I Did Well, Right?
I nearly died.
That wasn’t an exaggeration. I really had come within a hair’s breadth of dying.
If she hadn’t grabbed me before I fell.
“Hey, are you okay?”
“……”
Would you be okay?
I had almost died trying to stop her from killing herself, of all things.
…Still, I had also gone charging in at full speed without thinking, so I couldn’t exactly blame her for everything. I let out a slow breath and swallowed my irritation.
“If you come barreling at someone wrapped in mana, of course they’ll dodge.”
“Who told you to go kill yourself in someone else’s workplace?”
No matter how little I cared about other people, I wasn’t the kind of person who could just stand by and watch someone take their own life.
Who was the one who’d looked ready to jump at any second?
And after I rushed over, she only dodged me.
The more I thought about it, the more absurd it was, but for now I forced myself to hold back. There was no point dragging this out any longer.
But then—
“Suicide? Who?”
“You don’t know?”
“No. I don’t.”
Seriously?
I pointed at her and said, “You. Who else would it be?”
“...Me?”
She tilted her head, looking utterly baffled, as though she couldn’t make sense of a single word I’d said.
“Suicide?”
I nodded.
“Me?”
Yes.
You.
“...?”
Still not understanding, she only tipped her head farther to one side.
“I did? Why?”
“Why are you asking me that?”
“……?”
She folded her arms and sank into thought.
What on earth was she thinking about?
I couldn’t begin to guess what was going on inside her head.
“...Ah.”
After a long silence, she finally spoke. A grin tugged at the corners of her mouth, and she even let out a soft, amused chuckle.
“So you ran over here because of me? Because you thought I was going to die?”
“You’re just realizing that now?”
“Sorry. I never even considered it.”
The moment she said that, her whole face changed.
Her lips parted slightly as she stared at me in a daze, then she let out a faint laugh.
She’s annoyingly beautiful.
I found her reaction strange, but not interesting enough to care about. In any case, I wasn’t likely to see her again after today.
And then she said, “So you didn’t want me to die.”
...What?
“You were worried about me?”
She walked up to me and stopped right in front of my feet, smiling brightly.
Smiling.
Blushing, while smiling....
Has she lost her mind?
The look in her eyes, the tone of her voice—everything about her had somehow shifted.
The atmosphere had changed so abruptly that I was at a complete loss.
“Do you need me?”
“No.”
“Then why did you save me?”
“I think I already said it. This is my workplace.”
She tilted her head.
“Your workplace?”
“Yes. I’m the administrator here.”
She still didn’t seem to understand me. Then again, the idea that there was an administrator in Blackmore was probably something she’d never even imagined existed, let alone heard of.
“There was an administrator here?”
“Yes.”
“This is the first I’m hearing of it.”
“That figures. It only recently got established.”
I was already growing tired of answering her questions. My patience was reaching its limit as well.
From the looks of it, I did manage to stop her from killing herself, at least...
Even so, I’d have to make sure she went home before she got any more foolish ideas. To do that, though, I first needed to find out who she was, and where she had come from.
...Who is she?
I stared at her intently.
Honestly, I had no idea.
There just wasn’t enough information to identify her from the lines that had described her in the original story.
“What’s your name?”
“My name?”
“Yes. We haven’t even introduced ourselves properly yet.”
If I knew her name, maybe I’d remember something.
With that thought in mind, I asked her.
And then—
“Rudine Carlyle.”
Huh.
That sounded oddly familiar.
No, it was definitely a name I remembered.
“Rudine... Carlyle?”
“And you?”
“...Luke Richter.”
Rudine Carlyle.
The second daughter of the Carlyle marquisate, one of the Empire’s three great guardian families.
And an illegitimate child.
But that was only part of what she was.
I remembered it vividly.
Ten years from now.
I knew exactly what she would become after hiding away in Blackmore.
How could I not?
The seed of the apocalypse that threatened the continent.
Among them, the third seed born under the Heavenly Slaughter Star.
In other words—
“Luke Richter...”
She was a villain.
“...That’s a cool name.”
One that would one day be called the end of the world.
****
Footsteps came toward me, not hurried and not slow, just steady and deliberate.
“...”
What now?
It sounded like it was getting closer and closer.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m following you.”
I froze where I stood.
“No, I mean, why are you following me?”
“Because you’re my benefactor.”
“My benefactor?”
“Yes. You saved me.”
“What does that have to do with you trailing behind me?”
“Does that matter?”
I turned and glared at her.
Then I said flatly, “Yes. It matters.”
She smiled impudently and bent at the waist, wearing an expression that reminded me of a spoiled child.
“I ran away from home.”
She dropped the line with the same casual tone a runaway teenager might use.
“You ran away from home?”
“Mm-hm. So I’ve got nowhere to go.”
Well, that was understandable.
But I wasn’t asking why she had nowhere to go. I was asking why, out of the entire Empire, she had ended up in Blackmore of all places.
“Why here, specifically?”
“I was driven out.”
“Driven out?”
I nodded in dumbfounded silence as she answered with a bright smile.
“I did something wrong. So I got chased out.”
“To Blackmore?”
“Yep. To Blackmore.”
No, that made no sense.
What on earth had she done to get exiled to Blackmore?
Rudine Carlyle was a calamity-level villainess who would one day be known as the Blood End.
The Heavenly Slaughter Star she bore made her instinctively crave blood, and in the end, it drove her to slaughter.
Her nature was evil from birth.
Her strength, too, would eventually make her one of the top fighters in the world by the final arc.
She would also become one of the people recruited by the original story’s protagonist.
She seems fine for now, but...
I looked at her.
She was shorter than I was, but there was no mistaking the immense mana radiating from her.
Something’s off...
There wasn’t just one thing that was off. There were many.
She had tried to kill herself.
But as far as I knew, she was definitely alive in the original story.
Which meant she wasn’t supposed to die at this point in the timeline.
……No way.
“Hey.”
“Hm?”
Swallowing hard, I shot back, “You really were trying to kill yourself, weren’t you?”
“Yep, I was. I just felt so miserable and pathetic that I thought I’d jump off and die.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
She blinked at me and smiled mischievously.
It was a smile that carried absolutely no sense of sincerity.
Damn it, what the hell is going on?
My head was starting to pound.
The first person I met after coming here turned out to be an apocalyptic-level villain? This had to be a joke.
“So you’re going to keep following me?”
“Yep. I’ve got nowhere else to go.”
From the way she’d been acting as she pleased all this time, it was clear she had no intention of listening to a word I said.
And now that I knew who she was, I couldn’t exactly push her away carelessly either.
In truth, there probably wasn’t anywhere else in the Empire where she could stay besides Blackmore.
So I’ll be seeing her again and again from now on.
No, really, I was losing my mind.
It would honestly have been better if I’d never learned her identity at all.
Then her voice came again.
“Would you rather I stayed away?”
It was a rather sharp question.
Of course, I didn’t even blink.
“Yes. It’s inconvenient.”
I cut her off cleanly, emphasizing each word with a firmness that bordered on severe.
“I don’t want to stay away...”
“How well do you even know me?”
“You saved me.”
“No, why are you steering the conversation in that direction again?”
My temples throbbed.
This was such a pointless, stupid waste of effort.
Her following me wasn’t really the problem.
The problem was her clear reason for doing it.
Was she following me simply because she needed a place to stay?
Or did she have some dark little agenda hidden away in her heart?
I have no way of knowing.
Still, there was no need to show my displeasure openly.
I had no reason to make an enemy here.
So I smiled, as gently and politely as I could, summoning every last shred of my exhausted civil servant spirit.
But before I could even try to persuade her—
KUGUGUGUGUGUGUNG—
The ground began to shake with a violent tremor.
“!!!”
Something stirred beyond the brush.
The faint scrape of dry branches against something rough brushed past my ears.
At first it looked like nothing more than a shadow, but then its shape began to emerge little by little.
It was something that vaguely resembled a wolf.
“...”
Grrrrr—!
Yellow eyes flashed in the darkness, and drool laced with blood dripped from between its fangs.
A fantasy beast.
And one of the more ferocious predator species at that.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM—!
Every time the monster before us took a single step, thunderous booms rang out.
The ground buckled beneath it, and the crackling bursts of sound made my ears ring.
“...Tsk.”
It wasn’t all that surprising.
In a place like this, the appearance of a fantasy beast wasn’t anything special.
…That said, because they were so vicious, monsters like these were unmistakably harmful creatures that had to be eliminated on sight.
I’d known I’d run into one someday. I just hadn’t expected it to happen this quickly.
As I thought that, I turned to look at Rudine.
Why is she like this now?
She was staring quietly at the enemy in front of us.
Her expression was flat.
Emotionless to the point where it was hard to believe she was the same species as I was.
Just as I was about to call out to her cautiously—
“———”
The corner of Rudine’s mouth twisted sharply.
That twist wasn’t a smile.
It was something warped.
And then I saw it.
Something beginning to seep to life in her pitch-black eyes.
“!!!”
It was blood.
Crimson, chilling, and dark beyond measure.
Like liquid gore spreading through water, it bloomed in her gaze, then slowly opened.
She toyed with the dagger in her right hand.
And then—
Whoosh.
She snapped her raised hand through the air in a vertical slash.
Immediately after—
Shrrk—
A massive line was carved vertically across empty space.
As if space itself had split apart, light and darkness fell out of alignment, and a seam opened where the strike had passed.
“......What is that?”
Kiiiiiiik—!!
Blue-white sparks flared.
At the same time, a sound like space itself being torn apart filled the air.
The seam in space, the misaligned light and darkness, all began to compress around the line she had drawn.
And then—
“!!!”
Fwoosh—!!
An invisible blade split the monster in two.
No—more precisely, it had been severed.
From crown to toes.
It was an absurdly clean, unreal strike.
“……”
Half the monster’s body slowly slid apart and collapsed.
The cut surface was as neat as if someone had carved through a sponge.
What in the world had I just seen?
While I sat there blankly blinking at the scene, she turned to me.
“How was it?”
Rudine smiled brightly, her face splattered with the monster’s blood.
It was a smile like that of a child who had done something good for the first time.
I did well, right?