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Chapter 05
‘A mouse beastkin? Kill it on sight?’
Elodie had died of old age.
Which meant she had somehow survived her entire life among humans who tried to exterminate mice on sight.
Before she could even process what was happening, Elodie moved.
Poof.
She transformed into a mouse and darted between the piles of goods stacked throughout the storage room.
Now that she had transformed into a human once, shifting between her human and mouse forms came as naturally as breathing.
She felt free.
As though she had finally broken free from invisible chains that had bound her entire body.
“Don’t let it escape! If you lose it, you’ll die with it!”
The fate of the family was at stake.
The butler shouted until the veins in his neck bulged.
“What are you all doing?! S-Step away from Elodie this instant!”
Sera cried out, her face deathly pale, but no one paid her any attention.
The butler and the knights he had brought with him were obsessed with one thing—stomping the mouse to death.
Dodging the feet that rained down without pause, Elodie slipped into a mouse hole.
Because it was a storage room, patched together in places and full of cracks, such an escape was possible.
“Damn it! Tear down the wall!”
“Yes, sir!”
They’re tearing down the wall?
Were they really this desperate just to kill a single mouse beastkin?
How did they even know I was a mouse beastkin in the first place? And why are they trying so hard to kill me?
She couldn’t make sense of any of it.
But one thing was certain.
If they catch me, I’m dead.
Using her long tail and sharp claws, Elodie desperately climbed the wall.
She had to find an opening into the next room.
Crash!
At that moment, a knight’s blade pierced straight through the wall beside her.
Gasping, Elodie hurried to the opposite side.
Craaash!
But another blade immediately punched through the wall in the direction she had been heading.
The knights didn’t stop.
They strained to shove their swords straight through the wall without caring whether the blades were ruined.
They intended to tear the wall apart entirely.
“There’s an axe over here!”
“Good. Hurry and—”
Elodie squeezed her eyes shut.
Can I really survive this?
She had finally become someone who could help Sera.
I can’t die now… I can’t leave Sera behind in this place!
And then—
“What are all of you doing, gathered around a wall?”
A voice rang out.
It wasn’t particularly deep, nor especially high.
The moment its owner spoke, the surroundings fell silent, as though everyone else had vanished.
Footsteps approached.
Light, yet disciplined.
“Were you waging war against a wall?”
“Y-Young Master.”
“Pathetic. At this rate, even that madman from the novel who charged at windmills would look more like a proper knight than you.”
Though his tone dripped with unmistakable mockery, his voice itself was so cold it sent a chill through the air.
The cold-eyed boy swept his gaze over the knights struggling to tear down the wall before it settled on the butler.
More precisely, on Sera’s wrist, which the butler was gripping tightly to keep her from running away.
Struggling desperately to free herself, her face flushed bright red, Sera shouted,
“Let me go!”
The boy tilted his head as if responding to her words and gestured toward Sera.
“She says to let her go.”
“You misunderstand. This maid has been rather insolent, so I was merely trying to discipline her.”
“So?”
“Young Master, she’s nothing more than a lowly servant girl, not someone worthy of your concern—”
“She said let her go. Can you not hear her?”
“……”
The butler had no choice but to release Sera despite Count Bluewood’s orders.
His opponent was Young Master Edmund, heir to the House of Valkyrisen.
The moment she was free, Sera immediately dropped to her knees.
She didn’t know who the boy standing before her was.
But she knew one thing.
He was the only hope capable of saving Elodie from death.
“Young Master, please save Elodie.”
“Elodie?”
“She… she’s my friend. A harvest mouse beastkin. They’re trying to kill her…”
“N-No!”
The butler cut Sera off in horror.
Cold sweat poured down his face as he frantically denied her words.
“That’s an outrageous accusation! Why would we commit murder? Especially when you’ve personally come to investigate the disappearances of beastkin!”
“I’d like to know that myself.”
Edmund’s golden eyes, glowing brightly in the darkness, narrowed instantly.
He briefly glanced at the glass orb in his hand before looking back toward the wall.
“It’s not like that. This girl has completely misunderstood the situation. A mouse… a mouse appeared, so…”
“A mouse?”
Edmund began walking toward the butler.
Startled, the butler unconsciously stepped backward with every step the boy took.
His eyes quickly scanned the area before he deliberately covered the mouse hole Elodie had disappeared into with his heel.
The situation was only becoming more tangled.
If he blocked the only exit, she couldn’t escape.
The knights had already damaged the wall, but fortunately there still wasn’t a hole large enough for a mouse to get through.
He could still bluff his way through this.
After all, it was only the young master who had caught on—not the Duke himself.
“We had mobilized all the servants to search for the harvest mouse beastkin when an ordinary mouse appeared. We tried to catch it, and this girl happened to see us and misunderstood the whole situation.”
The instant Sera heard those words, her face twisted.
“No! They were—!”
“Silence! What gives you the right to raise your voice? Get back at once!”
Sera clenched her teeth.
This wasn’t the first time.
Everyone in the Bluewood family, from the master to the servants, treated her as nothing more than a maid, dismissing every opinion and every word she spoke.
She was used to this.
So used to it that it had begun to feel normal.
Even if she was Count Bluewood’s biological daughter…
If he refused to acknowledge her as his child, then she wasn’t one.
Unlike her older sisters, she had never received his affection.
Perhaps it was only natural that she was treated like a servant.
She had learned resignation.
She had learned obedience.
“That’s bad.”
But that child had told her this was wrong.
“It’s strange. It’s wrong. You know that too, Sera.”
She had told her it was strange.
She had told her it was wrong.
She had even asked her to run away together.
So…
“My name is Seraphina Bluewood. I am the youngest daughter of House Bluewood.”
This time…
No matter how insane they called her, she would not back down.
“They were definitely trying to kill the harvest mouse beastkin, and she’s behind that wall right now.”
“Hah! She’s completely lost her mind! How dare you impersonate Lady Bluewood and tell such blatant lies!”
The butler shouted over her, trying to drown out her voice.
Inside, he was panicking.
Whenever important guests visited from outside, Sera was always locked away.
Even on the rare occasions she encountered visitors, she was introduced as a maid.
And every single time, Sera simply lowered her head without resisting.
But now…
At a time like this…
“Seraphina Bluewood. That’s a name I’ve never heard before.”
At Edmund’s quiet murmur, the expressions of the two people before him diverged completely.
Despair filled Sera’s face.
Relief and delight spread across the butler’s.
“Exactly! Of course you haven’t heard it! The girl isn’t right in the head, so please don’t pay her any attention. If you’ll just proceed to the reception room—”
But Edmund wasn’t finished speaking.
“At least the rest of what she said wasn’t a lie.”
“Pardon? W-What do you mean…?”
Holding the glass orb before his eyes, the boy stared at the wall opposite him.
Beyond the transparent sphere, a tiny light blinked repeatedly, indicating a precise location.
“This magic orb marks the location of a specific individual. More precisely, it tracks the only daughter of House Ratson—Lady Ratson.”
“L-Lady Ratson?”
“But the young lady was cursed in an unfortunate accident and transformed into an animal. Because the curse changed her into another being, even magic could no longer determine her location. Yet for some reason, today the curse was suddenly broken, and the orb pinpointed her exact location… inside the Bluewood estate.”
Thanks to that, they had immediately locked onto the coordinates and teleported here using magic.
In a flat, emotionless voice, he continued.
“Of course, House Ratson couldn’t set foot in human territory because of the peace treaty. So two years ago, they came directly to my family with a request.”
“To find their missing daughter.”
At that moment—
A flash of killing intent flickered across the boy’s otherwise calm eyes.
“At this very moment, Lady Ratson’s location overlaps perfectly with yours.”
“How do you explain that?”
