Chapter 106. Halfway through Winter Break. (1/3)

When I came to next, I found myself in an unfamiliar room. Judging by the curtains around me, the small bed, the medical equipment, and the smell in the air, it wasn’t hard to figure out I was at a hospital.

The first worrisome thought that came to mind was Rosa and Irene’s family. What would they have done if I suddenly disappeared out of nowhere and didn’t return to the car?

If they all went up together, they would be greeted by my blood in the living room and my sudden disappearance. That would be troubling.

I sat up and reached for my pocket where I kept my phone only to realize I was in hospital attire. Where were the clothes I was brought in located? I scanned the room but suddenly realized someone had been beside me the entire time.

It was a woman I didn’t recognize, but her eyes and hair matched her daughter’s. Did this family only have people with these traits? It was already extremely rare for someone to even have red eyes as it was.

“Are you Rosa’s mother?”

She sized me up from top to bottom before she nodded and said, “I apologize for my idiot husband. He went and rushed off on his own the second he got a report that his daughter might be engaged. When I woke up in the morning, he had already disappeared. When I was still on the plane to get here and hunt him down, I received this picture of him posing with you.”

I was slumped over the couch, devoid of life, blood stained the white carpet a deep crimson. My arm hung over the side of the couch and the bandage on my hand was similarly stained with blood. Rosa’s father stood over me, taking a top-down selfie with me in frame while holding up a peace sign. There was a text caption over the image added in which read, ‘First time meeting my potential future son-in-law. He might really die, tehe.’

“Where is he? Please let me stab his hand a few times and let me see him tehe that,” I said seriously.

She stood up, cooly walked over to the front of the bed, then kneeled down and prostrated in front of me. “I sincerely apologize for my idiot husband! He is truly an absolute irreconcilable moron! He went and sent this image to his friends group and it inadvertently reached me. When I tracked down what hospital you were taken to he’d already gone into hiding. Even though I really, REALLY, want to stab his hand a few times myself, I’m unable to until I find him.”

“It’s fine, you don’t need to apologize for him. Seeing your reaction, it seems like you have it pretty tough in your own way…”

She raised her head up from the ground and complained, “Tell me about it. That idiot is always going around taking up whatever jobs he feels like depending on his mood at the time. He does everything on a whim and sleeps around with women without the slightest bit of remorse. If it gets him closer to completing his objective, he’ll do it without even consulting me. Though I guess I’m no better in that regard, but still! Because of him not even trying to hide such matters the way I did, my precious Rosa developed all sorts of weird tastes.”

Ah. So the father was to blame for this and not the mother. The root of all my problems ran even deeper than Rosa all the way back to her father. But wait, what about her own interest in other women? Could it be that came from her mother’s side?

“Uh… unlike your husband, you hid your relationships with men… is what you’re saying, correct?”

“Yes.” She nodded as if it was only natural.

“Uh… this is a weird question to ask on our first meeting, but for… achieving your own objectives, did you also… have to have those sorts of intimate relationships with other women too?”

“Ah… yes… but why are you asking about that?” She asked me quizzically.

“Did you hide those relationships as well?”

“Wouldn’t it just look like girls getting along well? Is there a need to hide that?”

You! You’re also an additional root of all my troubles too! Don’t act like you’re so innocent!

“Rosa seems to have also developed some weird tastes from you.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“I’m pretty sure she’s into other women as well.”

“No way. You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding. It’s left me quite troubled.”

“I sincerely apologize for my carelessness as a mother! I should have been more mindful of such matters when raising her!” She bowed her head low to the ground and raised it repeatedly while apologizing.

“It’s... really fine. Can you please get up? It’s weird to have my fiancée’s mother apologizing to me like this.”

I could see her cleavage every time she raised her head off the ground. She was quite well endowed. If her daughter’s were perky oranges just right for the picking, her mother’s were ripe coconuts that perfectly suited her own figure.

Would Rosa end up like her mother in the future? I couldn’t help but wonder. I was quite fond of her physical features as they currently were though. Some guys thought the bigger the better, but personally, I didn’t understand the sentiment. Bigger wasn’t always better. To me, it was more about the shape, proportions, and how well it matched the person’s figure. Rosa’s were ideal for her own slender frame. 

Though slender at the waist, that didn’t mean she didn’t have curves where curves needed to be. For example, whenever she wore her super short mini jeans in summer. The way her legs curved, I couldn’t deny I found them attractive. I always kept my cool and tried to not focus on these things too much, but with how far our relationship had advanced, I’d grown more and more conscious of her appeal.

With her mother being the fully matured version of that girl I loved and adored, it was a bit difficult to avoid such thoughts from surfacing. 

“Oh my. Sorry, I should be more mindful.” It seems she’d noticed what I’d really been troubled by as she immediately fixed up her appearance.

“You really don’t need to say sorry for every little thing.”

“I don’t? Sorry about that, I’m used to apologizing for my stupid whimsical husband all the time that it’s just become a habit at this point. Ah. I did it again, didn’t I?”

So this is what Rosa’s mother is like. It’s quite unexpected.

“Hey, do you know what happened after your husband brought me here? I mean, about Rosa. Did she find out about this?”

“Well… yes, I did get in contact with her. She called me immediately when she discovered you’d disappeared after dropping off some bags at her place. After I sent her the picture I received, she flew into a rage. She’s furious with her father right now and is trying to hunt him down as we speak. I haven't told her that I’ve found you yet as I was waiting for you to wake up first.”

“If you were concerned how the situation was handled after that, Rosa was the only one who saw the aftermath. She’d gone up alone at the time thinking something was strange with how long you were taking. She gave the excuse that there was something she wanted to get from her apartment. When she understood the situation, she explained to the people the two of you were with at the time that you’d fallen asleep on the couch in her living room exhausted from shopping and that you were running a high fever. She told them she’d return to their place with you later once your fever went down.”

I let out a small sigh of relief, thankful she’d handled the situation in that manner.

“You seem pretty relieved.”

“I am. Ah. My shift at work though!” We departed early in the morning as soon as stores opened. We finished at 3:30 PM and I was supposed to go to work right after, Irene promised to drop me off.

“Rosa handled that too.”

“She did?”

“Yes, she went there in person and explained that you were down with a fever.”

“I see. That’s a relief. You seem to be quite well informed about the situation. Do you keep in touch with your daughter?”

“Yes. She doesn’t keep in touch with her father though. He actually didn’t even know she even had a boyfriend up until now. He just thought you were some friend of hers until the last report he received. I’d been intercepting and modifying the reports he was sent with updates about her all this time before he could ever see them, but unfortunately, this report was received while I was asleep. I slipped up because we had… quite a long night in bed... for Christmas. I knew something troublesome like this would happen if he found out she’d found someone.”

“I suppose I should thank you for your efforts.”

“Still, I’m quite impressed. For a normal civilian, you did this to him, right?”

She took out her phone with the picture and pointed to the scratch with blood on his cheek.

“Uh… yeah. At the time I thought I was seriously going to die so I figured I’d at least bite him back if I could.”

“So you blocked the knife he threw at you with your hand and tried to launch some sort of counter-attack with it, right?”

“Well, more or less. It was a crushing defeat in the end.”

“Crushing defeat? You drew blood from him. Among assassins, he’s the only one known to have never spilled a single drop of his own blood. My husband is quite famous in the world of assassins for his accomplishments. You went and took away his unblemished perfect record. There are actually a lot of assassins freaking out right now wondering who this ridiculous son-in-law of his is. They’re wondering whether there will be a dark horse in the academy showing up in the next few years.”

“Absolutely not. Don’t even think I’d go somewhere dangerous like that. I’m going to enjoy a peaceful normal life without any sort of post-secondary education. University? Academy? Hah! Screw that! I’m just going to enjoy a leisurely life doing what I enjoy for a living.”

“Are those your plans for the future?”

“Yes, sorry to disappoint.”

“Disappoint? What’s disappointing about that? That sort of life sounds quite appealing to me.”

“To an assassin?”

“Yes. Just because you’re an assassin doesn’t mean you enjoy such a risky lifestyle where you’re constantly living on the edge forced to always be looking over your shoulder and on high alert. This sort of lifestyle is very draining on a person mentally.”

“Then why do it?”

“Because it’s what I’m best at, I guess. I was good at various things, but never quite good enough to be able to turn it into a normal career. I was just most suited to be an assassin as I came from a family with a long lineage of assassins. With my family's red eyes, we’re just more suited to dealings in the dark as a result of our sensitivity to light. We also tend to have an inclination toward killing. Perhaps it’s a result of the environment we grow up in from a young age surrounded by killers and death.”

“I see.” So even in a seemingly normal world like this, there existed an unseen underside such as this. I suppose there was still a demand for trained killers even in these times.

Well, it’s got nothing to do with me. At least, I’d like to think so. I hope nothing predictable like us getting transfer students at our school out of nowhere happens. Where those transfer students turn out to be assassins looking to test their skills against the person who left a scratch on Rosa’s father.

You know what, I think starting next semester, I’m going to skip school a lot more frequently. I’ll forge some medical documents and get a temporary fake number to use to impersonate a doctor if they call to verify the information. I’ll then have it set up so I only need to complete tests and exams. I’ll fake having a weak disposition with the excuse that I have some sort of chronic illness. This way I can at least graduate regardless of how many absences I rack up so long as I can pass academically.

This way I can preemptively avoid getting entangled in any such assassin nonsense. I have no interest in such a thing. None. AT ALL.