The Baddest Villainess Is Back - Chapter 83

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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 83
“That’s absurd.”
“If being born an illegitimate child is their only complaint in this world, yet they’re destroying people’s entire lives with it — what should we call that?”
“It’s wrong to treat a living person as a shadow! You have everything, so you could never understand. Abandoned after birth, forgotten, left to die — or living in terror, never knowing when death will come!”
Rozelin watched the brainwashed boy shout as though he were recounting his own story.
“So it’s right that you destroy the lives of people living perfectly well and kill them, leaving countless others jobless on the streets, driving them to take their own lives?”
“The sacrifice of the few for the greater good!”
“Want to know what happens if your plan succeeds?”
Rozelin crouched before him, her face expressionless as she began to speak.
“The Bellion Duke Estate will be stripped of all its techniques. The Duke himself will fall ill from an incurable disease, his body wasting away until he’s assassinated one day — he and the butler die together. The Young Duke succumbs to poison, lingering in sickness until the end. Lady Carmel takes control of the House as planned.”
……
“Before that happens, Ian Bellion gets used by Magluk and becomes wrongly entangled in a drug scandal, executed in the Emperor’s purge.”
Rozelin spoke in a flat voice, making a light cutting gesture across her neck.
“Ignis Bellion, who left the house in opposition to the Young Duke’s marriage and only returns too late to understand what’s happened, is forced to become Duke — and he begs the last of his bloodline to come back and help him.”
The leisurely flow of her words belied their catastrophic meaning.
“Of course, that cold-hearted bloodline refuses his plea coldly. And not long after, he dies — assassinated under the guise of an accident.”
Rozelin closed her eyes slowly, then opened them.
“In the meantime, Magluk’s plan succeeds completely. A plague spreads through the Empire. Just as Magluk and the King of Kaluta’s half-brother planned, the Empire and Kaluta wage a war of catastrophic scale.”
She remained crouching before the boy, her voice steady in a silence so complete that even her breathing was nearly inaudible.
“Both the Empire and Kaluta are rendered almost beyond recovery.”
The Crown Prince is busy rounding up and purging all the guilty to revive the broken morale of the people.
“In that future, someone loses a lover, someone loses a husband, a son, an only child — and the Empire fills day after day with the anguished grief of families who never return home.”
“No……”
“The First Prince becomes Emperor exactly as you wished. And you — you take the real King’s place, serving as Magluk’s King. Death by execution.”
At Rozelin’s unhurried words, the boy’s eyes snapped wide open.
“Well then, that’s quite the sacrifice of the few for the greater good.”
To anyone’s eye, it was the sacrifice of countless people for one man’s greed.
“So listen — Magluk’s King is irredeemable trash. Say that clearly, deny what you’ve been brainwashed to believe, and the brainwashing breaks.”
State the truth that contradicts the brainwashing directly, and the conditioning could be undone.
Rozelin rose slowly from her crouch.
As she turned, Arma was staring at her with eyes blown wide — fear and shock and dread all mingled in his gaze.
“……Rozelin, what are you even saying?”
Rozelin turned slowly to face her father, his face drained of all color.
“What I’m saying is — I’m not the Rozelin Bellion you loved.”
In this world, she would eliminate Magluk and erase every threat.
She would see the Second Prince and the Princess of Kaluta married for the sake of peace.
And when all of that was finished……
She would go back.
“Of course, I am Rozelin Bellion. I’m just not the Rozelin Bellion of this world-line.”
“……Then my daughter——”
“Conveniently, she died before I arrived. I was told I can only enter a body that’s already dead.”
“You’re lying……”
Cherti stepped back uncertainly.
Rozelin was accustomed to being despised.
Perhaps that’s why she smiled brightly, as always.
Or rather, she tried to.
Her lips simply wouldn’t curve upward.
In all her life, she had never failed to smile when she wished — so a momentarily disconcerted Rozelin gently rubbed her corner of her mouth with her thumb.
“I’m being sincere.”
Rozelin rubbed her lips softly and broke into her usual bright smile.
Before hostility, Rozelin smiled — partly to provoke and mock her opponent.
To anyone watching, it was clear she should be miserable, disadvantaged, angry — yet she smiled more radiantly than anyone else. It was her way of signaling that their attack had left her untouched.
It was a means of rendering their assaults void, of demonstrating her own composure.
So Rozelin knew how to smile often and well in the face of hostility and misfortune.
‘……Ah, so I had no real intention to provoke.’
Now she understood why her lips wouldn’t rise.
“In any case, I’m sorry for deceiving you.”
Rozelin spoke at her leisure.
“I debated telling you, but my thoughts became complicated here. You must be displeased — but I was quite pleased.”
I left home early, you see.
Rozelin added one more thing.
The reason she’d brought up such a long-winded explanation was, in fact, singular.
The arson and disappearance case was nearly resolved, the Magluk situation was almost settled, and the Kaluta affairs were being handled.
“If I’m not honest about it, I don’t think you’ll grant me the engagement dissolution, and I think you’ll try to stop me even when I want to die. So I’m telling you in advance to prepare myself.”
In case she really did die suddenly after pretending to be alive, and it wounded him terribly.
Since that wasn’t her intention, she wanted to prepare for it, and she thought things might go better if he knew the contents were someone else’s before it happened.
“……Wait, hold on. You’re trying to die? What do you mean by that?!”
Ian, who had been listening quietly, suddenly shouted with his collar grabbed from behind by Ignis.
Ah, Rozelin realized her explanation had been insufficient and added softly with a small sigh.
“It’s my Abyss. Apparently I do have one. Since it activates only after death, I’ll need to die to use it.”
She laughed under the astonished gaze of the Reaper.
“……What kind of ability is this, exactly.”
“When I die, just once, I can go back to the past and borrow someone else’s body to live one more time.”
And so she intended to go back, Rozelin answered matter-of-factly.
“So…… right now, you’re going to leave us—no, leave me…… and die……?”
Cherti murmured, his face deeply wounded.
“It’s not abandonment. It’s returning what I borrowed.”
Rozelin placed her hand over her chest as she spoke.
“Abandon…… a daughter who abandons her father…… where in this world…….”
Cherti fell into panic again, lowering his head as he began to mutter something unintelligible.
“Or maybe from the start, I was never even a real father to you…… was I…….”
As purple Poison Mist spread outward, Rozelin quietly closed her lips.
“Tch, who are you trying to kill now! Can’t you control your ability?! You bastard!”
“……If Rozelin dies…… there’s no reason for me to live either…….”
After staring at him for a long moment, Rozelin finally turned her head and opened her mouth.
“Father, I’ve never properly called you Father. I always thought you hated me…….”
So Rozelin had never approached him first.
Because he never came to her, she decided he must despise her.
Because he despised her, she faced the world with the petulant, childish determination to despise him in return.
“If I had ever spoken to you properly even once…….”
As Rozelin murmured softly, Cherti slowly lifted his head.
“I might have realized sooner what a useless, soft-hearted, gloomy, depressed father you are—one with no self-worth left at all.”
“……Daughter?”
At Rozelin’s breathless murmur, Cherti staggered, his mouth falling open.
Rozelin added that it was a joke.
“……That’s quite a brutal joke.”
“Father, you’re an expert with poison, aren’t you? There’s no reason you’d die from an epidemic or poison.”
“……Usually not, no.”
For Cherti, poison was like air to ordinary people.
Even if he countered poison with poison, it would only create something stronger—and he, born with the Poison Abyss, could never die from poisoning.
“But my father did die.”
Rozelin said quietly.
Only then did Cherti recall what Rozelin had said on that day when he’d gone berserk.

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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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