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Chapter 2
From the moment Maria Chetti stepped off at Bluegate train station, she could feel her tension returning, making her breath uneven.
The weather was clear today, and from the station she could even see the hill where the Mon Deplano Casino stood in the distance.
In Bluegate, a place without mountains, that flat hill stood out as a strange and distinctive presence. Since medieval times, nobles in the region had always settled there.
As she got off, her identity was checked at a temporary inspection post.
The staff at the checkpoint sized Maria up and down before even checking her ID. But once he realized she was from the Chetti family, he hurriedly stood up and bowed.
“I’m sorry. You didn’t look like a resident of Bluegate.”
Maria said nothing in return, only carefully took back her ID after it was checked and offered a polite smile.
Pressing a hand to her chest, she stepped into Bluegate. She hadn’t even drunk alcohol, yet her heart felt intoxicated, as if it was no longer under her control.
Thirty minutes by carriage. As she traveled slowly and observed the surroundings, Bluegate had not changed at all.
The only places with electricity in all of Bluegate were the Mon Deplano Casino and the streetlights along the road leading to it. Everywhere else at night became completely dark—an abyssal land where nothing could be seen or known.
Maria tightened the curtains nervously.
Halfway through the journey, she suddenly heard gunshots nearby.
Then she felt the carriage being violently shaken. Someone was trying to force open the door, which was designed to be locked from the inside.
Terrified, Maria fumbled her hand into her bag.
When she pulled out a silver pistol and gripped it tightly with both hands, the lock shattered and the carriage door burst open. A drugged, unfamiliar outlaw leaned his face inside.
Extract of mutated cactus.
The smell of Hoppins—a narcotic.
Maria knew that smell well. It was the drug that had destroyed Bluegate, the same one that had addicted even her mother and older brother.
She immediately raised her gun, but couldn’t bring herself to pull the trigger. Not killing with her own hands didn’t make death feel any lighter.
As she trembled, struggling to pull the trigger, a gunshot rang out—and the outlaw collapsed.
His eyes widened as he died instantly, still clutching Maria’s leg.
Because theft and robbery were so common, all carriages in Bluegate were designed so the doors could also be opened from the outside.
Maria pushed the man’s hand away and hurriedly opened the opposite door, stepping out of the carriage.
Breathing shakily, she collapsed onto the road as her legs gave out. Then she turned toward the direction of the gunshot.
Under the faint glow of a streetlamp, a silhouette was barely visible. The man was walking slowly toward her.
“Bluegate is still the same, isn’t it?”
Only after hearing his voice did Maria realize who he was—Benedict Ivy.
The boy she had grown up with like a sibling since she was fourteen.
She hadn’t recognized him immediately because in just one year, he had become completely grown into a man.
Maria looked up at him, still catching her breath.
Streetlight poured down over his head, making him seem even taller. His expression was hidden in shadow.
She tried to stand on her own but had no strength left, so she extended a hand as if asking to be pulled up. Benedict took it—but the moment she stood, he almost immediately let go.
It wasn’t rude enough to be offensive, but it wasn’t affectionate either. And for Maria, who had received endless affection from him since childhood, that difference felt especially sharp.
She hoped it was only because they hadn’t seen each other in a long time. After all, he had once been completely on her side—without condition.
Maria glanced back at the carriage, where both the horses and driver had fled, and asked:
“Are we walking?”
“It’s close, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
It wasn’t just his appearance that had changed.
His voice had deepened, his cigarettes had changed, and now there was the scent of perfume. A woman’s preference this time, she wondered.
She guessed he was seeing someone. He was almost always in a relationship, and even if partners overlapped, she rarely saw him alone.
In Bluegate, women never left him alone anyway. He knew how to disguise his danger, and women were always fooled by that disguise—because his exterior was beautiful.
His hair was neatly tied back, exposing the clean line of his neck. His pale skin looked smooth.
His eyes and lips were long and refined, and so whenever he rarely—truly rarely—smiled, it created a feeling in people that they wanted to make him smile forever.
It was that refreshing, that breathtaking—like there could be nothing more beautiful in the world than that smile. She had never seen it, but she imagined even his tears would be the same. He was the kind of person who could psychologically enslave others.
Fortunately, he didn’t smile often. And he likely wouldn’t now either, knowing she had just returned from her mother’s funeral.
When they were nearly at Mon Deplano Casino, Maria lifted her head to look at the beautifully built structure atop the hill.
After the revolution, when Geffel split into east and west—republic and monarchy—both sides rejected this land.
However, because Maria and her brother Alexander’s father, Kohas Chetti, had killed Camilo Scala—the former lord of Bluegate—and annihilated his family, the land was nominally assigned to the republic.
Between the Western Geffel monarchy and the Eastern Geffel republic, there was a half-hearted border barrier.
But after fourteen years of neglect from both sides, most of it was cracked, and some parts had even collapsed entirely.
Bluegate remained chaos even after the revolution. Its first mayor after the uprising—the so-called “civil revolution”—was Kohas Chetti, Maria’s father. Even now, fourteen years later, nothing had changed.
Kohas monopolized the mayor’s office and intended to keep it for decades to come.
Bluegate was clearly under Chetti family dictatorship. Only the owner of Mon Deplano Casino had changed; Bluegate itself had not.
Still the same lawless land.
Still the same hell.
At the far eastern edge of Eastern Geffel, on a hill overlooking Bluegate Bay, stood Mon Deplano Casino.
The Scala family, its original owners, had been nobles and initially intended the casino only for upper-class clientele.
But fourteen years ago, during the revolutionary era when most nobles either died or fled to Western Geffel, the Scala family was eventually overthrown by the Chetti family.
In the end, they were killed and everything was taken.
As a result, the building itself remained overly luxurious—designed by nobles—but inside it had been taken over by rough criminals, making it vulgar and corrupt. It was a contradiction embodied in architecture.
Most people in Geffel usually began dinner around eight.
Maria wanted to avoid the dinner her father hosted before the mayoral election, but she couldn’t.
She reluctantly headed toward the dining room.
Sitting at a table arranged with forced elegance felt humiliating to her.
Around the table were nothing but men known for their fists.
They were loyal to Kohas and controlled Bluegate by dividing it into districts. These rough men imitated nobles, wore fine clothes, and drank expensive liquor.
Every bite Maria swallowed felt disgusting—but that disgust only reminded her of where she came from.
No one had ever taught her etiquette at school. The finest brides of Geffel, who entered Saint Teresa Women’s University, learned manners from the moment they could crawl.
To avoid becoming an outlier among those ladies, Maria had learned etiquette by observing others.
And when she copied what she thought was correct, the rough men around her would imitate it too. If she got something wrong, even that became “gangster etiquette.”
Thinking about it made her want to abandon all manners and eat like an animal.
“Let them learn if they want.”
As she tried to steady her uneasy thoughts, Kohas Chetti’s son—her brother and owner of Mon Deplano Casino, Alexander—spoke to their father.
“Father, what happened to those terrorists?”
