“I knew keeping an eye on that bitch in the cloak was the right move.”

They must have found her quickly, just as the Firebird Hunter had said. I tilted my head at the crazed mercenary.

“You didn’t run?”

She might have seemed half-mad, but she’d struck me as exceptionally good at staying alive. I hadn’t expected her to still be in the domain.

“So it was you who ruined everything, brat.”

She raised her sword at me. At some point, the alley had emptied. Had people fled because they sensed a fight coming, or had other mercenaries cleared them out?

That stray thought crossed my mind, but what came out of my mouth sounded reasonable enough.

“It wasn’t me who ruined it. It was your mouth.”

This time and in my last life, she’d told me enough to get this far.

GRIND.

I heard her teeth grind together.

“Because of you, the job failed, and Benjamin died. If I hadn’t been out looking for you, I could’ve gone with him... It’s all your fault.”

Unfortunately, Simon hadn’t gotten anything out of Benjamin, the mercenary commander. With the knight commander’s help, they had won the fight without much trouble, but Benjamin had killed himself before they could torture him.

I’d wondered why she hadn’t been there. Had she been looking for me? She really wasn’t sane. Her sense of priorities was entirely her own.

With the mercenary commander dead, she was the only source of information left.

I studied her: eyes gleaming with madness, a red tongue that kept darting out to lick her lips, and a face twisted with rage. One look told me I wasn’t going to get any information out of her.

“I’ll kill you, give your soul to Benjamin, then peel off your skin and hang it over my bed.”

Here I was, facing down a woman straight out of a horror movie in broad daylight. In my previous life, I would have called the police at once. Now I had to deal with her myself.

She held up her sword and pretended to lick its blade. It glowed green. If only she’d actually licked it.

“Luckily, you’re just my type. You look delicious.”

I had no idea what kind of “type” she meant. I didn’t want to know, either. She’d been hunting me all this time, so she was hardly going to let me go because I was young. Nor did I want to run.

SCRAPE.

When I gripped the sword’s hilt again, the cloth-wrapped blade dragged across the ground with a harsh scrape.

‘Maybe I should’ve left this sword in my room and brought a mass-produced one.’

Carrying it around just because it was a good sword had made things troublesome.

WHOOSH.

I drew a deep breath.

“Come on, draw the sword you’re hiding under that cloak. Entertain me.”

But there was no sword under my cloak. With the breath I’d drawn in, I spread mana throughout my body. I could feel strength in every cell.

I tightened my grip. The sword that had been dragging on the ground rose into the air. Mana gathered in my arm again, then flowed through my hand and out.

POP-POP-POP-POP!

Behind me, I heard cloth bursting apart—the cloth wrapped around my sword. Torn strips of white fabric flew in every direction.

“What? That was a sword?”

Her startled voice came through the fluttering cloth. It drew closer fast, and I heaved my sword up with all my strength.

BANG!

A heavy impact struck the hand holding my sword. It was powerful enough that I would have been driven back if I hadn’t anchored myself to the ground with mana.

“Gah!”

But I didn’t give an inch. The impact blew the cloth away, clearing my view of the female mercenary as she was flung backward.

CRASH!

She only stopped when she hit the wall. Clenching her teeth, she glared at me.

“Impossible! Someone your size knocked me back?”

Oh, right. When I eavesdropped on them, the male mercenary had sent me flying. The next time we met, my sword broke and I fled injured. Come to think of it, I hadn’t fought her properly in this life. Was that why she’d been reckless enough to come after me?

SWISH, SWISH.

I took the sword in both hands and walked toward her, swinging it back and forth through the air. It still felt like I was swinging a giant oar rather than a sword. At my size, wielding such a large blade properly was difficult.

But there was no rule saying I had to use swordsmanship just because I held a sword.

I kicked off the ground.

BANG!

My mana-filled foot drove the ground behind me, and I shot forward. The startled woman rapidly drew closer. She swung her sword at me with all her might, but I merely held my huge blade upright in front of me.

CLANG!

The swords collided. My opponent was a knight-level mercenary with a nimble blade. In my last life, when I’d used a sword suited to my body, we hadn’t settled the fight. This time was different.

Light gathered on my greatsword, and the mercenary’s eyes widened. Her blade couldn’t withstand my new sword. The edge of her sword, which had been giving off a faint green glow, crumpled and was knocked aside. Her arm swung wide with it. Nothing stood between us anymore.

Keeping my sword upright, I took another step forward.

THUD.

The greatsword sank deep into the wall.

“Ghk!”

The mercenary coughed up blood. Gripping the sword that had pierced her stomach and driven into the wall, she glared at me.

“So you weren’t a real kid after all. Can you make yourself look like one? Where did you come from?”

She reached a trembling hand toward me. Her weak fingers neared my face. Without hesitation, I let go of the sword and stepped back.

“How did you know?”

“A mercenary who fights with a sword doesn’t grow her nails long. Of course I was suspicious.”

At my words, she looked down at her hand with a bitter expression. As it slowly sank, flashes of green showed beneath her nails. She hadn’t given up trying to kill me, even at the end.

“You really do look delicious. What a shame...”

With that last chilling remark, her head fell forward.

I watched her for a moment. She didn’t move again.

‘Is it over?’

At last, the score from my previous life was settled. I began to hear people in the distance. It was time to go home.

I pulled out my sword and quickly left.

The journey home was peaceful. Simon was quiet, too, as though his real fight against the mercenary commander had taught him something. The knights and soldiers seemed more at ease than they had at the start.

Monsters appeared now and then as we crossed the domains, but this time they were weak mutants the soldiers could handle on their own. And so, after a rather hectic trip, I returned home.

Several months had passed, but the domain and the mansion had hardly changed.

After the duke’s brief welcome, everyone who had been waiting flocked to Simon. The knights and soldiers headed to a tavern with the comrades awaiting them.

Still, unlike before, some people greeted me. Juan the soldier clutched a purse of money and thanked me. Sir Hugo bowed to me, then went off to drink with Miguel. The head butler acknowledged me with a glance before following the duke, but the knight commander left without even pretending to notice me.

Perhaps because I’d changed since our departure, the looks people stole at me had changed subtly, too. But my mother, standing before me and sighing with relief, mattered more than any of those looks.

“I’m home.”

“Yes. Nothing happened, did it?”

A great deal had happened, but I smiled as I answered.

“No.”

* * *

The day after Simon’s party returned, three people gathered in the duke’s office: the duke, the knight commander, and the head butler. It had been some time since the three had met.

“... And that was how the rebellion ended. We were told House Hierro would deal with the remaining rebels, so we left the lord’s castle.”

When the knight commander finished his account, the duke nodded.

“According to a letter that arrived afterward, they’ve finished dealing with the remnants as well. Unfortunately, it seems they couldn’t discover who was behind it.”

“House Hierro appeared to have suffered considerable losses too.”

“Quite a few knights died, it seems. The domain has been thrown into turmoil by the hunt for the mercenaries as well. But the greatest problem must be the death of the marquis’s heir. They passed him off as a soldier, but some nobles will catch a whiff of the truth. House Hierro’s standing will be shaken considerably on several fronts.”

The knight commander and the head butler nodded.

Among the nobility, ugly rumors could do tremendous damage to people who valued honor above all else. The Marquis of Hierro was sure to be plagued for some time by unfounded(?) rumors.

“Even so, I don’t intend to delay the engagement,” the duke said. “Now of all times, we can’t afford to appear weak.”

The knight commander fell silent in thought for a moment. “It would have been difficult to swallow up House Hierro with only mercenaries and an illegitimate son. Who could have ordered it...?”

“Hard to say. Plenty of people oppose an alliance between us and House Hierro. The noble faction, naturally, but there are opponents among the supporters of the First Prince and the Second Prince as well...”

The duke frowned as he thought of the kingdom’s hopelessly tangled politics.

“Even so, there can’t be many who would actually make a move,” the knight commander said.

“We’re still looking into it, but they’ve cut off every trail so cleanly that finding them won’t be easy.”

The knight commander tilted his head. “Do you think so? For all that, the rebellion was rather clumsy. The timing of the attack was improvised, and then there was the way it was discovered...”

Historically, many rebellions had begun on impulse, though not many of those had succeeded. Perhaps this had simply been another common rebellion of that sort.

The head butler offered a counterargument. “Could it seem that way because a child discovered it? If not for Lord Alex, the rebellion might have succeeded.”

The duke’s eyes sharpened. “Surely not to that extent? He only happened to overhear a conversation, didn’t he?”

The knight commander looked uncomfortable. “Well, he said himself that he overheard it by chance... But there are a few things that don’t quite sit right if we call it mere chance.”

The head butler picked up where the knight commander left off. “He befriended the marquis’s illegitimate son during the trip. He strongly insisted on scouting the city and met the illegitimate son again while doing so. It’s also hard to understand why Lady Adria showed him the secret passage and went out with him.”

“And she told the illegitimate son about the passage, too.”

The duke recalled what the letter had said about Adria.

‘Was she said to be almost confined to her room?’

Apparently, someone watched her under the pretext of guarding her wherever she went, even while she slept. Her life could hardly be comfortable.

But after what she had done, the punishment and surveillance were only to be expected. To be honest, the duke wasn’t particularly pleased with her as a prospective daughter-in-law, either. But Simon liked her, and he couldn’t abandon House Hierro for political reasons. It would probably be better to bring her here sooner rather than later.

Having settled that, he returned to the matter at hand.

“So either he’s had absurdly good luck, or all of this may have happened according to his plan?”

“He’s said to be a genius, but he’s still a child. Given his age, coincidence may be more likely.”

“He is clever, but still too young to act as a double agent. It must have been a string of coincidences.”

Both the knight commander and the head butler had suggested it might not be coincidence. Yet as soon as the duke voiced his suspicion, they argued the opposite. The duke gave a rueful smile.

“You’ve taken a liking to the boy, it seems.”

The knight commander started to reply, but the duke continued.

“If it was coincidence, it doesn’t matter. But if it wasn’t, what am I to do with him?”

House Gresia already had Simon, its heir, and his younger brother Manuel. Two sons beyond reproach—and an illegitimate son who might outshine them both.

Having just discussed what had happened to House Hierro, the knight commander and the head butler had no answer for the duke.