“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, his eyes growing wet as he made to blink away the moisture. He collected himself almost immediately, though the guilt within his heart remained just as strong. “This was my fault. I…I really am sorry.” To himself, he continued, “Not that that means anything at this point.”

He stood up and took a steadying breath. Delia had been far from a saint, even comparable to a devil in some contexts, so there was no reason why he should feel any guilt, let alone remorse. Now that she was dead, there was a good chance that he had inadvertently saved thousands of lives, not to mention that hardly any time had passed since she had tried to kill him.

Why should I even care? Although he told himself this, his words merely echoed around within a numbed mind. Just because other people were indecent or of poor character didn’t mean that their behavior was an excuse for his own bad decisions. Yeah, the woman might have tried to kill him, but she had ended up saving his life many times after that, along with the lives of his friends. Even if it was an unwilling grace, the fact remained that she was the only reason why he and his friends had been able to escape from the sect’s territory, and that Nolan had sent her to her death with a noncommittal laugh. He hadn’t cared much at the time whether she lived or died, but now that the latter had actually come to pass he felt as if he had done something terribly wrong.

The tatters in Delia’s clothing left a lot of her skin exposed, so out of respect for the life lost Nolan took off his sleeveless robe and gently draped it over her unmoving figure.

“I hardly knew anything about you,” he sighed, taking a seat beside her and looking out at the surrounding tree stumps as a moderate breeze ruffled his robes. “But I doubt your life was an easy one. We’re all products of our environments, in the end.”

Shrugging off his philosophical thoughts, Nolan stood up and began to draw out a basic construction arrayment, taking care to alter the schematic so as to account for the material that he intended to use for the construct, the desired size and dimensions, and so on. Upon activation, a large amount of mulched wood and destroyed detritus was gradually transformed into a sizeable, one-room building. He’d taken inspiration from the Roman Pantheon, made evident by the domed interior, the rectangular porch and the wooden pillars that supported a triangular pediment where letters would have been engraved were it the source of its inspiration.

The interior of the mausoleum was entirely empty save for an open casket of simple make, where he intended to lay Delia to rest. The inner rotunda was only four metres across and made entirely with raw, unvarnished lumber.

“What an interesting building.” May was floating directly above him, which came as no surprise since he had sensed her approach from the moment that she had left the cave behind the waterfall. Landing at his side, she glanced inside of the mausoleum and said, “This is supposed to be her grave, I take it? What’s the point?”

“I can’t just leave her like this, not when it’s my fault that things turned out this way.”

May considered her words carefully. “What’s the difference between her dying, and the deaths of all those kids you killed today? They’re enemies that died, and that’s that.”

“It’s not the same—and don’t say kids. That makes me seem like a psycho.” The ones he’d killed had been trying to kill him, and most of them had been within his age range, so he considered them fair game. “I promised her I’d let her go if she helped us. She did what I asked, and instead I got her killed.”

“You shouldn’t be hard on yourself for the likes of her. Do you know how many people have died because of her?”

“What you’re saying isn’t wrong. I’m not like destroyed or anything, it’s just…I don’t know.”

“She was the White Rogue, Nolan. The White Rogue! I doubt there’s a single place in this world where she’s wanted. I truly doubt that anyone will care that she’s gone.”

Nolan thought back to the former king of Ridgerock, the one that had rewarded him with a large supply of black halmite during the festival that had been going on at the time. He—along with the kingdom’s strongest general, the father of Esteban’s friend Haldi—had been the one to save them from this woman in the hours after they had left the kingdom’s territories. Had it been because she had been scared of them? No, such a thought was simply a fantasy considering that the two men had only been at the early levels of Genesis. The only reason that she had backed off, he’d later learned, was because the king’s father had raised her, in a way. Sometime before the events of ten years ago, which had resulted in the destruction of May’s town and the deaths of her family members, the old man in question had taken a much younger Delia into his home and raised her for a time.

“I don’t know about that,” he said, lightly shaking his head. “Besides, I’ve killed like five thousand people and almost all of them were my age. I can’t really judge her for doing the same thing.” Seeing the disapproving look in May’s eyes, he put on the ghost of a grin and shook his hand in a dismissive manner. “Trust me, I’m not going soft here. I just wish I didn’t ask for her name before this happened.”

He took out a knife and began to work on an epitaph, placed in the centre of the triangular pediment’s face. Here lies Delia, it read, though May simply rolled her eyes in exasperation when he jotted down another sentence. Snickering, she looked down her nose at the body on the ground.

“If you keep pretending, then I’ll wake you up myself.”

Nolan’s eyebrow twitched as he heard Delia toss his robe aside and jump to her feet. He turned to see her directing an angry, dagger-eyed look at May.

“But your pulse…”

“I stopped it on purpose.”

“Why?”

She scoffed and turned away with an odd look on her face that was difficult to discern.

“Isn’t it obvious?” said May. “She was hoping you’d find her here, think she was dead, and then leave. I bet the first thing she planned to do after was to get as far away from you as possible so your master-slave contract wouldn’t have any sway on her. You told her to head north from this island to meet up with you, but you didn’t give her any timeframe for when the meetup had to happen.”

“You should have minded your own business,” growled Delia, whose long hair began to vibrate as she released her inner energies. “Now I’ll have to—”

“Stop,” Nolan commanded.

“What was that?” said May, who stepped in close to look down on Delia with a sadistic smile. “You’ll have to what, now?”

“Delia. Did the spirit of the lake bring you here? Did you interact with it? Why didn’t it kill you? Tell me everything that happened after you left.”

It turned out that the spirit of the lake hadn’t taken Delia seriously from the beginning. It had entertained her in a game of cat and mouse, and just when she had been about to arrive at this island it had transformed into its human form and captured her without any problems. When asked why the creature hadn’t killed her, she broke Nolan’s understanding of her character and blushed fiercely, saying that the spirit of the lake had intended to take her on as a mate. After she had agreed, he had dropped her off here, cleared out the area with a strange technique, and promised to build her a human home that would suit her tastes after he drove Nolan and the others out of his dwelling.

“Are you for real? You’re telling me that you’d rather have sex with that monster than be my servant for a while?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“You were trying to have him kill us, and here I was getting all teary-eyed because I thought you’d died.” Annoyed, he destroyed the mausoleum with a wind-whipping punch that caused it to fall to the ground in hundreds of pieces. “What a waste of time.”

“I just wanted to survive. What would you have done?”

“I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t have done, be out here sleeping with swamp people so they don’t kill me, that’s what.”

“He wasn’t going to kill me. He actually doesn’t like taking lives. Why else would he protect all the demonic beasts on this island from the stronger ones in the area? The only time he’s ever done something like that is when I threw Tems’s pellet into his mouth and he lost his mind for a while.”