CH 71

“This is nonsense!”

Such a big festival is always accompanied by a great uproar.

Tonight was no exception, so everywhere, there were people raising their voices, some were even singing, and one or two fell over and threw things around.

“Damn it! This is a scam!”

Ophelia turned to the source of the unusually unpleasant shout that pierced her ears.

At the backgammon, a man was venting his anger with his face flushed red.

(TL/N: easiest description I can give for ‘backgammon’ is a dice game, google for a clearer picture!)

“Oh, what? Did you lose?”

Next to him, the woman who appeared to be his partner let out a long sigh, seemingly on purpose to stir up his anger.

They seemed to be outsiders, judging by the unfamiliar clothes.

Few people would want to win money playing street backgammon like that during the festival.

Most of the players just put in very little money for they simply wanted to have fun and enjoy it for a while.

But this couple didn’t think so, and they were making a fuss.

“This is a scam!”

“It’s a scam, a scam!”

Merchants and customers, who at first dismissed their protests with laughter, began to frown at the increasingly harsh language.

Soon after, some left, and others tried to stop them.

Ophelia watched the commotion without really thinking, and then moved on.

How nice it would have been if it was just a passing relationship.

To the outsiders, the man and woman, who were making the commotion.

—Tak.

“Excuse me.”

Ophelia, who bumped into someone while looking elsewhere, reflexively said.

However, something that wasn’t a response broke out.

“Ahh! It hurts! It hurts!”

Ophelia widened her eyes and stopped at the sound of a high-pitched voice that could rip her ears apart, and the woman who bumped into her waved her arms as if to gather attention.

“It hurts! What are you going to do about this!”

Ophelia’s eyes widened as she tilted her head.

She listened to the woman chirping in front of her with one ear, letting the words flow out through her nose, and couldn’t stop her wonder.

At this rate, the situation would flow into one where the person who bumped into her would say something like, ‘Hey, lady. How will you compensate me?’ 

And when that happened, Richard would appear from somewhere and save her… Huh?

‘Why did I think of Richard?’

“…Are you ignoring me now! You… you look like a beggar!”

Ophelia’s thoughts disappeared in an instant at the shrieking sound, and she belatedly recalled her outfit.

‘Haha, there’s no way a man will come and throw dirty words and forcibly drag me away.’

Still, it was not a difficult situation.

Ophelia stared blankly at the spitting woman, then glanced at Catherine, whose eyes were narrowed, and Iris, whose expression was soaked in cold arsenic.

It was then. She didn’t know which one it was, but it could have been both. The men who adored Catherine and Iris and secretly followed behind them…!

“I think it would be perfect if you come and save me now.”

“What? What did you say?”

The woman’s angry slit-like eyes widened involuntarily, but Ophelia didn’t even look at her. Instead, she glanced around.

“Hey!”

It was only after the woman’s sharp voice scratched her ears that Ophelia shook her head in disappointment.

“Indeed, life is self-salvation.”

Even in the middle of such thoughts, wasn’t it just like Ophelia, who erased things like romance and love from existence, to not think of a man who could save her?

Or should she say that before she thought of this, she could see hope just by thinking of Richard subconsciously.

Ophelia shook her head and paused.

The beginning was unexpected, but the progress of the incident was very typical.

The man loitering behind the woman suddenly shouted loudly.

“Who hurt my woman!”

“Here, this woman!”

It was poor acting even for a 5-year-old, but the man and woman involved were serious.

As the woman pointed at Ophelia, Catherine, who had been holding back from earlier, exploded.

“Who do you dare point a finger at! And what? It hurts? Do you have the color of a sick person’s face? Aren’t you waving your arms pretty well?”

“Oh my gosh, what is this crazy woman?”

“How dare you lay your hands on my woman!”

As if that was all he knew how to say, the man who had just said something no different from before clenched his fist and took a step forward.

—But who was Catherine Sheffield?

A person who wouldn’t give up on a dogfight. The evidence? She had a history of fighting with Raisa Neir, even throwing her shoes.

“You bastards!”

Catherine was on fire, about to charge at the man at any moment.

Ophelia took her hand and nodded nonchalantly.

“Okay. What do you want?”

“What?”

“What? Huh?”

Catherine, who was about to spring forward, asked the same question as Iris, who was glaring at the man with such a cold gaze, so cold it could kill.

“Oh, you’re a lady who can communicate. I think you’ll be more communicative with this.”

As the man drew a round currency shape with his finger, the woman bluntly shot at him.

“What, honey, you said I got hurt, but money is the problem?”

“No. Of course not. But what did you say was the best way to cure the pain?”

“Money!”

The woman burst into a laugh and rubbed her arm. Then she calmly said,

“Okay. You can pay for hurting me with money–”

Before the woman could finish her sentence, Ophelia cut it off.

“However, I’m injured too, so please compensate me with money.”

An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.

Ophelia, who had been perfectly fine up until now, stretched her arms weakly with a more realistically painful expression than the woman before.

“Ah, ah, ah! Oh my God, I think my arms are paralyzed. How much money must be paid to console me for not being able to use my arms?”

Catherine tuned in to the shameless performance.

“At least a house, no, a castle! How dare she make your arms like this!”

“You’ll have to calculate based on how much work you’ll be unable to do if your arm is paralyzed. Then…”

When Iris poured out the numbers, the atmosphere changed in an instant.

Even the onlookers buzzing around them so far began to add their voices one by one.

“Well said! Yes, I’ve seen them bumping into each other, but what an outrageous demand!”

“Yes, yes! Hey, I’m sure she lost her arm, so they have to pay for it!”

Here and there, booing poured out at the couple. The woman pouted and hid behind the man, whose face was flushed red.

“This, you!”

Since ancient times, the fists would do the talking if words didn’t work.

The man faithfully kept to it, stretching out his hand toward Ophelia, but there was no way she would just sit back and take it.

After all, she was the one who struck the back of the head of a professionally trained assassin.

Far from being caught by the hand of a random man rolling around the street, it was the other way round— she grabbed his hand and twisted it very vigorously.

“Kkoaaak!”

At the loud and unpleasant sound that was as if he was picked on by an animal, Ophelia immediately released his hand and took a step back.

Then Iris handed her a handkerchief.

“Let’s wipe the dirt off and go.”

After carefully wiping the part that touched the man’s hand, Ophelia returned the handkerchief, but Iris immediately threw it to the ground.

And Catherine stepped on it very hard.

“This handkerchief will be enough to fix your arm, so pick it up and use it well.”

There was no lie in what she said. Just selling Iris’ handkerchief would bring in money that was incomparable to the pennies the man and woman lost in the backgammon.

Ophelia moved off with a sour face like it was only now that she had become annoyed. Catherine and Iris followed suit with light steps, as if they had forgotten they were there at all.

Eventually, the figures of the three disappeared into the crowd, and all those who were spectating lost interest and hurried along.

The woman who had been hiding somewhere finally appeared and started berating the man. 

“Ah really, how can you not do anything against a woman?”

“Shut up! …Huh?”

The man shouted in response to the woman’s biting words. He wanted to continue shouting, but before he could do so, he was abruptly caught by the back of his neck… by a hand that jumped out of darkness. 

And he disappeared. 

With a stupid-looking face, the woman blinked, her lips parting. But before she even had time to make a sound, she, too, was dragged into the darkness.

A narrow alley where not a single light entered.

The man was already crawling on the floor with all of his limbs bent at an angle that should not have been possible.

“……!”

The woman didn’t even have time to see who did this. No, far from seeing it, she could only register the pain coming like a tidal wave.

In that alley shrouded in shadows, the man and woman writhed in pain. To the point of not even being able to scream.

As they buried their faces on the floor with their faces covered in tears, mucus, and saliva, a figure darker than the shadows appeared from behind them, as if cutting through the pitch-black night.

The two instinctively begged for their lives, but only hissing breaths came out intermittently from their gaping mouths.

Without paying a single glance at the two of them, Richard melted into the darkness again, having accomplished what he wanted to do.

The foreigner couple who tried to make unscrupulous gains from the festival crawled on the floor in a dark place where no one knew and cried until they could not make a sound.

Ame: Maybe Ophelia is misremembering the novel? These days, Richard is like, the villain protagonist, not the hero pfft—

Dea: Richard is the hero who’s willing to turn into a villain for the fl, in this case Ophelia haha