CH 221

Kane was the spitting image of someone who’d run like crazy. His breath was raspy, and his sweat-drenched hair was a wind-blown mess. Not only was his armor missing, even his knight uniform was soaked from being pelted by rain. Capping the picture, his horse was slumped on the ground behind him, neighing pitifully as if to say it could run no more.

“Why are you here?” The saintess remembered the Aluna arc—it was a place meant solely for the female and male lead. ‘I’m sure that at this time, Kane was…’ At this point in the plot, she vaguely remembered the knight commander had begun to develop feelings for Cecile. Wasn’t he supposed to be suffering from the fact that he was pining after his lord’s wife, and because Cecile only viewed him as a good comrade and subordinate?

‘This one’s a huge headache too.’ Be it Irene or Kane, why did their emotions keep deviating from the plot like this? It really flummoxed the saintess. She had created this world, so everything was supposed to play out according to her thoughts, and yet… why? Putting aside how the events and incidents were playing out differently, why were even the personalities of these characters changing?

‘This… It’s as if this isn’t a book, but another world that really exists somewhere.’ This was the thought that was truly gnawing at her. Dying, killing, and stealing—these were all things the saintess was comfortable with because she thought it was just things happening in a book, and she could allow as much since she was the creator of this world. But, what if that wasn’t the case? What should she do then?

While she was lost in her thoughts, fireworks began shooting up into the sky. Kane was staring intently at her, with fireworks bursting in the background. ‘What a view.’ The saintess felt like this entire moment was being automatically captured in her memory and saved under a file named something like ‘MaleLead2_Confession_MajorEvent.jpg.’

Kane took a step closer to her, and she caught a whiff of his odor, mixed with that of his horse and sweat. The realness of the situation finally setting in, the saintess retreated a step, not from discomfort but from how excessively vivid everything felt. It was as if she’d just learned that what she had thought was a dream was in fact reality. Suddenly, the words Kane had uttered moments ago came back to her.

“I ran away without a word?” There was only one thing that came to mind. Pointing a finger at Kane, she cried out in surprise, “You… You can’t be talking about that note?”

The smile on the knight commander’s face was replaced with a stiff look. “So, you won’t feign ignorance,” he replied.

“Th-that was you?”

“Then, who else but me?” Kane’s face hardened at her question, but after pausing for a moment, he added, “It’s okay. I’m confident I’ll win after all.”

“Win? Win what? Rather than that… What you said about ‘your first’ and ‘taking responsibility!’ What was all that about?” The saintess asked about the thing that had been bothering her all this time. This was an important issue for her.

‘I don’t think I put in some old-fashioned setting like losing your holy power upon having intercourse, but…’ If this world was different from the setting in her plot, she couldn’t know for sure whether this was the reason she wasn’t able to gather holy power. Gnashing her teeth, she thought, ‘If that is the case, then I’ll effing erase it all and rewrite.’

“You don’t… remember?” Kane asked in a hollow voice.

“Oh, I’m the type to lose my senses when I drink more than a certain amount, so I can’t remember.”

“You really… can’t remember?”

“Yes, so—”

While the saintess tried to cook up an excuse, Kane interjected, “Then, let’s do it again.”

“What?”

“Since you say you can’t remember, we can just do it all over from the start, so that you can perfectly recall the memory.”