The Tyrant's Terminally-Ill Childhood Friend (Completed Main Story) - Chapter 55

René remembered the moment he first felt powerless. That day had been no different from any other—for Anette, or for himself. Yet as he descended the stairs toward the study, he heard a faint cough. Weak as it was, it carried the scent of blood.

Following the sound, he found Anette alone in an empty room, stifling her coughs. She must have thought she could just get through that moment, but soon enough she vomited blood again and ultimately lost consciousness. Only then did René understand the truth about Anette’s illness.

‘Of course, I’d known she was sick from the very beginning.’

After all, Jurgen himself had explicitly told him when bringing her over that Anette was living on borrowed time—how could he not have known?

But the problem was that Anette had seemed incredibly full of life. Familiarity had blinded him. Who would ever suspect a gravely ill patient in a child who kept rushing off to the training grounds again and again, swinging the cursed blade Todd, determined to master it as quickly as possible?

Both René and Anette had come to mistakenly believe that the ever-present danger simply didn’t exist.

As a result, René felt powerless for the first time.

“Are you telling me there’s nothing we can do? Why on earth!”

“W-well… the young lady’s condition hasn’t deteriorated severely. It’s just that her body is so weakened and her vitality so low that this happened. The key now is for her to regain her strength. We’ve administered treatment to replenish her energy, but whether she can overcome this….”

Honestly, the man was utterly useless. Though his preface was long-winded, in short, everything ultimately depended on Anette’s own will. And no matter which physician they consulted, they all said the same thing:

That the only thing left to do was pray to the gods.

At first, René found it absurd. Then he grew furious. And after that….

‘I prayed to the gods.’

If only he’d understood sooner how utterly ridiculous that deep, bone-chilling sense of powerlessness truly was—would things have turned out differently? Would he have been so arrogant? Neither wealth nor power held any meaning before a fallen Anette.

René regretted having mocked those who sought the gods. If only he’d realized earlier that when you have nothing left to hold onto, you need a name to call upon—then perhaps he wouldn’t have felt so powerless.

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