The Tournament (3)
Ever since I was a child, I had been dying of curiosity… “Berry, are you half-blood?”
As I was about to leave the alchemy room after receiving the medicinal tonic from Anna, she suddenly asked me that question.
…So that was the reason she had been sneaking glances at my face all along.
“I don’t think I’m half-blood… Could it be that heterochromia only appears in people with mixed heritage?”
I brushed my thumb under my eye while asking, and Anna’s eyes widened in perfect circles. She clapped her hands together like a delighted child, mouth opening in surprise.
She looked exactly like the cute, pretending-to-be-proud cat from those old foreign animations. Of course her reaction wasn’t deliberate, but it only made her pure-heartedness shine even brighter.
“No, no! It’s perfectly possible for a half-blood, but actually, most people who display special talents come from mixed bloodlines! That’s why I thought you must have been born with a talent for swordsmanship… but you weren’t.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes! Heterochromia in a non-mixed-blood person… I’ve never seen it before!”
Anna’s voice rang out far more energetic than usual, nothing like her usual gentle tone.
I turned my head and looked into the huge flask, seeing my own reflection. My left eye, which Trace Changer could never hide—the eye that had been sacrificed for Lily’s Elixir.
As my consciousness focused on the left eye, half of my vision suddenly vanished and forgotten memories flooded back.
“Everyone else would have thought the artificial eye was perfectly natural and moved smoothly.”
The fact that I had offered my left eye to obtain Lily’s Elixir.
Why had I forgotten such an important detail until now? Why had my vision suddenly dimmed?
Before I could answer my own questions, Anna’s voice pulled me back from the edge of my thoughts.
“Berry…?”
“Ah, yes?”
“Are you all right? You look really tired…”
“No, no! I’m fine! See you later!”
Anna turned and hurried over to her drawer, rummaging through it with all the determination of someone searching for a fatigue-curing tonic. Since I wasn’t actually tired, I gave her a hasty farewell and left the alchemy room.
I still felt like a street urchin who had just swindled a child out of extra sweets, even though I had received the medicinal tonic completely for free. Anna had even offered me the fatigue remedy.
…But why had I been staring blankly into space?
Before I could even scratch my head in confusion, I stepped out of the alchemy room and found the maid from earlier standing exactly where I had left her, bowing deeply once more.
“Please take care, Master Berry.”
“Uh… yeah.”
Since my business here was finished, there was no reason to waste time. I turned toward the training grounds without delay.
Lily had insisted we continue sparring until the day before the tournament, and I had agreed.
***
The moment I stepped down from the carriage, Lily’s voice drifted on the wind—sharp, edged with barely contained irritation.
Her conversation partner answered in a nervous, creeping tone, trying to justify whatever had happened.
The voices gradually grew quieter, but even without hearing the rest of the exchange I could already guess something serious had occurred.
“So… why were you asking about that? More importantly, were we even in a position to ask such questions?”
“A-ah, no, I was simply curious…”
The carriage began to move again, wheels crunching over the dirt path, and Lily came into view. Beside her, Selina fiddled with her fingers, while Ian stood there, clearly lost on how to mediate the situation.
“What the hell is going on here?”
An unexpected problem had erupted right in front of my training grounds, so I quickened my steps toward Lily.
As I drew closer, the conversation became clearer.
“Curious? You’re asking about the private life of a royal family member out of curiosity? Or did you not know that even asking an equal is considered rude?”
“I-I’m sorry! I was just wondering about Princess Lily’s fiancé… I’ve never heard anything about who he is! I’m truly sorry…”
Selina kept bowing deeply, her voice growing louder with every apology. The surrounding swordsmanship students began gathering their attention around Lily, and Ian, sensing trouble, started alternating between nervous glances at Selina and Lily.
He made no attempt to resolve the situation at all.
“…That indecisive personality of yours is as consistent as ever, Ian.”
People say that someone who changes easily ends up dead. That idiot’s lifespan must be monstrously long—longer than a Galápagos tortoise, at least.
“What’s the matter? Right in front of someone else’s training grounds.”
“Ah, Berry!”
Before anyone could stop me, I stepped between the thorn-covered vines and all eyes turned to me.
The looks were the same ones housewives gave when watching a morning drama—equal parts curiosity and mild judgment.
There is nothing worse than drawing attention when you’ve done nothing wrong. That’s my experience speaking.
If I had received an award for doing something good, this would be different. But this situation called for a different approach—diverting the gazes toward someone else entirely.
“Speaking of which, Ian. You said you’d let me have your student council room as the department valedictorian, right? And that you’d take the training grounds? Now you’re eyeing that too?”
“E-Eh? No, that’s not what I meant…”
“That’s way too much. You begged me so desperately to let you live with your maid, and I agreed only because I had no choice.”
“W-What? When did I ever say that?! I only proposed it because you asked first!”
“…Is that true, Ian?”
“…?”
Selina suddenly stepped between us, eyes narrowing into sharp daggers as she glared at Ian.
I had no choice but to stare back at her with full resolve in my expression.
Originally, my plan had been to laugh it off as a joke to the bewildered Ian and then smoothly end the conversation. I hadn’t anticipated Selina would suddenly throw a tantrum right here.
The reason was simple: Ian was the protagonist who owned countless heroines, yet in the original story Selina’s jealousy had been extremely rare—if it appeared at all. The only scene I remembered involved her discovering that Ian’s maid had been sneaking kisses every night.
As I stroked my chin thoughtfully, Selina’s voice—thick and muffled like swamp water—drifted over along with Ian’s increasingly nervous, shrinking tone.
“Ian, last time you told me the maid lived on the servants’ floor, you didn’t say a single word? You were right there beside me.”
“T-The atmosphere felt… a bit… tense…”
“Then what the maid said is true? You’re living with her. Correct?”
“Selina, that’s… even though she’s been taking care of me since I was little, I can’t just kick her out now. With the valedictorian quarters we have enough rooms… that’s why I accepted it…”
“Sleeping together at night…!”
Selina had barely started, but after a quick glance with moving eyes, she continued.
“Of course we’re not sleeping together, right?”
“Absolutely not! I swear! How could I ask Cindy to sleep with me?!”
Ian began protesting that he was no ungrateful beast.
‘If you’d just said you wanted to sleep together, you’d have to strip first, you idiot Cindy.’
Probably in Ian’s head he was playing the role of a wicked noble who would use power to devour the body of the senior maid who had taken care of him since childhood—heartless and ungrateful.
In reality, Ian was a perfect gentleman, but protagonists in web novels are always the opposite of their looks and intuition.
“Fine! Fine! Let’s go to the training grounds first. There we can talk properly, Ian.”
Selina, whose mouth had been running the whole time, seemed to notice that most eyes were now fixed on them. She grabbed Ian’s arm, which had been flapping in protest, and pulled him into the crowd.
Soon the crowd that had been watching the drama lost interest and began to drift away. The mob that had gathered for the soap-opera scene vanished without a trace, leaving only the sound of footsteps fading into the distance.
I waited until the last spectator had gone, then poured mana into the training ground doors and asked Lily, “May I ask what exactly happened before I arrived?”
Lily looked thoughtful for a moment, then sighed and nodded.
“Yeah… It’s not something I couldn’t tell you. Since we’re going to team up, you have the right to know.”
Even though I had only joined later, I was one of the people who had suffered unnecessary harm. She had decided it was fine.
***
“Huh? You want to hear about the princess’s past?”
“Yes.”
From the context, Selina had shown enough composure to make me think she would never have thrown a tantrum like that. The continent had been abuzz with news that Lily was dying of a terminal illness—how had she recovered? Did the Emperor’s Shadow exist? If so, did Lily know her true identity? Why had she been spending so much time with the co-valedictorian from the swordsmanship department, and why had she chosen him as a partner for the tournament?
And about her fiancé—who was he? No one had ever heard any rumors about him…
Even though students sometimes asked during class and I ignored them, I couldn’t avoid the conversation now because I had accidentally run into it in front of my own training grounds.
“If she weren’t a woman, I might have killed her on the spot.”
“AHAHAHAHA…”
tsk. Lily clicked her tongue, looking genuinely disappointed as she smacked her lips.
I smiled awkwardly at her, who casually dropped lines about the end of the world as if they were nothing.
Originally it had been strange to see the early-eliminated heroine glaring at the main heroine with murderous intent.
But why were Ian and Selina in my training grounds? In the original story they were supposed to be sweating through intense training until sunset…
Could my mere existence be influencing their actions in a way that broke the script?
I tilted my head in confusion. Lily stood with arms crossed, replaying the earlier scene with heavy sighs.
Right… two irregulars here. That should be reason enough. But after everything that had happened, I had sworn I would never let my guard down again.
I couldn’t blame myself for missing the first warning, but the problems caused by complacency had to be removed as thoroughly as possible.
Selina was one of the characters I had barely influenced at all. I had never even exchanged a single conversation with her.
And yet she was behaving completely out of character?
The hypothesis that my presence was causing deviations was absurd on its face, but I decided to test it the next day. I walked into Ian’s training grounds, looked him and Selina in the eye, and deliberately spoke a sentence containing a modern English word.
Since this was a romance-fantasy genre with reincarnation elements, it was a logical possibility. I even suspected that Selina herself might not be the transmigrator. A vague, uneasy feeling settled in my chest.
“Well, Ian, here’s the vitamin supplement you asked for.”
Vitamin.
If Selina were actually the transmigrator, she would immediately realize I was mocking her. The word was far too familiar to a Korean, yet still completely unknown in this medieval world. Even if she suspected something was off, a Korean who had heard the word once would instantly understand it.
I waited for her expression to change.
…But nothing happened.
“Vitamin?”
Both Ian and Selina said the Korean pronunciation perfectly in sync—without even a single syllable out of place.
Thank goodness—or perhaps the opposite—Selina was not a transmigrator like me.
Trace Changer – Partial Soul Suppression
I exhaled in relief. The plan had worked. My heart still raced, but at least I could breathe easier now.
The tournament was finally here. No more hiding. No more illusions. Only raw truth remained.