"Wait...what the fuck!"

Kelly instantly grabbed his head with both hands on instinct. His eyes widened in panic.

"I just used the skill!"

He frantically felt around his scalp.

"You mean I’ve got horns now"

His voice rose in alarm as he continued patting his head from every angle. The woman watched the entire scene with complete indifference. In fact, she seemed to be quietly enjoying his panic. Only after letting him suffer for a few more moments did she finally decide to give him the relief he desperately needed.

"Absurd as it is. No, kid."

The woman waved the idea away almost lazily.

"That beast was extremely compatible with you."

A faint smile appeared on her face.

"If I were to put it politely... the two of you were practically soulmates."

Kelly stared at her in silence. Then he gave her a completely deadpan look.

"Yeah," he replied flatly, "except for the part where we bit each other and tried to kill one another."

For a moment, there was silence, then.

"HAHAHAHA!"

The woman burst into laughter. It wasn’t the cold chuckle she had given before. This time it was genuine, loud, and completely unrestrained.

"That was something else," she said between laughs. "Kid, you really do make a very funny desperate face."

She wiped away an imaginary tear of amusement.

"I truly enjoyed watching that struggle of yours."

After laughing her heart out, the woman slowly calmed down.

The amusement faded from her expression as she looked at Kelly again this time with a far more serious gaze. Then she spoke again, almost as if she were thinking aloud to herself.

"You are really lucky, kid."

The woman’s voice carried a thoughtful tone.

"To be able to devour a perfectly compatible soul on your very first attempt... stabilizing your foundation after it was destroyed by your summons’s death."

She paused slightly before continuing.

"Not only that, but you also completely assimilated that beast’s soul as well... truly, fate has its own strange ways."

But Kelly had already stopped listening. The moment she mentioned his summons death, everything else faded into the background. His mind instantly went back to that moment, crow. The way it fought beside him. The way it died. His chest tightened. His hands slowly clenched into fists as the memories resurfaced. A wave of emotions crashed into him all at once pain, helplessness, guilt. He remembered how powerless he had been.

How he had watched it die. How he couldn’t save it. And that guilt burned like acid inside his chest. Then came the anger. Anger at himself. Anger at the situation. Anger at the woman speaking so casually about it, as if it meant nothing. Before he even realized it, the frustration burst out of him.

"Shut up!"

His voice cut through the space sharply.

"Don’t talk about him like that!"

Kelly glared at her, his fists trembling.

"He was my partner..."

The woman stopped mid-thought and slowly turned her gaze toward Kelly. This time there was no amusement in her eyes. Just that single look was enough. Kelly’s entire body began to shiver. A suffocating pressure filled the space around him, and in that moment he truly understood what he was up against. The difference between them felt immeasurable. In front of her, he wasn’t even worth noticing. He was nothing more than a pebble before a mountain. The fear he had almost forgotten surged back instantly. Yet the woman ignored his trembling completely and asked the very thing he had been avoiding since the beginning.

"Partner...?" she repeated with a faint scoff.

"Come on, don’t be stupid."

Her eyes narrowed slightly.

"If he truly meant that much to you, you might have at least bothered to give him a name, boy."

Kelly froze.

"Don’t sugarcoat it. You know it yourself," she continued coldly. "He meant nothing more than a pet."

"You didn’t even understand the bond between you while it was still alive. It was still in its infant stages."

She tilted her head slightly.

"’Partner’ sounds nice. Very heroic."

"But in reality, you were the master, and that creature was nothing more than a slave."

Her voice remained calm, almost clinical.

"Or in your case... what you like to call a pet."

Kelly’s fists tightened, but the woman kept speaking without pause.

"And its death?" she continued. "That simply means it understood its role better than you did."

"A slave is meant to die for its master."

"Not the other way around."

Her words struck him like blunt blows.

"Don’t glorify your guilt, boy."

"You weren’t grieving some noble partner. You were grieving the loss of your emotional crutch."

Her eyes observed him carefully.

"In this big, frightening world... that beast had become your safety anchor."

"And that’s perfectly normal."

She shrugged lightly.

"It was just a beast. You will get more."

Then her tone sharpened slightly.

"But next time, remember to understand your affinity better...After all... you are not a tamer...You will be its companion next time."

Her gaze hardened as she finished.

"So if you insist on calling it your partner...Try to actually stand by those words, boy."

She paused briefly before delivering the final truth.

"Because whether you realized it or not, your feelings shaped the contract between you and that beast...Your magical affinity unconsciously turned it into a master-slave bond."

Her voice dropped slightly.

"That is why you are still standing here."

Then she looked at him with quiet certainty.

"Because believe me...If the contract had truly been one of companions...You would have chosen to die with it."

A pin-drop silence followed. Kelly didn’t say anything. The woman’s words had done what anger and shouting never could they forced him to look directly at the mirror of his own actions. Every uncomfortable truth she spoke circled in his mind: his guilt, his dependence, the way he had clung to the beast without truly understanding the bond between them. It all lay bare now. His mood sank even deeper than before, yet this time he didn’t lash out. The earlier outburst had already shown him how pointless that would be. The woman noticed the change.

The oppressive pressure around her presence softened slightly, and when she spoke again, her tone was different no longer sharp or mocking. It sounded more like an elder giving advice to someone younger.