The Villainess Duke Lady Hides Her Identity - Chapter 20

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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 20

Something felt off. A strange warmth bloomed in her chest, effervescent and unfamiliar.
Reponya turned her head sharply, evading Felens’s gaze.
‘What was that. As if he were worried I’d get hurt.’
Reponya frowned and shook her head. That couldn’t be. He was clearly just tired of her pestering—that was all that look meant.
He still couldn’t move past his dead sister, couldn’t even properly guard anyone else, and hadn’t even finished at the Academy.
There was no reason he’d worry about Reponya, who’d taken that sister’s place.
“Now you see? So stop sighing like that. What five-year-old sighs already?”
Felens patted her head gently before rising to his feet. Reponya watched his retreating back for a long moment.
But if what he just said were true—
‘That’s a path to destroying his entire life.’
If Felens couldn’t move forward because of his dead sister and remained a fixture at the Academy like this, his future was plain to see without needing to look ahead.
Someday he’d be expelled or graduate under a cloud of disgrace, accomplish nothing, and die idling away his days just as he was now.
Cast out by his family and die, or hidden away in shame and die regardless.
‘…Though it’s not my place to worry. I can’t even manage my own affairs—who am I to concern myself with his?’
Reponya turned away. If she failed to find the heirloom and time slipped through her fingers, Disownment would come from her house, and she too would die at the Pope’s hands, her task unfulfilled.
Reponya activated the Wooden Horse and changed direction—away from where Felens had gone.
‘I should stop asking Felens to guard me. That’s over.’
Reponya found herself envying the true youngest daughter of this house, whose face and name she’d never know.
What must it feel like to be remembered even in death, to have someone searching for you still?
‘I’ll never know that.’
The longer she lived as the Kraitan noblewoman, the more she obtained what the real daughter should have received,
the sharper grew a nameless loss, a creeping envy.
Reponya scrunched her brow and shook her head firmly.
‘Have I really become five years old in the head, just because my body is?’
Focus. She was past the age for melancholy and envy. She wasn’t actually a child, and she couldn’t afford to lose control of her emotions like this.
Reponya tidied away her feelings cleanly. That was when it happened.
Thunk.
Lost in thought, her eyes unfocused ahead, Reponya snapped to attention at the sound of something catching beneath her.
The Wooden Horse tilted forward, tipping over a stone.
“…What?”
Water filled Reponya’s vision. Very deep water—a lake.
Reponya blinked. That moment stretched out impossibly slowly, as if time itself had frozen.
“Wh—”
The Wooden Horse would keep moving forward unless she turned it.
The problem was that Reponya had been distracted, hadn’t been paying attention—the Wooden Horse had drifted on without correction.
Onward. Just onward.
“Damn—”
The curse never finished.
Splash!
Reponya and the Wooden Horse plunged into the Kraitan Mansion’s lake with a tremendous crash.
Glub.
Reponya’s body and the Wooden Horse sank slowly toward the lake bottom, deeper than she’d expected.
‘Foolish. What a stupid mistake.’
Reponya held her breath.
‘A real five-year-old would panic now, but I won’t.’
Reponya opened her eyes and swam instinctively upward.
Falling in was a shock, nothing more—no serious problem.
She’d been trained by the Pope himself in Diving, in holding her breath, in Swimming. Of course she could manage this.
‘During training, if I couldn’t hold my breath and lifted my head above water, they’d beat me until I was nearly dead.’
Calling up the memory, Reponya swam calmly toward the surface. Then she saw it—the Wooden Horse, collapsing as it sank.
More precisely: the expensive Gems and Mana Stones attached to it, sinking away.
And the gift she’d received for the first time in her life.
“…!!”
Reponya stopped in her tracks without thinking. The costly Gems and Mana Stones were disappearing into the lake’s depths.
The first gift she’d ever received was sinking away into the murky bottom.
For some reason, the Duke’s face surfaced in her mind.
The anxious look he’d worn when he handed her the Wooden Horse, and that smile of his when he’d realized he was the one giving her the first gift.
Reponya moved without thinking.
‘With Gems hanging like that, it must be heavy!’
Reponya swam not toward the shore but toward the sinking Wooden Horse.
This was the instinct of hunger. When Reponya first saw the Gems attached to the Wooden Horse, she’d thought of their price before their beauty.
She’d immediately thought of survival—how many months that single Gem might feed her. But there wasn’t just one; there were dozens, and Mana Stones were embedded among them.
So even as she swam deeper, knowing that the farther down she went the more distant life became, knowing her breath was failing, Reponya couldn’t help but chase the sinking Wooden Horse.
A Wooden Horse worth more than me.
That’s all the reason she needed. It wasn’t because the Duke’s face had come to mind. Using such a reason for such a choice would be foolish.
Glug.
Reponya’s breath caught sharply.
The Gems embedded in the Wooden Horse, which had glowed so beautifully, lost their luster the deeper they sank into the lake.
‘It was the first gift…….’
Perhaps the last one too.
Reponya’s brow furrowed at her own foolish thought.
Her breath was giving out faster than she’d expected.
‘A child’s body—it can’t hold its breath long…….’
Yet her eyes remained fixed not on the lake’s surface but on the Wooden Horse tumbling deeper and deeper toward the bottom.
Glug-glug.
Reponya’s eyes grew progressively clouded and dim.
‘Even if I die…….’
Will there be someone who remembers me and misses me like that child will?
Reponya’s body grew lighter, weaker. But she didn’t stop.
As if catching the Wooden Horse sinking to the bottom, as if grasping those Gems that no longer shone,
would somehow make everything end well.
That was when it happened.
Splash—!
The water churned violently. Someone approached and seized Reponya’s wrist, pulling her upward.
As she rose toward the lake’s surface, the sunken Wooden Horse receded, and light flooded back into her darkening eyes.
“Gasp!”
Reponya was hauled from the water by her rescuer’s grip. As her breath suddenly rushed back, a fit of coughing erupted from deep in her chest.
“Cough, cough!”
“Get a doctor!! Bring a doctor!!”
Even as Reponya collapsed to the ground, she looked up at her rescuer.
Drenched from head to foot, shouting urgently, was Felens.
“Se… cough, cough!!”
Felens, who had been calling for a doctor, whipped his head around at Reponya’s voice.
In his eyes, a tangle of emotions flickered—anxiety, worry, fury, despair.
“Are you insane??!!”
Felens swept his wet hair back and roared in anger.
“If you slip, you come right back up! Why!!! Can’t you swim??!! No wait, you were swimming toward the bottom!!! Why the bottom and not the surface!!”
Reponya looked up at Felens with water-filled eyes. It was hard to tell if what ran down his cheeks was lake water or tears.
“…The Wooden Horse.”
Her tongue was limp, her words slurred.
“The Wooden Horse was sinking.”
Felens, who had been raging, froze in place at her faint, fading voice.
“The first… gift. And it’s… expensive.”
“Expensive, expensive. Listen, little one. Things like that can be replaced. Anytime. We can get you another one right this instant.”
But if you’re dead, what’s the use? If you never come back out of that lake, what good is any of it?
Felens swallowed the rest and stared at the foolish five-year-old. At the same moment, that five-year-old let out a thin, bitter laugh.
“…Not me.”
The soaked child shook her head.
“For me—”
Even if I died and was born again, I could never have Gems like those.
Reponya slowly lifted her head. Looking at Felens, who stood frozen as if unsure how to respond, she parted her lips.
“You saved me.”
Perhaps because she’d nearly died but lived instead, that pitiful man seemed even more pitiful to her now.
It seemed sad that he could have a perfectly good life but instead lived as a wreck—and it seemed pitiable too, like her own desperation following the Wooden Horse down even knowing death waited below.
“You can protect me.”
“What?”
Soaked through, Reponya stared at Felens with an expressionless gaze.
“I saved you, didn’t I? If you hadn’t been here, I’d have drowned just now.”
Reponya wiped her drenched face with the palm of her hand. Her small hands trembled—the effort of swimming as hard as she could to follow the sinking Wooden Horse had taken its toll. She caught her breath lightly, then reached out and gripped the sodden hem of Felens’s sleeve.
“Graduate.”
Felens looked down at the sleeve she held.
“You could do it but didn’t. So graduate.”
Leave both the Academy and that life behind.
“I need you too.”
“Me? You need me?”
Felens’s eyes wavered.
As if he were hearing such words for the first time in his life, Reponya burst into laughter.
Perhaps it was the effect of nearly drowning and climbing back out. The suffocation that had weighed on her all this time suddenly cleared.
Felens gazed blankly at Reponya’s radiant smile.
“Haven’t I said it before? That it would be nice if you’d protect me? I’m not going to force it anymore, though.”
Reponya tapped the back of Felens’s hand gently, as if to comfort him.
“You protected me this time. Next time, you’ll do well too.”
“Little one, you—”
Felens’s words trailed away.
“Hey, little one!!”
Five-year-old Reponya’s body could no longer hold up, and she collapsed into unconsciousness.
‘Ah. Five years old—too frail. Truly useless.’
With that thought, Reponya closed her eyes.

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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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