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Yoo Joonghyuk has a blade pressed to Kim Dokja’s chest. Kim Dokja had known that it would end up like this for a while now.
Incarnation Kim Dokja will be killed by the person he loves most.
Still, he humored his party members and Uriel with the affection meter. Kim Dokja blushed and stuttered and pretended that the sinking feeling in his gut wasn’t because he already knew how the next few days would end.
Oh, it’s not all that tragic.
“It should have been me who died here,” Yoo Joonghyuk told him. It was obvious that he was bleeding despair from every pore in his body. Yoo Joonghyuk had also known how this would end up, and still, he tried to stop it. He tried to give his life to Kim Dokja, who had given so much to him already. Yoo Joonghyuk gripped the precious jade like a prayer and begged, Let me die in you, Kim Dokja. In return, Kim Dokja spat on Yoo Joonghyuk’s conviction and surrendered his own life again with a laugh.
Kim Dokja bit back another scream as he felt his skin tear apart at the seams. He doesn’t have time to coddle Yoo Joonghyuk right now. Yoo Joonghyuk held The Heavenly Sword of Gathering Clouds in a grip tight enough to dent the metal in his grasp.
“If I use this, you can’t be resurrected.”
Kim Dokja knew this, “That’s why you are going to use it. It would be difficult if I came back again as a demon king.”
For the first time, Yoo Joonghyuk hesitated. His grip on the sword loosened, his foot was stuck to the ground, unable to take another step. Kim Dokja failed to stop the next scream from escaping his lips, as he became aware of the horns in his forehead that suddenly felt like daggers.
[The remaining capture time is 3 minutes.]
Kim Dokja realized again, that he doesn’t understand Yoo Joonghyuk nearly as well as he thought he did. It shouldn’t be this difficult to kill him. Kim Dokja has been sampling death since he was fifteen and approaching the schoolyard tarmac as he fell from the sixth-story window. Kim Dokja needed to do something.
So, Kim Dokja lied.
“I wish you had never saved me,” Kim Dokja told Yoo Joonghyuk.
“What?”
“I wish you had let me die.”
While Yoo Joonghyuk raked through recent scenarios in his mind, Kim Dokja recalled a different time. Every kick to his ribs, every time his head was slammed off of a wall and he thought to himself, Yoo Joonghyuk could bear this. If Yoo Joonghyuk can make it through, I can too.
“I wish you had let me die, because I wouldn’t have to live like this,” Kim Dokja told Yoo Joonghyuk. The words burned his tongue to speak. Kim Dokja only hoped that the words made Yoo Joonghyuk feel as awful as they felt to say.
Yoo Joonghyuk managed to take another step forward, he pressed the tip of the sword on the right of Kim Dokja’s chest, right above his heart. There was hell in his eyes.
“Do you mean this, Kim Dokja?”
Briefly, Kim Dokja wondered if it would have been easier if he had died after jumping from the sixth-story window. If it would be easier if he had never known Yoo Joonghyuk at all. If he had never learned the feeling of a glowing ember settled at the bottom of his heart called love.
“I mean it,” Kim Dokja lied.
He couldn’t bring himself to look at the expression on Yoo Joonghyuk’s face. Instead, Kim Dokja leans into the blade of the sword and closes his eyes.
There was pain, and then there was the familiar dull ache of death that wrapped around his fingers and seeped into his bloodstream.
“You are also the one who I love most,” Yoo Joonghyuk confessed, as Kim Dokja faded away.
He registered a forehead, pressed against his own, and a hand, rested on his shoulder, as the blade was pushed in further.
Kim Dokja’s next words died on his tongue as fate was fulfilled.