More than that, there was something that had been bothering me since earlier.
“You’ve been sneaking glances at my stomach for a while now, and it’s kind of embarrassing.”
Grumbling, I raised my hand and covered Felix’s eyes.
He let out a soft chuckle, then placed his hand over mine, interlocking our fingers and holding them down.
“It’s because I’m fascinated.”
Then, he hugged my shoulders tightly and, holding me close, whispered softly.
“I’m sorry I didn’t realise sooner.”
“No, I’m the one who didn’t know anything and just fried some chicken…”
‘I’m sorry for being so clueless about this, my dear.’
‘You must’ve been so frustrated you flipped my insides just to make your presence known, right?’
“Wow. A baby, huh?”
Me, a mum?
I mumbled with a dazed expression on my face.
Honestly, we had talked about having a child.
Not in exact detail, but ever since marrying Felix, I’d wanted to have a baby who looked just like him.
Felix, on the other hand, wanted the baby to look just like me, so we had a bit of a disagreement.
But was it really this easy?
We had planned to allow plenty of time for it.
‘Well, considering how often we did it…’
I side-eyed Felix in silence, then leaned back against him and let my body go limp.
As if waiting for that moment, Felix pulled me close and said:
“I’m sorry I didn’t realise sooner.”
“You already said that earlier.”
“Just now… I finally recognised the baby’s heartbeat.”
He slid his hand gently over my belly and whispered softly.
He could hear the heartbeat?
I widened my eyes in surprise and looked back at him.
A faint blush spread across Felix’s pale face, like a delicate watercolour wash.
What was this? He looked like a shy flower bud about to bloom.
While I stared blankly at Felix’s face, he covered my ear with his other hand.
‘Thump.’
I could hear it.
The sound of thump-thump-thump.
As if by some kind of magic, the sound was transmitted through his hand and reached my ears.
‘This is the baby’s heartbeat?’
How could something be this adorable?
To be honest, it hadn’t felt real at all until just a little while ago.
The moment I heard that sound, a sudden sense of reality settled over me, and even my own heartbeat began to speed up.
I wondered if my cheeks, like Felix’s, had also taken on a faint blush.
・・・・・
“Aaagh! You devilish bastard!”
The low-ranking nightmare devil, Nol, let out a scream as if his body were being torn apart.
Just as he tried to sneak into Irene’s dream again while she slept soundly, he was caught.
It was the same suffocating force that had been tightening around him earlier — now it lunged forward and violently tore him from Irene’s consciousness.
“Calling me a devil. I’m not sure who you think you’re talking to.”
Felix tilted his head slightly, gripping the thrashing nightmare devil’s tail as if he meant to crush it.
“L-Let me go right now! If you don’t release me, Lord Pan won’t let you get away with this!”
Nol cried out in desperation, intentionally invoking the name of the nightmare devil’s lord.
But even as he said it, Nol knew the truth himself.
There was no way His Exalted Lord would ever bother to help someone like him — a mere low-ranking nightmare devil.
“Shh.”
Then Felix whispered, as if urging silence.
“Please be quiet. Rin is sleeping soundly.”
“...”
Nol couldn’t make a sound in the face of that quiet threat.
Felix’s face remained as still and composed as a painting, but the energy simmering inside him was anything but calm — it churned like a volcano just before the eruption.
Even Pand, the so-called Lord of the Nightmare Devils, was still classified as a low-ranking devil. Nol, a low-ranking nightmare devil among low-ranking devils, had no power to speak of.
That was how weak they were. So weak, in fact, that devils like Nol could live hidden among humans without raising suspicion.
They didn’t even need to be summoned or bound by contract, because they posed no threat to the human world whatsoever.
At most, they were like mosquitoes, slipping into sleeping humans’ dreams and secretly draining a bit of life force.
‘To that human, I must seem like a mosquito.’
Low-ranking nightmare devils could be exorcised with even the most half-baked rituals performed by amateur humans.
So what chance did he have against someone like Felix?
Just one flick, and he’d be gone.
“H-How did you even notice?”
That was why Nol had been confident. Confident that he wouldn’t be caught.
Those with overwhelming, transcendent power often couldn’t perceive beings as weak as him.
Just like a human wouldn’t notice an ant crawling by on the side of the road.
“Rin mentioned she had a strange dream.”
“That’s all it took for you to figure it out?”
“Yes.”
Felix answered calmly.
He looked down at the nightmare devil, no larger than the palm of his hand.
“There’s no way Rin would have the same dream as I did.”
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even a recent dream.
It was from before they got married.
Back then, even as Irene whispered words of love to Felix, she’d dash off the moment she spotted a lady in need.
It was during that time, when he was simmering with a deep, aching desire to possess all of her warmth and kindness for himself.
Of course, after they got married, Irene changed completely.
No matter how desperate a lady’s plea for help, if it meant crossing a line, she’d refuse without hesitation.
Even with other women, she was careful not to let physical contact linger beyond what was necessary, even unconsciously.
She fussed over Felix from beginning to end, almost as if competing, and then grumbled about it.
“You know what? Since Fel and I are going to be a married couple sharing our fate for the rest of our lives, we’ve decided to always return whatever we receive from each other. But honestly... I just can’t win against Fel.”
The way she’d mutter, “Just let me win once, will you?” — he found it impossibly endearing.
Felix only hoped she would never realise what sort of thoughts had crossed his mind as he watched her help others.
“You showed her my dream — exactly as it was.”
Thanks to that, even the desire buried deep within him — something Irene would never have known, something he never intended to reveal — had been exposed.
Having read his mind, Nol panicked and stammered.
“N-No, I just thought, since I was making the dream anyway, I might as well make it nice for the two of you... I mean, everything worked out in the end, right? Didn’t it?”
If he were being more honest, it was simply easier to reflect someone’s consciousness when they were nearby, so he had used Felix without a second thought.
And in the end, hadn’t they both gotten what they wanted? So what was the problem?
Nol simply couldn’t understand why Felix was being so threatening.
“Thanks to you, all my efforts to show Rin only the good things have been wasted.”
Felix whispered in the softest, most tender voice, careful not to wake Rin.
And somehow, that gentle tone made it all the more terrifying to Nol’s ears.
“P-Please… spare me… ngh—!”
Felix, silent and pensive for a moment, slowly began to tighten his grip around the nightmare devil’s throat.
Inside, he was afraid.
What would happen if he couldn’t overcome his possessiveness… and ended up locking Irene away?
She would surely come to loathe and despise him.
And yet — even so — he would never be able to let her go.
Because the moment he lost her… she would never come back.
He would resort to even more forceful, oppressive means. And she would slowly break down, piece by piece, right there in his hands.
In his delusions, Irene was always like that.
Her spirit was worn thin, the light in her eyes fading, her body wasting away.
But in reality...
Felix let out a small chuckle.
After seeing his vile dream, the only thing she said was that she would lock him up and nurse him back to health — that was her adorable resolution.
“Mm……”
As Irene stirred and groaned at the faint commotion, Felix loosened his grip on the nightmare devil, a grip that just moments ago had been poised to crush it.
Then, watching her face with care, he gently brushed aside the hair that had fallen over her cheek.
The nightmare devil wheezed and gagged as it crawled across the floor — but Felix had already lost interest.
“Damn it, you lunatic!”
Even with nothing to his name, the devil couldn’t resist getting the last word in before scurrying off in retreat.
Felix didn’t bother chasing after him. He simply let him go.
To be honest, the devil barely even registered in his mind anymore.
There was no point in hunting down a mosquito that had already flown outside.
“Rin.”
He pulled her gently into his arms, holding her close, and whispered softly.
“To be honest… I wanted to hide you away somewhere no one else could ever find you.”
“Is that so?”
It was then.
Irene, still half-asleep, cracked open one bleary eye.
She wore an expression that couldn’t quite tell dream from reality.
“...”
He could’ve brushed it all off, saying it was only a dream.
But for that very reason, he didn’t want to lie to her a second time.
“Yes.”
Felix admitted his feelings, plainly and without resistance.
“Yaaawn.”
Then, like a cat stretching after a nap, she let out a wide, lazy yawn and burrowed into his arms.
“If that’s what you want, then go ahead.”
“...Don’t say things like that so lightly.”
How could she say that after seeing everything — after witnessing, in vivid detail, the darkness of his thoughts through that dream?
As Felix murmured in a low, serious voice, Irene mumbled back sleepily:
“If I said I didn’t like it, you’d stop right away, wouldn’t you?”
“...”
“And I’m the one on the receiving end here, and I’m telling you — it’s not that bad. So why are you acting like it’s some kind of crime?”
If both sides agreed, then it was not imprisonment or anything else like that...
Her words were still drowsy, muffled and half-melted by sleep.
Even in that sleepy haze, the way she stubbornly forced herself to speak, worried Felix might be sinking into self-blame again, was so ridiculously endearing that it made him want to laugh.
“That’s true.”
“I’m serious. Even if it seems weird by normal standards, who cares? If it works for us, that’s all that matters.”
“Haha, that’s right.”
And just like that, mid-ramble, Irene fell asleep — so suddenly it was almost absurd.
Hearing her soft, rhythmic breathing, he couldn’t help but wonder if maybe she’d been sleep-talking this whole time.
Even though he’d experienced it more than once, the way just a few of her words could dissolve every anxious thought always felt new, like it was the first time.
Irene often said that just seeing him felt like her soul was being cleansed.
But she didn’t realise — didn’t know — that the one being saved every time was actually him.
‘Ah, what do I do?’
He didn’t expect to become even greedier.
If he told her he wanted to stay here forever — with her and their child — would she smile again and tell him to do whatever he wanted?
But no, he decided to stop here.
Because this was probably as much obsession as Irene could bear.
And because he didn’t want to ruin their eternity of happiness for the sake of something as selfish as his possessiveness.
“Sweet dreams.”
Felix whispered, pressing a soft kiss to her bare shoulder.
“I’ve already chased the nightmare away.”
<I Have Become The Heroes’ Rival> — Side Story 2: The End
Translator's Corner:
Hello everyone~!! Thank you so much for following my translations all the way through for IHBTHR! We’ve finally reached the end of this novel’s journey, and I’m so grateful to have shared it with you. Hope you all enjoyed it and see you in the next novel adventure~ 🌸
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