Chapter 55
When I entered the main lobby, Charlotte was there, gesturing for me to follow her. Dinner time had passed and night had fallen, so the streets of the Temple were devoid of students. There were also no other dormitories near the Royal Class dormitories, which made it even more quiet.
I couldn’t help but wonder what Vertus would say if he saw me speaking with Charlotte. He would probably take a very dim view of it. However, I had to be more careful of Charlotte than Vertus, so I couldn’t just carelessly ignore her.
Charlotte seemed to sense my feelings as she sat down on a dimly lit bench between the street lamps.
It was pretty obvious what she wanted. She likely wanted an update on my progress in finding Baalier.
Charlotte was sitting on the bench, not looking at me, but staring blankly at the street lamp. Her expression was hard to make out because of the darkness, but as always, Charlotte had a calm, cold air about her.
She was different from Adriana. While Adriana had a calm demeanor, she was also kind, whereas Charlotte was calm but indifferent. The other students might have also felt this kind of aura from Charlotte, but surely, she wouldn’t be this cold toward them.
Vertus and Charlotte had something in common: they had both shown their true selves to me.
“How does it feel to suddenly become a superhuman?” Charlotte asked out of the blue, as if trying to provoke a reaction.
I didn’t see how it couldn’t be a nice thing, so I told her straightforwardly, “Well... it’s nice?”
“... Is that so?” Charlotte replied, in a seemingly knowing yet inscrutable manner.
Just what kind of ability did Charlotte have? If it were true that Charlotte had supernatural powers, it appeared that she didn’t like having them much.
“Your ability, I’ve heard it’s Self-Deception.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“It’s the kind of power that makes whatever you believe in become reality.”
She was different from a regular student after all. She had already found out what my supernatural power was capable of. Then again, except for individuals like Charlotte, students’ supernatural powers weren’t really a secret, so anyone could easily find out about them.
“So, should I take it that there’s been no progress in finding that child?”
It was an incredibly difficult task, almost like searching for a specific person with a common surname like “Kim” in Seoul. It was impatient of her to ask about my progress when not much time has passed since she’d given me the task.
“... I’m working on it.”
Of course, I was not making any effort at all. There was simply no reason for me to make an effort, since there was nothing I could do.
“Fine, I won’t rush you for progress. Just remember that if you produce no results, I’ll have no reason to leave a criminal group running around that only harms the empire and is otherwise useless.”
Charlotte was as good as saying that the timer for the bomb had already begun to count down.
My plan was to extend my life as much as I could by gradually reporting progress regarding the task to her, little by little.
However, there were still many problems. Even if I were to actually make an effort to find Baalier, I might not succeed in providing solid results. If I told her I found a trace of Baalier, what would that trace be, and how would I explain how I’d found it?
Both the princess and the prince were searching for Baalier, so they would undoubtedly be suspicious if I kept finding out things the two of them couldn’t.
Even if I told them that I didn’t do it on my own and had support from the beggars, it still wouldn’t be enough to explain how this could be more effective than the secret search operations that they had to have been carrying out.
So, although the best tactic would be to start operating bit by bit, I still hadn’t decided how to properly present my supposed progress. At least Charlotte had not begun to pressure me yet, and had decided to give me some more time.
However, it seemed that Charlotte had more in mind than just checking up on my progress.
“Hey, try it once.”
“Try what?”
“Use your power to believe that you know where the child is. Maybe you’ll discover it somehow?”
Ah, was that what this was all about?
Charlotte seemed to be pinning some hope on my as-yet-uncertain supernatural powers. But unfortunately, my Self-Deception had no such capabilities. At my current level, the most it could do was enhance my physical abilities; it was impossible for it to magically provide knowledge of things I was unaware of.
It was an absurd idea. It was basically saying that I could know what my next-door neighbor was doing simply by believing it, as though it provided me with some sort of foresight.
Of course, I too didn’t know the full extent of my Self-Deception yet, so perhaps it could be possible later on. In its current stage, though, it was impossible.
I should have told her right away that it was impossible.
However, seeing Charlotte grasping at straws, trying to do anything she could, changed my mind.
Wait a minute.
This, if handled well, could extend the life of both me and the club. Since it was dependent on a supernatural power, it could be possible. It would be difficult to convince her if I told her I found clues and evidence through the Thieves’ Guild and the Rotary Club, but if I told her that I’d discovered these clues through my supernatural power, there was no reason for suspicion.
And I was Baalier, the very person Charlotte was looking for.
Supernatural power was an unbelievable force, something that could make the impossible possible. So it was worth a shot.
“It probably won’t work... but I’ll give it a try.”
Charlotte didn’t hold much expectation either. Nonetheless, she pulled out a portrait of Baalier from her pocket and handed it to me, as if encouraging me to take it seriously.
“... Do you... need this?”
... To think she always carried my portrait with her... Just this fact alone started to ignite feelings of guilt within me, although my conviction that running away had been the best option remained unchanged. Each time I realized how dearly Charlotte thought of me, I felt depressed.
Damn it.
Yet now, I had to deceive her again. The lives of Loyar and the club members were hanging by a thread.
I didn’t have a choice but to deceive her again.
I stared intensely at my own portrait which, in truth, was a completely useless gesture.
The Self-Deception that I was supposed to invoke involved believing that I knew where this boy was.
However, it wasn’t a matter of belief, because I was right there! This didn’t make sense!
Regardless.
Although it was impossible for me to track the location of another person, I had to appear as though I knew where Baalier was located. While pondering how I could possibly justify such a thing, I started to speak.
“Uhm... I see some sort of castle.”
“!”
As Baalier, I began to describe to Charlotte the experiences I had gone through.
“A castle? What kind of castle?”
“I’m not sure. It’s desolate... There’s a huge castle, and in front of it, I can see a scene of someone, just running. They seem to be riding a horse...”
Instead of making it sound like I knew where the child was, I decided to describe it in a way similar to psychometry.
Charlotte hadn’t told me the details about the child she was looking for. If I started describing Baalier’s and Dyrus’s escape from the Demon King’s Castle, it might suggest to Charlotte that my abilities held some potential.
By continuously proving my usefulness in this way, Charlotte would leave me alone.
Charlotte gaped in astonishment as I recounted the details I shouldn’t have known to her.
“I’m not too sure. There are people on horses chasing someone. And the person is running away. There seem to be monsters around too... This is all I can gather for now.”
I felt the urge to bite my tongue for putting on such a ridiculous act.
Charlotte stared at me, trembling, even her lips quivering.
“More... more... Try some more... Look further... deeper. More... Just a bit more...”
Charlotte had risen from the bench and was desperately urging me to continue. I couldn’t bear to meet her desperate eyes.
I felt awful for doing what I was doing, and it was indeed a heinous act. As much as I was doing this to survive, I was toying with her emotions.
I knew that a small lie could grow into a larger one and eventually lead to an even greater lie, yet I was in a situation where I had no choice but to continue.
“I don’t... I don’t know... I see the same scene... the same view over and over. In the supernatural power experiments I’ve done, this way of using Self-Deception never worked, but I don’t know why it suddenly works when you ask me to do it... Regardless, this is all I can do for now. Maybe my powers are still too weak...”
Though I didn’t know the location of the child she was seeking, the mere fact that I appeared to have seen things I shouldn’t have been able to know gave Charlotte a glimmer of what seemed like hope.
“Can you tell if he’s alive or not? Even that much... even just that... if you knew that... please...”
Charlotte, who had been so assertive when dealing with me until just now, was begging me. Even though she probably considered someone like me, with a wretched background and who was involved with a criminal organization, to be less than a bug.
“Please... Please find out... Please...”
Charlotte seemed ready to drop to her knees in front of me. Her cold, proud expression was contorted in agony, and before I knew it, she was crying in front of me.
Charlotte had been kidnapped and had suffered terrible things, and she knew that I was the only other survivor who had endured the same pain. And ultimately, it was me who had saved her life. It wasn’t weird to know that I was a very special person to her.
It was sickening to think that even the act of saving her back at the Demon King’s Castle had also been fake. And here I was, having to deceive her again solely because my survival was at stake.
To Charlotte, who was weeping and pleading just to know whether I was alive, I finally said, “I’m not sure... I really don’t know... I don’t know where he is right now.”
With the foreboding feeling that I would be continuing to tell many lies to Charlotte in the future...
“But... he’s alive. I’m certain of that.”
I had to reveal at least one truth to Charlotte.
Charlotte violently burst into tears, gripping my clothes tightly.
“You’re not lying... right...? You’re telling me the truth, he’s alive, right?”
“Yes... That’s right. I feel certain that he’s alive... and only that much...”
“Th-thank you... thank you so much...”
I watched Charlotte crying as if she was about to crumble at any moment, and couldn’t help but bite down hard on my lip.
I didn’t mind myself becoming a douchebag with anger management issues and being criticized by many.
However, deceiving one person so terribly in this way was excruciatingly hard to bear.
“Thank you...”
Her words of gratitude weighed me down even more.
***
My supernatural power was particularly unclear when compared to the other supernatural powers.
“This is truly the first time this has happened. It usually doesn’t work on others at all. It only feels this way with this child you’re looking for.”
“I don’t know why that is as well, but... anyway it’s a relief, and that’s good enough for now.”
Even though what I said was extremely suspicious and strange, Charlotte had no choice but to accept the result as the scenes I had described were ones only Baalier would have known.
Charlotte seemed to have no inkling that I might be Baalier. Of course, the vague nature of my supernatural power played a part as well.
Charlotte instructed me not to tell anyone what I had seen, and she asked me to not share the fact that I could use my ability like this with anyone else. Unlike her previous demands, which seemed more like commands, this time, it was a request.
“You know why I am asking this... Please, Reinhart.”
She had even said my name personally.
“I know. I understand.”
It must have been because Vertus would most likely want to use my powers as well, given the opportunity.
In fact, since the ability I claimed to possess was essentially made up, it actually worked in my favor if Charlotte kept silent about this as well. If someone started asking why I could use my ability to know one thing and not another, that would only make things harder for me.
Charlotte seemed as desperate to me now as she had been in the past.
At the current moment, I had to be the only clue she had when it came to finding Baalier.
Charlotte, after calming down a bit, seemed to reflect upon her own actions, and come to a realization.
“Oh, ah... um... well... ehem.”
Depending on one’s perspective, it might have seemed like the way she’d acted had been a terrible disgrace. It seemed she had calmed down only for even more complicated emotions to rise up within her.
“It’s fine, pay it no mind. Whoever this is must be incredibly important to you, I suppose. That explains why you’re like this.”
“...”
I offered words of sympathy to the imperial princess who had lost her composure, and she hung her head low.
“I never thought I’d reach a point in my life where I... I have to be comforted like this,” Charlotte mused as she gazed blankly up at the night sky.
It wasn’t clear whether she found it pitiful that it was the consolation from a commoner, from a criminal, or just the fact that she was being comforted by someone at all.
“He’s the one who saved me.”
“... Is that so?”
“If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have made it out of there.”
Everyone knew that the princess had been kidnapped by the Demon King’s forces, but no one really knew the details of what she had been through in there, and how she had managed to escape.
It seemed as though both Charlotte and Vertus preferred to bury the matter and not bring it up anymore. Since there was not enough evidence to say that Charlotte had been the target of an assassination in her timely escape from the barracks, there was not much to stumble over anyway.
It could easily be construed that the princess had fled on her own accord out of fright.
In Dyrus’s case, he had faced threats to his life directly and had even engaged in battle, but there was still not enough evidence to conclude that someone had attempted an assassination on the princess.
Therefore, any mention of an attempt to assassinate the princess had remained under wraps, and no scandal could be made out of it. That was why no information about Dyrus saving the princess or anything about the young child who was with her had come to public attention.
This was also why Charlotte had only mentioned vaguely that if it weren’t for “him,” she wouldn’t have made it out. Speaking concretely about what really happened would be dangerous.
“He’s the one who saved my life.” Was that the sole reason she was searching for him? It seemed like a plausible reason, yet for her to be so distraught that she almost lost her composure was certainly odd.
“Honestly... I get that he’s important to you because he saved your life...”
“It’s not just that he saved my life,” Charlotte said, looking at me. “If it weren’t for him, I would have gone mad.”
He had not just saved her life; she would have gone mad if it hadn’t been for him.
In that cell, Charlotte had been crying softly, holding onto the memory of her deceased mother.
Now that I thought about it, she certainly seemed like she was in a dangerous state. Before I called out to her, she hadn’t even realized someone was moving around in the corridor.
“The place was overflowing with corpses and filled with the stench of blood, where it felt like I could go mad at any moment...”
Charlotte seemed to be recalling that period of time.
“That child kept reassuring me that we would be okay, that we had already won the war, trying to comfort me. He did everything he could to console me and put me at ease.”
I had said all sorts of things to try to calm the trembling Charlotte. At that time, I had no idea who she was.
“He said he had lost all his memories. He didn’t even know who he was or why he was trapped there. Yet, even in such a hard time, when it must have been tremendously frightening for him as well, he saw me and tried to soothe me. He didn’t know who I was; just that some child was crying in that terrible place, and he tried his best to comfort her.”
To her, that person had lost all his memories and yet had tried to console her just because she was shaking with fear, despite the horror that must have filled him in the midst of that ghastly scene.
Claiming to have lost my memories had been a lie, but it was true that I had been completely lost and had no idea what to do or how to act in that situation.
It seemed that Charlotte wasn’t just trying to find me solely because I had saved her life.
“I made a promise to him.”
Yes, I remembered Charlotte saying something like that.
“I promised I would help him get his memories back...”
It seemed she was desperately trying to find me in order to keep that promise. Of course, I had not actually forgotten any memories because, while I inhabited the body of Baalier, the prince of the Demon Realm, I was not truly him.
My lies appeared to have etched something akin to a permanent mark in Charlotte’s heart—an indelible imprint.
“Do you really have to help him find his memories?”
“... Why do you ask that?”
“It’s just that... If those memories include his time being tortured at the Demon Castle and are mostly unpleasant, wouldn’t it be better if he did not remember? Discovering your memories and getting to know who you are is certainly important, but there might also be memories that are better off lost.”
I hoped that Charlotte would not feel too burdened by the weight of her promise. In fact, since there were no lost memories to begin with, if Charlotte felt tormented by her supposed failure to fulfill that promise, I would feel terribly guilty about what she was doing.
Hearing my words, Charlotte looked at me with widened eyes.
“... I never thought of that... that might be true... Yes... you have a point,” Charlotte said.
Perhaps it was better not to bring back terrible memories at all. Charlotte seemed to somewhat agree with that.
“Yeah, I guess we can worry about that later and focus on finding him first,” she added.
A small relief, amidst the guilt and remorse swimming within me. Earlier on, Charlotte’s expression seemed to have sunk into a deep sorrow, resigning herself to despair after believing that I had died and feeling tremendous guilt over losing me. Now, though, it had improved somewhat.
Charlotte, now slightly more spirited, looked at me and, for the first time, managed a smile.
“Find that child for me,” Charlotte said. “Then, I will do everything in my power for you.”
“... Isn’t that too dangerous a promise to make to someone so lowly and dangerous?”
Charlotte believed that I was her link to Baalier, and that was why her attitude had also changed.
“During the duel, I thought you were nothing but reckless. I knew you had a weird personality, but to see that you were doing all that solely out of pride made me think that you were stupid as well.”
“You’re speaking quite freely about someone who’s right in front of you, huh.”
“That’s all I could see in you at the time.”
It seemed that Charlotte’s assessment of me differed from Vertus’s. Vertus had praised my tenacity for continuing to get up even after being knocked down, but Charlotte seemed to have judged me as someone who foolishly persisted instead of accepting defeat because of my pride.
“However, I realized something else when I saw you win in such an unbelievable way.”
Had I lost the duel, Charlotte’s assessment of me would have remained unchanged. However, I had somehow achieved victory through the surreal event of awakening a supernatural power.
That seemed to have altered Charlotte’s assessment somewhat.
“Sometimes, there are times when you have to do reckless things,” She said quietly, having gone back to her usual, slightly icy demeanor.
Even if it meant making a promise to do everything within her power for a student who came from a beggar’s background and was tied to criminal organizations. Some things just had to be done.
Charlotte was willing to make such a dangerous promise to a person like me, someone she would never have even been involved with under normal circumstances.
‘Geez, I can’t imagine what it would have been like if she’d made such a request to someone other than me. Thank goodness she was talking to Baalier himself. Imagine if she was asking this of some weird creep!’
“... It’s like two elephants fighting, and I’m the grass that suffers because of it.”
“Are you talking about Vertus?”
“Yeah. It’s quite awkward trying to act casually with both of you like this. You two might be fine, but I feel pretty uncomfortable, you know.”
I was totally caught in the middle.
I now had a secret I absolutely could not share with Vertus. And with Charlotte, it was the same as well. What was I supposed to say if Vertus asked me, “Hey, I see that you’ve been getting quite close with Charlotte, what’s up?” And what if Charlotte said something like, “I’ve seen you hanging around Vertus, that’s a bit... disturbing, isn’t it?”
Things could get really complicated.
Honestly, although I didn’t want trouble with either of them, maintaining a neutral stance while caught between the two of them would be nearly impossible.
At my words, Charlotte’s lips curved into a slight, mischievous smile. It gave off the same vibe as when Vertus showed his cunning nature.
“I trust you will handle the situation well, Reinhart.”
It seemed I was caught between two people with a similar essence.
Seriously, why did both of them have to behave so similarly?
If Charlotte hadn’t died and was just a regular character in the novel, I’m sure she would have been in a similar position as Vertus.
Updat𝓮d fr𝙤m fre𝒆webnov(e)l.com