Chapter 65
“Grrrrrrrrrrhh….”
Perhaps he didn’t like the way we were making a fuss, but the frost wolf, who sent the severed foot, began to growl, the fur on the back of his neck rising up.
The others were equally threatening, revealing their large, beautiful teeth.
Brutal, this was brutal.
“What the h.e.l.l is that?”
“Did they hurt themselves?”
“There’s no one who lost a foot among them.”
I hesitated to pick up the feet rolling on the dirty ground. The roars, which seemed to be vibrating in the atmosphere, suddenly stopped.
“Ugh…”
I looked at the feet in my hand for a moment. Suddenly, Enzo came to mind. To be exact, the clock he once showed.
The mysterious dark red jewel attached to the exotic embossed wood.
A jewel that brought good luck.
Glancing back at the wolves, the sad alpha frost wolf now looked this way with a more frightening appearance than before.
I felt like they were going to start slaughtering the whole area like this.…
I think I know why.
“Hey…”
“What’s wrong, my lady?”
“What did you get?”
“Did the foot speak?”
What the h.e.l.l do these people think I am?
I swallowed back a sigh and carefully continued.
“The superst.i.tion you said earlier, I think someone just ignored it.”
“What?”
How should I explain this?
I took my eyes off the frost wolf and carefully chose my words.
It was hard to express exactly, but what the wolf was feeling right now, seemed vivid to me.
“Maybe they’re here to find the owner of this foot.”
“The foot owner… someone from their own kind?”
“I guess the owner is still around here. I don’t even know if it’s still alive. I think that’s why they’re only threatening.”
Bang, thadum!
Oh my… The timing was amazing.
Following the thunder that seemed to tear up the sky, frost wolves began to howl dramatically.
At a time like this, it’s unnecessarily dramatic.
Sir Galar, looked back at his colleagues, spreading his palms over my head.
“The blacksmith might have taken them.”
“…did those f*cking poachers sell the wolf?”
That seemed to be the conclusion.
I was resting in a nearby hut while the Three Musketeers overturned the whole area to catch a man who had broken the sacred superst.i.tion.
Frost wolves around the river bank were still camping like before.
I wonder if he was alright. He seemed extremely angry, but if the owner of the severed foot had already died….
“Aren’t you cold? You should wear a cape.”
“Oh, thank you……”
Even if my faint voice broke a bit in the end, it couldn’t be helped.
I saw Andymion smiling as brightly as ever in my eyes that had lost its spirit.
Why did he suddenly come out of here?
“Oh, I didn’t mean to surprise you. It’s just that you seemed to be hiding, so I didn’t know……”
As always. Did he come to see his brother? Wasn’t it time for work? The fact that Andymion appeared here meant…
“Oops!”
Something flew by, landing with a loud sound on the hard ground.
The horses that were standing nearby neighed in shock, already agitated by the lightning.
Andymion looked shocked as well. We turned around in unison, and Sir Camu was seen lying down with his limbs stretched out.
“Hey, you son of a bi*ch! Listen to me….Hey! Hey! Wait a minute!”
“Calm down, Izek! This isn’t your home!”
I could feel Sir Camu staring grimly at me, cries piercing my ears. And I suddenly felt sad.
Ah, it’s not just nice to have my heart beating like this.
I lowered my hood quietly and smoothed my tangled hair.
Then, I drained off the rainwater from my lace sleeves and brown skirt, and rubbed the mud off my shoes with straws near the bottom of the hut.
Andymion and Sir Camu just watched silently while I finished the whole process.
“My, my lady!”
I eventually slipped out of the hut with no choice, on hearing the dying soldier calling his mother.
In the middle of the rain, my eyes fell on my husband, who looked like a scary demon, with two paladins hanging to his legs.
What are you doing to someone else’s husband?
There was a moment of silence.
About 10 meters away, a group of dim-faced city guards opened their mouths and watched an unexpected situation.
Now, it couldn’t be helped. As soon as he saw Sir Ivan, my fate had already been decided.
“Hi, honey.”
“…….”
“Ehehe, I begged them to let me see the frost wolf, and they listened.”
Praise my foolish immature performance.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the guards didn’t seem to care much about me.
They were only busy looking at the Paladins hanging on.
Izek, who was staring at me smiling sheepishly, slowly lowered his arm.
Sir Ivan was let off by the back of his neck.
Sir Galar, who had been hugging Izek from behind his back, also let go of his arm.
Wow, they must be monsters to some extent if they’re not embarra.s.sed with this. I’m starting to get scared.
Thump, the helmet was thrown to the floor. Izek’s silvery hair soaked in sweat fluttered.
I gulped down my dry mouth on his approaching footsteps.
Thuck!
“…You son of a b*tch, you hit me again!”
Sir Camu, who was kicked for no reason, cursed fiercely.
But Izek didn’t even look at him and extended his arms to me. My body was lifted at once.
Oh, I’m a chick again.
“L-Lord……”
Andymion, who was trying to say something, kept his mouth shut and began to follow suit.
Since then, Sir Ivan who kept swearing, and Sir Galar, who helped Sir Camu, followed him.
The guards, who were still watching, finally turned their eyes and shook their heads looking at each other.
* * *
Being a Southern spy felt pathetic.
The weather was not as cold as expected. He thought it would be sunny, but the fleeting rains were quite annoying.
It was not his cup of tea to walk around in the dark, mysterious temples of Elendale, wearing rosaries and scapulars[1].
It was also important to keep in mind the attacks of the magicians even when they hide.
Fortunately, he was a very patient human being.
The man’s eyes glistened under the dull blue sky.
The most annoying incident of all was the failure of his mission.
It was a clear mistake to mess with Rudbeckia at the banquet.
He didn’t know she’d go to the Duke immediately after that…
No, it was surprising that the Duke would take her with him and disappear.
The couple, who once disappeared, showed no sign of returning, causing a disturbance that they left because they didn’t feel very good.
Duke Omerta had appeared and dealt with the situation, so he had to quickly hide.
Then, the night had already arrived, and the next day, the couple appeared side by side at the temple to make a declaration.
He felt like he had been hit hard on the back of his head. Though his master would add to this sort of feeling.
Maybe it was supposed to be a failure from the beginning.
In his years of loyalty to Cesare, Pietro had never spoken to Rudbeckia properly.
No, he had never even met her face to face.
When he contacted her, all he did was guard her, standing in front of the locked door at the behest of his owner, or hide and watch her in the distance when she was alone with her fiances.
Therefore, Pietro did not know exactly what Rudbeckia was like, what she thought, what she could be up to, and what she could do.
If he had known in advance, he would have been able to see through her movements earlier, but this could be chalked up as his and his master’s negligence.
Now it seemed that his lord also did not fully know his sister, who had lived in his arms.
He had thought of her behaviour as an immature child’s, but this fierce resistance…
Of course, it was too early to be completely sure.
Maybe that blind little girl just had a crush on her new husband.
Or maybe it was that stone-like man. Duke Omerta, who was known to be cold, fell in love with his fragile wife.
It was always difficult to make a hasty guess about what’s going on between a man and a woman.
So Pietro worked hard to keep tabs on Rudbeckia, while rubbing the back of his head.
He didn’t have anything else to do until Cesare came anyway.
Elendale was a boring land.
Even the bar was more like a monastery compared to Romagna.
It was no fun to pick a fight with the bullies and break their necks.
“What the h.e.l.l are you doing?”
A string of words flowed out of his throat.
It was getting harder to figure out that woman.
He was wondering why she had come all the way to this district with the Paladins. Did she come here to see the frost wolves or something like that?
He wanted to get closer to observe what she was doing, but if he went beyond this, he would be caught by those d.a.m.n paladins.
So, Pietro patiently waited for his missing target to reappear in sight, hiding in the th.o.r.n.y bush.
And when she finally reappeared, separated from the Paladins, headed alone into a nearby hut, he tried to move without wanting to miss an opportunity.
His mind said this was the moment.
“Sir, sir! If you move like that, your wife will be scared!”
A boy’s high-pitched, nasally scream rang.
Soon after, a Paladin riding a horse in a stormy mood, and a black-haired trainee, who was also trying to catch up with the horse, rushed near the area, trampling on the muddy road.
“…d.a.m.n it.”
Pietro clenched his fist as he muttered a curse.
He was unlucky. The unexpected disrupter who appeared in the form of a storm was obviously Duke Omerta.
As long as he was there, it would be no good to sit around anymore.
It was like recognizing your own kind.
On the night of the banquet in the Omerta Castle, when Pietro first saw the Duke, he immediately recognized that he was a dangerous man.
It was expected that he would simply be a cranky and picky young gentleman, and that him being considered as one of the strongest knights in the North was just exaggeration as usual, but the aura he gave off from afar was fearsome.
A mixture of arrogance, wildness, and pessimistic insanity, that couldn’t be reigned in.
At the same time, there was no sign of a raw barbaric man.
Was it because he was a n.o.bleman?
Was it possible for him to suppress everything with the n.o.ble blood running through his veins?
That was something that Pietro, who was born as a poor man and grew up from the bottom, didn’t have. Even Cardinal Valentino, who was held up like a prince from the front but called an illegitimate child from the behind couldn’t escape the criticism.
So, Pietro was particularly bothered by this man.
Apart from the fact that he was not his rival, but his master’s.
A confident man who had never felt deprived in his life, made him really annoyed.
It was a feeling similar to Wyvern’s hatred of dragons.
This feeling deserved to be suppressed. Until a miraculous opportunity came forth.
Pulling off the thorn stuck on the hem of his cape, Pietro left quietly like a shadow.
* * *
[1]Rosaries and Scapulars: They’re believed to be “devotional articles” in Catholicism.