The Baddest Villainess Is Back - Chapter 1

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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 1
Prologue
“What a brilliant and vicious woman she was. The villain who destroyed her own family and murdered even her fiancé is finally dead!”
Those who heard of Roserin Bellion’s execution spoke thus in unison, their laughter ringing out with savage delight.
A noble lady abandoned by the Bellion Family long ago.
A beautiful seductress who consumed her fiancé and lived.
A cruel villainess who even cast aside family bonds.
A vicious witch who ravaged the world.
There were many words used to describe her, yet precious few of them were flattering.
And Roserin herself felt little emotion at any of these monikers.
Crack!
The sting of the whip against her skin made Roserin slowly open her remaining eye.
Charged with regicide for the murder of the Third Prince, serial murder for the countless deaths she’d caused, fraud and moral corruption among a host of other crimes, she’d been sentenced to death—and her appearance reflected the sentence’s brutality.
She’d lost one eye long ago, her fingers were missing in places, and she had but one ear remaining.
Far from the grand epithets attached to her name, she sat in the dank, moldy Underground Prison, little more than a breathing corpse wheezing out her final breaths.
Of course, this did not mean that Roserin trembled with fear.
Even as her hair was seized and twisted, she opened her eyes wide to see who had grasped her.
“Ha, look at you.”
A portly man with a face full of freckles spoke as he wiped sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.
“You should have thanked me and bowed your head when I said I would have you, my lady. I was willing to marry a woman like you myself.”
Roserin’s brow furrowed.
She did not recognize who he was.
Only after lifting her gaze higher through her blurred vision could she ask in a voice worn and hoarse:
“Who are you?”
Insulted that Roserin did not know him, the man’s face flushed crimson in an instant.
“You fool! Calling you a villainess or a witch is laughable! What makes you think someone as stupid as you amounts to anything!”
He moved his bulky frame and kicked at her through the iron bars, though he soon tired and stopped.
“Perhaps this will help that stupid head of yours work a little better!”
Roserin laughed softly.
Even in that filthy dungeon, her smile remained radiant and luminous—beautiful enough to give the man pause.
The pale, lovely woman had not lost her luster despite her mutilation, kindling a sinister possessiveness in those who beheld her.
“Ah, my apologies. Was it Baron Gilbert? As you can see, having lost one eye, I’m afraid I cannot recognize even the most insignificant of men.”
Cough.
Roserin coughed blood as she spoke with casual arrogance, her complexion ashen.
“Tch—! I’m not Gilbert. I’m Robert!”
Robert shook her hair roughly where he held it.
Beautiful white hair, stained with blood and dirt, swayed with the motion.
Roserin regarded the man huffing and puffing before her.
He was a man twenty years her senior who had cast her flirtatious glances constantly since she’d made her debut.
“Ah, was that it.”
She spoke in a pitying tone, though her gaze was full of contempt.
“But you are not to my taste.”
Roserin spoke with derision in her expression.
“I never knew you were so fond of me. I should have taught you the method.”
“The method?”
Even now, a dim, foolish hunger flickered across the man’s face as Roserin spoke.
She understood now why the Crown Prince had bothered sending this insignificant man down to the Underground Prison.
“Baron Robert, if you’re to flirt with me, why not first do something about that stinking, bloated body of yours? And that pitiful conscience—throwing yourself at a woman twenty years your junior when you’re as dull-witted as you are. And don’t stand so close. Your breath reeks. My stomach’s a bit delicate, you see.”
“…You!”
“The former Baron Robert never managed to close his eyes properly. No wonder he clung to his barony past seventy before finally dying and passing the title to you. And with your lack of sense, that dead baron must be turning in his grave.”
Robert’s face swelled like a pufferfish about to burst, cycling from red to purple.
A sharp metallic ring sounded.
“Silence, you vile creature—!”
Roserin glanced at Robert’s sword.
She had no intention of mounting the gallows as the new Emperor desired.
He meant to make her death into a spectacle to solidify his rule among the people, but she had no desire to be a willing pawn.
He would see only her corpse.
And in exchange for killing a traitor like her, this bundle of inferiority before her would mount the gallows in her stead.
This wretched creature was perfectly suited for her purposes.
‘Just a little more provocation…’
Roserin opened her mouth.
“That lowborn wretch, as filthy and foul-smelling as you—such a base pig disgusts me.”
“You… you damned beast!”
The blade’s tip was about to pierce straight through Roserin’s heart.
‘At last.’
In the moment she surrendered to everything, her eyes closing—
“Stop.”
A soft yet resolute and quiet voice cut through the vulgar bloodlust.
“That’s enough, Baron Robert.”
“G-Geren, Your Grace?”
The moment Roserin recognized him, she grabbed the blade that had slipped through the bars and wrenched it toward herself.
“What the—”
Baron Robert, nearly disarmed, belatedly tightened his grip and yanked the sword back.
With a scraping sound, blood dripped steadily from her hand where she’d lost her hold on the blade.
Footsteps rang deliberately against stone.
From the lengthening shadows, a man who appeared to be in his late forties emerged at a leisurely pace.
“She means only to use you to die. If you kill her, you’ll be the one climbing the gallows instead.”
His voice, measured and melodic, sounded almost tender.
Roserin’s face twisted in disgust.
With just a few words, he soothed the flustered Baron and drove him from the Underground Prison, then stood before Roserin with a faint smile.
“A pleasant afternoon, Roserin. Pity—that lovely face is quite ruined. That fool couldn’t measure his own strength and played recklessly with a blade.”
At his words, tinged with gentle regret, Roserin narrowed her brow and fell silent.
He reached out and brushed away the dried blood smeared on her cheek, then withdrew.
He was Geren Wilbred.
The man who had personally caught Roserin when she fled without a trace, thrown her into this prison—her mortal enemy.
The contempt in his gaze toward Robert had already shifted to something sharper, more keen.
“Have you come to pity me? Or to mock? Always obstructing me to the last.”
“I’m simply offering you a chance.”
“The last thing I want is to hear that from someone who’s thwarted me at every turn.”
The man, ruined as he was, still held himself perfectly upright, and he looked down at his fascinating adversary with a low laugh.
“The world is terribly dull. Dreary, monotonous… And whatever brief joy appears never lasts nearly as long as one might hope.”
As the middle-aged man spoke, still gazing downward, he looked at Roserin.
Roserin’s brow furrowed.
This man more than any other was one she had never understood over all this time.
One day he played the role of her protector; the next, he brandished a sword against her; another day, he hid her away—and lately, he had pursued her relentlessly for more than half a year as she fled, until he finally caught her and threw her in this cell.
“Do you believe in parallel worlds, Roserin?”
He asked still wearing that smile.
Slightly downturned eyes, hair neatly swept back but with a few strands escaping, lending a careless quality.
He wore a suit and overcoat instead of a uniform.
Outwardly refined, yet violent beyond measure—a man whose thoughts remained inscrutable, and undeniably gracious.
His violet eyes rarely betrayed emotion, and there was always a smile playing at his lips.
“What nonsense are you spouting now, Geren?”
That was why Roserin despised him.
“You speak so harshly only to me. I’m wounded.”
……
When Roserin glared at him, the impeccably dressed man shrugged.
“Well, it’s written in Guilbern Dant’s book—that the world contains countless branching points born of choices, and the same world might split into multiple paths depending on which branch is taken.”
“And that man was branded a heretic and burned at the stake, and his book was classified as forbidden.”
“Yet you and I have read it.”
At her hostile reply, he laughed softly and answered, then knelt on one knee on the ground caked with dirt and blood, meeting her gaze.
“Don’t you sometimes wish? If only I’d made a different choice at that moment. If only I’d developed a different relationship with this person. Things like that.”
……
“Even I have come to find it a shame to kill you with so petty a label as villainess. Don’t you want to live, Roserin?”
Roserin’s eyes narrowed slightly, then she exhaled a short breath and let her head fall back against the bars.
Her vision swam, and the blood pouring from her palm would not stop.
Geren looked at the pool of blood pooling on the floor and at Roserin’s pale face even in the darkness, and finally paused.
“…You.”
“Didn’t I tell you, Geren? I’m rather sickly. I was born with poor health. I’ve spent my whole life hearing that I might die any moment.”
And yet I’ve managed to live quite a long time, haven’t I?
As Roserin spoke these words without strength, Geren’s eyes widened.
“The truth is, I took a poison before you caught me. It’s the kind that shows symptoms anywhere from a week to ten days on average. A drug that prevents blood from clotting.”
It was a gamble that required me to sustain a fatal wound by then.
Roserin added quietly.
When blood won’t stop, a person dies. A gamble built on the simplest common sense.
Seeing Geren’s rigid expression, she laughed softly, a sound almost like amusement.
“There was something you didn’t know after all. The final victory is mine.”
“……You’re the first person to blindside me like this, right to the end.”
Quite the honor, then.
As if she had finally withdrawn the sharp thorns that had surrounded her all this time, standing before death itself, she held a gentle smile at the corners of her mouth.
“Geren, I was so lonely.”
Geren stiffened.
“Running away isn’t as simple as it sounds either. So…….”
Roserin felt her vision beginning to blur. Because she sensed the end coming, she made no effort to stop her lips from moving of their own accord.
A wet, splashing sound echoed from the floor.
“……The answer to your question is ‘no.'”
Before the words had fully left her mouth, Roserin’s body, which had been leaning against the iron bars, tilted slowly and collapsed to the floor.
“……You always did know how to surprise a person.”
After the quiet murmur faded and a long time had passed, green flames suddenly erupted from somewhere, engulfing the Underground Prison.
* * *
“……To cling to life like that? What nonsense. You’re shameless beyond redemption. It’s because you keep doing this that everyone finds you so disagreeable and hates you.”
And when Roserin opened her eyes again, she was sitting on a bed, facing a person she had desperately missed.
It was her stepmother, the first person Roserin had killed after leaving home and establishing herself all those years ago.
‘……Geren, you bastard.’

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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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