I Am the Hero's Immature Younger Brother

But as always, the sun was bound to rise.

Dawn began to brighten.

Blue light pushed back the shadows draped over the castle wall, and a soldier who found it strange that they were not moving approached.

“Lord Giselle, is there perhaps some prob...... Lord Giselle! My God! Your Majesty—!”

The soldier walking over with a torch discovered Giselle and Ragniel covered in blood and ran over frantically. SPLASH! SPLASH! The sound of him cutting through the pool of blood rang out.

“Intru—!”

Giselle raised his hand and stopped the soldier’s shout. The white hand was covered in blood. It did not take long for the soldier to realize that the blood was not Giselle’s.

“This is a matter that must be investigated discreetly. Keep silent about everything you saw today, and everything you will see.”

“......! Yes, yes! Understood....... Then what should I do, should I call a physician.......”

The soldier swallowed hard. Terrifying words like treason, rebellion, assassination filled his head.

Giselle first told him to bring a blanket and bandages without being noticed.

Then, before the soldier left, he took his hand.

“My hand? Yes!”

Giselle held the soldier’s thick, rough hand. Giselle’s long fingers passed over the soldier’s hand and wrapped around his wrist.

Then his lips moved faintly.

A thin silver thread spread from Giselle’s mouth and wound around the soldier’s wrist.

Giselle let go of the soldier’s hand. As the soldier went to fetch what Giselle had ordered, he understood by instinct. Giselle had not told him anything, but the moment the soldier let slip anything he had seen today, death would come for him.

While the soldier left to get the items, Giselle looked at Ragniel lying limp in his arms.

At the edge of the mouth within the face twisted by pain, a faint smile rested.

What had made him smile?

Satisfaction at having saved a wretched life?

“Why do you not know that unless it is as your sword, it has no meaning anyway?”

A blood-soaked hand stroked Ragniel’s cheek.

***

The royal palace banquet ended well amid splendor.

There were six days of banquets remaining.

The servants ran around busily, cleaning away the traces of last night’s party.

“Ugh, I can’t believe we have to do this for six more days.......”

A short-haired boy swallowed a sigh and groaned.

“Hey, hey, being busy is still better. We get paid plenty for it too.”

A boy of similar age answered and began wiping the floor with a wet rag.

They chatted from time to time while still diligently moving their hands. Once they finished cleaning part of the area and straightened the backs they had kept bent, the stiffness rose all the way to their shoulders.

“But doesn’t the palace atmosphere feel kind of unsettled?”

“Ah, you didn’t know? No wonder you weren’t saying anything.”

“Why? What happened?”

When he pushed his face close, the boy looked disgusted and shoved him away. Then he grabbed his shoulder, telling him to listen quietly, and explained in a low voice by his ear.

To sum it up, it was this.

“The maids got dragged away!”

Last night, there had been a small disturbance that could hardly even be called a commotion, and it had been caused by one curious maid.

Rumors about “ghosts” often drifted around the royal palace. The history of these “ghosts” was extremely long, to the point that there had never been an age when they did not exist in the palace. They changed depending on the era, but usually, the most common stories were about people seeing the ghosts of criminals. However, after the regent king, the stories had quieted down considerably.

Recently, however, the stories about “ghosts” had begun to swell again.

It was not that there were no rumors about other palaces, but the rumor that shook the hearts of the servants and maids was, without question, the story drifting around the main palace.

The king’s sealed office. No one knew for what reason, but from a certain day onward, sobbing had supposedly begun to be heard from the king’s sealed office. How chilling and pitiful the sobbing heard deep in the night was, and whether there was anyone who had heard those sobs and screams, became one of the pleasures of those working in the royal palace. Like enjoying ghost stories on a summer night, the dreadful rumor was consumed as entertainment.

But as was true anywhere, there were also people in the royal palace who could not enjoy entertainment as entertainment and brought disaster on themselves through curiosity.

A maid belonging to the detached palace, unable to endure her curiosity about the rumor, had dared to open the king’s sealed office to confirm the truth. By morning, the news that she had invaded the room, been startled by the darkness before anything else, and made a mess of the office spread through the palace like wildfire.

There had been no ghost in the king’s office, but because no human hand had touched it for a month, it was thick with dust, and the fainthearted maid who had been startled by the darkness had, unfortunately, apparently gone mad in that single night.

What nonsense the maid had said was not known precisely, but even those who happened to hear it covered their ears and pretended not to have heard.

If they spoke of it even by mistake, disaster would fall on them.

Without any room to pay attention to the small disturbance, the royal palace turned busily for the preparations for the remaining banquets and for the enormous funeral preparation for the lives that had fallen in the war.

The southeast side of the royal palace, where the sun lingered the longest, was used on a grand scale as the place to hold funerals for great figures.

There were two palaces in the southeast. One was a huge palace used as a library to store the history of the royal family, and the other was a place where a queen from a hundred years ago, accused of being a witch, had been imprisoned. The queen’s injustice was cleared ten years after she passed away. After it was revealed that she was not a wicked being like a witch, but in fact possessed mysterious and holy power, the palace where she had stayed was newly expanded and became a space commemorating the queen who had met such a tragic end.

The fact that the queen’s palace, said to possess holy power, stood nearby had clearly also influenced the use of the enormous open ground between the two southeastern palaces as the funeral site. The few nobles who knew the kingdom’s history would bring up the queen’s name, saying that the appearance of a “Hero” in the kingdom was not so surprising. They said that holiness had clearly settled in the Kingdom of Setor.

The enormous open ground had now been transformed into an enormous garden. The workers permitted to arrange this place thought there could be no funeral more beautiful than this.

Among flowers of every color, white flowers praying for the peace of the deceased began to fill in one after another, regardless of variety. The servants sweated as they carried piles of flowers larger than their own bodies.

***

“Does it make sense that we don’t know?”

Luman asked, twisting the corner of his mouth.

The Heroes were currently gathered in Giselle’s room. The entrance to the room was guarded by a carefully selected knight holding a sword, and the room was filled with authority protecting Ragniel. Luman’s golden eyes shone bright yellow.

“What happened, Giselle?”

Geloman asked heavily, but Giselle did not open his mouth. Temar stood a little apart, quietly watching the situation. His dark brown eyes held Ragniel lying on the bed.

Ragniel’s state was terrible.

The wound that crossed his body contained intent. The intent to finish the matter in a single stroke.

It was undoubtedly a planned crime.

With Giselle’s authority, the wound had barely healed, but there was no way to feel relieved. It was only at the level of being gently stitched together with authority.

“You were with him when this disaster happened. Shouldn’t you at least make an excuse?”

The voice that had been suppressing irritation could not endure and ended up mocking him. Luman’s eyebrows twisted, and he spat out a curse between his teeth.

“Damn it! Say something, at least! No matter how much of a strategist you are, no matter if you’re the head of the Seven Stars, you must know you are the same as us. I am also Ragniel’s sword. I have the right to know about him.”

Giselle let out a faint laugh. When Luman saw the sneer hanging on a face pale as a corpse, he could °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° not hold back and grabbed him by the collar. Giselle gripped Luman’s wrist as it held his collar and stared into his shining golden eyes.

At the clear meeting of their gazes, Luman flinched.

Giselle said nothing. But Luman seemed to read countless words inside his eyes. And those seemed to be about things already absent from his memory.

With a confused expression, Luman released his hand and stepped back.

“Ragniel did not want it revealed. So all we can do is wait until he wakes.”

“.......”

“I see.”

Luman did not answer, and Geloman nodded heavily.

As though wanting an answer, Giselle looked at Temar, who was standing a little away.

A single line of doubt lay over his rock-hard face.

“It’s a wound that pierced through his back diagonally and reached his heart.”

“What are you suddenly talking about?”

“.......”

Luman and Geloman did not understand, but Giselle understood at once what Temar was saying.

“Was the assassin so short that they had to drive the blade in diagonally? If that were the case, it would have been easier to aim for the carotid artery.”

Temar pointed to the side of his neck where the carotid artery ran.

His eyes were shining calmly.

It was a sword that held resolve. It was not a blade extended merely to inflict a simple wound. Someone like that had no reason to thrust a sword specifically toward the back.

“The blade wasn’t aimed at Ragniel.”

“.......”

Temar’s eyes turned toward Giselle.

“Giselle. It was aimed at you.”

This time, his hand moved not to the side of his neck, but toward the place where the spleen was.

There was no one who did not understand Temar’s meaning.

Luman’s eyes widened.

The difference in height between Giselle and Ragniel, and if Ragniel had taken the blade in his place.......

“......Is what Temar said true?”

Giselle did not answer. There was no one who did not know what his silence meant.

A Hero’s authority dwelled in the spleen. Naturally, very few people knew that their vital point was not the heart.

As though they had agreed to do so, the gazes of the three men turned toward Ragniel.

There seemed to be something in this attack that they did not know.

“Will you not speak?”

“Let us say I cannot speak.”

“Fine.”

Temar answered calmly.

Anger suddenly surged inside Luman, but because of the emotion rising in his heart, he had to swallow it down. He did not know why he had felt such shame when his eyes met Giselle’s, but it felt as though he must not dare make any claim about Ragniel. Luman swept his face down with his palm and controlled his anger.

Watching the three men’s reactions, Giselle slowly blinked, then raised his body.

It was time for news to come from “Aked.”

“Where are you going with that body?”

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