"Wait, Ferrandon!" Running down the stairs by the bar, Arroyo ran from the tavern lobby to the second floor following the bartender's back, and then caught a glimpse of the red-haired girl walking briskly towards a room door with her back to him at the corner of the staircase on the second floor.

The first floor of the tavern is a hall for guests to drink and dine, and the second and third floors are guest rooms for lodging services.

Ferrandon walked down the hallway to the door of a room. She turned her head, flung the red braid from the front of her shoulders to the back of her shoulders as she twisted her neck, glanced coldly at the young thief who was hurrying after her, and then took out a bunch of keys from her belt and opened the door and walked into the room.

Arroyo then ran forward, only to hear a "bang" on the door, and Ferrandon closed the door directly in front of him, as if he didn't want to see him again.

Arroyo stood in front of the closed door of the room, opened her mouth, feeling a choke in her throat, but suddenly didn't know how to begin.

At the same time, although Ferrandon seemed to be very bored and slammed the door in front of Arroyo, she actually did not immediately rush to open her mouth to blast the thief youth away, but slowly exhaled with a complicated feeling, turned her back and leaned against the back of the door, quietly waiting for the thief youth to speak out first to provoke a topic.

As Arno and Scott had guessed, she and Arroyo had known each other before.

Not only did they know each other, but they also had a hazy relationship with each other - just the red-haired female bartender thought to herself, that was all in the past.

“…… Ferrandon. In the middle of the night, her ears moved slightly at the tips of her hair, and she heard the young thief whispering her name outside the door.

With a hint of hesitation in her heart, she hesitated for a moment, then raised her head to respond to the thief youth outside the door, and also read out the other party's name with an indifferent face: "Is there anything you want to say?" Arroyo? ”

Arroyo was still standing outside the door of the room.

The thief young man was still doubting whether it was appropriate for him to speak rashly just now, but now he could hear Ferrandon's response, he was slightly surprised in his heart, and then breathed a sigh of relief, and hurriedly continued to speak to the red-haired girl who was only a door away from him: "Ferrandon, I ...... I remember that incident five years ago. ”

“…… Oh. "Silence for a second. Ferrandon replied casually as if he didn't care, "So? ”

"I want to say...... I'm sorry, Ferrandon. Arroyo lowered her head and clenched her fists, "I remember everything that happened...... So, I'm sorry. ”

As he spoke, a memory appeared in the thief young man's mind that he obviously didn't want to recall, but he couldn't forget.

That memory took place five years ago, starting this year.

On the northwestern frontier of the Faentan Empire, a mountain village in the Moork Mountains five years ago. When he was a teenager, little Arroyo and little Ferlandon, who was also five years younger than now, knew each other in that mountainous village, and had a close relationship, and they both faintly fell in love with each other. If nothing else, the two of them might have come together five years ago like the knight and princess in the bedside story, and that village in the mountains would have had a young couple and a new family.

However, the accident happened to the boy and girl, who were supposed to be a knight and a princess, when one night, an imperial rebel army active in the surrounding mountains passed by the village where little Arroyo and little Ferlandon lived, pursued by the army of Faentan.

In order to replenish sufficient supplies for the march, the rebel troops ruthlessly and bloodily sacked the villages they passed. So the butcher's knife of fate was almost at the neck of the thief young man - but he survived the catastrophe, and the man who saved him was none other than little Ferrandon, who was in love with him at that time.

He still remembers it. That night, the moon was unprecedentedly round, and he should have died tragically at the knife of a rebel soldier at that young age - but Ferrandon's eyes lit up scarlet in the moonlight, and the red-haired girl rushed to the young man's side, tearing apart the rebel soldier who tried to kill him with her bare hands, and fleeing from the village in the fire and chaos like a monster.

From that moment on, Arroyo realized that Ferrandon was not simply human. Rather, it is the legendary cursed race—a race that scholars call "bloodborne."

Like the relationship between Tieflin and the demons, the bloodline is not a pure-blooded vampire, but rather a half-blood descendant whose blood is tainted by the bloodline of a vampire.

While genetically speaking, vampires as undead cannot produce offspring by combining with their own species, vampires can infect living creatures of other races by sucking blood. As a result, the living creatures infected by them are gradually degraded, and finally transformed into members of the Blood Clan through a magical ritual unique to the undead race.

Throughout the ages, the generational order in vampire society has been formed in this way. New vampires who have been transformed by rituals and join the Bloodline society are considered "offspring" by the vampires who became undead earlier, and the vampire who brought the new vampire into the Bloodline society is considered the "parent" of the new vampire.

As for those creatures that have been infected by bloodsucking but have not completely fallen in the end, they have evolved into so-called "bloodborns", and their descendants will also inherit the tainted blood from their bodies - that is, the descendants of the bloodline will still be bloodborn, and this nightmarish curse will not be diluted with the inheritance of the bloodline.

All in all, after discovering Ferrandon's true identity, the young Arroyo felt fear for the first time from the object with whom he had fallen in love with him. After that night, the young thief kept up at night, and finally found an opportunity to escape alone with his fear of Ferrandon.

He hadn't seen Ferrandon since.

He survived miraculously in the wilderness by relying on his survival instincts, and traveled all the way to Aurora along the mountain trails of the Moork Mountains, where he soon discovered the existence of the Brotherhood, only to be unlucky enough to become a captive of a nest of bandits in the mottled forest shortly after joining the Brotherhood, and finally became a bandit minion who didn't want to be a bandit in order to survive, as Finn did when he met him.

At this point, the memories that seemed like a marquee finally stopped playing in my mind.

Five years went by almost in a flash. After saying the "I'm sorry" after a gap of years, Arroyo looked up at the door in front of him, unsure of what he should continue to say after apologizing to Ferrandon, whether to beg for forgiveness or to try to repair his relationship with Ferrandon.

To be honest, the reunion with Ferrandon touched his heart, but he didn't know what Ferrandon had experienced in the five years since he parted with him, as if time, the only thing that could be called eternal, had inadvertently diluted the feelings between them, as if it was not a simple door separating the two of them, but an iron wall between the two hearts.

Suddenly, there was a "squeak" -

Arroyo was stunned for a moment, and then found that Ferrandon had opened the door to the room without warning, and now stood in front of him with a cold face.

Looking at the red-haired girl, the thief youth blinked, subconsciously took a step forward, and opened his mouth to say something more.

But at this moment, Ferrandon immediately put his index finger in front of his mouth to signal him not to make a sound, and then held his breath and looked around with the rest of his eyes.

The girl's sudden action also aroused the vigilance of the thief youth.

Suddenly, Arroyo also held his breath, cautiously looked around with his eyes, lowered his voice as much as possible, and asked Ferrandon in a voice that was almost only breathless: "What's going on?" ”

“…… Listen. ”

"Listen to what?"

"Voice." Ferrandon replied in the same low voice, "Someone is approaching here, ...... from outside this tavern"

As the words fell, she stepped out of the room, took a light step towards Arroyo, and looked at a window at the end of the corridor on the second floor.

Reality immediately confirmed that her fears were not unfounded—just for a moment, the window at the end of the corridor suddenly "popped" into shattered glass shards and fell to the floor of the corridor.

The next second-

"Be careful!"

The eyes of the young man and the young girl were pointed at the same time.

At the same moment, they shouted at each other's caution, reached out to each other and pushed each other, and then fell in opposite directions to each other on either side of the hallway, and a sharp dagger flew through the window into the air between them...... (To be continued.) )