A World Where You All Are The Villains - Chapter 4

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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04.

“…What?”
The Duke faltered at my words, turning to face me with a bewildered expression.
‘If I can’t escape it, I’ll play dumb.’
The method I chose was an age-old cliché straight out of a drama.
Amnesia, of course!
I recited a line I’d heard countless times before, my voice hollow and rehearsed.
“I can’t remember anything. Where am I? Who are you people?”
“What….”
“Is my name perhaps Edith Blake?”
The moment I finished speaking, silence flooded the chamber.
The Duke, who had been staring at me with a vacant expression, suddenly contorted his face in fury.
“Norman! Eston! What in blazes is happening here?”
He barked at the Physician and the healer.
“Didn’t you say she was perfectly fine!”
“W-well, that is… a severe shock can sometimes cause temporary memory confusion! The young lady experienced cardiac arrest, after all….”
“That’s strange. When I examined her just moments ago, there were no signs of severe trauma….”
Unlike the flustered Physician, the healer scrutinized me with sharp eyes.
Then, tilting his head, he asked the Duke.
“Shall I attempt to use my healing power once more?”
“Ah, my head…!”
Before the Duke could consent, I swiftly pressed my hand to my forehead and collapsed dramatically onto the bed.
“My head aches terribly. I feel nauseous too… How much longer must I endure this?”
“It may be a psychological issue rather than physical trauma.”
Moved by my earnest performance, the Physician quickly moved to persuade the Duke.
He seemed genuinely fearful of being accused of another misdiagnosis.
“It could be short-term amnesia, so let’s observe her for a few days. I’ll prepare a tonic beneficial for brain health.”
“…Hmph.”
The Duke glared at me with displeasure before turning toward the door.
The Physician, the healer, and the servants all followed him out of the chamber.
‘Phew… I survived.’
I exhaled a sigh of relief once I was alone.
I had barely come to terms with the fact that I’d been possessed, and I had no confidence in immediately impersonating the caustic Edith Blake.
Actually.
If I really tried, I could manage it well enough. Fortunately, my memory was quite sharp.
But.

― Is that all you have to say to me?
― What could Father possibly know about me?

As I recalled a few of Edith Blake’s lines from the novel—the ones she always spat out whenever she faced the Duke—the world before my eyes grew dizzy.
I would have welcomed amnesia a hundred times over.
‘If I can’t hold out like this, I’ll just claim my memories have returned. What else can I do?’
The more I thought about it, the less terrible the plan seemed.
If I was just a villain destined to perish anyway, couldn’t I simply fade quietly away from the protagonists?
‘Now that I think about it, this is a five-way entanglement. Insane. I absolutely cannot get involved.’
The moment I recalled the four male leads locked in their fierce romantic rivalry over the heroine, my spirit simply drained away.
I was congratulating myself on what was, for such a hastily improvised scheme, a rather clever stratagem.
“You….”
“…!”
A low voice suddenly resonating through the chamber startled me badly.
I lifted my head sharply and saw the man still standing motionless where he had been.
‘What? Why hasn’t he left yet?’
I had naturally assumed he would have followed the Duke, so I was deeply flustered.
Ethan Blake.
That silver-haired, cold-hearted beauty radiating an icy aura was Edith Blake’s step-brother and the first male lead.
After his beloved aide perished in a Gate incident, the Duke took in the man’s young orphaned son.
He had intended to raise Ethan as a knight like his father, but unexpectedly, Ethan awakened to his power.
True to his appearance, he wielded a formidable S-rank ability over ice.
It was only natural that the Duke, seeing his daughter fail to awaken even as time passed, adopted Ethan and made him his heir instead.
“You truly remember nothing at all.”
Ethan asked me back, his face oddly stiffened.
‘What is this? He’s not asking out of concern, surely.’
As his disagreeable tone made clear, Ethan and Edith Blake were hardly on good terms.
He grew increasingly contemptuous of her twisted personality, her unbecoming conduct for the Nobility, and her tyrannical behavior.
Especially after learning that Ruellin suffered harassment at her hands, his hatred reached its peak.
‘Still, when we were young, we seemed to get along quite well….’
Ethan and the other two male leads had frequent contact with Edith Blake from childhood.
Perhaps that was why she harbored such intense hatred for the heroine who stole them from her.
Of course, I could understand Ethan’s suffering under Edith Blake’s tyranny from an early age, all because they had become step-siblings.
Yet throughout reading the novel, I had found him disagreeable.
Perhaps I had projected my own past onto Edith Blake’s circumstances.
‘A stone that rolled in has no right to glare at a stone already embedded.’
Without that ability of his, he would never have dared to face me like this.
“Yes.”
I smiled harmlessly.
While the original Edith Blake spoke informally to Ethan, I answered with formal politeness.
To make it seem as though I had truly lost my memory.
“Who are you? Judging by your attire, are you the Duke’s… or perhaps my father’s adjutant?”
“….”
“Or perhaps, could we be close to one another…”
“….”
“For instance, could you be my hus——”
“Nonsense.”
Ethan abruptly cut me off, his face contorting with disdain.
At the sight of his displeasure, I suppressed an inward laugh of triumph.
Triggers of his type were painfully predictable.
Status. Bloodline.
Association with objects of his contempt.
Much like how my biological father’s third adopted son—once docile and sharp-minded—had beaten senseless the one who spread rumors of us living under the same roof.
“It’s fine if nothing comes to mind.”
“Won’t you tell me what our relationship is?”
“Why should I tell you that?”
Ethan, who had reacted sharply to my words, soon turned his head coldly away.
“Figure it out yourself, however you can.”
It was the moment he turned his body to finally leave the room, his tone dripping with mockery.
Suddenly, my vision blurred violently, and something flashed rapidly before my eyes.
―Ugh…!
―Ethan, it’s alright. Breathe in, breathe out, slowly. Good….
―Edith! Edith…! Please, just… gasp!
―Shh….

A man stripped to the waist, clinging to Edith Blake’s feet.
Edith, cradling his face, whispering tenderly to him.
The color of that man’s hair, reflected in the moonlight streaming through the window gap….
“This is insane. What is this?”
I cried out even before Ethan had fully left the room.
The scene was simply too absurd to be real.
‘Am I dreaming with my eyes open? Why would I be in such a position with him….’
Whoosh—!
But before I could finish the thought, the vision vanished as if it had never existed.
And in its place stood a face sharp as a blade.
“…What did you just say?”
Ethan asked in a tone that demanded, ‘Did you just curse at me?’
Had I been more composed, I would have brazenly answered, ‘What? I didn’t say anything,’ but….
My heart was pounding too violently from whatever I had just witnessed—dream or hallucination.
I ended up stammering out a pathetic excuse.
“I… well, that is….”
“….”
“A bug! I think there was a flying insect, and I was so startled I couldn’t help but cry out….”
“A bug?”
Ethan raised one eyebrow and immediately shot back.
“In the middle of winter, you say?”
I reflexively glanced out the window at his words.
Snow was piled on the windowsill. Damn it.
But I couldn’t take back words already spoken.
So I simply doubled down on the lie.
“Yes. It was definitely crawling around here somewhere. Where did it go? Haha….”
“You came back from the dead, and now you’ve completely lost your mind.”
Ethan regarded my awkward laughter with contempt in his eyes.
Then, as if I weren’t worth another moment of his attention, he shook his head and turned to leave.
As I watched his retreating figure, I found myself doubting my eyes once more.
It was because of a number that suddenly appeared above his head.

64%

‘64%…?’
Unlike a hallucination, the number did not vanish quickly.
I stared at it hovering above Ethan with trembling eyes, boring into it with my gaze.
I closed and opened my eyes repeatedly, but the number remained.
‘What on earth is that….’
That was when something strange appeared on Ethan’s body beyond the numbers themselves.
Goooooo….
An ominous aura began seeping up from beneath his feet.
Black, translucent smoke rose over Ethan’s body in an instant, like water pouring from an overturned cup.
For a moment, I wondered if I should stop him, but Ethan moved as though he felt nothing at all.
Whether fortunately or unfortunately, it halted at his waist and burned no further.
Undulating black smoke.
‘Mana Corruption.’
It was unmistakably Mana Corruption.
‘Then that 64% means….’
As I alternated my gaze between the number floating above Ethan’s head and the Mana Corruption wavering at his waist, shock washed over me.
Clack―!
He left the room without hesitation.
Yet I still could not tear my eyes from where he had been.
“…I can see the Rampage Index?”
I could not believe it.
I had never heard of such an ability existing.
Even with modern technology, it was impossible to know how much black mist—Mana Corruption—had accumulated within an Awakened’s body.
This was why Awakened who deployed to Gates were essentially walking time bombs.
The reason my father and others of his generation desperately avoided Gate sites by putting adopted children in their stead.
The catalyst for my resolve to oppose him and purge the black mist.
Yet while I possessed purification ability, I lacked the ability to discern when an Awakened would rampage.
“Then….”
I grasped it instinctively.
This is Edith Blake’s ability.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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