Chapter 277

Time passed.

Nerys learned that “Nona” was Rhiannon, and Rhiannon was embarrassed by it. If Rhiannon had admitted it and apologized then, things wouldn’t have gotten worse. Instead, she chose to shape public opinion first.

“Everyone, Truydd is harassing me with absurd accusations and bullying me! Yeah, that ‘weird’ kid! I’m innocent. Who do you believe—me, your friend, or Truydd, who claims to be the victim?”

Rhiannon probably wasn’t very happy saying it. She was the one who had been quietly tormenting Nerys, who’d done nothing but mind her own business. And the fact that she reacted so sharply when Nerys caught her meant she knew she wasn’t innocent. But rather than reflect on her own cruelty, she easily decided to make Nerys into a liar.

Cledwyn was shocked when Nerys started getting beaten in the backyard because of that cowardice. The ball of light spun around furiously like a bee, and Cledwyn nearly drew his sword.

He would have, if his body hadn’t moved on its own.

Cledwyn was used to his body acting without him—slipping away whenever he was about to enter Nerys’s field of vision. But this time, something was different.

His body didn’t flee her sight. It strolled forward at an unhurried pace, stopped a short distance from the scene of violence, and shouted.

“Over here! Over here, Sir Voltaire!”

The nasty children scattered the instant they heard the name of the irritable upperclass teacher. Cledwyn’s body approached Nerys, who had collapsed in a heap.

His heart hammered. The boy’s arm tried to support the girl’s frail body. Nerys curled up, covered her head with her arms, and sobbed. That miserable crying flowed into him, filling his breath with needles.

He couldn’t even draw a stinging breath. Cledwyn stared blankly at the helpless child. Even so, his body hugged her without hesitation. Nerys trembled, hiding her face and squeezing her eyes shut as if she didn’t have the courage to face the world.

By the time they reached the infirmary, Nerys was half-unconscious. Cledwyn’s body laid her on the bed and told the doctor bluntly.

“Don’t let it be known I brought her. I hate trouble.”

Who would refuse his order? The doctor bowed and promised he would obey. Cledwyn shouted at his body over and over. Don’t leave. You have to see her wake up safely. You have to hold her.

But his body left mercilessly, as if it were only natural.

❖ ❖ ❖

“So that happened to her?”

Cledwyn rubbed his face roughly. The moment he’d stepped outside after leaving Nerys in the infirmary, his body had become free again, and the emptiness left him sick with dissatisfaction. The ball of light spoke carefully.

[Yeah. This seems like something that really happened… Mom wasn’t asleep. I think it’s a memory buried in her subconscious.]

“So in my wife’s previous life, I watched a child nearly beaten to death by her peers, dumped her in the infirmary, and walked away. Even though she saved my life.”

[Don’t say it like that, Dad… You didn’t know. You saved a stranger who was in trouble.]

In a way, that was true. Cledwyn knew very well that he could be a cold person. If he’d seen someone else suffer the same thing before Nerys, he likely wouldn’t have felt even a trace of the guilt clawing at him now. Considering the Academy’s tangled politics, it was almost an anomaly that he’d intervened at all.

And yet his heart ached so badly it felt like his legs might give out. Perhaps for the first time in his life.

Only then did he realize that entering his wife’s memories and watching her helplessly was going to hurt—deeply.

He didn’t want to leave Rhiannon Berta alone. He didn’t want to leave alone the classmates who reveled in asserting their warped sense of justice and superiority until they drove one person to ruin. He wanted to kill the parents who taught them to be that way.

But no matter what he did, the young Nerys Truydd would keep suffering. And in the end, she would be murdered.

The confident declaration he’d made when he first came here drained into something pitiful. Helplessness made his lips tremble.

“…How do I change it?”

[I told you, Dad. This is Mom’s time… Even if Dad does things without Mom knowing, Mom can only experience what she remembers. That’s the logic of this world. The sun rises in the morning, and a stone thrown into water sinks. Those are the laws.]

“It’s fine if the sun doesn’t rise tomorrow.”

Cledwyn leaned against the cold wall and slid down until he was sitting.

“It’s fine if every rock that sank into the sea falls on my head. It’s fine if the world collapses. I just don’t want her to go through this.”

The boy’s beautiful gray eyes drooped.

“I don’t need a world where her love is never returned. I don’t need a world where she’s blamed without fault. I hate a world that makes her endlessly miserable and then kills her.”

[I’m sorry, Dad… I wish I could change it. But I can’t do anything about what already happened. Even if you changed something here, it wouldn’t change what truly happened—it would only change Mom’s memory…]

“I know…”

Cledwyn laughed hollowly. The guilty were walking around with their heads held high in both his time and hers, so what good would it do to change only Nerys’s memory?

His eyes soon turned bleak.

“If I can’t change my wife’s time, then I’ll remember it, one by one. So that when she wakes up, she can be repaid for everything she endured. So that I know exactly which bastards have to pay, and how much.”

[Yeah! That’s it, Dad!]

The ball of light, which had been drooping, trembled as if cheering. Cledwyn chuckled at it.

“…Shall we go? As long as it doesn’t contradict my wife’s memory, I can do whatever I want with the rest, right?”

[Yeah!]

The ball of light clung to Cledwyn’s shoulder. It was a reserved seat now. It had become part of his daily life—without any special warmth.

❖ ❖ ❖

The seasons changed.

During the vacation, Cledwyn subdued Maindulante. It would take more time to dominate every corner of that vast territory completely, but at least he had eliminated most of what could become a threat in the future.

The reason it was “most,” not “all,” was simple: the old, crafty elders just wouldn’t die.

“Isn’t this fate by now?”

Ren Fayel, who had been working as Cledwyn’s exclusive therapist ever since Cledwyn imprisoned him and forced him to treat his Pejalcho addiction, joked as he grumbled. Cledwyn had just heard that people who looked like they were at death’s door had once again avoided death in bizarre ways. He smiled as if he’d expected it.

“You could call it that.”

“You unlucky bastard. You don’t care about anything except ‘that kid,’ do you? I’ve never seen you waver.”

“I had a rough idea. It’ll be a few years before those men die.”

When he graduated and rose to the position of Grand Duke. If the time of their deaths was fixed in Nerys’s memory, then even if he did nothing, the knife would be stained with blood at that appointed moment.

“You’re relaxed.”

Ren Fayel, still grinding his teeth at Pope Omnitus III, couldn’t understand Cledwyn’s calm. But Cledwyn had no intention of convincing him. He focused on what he was doing.

“What are you doing?”

Ren Fayel sounded genuinely curious. Cledwyn shrugged.

“Checking whether the necklace came out well.”

“No, I know that. Why are you looking at it like it’s precious?”

“I’m giving it as a gift when school starts.”

“To that kid you go see every day? Are you just going to come back again without saying a word to her?”

Probably. Cledwyn carefully put the necklace away, ignoring Ren Fayel’s teasing. He probably wouldn’t be able to give it to her in this life.

But so what?

Even if it was something made only for her, if it ended up hidden somewhere she would one day find and be comforted by, that was enough.

❖ ❖ ❖

Valentin Elandria was also among the new freshmen.

Cledwyn watched with sunken eyes as the nasty silver-haired girl strutted up to her cousin and flaunted her power from the very first day of school.

That child seemed to think of Nerys as a toy. As if borrowing tuition from her family meant Nerys should be grateful just to entertain her. Such vile thinking was common among spoiled aristocratic children, but Valentin’s actions were different—because of Delma.

After renting a cabin by the lake, she locked Nerys in an empty warehouse and left with a bright smile. The ball of light, watching, trembled.

[That’s bad! That’s mean! You shouldn’t do that to your friend!]

Cledwyn wanted to say they weren’t friends, but he didn’t know if he should say that to a child who was barely old enough to read. So he kept his mouth shut and silently stared at the cabin’s warehouse where Nerys was locked.

He knew he couldn’t make a sound, and he couldn’t open the door. If he even thought about it, his body would move on its own and try to drag him away. So Cledwyn sat, leaning against a nearby tree, and swallowed the bitterness in his chest.

‘Valentin Elandria.’

The Valentin he knew had been too insignificant to care about. She’d conspired with her nanny to drag Nerys down, yet she was so stupid that she ended up ruining herself.

But the Nerys of the past was too weak to withstand even that Valentin. No—more precisely, she couldn’t easily imagine malice in others. Because she herself didn’t carry malice, she believed others would treat her fairly as well.

And the problem was that she seemed to be starting to believe she was ‘someone who deserved to be treated like this.’

‘I won’t let you get away with it when I go back.’

Cledwyn didn’t think the Nerys of the past was foolish. The ability to trust others should be cherished. The ones who shatter that trust are the foolish and selfish.

So if he could protect her at this very moment, he would have done it—no matter what.

Damn it. He was in a position where he couldn’t even properly warn Valentin. A stern rebuke from Cledwyn Maindulante would have mattered to Valentin Elandria. But whether it did or not, the Nerys of this time still had to relive the pain she’d already suffered.

From beyond the warehouse door, Nerys’s shouting and crying gradually died down. The moon rose, stars drifted across the sky. Cledwyn wondered how long she would be trapped in there.

[Dad, should I go check on Mom?]

“Yeah.”

The ball of light fluttered through the warehouse door. After a while, it returned.

[Mom’s sleeping.]

“It’s late. She’d be sleepy.”

Nerys was only thirteen. Imagining her curled up and asleep in a dirty, uncomfortable warehouse made Cledwyn’s anger boil. He stood and approached the door.

[What are you going to do, Dad?]

“I can stay beside her while she sleeps, can’t I?”

Cledwyn undid the latch. A beam of moonlight cut into the dark warehouse and illuminated Nerys’s frail body. His heart aching, he gathered his young wife into his arms.

[Mom must have cried. She must have been scared.]

The ball of light hovered near Nerys’s cheeks, where tear tracks remained, and chattered in a voice that sounded close to tears itself. Cledwyn agreed quietly.

“Yeah. She must have been.”

His wife was especially afraid of the dark. She said she was afraid of her own helplessness.

Cledwyn thought he understood that feeling now. He had never been so helpless in his life. He’d faced death more than once when he was very young, but even then, he hadn’t been forced to simply watch—unable to prevent even a single wound from being carved into the most important person in the world.

His chest felt suffocating. He held Nerys so she wouldn’t be uncomfortable and sat down by the lake. Then he took off his outer garment, covered her with it, and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

“…Look at me. I’m all yours.”