There Is No Hidden Villain in This Novel Chapter 95

“Just a brat with nothing but a unique name, how dare you—!”

Crack, crunch!

…The situation was resolved swiftly. To be precise, that’s how it felt to me. To me, rolling around pathetically on the floor. As soon as Ryuseong arrived, everything happened quickly. Or perhaps it flowed too slowly. I wanted to close my eyes, but I didn’t even have the strength for that. While everything was happening, I just lay there motionlessly.

I think I was trying to kill something a moment ago, but I couldn’t feel anything. It felt like a tangle of threads that could destroy something in an instant was entwined at my fingertips, but I didn’t have the strength to unravel it, so I just stayed still.

Just as clothes get ruined when you do laundry the wrong way, I felt as if the substance called emotion had been completely bleached out.

I felt no emotion, just like in those days when I had to sneak open the rice cooker lid during my harmonious family’s dinner time, scoop out all the rice, and steal the few remaining grains to eat.

My family was a super-wealthy chaebol clan. Therefore, they didn’t hold that much respect for a single grain of rice, which held the blood and sweat of farmers. That fact was a blessing to my younger self.

If you couldn’t understand this, you couldn’t understand me.

‘…Though who could possibly understand.’

If you scrape the pot hard with a plastic spoon, you get about a quarter of a spoonful to swallow. When I was younger, I got caught scraping the pot with a metal spoon and became a dog on a hot summer day, so I didn’t make that mistake anymore. The dog on a hot summer day I’m talking about isn’t the kind to be boiled in a pot. It was a citation of the old idiom meaning to be beaten like a dog.

Before I was possessed, I would look back on those days and think, ‘Wow, I even thought of swiping a plastic spoon from the trash can. What a smart little bastard,’ but at the time, I don’t think I had any room for such thoughts. Was it because my perspective was narrow? My great-grandfather liked scorched rice, and what was usually left in the pot after a hearty portion of it was served on the table was burnt rice. Scraping that together with a plastic spoon, a small one used for eating ice cream at that, was something I’d be screwed for if caught, but at the same time, it was a worthwhile adventure. After all, I could fill my stomach…

I’ve digressed for a moment; I just wanted to use a metaphor. I was just nicely using the expression of scraping the rice grains stuck to the bottom of the pot with a drrrk, drrrk sound as a metaphor for saying I was trying to look around by scraping together my last bit of energy.

‘To say I used the strength I had when I was a baby is not quite right, since I was a formula-fed baby.’

Anyway, I slowly rolled my eyes to look down at the floor. I hadn’t paid any attention until a moment ago, but on the floor where I was collapsed, there was another person collapsed besides me. For some reason, I felt dazed, as if looking at an inanimate object, but I observed steadily and meticulously. He was in a pathetic and miserable state, just like me. But he seemed a little worse off. A person who was bleeding profusely and unconscious, with broken limbs and a cracked head, would surely be in a more serious condition than I, who felt no particular pain.

‘It’s that bastard. Dick Baskerville or whatever.’

Dick Baskerville, who had choked me and inflicted violence upon me, was now writhing like an insect. It was clearly something Ryuseong did after coming in through the open door and finding me when I couldn’t feel anything. I felt nothing even as I watched him dying. If anything, I was in awe of the results of Ryuseong’s training.

The regressor, who had devoted himself to training, leaving me to my solitary room in the early days of the academy, seemed to have perfectly digested his pre-regression power. In the original novel, Ryuseong at his current age would not have been able to defeat Dick Baskerville. That was to be expected, as students attending the academy, no matter how much natural talent they had, were still no more than promising prospects or elite aspirants. The experience gap between those who have faced real combat and those who haven’t is that significant.

In that sense, I thought Cassis de Millang, with his rich combat experience, would have been better off in this situation than me. At the very least, he wouldn’t have had a reason to be rolling on the floor, unable to even get revenge with his own hands, haha.

‘It would be a huge hit if I started a revenge-for-hire service under the Hanra-pa name.’

Thinking back on it now, he had taken down Dick Baskerville with movements so transcendent I couldn’t grasp them, and at that moment, I thought there was no way my motion perception could keep up. But I saw it. It’s just that my brain couldn’t keep up with my eyes, so it wasn’t processed, but looking back, I could now understand just how brutally Ryuseong had defeated Dick Baskerville.

They say that those with chosen talents sometimes fall into a temporary state of transcendence when they experience a shocking event, and it seems that’s what happened to me.

‘Like Hae Yu-na, who had to watch her parents get murdered by a killer right in front of her as a child.’

The sensation of that moment was excessively contradictory. But I was confused as to whether what I had experienced was such a dramatic tragedy… I didn’t want to think about it anymore.

I rolled my eyes again. Roll, roll. And I stared blankly at Ryuseong, who was urgently fumbling inside his clothes as he approached me.

Ryuseong, who had uncapped a potion he found in his pocket and knelt on one knee before me, seemed to be saying something with his handsome lips moving, but I couldn’t hear a thing. Ah, so the reason I felt that my senses were strange from earlier was probably because my hearing was temporarily gone, and I couldn’t catch any sound at all.

‘I don’t think my eardrums burst.’

I knew very well what to do in situations like this. I raised my hand and slapped my own cheek. There should have been a slap sound, but I heard nothing. I didn’t feel any pain either. Thinking that my nervous system must have finally broken down completely, I turned my head and found my wrist caught by Ryuseong. Seeing Ryuseong, who had forcibly stopped me from slapping my cheek, a rage I couldn’t understand welled up. Really, I don’t get it… but just because I can’t accept it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t express it. Even if there was such a rule, I was going to break it. I slapped Ryuseong’s cheek with my other hand.

Because I couldn’t hear the slap sound, everything felt like a dream. The foolish Ryuseong took the hit without moving, but it didn’t seem to be an effective blow, as his head didn’t even turn. Ryuseong was just looking at me with his shining blue eyes, his skin didn’t even turn red, and the only thing telling me this wasn’t a dream was that my palm hurt like hell.

‘Shit.’

Am I crazy? Suddenly, something hot surged up from below my throat. I wondered if I would feel this kind of fierce pain if I swallowed a burning log or a piece of coal whole. In the end, unable to bear it, I threw it up. Blood was vomited.

The thought that my internal organs might have been damaged because I couldn’t tense my abs when I was hit in the stomach spread dimly. The fact that I was given the role of splattering blood on the protagonist, who had so effortlessly defeated a rather colossal villain like Dick Baskerville without a single drop of blood on him, felt quite undeserved. I clung to Ryuseong like trash and laughed. I did it like a madman.

‘Why am I laughing, you ask?’

Does laughter always have to have a reason? I was suddenly merry and wanted to dance. That was all. My body wouldn’t follow if I tried to dance holding Ryuseong’s hand, so I was just throwing out a pathetic laugh instead.

And after I vomited blood a few more times and let out a shabby laugh, only then, piercing through the void where nothing could be heard, did the song of a trumpet strike my ears. From then on, I gradually began to recognize the sounds around me.

“Damn it. You damn sons of bitches…”

Ryuseong, who couldn’t even use a potion for fear that the bones might set wrong in their injured state and was only trembling his handsome hands, spurred my excitement with his beautiful crying. And I remembered that the hum I was humming was jazz.

Come to think of it, I had been playing jazz on the speaker. Because of the jazz, Ryuseong didn’t discover my crisis quickly, but at the same time, it gave me back my hearing.

Is it that if you lose something, you gain something? But life never gives me anything back.

‘Fucking bastards.’

Listening to the jazz, I laughed. Still, if I leave him like this, my favorite’s eyes might get swollen. I decided to be kind.

“Ah, Mr. Ryuseong. It’s okay now. Haha. It’s okay. I think my ears were broken for a bit, but I can hear again.”

“Cassis…”

“It’s okay. More importantly, I’d like to gather opinions on how to convince Leversa of Dick Baskerville’s ‘disappearance’…”

“You’ve been crying this whole time.”

“What?”

The reply to my question was a single sentence.

“You haven’t been okay at all this whole time.”

…Come to think of it, thrown into the silence, I might have been seized by fear.

Yes, in that moment, I might not have been okay. But not now. I have recovered now, and everything is back to normal, and…

“You don’t have to force yourself to smile, please…”

I have no fucking need to hear this kind of shit.

“…”

I couldn’t smile anymore. Strangely, everything felt transcendent, and then it suddenly strangled me.

Suddenly, something I wanted to say to Dick Baskerville came to mind.

‘Daring to try and break me, yet resorting to mere violence was far too naive.’

To break me, you had to do at least this much. Violence is familiar, tedious, and boring. But Ryuseong made me happy. That was the problem.

There was no other way that could break me as much as that.