.
“I think that tower is the villain of villains.”
What do you think?
* * *
The sunset faded quickly.
As if to demonstrate the nature of this prison at the edge of the world.
Soon, the evening stars settled in the sky above.
Mint and Helios walked in silence. Through mealtime, and even after the meal when they gathered again for training during their break.
Until the final roll call was over and they lay in their beds, no particular conversation passed between them.
Of course, Mint didn't mind at all. She was simply thinking, ‘What kind of training should I start tomorrow?’
“They say you have to sleep early to grow tall.”
“……”
“Not sleeping?”
Mint yawned and turned over to face Helios’s bed.
Helios was sitting on his bed in the same clothes he’d returned in, not even having washed up.
His face didn’t look dazed, but it wasn’t exactly a look of shock, either.
It was a sort of composed expression.
At least, that’s how it seemed to Mint, who wasn't very good at reading expressions or emotions.
“You could have told me… no. You could have given me a hint.”
Mint had given him countless hints until now. From the very first floor they entered, and all the way up.
So she certainly could have given him a hint about the tower where you come back to life even if you die.
“Asking why I didn't tell you, why I didn't give you a hint… isn't that a bit childish?”
Helios’s shoulders flinched.
Her voice wasn’t cold. But it was devoid of emotion. More so than usual.
“In the first place, I never stopped you from interacting with anyone else.”
If he had tried talking to someone, if he had remembered the face of even one person passing by on the same floor.
Helios would have known.
Just as he had learned from his conversation with Ged today.
“Surely you’re not going to ask me to be responsible for your social skills, or for you growing up, are you? Helios the child?”
“……”
“Or should I say, Helios the adolescent?”
She usually acted as if she had no common sense or regard for the law, yet Mint was always sharp about the strangest things.
As if she were a person who knew everything but pretended not to.
“……So.”
The truth was, Helios himself didn't know what he was so angry about.
It was just that the sight of Mint, who seemed to be looking at him but not truly seeing him, made his blood boil.
And the fact that Ged and everyone else had known, while he alone was in the dark.
It felt as if Ged’s group and Mint were sharing a secret…
Helios quickly wiped his face.
Damn it.
*How am I any different from a real brat?*
Helios anxiously bit his lip.
“You’ll make your lip bleed if you keep biting it.”
The carefree voice echoed softly in the two-person cell.
Helios slowly lifted his head.
Here, at night, no light was permitted except for the lanterns carried by the guards.
Even when he turned his head, he could only see a silhouette, but he could feel that Mint was looking at him.
So, he had to be more rational, more level-headed.
*Why is she helping me, going so far as to call herself my master? How long will she help me?*
*How much will she teach me by then?*
“……Are you going to let me die now?”
But all that came out was a pathetically weak voice. He felt a terrible sense of self-loathing at this fact.
From across the space between their beds, he heard a small breath. A breath that sounded like a laugh.
*How can she be laughing?*
Helios swallowed. He wanted to see her.
“No. I’d rather you didn’t die, Helios.”
“……”
“And I don’t particularly want to see my first disciple die, you know?”
*What kind of expression is she making as she says that?*
“First disciple.”
“Yeah, don’t worry. You’ll be the first and last disciple of my life.”
It was laughable. How, with just that one lighthearted remark, he felt as if he had just surrendered the world he held in his hands.
“A master is a position of responsibility.”
“……”
“You’re the only one I want to be responsible for.”
Mint thought of the 25th floor.
Even those who had never died before often faced death on this floor.
In fact, it was a far more vicious floor than it seemed. Because not every sinner who came here had committed murder.
But the trial of the 25th floor forced those who had never killed to experience their first murder.
And for those who came here for murder, it reawakened a forgotten pleasure.
If the tower had a scheme to break human beings, this was the beginning.
Yes, the beginning of the collapse.
Because as Mint climbed, she had realized. What was lost on the lower floors could never be picked back up or remade.
“I want you to reach the very top without dying even once.”
Mint had come here at too young an age. Her mind may have been an adult’s, but her body was a child’s. It was impossible for her not to die on her way up.
“Do you know what’s at the top of this tower?”
Mint’s voice, echoing in the quiet room, sounded different from other days.
“……What’s there?”
Helios felt a thirst.
In this pitch-black darkness, he wanted to see her, just once. So desperately that he himself wasn’t aware of it.
“An escape route.”
“……”
With an endlessly gentle voice, Mint told a blatant lie.
“Climb to the top and escape. Don’t you want to get outside? I hope you do.”
Mint murmured quietly.
*Because this place is a living hell.*
*The male lead escapes anyway, but that might not happen this time. Even if things change from the original story, you'll probably find another way to break out, won't you? You're the protagonist of this world, blessed with all the luck.*
“Helios. What do you want most?”
Helios felt suffocated. *Right now, I just want to see your face. What kind of expression are you making while saying these things?*
“……I want to survive.”
“If you escape, isn’t that surviving? They say you can escape if you reach the top.”
“……”
In that moment, Helios’s goal was set. No, he had to do it.
“Yes, I will reach the top of the tower.”
A faint, broken laugh could be heard.
The day Helios found his true goal. Helios obtained a special Kia.
*What is this?*
He held his breath for a moment.
Because above his master, who lay before him, he could see the slender silhouette of a woman.
It was translucent, its color indiscernible.
It was a woman with long, straight hair.
