Chapter 5
Chapter 5
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Translator: uly
Chapter: 5
Chapter Title: Death Note
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"Look over there, Ras is actually making Irha run errands for him...!"
"His clothes look even more shabby up close. What a pathetic sight."
Whispers like that drifted in from all around, sharp and biting.
Making her run errands? Nah, I was just clearing out some karmic debt as quickly as possible.
I’d specifically told her to keep all the money except what she spent on a single loaf of bread and a carton of milk.
I didn't hand over a fortune—raising the eyebrows of the vultures in this room would be a mistake—but it was enough to keep her from starving for at least a few days.
I lifted my head and swept a deliberate, heavy gaze around the room.
My "dear" classmates. Those oh-so-familiar faces packed every single corner of the lecture hall.
I let out a massive yawn, tears of genuine boredom welling up in my bleary eyes as I stared them down.
The murmuring died off instantly.
They seemed utterly thrown by this version of me—a Ras Etgard whose edges had suddenly sharpened, appearing far more dangerous than the soft, pliable fool they remembered.
The classroom plunged into a momentary silence, but it didn't last.
Click-clack, click-clack.
The rhythmic, heraldic sound of heels announced the arrival of that tiresome girl.
Rizli de Gracia strode in with a colder expression than usual and claimed her seat beside me.
"Ras, good morning."
Her voice carried a calibrated chill, a signature quiet menace she no longer bothered to hide under the guise of affection.
Ten years ago, that tone used to terrify me. Now? It was just cute, like watching a small child throw a tantrum in a sandbox.
Instead of shrinking back from her frosty presence, I offered a lazy, dismissive wave of my hand.
"Rizli, come on in."
The Ras Etgard who used to wag his tail like a devoted black puppy whenever he saw her had been executed on Friday night.
Starting with the dawn of the weekend, Ras had been reborn as a stray dog wandering the streets without a master.
Stray might sound a bit grime-streaked, but in terms of pure freedom, it beat being leashed up any day of the week.
Back then, I had never so much as laid a finger on Rizli without permission. Not once.
All I'd done was wait endlessly for the crumbs of her innocent smiles, her rare admiring glances, and the occasional, sweet drop of skinship she deigned to grant me.
So yes, you're probably losing your mind wondering why your pet is suddenly baring his teeth after just a few days.
People like her always need to have those they deem beneath them firmly in their grasp, shaking them around like dolls to feel satisfied.
The frost between us was palpable—some of the kids were already sneaking panicked glances our way.
The whisperers were mostly Rizli's close girl clique, her little "maids-in-training."
They were likely worried about catching the fallout from their queen's bad mood.
At this point in time, Rizli was one of the central pillars of the social hierarchy in this classroom.
For starters, her beauty was drop-dead gorgeous. The way she only ever bossed around her fiancé was a secret the rest of the world didn't know.
That haughty beauty who seemed so elegant, kind, and sweet on the surface—everyone naturally fawned over her like she was a saint.
Of course... even now, it wasn't like no one knew her real personality, but those who did were her loyal followers anyway, bought with proximity to her power.
She only ever let slip glimpses of her true face to a select few in her inner circle, and I was one of them.
Come to think of it, past-me Ras Etgard really was the closest person to her in the world.
The face she showed me was the rawest, ugliest version of Rizli there was.
People say silent-and-dark types are cool, but they're wrong—being that close to something pitch-black brought zero perks. It was just a trap to consume you.
Rizli's maids edged in between us now, trying to slip into the icy gap like intermediaries.
The mood was all prickly and sharp, so they were probably trying to smooth things over before a scene broke out.
"Rizli, Ras! Good morning. Did you two have a fun weekend?"
The voice dripped with a fake, manufactured cheer, like she'd stirred two teaspoons of artificial pep into a cup of vinegar.
This was Emma Agnelri—Rizli's head maid and right-hand girl.
"Oh, Emma. Yeah, it was a blast," I smirked and shot back.
Emma visibly flinched at my uncharacteristically friendly reply, her eyes darting to Rizli, whose perfect brow furrowed in a dangerous line.
The normal me would've waited for Rizli to respond before even daring to acknowledge Emma's greeting.
Funny thing was, Rizli absolutely hated seeing me chat or flirt with other girls.
She didn't value me much herself, but she didn't want to share even a single hair of my attention with anyone else. It was a rotten, festering kind of jealousy.
Back then, I mistook it for affection. I even felt grateful for it.
But it wasn't an obsession born of love—it was the possessiveness of a collector and a desperate need for an ego-boost. There was nothing to be thankful for.
"Fun... huh... yeah... fun..."
Her voice dropped, trailing off with a bunch of those trademark, heavy ellipses. It was a hilarious sight.
But that crap doesn't work on me anymore.
No matter how much dread she tried to build, the growling of a child wasn't going to faze me.
Especially not after serving the real deal—the woman I'd bowed to until my very last breath.
Catching Rizli's increasingly icy tone, Emma scrambled to pick her words with the desperation of someone walking on thin ice.
Even this idiot knew the signs.
What sounded like mild fatigue to an outsider was actually Rizli's unmistakable signal that she was thoroughly pissed off.
"Haha...! Didn't you two go flower-viewing together? The festival was supposedly legendary. Right, guys?"
She was trying to pull others into the conversation to drum up a chorus of agreement to cool Rizli's temper.
If I was just chiming in with the group instead of talking one-on-one with another girl, she might have let it slide.
But this time, Emma picked the absolute wrong topic.
"Ah... that... yeah. We actually ended up skipping the flower-viewing somehow. Funny, right?!"
I put on an innocent, blindingly wide grin and played it off as a minor oversight.
I scratched the back of my head with a goofy chuckle, and Rizli let out a tiny, sharp huff through her nose that sounded like a tea kettle at the boil.
Then, some clueless girl nearby jumped into the fray. She was so low-key I couldn't even remember her name. Sorry, nameless student!
"Eh?! Did something super urgent come up all of a sudden? The flower festival was amazing! What a total shame you missed it!"
Oof, you're really in for it later, kid. Emma's glare is already murderous—you just can't see it from where you're sitting.
I figured I'd pull some of the aggro her way and tossed out a super-sensitive word, steeling my nerves for the reaction.
"Oh, that... it was the engagement ceremony..."
"Engagement??"
The word barely left my mouth before Rizli's scoff twisted into a stiff, shocked expression.
Emma looked outright furious, way past surprised. She was over-immersed in the drama, acting like it was her own business.
Idiot, I'm engaged to Rizli, not you. I swallowed the urge to snap and wrapped it up with a lie.
"My family had to rush together for my little brother's engagement ceremony or whatever. The kid's barely the size of an acorn, and he's already getting engaged... Makes me a bit jealous, honestly."
"Whoa~ Ras's little brother isn't even twelve yet, right? That is incredibly precocious!"
The idea of a twelve-year-old engagement drew awed whoas from around the room, the gossip spreading like wildfire.
It was total, unadulterated bullshit, of course.
Engagement at twelve? Come on.
The squirt still pesters me to play hero-and-mage whenever I go home.
Still, poking at Rizli's—nay, Emma's—sore spot about "Ras's engagement" felt damn satisfying.
Surprisingly few people knew we'd been engaged before even entering the academy.
Just us two parties, plus Emma fuming in the corner like it was a personal affront to her soul.
In the original timeline, after that fateful Saturday, Rizli's "noble" affair partner would've found out too—but I had successfully skipped that scene this time.
Anyway, someone might wonder why we went to such lengths to hide the engagement.
Rizli had sold it to me with a logic that was as flawed as it was manipulative:
"Ras, I'll definitely marry you someday... but what if, just what if, things fall through? Nobles take a massive hit from broken engagements. So let's keep it a secret until our future is rock-solid, okay?"
Looking back with thirty-one-year-old eyes, that logic was a joke.
How do you even cram "I'll definitely marry you" and "what if it falls through" into the same breath without your tongue catching fire?
It was less about praying against a breakup and more about hiding the shameful fact that a noblewoman was engaged to a commoner, period.
That's understandable with maximum empathy and generosity... but what really chafes when you chew it over in the dark is how I responded.
"Y-yeah! You never know with people...!! But you won't hide me if we're actually dating, right...?"
Me, wagging my tail and blurting out pathetic crap like that back then.
This fool had no spine in his past life. No wonder he got screwed over, chewed up, and wrecked.
That's why "engagement" became a taboo word between us, a landmine we both avoided.
Oh, and the funniest part? Emma took it harder than I did.
It was our business, but this outsider shook with a rage that suggested her own life was on the line.
Emma Agnelri.
She was one of the few remaining vassals of the fading Gracia Count Family—specifically, the daughter of the Agnelri Viscount Family.
Given her house's crumbling status, she'd been perfecting the role of Rizli's maid since they were children.
And she subtly, deeply, hated my guts for it.
It was as if she projected her own loss of status onto Rizli; she'd spat things like "lowly commoner trash who doesn't know his place" right into my face once I had finally fallen.
Of course, this girl wore her masks as well as her mistress, so she never showed her fangs outright before my ruin.
Though not long from now, she'd be the one to straight-up stab me in the back.
Thinking about it, unlike the harmless Irha, this one was a legitimate, major threat to my ten years of peace.
"Haha... Ras's little brother... yes, he sounds super mature. Tell him congrats on the engagement for us? Should we get ready for class now, everyone?"
She ground out the words, her eyes glaring daggers that practically screamed "just you wait until after class."
She'd never even met my brother but pretended she cared with a sickening sweetness.
You have no clue how your own life ended in the dark of the past life, do you?
I had no idea how it would go for her this time, but if she kept up the maid gig and the scheming, it wasn't going to be pretty.
Ah... speaking of which, it was time to pull that out.
At this point, I quietly began to review the "Kill List" I'd jotted down in the corners of my mind over the weekend.
This wasn't some literal ledger where I'd divided the world into those I'd murder and those I'd spare.
It was more like a probability chart, a way of logging the odds of a random roulette spin going off.
It was a tally of whether these past grudges would actually manifest as obstacles in this new life or not.
The rule was simple: if they touch me this time around, they die; if they leave me be, they live.
That's the twisted, beautiful perk of regression.
I came back from the future to the past, and every word or action I took now was rewriting the bloody path I'd once walked.
Hell, I'd already diverged on a small scale this past Saturday, shifting the currents of the future.
Would those few off-script words remain a butterfly's flutter, or would they brew into a city-wide storm? There was no telling yet.
Ten years ago, my life had crumbled in an instant from a series of tangled, malevolent currents.
A sudden, untraceable poisoning had wrecked my senses and my body, turning me into little more than a vegetable.
Then, in that feeble, defenseless state, I had been framed as a rapist through clever setups and mountain of false charges.
Beyond my personal woes, the infighting over the merchant group's succession had torn my family apart.
Finally, the fractured house had been slapped with treason, shattering it into pieces.
Through that absolute hell, I had survived by a series of freakish, bloody strokes of luck, and I had grown strong.
Once I was powerful enough, I sold my services to the highest bidders and pieced together exactly which currents had sunk me.
Some would have fizzled out with a mere nudge; others were ironclad and inevitable.
The point was, if I sat idle like I did in round one, the fangs would close in from all sides again.
So this life's grudge-settling was purely conditional on their actions.
You might think, "Aren't you going to pay back those injustices? Don't you feel wronged to your very core?"
Saying I won't seek revenge would be a half-truth, because my thoughts were abruptly cut off as Irha came barreling back into the room.
She was gasping for air and clutching the bread and milk to her chest like a holy relic.
Wait, why in the world was the bread wrapped in that specific, nauseating shade of green??
"R-Ras... here is the bread and milk you asked for... but they were completely out of the chocolate-filled ones," she stammered, avoiding my gaze.
"So... I ended up getting the mint chocolate flavor instead..."
"You absolute idiot! Who in their right mind eats this minty swill!!! Eat it yourself!"
I barked the words, causing several students to jump in their seats.
I dumped the entire pile of bread and milk back onto the dim-witted Irha and scanned the classroom once more.
Familiar faces everywhere I looked—vivid memories of friends, total nobodies, and "oh yeah, her too" types.
It was a surreal realization: over half the kids in this room had died by my hand in my past life once I had climbed out of the abyss.
But funny enough, as I looked at Irha struggling with her minty bread, I remembered one thing clearly.
Her name was the only one that had never been on that list.