***

Leticia understood the basic principles of disguise very well.

To appear like a completely different person, never resembling her original self.

It didn’t matter if her appearance was strikingly strange.

The goal wasn’t to be invisible to people, but to prevent them from recognizing her true appearance.

So Leticia wore a goatee, glasses, and a colorful fur cloak. Of course, it was early summer now.

Despite this beggar-like appearance, the people of the capital treated Leticia kindly, and Leticia, thinking things like ‘Money really works everywhere,’ generously handed over payment as a show of sincerity.

“Um, I… not this kind of money…”

“Oh, should I give you more?”

The clerk shook their head vigorously.

Seeing this, Leticia nodded in understanding and smiled.

“You feel uncomfortable just accepting it. Then, please recommend anything that doesn’t sell well here. I’ll buy that.”

“Oh, something that doesn’t sell well?”

“Something that’s just taking up space and causing worry. Clearing that out would be my repayment. Price it high. Not what I think, but as much as you want to charge.”

Just as the store clerk, enchanted by Leticia’s kind words, grabbed Leticia’s hand.

Aina, who had spotted Astrid, panicked and knocked away the clerk’s hand, blocking Leticia.

“Aina? Why…?”

“I’lltakecareofthisclerk’srewardsoleftward-”

Before Aina’s machine-gun words could properly register in Leticia’s ears.

“My adorable baby droplet.”

“…? Master?”

At the sound of her master’s voice that shouldn’t be heard here, Leticia turned her head with a bewildered face.

She saw Astrid smiling brightly before her.

She gently took Leticia’s hand and whispered.

“I’ve come to get you. Let’s go home now.”

Home.

While Aina held her breath at the bleakness underlying Astrid’s tone, Leticia fixated on that word ‘home.’

How long will Basilinte be my home?

Of course, Leticia considered Basilinte family and thought of it as home…

But now that the curse was broken, was it okay to continue staying there? Until when?

Until now, she had stayed as a fake hostage, but now that she knew the hostages were all dead, there was no need to continue that pretense.

So now her only justification for staying in Basilinte was being Master’s disciple…

‘Master also became independent from her master, but what about me? When should I leave? I could still make excuses about being young, but—no, that’s not right.’

She was just appearing as a boy while crossdressing with a woman’s body, but Leticia’s actual age was already twenty.

Being an orphan whose exact age was unknown, she might be even older than twenty, but certainly not younger.

If she were to reveal her identity as ‘Leticia Borba,’ a former death row inmate who was once an ‘En Travesti’ performer, everything, including her gender and ag,e would become known. How long could an adult Leticia stay in Basilinte without becoming independent, under the pretext of being a disciple?

When she was no longer a child or a hostage?

How long could she stay there after returning?

“…Why aren’t you answering, Leti? Are you afraid of your master?”

The frightening one was clearly Astrid, who looked like a beggar with her eyes wide open.

“Our baby must be scared because of the awful things you saw in Basilinte last time. Right?”

It was now, in fact, an incident that was being forgotten in a corner of her memory. The fact that mages were imprisoned in an underground storage in Basilinte, and their blood was being extracted.

Recalling that scene after a long time, Leticia carefully asked.

“Is Kalia alright?”

“Of course. Of course. The curse has been lifted, hasn’t it? All the mages have been released, and they’ve been given satisfactory compensation. Now our baby just needs to take Master’s hand and go back without any worries.”

Leticia fidgeted with her hand that was held by Astrid and held back her words.

She had planned to stick around Basilinte until they hinted at her independence, but before that, she needed to learn the truth about the Borba troupe’s great fire.

Only then could she honestly tell Basilinte why she had been hiding her identity and who she really was.

“Um, Master…”

“Yes, my baby.”

“I’d like to return a little later. Actually, I, I…”

Just as Leticia closed her eyes tightly and was about to say, ‘I want to tell you my real past and name.’

Astrid’s magic activated first.

Thanks to that, Leticia, with her mouth still open, was hit by a waterfall pouring from thin air.

The goatee and glasses she had carefully attached all fell off her face from the sudden shower.

“M-Master?”

Of course, the pouring water was neither threatening nor painful to Leticia.

She just wondered why such an absurd act suddenly, and what would happen if the store got flooded—ah.

‘What is this?’

The water didn’t flow to the floor.

As if Leticia were inside a transparent water tank, the water that poured down on her didn’t flow to the floor but instead made her completely submerged.

Trapped in what looked like a transparent tank, Leticia looked at Astrid with confused eyes.

“You said you wanted to go back, baby. Why bother walking on two feet? Master will transport you.”

“….”

The modifier “a little later” seemed to have gone unheard by Astrid.

Leticia stared at her master’s eyes, which seemed slightly unhinged, and then relaxed her body.

‘Chamuka’s eyes were like this too, how much trouble did she go through to get here…’

It wasn’t particularly difficult to escape from the water anyway, and if staying like this for a while would ease her master’s mind.

Leticia thought she should talk to her master after she got some sleep. Since she seemed a bit irrational now, it would be better to talk after she rested.

It was an incredibly naive thought.

***

“Now. This is my master. You can call him Great Master.”

Eckle, who was lying on the soft bed of the highest-grade inn that Colin had rented with tears of blood, flinched in his sleep at the sound of Astrid’s voice.

“Despite appearances, he’s over a hundred years old. He knows teleportation magic, so he was a great help in getting here.”

With his haggard face, flinching even while sleeping, he looked too pitiful to be a great mage.

Inside the tank, Leticia briefly wondered ‘Was it really this great mage’s own will to use teleportation magic, or was he forced?’

“When you return to Basilinte, you’ll have a lot to learn from him. Won’t that be fun?”

Astrid, who had arbitrarily moved the great mage’s residence to Basilinte when the mage only wanted to return to his magic tower, headed to the next room.

“Now. This is Ferik… hmm, why bother looking at this? Let’s go to the next room.”

Astrid, who mercilessly evaluated her husband as ‘this,’ closed the door and moved to the next room with a bright smile.

There were two beds in total, with Kalia lying on one and Tan on the other.

“You were worried about Kalia, weren’t you? Kalia whined so much about wanting to see Leti. Tan was so depressed without you that he walked on two feet all day.”

Leticia wanted to say ‘People normally walk on two feet,’ but no sound came out, no matter how much she moved her lips underwater.

Unlike the previous two rooms that Astrid passed by mercilessly, she stayed in this room for quite some time, talking at length about things they would do when they returned to Basilinte.

However, before all that, Leticia had a very trivial question.

‘Why… is everyone except Master unconscious?’

Why were they all collapsed on beds in such a miserable state? What did they do to arrive here so quickly?

No, more importantly, what did they intend to do by arriving quickly…

No, before that, why did the entire family…

No, but…