Once, twice, three times. Again and again, the glittering pupils rose to the sentence. His eyes were full of fire, but his face, fixed on the parchment, was steady. Cadel’s head tilted, his nose almost buried in the parchment, and he muttered in a low voice.

“What the hell is it saying…….”

No matter how many times he read it, he couldn’t understand it. Apparently, the White Kingdom was searching for islands, leaning on the very first line of the text, ‘One island, the only breath of a drowned world’. In fact, other than ‘one island’, it was all vague metaphors, so he couldn’t even tell where to start searching.

“A drowned world……. Is this a metaphor for the rise of the sea level because of the Sea Dragon? Can we call it drowned…… or did we have to wait until the Sea Dragon actually flooded the island?”

Maybe the cutscene in the event story showed the Sea Dragon sinking the island, and if so, it was now a mystery how to find it.

The more he thought about it, the further away he got from the clues. Maybe he should call his subordinates together and see if they could come up with some ideas.

“I wanted to give them a break.”

If he could narrow down the search a bit on his own, he could minimize his subordinates’ exhaustion. That was why he was out here in the middle of the night, alone, poring over the parchment. If he could analyze the text overnight and find many clues, it would make the others’ job easier tomorrow.

But he hadn’t expected to be stopped by a wall so soon.

“I’ll ask Kunra.”

Kunra had ties to the Seven Knights from the previous Demon War, so he might know the approximate location of the Stone of Peace. It would be better to ask Kunra for his opinion than to rely on his own shallow knowledge.

That was when Cadel grabbed the pendant.

“Darling, what are you doing out here by yourself?”

Lydon, who had just woken up, came up behind him, rubbing his bleary eyes and searching Cadel’s face before finally spotting the parchment.

“Were you reading something boring to yourself? Why?”

“I just couldn’t sleep, so I was killing time.”

As Cadel fumbled for words, Lydon casually put an arm around his shoulders, hugging him tightly from behind, resting his chin on the top of Cadel’s head and exhaling languidly.

“You’ve had a pretty interesting day, aren’t you tired? With your stamina, Cadel, you should have been stretched out long ago. It’s weird.”

“What’s wrong with my stamina? It has increased a lot you know?”

“Even so, it’s just like going from a snail to an earthworm.”

“……Get off me.”

Cadel, who had turned cold, pushed Lydon off him, but the tightly intertwined arms refused to let go. A muffled laugh drifted crisply on the sea breeze.

“If you can’t sleep, come play with me.”

“I can’t. I’m going to analyze the text a little longer and then go to bed.”

“We can do that tomorrow.”

“Sure we can, but I want to do it now……!”

All of this effort was for the sake of his future self. Lydon, who had no way of knowing Cadel’s mind, released his arms as soon as Cadel showed signs of saying no. Then he squatted down on the ground and bowed his head pitifully.

“You promised me. We were supposed to go swimming, but you put it off until later because you were already tired, and then when I ask you in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep, you say no? It’s not fair, darling. I’m so upset, I just want to go out and do whatever I want while the other guys are working.”

Lydon’s frustration was palpable, and he mumbled and mumbled incessantly, venting his frustration. Cadel looked down at him in disbelief, then sighed and sat back down. Roughly breaking eye contact, he gently lifted Lydon’s chin with his fingertips.

“Don’t make excuses to slyly slacken off. We promised to go swimming, but we didn’t decide when. Let’s do it when the time is right.

“Isn’t now the right time? You’re going to make up some excuse tomorrow and not play with me again!”

“I won’t.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Lydon’s answer was firm enough to catch Cadel off guard. There wasn’t an ounce of falsehood in his glare, and it made Cadel think about his own past.

‘But I always kept my word, didn’t I?’

He had never failed to fulfill an important promise. But when Lydon would ask to play, like this one, he would often make up evasive promises that were never fulfilled.

I’ll play with you when I’m done with this, let’s go play next time, if you listen to me, I might do this, etc. Of course, at the time, Cadel promised himself that he would fulfill his promises when he had time. The problem was, life was too hectic to fulfill all those little promises.

‘Well…… I can think of a few promises I’ve been putting off.’

Lydon’s frustration would be short-lived, but a quick reassurance would calm him down, and the number of crisis averted in this way was quite significant.

The more Cadel thought about it, the more he felt guilty. He wondered if he was being too harsh with the fairy, who was only too happy to be pampered. Cadel swept a hand through his hair with an awkward expression, then cleared his throat.

“……All right, let’s swim. I promise.”

Cadel’s brain wasn’t going to be cleared up anytime soon, and he wanted to make everyone less tired, but if that didn’t work, he might as well make one person happy.

So when Cadel agreed to swim, Lydon jumped to his feet, grinning like he’d never been so sullen. He stuck his hand under Cadel’s armpit, who hadn’t gotten to his feet yet, and sent him flying.

“Hey, hey, hey! What are you doing?”

“Let’s go to the sea!”

“We, we need to warm up!”

The thought of going bare-chested into the cold night sea was enough to give Cadel a heart attack, but Lydon’s excitement was too much for him to care about matters of human life. After holding Cadel face to face and kissing his forehead a few times, Lydon lowered his altitude and dove straight into the water.

Cadel’s eyes widened in surprise at the unprepared entry. Reflexively holding his breath saved him from disaster, but he shivered as the cold water soaked his entire body.

Struggling to lift his eyelids, he saw Lydon’s face in his blurred vision.

Moonlight pierced the murky waters. His golden hair shimmered beneath it. White cheeks puffed out from holding their breath. Droplets of transparent bubbles over his eyelashes, the corners of his eyes lightly curved, his lips drawn in a cute arc. His expression was filled with overflowing curiosity and joy.

It was a fleeting moment, but that brief glimpse of Lydon was enough to wash away all the negative emotions of his unexpected dive.

His eyes peered into the water, his pupils darting about to see if the water was comfortable. Cadel reached out and cupped his puffy cheek, and Lydon, who looked away, kissed him quickly. It felt slick against his cold lips.

It was a lovely kiss, but Cadel couldn’t savor the feeling for long. He was quickly out of breath. He patted Lydon’s shoulder in exertion, and with Lydon’s arms wrapped tightly around Cadel’s waist, they swam to the surface.

“Poo-ha!”

Cadel gulped in the air and rubbed at his wet face. His bones throbbed in the cold water. Cadel’s heart was pounding, and he was about to scold Lydon for taking him in so easily without permission.

“Did you see that, Cadel?”

Lydon said with a flick of his hair and a look of excitement on his face.

“There’s something down there that looks really funny!”

“Something that looks funny……?”

“There was something really round, transparent, and big, like a bubble of air, I swear I saw it! Does Cadel know what it was?”

Cadel stared blankly at Lydon, clueless, and then, with a grim expression on his face, he pressed their slightly separated bodies together again.

“I’ll go back in and show you, and you can tell me what it is. If you concentrate hard enough, you’ll see it.”

Before Cadel had time to formulate a response, Lydon yanked him down with another brute forcefulness.

Cadel clamped his hands over his mouth and nose and rested his head in Lydon’s arms. Lydon waved his arm around Cadel’s waist and pointed to a spot. The arm’s movements were jerky as if he were urging him on, as Cadel struggled to keep his eyes open.

Cadel’s eyelids barely lifted, and he looked where Lydon pointed.

‘……What’s that?’

Bewilderment quickly took over his expression. It sat there in the middle of the ocean, neither sinking nor rising to the surface. It had a membrane that was as transparent as a bubble of air, as Lydon had described it. But it wasn’t the bubble membrane that was the problem.

‘A monster? Something sealed? It looks like an egg…….’

Inside the membrane, there was a ‘something’ that was spinning furiously and spewing bubbles. It was spinning so fast, it was hard to tell what it was. Cadel decided to take a closer look at the ‘something’ before his breathing reached its limit.

Clutching Lydon’s arm around his waist, he made eye contact, and Lydon swam a little further down. As he got closer, he heard a strange sound. It was like a sharp sonic boom that penetrated his watery, muffled ears. It was unmistakably the sound of something in the bubble film.

‘It’s bigger than I thought. I don’t think I’ll be able to get a good look at it for long with these sound waves.’

The air bubble was much larger than it looked from a distance. Whereas he’d vaguely imagined it to be about the size of an armful, it was wide enough that three adult men could barely wrap their arms around it. Worse, the sharp noise assaulting his ears was getting louder and louder, and if he stayed long enough, he might lose his hearing.

‘What the hell is that? Is it making these sound waves, too? It looks like a living thing by the way it’s moving……. I can’t really see anything through the bubble.’

Not only was it spinning at a considerable rate, but the bubbles it kept spitting out filled the membrane, making it difficult to outline. Once he burst the membrane in front of him, he’d have a better chance of identifying it.

‘It could be dangerous, and if this membrane is the minimum safety measure, I shouldn’t rush to remove it.’

So far, the mysterious spinning object hadn’t done any harm. As long as you didn’t get too close, you couldn’t hear its dizzying sound waves.

‘But it’s also true that it could become a danger at any moment, and I can’t leave this strange being alone on the island where my subordinates reside.’

Something had to be done, Cadel decided, and tapped Lydon on the arm to get him out of the water. But.

‘……Lydon?’

The arm that had been holding Cadel’s waist tightly loosened its strength. Bewildered, Cadel reflexively grabbed Lydon’s shoulder and looked at him.

‘What’s wrong?’

The red eyes didn’t reflect Cadel’s. Instead, they stared out over the bubble membrane as if mesmerized. Perhaps he was overly focused on the mysterious being. If they didn’t get out quickly, they’d suffocate. Cadel shook Lydon’s shoulder vigorously to wake him up.

‘……?’

But Lydon didn’t look at him, shrugged off his touch, and before Cadel could catch a glimpse of something, he was swimming smoothly and reaching for the bubble membrane.

And the next moment.

‘Lydon!’

The fingertip that had pierced the membrane turned into a foam as if disintegrating. The bubbles sucked inward and began to gnaw at Lydon’s form. Cadel realized what was happening and quickly grabbed for him, but it was no use. The bubbles spread from his fingertips and quickly engulfed Lydon’s entire body.

Cadel could no longer hold him. The bubbles slipped through his empty grasp. The fist that clutched the water trembled.

‘No…….’

What the hell was going on? Lydon had disappeared before his eyes. His whole body turned to foam and disintegrated. Cadel’s reason clouded with the horrible realization that it was too much to even think about again. He tried to reach over the membrane, knowing he had to follow Lydon.

‘I can’t breathe……!’

His breathing, now at its limit, stopped his reckless behavior. Cadel clutched at his throat and turned desperately upward. He flailed his arms and legs in a desperate attempt to break the surface, his lungs bursting as he inhaled a massive gulp of oxygen all at once.

“Haah, haah……!”

Even as he continued to move his legs, a cold breeze chased away the daze. The scene from a moment ago stuck like an imprint in Cadel’s mind, refusing to fade.

“Lydon…….”

His blood ran cold in his veins, and he wondered if what he was seeing was an illusion, or if the mischievous Lydon was playing a trick on him.

Holding on to a vague hope, she called Lydon’s name a few times, waited for him to surface, and finally tried to hold his breath again and plunge his head underwater, but he couldn’t. If he found the water empty, he didn’t think he could hold on.

Lydon turned into bubbles? He wasn’t a character from a fairy tale, it was an absurd tragedy. He couldn’t have disappeared. It was definitely an illusion. A trap. It was a trap from the Demon Realm.

‘I can save him. If I fix it, …… Lydon will come back.’

Cadel told himself, brainwashing himself. Suddenly, his impulse threatened to overwhelm his reason, but he managed to control himself. No matter what methods he used, that bubble of air had absorbed Lydon in an instant. If he approached too hastily, he could vanish just as quickly, leaving no clues.

Cadel stared at the black surface for a moment, then set his jaw and began to swim back to the island.

‘I’ll need to wake my subordinates.’

It would be a dangerous choice to investigate alone. If he himself, who witnessed the atrocity of that air bubble, went missing, the others who would be searching would be in the same danger. So now they had to work together to find a way to rescue Lydon.