Magnus paused briefly in front of the door out of habit before entering the reception room, turning his head left and right to survey the inside.

‘No broken dishes and the decorations are intact. No smell of blood either.’

The reception room was indeed perfectly fine.

“Oh.”

He honestly turned his head towards the source of the woman’s voice that made him feel like he might develop neurosis.

A woman with a face not much different from what he had seen a few months ago was leaning on the sofa, looking at Magnus.

Magnus, as always, hardened his expression and furrowed his brow.

He strode over and plopped down opposite her.

Serena slowly examined her long-time fiancé, whom she was seeing after a very long time.

‘He showed promise even as a child, and he’s grown up splendidly.’

It was a face that could have made not just one or two, but dozens of women cry.

‘Would he have found a new woman if I gave him a divorce?’

He had his eye on someone.

Ah, it was some Count’s daughter. Originally, she was in a rival position with the female protagonist and sided with Serena, only to be thoroughly used and discarded by Serena.

And then the female protagonist embraces her and accepts her with her immense, immense tolerance.

After that, they become best friends, besties with the female protagonist, becomes a follower of the female protagonist, and in the end, only Serena ends up being the b*tch in this wonderful story.

Anyway, since the male protagonist is the Crown Prince, of course the reformed Count’s daughter had no chance, but she meets Magnus, who had already been rejected by the female protagonist, at the grand imperial wedding of the female and male protagonists, and they smile bitterly, wishing happiness for their unrequited loves, and at the same time their eyes meet, they feel a sense of kinship and leave the banquet separately.

Then, well, the two people, bursting with unfulfilled desires, end up just holding hands and sleeping on the bed under the influence of alcohol.

And despite only holding hands while sleeping, for some reason the Count’s daughter wakes up n*ked and flushed in the morning and says to Magnus, “Shall we date? Us, rejected people?”

Magnus, who seemed to quite like the night of just holding hands, accepts lightly.

And they fall in love.

In the sad ending where Serena’s child is taken away, they even raise that child.

Yes, the man in front of her was handsome, but he was someone else’s cake.

And Serena doesn’t covet other people’s cake no matter how delicious it looks.

It was a reunion after 11 years for Serena, but they didn’t exchange words.

Because 11 years ago, and 16 years ago when they got engaged, the two were like this.

Magnus didn’t particularly like the partner he was forced to be engaged to, and Serena was busy putting on airs.

If the other person didn’t speak to her, she was rather grateful.

And Magnus ignored her very well.

At their first meeting, he would sit her down in front of him and read a book alone, or look at documents, or do personal assignments, so from the second meeting, Serena also brought a book.

Because the other person did so, she thought she should do the same.

Once every three months.

They had regular meetings arranged by their families for the sake of friendship between the engaged couple.

For the first year, neither of them spoke.

At the first meeting, Magnus ignored her, but from the second meeting, Serena ignored him too.

Magnus, thinking that Serena Lavernia was having a battle of nerves with this attitude, was so annoyed that he kept his mouth shut even more, and Serena read her book and ate refreshments alone.

She would ask the head butler Pamel about anything she was curious about, and she would neatly pack up the refreshments she had been savoring alone to take with her.

Magnus thought Serena was doing this to get back at him, but that wasn’t the case.

Serena was sincerely pleased and comfortable with Magnus’s attitude.

Because she was very tired from putting on airs, coming to the ducal mansion once every three months was a day when Serena could breathe.

After a few years, they did start to speak a bit, but the conversations were short.

She endured the annoyance and pretended to listen to what the guy was saying while blankly thinking about other things.

Of course, her gaze was fixed directly on him.

Professor Kim Chul-soo was always a person who would go on and on about all sorts of things.

“There are these kinds of things in the world. Long ago in the past, they used this thing to do… blah blah blah… In the future, this will develop and become like this… chatter chatter chatter… If we go into the origins of this thing, in ancient times, a stonemason… woof woof woof woof woof…”

“As expected of you, Professor! I really had no idea such an excellent thing existed. To think that you would come up with the idea to research this, it seems like something an ordinary person could never think of. I will also set you as my goal and continue to strive forward.”

A teaching assistant should be able to pretend to nod along with bright eyes even if the supervising professor in front of them is talking about some nonsense so boring that the principal’s moral education speech would seem more interesting.

And she was an excellent assistant… no, slave of Professor Kim Chul-soo.

She could pretend to listen attentively with bright eyes to the boring drivel while in her head thinking about the male and female leads from the novel she read yesterday or worrying about tonight’s dinner.

Of course, she wasn’t like this from her fresh-faced days as a freshman.

But, humanity evolves in extreme situations.

She learned this firsthand.

Unlike his generous appearance and greatly expanded stomach from constantly stuffing something in, Professor Kim Chul-soo’s inner self was narrower than a silverfish’s gallbladder.

At first, she was caught thinking about other things and was persistently harassed.

Reports would pile up like mountains, or he would deliberately spill coffee on an experiment report that had been in progress for over 8 months, or he would take away a paper meant for publication and nitpick every single thing as if plucking with tweezers, or he would reject without even properly looking when she had neatly organized the contents of undergraduate experiments by year and requested confirmation.

Come to think of it, just with that, she could probably write several volumes of papers with titles like ‘The Correlation between Professors and Power Abuse’!

Anyway, Professor Kim Chul-soo would push people’s patience to the limit; to the point where she even looked into effective methods of quietly killing someone and hiring a sniper.

She evolved.

She awakened the ability to operate her expression, her mind, and her mouth separately.

Anyway, for these reasons, it wasn’t particularly difficult for Serena to listen to the young Magnus’s boring and uninteresting stories that were long-winded to the point of being verbose.

Compared to Kim Chul-soo, Magnus was at a cute level.

If she chimed in agreement, he would quickly be satisfied and return to his own work.

It was a case of the same bed, different dreams, as the two sat in the same place thinking different thoughts and quite pleased with each other.

“It’s been a while.”

Serena greeted him briefly.

For her it had been 11 years, for him a few months, but it was a neutral greeting that could be used in both situations, so Magnus didn’t notice the gap in time implied in her greeting.

“You look quite radiant, like you’ve eaten well.”

“……”

Serena was taken aback.

She had indeed been served a luxurious meal, eaten it all, and even refilled her stew twice more.

“…I didn’t think you’d notice.”

She asked Pamel to keep it a secret, but he must have blabbed already.

That traitor!

Serena glared fiercely at Pamel, who was bringing in tea, with a rising sense of betrayal.

Pamel flinched at the sudden killing intent and looked around nervously.

“…In that case, you’ll have to die.”

“W-What?!”

Pamel startled and almost dropped the teacup, and Magnus’s eyes widened.

‘…Why are they acting like this?’

It was a joke.

An undergraduate student had once said something similar to her.

“Miss Assistant! I’m submitting this.”

“Oh, just leave it there.”

The problem was that the content was quite high-level.

Unlike Professor Kim Chul-soo, who had little interest in students and dumped all the work on her, only looking at evaluation forms, career plan forms, and midterm and final grades, she graded directly and knew the level of undergraduate students well.

What the undergraduate submitted was something that at least a 3rd or 4th-year student would write.

“Who wrote this?”

“Gasp, how did you know?”

“I can tell by looking.”

“…Damn! I asked my cousin to do it in exchange for leveling up his game character!”

The undergraduate despaired with a crestfallen face.

“In that case… you’ll have to die, Miss Assistant…!”

— He had said something like that.

Apparently, it was a popular saying those days.

She wasn’t close with the undergraduates, but that guy was quite sociable.

Of course, she, already jaded as could be as a working adult, didn’t care whether someone did the assignment by proxy or not.

She didn’t want to increase her workload by unnecessarily searching for conscience.

“…How can you openly say you’re going to assassinate someone!”

“…No.”

That’s not it.

“How lightly do you regard human life?!”

Magnus was hurt by her words, thinking she would even kill him.

Serena realized something had gone wrong, but Magnus was already greatly shocked and holding his head in both hands.

“Ha!”

He barely managed to calm down and removed his hands from his head.

At that moment, several strands of hair fell onto the table.

Thud.

Magnus’s pupils shook.

Serena’s pupils also shook.

The two raised their heads at the same time and looked at each other.

“…Hair loss?”

“This is all because of you!!”

At Serena’s shocked voice, Magnus, who had finally lost his temper, burst out in anger.