Black Badger

His voice carried so many emotions that I couldn’t bring myself to doubt his sincerity.

Even just looking into his eyes, I could tell.

“You.”

With my head turned to the left, I forced out a cracked voice.

Seeing those blazing eyes, I let out a faint laugh.

“Have you been well?”

I had mountains of things I wanted to ask.

But I chose the one I wanted to say the most.

Kairos clasped my hand tightly.

“As you can see.”

After answering, he bowed his head and pressed his forehead against the back of my hand.

He didn’t move from that position for a long time. Maybe because my body temperature was high, his forehead felt cold. In the room, only the sound of Milk crying—piuuu, piuuu—echoed.

“As you can see....”

Only after a long time did an answer return.

“I’ve been well.”

He showed no sign of lifting his head.

I let out a hollow laugh and scolded him.

“Why are you being creepy. Get up.”

Kairos obeyed my words.

He pushed himself up, then placed my hand back down on the bed.

His gaze dropped again. Standing beside the bed, Kairos stared straight into my eyes with an unreadable expression.

I didn’t look away and studied him in return.

It had been far too long, and a silence bloomed between us.

The moment I opened my mouth, Kairos spoke as well.

“F1?”

“I was going to go look for you.”

We both stopped speaking at the same time.

I smirked and tilted my chin.

“Go on. Let’s hear it.”

The man smirked too.

Only then did the old him surface. The refreshing smile, the sparkling eyes. That easygoing aura born from his optimistic disposition.

Kairos lifted Milk, who had been circling his feet, with his right hand and put him on the bed.

“It’s a long and complicated story. Can you listen? You still have a fever.”

“I’m fine now.”

“You don’t look like it. How about eating dinner while I explain, so you can take your medicine?”

“Dinner?”

Was it already that late?

Milk wriggled, plopping down on my arm. With my free right arm, I stroked the back of Milk’s head, then rubbed my face.

“What time is it? My phone....”

The red-haired man told me it was seven as he handed me my phone.

How many hours did I sleep?

I clicked my tongue and turned on the screen—and recoiled the moment I saw it.

“What?”

I shot upright.

“134 missed calls?!”

“Ah, the phone kept ringing, so I answered instead and told them your condition. They were worried. I said I was looking after you.”

“Who?”

A chill ran down my spine.

Kairos tilted his head.

“I don’t know the name. Check it. It was a man.”

It was Leeho.

The moment I checked the call log, I let out a sigh of relief. Thank goodness it wasn’t from Ricardo or Kudo or Yun.

Of course, their messages were piled up like a mountain. I put off opening them. I had no courage for that right now.

Leeho must have told them where I was, so I’d have to bow my head and apologize later.

I put the phone down and petted Milk.

Even so, I didn’t take my eyes off Kairos.

“I want to hear it quickly, cough, cough!”

“I’ll bring porridge right away, so wait. Don’t move.”

If he was coming right back, fine.

I scratched Milk’s ears and watched the distant figure of my kin walk # Nоvеlight # away.

Only now did the space I was in fully register. A tall ceiling, no furnishings—so I couldn’t tell if this was a guest room or a bedroom. It was a room on the second floor.

It must be Kairos’s house.

He’d earned a ton of money, so it wasn’t strange for him to live in a place this large....

Kairos stopped midway down the stairs and turned back to me.

“You’re not going to leave, right?”

“Kairos.”

His anxious expression made me laugh.

“I’m the one who found you, not the other way around. Where would I go?”

When I answered in my cracked voice, Kairos smiled.

It was a smile honest with joy. Seeing that expression made me feel absurd and a little sad. Why he pretended not to know me earlier, and why he hadn’t come to find me until now—I still didn’t know, but it was clear he had been waiting for me for a very long time.

I made him wait too long.

I thought, looking at Milk climbing onto my thigh and peering up at me.

Long enough to wear someone out.

He came back really quickly.

White steam rose in soft wisps from the egg porridge. If I didn’t eat, he’d surely refuse to speak until I did. He had his own strange stubbornness.

So I obediently ate the porridge and took the medicine.

The whole time, my kin had dragged a chair beside the bed and hadn’t taken his eyes off me.

His stare was so persistent I couldn’t help but laugh.

“If you were going to stare that hard, why didn’t you come sooner?”

“Captain.”

When I was a knight commander, Kairos would call me by name, or say “you,” or call me “Commander.” After coming to Earth, he called me by name, or “you,” or “Captain.”

“Have all your memories come back?”

I put the spoon down.

I took in those vivid orange eyes again.

“Now they have.”

I gave a faint smile.

“You knew, didn’t you. You were watching, weren’t you? So that’s why you didn’t come?”

“At first, yes. That was the decision we made among ourselves. We thought it’d be better to wait until you’d calmed the confusion.”

So I had made them wait another year.

“It wasn’t easy to approach, either. But I hadn’t planned on waiting this long. Even if you hadn’t recovered all your memories, I’d planned to at least go see your face.”

“And then?”

The answer didn’t come right away.

Kairos lowered his eyelids.

He hesitated, unable to speak easily. Something had definitely gone wrong. This man didn’t make such troubled expressions over trivial things.

I just hoped nothing had happened to the remaining members.

Suppressing the dread slowly spreading through me, I urged him quietly.

“Tell me everything. Please.”

I didn’t think he would hide the truth to the end.

No matter how miserable reality might be, he was not someone who would look away from it. Even if he hesitated, he would tell me everything.

Kairos slowly lifted the eyelids he had lowered.

“Those who were not granted eternal life blended into human society without difficulty.”

He didn’t reveal the problem right away. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

Instead, he began with the current state of our kin.

He was trying to cushion bad news with good news. I didn’t interrupt.

He told me that most of what I had hoped for had come true. Those who were not fighters. Those who lived ordinary lives without eternal life—they had continued their previous lives safely. Many had even lost their sense of identity as kin.

I accepted the information under the weight of heavy emotions.

“There are mixed-bloods too. Most don’t even know they are mixed-blood.”

What needed to be hidden was excessive strength, faster regeneration than humans, their intuition.

That much wasn’t difficult to hide, he said.

By the third generation, some were even born without intuition.

“So in the end, you were right.”

Kairos lifted his head and gave a faint smile.

“They succeeded in blending in. And their happiness—well, that’s not something you could make for them. One’s happiness is something one builds for oneself.”

I let out a low laugh.

It was a sound argument. And it was the kind of statement that told me what the actual problem was.

“It wasn’t easy to blend in, was it.”

And the guilt I felt was unavoidable.

“A place with no roots.... Some must never have managed to adapt.”

“There are many people, so their ways of living are bound to be diverse. As you can see, I’m living very well.”

“Were there many who struggled?”

If there were more than a few, maybe that was why he didn’t come sooner.

He must have understood the point of my question. Kairos looked at me with a complicated expression.

“No. If we judge by absolute numbers, absolutely not. Many disappeared from contact simply because they blended into Earth life so well.”

“That’s really a relief....”

Something inside me unclenched.

I didn’t know exactly what it was. But something that had been piled inside me disappeared. Something I hadn’t even been aware was there, but had been pressing down on me for a long time.

Not that nothing new had been added.

“So what’s the problem?”

I looked at the person I still couldn’t quite believe was in front of me.

“Tell me the core of it, Kairos. Please.”

“You don’t need to ‘please’ me.”

My kin looked me straight in the eyes.

“Just ask.”

“Fine then. Tell me the core.”

“The hardships of life can twist a person in strange ways.”

He returned to his true self and went straight to the point.

There was no pity or sympathy in his voice—only firmness.

“Resentment easily turns into rage. The problem is that we haven’t been able to find the one who has fallen apart. To be fair, he barely held himself together until the Captain returned with his memories gone. But once you returned having neatly forgotten the past, and became a Badger, it seems he couldn’t accept it.”

“The name?”

Even as I asked, I already had an idea who the twisted one might be.

But I asked to confirm.

Kairos didn’t look away, but his fist tightened.

I waited quietly.

Until he said the name—one I was already expecting.

“Yo.”

Right.

It would be him.

“He vanished. That’s why I couldn’t come to you. Since he was trained as an assassin, he’s dangerous, and he’s twisted in an unsettling way. We were afraid that confronting him prematurely would provoke him while he was hiding. So we agreed to capture him first, then go to meet you. ...It sounds pathetic, I know.”

“No. Tell me more. Yo was fine until I returned?”

“He was our leader for a long time. While you were gone, Yo took care of every single one of our kin, making sure they blended safely into Earth life. He did well for years. We realized far too late that the position had been eating him alive.”

“The article was the fuse, then.”

The article about rescuing Foden.

That must have set him off.

I thought of the strategist I remembered.

The Emperor’s young strategist.

After coming to Earth, Yo and I had grown extremely close. When we removed the hardline Elders, Yo helped me immensely. We locked ourselves away discussing ways to eliminate our enemies, the next step, and the step after that.

He was brilliant. And he loved our kin deeply.

That heavy love must have turned into a heavy burden pressing him down.

My gaze drifted into empty air.

“No wonder he snapped. For decades, he must have felt the misfortune of our kin as his own, struggling desperately to help them live well. And then the one who had vanished shows up with everything conveniently forgotten and becomes a Black Badger.”

“Hilde.”

My name was called.

Hearing it in this voice felt strange. I turned my head. Kairos was standing by the bed again.

I toyed with Milk’s ear and gave a faint smile.

Such a complicated expression, on someone who was never like this.

“What.”

Kairos didn’t move for a long moment.

I let out a small laugh. And I was about to say, If you’re about to kneel again, don’t, because he looked like he might drop to his knees at any moment and grab my hand.

But he didn’t kneel.

He didn’t kneel—but suddenly, his cheek grew wet.

“Hey.”

What the hell.

I jolted upright.

“Why are you crying?”

Why are you crying?

In all my life, I had never seen this guy cry....

Does he even cry? Is that physically possible?

His mind always seemed harder than titanium.

He was someone who always waved with a bright smile.

I was so flustered I couldn’t speak.

As my hands hovered, unsure what to do, Kairos spoke through tears without lowering his head.

“We were living well.”

His orange eyes were wet.

“We were living well thanks to you.”

Thank you. That’s what Kairos said.

Thank you.