TCRVP 03

Chapter 3

“B-Brother…”

Lady Melissa looked up at her brother with a face covered in tears.

“I’m sorry…”

“…”

The Grand Duke of Cardicha turned around.

“My sister has caused you some trouble. I’ll pay for the damages immediately, so please inform the servant I brought with me.”

“It’s quite all right, Your Grace.”

The Duchess of Bayrets approached with several maids and spoke.

“It wasn’t anything particularly valuable, so please don’t worry. I’m more concerned about whether Lady Melissa was hurt.”

“She wasn’t.”

The Grand Duke of Cardicha replied in an openly displeased tone.

“But of course I should compensate you.”

“We’re hardly so impoverished that we can’t afford to replace a single piece of glasswork. Please consider it a gift we would have given her anyway. It was Lady Melissa’s birthday just recently, after all.”

“That’s true.”

The Grand Duke of Cardicha sighed.

“When will you ever grow up… Melissa, please just behave yourself. Is that really so difficult, hmm?”

…Something was strange.

At first glance, it was simply a situation where a guardian didn’t know what to do after a child caused an accident.

But considering Lady Melissa’s status, this was clearly far from ordinary.

Whether she was an illegitimate child or not, the children of nobles were subjected to rigorous etiquette training from a very young age.

Yet judging from the accidents Lady Melissa caused and the way she responded to them, she hardly seemed like a ten-year-old noble girl at all.

‘What on earth is going on?’

Just as I was standing there in confusion, something even stranger happened.

“U-Uwaaaah!”

Lady Melissa’s lips trembled.

Then, her face went deathly pale, and she burst into tears before pushing her way through the crowd and running away.

“…Haa.”

The Grand Duke of Cardicha pressed a hand to his forehead before silently setting off after his younger sister.

Now the people began openly whispering about Lady Melissa and her strange behavior.

“Just as you’d expect from an illegitimate child…”

“Are all illegitimate children like that? I think she was simply born a little deficient.”

“She looks perfectly normal on the outside. I almost feel sorry for the Grand Duke. No matter how much wealth and power you possess, it’s hard to sleep peacefully when your own family is like that.”

“She’ll have trouble finding a marriage partner, too. I’ll bet my watch that she’ll become nothing but a burden on the Grand Duke’s family.”

…Enough was enough.

If I listened to any more, I felt like my ears would rot, so I quickly made my escape.

‘The balcony… Ah, there it is.’

I spotted a small balcony and opened the door without a second thought.

I shouldn’t have.

“Darling… a little more, mm, right there…!”

Bang!

The moment I saw something I absolutely did not need to see, I slammed the door shut.

‘What are they doing in someone else’s house…?’

And not just any ordinary person’s house, either.

A duke’s residence.

Suppressing the urge to scrub my eyes clean, I headed toward another balcony.

This time, even before I opened the door, a honeyed voice sweet enough to rot my ears drifted through it.

“Darling, isn’t the moon beautiful?”

…Yeah. That balcony was a lost cause, too.

I was trudging back toward the ballroom when—

“M-Mommy… Daddy…”

I heard the sound of a child sobbing from behind yet another balcony door.

I opened it without thinking.

I assumed a child who had come with her parents had gotten lost, and I intended to help her find them.

But then—

‘…!’

A face covered in tears and snot.

Eyes red and bloodshot from crying.

Tiny shoulders trembling uncontrollably.

The little girl sobbing helplessly in the midst of a full-blown panic attack was none other than Lady Melissa.

Now, the question.

If you don’t even know which novel you’ve been transmigrated into, what is the best way to deal with a young lady who is clearly one of the important characters?

1. Quietly close the door and pretend you saw nothing.
2. Comfort the child and step straight into a troublesome quagmire.

The obvious answer was number one.

“Sniff… hic… Waaah…”

But unfortunately, I wasn’t heartless enough to abandon a crying child and run away.

Especially not one who was crying so hard she could barely breathe.

I carefully approached the girl, then knelt down to bring myself to her eye level.

Lady Melissa looked startled, but she still couldn’t stop crying.

“Sniff… hic… Hic…”

“Breathe.”

I gently took hold of the child’s shoulders and rubbed her back, helping her trembling body calm down.

“H-Hic… I can’t stop…”

“You can.”

I spoke firmly.

“Let’s do it together, okay? Breathe in… One, two, three. Breathe out… One, two, three.”

Fortunately, Melissa followed my instructions well, and her crying gradually began to subside.

She’d been crying hard enough to collapse from exhaustion, so I was relieved to see her calming down.

“W-Who…?”

Only now did Melissa seem curious about who I was.

I handed her a handkerchief and spoke.

“My name is Tessa Harrington. I’m the Deputy Director of the Child Protection Bureau.”

The girl snatched the handkerchief from me, blew her nose loudly, and answered in a hoarse voice.

“…I don’t know.”

“It means I meet lots of young friends like you as part of my job.”

I smiled as kindly as possible while telling a lie without even blinking.

I only had a moment to think that perhaps my meaningless title could actually be useful sometimes.

“…Like a kindergarten teacher? I’m not a little kid…”

…What?

For a moment, it felt as though my heart stopped beating.

The word kindergarten did not exist in this world.

At least, not in the sense she had just used it.

There were nurseries, perhaps.

Which meant that what the word kindergarten implied was…

My lips parted.

I wanted to say something, but no words came out.

Lady Melissa looked flustered and reached a hand toward me.

“I-I’m sorry. I said something strange again, didn’t I? I’m really sorry… I need to forget it quickly. I have to forget everything.”

She rambled incoherently, then began stammering as she apologized over and over.

“I-I’m really, really sorry!”

I barely managed to force the words out.

“…You’re a transmigrator too, aren’t you?”

Lady Melissa stared at me with wide eyes.

Her tiny mouth opened and closed soundlessly for a moment…

“Waaaaah!”

Despite all my efforts to calm her down, she burst into tears again and threw herself into my arms.

Flustered, I gently patted the young lady’s back.

My guess seemed to be correct, but Lady Melissa’s behavior at the ballroom had been completely unlike that of a transmigrator.

Actually, even now, she didn’t seem like one.

When two transmigrators met, shouldn’t the first thing they did be to exchange information and promise to cooperate?

Not immediately burst into tears and cling to each other like this.

‘Well, I suppose she must have been through a lot. And it’s a cliché for your way of thinking to become more childlike when you’ve transmigrated into a child’s body…’

I stroked the young lady’s back and finally managed to calm her down.

Her increasingly loud sobs were becoming a problem. If someone suddenly threw open the door, we’d be in trouble.

“Calm down. Everyone outside will hear you.”

“B-But…”

Lady Melissa mumbled through her tears.

“I didn’t know there would be someone else like me. I wanted to meet someone so badly! I was so scared!”

I stared at her.

Her body might look like that of a child, but if she was a modern person who had only just transmigrated and was struggling to adapt—not someone who had regressed or been reincarnated—then she should fundamentally be an adult.

Or at the very least, a high school student.

Of all the novels I’d read, I couldn’t remember a single protagonist who had been younger than a high school student before transmigrating.

I myself had been attending high school when I was transmigrated here.

No matter how much the setting insisted that the mind followed the body, behaving this helplessly like a child was something she needed to stop doing—for her own sake.

“Calm down for now. Just because you transmigrated into a ten-year-old doesn’t mean you have to act like one, right? Speaking of which, how old are you, anyway? I was eighteen when I transmigrated.”

Whether she was an adult or a high school student, if she realized that her true mental age wasn’t that of a child, surely her condition would improve considerably.

But things didn’t go at all the way I’d expected.

Lady Melissa stared straight at me, her lips moving uncertainly.

Then, from her tiny mouth came a trembling voice.

“I’m in… third grade of elementary school, high school student unnie…”