“The maid will take the clothes, so tell them to rest. It’s raining and the roads are slippery and the sun is gone, so we won’t be able to go down right away. I think we’ll have to rest here, so Benson should change clothes too.”
He nodded. He waved his hand at his eyes as if asking if he had anything else to say. Benson bowed lightly to say hello and then approached Ersia. My eyes followed his path and reached Ersia at the end. The look of my younger sister, who was sitting blankly with her lips biting, looked very confused. Her eyes narrowed. Carefully avoiding the slightly wet ground, I pulled the blanket wrapped around her body tightly with my hand. I wanted to avoid the cold wind entering my body.
Moving cautiously, I looked at Ian’s back as he gave orders to the knights. He lightly gave instructions to the knight commander called Oria. After Oria nodded his head, he and several of the knights started to descend the mountain in an instant.
“Where are you going?”
“I think we should stay here for a day, but we are running out of clothes and food, so he told us to go to a nearby village and get them.”
Did I need to?
“If the road is fine, I’d rather take a carriage and go down.”
“I checked, and there are falling rocks and broken trees all over the road. It hasn’t rained enough for a landslide.”
“That…” he grinned.
“It must mean that the other party was fully prepared. The cross section of the tree looked like it was cut with a sharp axe. It’s not a natural disaster.”
Ian turned his head and looked down at the man tied to the tree. He was a middle-aged man with brown hair. He had his head down. Ian looked down at the man and tapped his stomach with his foot. For a moment the man flinched, then squinted his eyes and looked up at Ian. The pupils of his eyes, which slit Ian once, then looked at me. The man’s mouth opened slightly, and he grinned.
“This this… To think that Grand Duke Berdian moved that heavy buttocks himself to save the woman he loves. After all, isn’t love great?”
“Noisy.”
Ian dismissed the man’s sarcasm in one word. Ian’s mouth opened again as he slightly bent his knees and gazed directly at the man.
“What is your name?”
“Do I need to know?”
“When I die, I should at least write my name on the tombstone.”
“Thank you for that.”
“Then again. What’s your name?”
The man grinned once again. Drops of water hanging from the tree fell little by little and wet the man’s head.
“Bod Bedel.”
“Bedel?”
Ian’s brow narrowed. Ian tilted his head for a moment, then looked at me. I also shook my head. I had met and talked with many people while doing business, but I had never heard of the Bethel family. The saints were the same. Ian turned his head back to the man.
“Where are you from?”
“I’m a free spirit. I don’t really belong anywhere.”
At that free-spirited answer, Ian took out a golden disc from his bosom and waved it in front of his eyes. The man’s expression darkened slightly.
“Is this yours?”
“It’s from my arms, so it must be mine.”
“You weren’t passing it on to someone else?”
“Ha, who other than me would use something that expensive?”
His voice sounded as if his throat had been scratched violently. A man with the surname Bedel spat out a handful of bloody phlegm on the ground, saying to solve his voice boiling with phlegm. His eyes narrowed. It was right in front of my feet. After taking a step back, Ian covered the phlegm with dirt and grass on the ground, pressed it with his foot, and opened his mouth to him again.
“Looking back, I guess you knew that this was used for counterfeit money.”
“It’s not like you’re wearing that kind of stupid head. You think it’s more useful to have it on your shoulder than rumors?”
Ian quietly listened to him and smiled. He put his disc back into his bosom and moved. to hit but? But instead of using wild violence, his hand moved quietly and grabbed Bedel by the collar. He lowered his head and brought it close to Bedel, whispering quietly. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it was a long whisper. After a while, Ian, who let Bethel go, softened his expression again and opened his mouth.
“Where did you get this?”
Bedel stared at Ian, then rolled his eyes and looked at me. Why was he looking at me all of a sudden? When I met his suspicious gaze, he made a fishy sneer.
“It seems that even the Grand Duke of Berdian would want to avoid being arrogant in front of his lover.”
“Excuse me?”
“It is a story that you are receiving a lot of love.”
I looked back at Ian and he shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, since I have nothing more to lose, I will answer.”
Bedel smiled.
“Just kill him, son of a bitch.”
Ian had a lot of patience, he thought to himself. He believed that most issues could be resolved through dialogue and considered violence to be the last resort. In front of his eyes is the head of the enemy, who tried to kill his lovely woman, but he tried to be as patient as possible.
He had a lot to figure out. He had to coax and find out where he got the counterfeit money discs and who was behind the orders to attack Laurencia. So he persevered once.
“If you don’t want to see what’s in your head alive, whether it’s a brain or a soft sponge, you’d better blow it. Fortunately, I’m in a pretty good mood today. If you talk well, I can let you go without getting sick, or if you do better, you can end up cutting off a leg. I was in charge. In other words, if you want to know how patient you are, feel free to play with that mouth, and you’ll get an answer.”
Well, there was a gap between being patient and the words coming out of your mouth, but what about it? I didn’t want to show a cruel look in my lovely eyes. So I had no choice but to hope that this man would come to his word. However, his outburst of words was sarcastic, tantamount to testing his reason. Reason seemed to be cut off. I didn’t need it all and wanted to open that mouth with violence. I wanted to drag her to the Berdian family, lock her in the dungeon, and pour out all the torture without even giving her a sip of water. His hand moved and struck Bedel on the top of his head, trying to knock him out. But Lawrence’s hand came before that.
Ian faced Lawrence’s hand and eyes that were stopping him. She shook her head quietly, then took a step towards Bedel and opened her mouth gently.
“Are you an assassin or a knight?”
When he heard Lawrence’s soft voice, it always felt like a gentle mountain breeze was blowing. He felt his head, which was filled with anger, cool down at the touch like a warm air that calmed the waves that were rolling in one corner of his heart.
I looked down at Laurencia. Contrary to her voice, her face was very hardened.
“Me? I’m nothing. I’m neither a mercenary nor a knight.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m a wanderer”
“A wanderer?”
“Yeah, didn’t you hear? I’m a free spirit So you’d better not think about trying to find out who’s behind me. There’s no one behind me and I did all of this because I wanted to.”
Laurencia put a faint smile on her lips.
“You mean you wanted to kill me?”
“Yes.”
“What did I do wrong to you?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. I just wanted to kill the lady. I wanted this disc.”
Her expression strangely changed.
“They say you tried to kill me because you didn’t do anything wrong, but you wanted the disc, but I didn’t have it. So, is it me that someone else offered to give it to you?”
“What’s going to happen?”
“But you said there was no background. Isn’t that strange?”
Bedel laughed.
“Nothing strange. That person is not behind me or anything, just a passer-by who asked me out of the blue. I don’t even know who that person is. But I gave you this disc and was asked to kill you. I even gave you money and knights to do so. Alas!”
‘Should I sew up that mouth?’ Ian pondered for a moment.
Hearing that sophistry made him feel possessed. Somehow, it seemed that he would get caught in his mouth and eventually release it. He thought he was a pretty eloquent man. Ian turned his gaze back to Lawrence. What would she think? Ian thought Laurencia was pretty brainy. Not only was she intelligent, but she was also good at figuring things out and making analogies. He thought it would be perfect to use as a staff member. He wondered how Lawrence would react to Bedel’s sophistry. Shall we laugh and argue? Or should she skip over it? Then, as he made up her mind to stun and take Bedel on the spot, Lawrence’s mouth opened.
“You are not free.”
“What?”
“Free spirits don’t talk like that.”
“what…”
Lawrence stretched her back and looked down at Bedel. Her eyes had become very ferocious. Ian looked at her blankly as he wondered if she was the Lawrence he knew. She smiled and opened her mouth again.
“Don’t play with me, son of a bitch.”
I quite liked Bedel’s expression, as if he was slightly surprised. I leaned over and stared at his face. It seemed that he did not know if I would use these words. People have said that I had a lot of patience. But I was quite hot-tempered, and my grandfather often told me I had to kill my temper.
It was true that despite what Bedel had done, it bothered him to spit out mean words to Ian.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I found it very fun to let go of sophistry one by one. I know a little bit of that kind of speech. A speech that hides important information when the listener is confused about the paradox while arranging oddly paradoxical words side by side.”
Bedel’s eyebrows twitched. It was one of the speeches that merchants quite hate. I didn’t know what to think, but this was how I decided. First of all, you claim to be a free spirit, but I don’t think so. They’re trying to hide some very important information. Maybe they wanted to hide someone they couldn’t help but think was behind it. Seeing as he was trying to hide that very elaborately, he must be quite a heavyweight.
“It’s not funny. You write such delusions in your diary alone, don’t you?”
“I don’t think it’s a delusion, but there is a basis.”
“Basis?”
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Translator Note:
Hello there! This is RJR. Thank you very much for reading.
Next post will be released on August, 14.
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