Chapter : 07
“E-enjoy your meal!”
“All right. You eat well too, young lady.”
The piercing gaze disappeared.
Thankfully, that had been the right answer.
It seemed Sirius was far more particular about manners than she had expected. To think he even carefully observed the greetings said before a meal.
Elena let out a sigh of relief and was just about to dip her spoon into the stew when she paused.
A greeting…
Come to think of it, this felt strangely similar to what had happened that morning when she’d run into him.
Back then too, he had stared at her without blinking, then slid down from the window frame the moment she greeted him.
She’d wondered if he had been waiting for her—and now she realized that hadn’t been a misunderstanding after all.
Strictly speaking, he hadn’t been waiting for her, but for her morning greeting. Her unusually sharp intuition told her that was the correct answer.
No, seriously—why is he so obsessed with my greetings?
Elena frowned without realizing it, a crease of worry forming on her small forehead.
Was Sirius some kind of greeting fairy?
With his cute face and silver hair sparkling in the sunlight, he did look a bit like one—but in truth, he was much closer to a young beast.
Even when hostility was poured onto him by blood relatives, he returned it exactly as he received it from birth. Unlike her, who clung on foolishly.
Even if he were glared at with the same hostility and slapped across the face again and again, his stubbornness never once bent.
Elena cautiously watched him as she continued eating.
Between crying last night and everything since yesterday, Sirius had been behaving in ways she couldn’t understand.
But could she really ask him why?
All she could do was mind her own business.
“….”
She silently shoveled stew into her mouth.
Whether fortunate or unfortunate, no further conversation followed.
As if the greeting she’d offered so ordinarily had been a lie, Sirius finished his stew before she was done and abruptly left the dining room.
“Good grief, isn’t that thing a monster?”
Courtney’s voice, filled with disbelief, carried all the way over.
Elena, who was looking down at the open training ground from the second-floor corridor, wholeheartedly agreed.
“…That bastard’s insane.”
This time she couldn’t hear him, but from the shape of Joseph’s lips, she could easily tell what he was saying.
Elena had secured a prime spot close enough to distinguish people’s lip movements.
She wanted to see what Sirius looked like on the first day of lessons under the Duke.
Watching Sirius swing his sword, Elena felt genuine admiration.
“Wow… he really is something else.”
It wasn’t for some grand reason like wanting to witness the protagonist’s first great step.
She was simply terribly bored.
There was nothing for her to do in this ducal castle.
Aside from the occasional provocation from her siblings, no one spoke to her all day long.
Elena’s position in this mansion was deeply peculiar.
After the Duke shoved her aside like a possession he’d grown dissatisfied with, her status undeniably fell to the bottom.
Everyone expected her to die soon.
She’d been sickly since birth, after all.
Yet unlike the brother just above her—whom the Duke had allowed to die of a mere cold—the Duke immediately summoned a physician whenever Elena seemed close to death.
Considering the Duke’s cold-blooded nature, that was extremely strange behavior.
As a result, no one knew how to treat her.
They were afraid the Duke might take offense if they treated her kindly as before.
But they also felt uneasy about bullying her outright.
In the end, they settled on treating her like she didn’t exist.
With no one reacting to her at all, Elena felt no different from thin air.
Air would be better, honestly.
Come to think of it, she was closer to a ghost than air.
There was no one in this castle who didn’t despise her or turn away from her.
Even when she tried to think of her treatment as if it were happening to someone else, the unfortunate part about being a living ghost was that she still felt boredom.
“Eek!”
But right now, she was thoroughly entertained.
Elena giggled as she watched Joseph jump back in panic, narrowly avoiding the splinters from the wooden dummy Sirius had just struck.
Why was everyone crowding so close?
This spot was clearly the best.
After all, Sirius was holding a single sword and quite literally demolishing the wooden training dummies.
Each careless swing sent them exploding upward as if bursting apart.
People ran around trying to avoid the flying debris, and even Elena occasionally ducked beneath the window as fragments reached the second floor.
Sirius possessed a monstrous strength befitting his wolf blood.
“Hah!”
With a small body barely reaching half an adult’s height, Sirius embodied the proof of the Hyperion myth with his entire being.
He was the incarnation of a wolf itself.
Not just brute strength—he must have been born with wider vision and animal-like instincts as well.
No matter how one looked at him, he didn’t seem like the same species as ordinary humans.
Just as Courtney said, he was already a monster.
“Enough.”
At the Duke of Lode’s cold voice, the surroundings fell silent.
The training ground was in shambles.
More than twenty wooden dummies lay scattered across the ground, unrecognizable.
At the center of it all, Sirius stood quietly.
“Hhh…”
Someone shuddered at the sight.
For some reason, it made one’s solar plexus tighten in unease.
“Is that all you can show me?”
“…Yes.”
“What a mess.”
A mess?
Elena wondered if she’d misheard the word impressive.
Everyone else was overwhelmed by Sirius’s monstrous strength, yet the Duke remained calm, his expression unchanged.
As the suffocating silence dragged on and Elena unconsciously twisted her feet together, the Duke issued another order.
“Bring the counter.”
The knights standing nearby brought over a training tool with hundreds of sheets of paper attached.
If one struck the marked spot lightly with a sword, a numbered sheet would flip over.
Its advantage was that one could practice the same motion repeatedly while counting—but its reputation was infamous for being unbearably dull.
Still, there was no tool that exposed fundamentals more plainly than this.
With flawless, unassailable movements, the Duke demonstrated.
He smoothly and gracefully drew the sword at his waist, applied just the right amount of force, and struck the target.
The paper marked “1” flipped over with a soft tap.
“Begin.”
After presenting the perfect textbook example, the Duke commanded Sirius.
Sirius took a deep breath and stood before the counter.
BOOM!
The universally hated training tool instantly met the same fate as the wooden dummies.
Good heavens—that pillar was pretty thick, wasn’t it?
The sturdy pillar snapped uselessly, jagged splinters sticking out in all directions.
The numbered sheets lay pitifully on the ground, smeared with dirt.
Elena swallowed hard.
Sirius—who was usually expressionless around everyone but her—now wore a visibly flustered expression.
It was obvious even without her golden-eye ability.
“Utterly brainless.”
The Duke of Lode approached Sirius—and without hesitation, struck his cheek.
Smack!
At the sound, Elena collapsed to the floor, her body convulsing.
Her legs gave out instantly; she couldn’t remain standing.
Learned violence instilled the same fear even when merely witnessed.
I shouldn’t have watched!
Holding back tears, Elena clung to the window frame and barely pulled herself up.
She knew Sirius had been slapped while being trained by the Duke.
She just hadn’t realized it started on the very first day.
If she had known, she never would have come to watch.
“Even the way you draw your sword is crude. You must relearn everything from the basics—”
She didn’t want to watch someone else get hit.
And she didn’t want to see herself trembling like this.
Leaving behind the Duke’s faint voice, Elena ran on shaky legs toward the attic in the west tower.
Elena lay in bed, having skipped both lunch and dinner.
Sirius would probably be fine.
The book had said he never wavered no matter what punishment the Duke inflicted.
Though not everything could be written in detail, everything that was written was true.
So the problem lay entirely with her.
Fortunately, as they said, time truly was a remedy—her fear gradually faded.
With a gloomy expression, Elena rubbed her stomach.
Grrr…
Skipping lunch was one thing, but she shouldn’t have skipped dinner too.
Once food touched her mouth, her appetite would return.
Knowing her own instincts well, Elena felt a bit dejected.
Thump.
Just then, a noise came from outside.
It seemed Sirius had returned to his room after training late into the night.
“Ugh…”
The walls were far too thin.
She could vividly imagine him groaning as he threw himself onto the bed.
The Duke was never one to know restraint.
And on top of that, the Emperor had subtly offered a reward, implying it was acceptable even if Sirius were worked to death.
After a few seconds, Sirius seemed to pass out the moment his head hit the pillow.
Along with his ragged breathing came a sound like a whimpering puppy.
What if he really dies like that?
Elena jumped up without realizing it.
Even asleep, he was groaning unconsciously—he sounded close to death.
Her body moved on its own, restless, stepping out of bed.
Even though she knew he survived and rose to greatness, she began to doubt whether that was truly possible.
His pain sounded too real.
I ignored him crying last night too…
Even a stranger would check on a whimpering animal—yet here was a young boy, his body seemingly shattered, suffering alone in the next room.
Something in her chest stung.
She couldn’t bring herself to lie there any longer.
