The Disposable Extra
I carefully flipped through the pages in my mind, but no matter how many times I retraced my steps, I couldn’t recall a single memory of Everett appearing.
Could it be?
Whether I’d fallen into confirmation bias or not, the only information that came to mind was something I’d picked up in reality: The Emperor’s adjutants, with the exception of Everett, were mostly vassals who had stood by his side since he was a boy.
He joined the latest and has no notable background. Doesn’t that perfectly match the conditions for a disposable extra?
Even though it was summer, a chill ran down my spine.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Constance looked at my suddenly pale face and asked, her voice full of concern.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
Seeing the doubt flicker in her eyes, I forced the corners of my mouth upward into something resembling a smile.
If she asked what was wrong, I wouldn’t have an answer ready.
It’s still too early to collapse in despair.
“You just described it so vividly that I got a little too immersed for a second.”
Instead, I wrapped both arms around myself as if I could actually feel a wintry draft in the middle of summer.
When I playfully lifted her up by saying that if she became a comedian she could buy a building in the capital, Constance forgot the awkwardness she’d felt toward me and immediately started teasing me right back.
“Wanted: Carolina Diaz to confirm whether or not I possess the talent of a comedian.”
“Request denied. The person in question is the one who knows best whether they have talent or not.”
Constance paid no attention to my refusal.
“I refuse your refusal! You’re the one who brought it up first. So, once upon a time in a certain territory, there was an abandoned house where an eerie shadow appeared every night…”
She set the mood with dramatic flair and then tried to tell a ghost story in the middle of a sun-drenched midsummer afternoon.
I smiled at her rather dull sense of humor, lifting only one corner of my mouth.
“So, did a ghost actually come out of the abandoned house where the eerie shadow was seen?”
At the word “ghost,” Constance visibly flinched.
I continued in a mischievous tone.
“Then who do you think will be the one tossing and turning tonight, unable to sleep? You or me?”
After all, between the two of us, the one who was overwhelmingly more terrified of ghosts and spirits was Constance.
By a landslide.
The capital was a place where land prices rose exponentially the closer you got to the imperial palace.
Even though it had a public cemetery, Indar Street was close enough to the palace to allow commuting on foot and had cheap rent, making it a fairly popular district among low-ranking officials.
Roughly half the residents in the row house where I lived were employees who worked at the palace.
The land prices around the palace are far scarier than any ghost, after all.
Yet Constance lived on the outskirts of the capital, willingly enduring a longer commute because she was afraid of Grizel Park.
The same Constance who had chosen something she personally hated just to tease me for a moment flinched again.
I shook my head as if to say I’d let it slide this once.
“Shall we stop the comedy routine now and get back to turning the wheel?”
“Yeah.”
At my generous offer, Constance nodded obediently.
Since she lived alone, she stayed quiet, probably already worrying about tonight’s bedtime.
If she hates ghosts that much, why on earth did she bring it up?
I clicked my tongue at the sight of Constance walking so slowly, but only for a second.
Even as I led the way back to the office, my mind remained tangled in knots.
I should have a notebook at home where I organized the original story.
Although the contents of the original work still remained quite vivid in my memory, I had currently lost a bit of my objectivity.
There’s so little information that even a slight error in interpretation could drastically change the outcome.
When the distance is great, even a tiny deviation in aim can make you miss the target by a mile.
Analyzing the role of an adjutant who had only appeared in two lines of the original story was as difficult as trying to hit a target the size of a fingernail from an enormous distance.
I offered up a small prayer that the past version of me—who had only just recovered her previous-life memories—might have written down some kind of hint.
The banter with Constance had lowered my tension a little, but time dragged on as if someone had deliberately stretched it out.
Still, quitting time does arrive eventually.
The moment work ended, I pushed all remaining tasks to the side and rushed straight home. The first thing I did was search for the notebook where I had recorded my past-life memories.
I didn’t even change out of my work clothes. Standing right there, I flipped through the pages at top speed.
The novel’s first chapter begins with the female protagonist Ivetta’s regression scene.
For convenience, let’s call the time before Ivetta’s regression Round One and the time after Round Two.
In Round One, Ivetta had been a low-ranking priestess from an orphanage.
She was chosen precisely because she was easy to use and discard. With a curse engraved upon her soul that stole her free will, she was mobilized to help commit the High Priest’s evil deeds.
Then the Emperor, unable to overlook the temple’s corruption any longer, gradually began to pressure the church.
It didn’t take long for the High Priest—who had always dismissed the Emperor as nothing more than a strong but naïve youngster—to find himself cornered.
Feeling the threat, the High Priest turned his greedy eyes toward a holy relic that had only existed in legends.
Priests in similar situations to Ivetta were sacrificed in the search for that relic.
In the end, Ivetta was the only one who survived and actually found it, but—
She too was dying from the injuries she had sustained during the search.
At the very brink of death, the curse engraved on Ivetta’s soul lost its power.
Before her eyes, all the atrocities she had committed under the High Priest’s orders flashed past like a panorama.
They were things she had done, even if it had not been by her own will.
The knowledge hurt Ivetta far more than the physical wounds that were killing her.
In her final moment, Ivetta prayed desperately to the god of Minos.
May divine protection reach those who were sacrificed. And may the High Priest pay the price for his sins.
Whether the holy relic had reacted to that earnest prayer or not, Ivetta regressed to the past.
Upon her return, she awakened as the Saintess and joined hands with the Emperor, who shared the same enemy.
The contractual romance began right then as well.
With the curse broken and her memories restored, Ivetta used her knowledge of the future to steadily drive the High Priest to ruin. That was the central story of the novel.
And then they fell in love while getting their revenge together and reached a happy ending.
The notebook I had written in detail while my memories were still fresh proved quite helpful.
Sure enough, there’s no Everett.
It confirmed that Everett had never once appeared since the beginning of the original story—that is, from the moment the Emperor and the Saintess met.
He might have changed posts, or perhaps he received a territory and retired to the countryside.
As if trying to avoid the reality I didn’t want to face, I kept searching for other possibilities.
Still, I couldn’t simply think positively and put my mind at ease.
I looked down at the list of adjutants I had obtained through a roundabout connection.
Most of the names were marked.
Out of all the Emperor’s adjutants, only three—including Everett—had never been mentioned in the novel at all.
One out of three.
I let out a heavy sigh.
33.3 percent.
It was far too large a number to brush off with a casual no way.
Although no detailed description had been given, because of that adjutant’s mistake the Emperor would fail in his plan to immediately dispose of his political enemy, Duke Camelot.
Duke Camelot in particular was someone the Emperor had harbored a deep grudge against for a long time—a person of special interest he had been waiting to strike.
In the original it had been described as a “major punishment,” yet the current Emperor’s tyrant meter seemed to be rising faster than expected. He was already at the level where he might draw his sword at any moment.
One wrong move and the punishment might become far harsher than in the original.
I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, trying to shake off the flood of gruesome images.
Would it be all right to intervene?
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to save the adjutant who might turn out to be Everett.
But what if the future changes because of my actions?
The future already seemed to be twisting little by little, which only made me more anxious.
Fortunately, my hesitation didn’t last long.
I’ve read my share of romance fantasy novels, after all.
The more you worry about twisting the original plot because of “original-work-itis,” the more the future ends up derailing anyway.