Night slightly surveyed the surroundings.
After confirming that no other people were around, only one herald and a few standing guard soldiers.
All mortals…
Thus, Night could no longer hold back the probing desire in his heart.
Rounding it off, everyone here was weak; chickens, not a single one could fight.
The location's concealment provided excellent conditions for his "infiltration" to go in and probe the situation.
Following the best possible approach to stealth, which was of the three-lives-no-cooldown variety... actually wrong, there simply was never enough time in life to hesitate.
Night directly swaggered in from the main door, as if he were returning to his own home with such familiarity.
But he had already activated his sound-dampening invisibility, and not the ordinary version either.
This was the enhanced plus version, complete silence included.
When he passed the herald and pushed the door open and walked inside, the herald and the soldiers on watch heard nothing.
Not even the sound of the door.
And only after entering the room did Night discover a whole new world inside.
The interior was completely empty except for a small cellar entrance, and along the base of the wall, a half-sized skylight barely big enough to let in a trickle of air and a glimpse of the outside world.
In this space that became completely sealed once the door closed, only here served as the sole channel connecting to the outside air and scenery.
Upon seeing this scene, Night felt slightly silent in his heart.
Just by slightly putting himself in the shoes of the person trapped dead in the cellar, the psychological and physiological suffering and loneliness, he felt incomparably uncomfortable.
A person with a free spirit and a sense of personal dignity, locked away in a world without daylight, able to see the outside only through a half-sized skylight.
That alone, the solitude and dead stillness of it, was enough to drive a person to the edge of madness.
He suddenly somewhat did not wish for Briseis to be locked in such a damned place.
This was no kind of life for a girl in the bloom of her youth.
Just how monstrous did a person have to be to hide someone this deep underground?
Did he honestly fear that a weak maiden without the strength to truss a chicken could somehow slip past this many soldiers and escape?
Completely unnecessary.
Night, who could only describe this as the behavior of someone deeply disturbed, was a person who almost always maintained cold composure and graceful serenity in front of others.
Yet in this moment, his face showed undisguised revulsion.
He sighed and thought of something.
His eyes gradually returned to calm, and then under a heart of pity, he restrained all negative emotions; the next moment, that gentle and sacred temperament rose from his body once again.
The kind of smile that made anyone who saw it feel immediately at ease and warmly welcome.
For the person he might be about to meet, someone who had been held in long darkness, he prepared to go down in as approachable and easy to communicate posture as possible.
A pity that this warmth and quiet consideration was something most people never got to see.
When Night stepped slowly down the stairs into the cellar entrance,
This time he didn't suppress the sound of his footsteps from carrying inside.
And when the sound of footsteps reached the cellar,
A thin, huddled figure in the darkness gave a full-body tremor.
A flash of fear crossed Briseis's eyes.
"Someone was coming?"
She didn't know what was waiting for her next.
If Agamemnon tried to force himself on her again, what could she do?
Without Achilles to block the way this time, who was left to save her?
Each steady footstep felt like it was landing directly on her chest, filling her with anxiety, unease, and helplessness.
The heart that had gradually calmed down because of the music every early morning now fell into turmoil once again.
And just then, a melody suddenly drifted in through the entrance, inaudible to anyone outside.
Like arms wrapping around someone in comfort, like a mother's embrace, the music came riding softly on the air.
Briseis's emotions gradually settled. She went still for a moment, and in those eyes so like Chryseis's, a feeling she couldn't name passed through, bringing a quiet and inexplicable sense of peace.
Warm enough to make her want to bury herself in someone's arms and cry, and then fall into a deep sleep.
She understood what the music was trying to say.
Because of that gentleness, Briseis stopped being afraid; instead, she became a bit curious about who exactly came.
It could not be Agamemnon, that violent man who left an incomparably cruel tyrant impression after just one glance (an absolute domestic abuser); such a person could not play such gentle music.
Achilles was also impossible, although he was young and handsome with martial prowess that few in all Greece could match; he similarly could not play such a melody.
A half-god who lived for battle, a young prince whose heart longed for the battlefield, one who was skilled in the art of killing and had very little in the way of artistic feeling.
So who else could possibly reach this place?
Someone who bypassed both Agamemnon and Achilles.
Without the approval of either of them, who could get this close?
As much as Briseis did not want to admit it, her current identity was indeed the war trophy of the hero Achilles, and then snatched away by Agamemnon.
How she wished it was her father, or some god in the heavens, who noticed her suffering and specially came to save her.
But reality told her that was asking too much.
Then finally,
When Night stepped fully into the dim underground room, the sliver of sunlight filtering in through the skylight let Briseis see his face clearly, and she froze for a moment.
How beautiful a person could be.
Moonlight wove his hair into long silver strands, and those eyes, deep and brilliant as stars, carried a faint quality of something beyond the mortal, and they looked toward her.
In that moment,
A young man as beautiful as a narcissus flower in bloom, his slender pale fingers gently plucking the strings, and Briseis felt certain those hands had the power to stir the hearts of every maiden in the world.
Her first impression of Night was simply: beautiful.
That beauty, if reshaped into a woman, would be the kind that drove countless heroes to madness, like Pandora once was, like Helen was now.
Even the half-god Achilles, whom she once saw with her own eyes, was not as handsome as him.
She found herself looking for a second longer than she intended.
The fear inside her shrank a little more.
First, a person with high attractiveness always made others feel closer more easily than a person with low attractiveness, so one would not feel fear.
And Night's bearing and presence had always been exceptional.
Combined with the goodwill already built through the music.
If it had been Odysseus or Patroclus who came instead, the reaction would have been entirely different.
In a dim underground room like this, with barely any light, someone without the looks to carry it would immediately get hit with the shadow effect, turning into something genuinely unsettling.
In that case, let alone soothing the other's emotions and then conversing,
Getting a frightened scream out of sheer atmosphere alone would almost be the expected result.
But faced with Night, Briseis managed to stay composed and asked carefully, in a small and cautious voice.
"May I ask, who are you?"
.
.
.
(End of the Chapter)