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Chapter 02
My head throbbed.
It felt as if I’d drunk myself senseless the night before—every tiny sound made my skull hum and vibrate. Cleora sat on a chair and pressed her fingers hard against her forehead.
Ha… what the hell is this.
The mercenaries who had stepped out briefly and returned from their scuffle froze as if they’d seen a monster when they found the girl—who had been lying there like a corpse—now alive and sitting upright. They flinched, wings metaphorically fluttering in alarm, then kept their distance from Cleora, exchanging furtive glances and whispering among themselves. After that, they cautiously approached her, spoke a few words—and once again looked shocked.
After staring at Cleora for a long while, one of them finally spoke.
“So, uh….”
Sitting across from Cleora was a middle-aged woman.
Adrian, the leader of the mercenary company, frowned deeply as she stared at Cleora’s filthy appearance.
“You’re saying this corpse—no, this girl—was dumped in the mercenary company’s backyard?”
“Yes! I swear!”
“In this battered condition?”
“Yes!”
At Adrian’s sharp questioning, Jade shouted, his face turning pale like a panda’s. In the process of roughly subduing him while trying to catch him as he suddenly fled, his eye had turned a deep shade of blue with bruising.
Even after hearing the answers, Adrian didn’t seem convinced. She stared at Jade with a dubious look, then lowered her gaze to Cleora.
Doesn’t look like she was assaulted.
Aside from her dirty clothes and disheveled appearance, there were no visible injuries. Extremely sensitive to crimes of this nature, Adrian turned her eyes back to Jade.
“Then why did you run?”
“I told you earlier—if I got caught there, you’d think I did it!”
“You could’ve just said you didn’t.”
“I have been saying I didn’t from the start, but no one believes me!”
“Hey! Criminals always say they didn’t do it!”
When a mercenary next to him scolded him, Jade snapped his head around.
“Innocent people say they didn’t do it too!”
“….”
Oh. Right.
The mercenary coughed awkwardly and stepped back.
Jade looked back at Adrian with an earnest expression.
“At first I thought she was a corpse and tried to get rid of it. That’s all. Please believe me!”
“Captain, it really doesn’t seem like he’s lying. Maybe we should stop here? He looks genuinely wronged.”
When the young man standing nearby spoke carefully, Adrian sighed and nodded.
“Fine. I’ll believe you, so step aside. But if you run again, I’ll assume you’re the culprit and report you. Don’t run.”
“I’m not going! I won’t!”
Jade backed away angrily, clearly upset at being suspected in the first place.
When the door slammed shut with a bang, Adrian let out another deep sigh.
What on earth had happened? How did a girl appear overnight in the backyard—locked tight, a place no one could enter without opening the door—and be found lying there like a corpse?
As Adrian was pondering how to deal with this completely incomprehensible situation—
“Um.”
Cleora, who had been looking at her reflection in a mirror, spoke up.
“Where is this place?”
At the utterly unexpected question, everyone gathered in the captain’s office fell silent.
Where is this place, she asked.
Adrian hesitated briefly, then slowly opened her mouth.
“This is a mercenary company.”
“No, not that. What country is this?”
As the pounding in her head began to subside, Cleora frowned and lifted her gaze.
The people looking at her were unmistakably mercenaries. And the language they were using was the same Western Common Tongue she knew.
So Cleora’s question was reasonable—but to the mercenaries, it was nothing short of absurd.
She didn’t even know what country she was in?
Adrian exchanged glances with the man beside her.
“It’s the Noird Empire.”
“Noird….”
Murmuring the name slowly, Cleora frowned as her head throbbed again.
It was a familiar name—the name of the country she had lived in. That familiarity was precisely the problem.
Then why am I here? Wasn’t I dead?
Cleora’s last memory was dying in battle against Keleagos.
And yet when she opened her eyes again, she was in the backyard of a mercenary company, with mercenaries jostling and fighting around her.
She pressed her head and let out a sigh.
As Cleora struggled to make sense of the incomprehensible situation, a memory suddenly surfaced—Keleagos’s words.
“The values you spoke of… you will realize just how empty and futile they truly are…”
What had that meant?
Cleora slowly raised her head.
“Hey… I know you’re in pain and confused, but may I ask you something? Um, who exactly are you—”
“Is the war over?”
“The war?”
Adrian tilted her head in confusion.
Which war was she talking about? If it was a recent one, there was only the Western Civil War. Could she be from there?
“Are you perhaps from the western region? That place—”
“Wait. Then what region is this?”
“….”
She answers nothing and just keeps asking questions, doesn’t she?
Adrian, who valued courtesy, felt a vein bulge in her temple, but Cleora was young—and they still didn’t know what she’d been through. She couldn’t just strike her.
Forcing her temper down, Adrian spoke calmly, her face twisted.
“Here? This is Gebena, a city in the Sondrom Province. Anyway—who are you, exactly—”
“What happened to Eisenwald? Is it still intact?”
“That brat is really—!”
As Cleora cut her off yet again, Adrian finally exploded, about to shout—when the young man beside her hurriedly stepped between them with an awkward laugh.
“H-haha, Captain… please calm down. She’s just a kid, isn’t she?”
“Is she mocking me right now—!”
“Please, calm yourself….”
The man forcibly restrained Adrian and smiled faintly at Cleora.
What are they even doing?
As Cleora stared blankly at the strange scene, a bald mercenary beside her spoke in a low voice.
“Eisenwald has nearly fallen.”
“F-fallen…?”
When Cleora lifted her head, the mercenary nodded calmly.
“Seventy years ago. After the Battle of the Golden Great Plains, with Cleora—the head of the house at the time—as the last, there was no one to succeed her, so the family began to decline.
An internal struggle broke out over the vacant position of head, and some collateral branches split off and became independent.”
“……”
“With the power divided and a young boy from a collateral line becoming the head, collapse was inevitable. That was already thirty years ago. But why ask about a family that’s practically ruined?”
It was impossible.
The moment she heard his words, Cleora couldn’t shake the sense of disbelief.
Because this was seventy years after the war ended? No.
Because she, who should have been dead, was suddenly alive? No.
What truly stunned Cleora was hearing that Eisenwald—her own family—was in decline.
That can’t be…
House Eisenwald had been the shield and spear that protected the Noird Empire.
Not for a year or two, but for three hundred years—since the founding of Noird itself.
That was why, when she went to war, the imperial family had sworn by imperial decree to protect her house.
A vow that even if the direct line were wiped out, the bloodline would be preserved to the very end.
Bearing that vow on her back, she had fought and given her life.
And now they squandered it—not in a hundred years, not in two hundred—but in seventy?
No—if it’s already fallen, then they must have thrown that vow away the moment the war ended.
A hollow laugh was about to escape her lips when Cleora sprang to her feet.
“How dare they—! Huh?”
“…?”
Adrian and the man beside her, still in the middle of their argument, widened their eyes at Cleora’s sudden movement. What now?
“I’ll be going now. Thank you for everything.”
Cleora bowed politely and turned around.
She was leaving? Just like that?
Adrian stared blankly after her, then hurriedly called out.
“Wait! Where are you going all of a sudden?”
“To the west.”
“Why there?”
Why?
“To reclaim what’s mine.”
To go back and smash the skulls of every bastard who broke their promise.
