I, Leonhart, Acid, and the muscle maid sisters returned triumphantly. I was already excited at the thought of boasting about getting a perfect score on the test.

But this is where the problem started.

“What are you all doing?”

No one was paying attention to me!

The castle maids who usually fussed over me when I arrived were sprawled out as if they had turned into zombies.

“…Huh?”

At times like this, I need to gently stomp my feet to wake people up.

Thump, thump. As the small sound was made, the maid sisters opened their eyes groggily and looked this way.

“Sisters!”

“Huh, gasp!”

“Lady Sien!”

They were looking at me as if they had seen a ghost.

Pale complexions, traces of sticky saliva at the corners of their mouths.

“What are you doing sitting here?”

“Th-that is…”

A maid sister staggered to her feet.

I tilted my head curiously.

Without answering what they were doing, she spoke hesitantly.

“Huh, gasp. You came back faster than expected. Please go in and have your meal. You must be hungry?”

“Hmm? Should I?”

At that moment, Leonhart, who had been walking a step ahead of me, stopped and came back, saying:

“Chestnut.”

“Hmm?”

“…Let’s eat quickly.”

Leonhart’s attitude was suspicious too.

‘Why is he like that? As if he’s seen something scary?’

I tilted my head in confusion, but neither the maid sisters nor Leonhart said anything. With suspicion piling up in my heart, I said quietly:

“Then let’s go eat quickly! Sisters, don’t just sit in the hallway, get up!”

“Y-yes…”

Even when I tried to look back to check the maid sisters’ pale complexions, there was nothing unusual. I had dinner while suppressing my slightly uneasy feelings.

Everything was the same as usual.

Except for the fact that my father, who I wanted to show my perfect test paper to, had disappeared somewhere.

It was late at night after Sien finished her dinner.

At that time, in the basement of the mansion where Sien was staying, an informant was being tortured.

“Did you say the mastermind was the Pope and the Saint?”

The assailant’s cheek was bitten by Matthias. It was a device to prevent him from biting his tongue to commit suicide.

“Ugh, urgh…!”

The assailant had tried to board the carriage Sien was riding in to kill her. If they had acted even a little later, Sien might have died. The thought made his heart shudder.

“Why do you keep trying to kill my daughter when you’ve supposedly gone to the path of light?”

“That’s…”

The assailant coughed and spat blood. However, Matthias stared at him calmly and said:

“Just say as much as you can.”

“Kn-knife…”

The tip of Matthias’s knife approached the assailant’s skin. This man was said to torture by slicing flesh with a knife. Even for a viscount, there was bound to be fear.

He coughed and opened his mouth.

“I won’t let you live.”

At Matthias’s words, the viscount bit his lip hard.

“I-I can’t speak. My body already-”

Matthias continued in a bored tone:

“There’s probably a suicide bomb installed by the temple leadership, right?”

“Cough, cough!”

“Blink if I’m right. The temple knows a secret about my daughter, Sien. Right? And my daughter poses a great threat to the temple’s existence. Correct?”

“…”

For a moment, the assailant’s eyelashes fluttered and then closed forever.

Matthias put his hand under the assailant’s nose.

He was already dead.

He wasn’t surprised, as he had anticipated this level of silencing.

When sending a viscount, they always use safety measures.

“Well then, next.”

It didn’t matter. He had gotten all the answers he wanted, so he could move on to the next.

He coldly whispered to another assailant lying on the floor.

“Who instigated you? Tell me.”

“I can’t… speak…”

The other one had tried to behead Sien by infiltrating the academy. They were all instigated by someone else. He had managed to escape and enter the Miremod mansion.

“Then I’ll tell you instead.”

Fear crept onto the face of the surviving assailant.

It was because he knew better than anyone about Matthias Miremod’s infamous reputation.

Because he…

“You’re trash from our family, aren’t you?”

As a member of the Miremod family, he knew very well about Matthias Miremod’s evil deeds.

The mastermind behind him began to be revealed one by one from Matthias’s mouth.

“The mastermind is the Senate President, and you’re one of his pawns, right? He must still be eyeing the position of the duke’s successor. But I wonder, do you think that will go as you wish?”

Matthias smiled crookedly and raised his sword. It was time to mercilessly punish those insolent ones who dared to try to take his daughter’s life.

At that moment, a blade so sharp it was chilling was pressed against the assailant’s neck.

On a dark night when all the corridor lights were turned off and even the moon was trapped in clouds.

I, lying alone in bed, quietly got up.

Then I walked tiptoeing towards the door. You might ask if the muscle maid sisters guarding the door wouldn’t stop me? Not at all, piece of cake.

Because…

“Snore-”

…The muscle maid sisters were snoring like that, probably tired.

Still, just in case they might wake up, I carefully breathed while sneaking out.

‘It’s strange. I need to observe a bit. What happened while we were away from the mansion!’

No matter how I thought about it, the maids’ behavior earlier was excessively suspicious.

Above all, I was worried that our father kept being out of sight.

I looked around the quiet, no, the dark and even eerie mansion, trying to find suspicious places.

‘The sisters being busy earlier was a bit suspicious.’

After going down near the corridor, while descending the landings one by one.

I could see the basement stairs dimly lit. This place was said to be used as a storage room, but because it was said to be a dust pit, I hadn’t bothered to go in for years.

And strangely, at this moment, I had a feeling that something important I didn’t know about was happening in that storage room below the basement stairs.

I quickly ran down towards the light, and there I could see Father’s gullible friends guarding in front of the storage room, frozen like ice.

“Uncles!”

As soon as they heard me, the aide jumped up. Although soft-hearted gullible inside, shadows on their faces made them look more threatening.

“What are you uncles doing there?”

“Y-yes?”

I stood on tiptoe and looked.

It was certain that there was something beyond that door.

I blinked, then saw a silhouette escaping through the door and widened my eyes.

“Oh? It’s Father!”

I can’t pretend not to see our father’s silhouette. At that moment, the door tried to close quickly again.

“L-Lady Sien!”

“Open the door!”

They could only stamp their feet, unable to catch me slipping out like a loach.

‘Maybe it’s because their hearts are soft?’

Anyway, it was good for me.

Perhaps because our father’s heart is also so soft, he seemed worried that I might get caught in the door.

Father couldn’t close the door roughly, instead he quickly came out of the door and slammed the storage room door shut.

“Father! What’s in there? What did you do? Today I got a perfect score on the test-”

I glanced and saw that Father looked healthy. So I was about to childishly boast about my perfect test paper…

Father was holding a dagger, no less. I stared at Father’s knife with wide eyes.

“Wh-what’s that knife?”

“Huh?”

“That’s a knife, isn’t it?”

“Uh, huh?”

I quickly took one step at a time. Father stood there with his trembling pupils fixed on me, unable to hide the knife behind his back.

I ran toddling towards such a father and stood right in front of the knife.

Only then did Father, who had barely come to his senses, try to put the knife in its sheath hurriedly, but I was faster.

“It smells like blood! There’s blood on the knife!”

Father shook his pale face hurriedly and said.

“Huh? That can’t be. It’s ketchup, ketchup!”

“It’s not ketchup!”

I stood on tiptoe and glared at the tip of the sword Father was holding.

Moreover, the wind blew through the gap of a timely opened window. For a moment, a fishy smell hit my nose. I stared at Father with narrowed eyes.

“Father, what did you do?”

Father’s expression froze coldly. I stared at Father with a pounding heart. Father’s pupils were shaking seriously.

“Why is there blood? What did you do?”

“That is…”

Father had a dumbfounded look for a moment. It was clearly a face with something to hide. I pressured Father like a gunman carefully aiming at a target.

“Hmm? Father. Tell me honestly. What is it?”

Even as I said this, I somehow felt uneasy.

‘Did Father become too much of a villain because I told him to become a villain? So, it can’t be, but are there perhaps corpses of bad guys piled up in that storage room?’

It was to the extent of having such an absurd delusion. I tried to get rid of the strange imagination blooming hazily in my head and looked straight at Father.

“To be honest…”

Father inhaled and exhaled. His chest rose and fell steeply. He seemed to have a very hard time choosing the next words.

Right at that moment, the sound of clicking shoes was heard from afar.

“…This gentleman knows what’s in there.”

It was a person I had never seen before.

He had blonde hair and blue eyes, a scar on his face, and one eye covered with an eye patch, looking just like Captain Hook.

It was too dark to see his face clearly, but he definitely had a vicious impression.

‘Oh? This person’s appearance…’

“I’m Duke Sebastian. Your father’s close friend. Nice to meet you, Sien.”

Yes, that person who wasn’t a major character in but was considered a threat to the crown prince’s position, another son of the emperor. It was Duke Sebastian!

“Hello!”

Anyway, since he said he was our father’s friend now, I thought he probably wasn’t a grand villain.

‘There was hardly any storyline allocated to Duke Sebastian in the original work anyway…’

I let go of my mental guard, then bowed my head politely and greeted him. A smile formed on his lips. Now it was my turn to ask the curious question.

“By the way, Your Grace!”

“Yes?”

“You said you know what’s in there, right? What is it?”

“Do you really want to know?”

Father had an expression as if his blood had dried up. I glanced at Father, then nodded vigorously.

“Yes!”

“Then I’ll tell you. Will you open the storage room door?”

“Sebastian!”

Father shouted in a loud voice and blocked the storage room door. But Father seemed to have forgotten how small my body was in his excessive panic.

He failed to grab me properly, and I flung open the storage room door.

“Huh…?”

And inside the storage room was something I couldn’t have imagined.

Behind my back, I heard Father swallowing hard and Duke Sebastian chuckling softly.