The World’s Strongest Are Obsessed With Me

Chapter 5

Hikan's words were less of a question and more of a demand for an answer.

Cold sweat dripped down Dahlia’s back. I’m so screwed.

She had wondered why things were going so smoothly. Now it was obvious her luck had run out. Why did he have to appear when she was holding a book with that kind of title?

Dahlia instinctively knew that if she said the wrong words, her relationship with Hikan was going to end right then and there. What if she was a Transcendent and found her supposedly innocent sibling reading a book that explained why the Transcendents were inhuman creatures?

I wouldn’t trust my sibling either.

“I-I’m Duchess Blueport’s friend... I would never think that way...” Luckily, she found an excuse. She smiled as brightly as she could. “I wanted to learn more about the Transcendents because I wanted to understand you.”

“Understand?” Hikan repeated, then frowned.

Dahlia nodded rapidly, but despite her gestures, Hikan’s expression didn’t change.

“You’re asking for the impossible.” He shoved the book into Dahlia’s arms as she sat on the floor, as though he was pushing it into her chest. “The book is right, Dahlia.”

“What?”

“You and I are different creatures. You will never understand me even if you die and come back from the dead.”

Dahlia shook her head again desperately. She thought she was putting on quite a good act, but Hikan continued to stare at her with an unreadable gaze. If it had been like any other day, he would have disappeared. Instead, he walked a step closer to Dahlia. Her body grew stiffer.

“You don’t understand, do you? Do you know how our beloved grandfather, the previous generation’s Duke Pesteroz, passed away?”

She did know: he'd died on a magic rampage. Still, it was a difficult story to talk about. But Hikan went over it in a cold voice, as though it didn’t matter. “He razed this Pesteroz mansion to the ground and tried to kill his own daughter. Our mother.”

Dahlia stared up at her brother, dazed. Hikan looked back at her. He was still wearing a cold, emotionless expression. “That was why our mother passed the title of duke to our father. She found the position so disgusting that she couldn’t handle it.”

Dahlia was too stunned to speak.

“Our mother saw me like she saw her father, as someone with the same nature. Someone who would kill her one day. Despite being a powerful Transcendent herself, she was never able to free herself from that idea, and chased me away from the mansion. Now, what about you, Dahlia?” he asked, surprising her with the question.

Dahlia blinked rapidly as she looked at Hikan’s eyes. Hikan also looked back, expressionless. “I said, what about you?”

Dahlia felt like she'd heard something she shouldn’t have. This was Hikan’s past, which didn’t appear in the game. This was the first time she was hearing that her mother had chased Hikan away because he was a Transcendent. Was that why she had never seen him around the Pesteroz mansion?

But this also wasn’t the time to be lost in her thoughts. If she remained silent, Hikan would think she had similar thoughts to the previous Duchess Pesteroz. She stumbled over her words, but managed to speak. “I... I don’t think that way. You’re my only brother, Hikan...and you’re a nice person.”

“Yes… To you, perhaps.”

Dahlia couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic or whether the strength had left his voice. Hikan’s gaze fell away from her and turned to a distant place as though none of what she said mattered. Dahlia’s desperate words didn’t reach him. Hikan left her where she sat and walked out of the library. Dahlia’s eyes followed him. Her heart was still pounding. Strangely enough, Duchess Blueport’s words from their recent meeting rang in her head.

“Being a Transcendent is lonely and solitary.”

Was that why Hikan looked lonely when he said that Dahlia would never understand him?

Her mind recalled a scene from the game. Hikan was talking to the main character, Adrisha, after he'd kidnapped her.

“It’s not too late yet. You can still make things better. We can try to understand each other...”

“No, there’s nothing to make better. You will never love me, or understand me… So all I can do is this.”

She had cursed furiously when she was playing the game, calling him a paragon of bad communication. She considered the main female character to be an angel of compassion for being nice to such a person.

But... did he make the same face in that scene, too? Dahlia’s thoughts spiraled.

She limped out of the library and into the corridor, where she ran into her nanny. Her nanny jumped in surprise and brought her to the reception room, which was the nearest available room. She asked a maid to bring some bandages and alcohol to treat Dahlia’s wound.

“Ow, it stings.” Dahlia gasped with clinging tears.

Her nanny scolded her gently. “How did you get hurt?”

“I was playing on the ladder in the library when I fell.”

“Goodness, consider yourself lucky to have gotten away with such a small injury!”

Her chiding lasted long after Dahlia was treated. Dahlia smiled, listening with one ear and letting it out the other. Suddenly, her nanny stopped as though she'd suddenly remembered something. “Wait, I saw young master Hikan leave the library just now. Were you...?”

It was a clever observation. Dahlia wasn’t able to come up with any more lies. Her nanny’s expression changed. “He left without giving you help? That’s so cruel.” From the way her nanny described it, Hikan had done worse than push Dahlia off a ladder.

Well, from her nanny’s perspective, Hikan was someone who had barged into the house to announce her father’s death rather recklessly. It was natural for her nanny to dislike him as she was on Dahlia’s side.

Well, I don’t like him either, Dahlia complained silently.

For some reason, she couldn’t openly criticize him because his lonely expression kept flashing through her mind. She ended up defending him. “My brother is a good person.”

“But...”

“If I keep trying, maybe he will like me one day.”

In fact, she didn’t want that at all.

“Our poor miss,” her nanny said as she dabbed her tears away.

Dahlia reassured her, but she saw a shadow flick past the crack of the door.

Did someone hear me? Thank goodness I didn’t say anything bad about him. She breathed a sigh of relief. It might have been Hikan.

Once Dahlia got to her room, she hid the book in her secret diary box. She couldn’t believe she'd gone through so much just for a book.

* * *

I shouldn’t have done that. Hikan regretted his actions. At first, he'd been trying to scare Dahlia so that she wouldn’t do anything stupid. However, he'd found himself rambling all kinds of stuff as soon as he saw her wide, teary eyes.

He'd also heard her ridiculous words. “If I keep trying, maybe he will like me one day.”

No matter how much he tried to get her out of his mind, Dahlia continued to annoy him. He didn’t want to admit it, but Hikan found himself thinking of her from time to time. Perhaps it had even begun the day he met her.

That first day, when he was about to throw her useless gift on the ground, he had seen the honest plea in Dahlia’s eyes as she looked up at him with clasped hands. She seemed uninterested in her own father’s death in contrast. Hikan had never been needed by someone so desperately. Those eyes made him feel strange.

He should have ignored his feelings then. He had to hate Dahlia. He had enough reasons to.

The family had abandoned him for several years just because he was a Transcendent. Dahlia was considered the success that came after Hikan, the failure.

He turned and looked at his mother’s portrait hanging on his office wall. She was staring into the air with a peaceful smile. Even after her death, she didn’t look at him.

A corner of his mouth twisted up.

What he had told Dahlia was the truth. The former Duchess, his mother, hated the Transcendents after her father ended up in a rampage. So much so that she even denied her own identity as one. She naturally didn’t want her children to be Transcendents either. The duchess didn’t mind getting a stupid child, or a troublemaker, as long as the child was normal like all the others. But her first child was born a Transcendent. Hikan grew too fast, too smart, and was too independent and cold-hearted to fit into her fantasy.

Their relationship was doomed as soon as the duchess began to project her father onto Hikan. From that moment, the duchess began to complain to the duke that Hikan wasn’t like a child, that his eyes were scary, and that he secretly derided her.

Hikan was smart, so he knew what his mother wanted from him. He didn’t feel the need to play into her fantasy. In fact, he would readily return all the ill will he received.

When Hikan was three, his mother’s friend and her child visited the mansion. Throughout his entire stay, the child continued to chip at Hikan’s patience. He tripped Hikan at random times and broke his favorite toys as a joke. After a small tussle, Hikan pushed him. The child ended up falling down the stairs and breaking his leg. He could have died, so it was fortunate the accident ended with such a minor injury.

But their mother argued that Hikan had planned the whole thing and began to hate him more, pushing him even further away.

Then Dahlia was born. He still didn’t know how his mother was able to get pregnant. She'd been declared infertile after his birth. His mother thought Dahlia was God’s blessing and wished to get rid of Hikan, the only smear on the family.

In the end, he was chased out to an extended family member’s fief under the pretense of gaining more experience as the heir. He lived there as though he was confined for ten more years after his mother’s death. His mother had managed to continue to influence the Pesteroz family even after her death, like a ghost that haunted the mansion. Her plans had been shrewd, so much so that she wrote in her will that her husband must never let Hikan back in their mansion.

Therefore, it was only after both of his parents’ deaths that he could return to the Pesteroz mansion. And on his journey back, he made a promise to himself: to never forgive this family for abandoning him completely.

Right. I will never, ever love Dahlia, he forced himself to think, as though attempting to brainwash himself.