Vandalieu eyed the meat that Zadiris offered him. It seemed that she had barely touched the meat at all.

「Yes. I do not have much of an appetite. The elderly do not move around much, so we do not need to eat a lot.」

Though Zadiris didn’t have a single wrinkle on her face, when she wasn’t training Vandalieu or the young girls of the village, it was common for her to say,「I am tired」and rest.

She looked like a thirteen or fourteen-year-old girl, but Zadiris was over two hundred and ninety years old. It was understandable for her to behave as such at that age, but…

『I can see the shadow of death.』

Vandalieu could see the shadow of death on Zadiris’s face, alongside her gentle smile.

It wasn’t enough that she would die at any moment, but she might only last a few more days. The shadow of death was thick enough that even if things progressed slower, Vandalieu knew that she wouldn’t live long enough to see his second birthday.

Though Ghouls had a lifespan of three hundred years, it wasn’t strange to think that an individual’s lifespan could be a little shorter than that. In fact, it was impressive that she had survived this long in a Devil’s Nest, where every creature had to fight for its own survival. It would be a peaceful death for this individual, who had no blood-related grandchildren of her own.

Pretending like nothing was wrong and seeing her off like this was probably the correct, natural thing to do.

「Zadiris-san, can we be alone for a moment?」

However, that might not be the natural thing to do. Defying the laws of life and death was something that Vandalieu would have preferred to attempt after increasing the levels of his skills a little more, but he decided to give it a try.

Even if it was for a reason like taking responsibility for shortening her lifespan by surprising her so much not long ago.