The Panties
“…….”
“Panties.”
Owen’s low voice pointedly repeated the embarrassing word once more. While everyone stared blankly at the movement of his lips, Owen alone kept spouting nonsense with a perfectly composed face.
“I let it slide once, didn’t I? But between you and your little friends, you’ve stolen so many that I’ve got nothing left to wear. What am I supposed to do if you keep lifting them every time I do laundry? This is straight-up harassment. You know that?”
He lied so naturally that Giphael was thrown completely off balance.
What the hell is he talking about? Panties? What panties?
That was what he thought, but he was so stunned the words wouldn’t even come out.
He’s seriously doing this over panties?
Up until Owen had suddenly clocked him on the head in the corridor, until the scuffle had escalated and Giphael had ended up pinned beneath him, Giphael had assumed it was over what had happened yesterday.
That had been bizarre enough. Last night, Owen had been standing behind tiny Appleton and had looked as though he couldn’t care less about any of this.
So he’d ignored it then, only to come seeking revenge the next morning? That was absurd enough already, but panties? What the hell. Seriously.
“W-What are you talking about? I don’t know anything about that. Why the hell would I steal your panties when I’ve got better things to do?”
“Then why don’t you ask me about it? You’re the one who stole them.”
People started murmuring. Giphael himself was so confused he couldn’t tell whether someone really had stolen Owen’s panties and Owen had mistaken him for the culprit, or whether Owen just wanted an excuse to deck someone and had made the whole thing up. Naturally, the others took his words at face value.
Even Sylvia just stood there, staring dumbly at Owen and Giphael’s standoff with a face that said she had no idea what was going on.
“No, I’m telling you, it wasn’t me!”
At this rate, he was going to be branded a bottom-of-the-barrel thief, so Giphael shouted it out first.
But Owen had clearly expected that, because he didn’t even blink before grabbing fistfuls of Giphael’s waistband.
“Then let’s see.”
“S-See what?”
“The panties.”
“You fucking lunatic.”
Spitting out a cry from deep in his gut, Giphael dropped his hands to clutch his trousers.
What drove him the most insane, though, was the fact that the difference in strength meant that even if he fought with both hands, he wouldn’t be able to hold on to them forever.
The crowd watched their standoff with gleaming, delighted eyes. They didn’t know why a noble like Giphael would suddenly start stealing someone else’s panties, but Owen sounded so utterly serious that they decided it must be true.
“If you look, you’ll know, won’t you? Why go to all this trouble? We’re both men, for god’s sake.”
“No, what the hell does that have to do with—”
Whether a man or a woman, having one’s pants yanked down while one’s body was pinned by someone else’s hand was a matter that went beyond humiliation and straight into human rights.
Giphael’s face burning bright red, he begged Owen to let him go.
“I-I’ll p-pay for the panties, so just—just let me go.”
But Owen didn’t budge an inch, no matter how pitiful the plea.
“It’s not something you can slap a price tag on. I’m just pissed that it happened, and I want to check the facts.”
At the same time, the force dragging downward grew stronger. Giphael called on God by name and tried to resist with everything he had, but it was no use. His trousers were stripped off as though they had been destined from the start to end up around his ankles, and with the cool air hitting his thighs, Giphael squeezed his eyes shut.
His underwear was exposed before some thirty people.
Giphael’s undergarments were plain. White and square, with nothing to them except a lot of wrinkles. Still, he trembled with shame at having exposed himself in front of everyone, and that alone was enough to make the sight somewhat ugly.
By then, Giphael had started believing Owen too. Someone really must have stolen the panties, and that was why he was doing this. Otherwise, no matter how insane he was, there was no way he’d go this far.
Now that he’s seen the panties, he’ll let me go, right?
Giphael desperately hoped he’d realize his mistake and apologize. But Owen merely looked down at the exposed lower half of his body for a long moment before speaking in a low voice.
“Yep. It’s you.”
What?
Giphael blinked stupidly.
“Giphael!”
Then a pitiful voice rang through the hallway. Having heard that his friend was being held down and humiliated in front of everyone, Wilden had finally arrived. The moment he saw Giphael sprawled before them in his underwear, his pants having been yanked clean off, he was unable to hide his shock. Buckley, who had come along with him, was just as stunned.
“W-What is this…….”
Even if they were nobles, this was the first time they had ever been subjected to such humiliation, sheltered as they had been.
“You bastard. Is this because of what happened yesterday? If you wanted to settle it, you should’ve done so honorably. What are you, some common thug?”
Buckley said, shaking with fury. Giphael squeezed his eyes shut, feeling like he wanted to faint, and Owen only then turned his head as though just remembering something.
“Come to think of it, you two stole them too.”
“……What?”
Even before Buckley and Wilden themselves did, the people who had been watching all this understood their fate.
“No way.”
No, they doubted it too. It was just their way of saying there was no way Owen would strip all three of them naked.
But Owen really did exactly that. Leaving Giphael where he was, his slender legs bared like a fish already gutted and losing interest, Owen stood upright.
Only when he straightened up did the sheer size of his body truly hit home. As Owen advanced slowly toward them, Wilden instinctively backed away.
“What’s wrong?”
“I got angry when I saw it with my own eyes.”
Buckley frowned, not understanding what that was supposed to mean. He took up a defensive stance, but Owen closed the distance in the blink of an eye, seized him by the shoulder, and then… yanked down his trousers.
“…….”
Buckley had expected a punch to the face, not to have his pants pulled down, and for a moment he turned to ice. A cold draft swept through the hall, and Owen’s chilly face, previously hidden by his hair, was revealed. In something like pent-up wrath, Owen stomped on the trousers Buckley had been left standing in.
The fury in him looked so vivid that, up until that point, people were still willing to believe his accusation.
That lasted until the end—until Wilden, the last one, abandoned his friends in disgrace and turned to run, only to be caught. Owen flipped him clean over from behind, pinned his shoulder, and stripped his trousers right off.
“Oh my.”
“H-Hhnk. Why are you doing this?”
Wilden’s face was bright red as he clutched at the pants that had fallen awkwardly around his knees and begged.
Every eye in the room fixed on his underwear. Even Buckley’s and Giphael’s, though they still had their lower halves exposed and forgotten.
“Hhnk…….”
Wilden tried to cover his crotch with his hands, but the cute, puffy underwear shaped like a pumpkin—something a child might wear—simply could not be hidden.
Owen frowned as he studied the underwear, seemed to think it over, and then said in a low voice, “See? That’s mine too.”
He looked a little troubled, as though even saying it was awkward, but he didn’t hesitate over the pumpkin-shaped underwear either.
He’s going to the end of the earth to stick to his story.
And yet, despite Owen’s crisp certainty, no one believed him anymore. It was all there in Wilden’s mortified face. More than that, even if the panties really had belonged to Owen, people would have filtered the truth out for themselves in order to preserve the illusion they had of him.
Owen was too handsome for it not to be so.
Wilden could read all of that in their faces.
“What in the world is going on here!”
Before Wilden and his group could haul their pants back up properly and try to retaliate, the vice-captain arrived after hearing the commotion.
With a blasé air, Owen neatly straightened up and held out his arm for the guards. They hid their embarrassment and hurriedly bound him, while the vice-captain gestured for them to conceal the disgraced trio beneath cloaks, as though hiding corpses that had been made a spectacle of.
“Honestly, what a racket. Tsk.”
The vice-captain clicked his tongue, and the group under the cloaks trembled with humiliation as they pulled their trousers back up. Sylvia and many others still had no idea what they had actually seen; they only blinked as if they had dreamed something strange and followed the guards back to their seats.
Only Owen, the one who had caused all this, was led away in silence, his expression calm and unwavering.
* * *
“What on earth happened?”
“Who knows? Apparently they did something massively wrong to Owen.”
“I mean, even so, what did they think they were doing, getting away with that? A Summers, of all people… well, you know.”
“The Count of Wilden already came and made a scene. He was asking how they planned to take responsibility for turning his son into a spectacle.”
“It’s not even like there was much of a spectacle to speak of.”
At the flat remark someone tossed in, the others stopped talking, looked at one another, and burst out laughing.
“No, no, there definitely was. Where on earth did he get those pumpkin-shaped underwear?”
“Did you see Owen pause for a second when he was about to say they were his?”
And then came another round of explosive laughter.
Meanwhile, Sylvia listened to the story with a deeply uneasy feeling.
Surely it wasn’t because of me, was it?
Of course everyone had seen her jaw being broken, and by now everyone knew what had happened yesterday too, but no one was connecting that to this incident.
As revenge for a lady who had suffered injustice, it was far too petty—and the excuse he’d used was far too… personal.
Sylvia was confused for the same reason, but she knew Owen a little better than the others did.
Owen absolutely could do that.
The man who had suddenly grabbed his own crotch and told her he was going to let her know what state they were in had been Owen Summers. So wasn’t it possible that he could pull off some insane stunt like this as revenge too? If not, there was no way to explain why he had suddenly stripped the trousers off the three people who had bullied her.
Owen is a fucking lunatic.
Once that thought took hold, Sylvia found herself convinced before long. Owen Summers had always been the sort of person who showed her more than she could possibly imagine.