System's POV

Thirteen's birthday celebration passed swiftly and smoothly.

For most of the time, Alessia had chatted with Erica and Sherry, who had accompanied him to the venue.

The three of them were in the corner of the room, talking in hushed voices as if they feared that others would hear their discussion.

Seeing that Zion was free, Shana approached him and asked to talk in private.

"Many things happened, so I wasn't able to get an opportunity to talk to you," Shana, who was wearing a dress that highlighted her innocent beauty, said in a serious tone. "But I just want to know one thing. Did you do all of that to break our party apart?"

"That's not my intention," Thirteen replied. "I just wanted to correct Roland's mindset before it's too late. By the way, how is he?"

Thirteen intended to talk to Roland after his duel with Joshua, but the other party wasn't accepting any visitors.

The guards stationed outside his room wouldn't let him in, having received direct orders from the Grand Marshal—they must not allow anyone to enter, especially Zion, whom Roland didn't want to see the most.

Since that was the case, the teenage boy could only take a step back and wait for another opportunity to talk to the Hero, who had suffered one bad end after another.

"I think… he is very depressed right now," Shana replied. "The betrayal and his defeat against Joshua seemed to have taken a toll on his mind and body. I'm afraid that he might fall into depression at this rate."

After hearing what Shana had to say, Thirteen thought that Roland now had a fifty-fifty chance of becoming a Dark Hero.

A Dark Hero was a Righteous Hero who had fallen from grace and would live a life for the sake of vengeance.

'I guess this is only natural after experiencing back-to-back losses, and he must be questioning why all of these bad things are happening to him,' Thirteen thought. 'He believed that he wasn't someone who deserved to be betrayed, and he would definitely question the world why he had to suffer all these hardships.'

The teenage boy didn't regret the things he did because he believed that the earlier it happened, the stronger the Hero Party would become.

Although a crack had formed in their relationships, it was still an incident that would allow them to become stronger in more ways than one.

However, the current members of the Hero Party were still too young, too naive, and too ignorant to realize that everything Thirteen had done was for their best.

Of course, some of them still believed that Zion had done this for a reason, which included Erica and Shana, as well as Rianna.

Derek, Diana, and Mildred were just as lost as Roland, and they came to Zion's birthday party, hoping to talk to him like what Shana was doing right now.

They wanted to know how to resolve the broken friendship that had festered between their members and prevent it from happening again in the future.

Shana carefully observed Thirteen's expression, but the teenage boy looked the same as usual.

Calm like the surface of the lake, as if he had seen and experienced all the hardships the world had to offer. It was obvious that the Hero Party's current issue was not a big deal for him.

"Zion, what do we do now?" Shana asked.

Derek, Diana, and Mildred, who were loitering a distance away from the two, were quietly eavesdropping on their conversation. Enjoy new tales from My Virtual Library Empire

They waited with bated breath as the teenage boy replied to Shana's question.

"Shana, do you know that Roland likes you very much?" Thirteen asked back. "Not as a friend, but as a woman whom he wishes to become his girlfriend."

Shana's face reddened after hearing Zion's reply. Of course, she also noticed that Roland always paid close attention to her and treated her more kindly than the others.

However, she really only thought of him as a friend and nothing more than that.

The three members of the peanut gallery, who were listening to Zion and Shana, couldn't help but look at the teenage boy with shocked expressions on their faces.

Of course, they also knew that Roland and Joshua treated Shana differently than them.

However, they all had a silent agreement that this was a matter between the involved parties, and they should not interfere with how things were going.

"I… I only think of Roland as an important friend of mine," Shana replied.

'Damn, Roland just got friendzoned,' Derek thought. 'We better keep this a secret, or else, he might break completely.'

Diana and Mildred were thinking about the same thing.

Currently, Roland looked truly pitiful, and if he knew that the person he loved had directly said that she only saw him as a friend, it might just become the final nail in the coffin to break him completely.

Thirteen sighed before holding Shana's hand. "Shana, Roland might approach you soon. In his current state, he is grasping for straws, hoping that someone will throw him a rope so that he can get out of the sinkhole that he found himself in.

"Right now, you are the person whom he wants to see the most. In his current state of mind, he might just confess to you and ask you to become her girlfriend. Perhaps, he thinks that he has nothing to lose.

"But he isn't aware that he still has things to lose, and if he loses this thing, he might just break apart completely."

Shana lowered her head and looked at the hand holding her own.

Thirteen's hands weren't soft, unlike that of most ladies.

It was very rough, which was the result of wielding weapons from a young age.

Shana, who had the same experience, didn't have delicate hands either. But compared to Zion's, her hand was still softer, befitting that of a lady from an influential family.

This was perhaps the first time that her hand had been held by Zion in this manner, making her heart beat wildly inside her chest.

She was still confused about what to do for her friends, but for some reason, she believed that the answers to her questions would be answered by the person whose words and actions were currently making her heart skip a beat.