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Chapter – 49
“…So if you thoroughly block even one of the conditions I just mentioned, there should be no further explosions.”
The twins stared at Ashilly without blinking.
What could they say? Or rather, what should they say?
When they had first sought out Ashilly, they had held no hope that the matter would be resolved.
They would have been grateful just to get a clue, a lead to a solution.
But for their desperate, urgent selves, Ashilly, despite her corpse-like pallor, willingly stepped outside for them and offered sincere comfort.
That alone should have been more than enough for the twins.
But now.
“It… won’t happen again.”
“The explosions.”
“Yes. If there’s no cause, there will be no effect. Of course, not everything in the world happens because there’s a cause and effect.”
Ashilly added this as a joking afterthought with a voice tinged with laughter, then quickly waved her hands.
“Ahh, for these explosions, if you remove the ignition source and control one or two of the remaining conditions, they absolutely won’t occur, so don’t worry… Hm. Hmm. My apologies.”
Near the end of her sentence, Ashilly, who had unintentionally held her breath to suppress a dry yawn, offered an apology with an embarrassed expression.
Seeing this, the twins frantically waved their hands and even shook their heads vigorously.
“No! It’s fine!”
“It’s fine! Of course it’s fine!”
In response, Ashilly pressed her eyelids and spoke in a voice that was almost fading away.
“Fortunately, what I anticipated turned out to be correct. And it seems I’ve reached my limit now…”
They didn’t need to hear the rest to understand.
She probably meant she was going back.
Anri and Kelly hastily exchanged opinions through eye contact.
But neither of them could figure out how to broach the subject.
The twins were direct descendants of the LeMaire Count family.
There were plenty of people who wanted to get close to them, but there was virtually no one they wanted to get close to.
Of course, they had social interactions, but those relationships were merely complex entanglements based on benefits between families.
In fact, when the LeMaire family began to struggle, those very people watched each other, scrambling to see who could distance themselves first.
Not that those people were particularly shallow.
From the beginning, it was the LeMaire twins who had built the walls.
Ashilly was the first person they had ever wanted to approach themselves.
How could they convey these feelings?
How could they avoid being rejected?
How could they…
“Well then, I’ll take my leave. You must have much to attend to, but since accidents like this won’t happen anymore, don’t worry any further.”
Ultimately, while the twins were still fumbling for words, Ashilly gave a light farewell and left the spot as briskly as before.
No, she tried to leave.
Stopped awkwardly by her hands being grabbed from both sides, she alternated her gaze between the twins.
Both had their heads bowed, so Ashilly asked with a puzzled expression.
“Is there something more you wanted to tal…”
“We like you.”
“We like you.”
“Thank… you?”
Just like when they had burst into tears simultaneously, this sudden confession was equally abrupt, but she offered her thanks first.
Once Ashilly closed her mouth, an unbearably awkward silence fell between the three of them.
How long had it been since the twins’ faces turned the color of ripe tomatoes?
Kelly shouted.
“We want to be close to you, my lady!”
The loud, explosive voice hit the warehouse walls and echoed.
Instantly, the gazes of everyone in the warehouse focused on them, but then, as if by prior agreement, they all turned their heads away.
Startled by the deafeningly loud voice, Ashilly’s eyes widened like a frightened rabbit’s.
Most things that happened with these twins were sudden, but…
First a confession, and now ‘being close’?
Whether it referred to love or friendship, it was a word quite embarrassing to utter out loud, wasn’t it?
“Uhm… By close, you mean…”
Ultimately, Ashilly trailed off, muttering the word that couldn’t quite leave her mouth.
Surely they weren’t both confessing their love for her?
It seemed more like they wanted to be friends? Friends.
Ashilly blinked as she looked at the twins, whose nervousness was palpable.
Was it such a grave matter…?
Now that she thought about it, since she was very young, she had never shouted “I want to be friends with you!” to anyone, nor had she heard such words said to her.
Since when had such words become things you didn’t say because they were awkward and unnecessarily embarrassing?
But still.
Because they were awkward and embarrassing words, they made her feel itchy inside, as if she had swallowed a feather.
What were the odds of someone holding goodwill towards her and mustering the courage to express it?
Moreover, the twins didn’t try to sound her out or test whether she would accept them or not.
So I’m getting good people by my side again.
It’s a world I have to leave, but aren’t they good enough people to make bearing the farewell worthwhile?
Ashilly opened her mouth to address the twins, who couldn’t even lift their crimson faces.
“Anri and Kelly. May I call you that? Please call me Ashilly.”
At that, the twins’ heads lifted one after the other.
“Perhaps it’s too soon to use first names…”
“Anri!”
“Please call me Kelly!”
At their desperate-sounding cries, Ashilly let out a small laugh.
Laughter is contagious. The twins, who had been watching her with wide eyes, soon had smiles forming at the corners of their mouths, which then gave way to laughter.
On a certain afternoon under a cloudless, beautiful sky.
The three of them became friends, holding each other’s hands.
That evening.
The Crown Prince, who was downing cheap rum in a back alley instead of being at the Crown Prince’s palace where he should have been, suddenly started laughing.
His appearance, laughing to himself while drinking alone, looked like a madman to anyone who saw him, but since the bar itself was full of crazy antics, no one paid him any mind.
“Well, well. To have explained the cause of that explosion. She truly always exceeds expectations.”
The Crown Prince, who had been tracing the rim of his glass, was recalling Ashilly, whom he had encountered near the warehouse where explosions frequently occurred.
They had even made eye contact from quite a distance.
He had briefly considered acknowledging her, but the Crown Prince soon hid himself from her view.
If she had been alone, he would have gladly revealed himself, but since the LeMaire twins were also there, he wanted to avoid troublesome matters.
“Friends with the LeMaire twins… She’s got another powerful figure in her corner now.”
What else could you say but impressive?
Bolscheik, Callient, and now LeMaire.
These were places other nobles would be desperate to have a connection with even one of, and she had three?
Furthermore, his own suspicions of her were gradually fading.
The face she made when she saw me and was surprised was definitely not fake.
Well, it was a chance encounter, so it made sense to be surprised.
Of course, the Crown Prince’s presence there was by no means a coincidence.
For the Crown Prince, who sought out incidents and accidents on his own feet and solved them without anyone asking, the explosion was just another form of amusement.
Truthfully, the losses to the LeMaire Count family or the damages from the explosion weren’t of great importance to him.
What mattered was solely escaping the suffocating imperial palace and doing something with his own hands.
But even the LeMaire Count family, mobilizing all its resources to investigate, had failed to determine the cause of the fire, something the Crown Prince couldn’t magically figure out in an instant.
But Ashilly had accomplished that magical feat with utter simplicity.
Just like how Ludwig Callient effortlessly obtained everything the Emperor wanted, as easily as breathing.
For a moment, the Crown Prince’s lips twisted grotesquely.
But it was only for an instant, one he himself didn’t even perceive.
“The sun and fire.”
For a moment, an image flashed through his mind: himself, holding the Sun Disc, the empire’s symbol, and next to him, Ashilly with her flaming red hair like fire, standing side by side.
Not bad.
The moment he thought that, the Crown Prince’s fingertips, which had been tracing his glass, abruptly stopped.
“Not bad?”
Only when he said it aloud did it become clear.
“Ashilly. Ashilly Bolscheik.”
It really wasn’t bad.
Those piercingly blue eyes that had stared straight at him.
Her blunt speech and sharp, unfiltered comments…
“She’s an interesting woman.”
The Crown Prince’s laughing expression slowly hardened.
‘I cultivated this garden for Ludwig.’
That time, in that place, she who hadn’t looked at him for even a single moment.
Just like then, even now, for some reason, his insides seethed, but he couldn’t quite grasp the root of it, as if groping through a dense fog.
It was only natural.
Unlike Ashilly, who had instantly noticed his strange agitation, the Crown Prince had long concluded that love was a mere illusion, something very distant from himself.
That’s why he could say without hesitation that the qualification for Crown Princess was someone who ‘made his heart flutter.’
Because he had the baseless confidence that such a person didn’t exist.
The Crown Prince downed the remaining rum in one go.
“Ugh…”
The burning, fiery rum flavor scorching his throat and going down seemed to settle his seething insides a little.
He shook his head as if consciously pushing away the things unsettling him.
But if it were something so easily shaken off, it wouldn’t have welled up from his subconscious into his consciousness in the first place.
Frowning, the Crown Prince kept drinking the rum.
After pouring cheap rum into himself for a while, he finally threw the glass away.
“Damn it.”
He, who was cursing viciously, had long discarded the dignity befitting the Crown Prince or the authority that came with the position.
From the beginning, he had decided such things were useless formalities, just for keeping up appearances for others, so he felt no shame himself.
After cursing and pouring rum down his throat for a while, the Crown Prince let out a short, scornful laugh.
“Now that I think about it, that country bumpkin was really good at cursing too.”
