Let the Whales Fight, This Shrimp is Leaving! - Chapter 56

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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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Episode 56
I watched Deyan’s gaze blur as he stared at my fist.
What was he remembering?
“My life has never been my own from the very beginning.”
He mumbled, his expression slack with some distant reverie.
“My fate was decided the moment I was born, and I don’t even know if I have the strength to resist that predetermined fate…….”
Don’t know?
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
I laughed despite myself.
‘He’s talking complete nonsense.’
The weakness of a mind that surrenders to such drivel about fate and destiny.
“So you don’t know what you can do, so you just let yourself be swept along?”
“That’s how I’ve lived until now.”
“Of course you have. So you’ve lived with no sense of self at all—doing whatever the Emperor commands, killing if ordered to kill, dying if ordered to die.”
How stupid must he be to be manipulated even by his own lieutenant?
It’s only because Holdin is a loyal subordinate who thinks of Deyan with such intensity.
If he were a base wretch who calculated only his own profit, Deyan Boislav Nemanic would have ended up naked in the streets long ago.
“You’re speaking pathetically before me.”
After witnessing all that, to still possess such a broken mind.
Deyan had been thoroughly conditioned by powerlessness.
The past version of me, who had briefly pitied this man’s circumstances, now seemed foolish by comparison—Deyan possessed no will to think at all.
‘Why did I ever agree to break his curse?’
There’s no point pulling a suicide-hopeful from the water when he lacks even the will to struggle—all you’ll hear is resentment for saving him.
I held back a sigh and paused to think how to fix this man’s mind.
The answer came quickly.
I rose from my seat, circled the table, and stepped in front of Deyan.
“Sir Nemanic.”
“Yes.”
“Clench your back teeth. Tuck your tongue away.”
“……?”
I drew a sharp breath.
Then I pulled my arm back with all my strength, twisted at the waist, and swung my palm forward.
Crack!
The explosive sound of flesh meeting flesh rang through the room.
“……Ah, that felt good.”
I shook out my stinging palm.
Caught completely off-guard by the sudden slap, Deyan went rigid, frozen in place.
“I’m sorry. You were saying such stupid things I just got angry.”
I apologized calmly.
“Are you thinking straight now? Or should I give you another one?”
Gasp, gasp.
Deyan’s mouth moved wordlessly, unable to respond.
He was still in shock.
“Sir Nemanic. Listen carefully.”
I spoke to the man who couldn’t even bring himself to touch his struck cheek, speaking quietly but firmly.
“As you’ve already seen, my mother was murdered, and after political disadvantage forced my father to abandon the search for her killer, he became a breathing corpse.”
“…….”
“My only brother locked himself in his room, crushed by guilt.”
I also witnessed my mother’s final moments.
Her neck hung from the ceiling, her face gone blue, her tongue grotesquely extended.
Beneath her pristine white, beautiful dress, urine and feces dripped steadily.
“That was how my mother’s end came to pass.”
And that isn’t even the end.
The history of my nation, the Plene Grand Duchy, is so sorrowful.
“The Plene Grand Duchy’s history doesn’t even span a full century. Do you know how many nations have tried to invade us in that brief span? Including your homeland?”
“…….”
“Twenty-one times.”
In simple calculation, that means we’ve been attacked once every four years.
Before old wounds even heal.
Before the devastated cities can be rebuilt.
We were invaded and invaded again, swept up in wars we never chose.
“A shrimp with its back broken from fighting whales is almost cute by comparison.”
We’ve been treated like vermin.
Parasites on the most coveted yolk of the continent.
Writhing and struggling and hiding ourselves to survive.
“So would you have me, a Ducal Princess born in such a nation, simply surrender to fate?”
“That’s not what I meant…….”
Deyan started to protest but stopped himself.
Sometime in the exchange, I’d seized his throat.
The urge to strangle him dead rose up in me.
“Don’t whine about being used as a tool.”
“…….”
“If you do, it makes my own madness look ridiculous.”
His brow twitched.
“Resist. Like I do, even if it means doing mad things.”
“…….”
“And if you try that and still don’t know what you want, come to me.”
I tightened my grip slightly on his throat and smiled.
“I’ll kill you myself. You’re one of my enemies, after all.”
I pour out all the hatred that cannot be soothed, and you find peace.
What could be a better proposal than that?
I was just about to withdraw my hand as if putting a period at the end of a sentence, smiling thinly.
When Deyan, whose eyes had gone empty with shock, suddenly gripped my wrist.
“……th…….”
“……?”
He seemed to be muttering something, but his voice was too faint to hear.
Still, I waited in silence, watching his lips move.
“……will you……do that……for me?”
Tears suddenly began to spill from the eyes of the large man before me.
‘Oh my.’
I hadn’t meant to make him cry.
Deyan asked again, his voice choked.
“Will you……kill me?”
The question he posed had a peculiar quality to it.
* * *
He had lived because he could not die.
As his parents were murdered before his eyes and he was imprisoned in darkness, tortured terribly, each time consciousness slipped away he thought:
‘Ah. I will die now.’
If he died, could he see his parents again?
If he could see them again, he vowed he would apologize first.
Because the reason they had to die was him.
But he did not die, and when he came to, he had become unable to die.
“Your Highness, come to your senses! Your Highness!”
“Stop, Your Highness!”
“Help me! Ahhhhh!”
Even in the depths of madness, he could clearly distinguish whose voices were screaming.
The spine of the man he’d shared a meal with yesterday, crushed. The abdomen of the attendant who served him days ago, pierced through.
What was most terrible was that as their blood soaked into him, a strange satisfaction bloomed.
Kill.
Kill.
More blood for me!
‘Please stop.’
Mad urgings rattled his skull.
The Demon kept manipulating him.
So he came to wish it.
That death would be better.
That he be allowed to die.
“Sir Nemanic. You must live and return to my side. That is my command.”
But death was denied to him—a sweetness forever out of reach.
“You shall march out, Sir Nemanic. This is an Imperial Order.”
Facing irresistible commands and endless helplessness, he abandoned everything at some point.
He obeyed when commanded, killed when needed.
He removed his will and discarded his thought.
Without emotion, drifting, being pushed along, simply so.
He breathed because breath came.
“I will, I will most certainly restore you.”
That single promise, heard while his whole body burned with agony and he struggled, was his only hope.
Only Holdin remained at his side.
Under the name of guilt.
Without even that, he might have lost his mind completely.
“I’ve discovered a way to nullify the Curse of a Demon Contract! If we use this, surely……!”
It would be easier to give up.
“Tch.”
He couldn’t bring himself to tell him to stop, grateful for the tenacity that refused to surrender even in failure.
Anyway, he was a body that could not die.
He had steeled himself countless times, telling himself to simply endure for now.
But this woman before him was different.
“Come to me then.”
With wrists so delicate they looked ready to snap at a touch, she struck his cheek without hesitation, seized his throat, and spoke like this.
“I’ll kill you myself. You’re one of my enemies, after all.”
The woman’s eyes, smiling as she spoke, blazed with sincerity and a strange vitality.
He became certain that this woman, truly, by any means necessary, could kill him.
Only then did he finally understand.
‘Ah. I can die after all.’
I am still human.
I never imagined someone would appear who knew what power I possessed and would gladly kill me anyway.
Truly, never in my dreams.
* * *
He hadn’t known.
That he could cry this much.
‘Is it because his body is large, so his tear ducts are large too?’
Unable to rebuke him for crying—guilty as I was of slapping his cheek—I simply waited, watching him shudder and sob.
“……here.”
I pressed a fresh Handkerchief into the hands of Deyan, whose shoulders heaved as he wept.

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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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