Chapter 3
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Translator: MadScientist
Chapter: 3
Chapter Title: The Princess and the Grand Duke (2)
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Quiet midnight.
The silence was broken by the faint scrape of metal.
Srulk, sreeeuk—.
Inside the rundown shack where the servants lived, Luhan sat awake instead of sleeping.
Rather than rest, he was sharpening an old sword that scuttled about in the corner against a whetstone.
He looked as if he were waiting for someone.
"Argh... This sword is total garbage. It wouldn't even cut properly."
Luhan grumbled curtly into the empty air.
And no sooner had the words left his mouth than five or six shadows shot out from the darkness.
The clash between the Grand Duke and Luhan earlier that day.
Count Ponsword's surveillance agent, who had witnessed the scene, planned to eliminate Luhan first as he could disrupt their schemes.
They were elite assassins dispatched by Count Ponsword, with the count's surveillance agent—Jack—watching from the rear.
The assassins thrust their blades at Luhan's vital points in perfect unison.
Their sharp swords were coated with a silencing poison that suppressed magic power.
Surely, multiple blades had reached his vitals.
Chaeng—!
Luhan didn't even rise from his seat; he simply tossed the old sword in his hand lightly.
In that instant, the air within a ten-meter radius centered on the shack expanded explosively.
"Kuhk...!"
"Kwaaak!"
The assassins' swords crumbled to dust before they could even touch Luhan's body.
The magic power sustaining them backlashed into their hearts, and the assassins slammed into the ground without so much as a proper scream.
Surveillance agent Jack could only stare in horror.
"Y-You bastard. What the hell are you? When I saw you subdue that mad wolf today, I thought you were a mage... What is this...?"
"Just an ordinary gardener."
Luhan cracked his neck and slowly approached him.
"If you're going to prepare an ambush, at least do it thoroughly."
Count Ponsword's elite assassins were far from weak.
Jack had seen the mysterious man overwhelm the empire's wolf and advised the count to send only the most reliable killers.
Yet the result was utter defeat.
The assassins hadn't even lasted a few seconds and were already lined up for the afterlife.
"Damn it... This is impossible..."
"It is possible. You're seeing it right now."
As Luhan's finger pointed upward, transparent threads sprouted over the fallen assassins' bodies, binding them tightly.
Like insects caught in a spider's web, they couldn't even twitch a finger.
"What was all that commotion!"
Moments later, Grand Duke Kasian appeared with soldiers bearing torches. He halted at the sight of the wrecked shack and the assassins piled up like trash.
His gaze lingered on Luhan, who stood calmly at the center, and Jack, rolling on the ground.
"...Jack? Why is Ponsword's dog here?"
Kasian instinctively realized Ponsword's hound had been after something in his castle.
And his gut told him it was highly likely related to Erin.
Trembling with rage, Kasian approached Luhan.
"Did you take care of these bastards?"
"That's not important, Your Grace."
Luhan set down the bloodstained old sword, rose to his feet, and met Kasian's eyes directly.
"I told you, didn't I? To protect the flower, you have to cut down the weeds around it."
"...I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm always doing my best."
Kasian shouted indignantly, but Luhan scoffed and mocked him.
"Your best? Threatening the princess by holding her people hostage? While conveniently omitting that you've secretly relocated them to the western territories for their safety?"
In that moment, Kasian's face paled.
"...How the hell did you know that?"
It was the utmost secret, known only to Kasian and a handful of his closest aides. If it reached the emperor's ears, Kasian's head could roll.
"I can see it. How foolishly you're going about showing your love, Your Grace."
"...I have no clue what you're saying."
With other soldiers around, he had no choice but to say that.
"No one but you and I can hear this conversation. So there's no need to lie to my face."
Kasian glanced at the soldiers behind him.
Just as Luhan said, they seemed oblivious to the exchange.
'What the... I thought he was a knight from that overwhelming presence... But he wields such advanced magic too...?'
As Kasian wore a complicated expression, Luhan's voice echoed coldly through the garden.
"The princess only knows you as the enemy who killed her parents. And on top of that, you tell her, 'Don't die, or I'll kill your people.' How do you expect her to understand your feelings?"
Kasian had no retort. Luhan's words pierced his heart like a dagger.
He only wanted Erin to survive. He believed she could stay safe from the emperor's suspicions if she hated him.
But as Luhan said, that had only torn her heart to shreds.
"I... just wanted her to live."
Kasian's voice trembled powerlessly for the first time. The shoulders of the man called the empire's mad wolf shrank slightly.
And then.
From behind the shadow of a large pine tree in the corner of the garden, a stifled sob leaked out.
Kasian and Luhan's gazes turned there simultaneously, but nothing was visible.
Kasian furrowed his brow slightly at the oddity.
But Luhan, standing opposite him, quietly smiled.
'Just as planned.'
It was a sleepless night.
Erin stared blankly at the pale pink Luna Rose by her bedside. The rose the gardener had given her that day.
Every time she touched its smooth stem, thorns perfectly removed, a pang struck her chest.
Even as she yearned for her homeland's scent, the fact that she could never see it again filled her with misery.
'Why of all places did this flower bloom in this castle?'
Questions piled upon questions, and eventually, she drifted to the terrace as if entranced, wearing only a shawl.
The cold night air stabbed her lungs, but she didn't care. She just wanted to escape this stifling room.
Then.
A sharp metallic clang echoed from the darkly shrouded side of the castle.
Erin instinctively hid. Were Kasian's soldiers up to something strange in the dead of night? Or were her watchers fighting among themselves?
Terror surged, but she felt compelled toward the sound.
Hiding behind a large pine tree, Erin beheld an unbelievable sight.
"......!"
There stood the gardener from earlier, with five or six men bound in humiliating heaps like trash.
And a man in a fluttering black cloak.
Kasian was there too.
Erin held her breath. Her heart pounded as if it would burst, certain Kasian would draw his sword and behead Luhan any second.
But the conversation that followed shattered all her preconceptions.
"Your best? Threatening the princess by holding her people hostage? While conveniently omitting that you've secretly relocated them to the western territories for their safety?"
Luhan's voice was calm, but it rang clearer than anything to Erin.
'Western territories...? He relocated my people... to protect them?'
Erin's mind flashed white. She thought she'd misheard, but Kasian's response cruelly dashed her hopes.
"...How the hell did you know that?"
Kasian's voice dripped not with anger, but bewilderment and panic.
The meaning was clear affirmation.
Erin clutched the pine bark until her nails turned white. Her legs nearly buckled, but she barely held on.
"The princess only knows you as the enemy who killed her parents. And on top of that, you tell her, 'Don't die, or I'll kill your people.' How do you expect her to understand your feelings?"
Each word from the gardener stabbed into Erin's chest.
Enemy. Butcher. Demon.
The words she'd used to define Kasian over the past months. She'd endured day by day, feeding on that hatred.
Her sole reason to live had been the resolute vow to kill him and then herself.
But what was the truth?
Why had he deceived her? Why had he played the villain, spewing those cruel words?
"I... just wanted her to live."
Kasian's low murmur reached Erin's ears on the wind.
As she bit her lip, the metallic taste of blood filled her mouth.
'Lies. It's all an act. A scheme to make me more miserable.'
She wanted to believe that, but...
Unlike her head, her heart had already accepted the suffocating truth.
The lavish meals he sent daily. The pretty dresses and jewels she'd thought were mockery.
Realizing they weren't spoils to taunt her but desperate anchors to keep her alive made her nauseous.
She'd preserved her nobility through hatred, only to learn its target had risked everything—defying imperial law and the emperor's eyes—to save her.
"Hic...!"
A stifled moan escaped despite herself.
Realizing it, she whirled around and fled the scene in a panic.
Stumbling back to her annex bedroom, she couldn't sleep, haunted by the shocking truth revealed that night.