Duke Balthar was undeniably a seasoned and weathered politician. He had seen through the fact that Heliones’s ultimate goal was to make Lucian his Empress, and he knew that Heliones’s character was unbending as a rod of bamboo.

But he had grown too weathered for his own good. The arrogance that came from experience made him careless and caused him to misjudge his opponent’s capabilities.

Heliones did favor honorable methods, it was true. But that was not because his character was upright by nature. It was simply because he found it tiresome to be tripped up later by a lack of justification.

When political maneuvering fell away and it came down to pure force meeting force on the battlefield, he did whatever it took. If no evidence would remain, he spared no means or methods in pursuit of victory.

He was a man who could be as honorable as the situation required and as ruthless as it demanded.

“Oh, and while we are at it, release this at the same time. That the money went toward laundering the identity of an illegitimate child he had with a theater actress of foreign origin.”

House Balthar would not fall over something of this scale, but a price had to be paid for daring to touch Lucian.

He should have stopped while I was still being lenient. The nerve of a worn-out old snake, underestimating me.

After Count Fonta departed, a gentle smile settled back onto Heliones’s face.

“What fertilizer did she say to use? The longer you bloom, the more often she will visit the garden, won’t you?”

With a face far too guileless for a man who had just ordered someone’s reputation destroyed beyond recovery, Heliones organized in his mind what he would pass along to the gardener and returned to his office.

* * *

“You have been going to that house often lately?”

At Lewian’s question, Nelia gave a perfunctory answer and walked straight into her own bedchamber.

“Tsk, tsk. She must think she actually is a princess. Fawn over lowborn trash and they start getting ideas.”

Lewian shook his head with displeasure at Nelia, whose true thoughts he could not read at all.

‘Not yet. I still need her father’s help.’

It had already been two years since Rodencia fell. That he, noble-born and carrying the blood of a divine beast, had to endure this kind of hardship because of incompetent retainers. Lewian lit his pipe with a flame from his fingertip, trying to soothe the fury burning black inside him.

Nelia detested smoke, but what did it matter what some lowborn girl thought. Before Rodencia fell, she would not have dared meet his eyes.

‘Desire, is it. Keeping her in the capital this long, there is clearly something there. Whether it is political or whether he intends to make her his mistress, as Nelia says.’

“Tch.”

Lewian clicked his tongue without realizing it. He regretted not having killed Lucian sooner.

‘Harbinger of a fallen nation. If I had killed you when I had the chance, I would never have had to go through any of this.’

And yet neither Lewian nor his mother had ever killed Lucian in the end. She was family, after all, and they had hoped her ability would awaken, so they had personally, with their own hands, worked to develop it.

‘That ungrateful wretch never once showed any gratitude for the fact that she still had her life, and always wore that insolent look in her eyes.’

When Lucian left for the Gertil duchy on their father’s orders, she had looked back at the family as she departed the palace for the last time with an utterly defiant gaze. Even now, thinking of that moment made Lewian’s skin crawl.

‘I should not have let her leave like that. I should have finished it with my own hands.’

Family or not, this time he would show no mercy whatsoever.

‘What was it she hated most? Having her flesh carved off, was it? How she screamed, so wretchedly. And even after all of that, she never awakened her ability. Someone like you should never have been born.’

He could not yet gather the forces to bring down Frianc outright, but troops enough to announce the revival of the Rodencian royal house and seize the capital were slowly coming together.

Heliones, the thorough soldier and realist, had overlooked the existence of ability users bound together across a thousand years of intermarriage.

To outsiders, the divine beast was nothing more than an unusual piece of mythology, but to those who carried its blood and wielded its power, the divine beast was an absolute religion and an ideology.

Lewian was not gathering soldiers. He was gathering ability users. Drawing on the bloodlines and the faith of those who carried the blood of the divine beast scattered across the continent, all to resurrect the Rodencian royal house.

Until that day, Lucian’s existence, which he had previously sought out only for personal revenge, had taken on new importance. If the Emperor was obsessed with that defective thing, she could prove useful as a bargaining chip.

And once her usefulness ran out, she would pay the price for bringing her homeland to ruin. He would let her become ash in the flames, just as the prophecy foretold.

Whoosh. A flame the size of a palm flared at Lewian’s fingertips.

He knew it well enough himself. A flame of this size was no match for modern weapons.

But this flame would be more than enough to ignite the faith lying dormant in the hearts of those who worshipped the divine beast.

The following day, a special report ran on the front page of the capital’s major newspapers.

A credible press outlet with an influence incomparable to any gossip sheet had published a story on the private educational foundation scandal involving House Balthar.

House Balthar, which had existed even before the name Frianc came into being, had many primary sources of income. There were countless means by which the family had accumulated its wealth, but the one Duke Balthar took the greatest pride in was the private educational foundation the family owned.

Education itself did not bring in large sums compared to other ventures, but the bonds and connections formed among peers who had lived together in dormitories from early adolescence and attended university lectures side by side, and the powerful academic network that originated from those connections. House Balthar, which owned the educational foundation that served as the starting point of that network, held a vast and invisible influence that spread across the entire continent.

The graduation banquet of the university owned by House Balthar was even treated as an event of equal importance to the official banquets held at the imperial palace, a gathering where young people just entering society made political connections with their seniors and sometimes found a companion for life.

As a result, enormous sums of sponsorship money flowed into the educational foundation. The revenue from tuition was not particularly large, but the amounts that alumni willingly donated for the benefit of their juniors regularly far exceeded the foundation’s entire annual budget.

And Duke Balthar had been using that sponsorship money as though it were his own personal funds.

Most of the generous donors held Duke Balthar in high esteem and trusted the annual financial statements he released. They were confident that their money would become the foundation of connections for themselves, their families, and the next generation.

The donors had not the faintest idea that their goodwill was being spent on a theater actress of low birth and her illegitimate child.

The moment the story broke, an organization that had been investigating the educational foundation filed suit against House Balthar.

The donors did not join the lawsuit directly, but they applied pressure on Duke Balthar by funding the cost of legal representation.

They demanded the truth from the aging duke who had betrayed the trust built up over years of youth spent together.

* * *

“This is getting serious. There is no brushing past this at this point. The evidence is too clear.”

“Indeed. It seems even the actress and the illegitimate child have been fully identified.”

Hanna and Lucinda exchanged opinions on the massive lawsuit against Duke Balthar that had been setting the Frianc Empire ablaze day after day.

I had hoped Delmir would face a fitting consequence for going after Heliones, but I had not hoped for a scandal of this magnitude. Even if the fact that Delmir had ruined someone’s engagement came to light, it would not rise to the level of a legal matter. It would simply be a matter of her carefully built social reputation crumbling.

But the lawsuit currently underway was becoming an international uproar with legal and political complications tangled together.

The Frianc Empire with its history of over four hundred years, and House Balthar, which had operated its private educational foundation even before the Empire began. Because of that, House Balthar’s alumni were spread across the entire continent.

With countless powerful figures all bearing down on one man, it was plain to see that even Duke Balthar would find it difficult to hold out.

“I know. House Balthar is in quite a state.”

“Quite a state? They brought this on themselves by doing wrong in the first place!”

I had never said much to Hanna about Delmir. It was a bad history that predated my time with Hanna, and I had no desire to burden her with it.

But sharp and perceptive as Hanna was, she had already pieced together through her own observations and overheard conversations that House Balthar was behind the gossip sheets, and her hostility toward Delmir was burning hot.

“Miss Lucian seems like such a kind person. You never seem to get angry about anything.”

Lucinda, clearly finding some private satisfaction in Delmir’s predicament, quietly sided with Hanna.

Kind, indeed. I was the one who had tried to use Elise to ruin Delmir’s reputation.

These girls who knew nothing were judging me by my outwardly gentle appearance.

If they ever saw the ragged, scheming inside of me, they would recoil and back away in revulsion.

The very thought was dreadful. The sight of Hanna looking at me with different eyes and pulling away.

I kept my true self buried under layer after layer and, with a warm smile on the surface, stroked the heads of the two girls one after the other.

“You are both right. Rather than worrying about House Balthar, it makes more sense to worry about the people whose trust was betrayed and whose donations were wasted.”

“Exactly. People who do petty things like spreading gossip behind others’ backs deserve absolutely no sympathy!”

Delighted that I had agreed, Hanna leaned into me with a bright smile that looked entirely out of place on her lovely face.

“By the way, do you think Lady Delmir will come to the ball? With her family in this state, you would have to have quite a lot of nerve to show up, wouldn’t you?”