Chapter 45: However I Want

Without waiting for the little girl’s reply, Raive already had her on his back and was running. Seeing him bite through the pain, Hazel realized Raive might’ve seen something with his ability.

So she didn’t press further, just followed close behind.

"Brother...!"

Hershey was still worried, but she didn’t have much choice either.

She pressed her hands against Raive’s chest, arms tight around his neck, and began healing him. Slowly, his wounds closed, letting him move much easier. Soon enough, he was fully healed.

A few hundred meters later, though, they came to a stop again.

Before them were three paths. Only one could be real. However...

"Two of the three have drafts..." Hazel whispered, worried.

She’d tested it the same way Raive had, but even after checking two, three times, the result stayed the same.

Once again, a 50-50 shot at the right path.

"No... there has to be a way."

Raive, though, refused to leave it to luck. He closed his eyes, recalling the words on the door, trying to dig into their meaning.

But no matter how hard he pushed, nothing clicked.

"Is luck really all we’ve got..."

Just then—

"The middle one."

Hershey suddenly pointed at one of the paths.

"Middle?" Raive raised a brow, confused.

The middle path was the only one with no breeze at all—the one already "confirmed" a dead end. And yet—

"Wait!"

Raive caught something, then smiled.

"So that’s it!" He cheered. "Hazel, the middle path! Let’s go!"

"Huh? O-Okay..."

Confused but trusting him, Hazel followed Raive and Hershey down the dead-end path. About a hundred meters in, though, the two noticed something.

"Knew it!" He roared.

Ahead, the path was blocked by ice, which explained why no wind passed through. Instead, side channels split off left and right, drawing the airflow away.

After shattering the ice with a swing of his sword, the two kept running, glancing back as they went.

It was dark, but Raive was sure he’d spotted a portcullis-like mechanism sealing off the side paths. Had they taken either one, they’d have burned time equal to running an extra 200 meters!

"TRAP!"

At Hershey’s shout, Raive snapped his focus forward.

Spotting a tile that looked off from the rest, he jumped clear of it. But—

"...!"

It wasn’t the only one.

Right after landing, he caught a tripwire, far better hidden than the earlier ones. Even with his foot right on top of it, he’d barely felt any give.

"Shit!" He cursed.

No time to dodge, though.

A massive blade swung out ahead of them, aimed to cut them clean in half.

Raive dropped on reflex, ducking under it. But he’d missed one thing. Hazel.

"Hak...!"

Standing behind him, she never saw it coming and couldn’t dodge in time. The blade sliced her clean in half—instant death.

Raive glanced back, saw there was nothing to be done, and kept running.

Two of them gone already. Only him and Hershey left. Even so, that wasn’t enough to make Raive give up on this dungeon.

"HAAAAAH!"

With fresh resolve, as if pouring every bit of his anger into his legs, he pushed faster.

He kept his eyes sharp, catching every sign of a trap—pressure tiles, tripwires, wall switches, all of it.

When a danger was unavoidable, he simply let it hit him and trusted Hershey to heal it after, keeping her alive above all. A few times they had to stop entirely, like when Raive lost a leg, and the gap between them and the chasing stone monsters shrank fast.

About 15 minutes in, a new fork appeared.

"Five paths this time!" Raive cursed.

He already knew better than to trust the breeze this time, given what had just happened. Even setting that aside, three of the five carried airflow. Whichever he picked, the odds of it being right were slim.

"The middle path."

"Huh?"

Hershey’s words caught him off guard.

She said it with total certainty, as if there was no doubt at all. And given how right she’d been last time, Raive couldn’t just brush it off.

Still, blind trust without understanding felt careless, so he had to ask.

"How can you be so sure?" He asked.

"I saw it." Hershey answered, cryptic.

"The other four dead-end after a kilometer. They’re packed with traps that make the ones behind us look easy."

"You saw it...?"

Raive paused, thinking it over. Then it clicked. "You mean... your skill?"

"..."

Hershey didn’t answer, but she didn’t deny it either. That alone shocked him. He hadn’t expected her to be hiding something behind her skill.

’So it wasn’t just a simple healing skill—there’s more to it!’ He thought.

Of course, he didn’t blame her for keeping it quiet. Some things were better left unsaid, and his own skill was proof of that. So he understood her silence well enough.

"If you had a skill this useful, you should’ve said something sooner!"

With his trust in her choice now absolute, he adjusted her higher on his back and ran on.

"I... was scared." Hershey said as they ran. "Ever since I joined you, brother, the future kept shifting. I couldn’t be certain, so I stayed quiet..."

"The future..."

Raive had a fair guess why that was happening.

It was because of him.

He couldn’t say for sure whether Hershey saw one fixed future or one that kept reshaping the further she looked, but either way, his auto-load was clearly interfering with it.

"The future’s never set in stone." So all he could do was reassure her. "The moment someone looks into it, it changes—that’s just how it works."

Just like how Hershey spotting the right path had erased the future where they’d had to check each one by hand.

"So don’t be afraid of it. You’ve got the power to shape it however you want."

"However I want..."

Hershey murmured the words, her grip around his neck tightening slightly.

Raive’s words had clearly struck something deep in her.

But then—

"Then, please... leave me here, Brother. No... Raive."

"...?"

Her answer was nothing like what he’d expected.