Chapter 17

. Yuri in Complete Disarray

 Thud—! Crash—!

The loud sound of Yuri rolling down the stairs echoed through the mansion.

Emilia, who had just stepped onto the stairs, stared in shock at Yuri, who had tumbled all the way to the bottom and was lying there.

“Head Maid!”

Several passing maids stopped and looked at Yuri with startled expressions.

“……Hic… ugh……”

Yuri, who had thrown herself down the stairs without holding back, was covered in injuries.

Blood was flowing from her head, as though she had struck it somewhere.

“……Gasp, Head Maid.”

One of the maids covered her mouth and lowered her voice.

Judging by their expressions, Yuri knew that her plan had succeeded.

“What happened?! Did you lose your footing?”

Yuri looked at the horrified Emilia and raised a hand to wipe her nose.

When she wiped the damp area, her hand came away covered in blood.

“The Head Maid is having a nosebleed from both nostrils!”

One oblivious servant shouted.

“What? A double nosebleed?”

“The Head Maid’s nose is covered in blood?!”

Yuri wanted nothing more than to smash that servant’s head open right then and there, but she held herself back.

Instead, she whimpered as though she were in terrible pain.

“Ugh… ugh… It hurts… It hurts so much…! Help me!”

At Yuri’s cries, servants began gathering one after another.

Emilia hurriedly tried to support Yuri and help her stand, but Yuri refused to get up and continued crying pitifully.

Then, at one point, she pointed at Emilia with her finger and shouted,

“You… you wicked woman!”

**

“It can’t be, Duchess Dowager. I… I would never do such a thing.”

“Emilia pushed me down the stairs. I found out that this woman was the one who gave the Duchess Dowager the stomach medicine.”

Yuri’s words were certainly more convincing than Emilia’s perfectly healthy appearance, especially with her head tightly wrapped in bandages.

Surely, no matter how ruthless someone was, would they really lie while making themselves look like this?

Leona looked back and forth between the two women kneeling before her.

“The Head Maid is lying. Yes, she must have been the one who gave the Duchess Dowager the stomach medicine—”

“I ordered the other maids to search Emilia’s room.”

“What are you going to find by searching my room?! You witch!”

But before long, several pale-faced maids entered carrying an empty medicine bottle.

Yuri spoke to Leona with a triumphant expression.

“Look. If you examine what was inside that bottle, you will be able to find out who dared to harbor malicious intentions toward the Duchess Dowager.”

Leona’s expression became sullen.

“Duchess Dowager! It’s all lies! You know how wicked Yuri is—”

“Shut up.”

Leona’s calm but merciless rebuke rang out.

“Duchess Dowager… I’ve served you for ten years.”

“Whether what she says is true or false, I am not foolish enough to allow even the slightest seed of suspicion to grow beside me.”

“Duchess Dowager!”

Emilia’s face had gone white, and her body was trembling.

“Take her away.”

At the Duchess Dowager’s merciless command, several maids entered from outside.

“Duchess Dowager! It wasn’t me! Yuri… that woman Yuri…!”

“Don’t believe Emilia. She has cursed the Duchess Dowager to me more than once, saying that the Duchess Dowager grabs her by the hair and beats her. You heard her too, didn’t you?”

Yuri asked the two maids with a piercing gaze.

Since they had also gossiped about the Duchess Dowager behind her back, the two maids could do nothing but tremble and nod.

Emilia screamed as she was dragged away.

From that day forward, no one would ever see Emilia in the Klaus mansion again.

“It’s true. Emilia… spoke badly about the Duchess Dowager behind her back.”

“The Head Maid is telling the truth.”

At the other maids’ testimonies, Leona leaned back and closed her eyes.

The ends of her eyebrows were still raised impossibly high.

She had found the cause of her inexplicable stomach trouble.

That lowly Emilia had dared to do this!

But there was one thing she did not like.

Ideally, Yuri Anesis would have confessed that she had given Leona the medicine and then blamed it all on Essika’s orders.

That would have been the most advantageous move for Leona.

She could have quietly dealt with the actual culprit, Emilia, separately.

But Yuri had caused such a commotion throughout the entire household that everyone now knew Emilia was the true culprit behind the stomach trouble.

Therefore, that plan had gone up in smoke.

Could that woman have…

Had Yuri understood all of this and deliberately thrown herself down the stairs?

Leona opened her eyes halfway and stared at Yuri.

The bandages wrapped around Yuri’s forehead were stained with dirty blood.

Leona frowned deeply.

“I have always been loyal to the Duchess Dowager, and in order to root out those who dared to harm the Duchess Dowager—”

“Enough.”

Yuri flinched at Leona’s words.

The maids who had been standing rigidly nearby also stiffened even more.

“I don’t want to look at that ugly mess of a face. Go inside.”

At Leona’s words, Yuri lowered her head.

Good.

At the very least, she had avoided being dragged down to hell together with Essika as the culprit behind the stomach incident, just as Leona had intended.

If that had happened, even if Leona forgave her, she would have had no hope of ever receiving Kallian’s favor.

Yuri was prepared to roll down an even steeper flight of stairs if that was what it took to achieve her goal.

“……I understand, Duchess Dowager. Then I will take my leave.”

After bowing, Yuri limped away.

Naturally, there was not the slightest trace of guilt toward Emilia in her mind.

Instead, there was relief at having escaped the crisis, along with a desperate desire to accomplish her goal by any means necessary.

“It hurts like hell… Essika, this is all because of you!”

And every muscle in her body was screaming in agony.

**

The elixir made by combining freshly picked golden fruit, frog extract, and seven lizard tails increased the speed at which one’s internal energy grew.

Even if I don’t look like it, I’ve become quite skilled at making elixirs.

When she was young, she had personally received instruction from the Nomads and learned the methods for combining various elixirs.

What mattered was not the form of the ingredients but their effective components.

For someone as observant as her, figuring out which foods contained effective components similar to those found in martial arts medicine was not particularly difficult.

Therefore, as long as Hemos did not carelessly mix the ingredients as he had before or substitute completely different ingredients and ruin the mixture…

It could become a fairly decent elixir.

This should be enough for me to have no trouble practicing martial arts for the time being.

Sitting cross-legged in her room, Essika practiced circulating her internal energy.

Compared with before she drank the elixir, the flow of her internal energy was much smoother.

“What kind of effect does this even have for you to make something like this out of such rare and strange ingredients?”

Although Hemos still looked doubtful, he was now faithfully making the medicine exactly as Essika had taught him.

Hemos had become loyal to her.

Knock, knock.

Just as she was deeply focused on circulating her energy, she heard a knock from outside.

It was a slightly heavier sound than Sella’s usual knock.

Essika frowned and stood up.

At the same time, someone opened the door.

“……”

Duke Klaus stood there in a white uniform.

His tall body cast a long shadow into the room, making his features appear even sharper in the shadows.

The breeze coming through the open window gently moved his brown hair.

Only his violet eyes, resembling the night sky, shone brightly.

It was a face she was hardly pleased to see.

“What brings you here?”

The moment their eyes met, Essika’s heart turned cold.

It was like seeing the face of an unwelcome guest she had never wanted to meet.

“……”

Step. Step.

Kallian silently walked toward Essika.

Then he stopped directly in front of her and looked at her.

The smell of alcohol.

Seeing Kallian’s stiffly furrowed brows, slightly twisted lips, and unusually fierce gaze, Essika slightly tightened her brows.

“If you have nothing to say, why don’t you leave? I would like to rest.”

At that moment, Kallian grabbed Essika by the wrist.

Meeting Essika’s cold gaze, Kallian gritted his teeth.

Then, in a voice that was either cold or boiling with emotion, he asked,

“……Are you angry with me?”

Essika was dumbfounded by Kallian’s sudden, almost confrontational question.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“……I’m asking if you’re deliberately treating me like this.”

“……”

Essika frowned and looked at him as though he were a strange person.

Kallian became angry at her attitude.

Essika Klaus had never gone a single day without chasing after Kallian.

No matter what hurtful words he said to her, she would merely become teary-eyed for a moment before appearing before him again the next day with a bright, thoughtless expression.

But the Essika standing before him now kept avoiding him.

She had suddenly changed, behaving as though she had never had even the slightest interest in him from the beginning, always looking at him with such a cold expression…

And on top of that—

Snap!

Perhaps because he had been holding her wrist too tightly, Essika frowned and moved Kallian’s hand, brushing it away from her wrist.

The decisive rejection of his touch, as though she had not even the slightest lingering attachment to him, caused turbulent emotions to surge within Kallian’s eyes.

“I, for my part, cannot understand why His Grace the Duke is acting this way toward me.”

“……What?”

“From the beginning, you never had the slightest interest in me, did you? And yet you came all the way to this little room of mine just to play these pointless word games…”

Kallian’s throat suddenly went dry at her red lips as they moved.

“Could it be… that you’ve developed an interest in me?”