The Baddest Villainess Is Back - Chapter 63

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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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Chapter 63
In preparation for the Karutain delegation, troops and personnel had converged entirely on the backyard where the banquet was being held.
Though outdoor, it was far from cramped—quite the opposite, so expansive that there was all the more to manage—and the exterior security was notably more stringent than usual.
The Karutains proved far more convivial than expected.
Their unselfconscious, genial nature ripened the festivities in no time.
Rozelin too drained her wine glasses one by one, her spirits lifting with each sip.
“Lady of Bellion.”
Rozelin’s cheeks flushed slightly.
As she tilted yet another wine glass—she’d lost count—she stiffened at the maidservant’s call.
“Yes?”
“Lord Geren sends urgent word. He says there’s something from the previous matter he must discuss with you. He asks that once you’ve eaten your fill, you come for a moment.”
“…Geren?”
“Yes.”
At the maidservant’s reply, Rozelin tilted her head slightly, then nodded in compliance.
‘Why would Geren suddenly summon me alone? The previous matter…’
As she followed the maidservant into the Imperial Capital, her brow furrowed. If it’s the previous matter, shouldn’t he be the one coming to me?
“…Did that bastard really ask for me?”
“Yes.”
Rozelin slowly pressed her thumb against her brow. The wine’s haze began to clear from her head.
“That’s odd.”
……
At Rozelin’s words, the maidservant’s footsteps halted abruptly.
“That man doesn’t trust people. There’s no way he’d have told anyone what we discussed. So who are you?”
“Wow, you’re sharp, aren’t you? I thought you two were just… well, you know. But it seems there’s something else going on.”
With the sinister voice that came from behind, Rozelin’s eyes flew wide.
At the same moment, a dull thud echoed—and a heavy pain bloomed at the base of her neck.
Her vision blurred the instant after.
* * *
She’d been abducted.
Rozelin couldn’t decide whether to rejoice or despair at a situation so easily summed up in a single word.
‘I should’ve been more careful when Khan warned me.’
Despite his instinctive counsel—that animal sense that made him feel something amiss—she’d failed to anticipate, and inwardly she cursed herself.
‘Abducted in the heart of the Imperial Capital…’
The laxity of her escort was nothing short of lamentable.
Though, with the Karutain delegation’s arrival, the city’s security had inevitably grown stretched thin in the course of preparing for all contingencies.
“Hello there, young lady. Awake now?”
……
“I know you’re awake, so open your eyes.”
At the voice, Rozelin—who had been feigning unconsciousness—furrowed her brow.
She exhaled slowly, lifting her head slightly, and a man whose face she recognized broke into a grin.
“It’s been a while.”
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t greet me like an old friend you’ve bumped into on the street. It’s irritating.”
Rozelin spoke with her hands bound behind her, her body forced into a chair.
She twisted her hands this way and that, but the bonds showed no sign of yielding.
Rozelin’s jaw tightened.
“Where is this?”
“Well, where do you think?”
The man who’d dragged a chair across and now sat cross-legged at a distance wore aristocratic dress, yet looked nothing like an aristocrat.
No—he bore the look of an alley thug far more than a noble.
“Tell me, young lady, how did you find out about our business? And why do you keep interfering?”
……
“Forgive the bluntness, but while you slept, I took the liberty of examining you. I didn’t detect any particularly exceptional power.”
“You speak with remarkable confidence about having touched a woman’s body without permission.”
“Well, I had no such intentions when I did so.”
The man, Axismos Baldur, surveyed Rozelin from every angle.
His expression was impassive, his gaze steady and unwavering.
Yet he knew how fiercely her heart was pounding.
A calm face did not mean the absence of fear.
“I’m curious whether you have some reliable backing to speak so loosely—but you hardly seem to have reason for such confidence.”
The words he added with a hint of disappointment carried no decorum, his manner lacked refinement, and his bearing was crude.
Rozelin met the sight of a man wholly unworthy of a count’s title with silence.
She had no desire to exchange words with such an imbecile.
‘……Count Baldur.’
By her recollection, everyone in the Baldur family had perished in mysterious accidents, which was why he—an illegitimate child—had become the next count.
‘As if that could have been a mysterious accident.’
Though the perpetrator had never been identified, everyone knew the affair was deeply suspicious.
“What, going to keep your mouth shut? What if I kill you?”
“If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it already.”
“Hmm?”
“If you meant to kill me, you wouldn’t have bothered tying me up like this. You must have business with me besides that. Isn’t that right?”
Rozelin spoke with glacial precision, emotion suppressed to its limits.
Count Baldur burst into snickering laughter at her demeanor and shrugged his shoulders.
“Ah, sorry, sorry. It’s just that I inherited the count’s seat through this mysterious accident business, but I was never properly trained, you see.”
“That much is obvious.”
At Rozelin’s cutting remark, the man hesitated.
“I understand that you come from lowborn commoner stock, but now that you wear that title, couldn’t you manage to drop the vulgar speech? It’s making my ears rot. And since my hands are bound, I can’t even stop myself from listening. How vexing.”
At Rozelin’s taunt, Count Baldur’s lips twitched once.
The man laughed heartily and carried himself as though everything bored him.
On top of that, he wielded his bearing and speech as though in defiance of the world, and his clothes were a complete mess.
This was how the man conducted his rebellion against the world.
Open defiance against the suffocating aristocratic order.
Rozelin herself had once harbored similar thoughts, so she understood well.
For a man approaching forty, to have no method of rebellion left but this was pitiful—almost laughable.
Rozelin moved her bound hands roughly behind her back, as though attempting to work the rope loose.
The Seven-Color Stone Bracelet was still on her wrist.
Geren had even picked up the red stone again and returned it to her earlier.
She searched her memory, distinguishing the colors of the beads, and tilted her head upward.
“……Our young lady seems to be crossing the line bit by bit.”
“Ah, forgive me. I thought it might be better than calling you a thoughtless child, but it seems I was wrong.”
“A child……?”
The man’s lips curled savagely upward.
Crunch—!
His hand seized the back of her neck.
“Why does our young lady have to be like this? I made a polite request for conversation.”
“Polite? You need to learn what that word means first.”
Rozelin spoke in fragments through her constricted airway.
Even with her breath cut off, she did not silence her tongue.
“Ah, damn it……. You really are impossible. Hm? Don’t push me. I don’t want a bloodbath.”
Rozelin stiffened.
“You don’t want your eyes gouged out or an ear sliced off either, do you?”
At the added threat, her face grew even more savage.
“Do I look like I’d cower before something like that?”
At the sinister gleam in Rozelin’s eyes, Count Baldur hesitated.
‘……What is this, a fragile young lady?’
This was the face of someone who had been through it all—a weathered beast.
The man released his grip as he stroked the stubble on his jaw.
He held his eyes narrowed as he looked down at Rozelin, then flopped back into the chair across from her.
“Truly a fascinating young lady. By the time this business is done, I might want to kill you myself.”
“Words befitting a failure—a coward who seized the count’s seat through dishonorable means because he couldn’t win through legitimate methods.”
“……Stop goading me, young lady. Your lovely face really will be scarred.”
The man extended his hand, pressing his blunt nails against the hollows of Rozelin’s eye sockets as he spoke.
With the sensation of his nails pressing her eyeballs through her eyelids, physiological tears spilled down Rozelin’s cheeks.
“Oh my, I’ve made you cry.”
The man, who had roughly wiped her cheeks with coarse fingers, flopped into the chair he had pulled in front of Rozelin.
“Why?”
“……Why?”
The man’s words, which he had been about to speak, were cut off by Rozelin.
“Did the King of Malouk order you to make me a Queen?”
At Rozelin’s words, the man went rigid.
All traces of irritation and exasperation vanished instantly from Count Baldur’s face.
In her cool, narrowed eyes lay only fury and suspicion.
“……What are you, really?”
Axismos Baldur’s expression, which had been smooth and light throughout his dealings with Rozelin, hardened.
“No, seriously—what are you?”
“Whatever I am is hardly your concern. You’re going to die anyway.”
“……So how much do you know?”
“I wonder where I should even begin.”
Rozelin tilted her head back with aristocratic poise, her tone deliberately evasive.
“Does it look like I’m joking, miss?”
“Not at all.”
Rozelin laughed, sultry and knowing.
“I simply know that no matter how hard you struggle, you’ll never best me.”
Axismos Baldur.
To the untrained eye, he seemed much like Geren—a confident hedonist at ease in the world. But beneath that surface churned only twisted rage against existence itself.
In short, at forty years old, he still hadn’t outgrown his adolescence.
“……Tsk. In any case. Fine. The King wants to make you his Queen. Don’t you want to live without being looked down upon by anyone, miss?”
He shrugged.
“A life without contempt. To become a noble being, the world crushed beneath your heel. It’s no common offer—the Queen’s seat has remained empty all this time.”
Rozelin watched Axismos Baldur in silence.
“If that’s what you believe at your age—that trampling others is the way to avoid being trampled……”
Rozelin laughed softly, her eyes full of pity.
“You’ve wasted your life in the saddest way imaginable.”
“……What?”
“What else could it be but pathetic—a life where your own worth can only be defined by others’ judgment of you?”
At the laughter threading through Rozelin’s voice, Axismos Baldur glared at her.
“No, I understand.”
“What could a wretch like you possibly understand!”
“I thought we were in the same situation, which is why I offered you the Queen’s seat. It’s true—I was lonely too.”
Rozelin’s lips curved as she smiled slowly, leisurely.
Despite her bound arms and shackles, she carried herself with such confidence and ease that he wondered for a moment if he were dreaming.
“But I never whined for others to assign me a value the way you wretches do.”
“Hey, miss……! Enough of this jest…….”
“Understand what? Your twisted nature, perhaps?”
Rozelin simply said what needed saying.
“You were born in a brothel as the Illegitimate Child of the previous Baldur count, and you grew up calling a bandit your father, getting beaten for your pains.”
“…….”
“Then one day, after nearly being beaten to death by that bandit, you awakened the Abyss—and you sealed that brothel with earth, set it ablaze, and burned it to ash.”
As Rozelin spoke his past as though she had witnessed it herself, Axismos Baldur’s face went rigid, then pale.
“So it was the Abyss?”
“Terrified as you were, the King of Malouk found you and told you that you were the bastard child of a nobleman. You sought out the count’s house, only to be denied your very existence and turned away at the gates—isn’t that right?”
The man did not answer her arrogant questioning.
Watching his silence, she smiled.
“And with nothing but revenge in your heart, you’ve spent all this time carefully building Malouk alongside the King.”
A soft, bright laugh.
Rozelin smiled radiant and beautiful.
“But the trouble is……”
“……What did you just say?”
Sweat beaded on her pale cheeks and dripped steadily down.
“All of that is about to fall apart.”
With a soft sound, the rope, singed and frayed by fire, crumbled and fell burning to the floor.

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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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