Or was it? Well, did the reason matter? What mattered was simply that the face of the bastard in front of her was quite displeasing.

“I’ll return the revolver. In exchange.”

Bellus, halfway risen from her seat, stopped short. Yantis smiled at the black eyes staring straight back at him.

“Tell me about yourself.”

It was a sweet voice that felt almost seductive.

A voice with a history of making not just women but occasionally even men go glassy-eyed.

The unfortunate thing, however, was that the smooth baritone had the effect of making Bellus absolutely furious.

Her brow furrowed with an intensity unlike anything before, and she walked straight toward the man without hesitation.

She had no interest in whatever flustered look he might be wearing. It was simply that this man was toying with her again, and she was on the verge of losing her composure entirely.

Thwack―!

Bellus closed the distance to right in front of his face in an instant and snatched the revolver roughly from his hand.

The grip, carrying a faint warmth rather than the familiar cool bite of metal, was strangely unpleasant. The revolver felt almost slightly foreign after only a few days away from her hand, and she adjusted her grip as she spoke.

“Yantis Kal.”

“…I wondered why you hadn’t asked. You’ve already figured out quite a bit about me, it seems.”

Yantis looked at the barrel aimed squarely at his chest with a resigned expression and raised both hands lightly.

For someone standing at the end of a gun barrel, though, he seemed entirely unconcerned. It was obvious disregard, but Bellus didn’t care. She wouldn’t be caught off guard so easily this time.

For some reason, when she had woken in the forest after being transported here, Bellus’s mana had been drained in great chunks.

Her always-vast mana running that low was something that only happened in the most extreme frontline combat, when her life was on the line, so she had been privately shaken. With less than a tenth of her usual mana, dealing with the man had been impossible.

But that was then.

Thanks to Lora’s devoted care, she had done nothing but rest without lifting a finger, and had been able to refill her mana at twice the usual speed. Feeling the full, tingling charge of mana down to the tips of her fingers, Bellus cocked the revolver.

Click―

Yantis swallowed a sigh at the revolver being cocked as a matter of course.

The first emotion to appear clearly on the woman’s face, which had been expressionless throughout, was contempt. Being caught off guard by an emotion he hadn’t expected was what had done it. Yantis clicked his tongue lightly, looking at the barrel of the blunt revolver aimed squarely at him.

“Your reason for bringing me here?”

Yantis squinted one eye slightly at Bellus’s cold question and shrugged as he answered.

“Because I want to know about you.”

“…Drop the games.”

The trigger pulled slowly, as though she meant every word, and mana began gathering and swelling inside the barrel.

Yantis watched the sight with the languid thought that it felt like déjà vu and clicked his tongue lightly. He didn’t know what had made her this furious, but she needed to be calmed down first.

“If you know my name, you’d know what kind of person I am. There’s no one in Attica who doesn’t know me. So if you shoot me right now, whatever happens next is going to be quite a headache for you.”

So that was where the composure in the face of a gun barrel came from.

Infuriating, but undeniably true. According to the articles she had read, he was a war hero who had shown outstanding military prowess in the war against Hiam, which had been a string of defeats, and Attica’s Archmage.

And that wasn’t all. The man was known here by the ridiculous nickname “Flower of the Geniuses,” and was a public figure who was barely off the front page of the newspaper.

Which meant Bellus, left behind at the estate, had been forced to see the man’s face to a nauseating degree through the newspapers.

The various articles had been relentless in covering everything from where the man was at any given moment to what he was doing.

One article had even run a photograph of the man, who had supposedly attended a film screening, leaning against a back alley wall behind the grand theater and exhaling pale cigarette smoke, and the journalist had gone so far as to use the word “exclusive.”

The photograph, showing him with a cigarette balanced precariously between his lips, brow furrowed at the discomfort of his formal suit, carelessly tugging at his tie, had been reasonably worth looking at. Even she, who had clicked her tongue at the thought that there could be so little worth reporting on, had spent a while looking at that photograph while nibbling on a sweet snack.

So in conclusion, shooting the man in front of her right now was a foolish thing to do.

She knew that. And yet.

“If you still want to shoot, go ahead and try.”

The face wearing that pleased smile was insufferable, and there was simply nothing to be done about it.

Pssshk― Bang!!

* * *

Bellus was never one to act on impulse.

Her actions were always the result of thorough calculation, decisions made through rational judgment.

She had been uncharacteristically idle these past few days to replenish her depleted mana, but that hadn’t dulled the coldly trained instincts within her.

So she pulled the trigger without hesitation.

Pssshk― Bang!!

The revolver, specially modified for Bellus alone, had firepower exceeding that of a standard bazooka. Which meant that if it had fired properly, there should have been a tremendous blast loud enough to make eardrums ache.

Pshhhk―

A feeble sound escaped, and black Cor smoke curled up from the empty barrel. A familiar and acrid smell drifted past the tip of Bellus’s nose.

Yantis, who had already known the outcome, finally lowered the two hands he had been holding up as a formality and spoke.

“You’re not exactly what I’d call normal either.”

“……”

He had provoked her a little, and she had just gone ahead and fired. Yantis took her silence for embarrassment and continued in his usual tone.

“Honestly, what made you think I’d just hand it back without doing something to it? Still…”

“…I expected as much.”

Bellus cut off Yantis’s words, delivered with that pleased smile, and replied in a cold voice. The black eyes that had been meeting his lowered gently, half hidden beneath those dense lashes.

Caught off guard by the unexpectedly composed reaction, Yantis had just opened his mouth to speak again when Bellus’s lowered eyes lifted and fixed on him fully once more.

“Still, you’re supposed to be Attica’s Archmage. If you can’t even prepare for something like this, shouldn’t the people feel sorry for themselves?”

All the restraint she usually kept in place stripped away, Bellus twisted the corner of her mouth and sneered.

This was the side of her that Dolor, who had kept her company from time to time, would marvel at, saying she had a blade in her mouth. Bellus’s anger tended to manifest not as physical violence but as the kind of withering sarcasm that stripped a person down to nothing.

‘You dare tamper with the revolver Milles gave me?’

She had expected him to have done something to it, since anyone with a brain would have, but the unpleasantness refused to subside. Bellus ground the words out, packed with irritation.

“And here people trust a fool like that, calling him the Archmage, a war hero.”

Yantis looked quietly at Bellus’s sharp, cold face and let out a hollow laugh. His own attitude a moment ago had been rather ridiculous.

The instant he had seen her eyes lower, something hidden in them, the thought that had come to him was that he might have gone too far.

He had thought she seemed hurt.

Of course, she was nothing of the sort.

Yantis’s violet eyes drifted back to the woman before him, moving with an ease that came naturally. Even having confirmed that the revolver in her hand was completely useless, her stance, still holding the barrel aimed at him, hadn’t changed. It was a textbook posture, genuinely impressive.

‘She’s clearly had proper training, that much is certain. The question is, who does she belong to?’

She carried herself in a way that spoke of serious training, and he had combed through every relevant organization, but he couldn’t find anyone even remotely similar to this woman, let alone a match.

The complete absence of any trace of her within Attica made it highly likely she was from Hiam. Those bastards had been lying low as a defeated nation for now, but they were the type to be plotting a comeback at any moment.

‘If not Hiam, she could be one of the Chancellor’s people.’

That would be even worse. Yantis pushed his fringe back in irritation and stepped off the desk he had been perched on.

Thwack!

His long, elegant fingers reached out and closed around the barrel of the gun aimed at his chest.

Yantis smiled with a languid expression at the rare look of puzzlement in the woman’s black eyes. It was the first new emotion she had shown, after expressing nothing but anger in his presence.

The barrel pressed against his palm beneath his tight grip was quite hot. His lock had caused it to misfire, but until moments ago it had been seething with mana on the verge of detonating.

“What are you…”

Bellus’s questioning words cut off abruptly.