Chapter 13
Toby clicked his tongue as if displeased, staring at Elio with a distorted expression.
Elio didn’t understand who he meant she resembled, but she forced the trembling corners of her mouth upward.
“Don’t smile.”
“…Pardon?”
“It’s annoying because it makes you look even more like them when you smile.”
Elio tightly shut her mouth, which had been opening to speak. Who on earth did she look like? It was utterly baffling how she was supposed to please men with such foul tempers.
The closer you lived to the north, the nastier people’s dispositions seemed to get.
A wave of sorrow kept rising up in her throat. Feeling too embarrassed to even look at Carlos’s face, she turned away and cast her gaze downward.
It looked like no one was going to buy her potion…
Clink. Clank. The sound of a bell rang out. A boisterous crowd of men poured through the open door.
The young junior knights, carrying the scent of tree branches as if they had been outdoors for a long time, crossed the inn’s dining hall with puzzled expressions.
“Vice-commander. What on earth are you doing?”
“Can’t you tell? Potion.”
Toby replied in a blunt voice.
“Why are you putting that on? You always said we should overcome things with sheer willpower…”
“W-well, you knights are doing such incredible and monumental tasks that you need willpower. You really ought to save your mental energy.”
Quickly cutting in, Elio scurried away from the wild-dog-ferocious Toby and Leon, hiding like a frightened animal behind a young knight.
Peeking out from behind the knights while pressing down her pounding heart, she stretched her neck.
Carlos was still standing tall in the same spot.
Accompanied by Greta, who had walked down at some point and was laughing while shaking her head.
Greta slipped her hand into her inner pocket and pulled out a leather purse.
“Lady. Shall I buy a potion for you? How much money do you need?”
Elio blankly stared up at Greta’s polite smile and the shiny gold coins resting in her hand.
“Lady?”
Why did being called “Lady” persistently make her feel even more ashamed? A real lady wouldn’t be so desperate over money.
Carlos silently watched her peek out from behind the young junior knights, then, as if having lost interest, flicked his cigar into an ashtray and walked up the stairs.
Elio followed him with churning eyes.
With a heavy thud, the door to the second-floor room clicked shut at the end of the man’s long, agonizingly slow strides.
“Lady?”
A neat, soothing voice tried to calm her bewildered state.
“Don’t worry. Instead of the commander, I’ll buy plenty from you. The commander rarely uses cheap liquid-type potions like this…”
At Greta’s reassuring words, Elio managed to compose her expression and pulled the trembling corners of her mouth back up.
With a bright, smiling face, she explained clearly and precisely that her potion was by no means inferior in performance.
Because her fingertips were shaking quite a bit, she couldn’t demonstrate by applying it as a sample.
Late in the afternoon, as the sun dipped a little lower.
“It’s four thousand shillings in total. You know it’s cheap, but the performance is guaranteed, right?”
Carlos stared at the flushed face and red nose of the shamelessly brazen assassin-rabbit.
Under the man’s fixed gaze, Elio lifted her chin, which had been sinking. Slightly frowning at the rich scent of cigars rolling off the man, she rubbed her stuffy nose-tip. She hated and felt uncomfortable around a gangster-like chain-smoker.
“A swindler.”
“A swindler, you say?”
Elio widened her eyes in shock and quickly offered a rebuttal.
“I only said I’d give you the potion for free if we made it across the Ogre Mountains in one piece. But we didn’t make it across in one piece, did we? So you have to pay for it in full, sir.”
Elio firmly pressed her lips together. Her long eyelashes, damp with moisture, fluttered wildly in agitation.
“Hey, Lady, you told us five thousand shillings earlier! Why is the commander getting it for four thousand?”
A young knight, in the middle of dabbing potion onto himself with his bulky frame, cried out in perceived injustice.
“That’s because Commander Carlos killed the ogre—even if a little late—so he gets a special discount! You guys just stood there doing nothing!”
When Carlos walked down to the first floor, the sight that met his eyes was a spectacle.
To think these grown men, who wouldn’t care if a finger got chopped off, were applying potions to tiny scratches.
How on earth did she manage to sell those?
“Lady, we were under orders from the commander just to stand watch and observe! In our hearts, we had already hacked that ogre bastard to pieces hundreds of times!”
“H-hearts don’t count! Next time, show it with your actions!”
Elio puffed out her cheeks. Even her pale chest instantly flushed the color of a strawberry.
She’s going to overheat at this rate.
Carlos curved the corners of his lips in a faint smile. He nudged the potion bottle with his finger.
“Am I getting special treatment?”
“It’s not special treatment; you saved me, so I’m just showing a minimum token of gratitude.”
Giving him a sideways glare with a face as red as a tomato, Elio carefully folded the money she received from the knights and tucked it neatly into her flower-patterned pouch.
Seeing that absurd scene, Carlos let out a quiet laugh. He gently wrapped his long fingers around the small potion bottle.
“What are you trying to buy with all that money anyway? I’m going to take responsibility for everything you need.”
Elio narrowed her eyes at the man’s nonchalant reply and whispered,
“We’re splitting up in three months, remember?”
“So?”
“Are you saying you’ll take responsibility for the rest of my life?”
“Money? How much could it possibly take.”
Carlos casually flicked the ash off his fully burned-out cigar.
“…Someday, you’re going to change your tune. You’ll complain that even the money I spend on food is a waste. No matter how much money someone has, human hearts work that way. Once affection fades, everything about a person starts to look repulsive to you.”
Elio remembered to her bones the pain and starvation of her stepmother, who had to beg for money while being beaten by her father every day for being useless.
The dying face of that emaciated young stepmother, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, was still vivid in her mind.
At the age of seven, she had learned a crucial fact: to survive, one had to be useful.
“My affection isn’t going to fade.”
“Right. I know. For now, if you want to show your benevolence, please buy my potion.”
At the woman’s desperate tone, Carlos let out a quiet scoff.
A cockroach-like rabbit, struggling desperately to survive, crying and laughing over a mere handful of coins…
“Sir? I trust you. I might not trust tomorrow’s version of you, but I trust that today’s version of you will buy my potion. Right?”
Struggling as she tried to force the potion back into the man’s hand, Elio pried open his clenched fist.
Seeing the soft hand struggling all by itself, Carlos finally let out a low sigh and relaxed the grip of his fist.
When he wrapped his hand around the potion, the woman beamed brighter than ever.
“I need quite a bit of travel funds so I can leave the Schönhardt estate on time, you see.”
Elio’s turquoise eyes sparkled as if they had captured all the burning light of the summer sun.
“The effectiveness is absolute! You tried it yourself back then, on my cheek…”
Carlos’s finger twitched slowly.
Staring at the woman’s cheek where the bruise had once settled, he traced the smooth glass bottle as if he might crush and shatter it.
“Weren’t you pleased with it?”
The woman’s clear voice trembled once more.
Carlos inhaled the floral scent blowing in from the window. Amidst the damp smell of earth and the cool scent of grass, a vivid aroma of acacia drifted past.
Swallowing hard as she watched the utterly silent man, Elio cautiously reached her hand out toward the money resting in front of Carlos.
“I-I need travel funds so I can leave promptly when the time comes…”
Carlos turned his head. With a smooth slide, he pulled the four thousand shillings left on the table over to his side.
Elio’s eyes widened round as she stared at the money suddenly moving out of reach. Leaning back against his chair, Carlos wore a calm smile.
“I don’t feel like buying it anymore. Feels like a rip-off.”
The suspicion and pettiness of Schönhardt’s heir were truly astonishing.
“A rip-off? It even has purification properties! This is dirt cheap for what it is!”
“…Purification?”
Carlos raised an eyebrow.
“You know how to use purification?”
“…I-I can do it.”
Tilting his head sideways, he casually extended his large hand.
“…Why?”
“Do it.”
Elio hastily averted her gaze, fleeing as if running away from the scar-covered hand resting before her. Staring only at the cascading acacia blossoms outside the tall window on the left, she parted her hesitant lips.
“I don’t have enough mana right now because I used it all up making potions.”
Elio scrubbed hard at her burning eyelids over her lame excuse. A weak little rabbit. A pathetic rabbit. The man’s criticisms seemed to echo in her ears.
Without a word, Carlos watched her before reaching out to pull up her lowered chin.
“Don’t rub your eyes so hard.”
Elio blinked her round eyes, staring down at her wrist now caught in the man’s grip.
Extinguishing his burned-out cigar, Carlos let out a soft laugh.
“Tired? If you’re tired, you should sleep instead of abusing your eyes.”
Eager to run away from the man today more than ever, Elio hurriedly nodded with a blazing-red face.
Though she wasn’t the least bit sleepy, Elio somehow ended up taking a nap anyway. Afterward, she sat on the bench outside the inn, poking at the sand with the worn toe of her shoe.
“Can you actually use purification?”
“……”
“Who knows if telling the commander you’d show him tomorrow was just some cheap parlor trick to stall.”
Toby spoke with indifference, spreading his arms across the backrest of the bench.
“Sir. A parlor trick, you say? I really do know how to use all basic magic.”
“Then why can’t you show it right now?”
“Well, that’s… I’ll handle that on my own. The reason I called you over separately is because I have something to ask.”
The two of them sat far apart on the bench outside the inn like total strangers.
“Let’s hear it.”
A bleak wind swept between them. Hesitating, Elio scratched the back of her neck.
“…My spar today… did I do okay…?”
Toby opened his wide mouth as he reached to uncork his wineskin. He stared at the crazy rabbit with a dumbfounded expression.
“Well, there’s nobody else to ask. I figured if I asked Commander Carlos, he wouldn’t give me a straight answer anyway…”
Thinking back to the man who had stood frozen and icy after the spar without offering a single word of praise, the strength immediately drained from her shoulders.
What on earth had been wrong, and how much had she displeased him?
Too weak. Too faint-hearted. He must have found her utterly disappointing. Imagining how much more pathetic he would think of her since she couldn’t even demonstrate purification made her stomach ache.
Still, they had to live together for three months… Should she try making a few more potions?
Rubbing her throbbing stomach, Elio kicked at the sand with her foot.
“…Asking Commander Carlos would be pointless anyway.”
Whimper-whine! Whimper-whine!
At the sudden, intensified whimpering of the puppy, Elio blinked around with a furrowed brow.
Hush now.
Immediately following, a rhythmic, affectionate voice soothing the puppy could be heard, but no matter how much she looked around, nobody was in sight. With suspicious eyes, Elio peered over the stone wall.
