The outdoor air hit Hayjin's skin like a jolt of awakening. Crossing the heavy oak and iron gate that separated the castle's inner hall from the main courtyard felt like stepping from a suffocating tomb into an open expanse, but the illusion of freedom lasted only a fraction of a second. Sunlight filtered through passing gray clouds, casting long, jagged shadows over centuries-polished flagstones, while the highland wind carried the sharp scent of pine, damp earth, and wrought iron from the garrison's forges.
Wilder walked beside him with a casual, almost regal stride. His long, dark cloak swayed with a rhythmic rustle at every step, and the silver plates of his armor caught the gleam of the morning light without making the slightest metallic clink. Every movement emanated absolute control over his body the innate grace of a warrior who had never needed to demonstrate his strength because he radiated it from every pore.
Hayjin, in contrast, maintained a tense, seemingly meek posture. His boots clicked against the stone with slight hesitation, his head tilted subtly to the side, and his shoulders slightly hunched just as befitted a low-ranking adventurer walking alongside a legendary elite knight. But behind that naive, intimidated facade, Hayjin's mind worked at a feverish pace, calibrated like a precision mechanism.
From their very first steps past the gate, Hayjin had established a strict, inviolable rule: maintain a safety buffer of at least a meter and a half at all times.
He never permitted himself to align perfectly with Wilder. He always stayed half a step behind, positioning himself at a three-quarter angle relative to the knight's imposing frame so he could keep the man perpetually within his peripheral vision.
He would never turn his back on him, not even for an instant. The memory of the cold efficiency with which he had been subdued and knocked out in the corridor mere minutes ago was still too fresh. Wilder's speed was monstrous, and closing the distance meant handing over total control of his life.
"Fresh air," Wilder remarked, spreading his arms slightly and inhaling deeply as they took the wide gravel path skirting the inner moat. "There's nothing better for clearing one's thoughts. The palace has a way of gathering dust, wouldn't you say? Up in the northern frontier mountains, though, the air is so harsh it dries out your throat but at least you always know which way danger is blowing from."
Hayjin remained silent. He merely offered a faint nod, keeping his eyes glued to the gravel beneath his feet. His mouth stayed sealed, letting the knight fill the ambient silence.
Wilder chuckled softly, taking full control of the conversation. In a warm, engaging tone seasoned with a pleasant touch of self-deprecation, he began recounting a series of anecdotes from his past military campaigns. He spoke of the time his patrol was surrounded by a pack of snow wyverns in the rocky gorges of Oakhaven, how they had been forced to burn their own sleds to build a wall of fire, and how he managed to slit the alpha male's throat while the creature tried to drag him down a ravine. He then described long months spent on the western borders, honorable duels against lowland mercenaries, and the strict discipline required to serve the royal house directly.
As Wilder spoke with fluid ease, occasionally making elegant gestures to emphasize the more dramatic beats of his stories, Hayjin observed him with the cold focus of an anatomist.
He didn't respond. He offered no prompts, asked no follow-up questions, nor did he join in the knight's laughter. He merely played the part of a young listener overwhelmed by the veteran's aura. But inside, Hayjin was initiating a complex psychological analysis.
"I can't afford a direct accusation," Hayjin reasoned, without letting his expression betray a single internal thought. "If I accused him openly, he'd laugh in my face or worse, use my lack of evidence and his position as a royal knight to have me locked away on charges of madness or treason. And I certainly can't afford a physical confrontation. If we came to blows, he'd snap my neck before I could even draw my dagger."
Brute force was a dead end. The only remaining option was to act as a psychologist and an invisible observer. He had to turn this seemingly friendly stroll into a latent interrogation room. He needed to extract clues, analyze behavioral patterns, and provoke subconscious reactions all without ever letting Wilder realize he was on trial.
Wilder paused briefly in his narration, smoothly shifting gears and turning his face slightly toward Hayjin with a look laced with genuine curiosity.
"You know, Hayjin..." the knight said, slowing his pace just enough to match the boy's stride, though still unable to shrink the meter-and-a-half gap Hayjin maintained with mathematical precision. "I've heard quite a bit about you lately. Word of what happened in the deep dungeon with Princess Zhilian made the rounds among the elite guard. They say a manaless novice threw himself into the flames to protect her from a wyvern, surviving creatures that would have slaughtered a squad of veterans."
Hayjin clenched his jaw imperceptibly, but kept his eyes cast down, shifting his fingers inside his jacket pockets.
"However," Wilder continued, his voice softening into an almost paternal tone, "I've also noticed how certain royal guards and servants look at you around here. They size you up like you're an outsider a peasant who wandered into a crystal hall by mistake. But take it from someone who's seen a lot: you shouldn't worry about them at all. Everyone judges on first impressions in places like this. It's the nature of the weak to cling to titles to feel superior. You just keep on your path, do your duty, and in time you'll make them eat their words, every last one of them."
Wilder's words sounded remarkably warm, encouraging, and genuine. Anyone else in Hayjin's shoes would have felt reassured and flattered by the attention of a warrior of his standing. But to Hayjin, those words were sugar coating on a sharp blade.
It was time to launch his first psychological test.
Hayjin feigned a subtle stumble over a gravel stone, quickly recovering his balance with an awkward gesture. He brought a hand to his forehead, letting out a faint, weary sigh while painting an expression of deep exhaustion and vulnerability across his face.
"F-Forgive me, Sir Wilder," Hayjin murmured, using an audible, cracking, and deliberately insecure tone for the first time. "It's just... I didn't sleep well at all last night. I think I had... or maybe a particularly realistic nightmare."
Wilder paused for a moment, turning completely toward him with an expression of attentive concern. "A nightmare? Does that happen to you often?"
Hayjin kept walking at a reduced pace, forcing Wilder to stay beside him without closing the distance. As he did, Hayjin locked eyes with the knight, focusing all his attention on searching for micro-expressions: an involuntary pupil contraction, an imperceptible twitch in the cheek muscles, a shift in breathing rhythm, or a sudden change in neck muscle tension.
"Not a normal dream," Hayjin explained, describing the physical sensations with excruciating slowness and precise detail. "It was strange. I felt completely awake, lying in my bed... but I couldn't move. I felt this terrible suffocating sensation, as if someone had entered my room in pitch darkness, leaned over me, and pressed something down on my face... I felt the physical presence of someone over me, their hands near my neck. It was so real that when I woke up, I still felt like my throat was constricted."
As he spoke those words, Hayjin analyzed every single millimeter of Wilder's face.
If Wilder were entirely uninvolved, his reaction would be pure confusion or generic empathy for a night terror. If, however, he was the assassin who had suffocated and slit his throat in the previous loop, his brain would have had to process a micro-signal of surprise or calculation to figure out why his victim was accurately describing the details of his own murder.
Wilder's response was staggering in its perfection.
Not a single twitch of panic flashed across the knight's face, nor did his pupils dilate. On the contrary, his brow furrowed with deep, immediate concern. His clear eyes expressed genuine, warm sympathy.
"Damn, Hayjin..." Wilder said, shaking his head empathetically, his tone conveying genuine regret. "Sleep paralysis, right? That's a nasty beast, you know? It happens often to young warriors when stress builds up, or when the body undergoes intense physical trauma like what you went through in the dungeon. The mind wakes up before the muscles do, and the brain creates hallucinations of a presence to explain why you can't move. It's a terrifying experience happened to me a couple of times. Well... actually, it still happens to me today, haha."
Wilder offered a small gesture with his hand, as though struck by a sudden idea.
"Listen, take a bit of friendly advice," Wilder resumed with warm enthusiasm. "Ask the kitchens to brew you some chamomile tea from the fairy lands. It's a special herb merchants bring from the eastern borders; it relaxes deep muscles and calms the mind before bed. I always drink a cup when my old wounds start aching at night. You'll see with that, you'll sleep like a log and won't have any more of those suffocating nightmares."
Hayjin absorbed the answer, nodding faintly. "An flawless performance... or is he truly innocent? No, I can't let appearances deceive me. A professional assassin knows how to control his face. I need to dig deeper."
The two continued walking, approaching the raised perimeter of the primary curtain wall. Hayjin shifted his strategy, deciding to ask seemingly harmless questions about the castle's architecture to test the knight's knowledge and nighttime movements.
"Thank you for the advice, Sir Wilder..." Hayjin said, looking up toward the tall windows of the wing occupied by diplomats. "It's just that this castle is so huge and old. My room is in the secondary east tower, and the walls feel paper-thin. At night it's strangely quiet, but sometimes I feel like I hear every single step in the halls... Is your wing quiet at night? Or can you hear the guards passing by?"
Wilder chuckled, adjusting his cloak over his shoulder with a casual gesture.
"Ah, the east wing! A fascinating place, but built with resonant limestone," Wilder answered without a moment's hesitation, displaying a disarming familiarity with the castle's layout. "Your room is the one on the third floor, right? The one with the light oak door near the recess with the royal tapestries?"
Hayjin felt a chill shoot down his spine, but he maintained his mask of inexperience. "Yes... exactly. How do you know that?"
"Oh, I memorized the quartering layout as soon as I arrived," Wilder explained with effortless ease. "It's a habit I can't break a good knight must always know where the castle's key figures are housed. And as for the footsteps you hear... well, no surprise there. The night watch switches shifts at exactly two and four in the morning. Patrols in the east wing are pretty sparse at those hours; the two guards cover the whole long corridor, but there's a blind spot of nearly ten minutes when they go down the stairs to report to the central guardhouse. If someone wanted to move unseen around there, they'd just have to wait for the guard with the torch to turn toward the corner tower."
Wilder paused briefly, then offered a candid smile. "That's why you feel like you're hearing strange noises. The structure amplifies the echo of the guards as they move away, making it sound like someone's right outside your door."
Hayjin barely suppressed a shudder.
Wilder's words, spoken with the casual composure of someone offering a routine technical explanation, revealed a terrifying level of knowledge. Wilder knew precisely where Hayjin's room was located, knew the exact routine of the night watch including shift changes and, above all, was aware of the ten-minute blind spot that would allow someone to reach Hayjin's quarters completely unseen.
His initial suspicion hitherto based purely on logical deduction and the Brand's lack of reaction spiked dramatically in that moment, hardening into near certainty.
Who else, if not someone who had studied the blind spots and patrol routes down to the letter, could have slipped into his room in the dead of night, suffocated him in his bed, slit his throat, and vanished without alerting a single guard?
Hayjin kept walking, his mind operating in overdrive as he pivoted his attention to analyzing Wilder's physical presence and equipment.
During the murder in the previous cycle, the assassin had pinned him to the bed with monstrous strength. But what had burned itself into Hayjin's memory was not merely the violence of the act, but a morbid, grotesque detail: before severing his carotid artery with the blade, the assassin had held him down and gently stroked his hair with macabre tenderness like one would comfort a child or a pet before slaughtering it.
Hayjin wanted to figure out if that gesture belonged to Wilder's natural mannerisms. He observed how the knight navigated space.
Throughout their walk, Wilder demonstrated a clear inclination toward physical contact. Whenever he emphasized a joke or wanted to highlight a point, he instinctively reached toward Hayjin to offer a gesture of camaraderie a pat on the shoulder, a squeeze on the arm, or a hand placed on his back to guide his step.
However, Hayjin was exceptionally adept at avoiding every single touch. Each time he saw Wilder's arm begin to rise, Hayjin executed a subtle, fluid corrective movement: he pretended to lean over to inspect a detail of the moat, stepped aside to avoid a dip in the ground, or shifted under the pretense of adjusting his quiver belt. He managed to dodge every gesture while maintaining his meter-and-a-half buffer, but Wilder's tendency to seek physical dominance through visual and tactile contact was glaring. Wilder didn't exert force aggressively; he employed a "creeping dominance" enveloping, seemingly warm, and engineered to make his target drop their guard.
Next, Hayjin's eyes darted toward the knight's belt and the folds of his attire, searching for his weapons.
Wilder wore a magnificent rapier at his left hip with a finely crafted silver hilt the standard sidearm of royal knights. But Hayjin knew all too well that professional assassins or elite combatants never relied solely on a bulky weapon for precision work indoors.
Analyzing the beltline on his right side and the silhouette of his cloak, Hayjin spotted subtle yet unmistakable details: beneath the lateral plate of his leather cuirass, angled slightly inward for a swift and silent left-handed draw, peeked the dark leather tassel of a concealed dagger.
The hilt's shape glimpsed for a fraction of a second when the wind lifted the hem of Wilder's cloak did not belong to a standard utility knife. It was a triangular-bladed stiletto, an unedged weapon built with a needle-sharp point specifically designed to slip between armor gaps or sever soft tissue and arteries with a single, frictionless thrust.
The position of the grip and the weapon's balance matched the angle of the blade driven into his abdomen and subsequently drawn across his throat during the night with terrifying precision.
Every piece of the puzzle was falling into place with icy, mathematical accuracy.
Meanwhile, their stroll had led them near the edge of the primary curtain wall.
Before them lay a dirt trail descending toward a small grove of ancient trees an isolated, quiet copse located just beyond the castle's outer defenses.
"There's a lovely lookout over this way," Wilder said with a relaxed smile. "A clearing among the trees where the view of the valley is truly spectacular. It's very quiet perfect for chatting away from the noise of the patrolling guards. Care to walk up there for a minute?"
Hayjin's heart skipped a beat, but his mind remained cool.
Stepping into an isolated grove far from the guard posts, alone with a man who had already subdued him once and possessed every trait of the previous night's killer, would be tactical suicide. In a place devoid of witnesses, Wilder could eliminate him again without waiting for nighttime.
Hayjin stopped dead in his tracks along the walkway of the first rampart, remaining clearly visible to the two sentries posted atop the guard tower less than twenty meters away.
Hayjin feigned checking a small pocket watch a cheap item he always carried and let a flash of anxious regret cross his face.
"Oh... I'm so sorry, Sir Wilder," Hayjin said in an apologetic tone, using duty as a pretext to decline politely. "I actually need to head back to Princess Zhilian soon. She asked me to handle some important errands for her before this afternoon, and I'm already running late. I'd prefer to stay along the rampart walkways so I can get back to the palace quickly once we're done."
Wilder stared at him for a moment. His light eyes scanned the boy's face with sudden intensity, as though attempting to read beneath that timid response. For an imperceptible second, the knight's smile stiffened, but his customary warm, cordial demeanor quickly resurfaced.
"Ah, I completely understand!" Wilder exclaimed with a laugh, offering a surrendering hand gesture. "Duty to your princess comes before all else one certainly can't keep Lady Zhilian waiting. Very well, let's stay right here along the ramparts."
Hayjin let out an invisible sigh of relief, continuing his act as the naive, insecure young adventurer visibly cowed by the elite knight's imposing stature.
He knew the key to this psychological chess match lay in his opponent's superiority bias. The longer Wilder remained convinced he was dealing with a frightened, inexperienced kid psychologically unraveling over "bad dreams" and thoroughly awed by his veteran charisma the more secure, calm, and immune to suspicion he would feel. And the safer a predator feels, the greater the likelihood he'll make a careless mistake, a slip-up, or display overconfidence that will ultimately betray him.
The two walked the final stretch of the curtain wall toward the inner garden courtyard.
Wilder stopped near the marble staircase leading to the palace's upper levels, pulling a small silver whistle from his pocket and tucking it away after gauging the time from the sun's position.
"Well, Hayjin," Wilder said, turning toward him with an air of warm leave-taking. "I'd say our stroll for today has come to an end. I must get back to little Princess Wren; I promised to escort her to her afternoon reading session, and I'd hate to keep her waiting."
Hayjin gave a short, hesitant bow. "Thank you for the walk and for the advice, Sir Wilder."
"It was a true pleasure," Wilder replied with a broad smile. Then, thumbing toward the royal garden just past the rose arcade, he added offhandedly, "Ah, by the way... Princess Zhilian happens to be right over there in the royal garden with Wren and Riko at the moment. If you'd like to come along, we can join them together."
The invitation was direct and seemingly casual. But Hayjin had no intention of walking alongside Wilder into a group that included Riko his other primary suspect while his mind was still processing the terrifying volume of information he had gathered.
"Thank you, Sir Wilder..." Hayjin replied with subtle hesitation, stepping back and keeping his head slightly bowed. "I'd prefer to wait here a moment before heading over. I need to get some fresh air alone and clear my head before reporting back to Princess Zhilian."
Wilder looked at him, crossing his arms over his chest and raising an eyebrow with an amused yet understanding expression.
"As you wish, kid," Wilder said, giving him a final nod. "Take all the time you need. I'll see you later at the palace. And don't forget that tea tonight!"
With a light, confident stride, Wilder turned and entered the rose arcade, slowly disappearing behind the stone archway leading to the royal gardens.
Hayjin was left completely alone on the stone walkway.
The moment the knight's figure was entirely out of sight, Hayjin's timid, insecure demeanor vanished instantaneously. His back straightened, his face set into a hard, ruthless line, and his dark eyes filled with terrifying clarity.
He slowly raised a hand to his neck, brushing the exact spot where Wilder's blade had severed his throat in his previous life.
"It was probably you..." Hayjin whispered to himself as the freezing highland wind tousled his hair. "You know my room, you know the guards' blind spots, you carry a concealed stiletto under your cloak, and you tried to lure me into an isolated spot... You could very well be the assassin, Wilder."
The puzzle had partially come together. Now Hayjin needed to figure out whether his theory held true, but the challenge would be far harder than expected.