Tae-man's loud, animated voice continued to bounce off the walls of the shaded terrace, completely untamed by the fact that we were out in public. Because he was a natural loudmouth, his enthusiastic English sentences began drawing sharp, bewildered glances from the nearby Carian patrons.
"Look at those two, speaking in that bizarre, clicking gibberish. What kind of foreign dialect is that?"
"Probably some backwater nomads from the outer borders, completely ruining the atmosphere."
Our quiet, public date was rapidly losing its serene cover. I could feel the collective gaze of the food hub shifting toward our wisteria booth. I pulled my shoulders back, the heavy weight of my hidden firearms shifting slightly beneath my crimson trench coat as I shot Tae-man a sharp, warning glare with my single jade-green eye. I wanted to tell him to lower his volume, but without my notepad out, I could only sit there in tense silence.
Completely oblivious to the growing discomfort of the crowd and fully locked into his gamer delusions, Tae-man raised a casual hand and confidently flagged down a passing server. Still entirely mentally checked into our Earth dialogue, he blurted out in fluent English:
"Waiter, one milkshake!"
The local Carian server stopped dead in his tracks, his brow furrowing deeply as he stared down at the teenage vanguard in the iron-leather armor.
"What in the heavens are you talking about? 'Way-ter'? 'Milksheyk'? Speak proper Alatist, boy."
Tae-man froze, his crimson eyes blinking rapidly as his brain finally registered the linguistic error. A bright wave of embarrassment flushed across his cheeks. He cleared his throat roughly, instantly shifting his gears back into the local dialect.
"Ah… sorry, sorry! I mean... one sweet cream berry-blend. And make it with two straws, please." Tae-man stammered in Alatist, waving his hand dismissively.
The server let out a heavy, thoroughly annoyed sigh, rolling his eyes as he scribbled down the order.
"What a complete mental case, That will be twenty copper pieces." the man muttered under his breath, clearly thinking Tae-man had a screw loose from spending too much time fighting monsters.
Tae-man quickly dug into his coin pouch, pulling out the coppers and handing them over. The server took the money with a deeply weirded-out expression, casting one final suspicious glance at my pale, silent silhouette before turning on his heel and heading back toward the main kitchen.
I sat perfectly still, watching the server walk away. Beside me, my Level 8 Mana Pool and Level 6 Magic Enhancement rings hummed with a low, chilling pulse against my fingers. The local humans of Caria had absolutely no idea they were serving two displaced souls from Earth… let alone the youngest son of the Katt bloodline and the infamous Crimson Phantom herself.
Tae-man leaned back into the booth, letting out a nervous, self-deprecating chuckle as he looked across the table at me.
"Man... talk about a total immersion break. My bad, Roxanne."
I stared across the table at Na Tae-man, my single jade-green eye tracking the subtle contours of his face in the wisteria shade. Now that I knew the truth, the resemblance was uncanny. His crimson eyes were the exact same shade as Vanessa Katt's… the very woman whose skin I had stolen to infiltrate her husband's fortress.
Yet, looking at him, it was obvious he was far more intelligent than his napalm-wielding sister. Tae-man didn't just rely on raw, destructive Andromeda magic; he adapted to this brutal world using his past-life macro-knowledge, treating survival like a tactical map. It was a brilliant, self-taught strategy.
A bitter, cold irony settled behind my lips. His family had thought him a useless runaway, just as my own harsh family back in the archives had looked down on me. Because I possessed the Appraiser's affinity, my childhood was a prison sentence of syntax and bleeding scrolls while my siblings were groomed from birth to be elite, high-tier military weapons. To my handlers and my bloodline, I was the weakest link… frail, mute "Little Ren," only useful for reading item descriptions in dark corners.
Little did they know.
They had absolutely no conception of the reality that their disposable little archivist was currently standing in the heart of Caria as the Luminous Knight, or that she had single-handedly slaughtered four S-rank bounties, clearing out nearly half of the continent's Registry of the Condemned. They didn't know I had fused my Earth Kendo with the very languages they used to chain me, turning a master's understanding of syntax and a bit of old MMORPG kinetic theory into a weapon of absolute slaughter.
Clack.
The server returned, breaking my train of thought as he abruptly set a tall, chilled glass onto the wooden table. The thick, pink berry-blend cream inside radiated a frosty condensation. And there, sticking out from the top, were exactly two straws.
Tae-man's face instantly flushed that familiar, bright crimson color again. He looked at the two straws, then looked up at my pale, scarred face, completely losing his confident gamer bravado in an instant. He had his romantic light-novel moment right in front of him, entirely unaware that the "heroic protagonist" he was trying to romance was a tongue-less, blood-winged executioner who had just scrubbed his sister's lineage from the board.
I simply reached out my right hand, the Level 8 Mana Pool ring catching the light, and pulled the glass a fraction of an inch closer.
The sheer, unadulterated influence of Na Tae-man's Earthly romance light novels was on full, unabashed display right there on the wooden table. In the structured tropes of the teenage gamer's mind, placing two straws into a single chilled milkshake was the ultimate, textbook setup for an indirect kiss… a romantic milestone designed to escalate the chemistry between a protagonist and his chosen heroine.
Tae-man shifted uncomfortably in his iron-leather vanguard armor, his face burning an incredibly vivid shade of crimson as he avoided direct eye contact with my single jade-green eye. He cleared his throat roughly, his hand trembling slightly as he gestured toward the frosty glass.
"Let's drink, Roxanne," he murmured in English, his voice dropping an octave as he tried to channel the suave energy of a romance manga lead.
I looked down at the two straws poking out from the pink berry-blend cream. It was completely absurd. The dark, cynical part of my brain … the side that calculated bullet trajectories, managed the volatile weight of my tear gas canisters, and remembered the horrific stench of the sewer captives from this morning… wanted to pull out my notepad, write a scathing rejection of his teenage delusions, and return to the sanctuary.
But we were on a date. His romance date. I had willingly walked out of that commercial building with him, and some small, buried piece of the girl named Roxanne Albatross from Manila wanted to let him have this single, harmless victory before the world tore us both apart.
Leaning forward simultaneously, our faces drew close under the dappled purple shade of the wisteria canopy. I wrapped my lips around my designated straw while Tae-man did the same with his. Together, we began to drink from the exact same cup.
As the thick, icy liquid pulled up through the plastic tube, the familiar, hollow sensation echoed in my mouth. Because I lacked a tongue, the rich, sugary berry cream was completely, utterly tasteless to me. It was nothing more than a freezing texture sliding down my throat, a mechanical fuel intake to sustain my sixth-evolution demonic biology. I couldn't appreciate the sweetness he had paid for with his hard-earned monster-hunting silver.
Yet, as I kept my single green eye fixed forward, I could see Tae-man's expression right across the rim of the glass. His eyes were squeezed halfway shut, a look of profound, overwhelming happiness and intense validation washing over his face. He was ecstatic. To him, this wasn't just a physical intake of sugar; it was a monumental milestone in his "main quest," a genuine moment of connection with the legendary, enigmatic bounty hunter who had saved him from the capital cells.
Seeing that raw, completely innocent joy on his face triggered a sudden, unprompted chemical reaction deep within my own chest. A wave of intense, burning heat flushed rapidly across my pale, scarred cheeks. I felt myself blush intensely, the warmth contrasting sharply with the freezing cream in my throat. It was an involuntary, human emotion… a long-forgotten spark of Earthly chemistry that slipped right past my cold, analytical defenses. For a brief moment, I wasn't the feared Crimson Phantom with an 18 gold bounty, nor was I the tongue-less "Little Ren" chained to ancient scrolls. I was just a girl sharing a drink with a boy who saw me as someone worth pursuing.
We stayed like that for what felt like minutes, the bustling noise of the 7th District's entertainment hub fading into a distant murmur. Together, through two separate straws, we steadily drank down exactly half a cup of the milkshake, our shared silence speaking far louder than any language Andromeda could ever offer.
I leaned back into the wooden chair under the wisteria canopy, my body slightly trembling as a deep, vivid blush burned across my pale, scarred cheeks. My chest felt tight, my heart beating with a rapid, echoing rhythm of genuine affection. For eighteen grueling, agonizing years in this evolutionary nightmare of a continent, I had been completely, utterly alone… trapped in dark archives, running from syndicates, and drowning in the blood of my targets. But looking at this dorky, earnest Seoul gamer across the table, the freezing void in my soul felt a little less vast.
Tae-man set his straw down, his golden-crimson eyes locking onto my single jade-green eye with a seriousness I had never seen from him before. He cleared his throat, his face turning as red as his own armor as he uttered those iconic, life-altering words:
"I love you, Roxanne."
The sentence struck me like a physical blow. I hadn't heard those words in nearly two decades… not since the split-second on Earth when I threw my body in front of a speeding van to save my high school crush, Marcel, trading my future for his. To hear them now, from a boy who saw through my terrifying, silent exterior, felt surreal. Was this truly the chaotic, blood-soaked beginning of our romance? And even more profoundly... I was a mother now. The secret, heretical demonic life growing quietly within my womb gave my rapidly beating heart a completely new weight. I wasn't just a hunter anymore; I had a future to protect.
But in Andromeda, peace is always a fleeting illusion.
Clank! Clank! Clank!
The heavy, synchronized rhythm of iron boots suddenly shattered the lively atmosphere of the food hub. Patrons gasped and quickly scrambled out of the way as a massive detachment of elite Luminous Knights and high-ranking Capital Knights swarmed into the shaded restaurant terrace, forming a tight, inescapable tactical perimeter around our wisteria booth.
Stepping gracefully through the parting ranks of armored soldiers came a face I recognized all too well.
It was my biological baby sister, Evelyn.
She stood there, her immaculate silver-trimmed armor gleaming under the filtered sunlight, a sharp, deeply smug smirk playing across her lips as she looked down at our half-empty milkshake glass.
"Well, well, well... big sister, look what we stumbled upon. The great, stoic vanguard of the sector, caught red-handed." Evelyn drawled, her voice dripping with mocking amusement as her eyes locked onto my unmasked, pale face
My single jade-green eye narrowed instantly. The Bureau tracking matrix had managed to pinpoint my location despite my best efforts to lay low. We were completely caught in the act of a textbook romantic date by the very military family that had raised me as a disposable tool.
Tae-man's jaw dropped, his gamer reflexes instantly forcing him to stand up and reach for his steel shortsword, though his face was a mixture of absolute panic and utter confusion. He looked between my silent, tense form and the small army surrounding us.
"Hey, Roxanne… You... you didn't tell me your guild job was active right now! Especially not during our literal main-quest date! Who are these high-tier elite mobs?!" Tae-man muttered in a frantic, hurried English whisper, his eyes wide.
Evelyn let out a sharp, melodic laugh, completely ignoring Tae-man's bizarre language as she crossed her gauntleted arms.
"You two are almost cute, honestly," Evelyn mocked, her eyes flashing with a cold, predatory intelligence. "But the romantic getaway is officially over, big sister. The higher-ups at the Bureau have a very serious word for you. Secure your mask, Luminous Knight. You're being summoned immediately."