I Married the Dragon I Killed [Novel] Chapter 255

Chapter 255: Gae Bolg

The slums of the Arken Empire.

A dark city standing in stark contrast to the glamorous commercial district centered around the main avenue.

An abandoned place beyond the reach of Alte’s light.

“The air here is always filthy.”

A man grumbled.

His leather armor was stained with sewage, and the cloth beneath it had clearly not been washed properly in ages.

Anyone who saw him would have taken him for a member of one of the local gangs.

His disguise was so perfect that no one would ever guess he was actually an imperial knight.

Wet Clorfield.

A noble-born elite knight who had walked the perfect career path, earned the trust of his superiors, and should have had a smooth road ahead of him.

A man like that pretending to be a vagrant in a place like this should have been unthinkable.

The order given to him had been simple.

“Isolate and protect the target. This is a mission only you can carry out.”

It was a Level-One secret.

Even among the highest-ranking military officials, very few knew of the operation.

Since the duty was important, Wet naturally displayed his knightly spirit.

Knightly spirit was just a fancy way of saying that when his superiors told him to do something, he had no choice but to obey.

Carrying a paper bag, Wet quietly entered the sewers.

They had been cleaned to some extent and no longer smelled as horrific as before, but a sewer was still a sewer.

Wet followed the twisting tunnels until he reached a place no one could possibly find unless they already knew to search for it.

He knocked on one of the stone walls.

The sound echoed as if he had struck a drum.

The people inside thoroughly verified his identity before admitting him.

Two guards standing along the short corridor saluted him.

“You’re here, Captain?”

“The isolated target?”

“Same as always.”

“She’s a creepy bitch.”

Both guards looked completely fed up.

Wet could hardly blame them.

He passed them, opened the second door, and stepped inside.

A technician was working there.

But the room was nothing like the workshops people imagined, packed with sophisticated tools and cutting-edge equipment.

It looked like a garbage dump.

Even the table had been assembled from trash, and everything gathered around it was junk.

With her nose practically buried in the refuse, the woman muttered endlessly to herself.

If one did not listen carefully, it would have been easy to mistake her for someone chanting black magic.

“Brought you food.”

Her muttering stopped briefly.

“Throw it over here.”

The knight tossed the bag beside her.

Perhaps she had been hungry, because she immediately inspected the contents.

Wet was about to turn and leave when she spoke.

“Wait.”

She flung the food back over her shoulder, and the bag landed at his feet.

“This isn’t what I asked for.”

“Salt bread with mayonnaise. I brought exactly what you demanded. What the hell are you complaining about?”

“It’s too fresh.”

Her reasoning operated on a completely different plane from that of ordinary human beings.

“I clearly said the mayonnaise should be just about to spoil, and the salt bread should be hard and stale.”

“…”

“But this bread is warm and soft. And the mayonnaise isn’t just fresh, it’s practically mild and clean-tasting.”

“…”

“You can’t even do one thing you’re told properly, can you?”

Wet tried to ignore her.

“Well, I guess that’s why you’re stuck in a sewer like this.”

That was the final push.

Wet turned back and locked the door he had been about to leave through.

He strode toward the woman and grabbed her by the head while she fiddled with an explosive device.

“Looks like you need another lesson.”

Then the beating began.

For an elite knight to be buried in a sewer, forced to isolate and monitor a madwoman, was already stressful enough.

And when that same woman deliberately scraped at his nerves, he needed somewhere to vent his anger.

He struck only the most painful areas, carefully avoiding breaking bones.

The woman did not resist.

Violent sounds echoed through the isolation room.

The guards knocked on the door several times to ask what was happening, then eventually fell silent.

There were no screams of pain.

No pleas for mercy.

Only the repeated sounds of bodies and furniture crashing around.

Blood poured from the woman’s nose like water from a broken faucet.

Once Wet felt he had beaten her enough, he hauled her upright.

She was startlingly light, just as thin as she looked.

“Are you thinking clearly now?”

After a lesson like that, surely even her pointless stubbornness would disappear.

Wet wanted to see Gae Bolg trembling and bowing her head.

But the light in Gae Bolg’s eyes had not died.

Her green eyes gleamed.

“Will that… actually kill me?”

She was smiling.

“If you’re going to kill me, wouldn’t it be better to do it now?”

Blood streamed from her nose, yet the grin on her face was enough to send chills down the spine.

This was not the hollow defiance of some man pretending to be tough.

This woman was genuinely enjoying the situation.

She seemed to treat even the fear of death as entertainment.

Wet hated it.

Her behavior constantly taunted him with the fact that she knew he could not truly kill her.

And in fact, he could not.

He was an elite knight who faithfully followed his superior’s orders.

“Crazy bitch…”

The knight released her.

“Coward.”

The woman snickered and mocked him.

She blew the running blood from her nose with a sharp snort and immediately went back to tinkering with a mana stone.

As though the beating had never happened, she resumed muttering and working.

‘I don’t understand why the hell they’re keeping a lunatic like this alive.’

Wet had already reviewed her entire record before arriving.

Her criminal charge was astonishing.

‘Attempted murder of a noble.’

Attempted murder of a noble carried a punishment even heavier than killing one’s own family.

There was no way anyone convicted of it should survive.

That applied even within the aristocratic world itself.

For a commoner, it was beyond question.

And yet she lived.

That alone showed how deeply her actions had shocked the nobility.

The noble she had attacked was Marquis Phellus.

As a noble of the financial world, he possessed little personal combat power compared with other aristocrats.

But his enormous wealth meant he had more than enough money to hire people capable of protecting him.

Through his silver tongue and capital, he had successfully secured the most famous bodyguard mercenary group as his exclusive protectors.

Their name was Aegis.

As their name implied, they boasted that they were a shield no one could ever pierce and warned that no one would be able to lay a hand on Marquis Phellus.

Naturally, the public believed them.

No one intended to attack him in the first place, much less attempt to penetrate his defenses.

Who would ever imagine someone daring to lay a hand on a noble?

Especially not a skeletal girl who looked like skin stretched over bone somehow breaking through hulking men and elite soldiers.

It was like smashing an egg against a boulder.

‘But she did it.’

She had broken through the guards entirely on her own.

‘With a few fireworks and some dye…’

She toyed with the elite soldiers, threw the guards into confusion, and slipped past them in an instant.

When she finally reached Marquis Phellus, the only thing she did was leave a red handprint on him.

Nothing else.

At that time, she had said only one thing.

“I pierced it.”

She did not even try to escape.

The confused elite soldiers eventually captured her, and she burst out laughing as she shouted,

“If you call yourselves Aegis, then I’ll call myself Gae Bolg! From now on, call me Gae Bolg!!”

Gae Bolg, the spear that pierced the heart.

The tragic demonic spear fated to kill even its wielder’s own family.

The woman should originally have been executed.

But she was not.

Aegis had failed, yet their reputation had not been exaggerated or fabricated.

It had been built through genuine trust.

Which meant Gae Bolg’s attack had demonstrated potential too valuable to dismiss.

Killing her according to the law seemed too wasteful, so they tested her in several ways.

As expected, she possessed an extraordinary gift.

Her hands were absurdly skilled.

She could build mechanical devices that trained craftsmen would need to study for years, relying on pure intuition alone.

They looked crude on the outside, yet somehow became tools capable of ruining someone’s day at precisely the perfect moment.

Regardless of what a client originally wanted, everything always ended up functioning according to her own intentions.

Someone eventually concluded that she might prove useful someday.

And that day finally came.

They managed to secretly bring in several magitech rifles and dozens of magazines.

Gae Bolg immediately began preparing to create something new from them faster than anyone else.

One of those creations was the round object lying nearby.

It had been made by modifying an entire cylinder.

At a glance, it resembled a magazine, but the color was different.

The woman called it a grenade.

The knight had once read records about magitech grenades.

‘According to the records, they release mana when they explode, right?’

The shockwave itself was lethal enough, but the pure mana released over a wide radius also paralyzed the nervous systems of monsters, creating an opening for close-range spearmen to attack.

But the object before him was not blue.

It had compressed into a quiet violet glow.

What difference did that make?

Without thinking, the knight reached toward it.

“I’d recommend not touching that.”

Gae Bolg spoke without even looking back.

It was almost as if she had eyes in the back of her head.

“If someone with no manners like you touches it carelessly, the entire area might disappear.”

“Something this small?”

“It’s not quite the explosion I ultimately want, but it’ll do that much easily enough. If you want…”

She turned her head.

Mockery filled her eyes.

“Want to test it?”

At those words, a powerful impulse stirred inside the knight.

He had felt it while beating her as well.

The woman possessed a strange ability to scatter people’s reason.

Wet was a man who never refused a challenge.

But he did not touch the device.

His orders said he could lay hands on the woman if necessary, but never touch her creations.

‘When the day comes to dispose of you, I’ll make sure you die as painfully as possible.’

Promising himself that future, Wet focused on monitoring her.

Then it happened.

Her muttering abruptly stopped.

Like a dog that had heard a strange sound, her head snapped upright.

“Hmmm~”

She stared toward the door with obvious interest, a crooked grin spreading across her face.

Wet was about to question that bizarre instinct of hers when he realized the reason himself.

‘I can’t sense them.’

Two guards were stationed outside.

The complete disappearance of their presence meant they had been taken down.

Wet backed away from the door and drew his sword.

He expected whoever was outside to smash through the iron door and charge inside.

Instead, everything happened quietly.

Something black crawled up across the surface of the iron door.

It took the shape of a hand, then simply pushed the latch open.

The door, secured only by a mechanical lock, opened effortlessly.

It swung inward slowly.

Wet maintained his guard in case something suddenly flew through the opening.

No surprise attack came, even after the door opened completely.

Instead, the scene before him was clear.

Two guards lay unconscious on the floor.

Behind them stood four intruders who had subdued them with ease.

For attackers, they carried themselves remarkably openly, making no attempt to hide who they were.

Wet recognized one of them immediately.

The man’s features were uncommon within the empire, but he was so famous that not a single noble could claim ignorance of his face.

Tall.

Gray-haired.

And with eyes so deep that meeting them made one feel as though even breathing would drag them beneath the surface of a bottomless lake.

He walked inside with the composed bearing of a noble.

Wet addressed him.

“Aren’t you the Regent of the Principality of Baldrova?”

“I am. And you?”

“Nothing more than a member of some nameless gang from the slums. What brings the future consort of the great dragon to a place like this?”

“You already know the answer, don’t you?”

There was no reason for a man like Ferda to travel this far merely to raid some slum gang.

Wet gave a hollow laugh.

“Even many within the empire know nothing about this place. You truly are a regent wrapped in mystery.”

“There is no such thing as an eternal secret in this world.”

“I won’t break easily.”

“That’s merely what you believe.”

Ferda made a slight gesture.

A handsome young man with brown hair stepped forward.

He wore similar leather armor, but carried a dagger shorter even than a short sword.

“Let’s see how well a slum gangster can fight.”

“With that irritating face, you must be Sir Swallow.”

“Nice to meet you, nameless trash.”

“I read the reports. You were apparently serving as Regent Ferda’s guard, but failed at the job.”

Wet smiled cruelly and deliberately struck at a sore point.

“A knight who failed his duty, yet somehow still has his head attached.”

“Honey traps aren’t something you use only with women.”

Zed answered with an easy smile.

“Besides, insults don’t hurt much coming from a man who beat academy students half to death, got abandoned by his peers, and ended up demoted.”

“What?”

“What kind of elite knight do you think gets assigned to watch a crazy bitch in a sewer? You’re more naive than you look.”

Wet’s face hardened.

“Zed wins the trash-talk round! One point ahead!”

Behind them, Penelope munched on snacks as she happily added fuel to the fire.

“Try failing to protect your lord twice, you bastard!”

Wet finally lost his temper and charged Zed first.

Zed’s dagger caught his sword.

The vibration from their first clash made one thing obvious.

This was no spar.

It was a fight where one of them could die.

“You bastard! I guess your reputation for beating juniors wasn’t all hot air!”

Wet possessed the advantage in strength.

But Zed had the technique to overcome it.

He twisted his dagger slightly, deflecting the sword aside, while drawing another dagger with his empty left hand and aiming for Wet’s abdomen.

“Cheap tricks!”

A textbook knight clashed against a heretical knight who relied on every dirty trick imaginable.

Wet held the advantage in reach and raw power, yet strangely, he was the one being pushed back.

And this was in a pure one-on-one fight.

His pride began crumpling like paper.

‘I walked the elite path and built my reputation!’

He could not believe he was being forced back by some street-born nobody of uncertain origin.

But it did not take long before Wet understood why he was losing.

He had been distracted by the man’s flippant mouth and failed to look at his eyes properly.

Those eyes belonged to a predator, completely at odds with Zed’s frivolous demeanor.

Serious, sharp eyes steadily drove Wet into a corner.

Wet’s confidence in victory began to collapse.

‘I’m going to lose!’

For the first time in his life, a man who had never believed he would lose until the final moment of a duel found himself thinking exactly that.

His mind raced endlessly for a way out.

“Duck!”

Gae Bolg shouted.

To Wet, it sounded like salvation.

Perhaps her strange talent would finally prove useful in this moment.

He immediately lowered his head as instructed.

Nothing happened.

When he looked toward Gae Bolg, she was merely sitting on the edge of the table, grinning.

From the very beginning, no one in this room had ever been on his side.

“You fucking bi…”

THWACK!

Zed’s hook landed perfectly on Wet’s jaw.

His head snapped violently to the side.