As always, parting and death were fleeting. It was the same when my own vigilantes died in gruesome deaths. At the moment of death, I poured my heart and soul into mourning, then buried them in my heart. This time, there was no need to chase after something unusual. Thinking that way, my heart felt much lighter.
Humans were creatures of adaptation, and she was ultimately no different. She quickly became accustomed. She hadn't made any effort to wash away the past, to become numb. She simply flowed along, naturally, with the passage of time. The admirable efforts she'd made that night, losing sleep over that thought and deliberately throwing herself into the cold water, seemed meaningless. Time inevitably provided a partial solution to her pain.
For a daughter of a noble family, she frequented the palace far more frequently than anyone else, so she knew the geography like a loggerhead. The outside world was chaotic and unfamiliar, but she was the only assassin in Joseon who roamed the palace grounds like her own private home. Everyone had their own story behind becoming an assassin, but hers was one of the more mundane.
She lived a life of luxury, and even interacted with the palace. In other words, she was completely detached from the assassins. Yet, strangely, the assassins themselves weren't wary of her. Instead, they exploited her reputation and connections to their advantage. At first glance, she seemed dull, but the deeper you delve into her, the more ingenious she became. This was the kind of fascination she felt toward the assassins. Contradiction, though potentially infinite, was a source of greater interest than she'd imagined. For her, it was simply a means to an end.
They said she was an animal of adaptation, a beast. In fact, to her, it was monstrous. The innocent girl, ignorant of the world, had been a very lovely and beautiful child. When she was born and first put on a mask, she was a youth who could barely hold a sword, an uncivilized youth. Sydney had become a swordsman who had lost all sense of emotion. She, who had been so affectionate, was a swordsman who could only breathe and release her heart in moments. It was truly bitter.
It was her first mission. When she stabbed a commoner to death, her heart pounded like a madman. Now, with my sword, people lost their smiles. The face of a middle-aged man begging for his life flashed before her eyes, and his screams echoed in her ears like hallucinations. The red blood that gushed out when she forcefully pulled the knife from her abdomen, even though it had been deeply inserted, was more than she could handle.
Perhaps, he thought. The sword and the chief had nothing to argue about, and he shut his eyes tightly against the blood that clung to his eyelashes. He considered striking, but quickly changed his mind. And then he became numb. The expression "numbed" seems strange, as if the feeling had been a lie to begin with. It was nothing more than a fantastical delusion, born of the unspoken pressure to feel guilty.
At the time, the leader of the group was in charge of cleaning up. Seeing her trembling, he ordered her to refrain from actual combat for a while and focus solely on training. It wasn't a bad suggestion, so she didn't refuse. Focusing solely on martial arts yielded positive results. Having seen and learned from a young age, she mastered it at a frightening pace, and her inherent strength ensured she never acted weakly. Consequently, she won the favor of the assassins who had previously been resentful of her for being a woman, and, naturally, she caught the leader's eye.
Maybe that was where the disaster began.