'Just what the heck is happening here?'
He stood rooted to the spot, his thoughts racing behind a mask of shock. 'What is she doing here? Did she follow me? But the [Static Veil] was active. I'm should be a ghost to the world right now. Then how?'
Aiden began to wonder if the system had deactivated the skill without notifying him, or if the skill was simply too primitive to be called a skill.
[I didn't do anything, Boss. Even I am confused by her appearance. My sensors didn't register a single footstep until she was breathing down your neck.]
The system's voice rang in his head, dripping with an uncharacteristic anxiety.
'Yeah, even I couldn't sense her,' Aiden thought, his eyes narrowing as he scrutinized the girl in front of him. 'Does she have some kind of high-level concealment trait, or is she so fundamentally weak that the system filters her out as background noise?'
He wondered, but even if she was weak, it should have been impossible to go unnoticed by him if she was actively following him.
"You look confused, Young Master," Hazel's voice broke him out of his thoughts.
Aiden snapped back to the moment. Hazel's face was inches from his, her expression a mix of terrifying devotion and a strange, hollow calm.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked softly.
Aiden kept his mouth shut. He wasn't sure if she had something hidden—a bloodline trait, an ancient curse, or a dormant power.
'I've only known her for a month. I can't assume she's just a simple maid.' He remembered the history of this body. The Veynar family had obliterated hers, turning her life into a graveyard of service. What if she had an ulterior motive? In her eyes, he was still Aiden Veynar—the son of the man who ended her world.
'I can't let her see the Primal Font. If she sees what's behind that lock, my entire plan will have the chance of being compromised.'
"Young Master, you aren't hurt anywhere else, are you?" Hazel asked, her hand reaching out as if to check his pulse or touch his forehead.
Her eyes searched his, pleading for a positive answer, desperate for the reassurance that he wasn't breaking apart.
Instead of answering, Aiden's instincts took over. He reached out and grabbed her wrist firmly.
"Enough," he said, his voice dropping into a low, commanding tone.
He didn't wait for her to respond. He spun around, pulling her toward the steep incline they had just descended.
"Young—"
"Be quiet," Aiden interrupted, and kept walking. His grip was firm. He didn't look back to see her expression; his focus was entirely on the path ahead.
'I'll have to absorb the mana from the Font later. Right now, I need to get her out of here.'
He didn't trust her, but leaving her there was worse.
The climb back up the incline was a blur of shadows and heavy breathing. Every time Hazel stumbled, Aiden's hand tightened, pulling her forward as if she were a piece of precious, dangerous cargo.
After what felt like an eternity of navigating the Manor's dark veins, they finally emerged into the center of the attic.
The air here felt stale and thin compared to the electric pressure of the tunnel. Aiden stopped abruptly, the dust of centuries swirling around his boots in the moonlight coming through the cracks.
Then he turned around toward Hazel, and let go of her hand.
"Were you following me?"
He asked with a low, vibrating anger. His brow was furrowed, and his eyes flared with a lethal sharpness that seemed to slice through the darkness. His head was tilted slightly, and his entire posture was radiating cold authority.
Sensing the anger radiating from Aiden's face, Hazel's newfound confidence vanished as quickly as a candle in a storm. Her old self returned in a heartbeat.
Her shoulders slumped, her fingers began to twitch against the fabric of her blood-stained sleeve, and a look of profound, crushing guilt washed over her features.
'Young Master is... angry?'
The thought was a physical blow. Her heart, which had been racing with protective fury moments ago, now sank into a pit of lead.
She tried to meet his gaze, but the sheer intensity of his stare was too much; she quickly looked down at the floor.
"I... I..."
She couldn't form any words. Her mind was a battlefield of conflicting impulses. Part of her wanted to tell him the truth that she had followed him because she feared for him.
Part of her wanted to lie, to say she had simply gotten lost in the attic while cleaning. Another part wanted to fall to her knees and beg for his forgiveness for her insolence.
But as she stood there, trembling in the cold attic air, she couldn't say any of them. The fear of his disappointment was a heavy weight on her tongue, leaving her paralyzed in the face of his wrath.
Aiden watched her—the way her hands shook uncontrollably, the way she refused to meet his eyes as if her very existence were an affront to him.
He was a creature of logic, waiting for a variable that made sense, but all he saw was a broken girl whose only crime was an obsessive devotion he didn't yet understand.
"Hah~"
Aiden let out a tired, heavy sigh. He ran his hand through his hair, pressing his palm against his forehead as he tilted his face toward the darkened rafters. The sharp, lethal edge in his eyes softened and we're replaced by a deep exhaustion.
Dealing with ancient seals was simple; dealing with a girl who shattered all known logic with a stutter was a different kind of headache entirely.
"Whatever," he muttered, his voice dropping from a command to a weary dismissal. "Just go back. Forget you saw anything tonight. Forget that tunnel exists."