The Protagonist’s Party is Too Diligent – 132
EP.132 Revenge (8)
“Father…”
Mia Crowfield murmured weakly.
“Your mother… the Countess… may have instilled a desire for revenge in you. Perhaps she told you to seek vengeance against me, Alice, or even the Imperial Family.”
“……”
I continued speaking to her bowed figure.
“But you know, don’t you? Your mother knew as well. If she were to pursue revenge, it would be the end of Crowfield.”
“That’s…”
“And if that were the case, your mother should have acted immediately—right after the Count’s death, when the timing was still favorable. If she had any evidence, that would have been the perfect moment to expose it. The surrounding nobles would have supported her. Even if she couldn’t kill the Emperor, it would have dealt a significant political blow. Yet, Crowfield didn’t make a move. Why do you think that is?”
“……”
“It’s because there was an agreement—something exchanged between the Imperial Family and Crowfield.”
Mia Crowfield remained silent, her head still hanging low.
“It means that at that moment, the Emperor also held a card he could play. Something unspeakable, something terrible, that everyone may have suspected but could not openly address. Your mother must have spent her time erasing every trace of that evidence in preparation for her revenge.”
“And that man.”
Alice, who had been listening quietly, took over the conversation.
“He must have exploited it. He took advantage of the fact that Crowfield was trying to bury its past and likely bought a house like this one with the leverage. Anyone who knew even a fragment of the truth opening their mouth would be detrimental to their cause.”
A flicker of pain crossed Alice’s expression as she spoke. After all, they had spent an entire semester together, fighting side by side, even risking their lives at one point.
Killing the man outright might have seemed like a viable solution.
But a man like him wouldn’t have dared to blackmail the Countess without some sort of contingency plan. At the very least, he would have pretended to have one.
And he had value as a tool. He probably wasn’t selling drugs to Crowfield alone. If he were distributing them to other territories, that information could be used as leverage later, forcing those territories to align with Crowfield’s cause. It would be an exceptionally dishonorable tactic, but effective.
Now that he had been captured, the man would likely spill everything anyway.
“……”
Mia Crowfield slowly raised her hands and clutched her head.
“You killed my father, didn’t you?”
“……”
For a brief moment, I hesitated.
It was strange. At the beginning of the semester, I had said it openly to her during our very first conversation:
I killed your father. And that father was a drug-addicted pedophile.
But now, saying those exact same words felt unbearably difficult.
The weight of time must have changed things. Though I couldn’t say Mia Crowfield and I had become true friends, the time we had spent together made it hard to utter those words. It felt as though they were stuck in my throat, like a physical object blocking my voice.
“Yes.”
In the end, I could only manage that single word.
What happened next was over in an instant.
“Mia!”
Alice screamed.
I couldn’t breathe.
Mia Crowfield, smaller than me, had wrapped her hands tightly around my neck, squeezing with all her strength. Her hands were small, but they had more than enough force to strangle someone.
But it lasted only a moment.
Before Alice could rush forward and pull Mia off me, her grip slackened.
Her hands fell from my neck, dropping down, lower and lower.
Mia Crowfield collapsed to her knees on the floor. No, she crumpled entirely, lying prone on the ground.
She clutched her head with both hands, pulling at her hair.
“Mia…”
Alice knelt beside Mia Crowfield, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch her.
“You… you knew, didn’t you?”
Mia’s voice trembled faintly as she asked.
“Yes, I knew,” Alice replied softly.
She had known even before coming to this place.
“Was it here?” Mia asked again.
“Yes, it was here.”
“The children who were here, the ones who stayed until the end… where did they all go?”
“I don’t know.”
Whether the Imperial Family took them, or the Count’s household disposed of them, I had no way of knowing. I had never returned here to find out.
“How many were there…?”
“I don’t know.”
The evidence had likely all been burned, and the children who had been here were probably erased entirely, their names lost to anyone who could remember them.
“Ah…”
Mia Crowfield let out a groan that quickly morphed into a scream, raw and filled with despair, a sound beyond words.
The knights stationed outside the door reflexively burst into the room but froze in place at the sight before them.
*
When Mia Crowfield returned to the Count’s mansion, she staggered past the Countess without a word. No greeting, no embrace.
The Countess, watching her daughter pass without so much as a glance, turned to glare at us with eyes full of hatred before storming off to follow her.
Leaving the mansion behind, Alice and I boarded the steam car that had been prepared in advance.
We sat side by side in the back seat. Even after the car began to move, silence filled the space between us. Perhaps it was because the driver was present, requiring us to choose our words carefully, or perhaps it was because neither of us felt like making light conversation.
“…Did we do the right thing?”
After a long silence, Alice finally spoke. Her voice was hesitant, weighed down by doubt.
And yet, I had already prepared my answer.
“You did the right thing.”
My words carried no hidden meaning, only sincerity. At first, I had been at a loss for words when I learned she had forged the Emperor’s orders, but in the end… this was inevitable.
At least it had happened now and not during the school term. Mia Crowfield would have time to process and recover.
“But…”
Alice bit her lip, her voice trembling slightly.
“If the actions of the Imperial Family are no better than the terrible deeds of other nobles…”
The confident Alice I had seen before we entered that building was gone. Now, she sat beside me, speaking in a voice filled with anguish.
“Do I really have the right to punish such acts?”
“……”
I stared quietly out the window for a while.
I didn’t have the authority to grant such rights either. I had once been one of the orphans, but now I had become a servant of the Emperor.
That wasn’t Alice’s fault, though. Just as it wasn’t Mia Crowfield’s fault for the Count’s actions.
“At least,”
I spoke cautiously, breaking the silence.
“At least the fact that Her Highness even considered such actions means that she is someone different from His Majesty the Emperor.”
Alice didn’t respond for a while.
“…Thank you.”
Her reply came after a long pause, soft but sincere.
*
“Your identity.”
After I had taken Alice back to her room, I immediately went to meet the Emperor. It was a relief that Alice had a lot to think about; otherwise, I would be standing beside her right now and unable to ask the questions that were on my mind.
“Why ask me about that?”
The Emperor looked at me with amusement, as if finding the question entertaining, and my insides simmered with frustration. But I held my patience and asked again.
“If you brought me here, there must be a reason. Why did you place Lucas in that orphanage?”
“It’s curious you’re asking me this now.”
The Emperor placed his hand on his neatly groomed golden beard and looked down at me silently.
“I won’t make you guess. It might be fun for you to figure it out on your own.”
“I didn’t come here to play a guessing game.”
I glared at him, but he still looked at me with an expression of amusement.
“Don’t you already know your own identity?”
In that instant, my heart dropped.
Could the Emperor already have figured it out? Had he sensed that I came from another world, knowing some truth that I hadn’t read in books?
“You are my daughter.”
But my unease disappeared almost instantly. I almost sighed in relief, though I was still frustrated. I was thankful for that fact.
“So, no more of those answers—”
“Hm? I’m telling you the truth. Isn’t this the answer you wanted?”
The Emperor smiled as he spoke.
“You are my daughter. You definitely inherited my talent. Perhaps you even inherited your mother’s talent as well. Although, I don’t remember much about your mother.”
He said it so casually. As if, when his biological daughter asked, “Am I an adopted child from under a bridge?” he would have answered just as nonchalantly.
“…Excuse me?”
“You are.”
The Emperor leaned slightly toward me, still smiling, and repeated,
“You are my daughter.”
…And that…
It was probably a story about Claire.
And about “the Emperor’s children.”
The reason the Emperor could think of his “children” as just “children.”
For the first time since coming to this world, I couldn’t hide my shock in front of the Emperor.