I Can Hear the Saint’s Inner Thoughts

52 – A Fake Who Wants To Be Real (3)

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My dream is shattering.

The pillars of fire Kyle and Astal created shot up to the end of the sky, melting the ceiling that looked like the heavens.

And as if that were a signal flare,

everything in sight shook, and the demon army made of illusions vanished into shimmering light.

“This can’t be. How can everything I planned crumble so easily…?”

Bellamora looked at the gaping hole in the sky, letting out a hollow, distraught laugh. Decades had been poured into building this domain.

To live an eternal life in a dream more blissful than reality.

Because life inherently held nothing but pain, Bellamora believed she could use her abilities to make everyone happy.

But, what went wrong?

“Astal, are you really throwing away the chance to see your parents again? I just don’t understand it. All you had to do was swallow a little pride!”

Based on the memories of this man, Astal, she had succeeded in perfectly recreating his parents.

She had even tested it on others beforehand.

They possessed individual emotions and memories, just like living people, so there shouldn’t have been any instinctive revulsion.

“Why are you doing this? Could it be… are you really in love with that vulgar, big-breasted woman, Victoria? I could have used magic to….”

Bellamora couldn’t understand Astal, and her face contorted.

All he had to do was say he would abandon the saint, Victoria, and become her lover, but was that really so distasteful to him?

“…In the end, a dream is just a dream, Bellamora. My parents wouldn’t have wanted to be used by demons either.”

Astal breathed roughly, adopting a fighting stance. What Bellamora had just done was no different from exhuming a corpse and desecrating it, he thought.

Knowing that his parents, who’d left him the last will to survive to the end, were no longer in this world.

“Oh, really? Then, would you still feel the same even if I did this?”

Bellamora, seeing that look in Astal’s eyes, traced a deep arc on her lips with a smile. She was, after all, specialized in reading the deep desires within people’s hearts.

She knew better than anyone that Astal carried guilt and trauma regarding his parents and the villagers.

She wanted to see him wear a face of despair.

To see his steel-like resolve and thirst for revenge crumble, to see him cling to her, weeping and begging.

A destructive love that would break everything, a selfish love that didn’t consider the other’s feelings. That was the form of love Bellamora practiced.

“…How about it? I’ll show you this scene repeatedly, hundreds of times over. I want you to endlessly recall the scene of your parents dying, unable to do anything.”

Bellamora, with a laugh, snapped her fingers, plunging Astal into a phantasm once more.

A dream within a dream, she didn’t have the power to trap the entire territory in a phantasm again, but she had enough strength left to target one man.

Scrape, snap, patter.

Along with chilling sounds, a viscous ripple of blood soaking the ground began to appear before Astal’s eyes.

Bellamora used durahans connected by threads to commit the atrocity of pulling off, or hacking off, his parents’ heads, just as it had happened in history.

“……!!!”

Victoria’s face turned deathly pale, unable to stop the act. She was utterly exhausted from Bellamora’s relentless attacks.

Even using the saint’s miracle couldn’t resolve physical or mental fatigue.

“A, aaa….”

And in that moment, despair took root in Astal’s eyes.

As if in an eternally repeating video, the phantasm of his parents dying unfolded endlessly before him.

Astal, watching that spectacle, could only open his mouth and sigh. Because no matter how he used magic or swung his fists in resistance, nothing changed.

Even in the blink of Victoria’s eyes, Astal felt as though dozens of hours were passing.

“And to top it off… I’ll add a little extra trauma. Wouldn’t it be a truly horrific memory if your parents came back to life like zombies, asking you why you killed them?”

Bellamora was using threads made of blood to manipulate the corpses of his parents like puppets. The detached heads clattered as they spoke.

“Astal… why didn’t you save your mother…?”

“Our son… it’s so cold and painful here….”

Reaching their arms out towards Astal, two headless corpses shedding tears of blood. Seeing them, Astal lost the light in his eyes as he relived past memories.

Astal bit his tongue raw, forcing himself to remember it was just a nightmare, a hallucination created by Bellamora’s scheme, but

His mind, returning to childhood along with his body, was tormented by his parents’ screams, more vivid than reality itself.

“……”

Astal thrashed magic around him, swinging his fists, trying to wake up from the dream. He was suffering terribly, caught in a dream within a dream – a situation he hadn’t even conceived a way to deal with.

“Lord Astal, just hold on a little longer…!”

Victoria, protecting Astal as he lay sleeping and sweating, was clearing out the surrounding demons.

Even as the dream crumbled, hands still reached out to violate her, following Bellamora’s orders, and they wouldn’t disappear.

The hand holding the hammer was losing strength, his muscles screaming in agony, proving that Victoria’s stamina was reaching its limit.

“Why don’t you just give up? Even if the power source is destroyed and everyone wakes up from the dream, there’s no guarantee that Astal will be sane!”

Bellamora sneered at Victoria. As one of the Four Heavenly Kings of the Demon Lord’s army, she was the kind of person who could find another way, even if all her schemes were ruined.

If she could just completely destroy Astal’s mind and claim it for her own before the nightmare based on his memories fell apart, that would be enough.

Furthermore, Bellamora had a reason for her confidence.

Even if everyone in the territory woke up from the dream, the viewers who had already abandoned reality, drunk on the illusion, wouldn’t turn their blades on her.

The happy dream, more vivid than reality, had long become the driving force that kept people alive in this territory.

In the back alleys, guys were already thick as thieves, selling off their own families or ripping out and peddling someone else’s organs.

‘…There might be a bit of static for a moment, but if I unfurl the shadow and crush them all, we can go back to how it was before.’

Belamora offered a soft smile, imagining the future.

Astal, pretending to be her lover in her arms.

Right beside them, the vulgar saintess, her limbs turned to stone, howling like a beast, being violated by a demon.

And finally, the hero and Astal’s other companions, all brainwashed, protecting this territory as if it were their own lives.

‘I’m a woman who always gets what she wants.’

Just imagining it made Belamora happy, and she giggled. She wielded scissors and thread made of blood, slowly pressuring Victoria.

Just a little bit more and she could slice off that loathsome saintess’s arms simultaneously, preventing her from using miracles.

But at that moment,

an anomaly occurred.

“Huh…? How the hell…?”

His magic, which should definitely be keeping him lost in a dream, pierced Belamora’s body with perfect accuracy, leaving a gaping hole where her heart should be, visible all the way through.

Belamora coughed up blood, staring at Astal standing there on two legs. Not in his childhood form, but back to his original self.

“This… can’t be…”

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

The number of people who had escaped from her dream weave on their own could almost be counted on one hand.

Besides, Astal was under a dream within a dream. The existing dream was already collapsing, so she had doubly layered the dreamweave to ensure he could never escape.

How the hell?

This wasn’t something that could be solved with mere willpower or a feeling of discomfort.

The repetition of trauma based on actual memories would have broken even the strongest minds.

“Haa…. Huheok….”

Astal trembled, his breath ragged, and reached out his hand towards Victoria in front of him.

‘…Thank you, and I’m sorry.’

He was too exhausted to speak, but with that gesture, Astal expressed his gratitude to Victoria.

What momentarily jolted Astal’s mind awake, after countless repetitions of frustration and sorrow in his dreams, was the deep kiss and contract relationship he had with Victoria.

‘Because you… because you became my girlfriend… I could easily tell it was a dream within a dream….’

Unlike the present, the character Victoria Everhart didn’t exist in his originally bleak past.

And so, Astal repeatedly committed suicide in Bellamora’s dream, striving to get out to where she was.

Squeezing out his last strength, Astal, having protected Victoria, closed his eyes and lost his balance.

“Astal-nim…!!”

Victoria, abandoning her hammer, sprinted to catch Astal as he fell.