Chapter 3

Order Over Neatness

The acrid smell of gunpowder stung her nose.

That harsh, choking scent had never felt more welcome.

“…”

Cautiously, she opened her eyes.

The man was still standing right in front of her.

Even at a second glance, he was so breathtakingly handsome it could steal one’s soul.

But the smoke curling up from the rifle was unmistakably real.

Without taking her eyes off the man, Riche slowly stepped back.

Something unpleasant and ominous brushed against her heel.

The moment she turned around, she had to clamp a hand over her mouth.

What her heel had touched was a fallen body.

Someone who could no longer be called a living person.

An assassin, by the look of it.

And it didn’t end there.

When she looked around, she saw corpses strewn all across the ground.

Above them, the rain clouds had mysteriously cleared.

It was as if the torrential downpour from earlier had never existed.

A living hell under the heavens.

She had witnessed scenes like this countless times before.

But no matter how many times she saw it, she could never get used to it.

All she could do was grow numb.

She looked up at the man again.

He showed no sign of disarray, not even the slightest hint that he had just walked through hell.

Rather than neatness, the word that suited him was order.

Grand Duke Damias Eldéard.

The fallen crown prince.

The target she might one day have to eliminate.

Could she really do it?

The moment their eyes met, even she wasn’t sure anymore.

“….. I am…”

It was proper for her, the subordinate, to introduce herself first, but it felt like something was stuck in her throat — no sound came out.

Regardless, the man simply kept looking at her.

Suddenly, a strange sensation wrapped around her body.

When she turned to look, the assassin she had thought dead was somehow standing upright, staggering toward them.

It wasn’t a surprising sight — she was all too familiar with it — yet Riche took a step back like any ordinary person would.

In contrast, the Grand Duke didn’t move an inch from where he stood.

“Close your eyes.”

The man spoke softly.

His voice came much closer than when he had first pointed the rifle at her.

But Riche didn’t close her eyes.

A surge of curiosity — the desire to see exactly what he would do — overpowered her.

Bang!

The kill happened in an instant.

A warm liquid splattered across her cheek and lips.

She didn’t need to check to know what it was.

The assassin crumpled like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

The metallic scent of blood rode the gentle breeze to her nose.

All the blood in her body seemed to freeze cold.

It wasn’t just the sight of corpses or blood — she had long since passed the stage of being shocked by mere death.

It was the brutal truth that she was no different from those fallen assassins.

A sharp headache pierced her.

She was grimacing, pressing a hand to her forehead, when—

“Ah.”

She hadn’t expected him to catch her.

An arm wrapped around her waist with a firm, generous hold, making her open her eyes wide in surprise.

Without thinking, she pressed her hand against his broad chest right in front of her.

It was a solid, warm embrace.

It felt — irrationally — like even if she collapsed, he would somehow hold her up.

When she lifted her face, she instinctively held her breath.

Their faces were far closer than she had expected.

So close that their noses almost brushed, their breaths tangled and merged, indistinguishable from whose was whose.

“…”

The Grand Duke, with his jet-black hair and ashen-gray eyes, was, without a doubt, the most strikingly handsome man she had ever seen.

Every feature was sharp and distinct.

The lines of his eyes, his nose bridge, his jaw — every contour on his face was steep and defined, like the sheer cliffs deep within a mountain range.

He resembled a statue painstakingly sculpted by a god, crafted day and night with utmost care.

It wasn’t just his beautiful face that made it impossible to look away.

Unlike his warm embrace, the gaze he cast down at her was chillingly cold.

The gray eyes set deep beneath his brows were clouded, utterly devoid of light.

What had he burned away to end up with eyes like that?

They were selfish eyes — ones that mercilessly pierced and dug into the soul, yet stubbornly revealed nothing of their own emotions.

She found herself unable to escape from those eyes.

The blazing sunlight began pouring from the crown of his head, flowing down the strands of his black hair.

And yet, something felt strange.

Even with that flood of golden light at his back, why was it that only a cold darkness seemed to cling to this man?

“…… Ah.”

Something heavy pressed against her lower back.

The moment she realized what it was, her breath caught again.

She had forgotten.

He was still holding the rifle.

The Grand Duke hadn’t let her go, even after surely seeing how shaken she was.

The nape of her neck tensed stiffly — not solely because of the distance between their heights.

Suddenly, the man’s hand tilted her chin upward.

A foreign warmth spread from her lower jaw to her left cheek in an instant.

As his face drew closer, she instinctively wanted to shut her eyes.

For a brief moment, his thumb brushed against her cheek.

Next, it touched her lips.

The calloused pad of his thumb pressed into her soft flesh, wiping away the blood.

His hand that brushed her face, his arm that held her — they were far too tender for a man touching a woman he had just met.

The man licked the bloodstained tip of his thumb.

There was something almost indecent about the way he did it, making it hard for her to meet his eyes.

But the look in his eyes was utterly dry and devoid of emotion.

After tasting the blood, he offered a short assessment.

“Not bad.”

So this is the kind of man he is.

From now on, she would have to face this kind of man.

And someday, she would have to kill him.

His words and his demeanor didn’t match, leaving her confused.

She couldn’t tell which side truly reflected his heart.

“You said you’re a doctor?”

She hadn’t even spoken a word about herself yet.

“Follow me. This will be your first task.”

Only then did she fully understand why Kian had been so careful with his words.

* * *

They thought everything would be resolved once the war with Dossien ended.

It had been a miscalculation.

They had succeeded in forcing the Axis powers — those who had plunged the Six Continents into chaos — to pay enormous war reparations.

But at some point, the two great allied powers turned their backs on each other.

The war began anew.

The great powers planted their flags one after another across the confused world map.

Countless new nations were born and just as quickly perished.

Thus, the Sobek Empire became the leading nation in the east under the guise of a federal republic, and Atlantia rose as the leader of the west.

Both nations were weary of the endless conflict.

And so, they declared a truce.

Yet while they shook hands above the table, an intense battle of espionage waged beneath it — a cold war without gunfire, fought across a sheet of thin ice.

The world was nothing more than a massive chessboard for the two great powers.

They divided the world into black and white, good and evil.

If the two nations were the black king and the white king, then the rest — including their own people and other nations — were mere chess pieces meant to protect the kings.

From pawns to queens, each piece had a different place and value.

It was a grotesque hobby.

Riche pondered all this as she used tweezers to dig into the flesh of a sedated man.

She didn’t need to look intentionally — the Grand Duke was already visible at the edge of her vision.

Bullet removal surgery.

The very first task he gave his new personal physician was to save the assassin who had tried to kill him.

If the man died from blood loss before interrogation, it would be a problem.

Beneath the paradise-like scenery was a secret underground chamber.

A low ceiling.

Dusty incandescent lights.

The stench of rot, the sharp smell of medicine, and the metallic scent of blood all mixed into the air, torturing the senses.

It was a place where even breathing hurt.

The purpose of a place like this was obvious.

Imprisonment or torture.

Or — as now — illicit surgery.

“To do something well, you have to practice a lot.”

The Grand Duke broke the silence, making Riche flinch.

He clearly understood her situation completely.

“Just like how you must have practiced countless times — cutting and stitching human flesh.”

A little ways away from the cold operating table stood a wooden table and a worn-out single-seater sofa.

The Grand Duke placed a large chessboard on the table, large enough to cover it entirely, and played a game by himself.

On the board, he was both the black team and the white team.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

The tiny sounds of the chess pieces moving grated on her nerves.

She nearly lost her grip on the bullet she was pulling out near a vital spot.

“Ugh, uuugh…”

A strange groan escaped the sedated assassin’s lips.

The noise made it even harder to focus, further fraying her nerves, but she quickly suppressed her emotions and concentrated.

Sweat rolled down from her temple and clung to the tip of her chin before dripping off.

Before long, she successfully extracted the bullet.

Only then did she release the breath she had been holding.

It had been a difficult surgery.

Had the bullet lodged even slightly closer to the right, death would have been inevitable.

The Grand Duke’s ability to control even such minute details of life and death sent a chill down her spine.

She stitched up the skin and habitually prepared an injection of painkillers.

Scrape.

The Grand Duke rose from his seat.

To be continued in the next chapter▶