CH 3

‘How fun is this.’

She quickly left the mansion with a slightly refreshed face.

The servants kept saying, ‘the First Princess will be visiting soon!’ and they were so busy with Milard that they didn’t even notice Diana leaving the mansion.

‘This way, Rebecca won’t recognize me and try to take me to my limbs.’

This was the plaza in the opposite direction of the imperial palace and the Susfield mansion, so she didn’t have to worry about encountering the procession of the princess.

Diana took a deep breath while looking at the wide open space in front of her.

‘…Now, the first step.’

Now she has only taken her first step to defeat Rebecca.

Diana blinked her eyes under her hood, which covered half of her face.

‘First, shall I get an identity for camouflage? To attack the First princess under my real name right now is no different than committing suicide…’

Diana was waiting for Rebecca to leave the Susfield mansion anyways, so she had nothing else to do.

She lived in Rebecca’s shadow for five years, to say the least, and Diana knew most of the backstreet forces she needed for her future job.

She happened to have one suitable place in mind for her to do many miscellaneous things.

Diana, having decided on her destination, turned her shoulders lightly and then took her steps towards a dim alley.

The darkness of the back alley was colder than the wind of winter.

A few who had been lounging in the back alley caught a glimpse of Diana walking in her cloaks.

She hurried her steps tracing the path in her mind while ignoring the gaze of others.

It was then that foreign moans pierced her ears.

“Ugh… Ouch…”

Diana paused, stopped her foot and turned her head.

On the other side of the alley, a messy boy, as if he had been beaten by someone, was lying on the ground.

The boy, who looked to be struggling with blood bruises all over his body, raised his head with difficulty as if recognizing Diana’s presence.

With a distorted face, he made a trembling voice.

“Help me….”

It was clear that he would look pathetic in the eyes of many.

But Diana remained in her place and tilted her head indifferently.

“Why me?”

“…Yes?”

The boy asked with a blank face at the completely unexpected answer.

However, Diana calmly moved in front of him and continued to talk.

“Nothing is free in this world. In order to gain the favor and approval of others, you have to be useful, no matter how small or insignificant you may be.”

“What…”

“And.”

Diana calmly interrupted the boy and squatted in front of him.

Under the hem of her deeply pressed hood, her blue-purple eyes gently curved.

“Aren’t I the one in danger here? Not you.”

At those words, the expression on the boy’s face was washed away in an instant.

His people, who were approaching Diana from behind with ropes and weapons, also flinched.

‘It’s been a long time. Euro can eat well.’

Diana muttered to herself, moving her mana lightly.

From the moment she first set her foot in the back alley, this was what she expected.

This was the most common sight she had ever seen while working under Rebecca.

It was the moment when she licked her lips to summon her higher dark spirit, Euro.

“Elfand.”

A low call echoed through the air.

The men screamed the moment Diana looked behind her with her eyes wide open.

“Ahh!”

“Hey, what is this… Ah!”

“You’re a high-ranking elementalist, why is he here…!”

Diana turned her head to see the white-haired leopards biting those people.

And among them, someone held a bow of white light as bright as the sun.

“There, lower your head.”

Just like Diana, soft words flowed from the man who pressed her hood down deeply.

As she reflexively lowered her head, he released his hand from the bowstring he was pulling.

The white light flew past her ear, fluttering her pale pink hair.

Pluck-

“Ah!”

An arrow hit the boy’s chest as he was about to wield his dagger at Diana.

The shock caused the boy to faint and fall.

“Good job, Elfand.”

The bow in the man’s hand shattered into the light.

He smiled while stroking the head of Elfand, the higher spirit of light, who suddenly fought the alley men and returned to him.

Diana couldn’t believe her eyes. She opened her mouth slightly and looked up blankly at the man.

The man who had summoned Elfand turned his head to Diana, who was sitting there without moving.

“Hey. Are you okay?”

A voice she could never forget rang in her ears. Her heart thumped and fell with a heavy sound.

‘…Cayden?’

Tuk-

~pls read only at pink muffin tl~

The moment she looked at his face, a single tear fell from Diana’s eyes without stopping.

It was an instant when Cayden’s eyes widened when he saw it.

“No, wait. Why are you crying… Are you sick? Are you hurt?”

Cayden approached Diana with a puzzled face.

Restless, he leaned over to Diana and spoke like a grown-up.

“I won’t hurt you, so can I see your wounds?”

Diana was taken aback for a moment by her tears for no reason, and then finally smiled at him for worrying about her, just as he did just before her death.

“…No. it’s okay.”

Diana got up with a smile.

She lowered her hand and ruffled her wrinkled clothes.

After a while, Diana, who had refined her look, raised her head.

Correspondingly, Cayden also turned his gaze away as if searching.

Diana smiled brightly at Cayden, who was standing in front of her with her eyes drained of moisture.

“Thank you for saving me.”

“…It’s fine. As long as you’re safe.”

Cayden responded neatly with a twitch of his eyebrows from a subtle feeling.

Meanwhile, Diana’s reason, which had disappeared for a while due to the sudden situation, returned.

She tilted her head and asked a question, which had come a little late.

“By the way, what’s up with a high elementalist coming to a place like this?”

“Ah.”

Cayden, who had been captured by the strange feeling for a moment, came to his senses at the question.

He kicked the men lying at his feet.

“Because of these guys using vicious methods, and they have recently gained notoriety in the capital, so their bounty is quite high.”

Cayden smiled mischievously like a villain, and made a circle mark with his thumb and index finger.

Diana then recalled one of the facts that she had forgotten about.

‘Oh, come to think of it, Kayden at this time…’

Didn’t have money.

‘Is it the work of the First Empress?’

Rebecca’s biological mother, the First Empress, came from a prestigious dukedom, and she now effectively controls the internal affairs of the Imperial Palace.

Originally, it was the role of the empress to distribute the budget to each palace, but the current empress was from a foreign country, so her position in the empire was not good.

So even if the First Empress, who is no different than the absolute authority, plays a prank on the budget allocated to other palaces, who can stop it?

Although Cayden, who has the spirit of light, is superior to Rebecca in terms of the legitimacy of the imperial family, Rebecca still has the upper hand in other areas.

Because Kayden’s biological mother was a maid in the Imperial Palace, he didn’t have a definite maternal family to him.

Diana thought through the memories of her pre-return, and she found something about Kayden in it.

‘It was said that the Weaver family was helping, but the third prince still should’ve had some power. The financial situation was not good…’

She didn’t know because she wasn’t interested in it before, but now that she sees it, Cayden seems to have been running around to make up for the insufficient budget.

For Diana, the fact was quite new.

An imperial family member who runs through the back alleys to take care of their own family.

Whenever she remembered Rebecca, who was like a snowy mountain covered in perennial snow, she couldn’t help but feel that he was an imperial family member that was not truly imperial.

Then Cayden reached out to Diana.

“If you’re not hurt anywhere else, you’d better get out of here now. I have to hand them over to the guard.”

“Oh, yes.”

Diana, who was lost in thought, was embarrassed by the sudden voice and grabbed his hand.

At the same time, the two of them flinched their shoulders.

‘What is…’

Diana barely managed to resist Cayden’s hand for a moment and looked down at his hand.

The blue-purple eyes covered by the hood trembled with embarrassment.

As soon as Cayden and her hands touched each other, a sense that could not be expressed in words wrapped around her body.

Peace, or comfort.

A feeling that can only be expressed with words of that kind, as if returning to where it should have been from the beginning.

‘Is it because… we’re the opposite?’

Diana blinked at the one assumption running through her confused head.

Cayden was born with the brightest spirit since the founding of the country.

Diana was probably the darkest spirit elementalist since the founding of the country.

Recalling that, it didn’t seem to be a meaningless assumption.

‘There was no saying that fire and water or other attributes had this effect.’

Well, Diana was the second since the first “dark” attribute of the founding myth was erased.

In the past, there has been no such thing as a dark elemental spirit, so there were no studies of it.

‘I don’t know for sure, but it’s roughly alleviating tension, psychological stability…or something like that.’

Diana, who had picked up this and that through Rebecca before her return, shook her head and roughly understood.

But Kayden, who had neither seen nor heard, was confused by the sensations he had experienced for the first time in his life.