Chapter 4

To be fair, the sprint across the sky itself didn't last long—two or three minutes, tops. But I'm afraid those few minutes are burned into my mind forever. Every bounce my wet nurse made felt like our last. I could see her energy draining fast with every use of that technique. I could see us slowly losing altitude. I could see a plague of evil devils pouring after us, more and more by the second, and arrows whistling right past us, trying to bring my wet nurse down.

…I wonder if they know she's carrying precious cargo.

As a scrap of consciousness hovering next to its own body—one that had learned to swivel its metaphysical head all the way around—I had a truly magnificent view. Somewhere at the edge of a mind badly dented by harsh reality, I wondered how loudly I'd be screaming if I went back into my body right now.

Fortunately, at some point the woman made it out of the valley and into the woods: thick, and even gloomier. Moonlight seeped through the trees now and then without doing much for visibility, but that didn't bother her in the slightest. My wet nurse moved strangely, and certainly not at random. Sometimes she made sudden leaps, probably clearing some sort of trap. Sometimes she skipped a fairly open clearing and went the long way around…

Besides that, she'd stopped taking risks. She mostly quit broadcasting that supernatural energy all over the place and played it careful. I could feel in my bones that nobody had given up on us and the chase was still on, but my wet nurse's skills outclassed our pursuers by a whole order of magnitude, if not more. Little by little we pulled further ahead of the baddies, skirting the occasional rat holed up among the trees. If you ask me, the woman knew how things worked around here a bit too well.

Unfortunately, I'd started relaxing too early. Again.

Out of nowhere, a man's silhouette nearly slammed right into us, trailing dark-gray, almost black emanations. My wet nurse dodged in time, and I would've bet my collection of matchstick towers (I doubt it's doing too well back there) that if that goddamn torpedo had hit us, it would've hurt. Because the tree it flew into got knocked flat!

It was a freaking oak! AN OAK!!!

My wet nurse was impressed too. She pushed herself as fast as she could possibly go and, as far as I could tell, left the small fry and this midboss behind in one go. She was badly winded by now, right up against her limit, but she flat-out refused to give up and squeezed every last drop of strength out of herself. Our pursuer, way too quick and way too strong, was closing in fast. Apparently, he'd noticed too:

"HahaHAhahahaHAH!!!"

His laughter, full of hysterical glee, was punctuated by the occasional attempt to flatten us with his bulk, but every time, my wet nurse managed to dodge. She was getting closer and closer to her limit. Her body was visibly shaking, her blood-red aura had lost most of its gleam, and her movements weren't almost as precise anymore. They'd turned choppy and jerky.

Running across the sky had cost her too much.

Still, we were getting close to the edge of the woods. Up ahead, the end of this madness was in sight, though the end of the woods didn't mean the end of the chase. All I could do was hope my wet nurse had planned for that and wasn't running for her life on nothing but her own strength.

Alas, they weren't about to just let us go.

The midboss figured this game of tag was dragging on, and in an instant he was in front of us. The woman stopped dead. She knew that if she tried to slip past him now, she might pay dearly for it. The short breather, at least, gave me a good look at our pursuer.

Moonlight fell through the leaves onto a tall, muscular, hairy, middle-aged man in the same robe-like thing—a gray one, torn and beat-up. His long hair, going gray now but clearly black once, hung loose and looked like someone had ruffled it. His eyes were black, but cloudy. In those eyes I saw glee sparkling, and his wide grin only confirmed it. Funny—I noticed the glee in his eyes first, and only then got around to the rest of his face.

Something is definitely wrong with my brain…

"Tired, Shin Won-gi?" The big guy's grin turned into a snarl. My eyebrow twitched—mentally. That was a name, I think. Probably. Come to think of it, it was the first name I'd heard in this world. It sounded super strange to me, and kind of masculine. I doubted it was my wet nurse's real name, but even so… Okay, let's skip the name thing. While I was busy with my new discoveries, the strong baddie lowered his gaze to me. "Do you truly think […] is forgiven for the […] of the young […]?"

"I am acting in […]," my wet nurse said in her man's voice, breathing hard. "The Cult Leader […] something bad!"

The big guy's grin faded a little. He didn't look so cheerful anymore.

"He acknowledged him."

"That is a lie, Yoon Bo-kyung," my wet nurse all but growled.

She started listing what my days looked like and how I'd been treated. I didn't understand a lot of it, but even someone who didn't speak the language could have caught the gist: something was wrong here. This wasn't how things were supposed to go. And from what I gathered, she'd found out how my days went by means that weren't, let's say, entirely honest.

Oh, please. I'd figured that out on day one, guys. Stop the presses. So, what, they didn't know my new body's mother had been murdered? They thought she just hadn't survived the birth? And the midwife had mysteriously wandered off into the fog, sure? I knew I was in a villains' den, but who knew these villains also casually murdered, betrayed, and framed their own? So much for honor among thieves!

And here's the best part: the one doing it was supposedly the biggest shot around. Wonderful.

A big bad who whacks and frames his own people left and right is a lousy big bad, period.

The woman's speech got both me and the big guy thinking. He'd stopped grinning. At some point he just looked up at the moon, thinking hard about something. For my wet nurse and me, those probably weren't the most thrilling minutes of waiting, but they were definitely the tensest. Her muscles were practically cramping.

Sadly, diplomacy didn't work.

"Even if you are not lying," the meathead said, snarling again as he shifted his gaze from the moon back to us, "what of it?"

The woman barely dodged his lunge. He seemed to literally teleport to her and throw a punch strong enough to nearly flatten the nearest tree. If that punch had hit me, there wouldn't have been enough of me left to wipe up…

And I wasn't the only one who knew it.

"You… How dare you?!"

My wet nurse, who had just saved me from a truly horrible fate, stared into the big guy's eyes in shock. Still grinning wide, he lunged again. And again the woman barely dodged. If I hadn't been outside my body, the dance of these battle mages would probably have made me seasick. My metaphysical butt cheeks were clenched as tight as they'd go—and not just for my own sake. For the redhead's, too.

Because even if I could, in theory, survive this, she couldn't. I'm not some heartless demon who can calmly watch his wet nurse get closer and closer to death. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do. Not unless someone gave me a chance.

Unluckily for the big guy, someone did.

At some point the woman didn't quite dodge in time, and the big guy jumped on it instantly, switching from punches to a grab. He towered a full head above the red-haired woman. He clamped his bare hand around her throat and lifted her off the ground.

My wet nurse's body shook in convulsions, and a pained wheeze came out of her mouth.

"[…]," the big guy sneered. "Your […] is too […]. I always […] you were hiding something. Who would have thought…" His face twisted. "Who allowed a woman to become a Black […]?"

Oh-ho-ho. I didn't catch all of it, but if this clown had blurted that out back in my world, superpowers or not, he would've been canceled into oblivion by now. Idiot.

Then again, I was kind of grateful to him. The brute brought his face way too close to my wet nurse's, about to pull off her mask, and didn't stop to think that along with an exhausted woman, he'd brought something else dangerously close to his chest. Me. I didn't know if I could do anything at all, but not trying wasn't an option.

You only live once? Not in my experience!

The black heart, which had become an energy extension of my real one, started pounding with something like childish delight, as though it could sense a chance to pull something nasty. Refreshing energy rolled through my body, then gathered from every corner of it into a single bundle. Using everything I'd figured out by trial and error outside my body, I sent that bundle out and straight into the heart of the big guy, who'd let his guard down.

In theory, given the gigantic gap in power, the guy should've crushed my energy on pure instinct. But, as I said before, there was one catch…

My little black heart was a pretty scary thing. Besides that, the guy had burned through a decent chunk of his own energy chasing us. And most importantly, he'd relaxed. That was his main mistake. Even after it left my body, the supernatural energy—genuinely sinister and black, as I perceived it—stayed on my radar for a while, so I could see what I'd done. Like a hungry, evil beast, it started eating away at his energy. The effect was instant. The midboss's face literally twisted.

A crazy wave of weakness washed over my body, and I got thrown back into it against my will, which made things even crappier. But I was pleased. The worn-out black heart inside me seemed even happier than I was, sending pulses of already-recovering strength through my body.

The baddie coughed, loosened his grip, and clutched at his chest with his free hand, where my power was now running the show. It wouldn't last long—a measly instant—but in a real fight, especially a fight between battle mages, that's a crazy long time. My wet nurse didn't let me down. Finding what must have been her third wind or so, she pulled a dagger from her sleeve and rammed it, nice and deep, into his throat. Then she jumped away from him and almost fell over herself.

Confusion mixed with pain froze on the hairy man's face. Still rooted to the spot, he touched the dagger's hilt, and his hands began to shake. I could already feel myself drifting off to sleep, but when I saw the stupid mug of the soon-to-be corpse, lit by moonlight through the thick trees, I burst out laughing. Really laughing, the way only little kids laugh when their evil parents decide to tickle them.

My wet nurse, on the brink of passing out herself, hugged me and started stroking my head. I kept laughing.

"Y-you…"

That was the last thing he said before he fell for good. And I would've bet my collection of matchstick towers that he was looking straight at me. I was laughing too hard to really notice a new surge of strength. Not that it did much good when my brain had completely stopped working, but thanks to it I got a fresh dose of irrational happiness. I think that even scared my wet nurse a little.

The euphoria washed over me, and I don't remember what came next very well. We got out of the woods, and beyond them a group of people was already waiting for us: a teeny-tiny old man with a broom and a couple of others in white. Unhinged as I was, I somehow remembered perfectly how they looked at my wet nurse—like she was a dangerous animal. All of them except the gray-haired old man with the broom.

My wet nurse handed my happy and definitely unhinged self over with obvious reluctance. Trembling a little, she kissed my forehead one last time and said something I couldn't forget even if I wanted to. She said it to no one, really, without hope, knowing full well that a baby wouldn't remember it—wouldn't even understand it:

"Live, Young Cult Leader, Ahn Ha-yan."

That was the last thing I heard before I passed out for good.

My life, dear wet nurse, was shaping up to be seriously weird…