The dull thud of the garden doors closing behind him was only the beginning.
Hayjin marched down the corridors of the royal castle's east wing with the heavy stride of a wounded giant. His heavy, blocky gray iron greaves clattered against the polished marble floors with a furious, metallic, almost deafening rhythm that bounced off the high vaulted ceilings. His bolo tie swung wildly against his unbuttoned white shirt collar, and the brown leather straps of his black vest squeezed his chest like a cage.
The tailors, pages, and court maids stationed along the hallways froze in place as he passed. Several servant girls carrying silver trays with pots of steaming tea backed up three paces, flattening themselves against the tapestry-draped walls.
The servants' expressions were a mix of pure bewilderment and restrained terror. Never had a guest least of all an ordinary boy in low-ranking adventurer attire permitted himself to stride through the halls of the royal palace radiating such wild, unchecked fury.
"What is wrong with that boy?" a young maid whispered to a page beside her. "He came out of the garden screaming... he even talked back to Sir Redvers..."
"Shh! Quiet, he'll hear you!" the page hissed back, clutching his trays tight. "He's the adventurer who survived the tower. They say he's got quite a temper..."
Hayjin didn't spare them a glance. His mind was an incinerator of toxic thoughts, a paranoid vortex where Wilder's smiling face overlapped with those of his former tormentors from school on Earth, the disdainful faces of the capital's nobles, and the hooded shadow of the Cult of the Brand's leader.
"I won't go easy on you out of respect..." Hayjin repeated in his head, his throat burning with rage. "Bullshit! Top-grade aristocratic bullshit! Everyone's so quick to lecture you on how brave and courageous you are, but the second there's a chance to show you who's really in charge, out comes the silver sword! I'm sick of it... I'm already sick of playing the fool to entertain the nobility!"
He reached the door to his bedroom in the honored guests' wing. Grabbing the heavy carved brass handle, sweeping aside the lock's resistance, he barged into the room.
SLAM!
Hayjin slammed the solid wood door with such force that the stone walls trembled. The glass of the grand window vibrated ominously, and a candlestick on a side table creaked dangerously on its stand.
Out in the corridor, two passing servants jumped mid-stride, clutching their chests and staring at the closed door with wide, stunned eyes before quickening their pace to get away from that potential powder keg.
Inside the room, Hayjin paced jerkily toward the center of the floor. He spun around twice like a caged animal, fists clenched so tightly his knuckles turned white and his fingernails dug into his palms. Then, exhausted by the adrenaline rush, he collapsed heavily onto an inlaid wooden chair beside the bed.
He rested his elbows on his knees, let his head fall into his hands, and began breathing in ragged hitches, shaken by involuntary tremors.
Barely two minutes passed. The heavy silence of the room, broken only by Hayjin's labored breathing, was shattered by a soft, hesitant sound from the hallway.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Three small raps of knuckles against the thick wooden door.
Hayjin didn't move from his position. He lacked both the strength and the desire to face Isabelle with her lectures on nobility, let alone Arkon or some royal guard coming to scold him for disrespecting Wilder.
"Go away," Hayjin wheezed, his voice muffled behind his palms. "Leave me alone. I don't give a damn if I have to apologize to Wilder, I don't want to see anyone."
The door handle turned slowly. The heavy door swung open with a subtle creak, letting in the golden light of the corridor.
On the threshold stood neither guards nor stern maids. There was only Wren.
The little princess was still wearing her light training dress. She held her small grimoire tightly to her chest with both arms, as if it were a shield to protect her from the world. Her huge golden eyes, still glassy from tears she had wiped away before entering, stared at Hayjin's doubled-over form with a mix of anxiety, apprehension, and deep empathy.
She stepped inside softly, letting the door click almost entirely shut behind her to block out the castle noises.
"Hayjin...?" the girl whispered, taking a few steps onto the room's red carpet.
Hayjin slowly raised his head. Seeing that it was only her, the stiffness in his shoulders eased slightly, replaced by a profound sense of weariness and shame.
Wren approached his chair, placing her grimoire on a small side table. She stopped half a meter from him, looking into his hazel eyes.
"Is... is everything okay?" the girl asked in a soft voice, tilting her head slightly.
Hayjin let his hands drop onto his thighs, rubbing his face tiredly and angrily. He let out a long, shaky breath that vibrated in his lungs.
"Honestly... I don't know, Wren," Hayjin admitted, his voice raspy and stripped of any sarcastic mask.
He stared at the floor, fixating on the tips of his gray iron greaves. The heat of his blind rage was beginning to fade, leaving behind the usual bitter layer of guilt and insecurity.
"Maybe... maybe I was too harsh with Wilder?" the boy continued, running uncertain fingers through the black and white streaks of his hair. "Maybe... maybe I went too far. The blood rushed to my head and I screamed terrible things in his face right in front of your sister and Isabelle. He was just trying to talk to me, and I... I treated him like he was the worst garbage in the world. I'm just an idiot, aren't I?"
Wren didn't laugh. She didn't scold him or lecture him like a noble. On the contrary, the little princess took another step forward, stopping directly in front of him.
"I understand you completely, Hayjin," Wren said, with a gravity and maturity that felt entirely uncharacteristic for a child her age.
Hayjin looked at her, startled by such a blunt and confident response. "You understand me? Wren... you're a royal princess. You live surrounded by gold, waited on hand and foot. How could you understand what it feels like when people look down on you or treat you like an insect?"
Wren lowered her gaze for an instant, rubbing her small fingers together. When she raised her golden eyes back to him, an ancient shadow of melancholy lurked within them.
"Because unfortunately, I too have felt humiliated and inferior many times," the child confessed in a soft but clear voice.
Hayjin straightened slightly in his chair, forgetting his own anger for a moment. Wren's confession had caught him completely off guard.
"Inferior?" Hayjin repeated, furrowing his brow. "You? But you're a magic prodigy! You can use different grimoires better than most mages in the capital! Why would you ever feel like that?"
Wren pressed her lips into a thin line. She took a deep breath and sat on the edge of the bed right across from Hayjin's chair, letting her small legs dangle in the air.
"It was all because of Zhilian," Wren said, her voice dropping into an intimate, almost conspiratorial tone.
Hayjin flinched. "Zhilian? Your sister? But you two love each other to pieces! At least, I thought..."
"I know, I know!" Wren hastened to clarify, waving her hands. "I love my sister endlessly! I adore her she's the most important person in my life! But... growing up in here, it was so hard."
The child stared at her grimoire resting on the side table, organizing her thoughts.
"Since she was the eldest, she was the one who would most likely ascend the throne first," Wren explained with painful maturity. "Ever since we were little, all the sages of the Council, all the nobles of the capital, the guards, the weapon masters... everyone praised Zhilian. Every word she spoke was considered a pearl of wisdom, every magical feat she performed was rewarded with celebrations and applause. She was the 'Princess of Light,' the perfect future queen who would bring prosperity to the realm."
"And you?" Hayjin asked softly.
"I... even though I was loved and respected by everyone," Wren continued, lowering her head, "I felt like I was just an extra to the court. The shadow of the crown princess. But the thing that truly made me feel awful... the thing that made me feel tiny and humiliated inside... was Zhilian's gentle, caring attitude toward me."
Hayjin furrowed his brow, confused. "Wait, I don't get it. It made you feel bad that she was nice to you?"
"Yes!" Wren exclaimed, and for a moment, that same spark of desperate rage Hayjin had shown in the garden flared up in her golden eyes.
"Because it wasn't just sisterly affection. I felt like it was a display of superiority toward me! Every time I tried to do something great, every time I studied a difficult spell, she would pat my head with that sweet smile of hers and say, 'Oh, good job, my little one! Don't overexert yourself, let me take care of it.' I felt immensely undervalued by her. In her eyes and everyone else's, I was just the cute little sister to protect. I thought that to them, I had no worth other than being... Zhilian's younger sister."
The girl let out a long sigh, wiping away a tiny tear with her dress sleeve.
Hayjin stood open-mouthed.
Suddenly, many of the puzzle pieces of Wren's bizarre behavior clicked into place with the precision of a perfect gear snapping into alignment.
"That's why..." Hayjin whispered, his hazel eyes widening. "That's why you constantly practice with a different grimoire every single day!"
Wren nodded firmly, raising her chin.
"Exactly!" the child admitted. "Zhilian is an absolute specialist in light and barrier magic. She's unbeatable at it. I didn't want to be a faded copy of her! I wanted to learn every school of magic fire, wind, earth, even Isabelle's spatial magic because I wanted to prove to her, to Riko, and to the entire castle that I have value for who I am! I didn't want to be 'the little sister to protect,' I wanted to be Wren!"
Silence returned to the bedroom, but this time it was no longer heavy with anger or suspicion. It was a silence of profound mutual understanding. Two souls who, despite coming from completely different worlds a mana-less boy and a royal princess smothered by her sister's shadow had recognized each other in the exact same wound of inferiority.
Hayjin looked at the girl with a whole new sense of respect. He had always thought of her as a spoiled, hyperactive child, but beneath that surface lay an unyielding determination.
Wren stood up from the bed. She took two steps toward him, stopping right in front of his knees. She raised her face, looking Hayjin straight in the eye with absolute seriousness.
"And that's why I followed you in here, Hayjin," Wren said, her voice steady.
"You don't have to be the best. You don't have to excel as a knight or a hero of the palace. You don't have to become like Sir Redvers or the weapon masters marching through the corridors in golden armor. It's enough for you to be good at what you do and what you do best."
Hayjin shook his head faintly, a bitter smile curling his lips. "But I can't do anything, Wren. I don't have mana. I can't do fancy magic. I don't even know how to fence properly..."
"Who cares?!" Wren exclaimed, planting her hands on her hips with overwhelming energy.
"You don't have to prove anything to anyone! Not to Arkon, not to Isabelle, not to the guards, and not to Sir Redvers! You saved my sister in the dungeon when no one else was there! Even if you were to lose to Wilder in a sword duel... you will always just be Hayjin. With your qualities, your stubborn head, your strange way of speaking, and your individuality that makes you who you are! Nobody in this castle can take away who you are!"
The child's words echoed in the room with crystal clarity, piercing through all the paranoid barriers Hayjin had built around his heart.
For the first time since passing out in the training tower, Hayjin felt the suffocating knot in his chest dissolve. It wasn't an etiquette lesson delivered by Isabelle, nor an honorable speech from Wilder. It was the pure, raw, unfiltered truth of a child who clearly saw his worth, even when he himself was too blinded by trauma to see it.
Hayjin ran his hands over his face, hiding a faint flush of emotion.
"Wren..." the boy said, his voice cracking slightly. "Thank you. Thank you, really... you made me feel a little better."
Wren smiled radiantly, her golden eyes sparkling with pure joy at seeing him finally relaxed.
"Though..." Hayjin continued, looking up and offering her one of his usual weak smiles, "right now I'd prefer to be alone in the room for a bit. I need to clear my head and process all this mess."
Wren wasn't offended in the slightest. She accepted his request with an understanding nod.
"That's totally fine!" the little princess said.
She stepped forward and, before Hayjin could even react, reached out and hugged him warmly, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and resting her head against his black vest.
Hayjin was startled for a moment, then cautiously returned the hug, giving her two gentle pats on the back.
Wren pulled back with a broad smile, retrieved her small grimoire from the side table, and headed toward the door.
"Get some rest, Hayjin!" she told him before stepping across the threshold. "See you later for lunch!"
"See you later, Wren," Hayjin murmured.
Wren stepped out of the room and gently shut the door behind her, returning the space to silence.
The click of the lock snapping from the outside echoed in the empty room.
Hayjin sat motionless in the chair for several seconds. Wren's words were still ringing in his ears: "With your qualities and your individuality that makes you who you are..."
It was true. Everything the little girl had said to him was terrifyingly true. But the awareness of being right, combined with the weight of the trauma endured in the loop, the paranoia of the Cult of the Brand, the perceived humiliation in front of Wilder, and the endless exhaustion accumulated from losing his old life on Earth... didn't magically disappear.
On the contrary, Wren's presence had prevented him from exploding the poison accumulating inside him. Now that he was alone again, that emotional dam shattered once and for all.
A surge of pure, visceral, brutal frustration rushed up Hayjin's spine.
He bolted to his feet. His chair slid backward with a harsh screeching sound.
Without thinking, driven solely by a surge of blind, primordial adrenaline, Hayjin grabbed the heavy inlaid wooden chair with both hands. Even though he didn't have a drop of mana in his body, the raw physical strength gained from boosting his stats in the dungeon exploded in his arms.
He lifted the chair above his head and, with a raspy roar born from the depths of his lungs, hurled it with all the force in his body against the stone wall of the room.
CRASH!
The impact was devastating. The chair shattered into a thousand splinters of dark wood and padded velvet, spraying in every direction across the marble floor. A piece of the carved backrest bounced against the wardrobe, while the dust of chipped stone from the wall dispersed into the room's air.
Hayjin didn't stop. He stumbled backward two steps, breathing like a wounded bull.
He brought his hands to his face, covering his eyes and mouth with trembling palms, and bent double at the waist.
"AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!"
A desperate, long, excruciating, and brutal scream exploded from his throat, echoing off the room's walls.
It was a scream that contained more than just anger over the clash with Wilder. It was the cry of someone who had been decapitated in a limbo and could still taste his own blood; the cry of someone who had lost a year of his life, his university, and his Earthly future to end up in a ruthless world; the cry of a boy wracked by social anxiety frantically trying not to collapse beneath the weight of expectations greater than himself.
Hayjin stood there, bent double amidst the broken wooden splinters, hands planted over his face and shoulders shaking with heavy, labored breaths, screaming into the dark of his solitude until there was no air left in his lungs.