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My Male Lead Became Fierce (4)
[Anastasia’s POV]
Once I had regained my composure Adele cast a teleportation spell again. We returned to the carriage, alighted in front of the Duke’s residence, and this time we entered the study by foot.
I’m not very good at acting so I was a little nervous when we ran into the maids, but somehow it also felt a bit like we were playing a mischievous prank.
I lay out on the broad window seat and covered myself with a thin, silk blanket.
Even though he seemed to be controlling his expression, every so often Adele would lower his head and snicker. My face burned red like a lit match.
“Will you stop laughing? I’m embarrassed enough as it is.”
“No… Anastasia, you’re incredible.”
Adele had been laughing like that since he heard that I told Kylis that I wanted to kill him twice. He seemed fairly concerned when he first heard Kylis’ name, but now he was dying of laughter.
“Urgh, you’re being sarcastic. Right?”
“Of course not,” Adele said with a smile on his face.
After sitting at his desk and examining Kylis’ helmet, he concluded that he needed more time to think about what to do with it.
“But let me correct one thing, Kylis didn’t have a wife. That great ruler will never be able to understand your reason for wanting to live. He has never once felt affection for someone.”
I laced and unlaced my fingers as I listened to the bits and pieces of general knowledge that Adele was telling me.
According to Adele, Kylis was the most cruel monarch in history who viciously repressed religion. He told me that people were reluctant to write his name down because it supposedly had a corrupting influence.
“Kylis the Great killed countless people from the age of 15 to the age of 30. Because it is an account of the distant past, some facts may have become somewhat exaggerated. But there is no disagreement among historians that he was the one who ended an era.”
Simply put, I hadn’t been able to find information about Kylis in any of the books I had looked at because the excessive vileness of the subject had been sanitized as much as possible.
Kylis the Great was described, in a roundabout way, as the Mad King who spread the concept of ‘evil’ throughout the land. Although the Marquis said that in recent years even reference to that had been banned by imperial mandate. It was said to be unsuitable for our peaceful age. I could be excused for not knowing who he was since I had only been searching for his name.
Ugh, he was far more dreadful than I thought.
If I had been aware of Kylis’ identity beforehand, I would have run away without saying a single word. I would have just bottled everything up on the inside and then died of frustration.
Warm sunlight poured through the window, making me feel drowsy. I turned towards Adele.
“That person… What was the cause of his death? He said that he’s been wandering for a very long time and that half of his soul was chained up so he won’t ever be resurrected as the perfectly evil villain that he once was.”
Now that I think about it, that was probably a foreboding warning sign. Since an ordinary bad guy wouldn’t have received such a severe punishment…
Adele wanted to hear more, but understanding the look on my face that said I didn’t want to say more, he spoke instead.
“His head was cut off while he was alive. His ending was fairly normal up until that point, but it is said that half of his soul was then sealed by a holy relic along with his severed head. By some accounts that is why his malevolence has not resurfaced in later generations. The body that now wanders the Forest of Repentance must have found its way here while searching for it.”
A ghost wandering around looking for his head… just taking that part into account conjured up a sympathetic image of having been unjustly killed. But this was shocking.
Scholars claimed half in jest that if Kylis had continued to kill people, the human race could have gone extinct.
Killing was a daily routine for Kylis and he was a ruler that regarded it as a lifelong mission. But not a single person could fathom the reason why. He wasn’t seeking revenge and he had no desire for conquest. Nor did he do it for pleasure.
Kylis didn’t torture his enemies. He didn’t even loot things. He killed everyone indiscriminately. The only thing he did was kill. That was why people judged Kylis to be pure and absolute malevolence. Something like… he killed for the sake of killing? My thoughts kept going round and round.
“So like King Chester, he committed some horrible offense during his lifetime and became unable to even die? Ughhh. Rayleigh was right in the end. Kylis must be the corrupt presence that he was talking about.”
The problem was the corruption that came from being so close to the original source.
“That’s correct. Anastasia, you were simply affected by Kylis’ malevolence, but he incorrectly assumed that you must have committed some monumentally grievous transgression. He was planning on spreading more rumors about you. So don’t take it to heart. Judging by the fact that he still has enough energy to wander around in public he seems to be having a hard time understanding the situation he’s in.”
It started out as words of comfort and then ended a bit dark.
I blinked, puzzled.
“Huh?”
“So you were thinking of just leaving that b*stard alone?”
Ha ha. In the end, the word ‘b*stard’ came out after all.
Adele immediately corrected himself with a slight blush.
“I apologize. That was inappropriate. I’ll try to think of another word to use.”
I chuckled silently and asked him a question.
“But the Duke stopped sponsoring the church already… and no one believes the things he says, so are there any avenues of revenge left?”
“He still has a shelter to take refuge in, money to buy food, and all of his limbs. Those will all disappear soon.”
I lifted my head up a little.
“Wouldn’t it be a big problem if that last one disappeared?”
“Don’t worry. I am confident that no one will suspect me.”
His pearly-white smile was dazzling.
“Ah… Ha ha… Still, let’s rethink that last one.”
I glanced out the window.
The sun was low in the sky, sluggishly moving towards setting. It wasn’t dinner time yet, but it was late in the afternoon.
“It’s already this late.”
“Would you like to return now? Should I take you back?”
I hesitated, clutching the silk blanket that Adele had given me.
“C-can I stay a little longer?”
“Then I will contact Lord Oscar.”
I mulled over Oscar Sinclair while Adele spoke to an attendant.
Like me, my brother was extremely thick-skinned and one of his strengths was being able to get along with someone easily and to joke around with them, even if he was meeting them for the first time.
But it was somewhat tricky to say that we were close… even though we were brother and sister.
When he returned a little later I shot Adele a question.
“Hey, what kind of person does Oscar-oppa seem like to you?”
Without thinking about it too much Adele replied, “He’s not a bad person. He’s sociable and he knows the areas in which he’s lacking. Although he doesn’t seem to have any intention of fixing those flaws.”
Why does the last thing he said sound like it’s the most important? Although funnily enough, I’m unwilling to argue with it.
Adele came over and sat down on the window seat that I was lying on.
Rather than asking to use his lap as a pillow, which might have troubled him, I took Adele’s hand and interlaced my fingers with his. My mind became much calmer.
“I like both my brother and my parents. I want to make it work somehow. I’m trying my best to get closer to them, but… If I fail again, I’ll probably be pretty upset.”
I could only honestly confess my anxieties in front of him… only while he was listening.
If I wasn’t able to become close with my family even in my second life, then it probably meant the root of the issue was me.
“Getting to know total strangers was a lot easier…”
In my previous life I didn’t receive much love from my family to the point that even my friends thought it was pretty weird. My family never once came to important events like school entrance ceremonies or graduations. Whether I received good grades or came home covered in bruises after falling from some steep incline, they’d just give me large sums of money that were hard for me to touch at such a young age.
Maybe that was why I was so much more afraid of them completely ignoring me rather than openly disliking me.
I wanted to be loved. But more than that, I wanted to give love first. I just wanted to be given a chance to do that.
Looking down at his hand entangled with mine, Adele opened his mouth to speak.
“Lord Oscar once asked me the same question.”
Adele’s voice was calm and sweet like it always was, but hearing it made my heart race faster.
“Lord Oscar said that he didn’t know you very well despite being related to you by blood. But he also said that he didn’t want to reach out to you purely out of a sense of duty or because he felt forced to. He told me that, even if his reasoning was absurdly irresponsible, it would still be rude to you.”