Even Bellus, who paid far too little attention to other people’s appearances, had no choice but to acknowledge that the man before her was strikingly, almost shockingly handsome. Every beautiful thing in the world would have been rendered useless standing beside him.

But more pressing than that fact was the realization that her body, for some reason, was in terrible shape right now. Her mana had drained away in great chunks, leaving her nearly empty, and the anxiety it stirred made her fight the urge to bite down on her lip.

Yantis, who had been watching with interest as the woman stared hard at him and then lowered her gaze, finally asked the question he had been wondering about all along.

“How did you get here?”

“Here?”

“Atlan, I mean.”

“…Atlan?”

It seemed like they were communicating, and yet somehow not at all.

Yantis furrowed his brow, his patience wearing thin, watching the woman look around past the trees with that somehow vacant expression.

There was no time for this. It wouldn’t have been strange for the Department of Magic’s informants to come bursting in at any moment. He doubted there were many with the skill to detect a distortion of this magnitude, but it was better to be safe.

“Are you referring to Atlan, the capital of Attica?”

Pulled from his thoughts by the sudden question, Yantis gave a slight nod. The woman, who appeared to be confused for some reason, blinked several times and muttered to herself.

“…This place is Atlan?”

He had no idea what she found strange about land that had been Atlan for over a thousand years, but Yantis watched the woman who was clearly finding something strange, then stepped forward.

He had taken one step toward her when it happened.

Click―

A cocked revolver was aimed at Yantis with a spine-chilling sound.

It had been in Bellus’s left hand from the moment she had first woken up.

‘This got complicated.’

Yantis let out a pointless breath and shaped his voice into something reasonably gentle as he opened his mouth. Not that the effort amounted to much, given how plainly his true nature was leaking through.

“You don’t actually think you can kill me with something like a revolver, do you?”

That self-assured provocation seemed to be the trigger. The index finger curled around the trigger moved without hesitation. Yantis, staring straight down the barrel aimed at him, swallowed a hollow laugh at the deep crimson mana round gathering and swelling into form.

“Whoa, hold on.”

Unlike any ordinary revolver, the concentration of mana in it was no laughing matter. Yantis made a face of pure disbelief and exhaled a resigned sigh.

The way that sigh came out as his chest deflated seemed somehow exaggerated.

Noticing something, Bellus’s face took on a faint, peculiar displeasure, and a bright smile bloomed at the corner of Yantis’s mouth.

“This really couldn’t be helped. You started it.”

“……!”

Those were his last words, delivered with eyebrows drawn down in exaggerated sympathy, like she was some small, helpless creature. Bellus felt her vision going dark again and thought:

This f*cking bastard is definitely messing with me.

* * *

That morning.

The master of the estate, Yantis, returned from a sudden outing and appeared with an unconscious woman in his arms. There had been no shortage of women who visited the estate with him, for various outward reasons and also for the reputation as a playboy he rather enjoyed maintaining, but even so, this was truly a first.

The woman draped limply in Yantis’s arms looked, at a glance, like a princess who had fallen under the curse of a wicked witch, and the household staff had no choice but to look at their master with expressions that were half skeptical.

‘I heard Lord Yantis brought a woman home!’

‘…What I heard was that he kidnapped her?’

Unaware of any of this, Yantis had no idea what misunderstanding his offhand words would cause, and proceeded to drop something of a bombshell.

“She is a very important woman to me, so please take special care of her.”

On top of that, he flashed a smile at the dumbfounded head butler Lora before turning to leave, then stopped and added one more thing, and it was only natural that everyone fell completely and perfectly into this absurd misunderstanding.

“Oh, and when she wakes up, let me know first. She’ll probably be looking for me.”

Those warm eyes, capable of making even the most indifferent person mentally walk down the aisle and have three children on the spot, were nothing short of incriminating. Even Lora, the head butler who had stood at Yantis’s side for a very long time, was completely taken in. He was, to all appearances, a man in love.

The same misunderstanding had been shared by Natura and William, seated in the study.

Well, to be fair, they did think it was a somewhat absurd misunderstanding, to a degree. The superior they knew was not someone who opened his heart to anyone easily.

While their heads were each tangled in their own complicated thoughts, Natura, a little hesitant at the sight of Yantis looking utterly untroubled, spoke up.

“Lord Yantis, did the matter you went to look into resolve itself?”

Ah, that manner of speaking.

Yantis shook his head at his familiar adjutant’s question and sank into thought.

The many soldiers he had fought alongside in the war with Hiam. The woman spoke exactly as they had. A blunt, upright voice, nothing like the crawling, honeyed tones of the vermin who started every war in existence and then hid somewhere safe, dripping with affectation.

Well, he himself used those same skin-crawling honeyed tones.

Out of necessity, he told himself, but the flashes of revulsion that rose in him from time to time were not something he could always suppress. Yantis’s violet eyes, settled into a cool stillness, traced the shape of the woman’s revolver where it lay before him.

The barrel aimed straight at him.

That had been the movement of someone trained.

Resting his chin lazily in his hand, he ran his long, elegant fingers lightly over the name engraved into the grip of the revolver.

[Bellus]

An ancient word meaning beloved.

‘Must have been a well-loved child.’

It was a name that radiated nothing but pure affection. Somehow, picturing that expressionless face, it seemed like the wrong guess entirely.

‘…Or maybe not?’

Then again, she had worn that childlike expression of wonder over a perfectly ordinary forest, if only for a moment, so perhaps his read was right after all.

“Lord Yantis? So the mana distortion phenomenon you said you’d look into still hasn’t been resolved? And also, why do you keep staring at that revolver…”

Natura’s amber eyes fixed on him with a persistence that made clear she had no intention of letting it go. Yantis straightened, dropping the arm propping up his chin. His hand, which had been idly toying with the revolver, stilled, and he drummed the desk at a steady rhythm as he turned something over in his mind.

This was still a hypothesis that existed only inside his head.

The mana distortion phenomena that had been occurring continuously over the past few days. The Department of Magic’s covert movements to conceal them. Not that those idiots ever did anything worth noting, but still.

In any case, what mattered was that today he felt he had glimpsed the thread of that secret.

Because of a woman who had appeared out of thin air.

“Pardon? Lord Yantis, who exactly is this woman you suddenly brought back with you?”

Yantis had been carefully choosing his words in his head as Natura’s question pressed him for an answer, and at last he found it.

‘That woman is……’

Pleased enough with the answer he had found, the man’s lips, curved in a graceful arc, parted, and a smooth voice followed.

“She is my key.”

The key to unraveling every thread. Or perhaps, even more than that.

“Yes, certainly.”

She might be the perfect beginning that would resolve everything.

Lost in that vague premonition, Yantis was deep in thought, and so he failed to notice the peculiar looks being exchanged around him, looks he would ordinarily have caught in an instant.

* * *

Tweet, tweet, tweet―

Before the gently closed eyelids had even finished trembling, the fine brow above them crumpled sharply. The black eyes that flew open a moment later held a blazing heat. It was anger, unmistakably born of irritation.

And the birdsong still tickling at her ears, identical to when she had first woken in the forest, only added fuel to the fire already burning in her.

‘This f*cking bastard……!’

Bellus ground her back teeth together and yanked back what she assumed had been covering her until now, throwing the blanket roughly aside.

The overwhelming softness that met her palm brought her movement to an abrupt stop just as she was about to push herself upright.

Soft. So soft.

Her palms had been roughened beyond roughening by years of grueling training, yet the peripheral nerves that registered touch were still far too sensitive. She ran her hand back and forth across the blanket, taking in a softness she had never felt in her life, and for some reason she couldn’t pull her hand away, like it had been glued there.

Her face, drifting into a somewhat dazed expression, had just registered the white dress she was wearing when it happened.

Knock, knock―

The sudden knock that cut through her hazy mind made Bellus’s unfocused eyes sharpen back into their usual edge.

With the practiced efficiency of a trained soldier, Bellus took stock of her own body first and realized she had nothing on her, no weapon of any kind, only this excessively smooth dress. Bellus set herself on a razor’s edge and fixed her attention on the presence she sensed beyond the door.

‘…Wait until the target gets close enough, then snap the neck in one move. One chance.’

“Oh! You’re awake?”

A small woman whose voice matched its buoyant, bouncing quality peeked her head through the gap in the door. The woman in a beige dress had round brown eyes that sparkled as they landed on Bellus.

Caught off guard by the unexpected figure, Bellus paused for a moment before making herself look the woman over with sharp eyes. That endlessly soft-looking woman might actually be a highly trained assassin conducting an undercover investigation. Their kind usually adopted a fragile appearance to put their targets off guard.

But the way she came trotting over with her hands clasped together was somehow like a little flying squirrel.