PAF 13

Chapter 13

“……!”

Everyone in the lounge—except for Raibel Nicalis—shot up, their shoulders flinching as a collective gasp echoed through the atrium at my impulsive action.

Observing their wide-eyed, horrified reactions, I confirmed what I had already deduced: the liquid in the vial was definitely not poison.

It was an operational fact I had just recalled, but my former companions were a group of volatile personalities who could barely coexist in the same room.

If their sole objective from the beginning had been to assassinate me, they would have offered some vague excuse and scattered to different dimensions the second I fell. The person who went through the immense risk of poisoning a senior librarian must have carried what they considered a desperate, overwhelming motive.

If individuals like that didn’t dissolve their alliance after my “death”—and instead spent years scouring that specific book—it was logical to conclude they held a secondary objective that outlived my initial downfall. And whatever that goal was, they were forced to pursue it while remaining bound to one another.

Therefore, if my soul were to dissolve right now in front of them, there was a high probability their fragile alliance would collapse, permanently ruining their ultimate objective. Not a single person in this room would benefit from my death today.

If Raibel Nicalis had handed me lethal poison to murder Arsil under the guise of an antidote, his calm, observational posture wouldn’t have made a shred of sense. The others were only terrified because they simply didn’t trust a single word out of Raibel’s mouth.

One of them was the traitor.

And none of them trusted each other.

Even though Kaellariatus had explicitly confirmed that only one traitor existed, my instincts wouldn’t rest until I verified the administrative records with my own eyes.

However, I hadn’t taken such a reckless gamble merely to gauge their emotional reactions.

“Archive.”

The heavy tome in my hand floated weightlessly into the air, its pages flipping rapidly as it processed my physical state.

[ View Information → User Profile ]

Identity: Librarian

Status: Administrator of the Dimensional Library.

Condition: Severe memory loss and reduced capacity due to operational failure.

The four men stood in dead silence, staring in unison as my administrative status projected across the air.

“…What are you all looking at?” I asked, crossing my arms. “Never seen a librarian run a diagnostic scan on herself before?”

After a swift scan of the system log, I confirmed that no secondary afflictions or hemotoxins were logged in my profile, aside from my existing memory corruption.

“Zero additional status ailments recorded,” I declared, looking up. “Looks like it really was the antidote. Give me another vial.”

“…Ha!”

Watching me shamelessly extend my palm to demand a second vial after casually chugging the first one, Raibel Nicalis clicked his tongue in absolute disbelief. He reached into his coat, pulled out a matching glass vial, and tossed it toward my face.

Just as I thought. A lunatic who carried military-grade hemotoxins wouldn’t bother carrying a single dose of the counteragent.

As I caught the vial and turned back toward Arsil, Raibel’s sharp, sarcastic voice cut through the quiet atrium.

“What are you going to do if I handed you pure poison this time, sweetheart?”

“And what are you going to do if I just drink this one right in front of you, too?”

I raised the vial to my lips, making a dramatic motion as if to down it on the spot. Though the smug smile remained plastered on Raibel’s face, his jaw snapped shut, his green eyes widening slightly. For the first time, he seemed completely at a loss for words.

“…Fine. It’s the real antidote, so stop that crazy performance.”

Hearing his defeated tone, I knew there was no longer any reason to doubt the vial’s contents. I knelt beside Arsil, carefully trickling the clear liquid past his lips before using a sleeve to wipe the cold sweat from his forehead. I had done my absolute best to project an air of unshakeable confidence, but on the inside, I had been terrified out of my mind.

Adnihil had forcibly closed the physical puncture wound, and the hemotoxin was officially neutralized, but a section of tissue around Arsil’s shoulder was already severely necrotic. It would take considerable time and care for him to regain full mobility.

At the very least, the deadly spread had been stopped in its tracks.

“Whew…”

Letting out a long, shuddering sigh of relief, I stood up and scanned the faces of my former squad once more.

“…”

“…”

Excluding Arsil, who was lying semi-conscious on the floor, the four men either glared suspicious daggers at one another or stared at me in total silence, not uttering a single word.

In the end, I was the one who broke the suffocating silence.

“So… what’s the plan moving forward?”

Out of the group trying to read the room, the tall, black-haired man took a heavy step forward, his voice echoing with a serious weight.

“You stated you intend to hunt down… the traitor. After you find them, will things return to the way they used to be?”

“Return to the way they used to be?” I let out a sharp, hollow laugh.

There was only one possible meaning behind that phrase. Given the high-risk nature of our profession—where solo deployments were notoriously suicidal—he meant returning to our original dynamic: a tight-knit squad traveling through books and clearing high-tier missions together.

It was not a suggestion that was ever going to elicit a warm response from me.

“And why on earth would I ever do that?”

They seemed to be operating under a massive, delusional misapprehension. I held zero desire to form a happy reunion or collaborate with any of them ever again. My sole objective was to drag the single traitor out into the light, bring them before Kaellariatus, and reclaim my stolen life force.

“Honestly, were any of you ever in a position to actually ‘help’ me back then?” I asked, my voice dropping into a cold line. “Looking at my own profile notes, all any of you ever did was leech off my capabilities.”

Even with my memories fragmented, one objective truth was burned into my Archive records: I was the absolute backbone of that team.

And while I decayed as a starving beggar inside that novel for years, I had waited for their rescue. Because I had carried them through countless life-or-death missions, I had naively believed they would locate me—if only to repay the debt they owed me.

“You claims you tried for years. Fine. I’ll grant you that much,” I said, pacing slowly in front of them. “But in the end, I broke out of that narrative entirely on my own, didn’t I?”

No matter how hard they claimed to have tried, the cold result remained the same: they were useless to me when it mattered most.

“So what brilliant quality am I supposed to see in any of you that would make me want to risk my life alongside you again? I hold absolute zero expectations for any person in this room. What, do you think you still have something left to squeeze out of me?”

I couldn’t stop my voice from trembling with intense emotion.

How could I possibly remain composed after being left to rot in the mud for years while they went about their business?

Raibel Nicalis had actually hit the nail on the head earlier.

If they weren’t malicious traitors, they were hopelessly incompetent.

“It would be infinitely safer for me to take on solo library deployments to recover my lost abilities,” I stated firmly, “rather than getting tangled up with a group of liabilities just to catch one rat!”

Deploying solo was vastly preferable to reforming our old team. Or perhaps I would simply register Arsil—the man who had actually surrendered his own lifespan to save me—as my new official partner.

“Th-Then what are we supposed to do?!” Adnihil blurted out from the back, his golden eyes filled with an aggrieved, desperate light. “Is there truly no way for us to make up for our failure?!”

“We all tried!” the blue-haired healer pleaded, his hands trembling. “We didn’t want to lose you! We fought so hard to find where you went, but… we just couldn’t break through!”

Coming from the man who carried the most clueless profile in my notes, his desperation at least carried a strange shred of sincerity.

“As you mentioned…” The tall, black-haired swordsman narrowed his dark eyes, making a sharp, logical point. “…if one of us in this room is the actual traitor, isn’t it highly probable that they deliberately sabotaged our search efforts from the inside?”

“…”

The fourth man—the one with dark skin and ash-gray hair—remained dead silent, his heavy gaze fixed on the floor.

Thinking through his logic, the scenario was terrifyingly plausible. It was entirely possible that the traitor had been actively misleading the team’s investigations—that their continued association wasn’t born of a shared secret, but was a deliberate cover to ensure my soul was permanently erased.

“So please,” the swordsman urged, lowering his head slightly. “Grant us a single chance. Give us the opportunity to prove ourselves. If there is a traitor among us, we will drag them out and… tear them to shreds.”

Adnihil’s voice, as he echoed the final words, dropped into an unbelievably low, sinister tone that sent an unnatural chill through the atrium. For a second, I was so taken aback by his sudden shift that I forgot my own authority.

‘It’s infinitely more terrifying when a guy who looks like an innocent healer says something like that with a completely straight face…‘

I instinctively swallowed a lump in my throat before asking, “…What kind of chance are you asking for?”

“You stated you need to take on deployments to recover your lost powers,” the swordsman explained smoothly. “Allow us to assist you during those missions—at least once per person. Furthermore, won’t you need to keep us close to observe our behavior and identify the culprit? As it stands, no one is going to confess voluntarily…”

He shot a cold, sweeping glance at the men around him.

He wasn’t wrong. I held zero concrete clues on how to isolate the traitor through passive deduction alone. If I could leverage their combat capabilities to clear my recovery deployments, my workload would decrease significantly, and I could systematically monitor each suspect under high-pressure conditions.

“Please grant us the time to hunt down the traitor ourselves,” Adnihil added softly, “while you evaluate us.”

“Hmm…”

As I weighed the tactical advantages, Raibel Nicalis—who had been quietly listening with his arms crossed—suddenly spoke up.

“I just want to ask one thing, sweetheart.”

“What?”

“Did you really have to test that vial on your own body just now?”

I frowned, wondering why he was bringing it up again, but realized he was referring to how I had chugged the counteragent to verify its safety.

“Obviously,” I replied coldly. “You all claimed you spent years trying to retrieve me. Which means at least three of you genuinely cared for my survival as a squad leader.”

It was a calculated move executed on the absolute certainty that the non-traitors would never allow me to perish before their eyes.

Raibel went dead silent after hearing my explanation.

A sharp, violent grinding of teeth echoed through the quiet lounge. It was coming directly from Raibel Nicalis.

“You… you knew that,” he hissed, his green eyes flashing with a terrifying, unhinged fury, “and you still pulled a stunt like that?”

I opened my mouth to ask what his sudden damage was, but stopped myself.

Of course I did it because I knew that. It was basic operational leverage.

Reading the complete lack of remorse on my face, Raibel Nicalis abruptly stood up from the velvet sofa, his broad shoulders tense as if he were about to strike me.

“Fuck,” he spat, a low, vulgar curse breaking past his lips. “You are so fucking infuriating when you pull that manipulative shit.”

He turned on his heel, kicking a stray wooden fragment across the floor in pure irritation.

“I’m out.”

As he strode toward the central exit portal, he violently kicked a heavy leather tome out of his path, sending it slamming into the wall.

“This whole disaster started because I got mixed up with a bunch of useless bastards in the first place,” Raibel growled, not bothering to look back. “And now you want us to what? Sit in a circle and bicker like children again? And what ‘effort’?!”

Raibel paused near the portal threshold, turning to shoot a venomous glare at the remaining three men.

“Effort to bring her back? Don’t make me fucking laugh! Every single one of you gathered in this room today because you wanted to leech something more off her administrative authority, but you wrap it up in this righteous, heroic speech! I’m fucking done with this circus. Do whatever the hell you want!”

Without waiting for a response, he stepped through the glowing archway and vanished into the main district.

The moment Raibel departed, a second figure moved. It was the man with ash-gray hair who had remained silent throughout the entire brawl.

He cast a quick, somber glance over our group, then bowed deeply to me in complete silence.

“…”

Without uttering a single syllable, he trudged through the portal after Raibel. True to his stoic profile, he hadn’t spoken a single word from start to finish.

“Then please… consider our proposal and contact us when you are ready,” the black-haired swordsman said softly.

He offered a brief, respectful bow, then motioned for Adnihil to follow. Within seconds, the lounge emptied, leaving only the wounded Arsil, a thoroughly bewildered Adnihil who lingered near the exit, and myself standing among the ruined furniture.

I pressed a palm firmly against my forehead, a deep, overwhelming wave of existential exhaustion washing over me.

‘I… my past self…‘

‘…To think I used to lead a squad of such absolute lunatics…‘

✦ ✦ ✦

In the end, isolating the traitor on the spot proved impossible.

I could have used my administrative authority to force them to remain, but a sudden emergency forced me to end the confrontation immediately.

“Ugh… heuk…!“

Arsil’s physical condition was deteriorating rapidly. Even though the hemotoxin had been neutralized by the counteragent, the physical trauma where the poisoned blade had struck his shoulder was far too severe to leave untreated.