You Knew It Too
You knew it too.
She simply could not let it go.
For the first time in her life, Veronica tailed someone.
Ugh, what the hell is this even…
Thankfully, the place the two of them arrived at was the training grounds.
From the entrance, Veronica spent hours secretly watching them. In the end, when all they did was practice swordsmanship the entire time, she felt a strange sense of relief. Still, the fact that Louis was spending time with another girl did not sit well with her at all.
After that night of shadowing them, Felice started grating on her nerves just as much as Aine or Elin. Precisely because Felice had always been so blunt and distant, the change in her attitude toward Louis was painfully obvious.
Even so, feeling threatened did not suddenly turn Veronica into someone who treated Louis better. She denied her own feelings, and even after she finally admitted them to herself, the one thing she absolutely could not stand was Louis finding out. If he ever realized, she would die of embarrassment.
So she kept treating him roughly. If anything, she took out her irritation at Aine, Elin, and Felice on him instead.
“Hey, Louis! I told you not to hang around those bitches!”
“Hey! Are you ignoring me right now?!”
Day after day she screeched at him like that. Even so, she hated watching him get cozy with other girls.
Especially that Felice. The girl had completely ignored Louis before, and now she was suddenly acting all friendly? And that pointy-eared elf kept pretending not to care while still looking his way, only to turn around and start talking about “lowly humans” again.
Every last one of them was trash.
She was the only one who had been close to Louis from the very beginning. Unlike the others, she had never looked at him through the tinted lens of “traitor family.” Sure, Aine was there too, but Aine was a commoner. Veronica was the heir of the Red Magic Tower.
No matter how she treated him, Louis stayed the same as always. He never truly got angry at her. Yet that was a separate matter from the fact that he continued to get along with Felice. He had always been close with Aine, and lately he even seemed to exchange the occasional word with that elf bitch.
It felt like he was ignoring her, and that put Veronica in a foul mood. Still, the two of them never truly fell out. No matter how she treated him, Louis never changed.
Time passed again, and things finally began to go the way Veronica wanted.
The Saintess had never shown much interest in Louis to begin with. As for Felice, who had grown so close to him, she suddenly started pushing him away again—harder than before. She shoved him aside, treated him coldly, and instead struck up conversations with Leo.
Cheap bitch.
That was what Veronica thought. Of the five of them, Felice had always held the lowest status. Recalling the people who normally grovelled before her, Veronica looked down on Felice for clearly trying to curry favor with the Epsilt family rather than the traitorous Wallensteins.
For reasons she could not understand, the elf who had been slowly showing interest in Louis started insulting him again too. In the end, every girl who had been paying attention to him turned their backs. Everything was going exactly the way Veronica had wanted—even if she had not been the one to make it happen. From her perspective, it was a good thing.
But Louis grew more depressed by the day.
Why? I’m right here!
She never said it out loud, yet it still stung a little. Whether the shock of their change was the cause or not, Louis’s personality began to shift bit by bit. Even when she insulted him, he no longer reacted the way he used to. The playful bickering between them dwindled. She hated that.
When irritation drove her to torment him even more, she still failed to get the reaction she wanted.
Around that time, Veronica had to return to the Magic Tower for a while. While other students occasionally went home to their families, her home was the Red Magic Tower. After a long while she met her master again and was able to talk about all the things she had not been able to share.
“Hmm, I see.”
Scarlet listened carefully to Veronica’s stories about the Academy.
“You didn’t actually say something about burning down the Great Forest, did you?”
“H-How did you know?!”
“Because those pointy-eared bitches get on my nerves too. I once brought up the idea of World Tree barbecue and we ended up having a huge fight.”
Scarlet’s eyes turned distant for a moment.
“Still, don’t go too far. There were a lot of elf magics I was curious about…”
“And?”
“…I said that right in the middle of the Great Forest, so now I’m banned for life.”
Veronica also complained about Leo.
“He’s so damn annoying! If it were up to me I’d just—”
“Haha, but you really can’t burn him, okay? Half of my research funding comes from money I squeezed out of the Epsilt family.”
Scarlet had been completely serious about the possibility that Veronica might actually set Leo on fire. Veronica, however, assumed her prideful master was merely dancing around the money issue.
Guess I should be careful around Leo Epsilt from now on.
Even so, someone as proud as Veronica was never going to bow her head to Leo. From what she could tell, Leo already treated Louis like a thorn in his eye. All she had to do was trash-talk Louis a little in front of him and Leo would light up with joy.
Ha, what a simple idiot. How can anyone be that transparent?
In the process she discovered something else: Louis hated Leo far more than she had imagined. Lately the depressed Louis barely reacted to her usual teasing, but comparing him to Leo and praising Leo in front of him worked surprisingly well. Just like before, Louis got irritated. Of course, unlike the old days, he almost never laughed or snapped back at her anymore.
Veronica never noticed. The reactions Louis showed now were no longer playful anger. He was genuinely irritated with her, and disappointed.
Driven by a nameless restlessness, Veronica kept doing the same thing. And the more she did, the more Louis changed. Of course, she blamed everyone else in the party for the shift in his personality and the pain he was going through. Felice, Elin, and the Saintess certainly played their parts—but she never realized she herself was part of the problem.
The situation kept sliding in a worse direction, and an inexplicable anxiety began to gnaw at Veronica as well. Then, with the first year almost over, Leo finally brought up the matter.
The expulsion of Louis Wallenstein.
The moment she heard those words, a brilliant idea struck her.
Aine had opposed it to the bitter end, but Leo somehow flipped her into agreeing. Now Louis would have to cling to Veronica herself if he wanted to stop the expulsion. When he begged, she would tease him mercilessly like always, get those satisfying reactions out of him again after so long, restore her own pride, and then, as if she had no choice, she would oppose the expulsion and do him a grand favor.
It was the perfect plan. She could fix the relationship that had been slipping away lately and return things to the way they used to be.
But Louis simply accepted the expulsion.
Faced with a situation she had never once considered, Veronica’s mind went completely blank.
W-What the hell is this?!
He never came to her to plead. When Leo actually submitted the expulsion request, she finally felt, with painful clarity, that things were going horribly wrong. Then she heard the absurd news that Louis had instead expelled them from the party.
She followed the others to confront him. There, Leo went so far as to challenge Louis to a duel with Academy expulsion on the line.
No!
Veronica screamed inside. Louis… Louis was leaving the Academy? Of course he would never lose to someone like Leo, but the mere fact that he might leave made her tremble.
Once everything was over, she slipped away from the other party members and ran back to him.
“Why did you have to take things this far?! You could’ve just apologized to me properly!”
Like before. Just like before, no matter how much she teased him he wouldn’t get truly angry, and a playful apology would have been enough. But Louis asked her, completely serious, what exactly he was supposed to apologize for.
Veronica’s words stuck in her throat. Because Louis had done nothing wrong.
The excuse she scrambled for was the gargoyle incident. She had thought of it so hastily that she never considered the consequences it would bring. And finally, Louis became truly furious.
It was the first time she had ever seen him like that—something she had believed she would never see in her entire life. Veronica realized she had made a mistake. Yet she had no intention of stopping and apologizing. No—she simply could not even think of doing such a thing. It was something she had never done in her life.
So instead she made another excuse.
“W-Why is that my fault?! Everyone else just stood there doing nothing too!”
“If you’d just lowered your head and asked like always, I would’ve—”
It was the truth. Even when they fought the gargoyle, if he hadn’t barked orders so high-handedly and had simply asked her, she would have listened. And with the expulsion, her plan from the beginning had been to stop it once he begged her.
But she never finished the sentence.
It was the first time anyone had ever hit her. And she had never once imagined that person would be Louis.
“I used to think the way you treated me was just you being a little rougher than usual with your teasing…”
Louis kept talking. Even through the pain, every word reached her clearly. Veronica shook her head desperately.
“You actually meant every word of it. You really thought that way.”
“N-No… that’s not…”
She sobbed the words out. That couldn’t be true. She liked him. There was no way that had been her real feelings. Of course it was all just teasing. Why are you like this, Louis? You knew it too…
Louis was leaving her.
Clutching her stomach, Veronica somehow tried to force herself up. If she didn’t stop him here, everything would truly be over.
“W-Wait… khh…”
She failed. The pain dropped her flat onto the ground again with a heavy thud.
In the end Louis left her, and Veronica, left alone, wept bitterly.