"Zachariel!"

A voice woke Zachariel up from his dream, a dream that he never wanted to experience again.

Zachariel looked around.

He was lying on a soft bed and the light from the ceiling shone pleasantly. Some furniture, decorations, and other miscellaneous objects were present in the room, bringing a vibrant sensation amidst the desolate atmosphere.

There was a strange magic equipment at the top of a side table.

Zachariel saw Sabrina holding onto his arm.

"Sabrina, what are you doing here?"

Sabrina stared at him with a worried look on her face.

"Zachariel, you've passed out for 3 days now. Everyone is worried about you."

He lifted his upper body.

"What happened? How did I pass out that long?" Zachariel spoke roughly.

"I don't know. I saw that you were having a bad dream so I tried waking you up."

Zachariel held his head with his left hand.

`Damn it! The pain is coming back.`

Those green lines have started to slowly envelop his brain.

"Zachariel, are you okay?"

"Yeah."

He noticed a figure laying down on the floor beside his bed. It was Amelia. She maintained a stressed look, with her dried-up tears tarnishing her beautiful face.

"Sabrina, what's the meaning of this?" Zachariel narrowed his eyes as he looked back at Sabrina.

She lowered her head, closing her eyes and nervously clasping her hands as her body trembled.

Zachariel's heart began to beat faster. `What is wrong with me?!`

He started getting nervous for no reason that he could understand.

Sabrina mustered the courage to say it out loud as tears started to form in her eyes. Her lips and voice trembled as she spoke.

"Zachariel, Hal is dead."

Zachariel's indifferent expression remained on his face. Sabrina saw it and disappointment grew in her heart.

`Why? Why are you still indifferent when things have gone this way?!`

"I see." Zachariel plainly looked on the wall at the front as Sabrina continued crying beside him. She held her skirt tightly, afraid that she might lash out at Zachariel for being apathetic about the death of his brother and friend.

A sad feeling had roused within Zachariel's heart, but he resisted it.

A part of him wanted to cry, while a part of him didn't care.

Amelia woke up from the disturbance. She clumsily rubbed her eyes and saw Zachariel on the bed.

"Zachariel?!" She nervously said those words as she rushed up to him, slowly checking his body while muttering something.

"He's alive, he's alive. I know it. it must be all fake. Must be all fake, right?"

Her body was trembling as she held Zachariel's face, their eyes stared at each other.

"Zachariel?! Hal is still alive, right? He's just sleeping in his room, right? Come, come with me. Let's go see each other outside the dorms…"

Amelia's eyes were bloodshot as her broken voice resounded in the room.

Zachariel's indifferent expression changed. The look on Amelia's face stirred his heart.

"Amelia! Hal is already dead! Let's accept it already!"

Amelia turned over to Sabrina, looking at her with red eyes.

"Shut up, Sabrina! Hal is definitely alive! You're just lying to me! Everyone is lying to me! Right, Zachariel? Come, hold my hand! We'll go see Hal now!"

Amelia grabbed Zachariel's hands, but the latter didn't budge. She looked back at him.

"Zachariel, what are you doing? Do you not want to see Hal anymore? Are you telling me you're believing what this b*tch said just now?"

Sabrina wanted to argue back at her but stopped when she saw Zachariel's expression.

Zachariel immersed himself in what he had seen earlier.

`It's impossible!`

`She couldn't be acting that, right?`

`There's no way she could've felt what I've felt before!`

"Zachariel! Answer me!"

Zachariel remained uninterested.

"I see. You don't care, do you? Whether Hal is alive or dead, whether everyone around you is happy or not. You just cared for yourself."

Her creepy laugh frightened Sabrina. "Amelia, where are you going with this?" Sabrina tried to touch Amelia's hand but the latter swatted it away.

The tears in her eyes had stopped flowing and left the room without saying another word.

Amelia saw senior Cody standing in the hallway, his back laid on the cold white wall. She ignored him and went outside of the area, her fists clenched tightly as she walked away.

"Senior Cody." Sabrina followed her out but stopped on the way to greet her senior.

"Follow her and take care of her. I'll talk with Zachariel."

He had long noticed the commotion in the room when he was in the lounge talking with the other Prospects.

"Thank you, senior." Sabrina bowed to him then hurried after Amelia.

…

Cody went inside and saw Zachariel laying on the bed.

He approached him and looked at him with narrowed eyes, saying in a cold voice.

"Tell me, Zachariel. How does it feel like to be given the cold shoulder too?"

"You must be thinking that 'Why would it bother? I have felt that a long time ago.'."

Zachariel's eyes widened. He abruptly stood up and grabbed senior Cody's collar.

"What do you know?! What do you know about being told to die somewhere else by the person that you've trusted fully in your whole life?! Haha, that's right!"

"Your childhood must've been so beautiful because your parents doted on you! Your friends must've been close with you! They had never abandoned you because you were important for them!"

"Well, I'm sorry then because I wasn't like that when I was young! I was just adopted because their conscience hit them when I was a baby. Now that I've grown older, they wanted to discard me like the trash I am!"

"Tell me, senior! How does it feel like being treated like a dispensable child when you've grown up?!"

"Why aren't you answering, huh?! Aren't you the type to guess what others feel? How about it, where'd that spirit from earlier go?!"

He tightened his grip on senior Cody's collar as he saw that his senior smiled.

"Yeah, you're just pretending to act that you're pitying me, aren't you? How about you drop your pretense and start acting on who you truly are?"

His eyes fiercely stared at senior Cody. After a while, he loosened his grip and jumped off the bed, snorting as he made his way to the door.

"Hehe, look at this loser. He's like a crybaby!"

A playful robotic voice resounded in the room. It came from that strange magic equipment that Zachariel saw earlier.

"You bastards! I thought of you as friends, why are you doing this to me?!"

`That voice! It's from Hal? And he's crying, what's going on?` Zachariel turned to look at the magic equipment.

"Blame your brother for this, Hal. He offended someone he shouldn't have. You're just collateral from their dispute."

"Shut up! I won't blame my brother for your atrocious behavior! You're just trying to make me hate him! Even if you torture me to death, I won't turn against my brother!"

"Oh, this guy isn't that dumb at all."

"Aaaahhhh!" A part of Hal's body was twisted. The sound of blood gushing out could be heard.

"You f*ck*rs! Once brother Zachariel hears of this, he will beat you up just like what he did to others before!"

A series of mocking laughter followed.

"Look at this idiot! How does he think that this brother of his will come and save him?"

"Aaaahhhh!" Hal shouted again.

"Brother Zachariel, I'm sorry! I couldn't be strong just like you. I failed my promise to Amelia years ago! I just wanted to stop giving you trouble, yet until now, I-"

Something seems to have been crushed and Hal screamed in pain again. His breathing became rough.

"Damn, you're such a noisy brat. Hey, come here and rupture his throat."

The recording stopped.

"This was the recording found in the room of one of the culprits that killed your brother. Sir Matthias luckily chanced on it before anyone else could find it. He gave this to me and told me to give it to you so that you could hear his last words."

Zachariel could not believe what he just heard right now. "That's not right. No, you've just made this up! I don't believe that someone like him could say that!"

Somebody barged through the door. It was Amelia.

`Amelia? Didn't she leave earlier?!`

She approached Zachariel and slapped him in the face.

"How could you say that to Hal? Why do you try to make him look like he had abandoned you instead?"

"Isn't that the truth? You even lied to me that you will always stay by my side! But what happened?! You simply abandoned me after you've deceived me! You're all the same!"

"You're wrong! We didn't abandon you! You were the one who distanced from us instead!" Amelia retorted back to Zachariel. She teared up when she heard how he kept on rejecting what she had said.

"Shut up! I won't listen to your lies anymore!"

Amelia hugged him, drenching his uniform with her tears.

"Zachariel! Please stop this already. We had never left you all these years! It was just your imagination!"

"You've never left me? Then tell me, why did he say that-"

"That we should stop bothering you and depend on our own, right?"

Zachariel widened his eyes. "How do you know that I-?!"

"Zachariel, Hal never abandoned you. He just wanted to become strong so that he will be the one to protect you instead. That was what he had promised to me when we were kids."

Zachariel was stunned for a moment when he heard Amelia's words.

"He never said about abandoning you! He just wants to be someone whom you could depend on! That was all!"

`So I was wrong all this time?!`

"Why? Why didn't you tell me then?!"

Zachariel started to tear up. His voice quaked as emotions filled up his cold heart, thawing the coldness that had enveloped it for years.

"What do you know, Zachariel?"

Senior Cody interjected.

"You just made up your own thoughts of what they thought of you and had never considered what they actually felt for you. You drowned yourself in a world of illusion, thinking that the world had forsaken you when you were the one who had forsaken the world itself."

"Only now when Hal died, that you have realized that you were the one who was in the wrong all this time. Only now had you wanted to hear what your brother truly felt for you."

"Unfortunately, asking him now, what could the dead deliver to you?"

Zachariel's heart was filled with intense guilt and hatred for himself.

"Aaaahhhh!"