Chapter 38

When the two returned, Horne was already exhausted. He stood under the hot water for nearly an hour before emerging, only to find Hels still casually lounging on the sofa, as if it were his own room.

Horne expressionlessly wiped his damp hair and asked, “What are you still doing here?”

No sooner had he asked than Hels chuckled and said, “Colonel, do you know how to change faces? When you need me, you reach out; when you don’t, you kick me away?”

Horne: “…”

Yes, but not entirely.

Horne silently drew the curtains, turned on the bedside lamp, returned to the bathroom to blow-dry his hair, and had no intention of answering him.

The situations were different. Extreme emotions had surged during the treatment, beyond his control—but now, it was manageable.

The hairdryer’s hum stopped. When Horne emerged a second time, Hels was still sitting there. Horne couldn’t be bothered to ask again and sat directly on the edge of the bed.

Hels asked him, “No more dizziness now? Body feeling okay?”

Horne: “No.” With that, he pulled a box of biscuits from the nightstand and tossed it to Hels.

Hels caught it.

Horne slipped under the covers, leaned against the headboard, eyed the sofa, then shot Hels a warning glare: “Don’t spill any on the sofa, or I’ll make you lick it clean.”

“Wow, so fierce. Isn’t this kicking me away the moment you don’t need me?” Hels feigned surprise. He glanced at the biscuits in his hand—the kind uniformly procured in the Red Light District. “And brushing me off with this?”

Horne closed his eyes: “Then what do you want?”

What else could he do besides a box of biscuits as a token of thanks? The problem was, he didn’t keep snacks around; this box was what Wan Ji had given him when he’d gone upstairs earlier.

Hels’s smile deepened at the corners of his mouth. He asked, “Anything I want is fine?”

Horne didn’t see this as an innocent question—it was definitely one of Hels’s traps. He weighed his words for a moment before replying, “I’ll consider it.”

He sat up straight and shrugged off his bathrobe, exposing the skin beneath.

Most of the wounds had faded from bright red to deep brown, with a few severe ones still healing. As long as he avoided another near-fatal injury, they should recover soon—but that was unlikely.

Horne didn’t think Hels would spill the hidden incident so easily. More likely, the two of them would end up fighting. He just wondered if Hels would still be this gentle by then.

He recalled the shot that killed Han Ya.

Probably not. This man was more decisive than he’d imagined.

So far, the plan was going smoothly.

The bathrobe landed on the sofa, draped beside Hels. Hels gave it a sidelong glance and said, “Throw it a little more off-center next time, and it’ll land on me.”

Horne, deadpan: “You don’t have to sit there.”

As soon as the words left his mouth, he realized they carried double meaning.

Then Hels stood and approached.

It was only three steps from the sofa to the bed. Hels took them, stopping at the bedside before slowly squatting down.

Horne tensed all over. He said nothing, turning his head so his hair veiled his face. The bedside lamp’s warm glow traced his muscular contours, then higher, deepening the reddish-brown of his hair. The slight waves should have softened his look, but Horne was always aloof.

He’d expected some unacceptable move from Hels, but the man merely squatted at the bed’s edge without truly closing in.

Horne suddenly realized: aside from extreme situations or when he’d given consent, Hels had never gotten close. Not even when Horne pretended to sleep, not even with opportunity—the reaching hand had always hovered in midair.

A moment later, Horne heard Hels’s neurotic laugh. He turned and met eyes brimming with mirth.

Horne yanked the pillow and smothered it over Hels’s face.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Hels pulled the pillow away, set it back in place, then simply sat on the floor by the bed. He rested his arm on the mattress edge, propping his chin in his hand. “Since you’re feeling fine now, let’s chat.”

“About what?”

“About something I discovered.”

Knowing it wouldn’t be a normal answer, Horne still asked, “What?”

Hels stared unblinkingly at Horne, brows knitting downward in a troubled expression. “I’ve noticed that lately… you’ve been awfully well-behaved.”

Horne: “…Your observational skills could use work.”

Hels looked at him earnestly, brows furrowing. “But you really have been. Well-behaved like… there’s some scheme behind it.” On the last words, his voice dropped low, the syllables dissolving into faint breaths.

Horne kept his composure, face unchanging. “Do enough bad things, and everyone looks like they’re scheming.”

His fingers clenched under the covers. He hadn’t thought he’d slipped anywhere—no approaching just to get close, no pointed questions, just dialing back his initial hostility and wariness to an appropriate degree. Could even that be detected?

Hels burst out laughing, head bowed as he chuckled for a good while before saying softly, “Alright, then tell me—what have you been probing lately? Throwing yourself at me, asking where I am one minute, what I’m doing the next. You weren’t in that much of a rush to the doctor’s, but you still called for me. You weren’t that eager to see me, were you?”

Horne could scarcely imagine what it would take to fully evade Hels’s scrutiny. He opted for a vague sidestep: “I didn’t throw myself at you.”

As he spoke, Hels had just risen to stretch, body arching slightly, hands braced straight on the bed’s edge.

The lamp lit his profile—half in light, half in shadow.

Hels drawled slowly, teasingly: “Fine, you didn’t. What about the rest? Horne, I’ve only got one explanation for your recent behavior. Want to hear it?”

Horne figured it was better to preempt than wait. Sooner or later, it’d come to this.

His hand had already found the knife hidden in the bedsheet. His gaze turned icy in an instant—and just as he drew it, Hels’s voice murmured softly in his ear.

“Aren’t you… wanting to sleep with me?”

Horne’s limbs locked rigid, every motion freezing on the spot.

Shocked, Horne stared at Hels in stunned disbelief.

Hels began to purse his lips in laughter, bursts of it, his breath hitting Horne’s chest. He couldn’t stop laughing and sat back down on the floor by the bed, burying his face in his hands as he laughed, his shoulders trembling.

Horne: “………………”

Horne gritted his teeth, unable to hold back. He directly drew the knife from under the bedsheet, one arm immediately looping around Hels’s neck to restrain him from behind and lift him up. His other hand held the knife, the blade pressed against Hels’s Adam’s apple.

“Who allowed you to joke with me like this?”

Hels relaxed his body, raised both hands in surrender, his voice still thick with laughter. “Sorry, sorry, my fault. Don’t be angry.”

Horne gnashed his teeth, his arm muscles tensing hard. He really wanted to just stab through his trachea right then.

Hels felt the restraint on his throat tightening further. He lightly poked the skin of Horne’s arm with his fingertip. “Let go quick. Are you going to kill me?”

Horne’s hand kept pressing, the knife edge sinking into the skin of the neck in front of him.

“Hiss,” Hels drew in a breath. “You’re really using force? It hurts a bit.”

Horne’s syllables were almost squeezed out from between his teeth: “Get lost! Don’t let me see you again.”

The knife was put back under the bedsheet. Horne’s face was icy cold as he wrapped himself in the blanket.

Hels half-kneeled up, drew a piece of paper from the table, and dabbed his neck. There was a bit of blood—a very minor skin abrasion.

He seemed really angry.

Hels said seriously, “Sorry, I won’t joke like that with you next time. Don’t be angry.”

Horne didn’t want to respond. He even shifted a bit toward the center of the bed to put some distance between them, turned his head, and hid his face in the shadows.

It was that feeling of losing control again.

He didn’t feel offended—he felt out of control.

He suddenly realized he had too many weaknesses. Just one sentence had stirred up such intense emotions in him.

After a moment, Horne turned back. “Not angry.”

Hels stared at him. After a long pause, he softly asked, “Alright, then do you want to explain your behavior lately?”

Horne glanced at him, calmed down, and explained, “After spending some time together, I realized you’re not as unreasonable as the rumors say. And…”

He thought for a moment, then said, “You’re good to me. Sometimes too good to be real.”

Hels agreed, adding a self-compliment: “That’s right. Something as wonderful as me is always unreal.”

Horne: “……”

He really should have stabbed this guy’s trachea just now.

When facing him, Hels often smiled at him, saying it was a way to express emotions—because seeing him made his mood better.

Horne’s dreams were filled with his laughter.

He couldn’t remember when he’d fallen asleep the previous day or when Hels had left. The next morning at dawn, when Horne opened his eyes again, his first thought was to check the time and look for Hels’s messages in the terminal.

At that moment, Hels’s location was still in the Red Light District—probably still next door.

Horne rolled out of bed, washed up casually, and waited quietly until nearly evening, when a faint door-closing sound came from outside. He immediately leaned against the wall, holding his breath to listen to the movements outside.

He currently had two pieces of information: First, the places where Hels stayed for long periods showed up on the map as the Slum, but when he’d gone to the Slum himself, he’d found nothing unusual.

Second, Hels had disappeared from the Holographic Game room last time.

The connection he came up with was that he couldn’t find Hels because he was actually underground, and the game room was the entrance.

In other words, there was a secret passage in the Red Light District leading straight to the area near the Slum—or even connecting to outside the city.

But this guess was quickly overturned. Horne went out and followed not far behind Hels, discovering that the other man didn’t enter the game room but instead exited through the Red Light District gate.

Humans weren’t allowed to leave through the city gate, but Aliens could. However, they hadn’t discovered anything suspicious outside the city. Instead, they suspected Hels’s movements. Han Ya had told him to go outside the city before dying, which meant something out there was completely secret.

The underground secret passage could explain it.

Horne suddenly realized something: Aliens didn’t build human cities.

They had come from distant outer space, seized this land on Earth, and lived for a century. They preferred the cold, so they’d always survived in snowy areas. Only after taking on human forms did they gradually build the Tower and live in the center of human cities. But human society had operated for millennia with a complete, self-consistent system.

This human city—whether the districts or the Tower District—had all been built by humans, including the drainage systems, the vents of various heights and sizes, and that string of encrypted language.

This was a blind spot in the Aliens’ knowledge. Humans had tampered with things to greater or lesser degrees, and they couldn’t tell the difference. So they sent humans to betray their own kind—but those humans’ opponent was Hels.

At that thought, Hels turned a corner, and Horne quickened his steps to follow.

The sun gradually set, turning the sky deep blue with a few wisps of black clouds floating. Recon Drones emerged from the black clouds, dove downward, then flew parallel forward over the hurried people on the street.

The direction Hels was heading was the North City Gate, near the Slum.

The two were less than fifty meters apart. Not long after Horne set out, a Recon Drone began following behind him.

Through the glass of a silver building across the street, Horne spotted the Recon Drone circling high overhead.

Ais had been monitoring him all along.

The Slum at night was unusually noisy, with more people than when he’d come during the day. They densely packed half the open space, and the number of temporary tents rigged up with bamboo poles had surged.

In the center of the open space, they’d piled a massive bonfire. Thick smoke rose straight to the sky, forming black clouds overhead. Next to the bonfire were tables and chairs of various styles, scavenged from different junkyards.

As the firelight blazed, shadows flickered on the ground, everyone’s silhouettes swaying like ghosts.

They ate, shouted, yelled, and hollered. One group of people chased another with bamboo poles, the scene utter chaos.

It was very much like a primitive tribe—something ordinary people would shy away from.

Just as Horne took in the Slum in total disarray like a pot of porridge, his expression changed—he might lose Hels if he tried to blend in here.

He quickened his steps to follow.

Hundreds of vagrants—no one noticed if strangers had entered their territory.

The stench was still the same stench, even more nauseating now with the increased number of people—rotten, sour, mixed with sweat and foot odor. Horne wrinkled his brows and held his breath with difficulty. He saw that the moment Hels stepped into the clearing, those vagrants went crazy. They ran around chaotically and shouted. Some sang songs or recited elegies, while others rushed into the fire only to scream and rush back out.

“Fire! Help!” one shouted. A group around him grabbed bedsheets and quilts and rushed over to put out the fire.

It was called a slum, but it was more like a mental hospital.

They threw the bedsheets into the flames one after another. The firelight reflected in everyone’s trembling pupils as they shouted, celebrated, and screamed.

Horne was shocked, though it was just as he had expected. The fire grew larger and larger amid the chaos. Then, in the midst of that mess, Hels’s figure flickered and vanished.

It was over.

Horne rushed forward a few steps and plunged headfirst into the chaotic crowd.

People jostled shoulder to shoulder without any order. The shouting grew louder and more exaggerated.

A bedsheet came flying at his face, enveloping him entirely. In that instant of suffocating rot, he slashed a huge gash in it with the knife in his hand and struggled free from inside.

He could barely breathe. The smell here was like poison gas.

“My bedsheet is ruined!” someone shouted, then ran off, swallowed up by the crowd.

How had Hels disappeared?

Horne kept walking through the muddy ground, squeezed in the crowd, letting the vagrants bump into him from all sides.

He calmed down and looked around.

Aside from near the central bonfire, tents made of bamboo poles and bedsheets stood every two or three meters, stretching across the entire clearing. Leaving the clearing would have been obvious—Hels couldn’t have gone out. He was still among this group of lunatics.

During the day, with fewer people, nothing seemed amiss. At night, with the crowd, he could vanish without anyone noticing. But the one thing that existed both day and night was only one.

Horne turned his head, his gaze locking onto those tents made of bamboo poles and bedsheets.

He squeezed through with difficulty.

“Who stole my instant noodles I just cooked!”

“My bedsheet is on fire, aaah!!”

It was too noisy. Horne had just squeezed to the edge of a tent when a group returned, chasing someone with bamboo poles held high. Dozens of poles thrust upward as they shouted, “Who’s stealing stuff? Beat him to death!”

“Celebrate that we’re still alive!”

Horne didn’t react in time. Bedsheets came down from the sky like a net. He slashed one apart with his raised hand, but another covered him.

“We caught the thief! Beat him to death! Beat him to death!” The crowd was wildly excited.

Horne was pushed into a tent, buried under bedsheet after bedsheet.

“Put out the fire! Is there any water?!”

“I grabbed a chicken—anyone want some? Trade a bedsheet for a chicken wing!”

“Thief! Stealing from vagrants! Are you even human?!”

Screams and roars exploded in the air. Horne was shoved so hard he nearly fell several times. Amid the chaotic yells, he suddenly caught a key phrase.

Vagrant.

In that instant, Horne understood.