My Past Life is Riddled With Many Sins - Chapter 77
Where is it? Where are you hiding like a rat?
“…Miss Heather?”
Regina’s attention was elsewhere. She did not hear the Crown Prince calling her. She was seething with anger.
How dare someone step foot here so insolently!
Spotting her target, she reached for a silver knife from a table laden with sumptuous banquet food. The cutlery, fitting for the imperial palace, was made of high-quality metal.
The Crown Prince, who had been watching her every move, widened his eyes. Suddenly his expression hardened, and he sensed a dangerous mood. Seeing her pick up the knife escalated his sense of crisis.
“Hey, what are you planning to do….”
Without responding, Regina began to walk somewhere determinedly. It was the first time the Crown Prince had been so blatantly ignored, and he was momentarily stunned before urgently commanding his knights.
“Seize the brown-haired female student!”
It was just a dining knife. Under normal circumstances, he might have thought, ‘What can she do with that?’ and not take it seriously.
But this time was different. Perhaps it was her imposing presence that overwhelmed him.
The moment Regina’s gaze hardened, the Crown Prince was paralyzed. The relaxed atmosphere had completely vanished, and it seemed as though she had transformed into someone else.
Though he didn’t want to admit it, he felt utterly defeated by a much younger commoner female student, without even fighting a battle.
This was the origin of his alertness—an instinctive awareness of an opponent who might be unstoppable, or perhaps even impossible to stop.
At the Crown Prince’s command, the knights stationed around the ballroom began to move.
As dozens of people converged on her from all sides, Regina calculated her next move. If only she had a sword—right now, all she had was a dining knife, hardly a weapon to make a stand with. Lacking the ability to break through without causing harm, she instinctively looked for an ally.
“Dean!”
Even in the chaos, Regina hadn’t called out ‘Bliss’ due to the last shred of reason that hadn’t given up on her.
Bliss intervened immediately, creating a pathway to their destination as if he had read her mind. It was a fleeting opportunity, a mere mirage of a gap, but knowing his intentions allowed her not to miss the perfect timing.
Breaking through the wall of knights, she surged towards her target.
A subtle golden glow surrounded the silver knife. To the unobservant eye, it might have seemed merely to reflect the chandelier’s light, flickering like a mirage.
The mana blade, elegant yet faint, pierced the neck of a dignified-looking middle-aged nobleman.
The murder, occurring in the blink of an eye, provoked screams from the onlookers. Undeterred, Regina withdrew the knife from the nobleman’s neck, which only intensified the screams momentarily before they subsided as if silenced by an unseen hand.
From the hole in the nobleman’s neck, what initially appeared as blood transitioned into an unidentified black liquid.
“De, devilkin…”
A frightened murmur cut through the unnatural silence of the ballroom.
The fact that a devilkin’s blood was black was common knowledge to anyone with a basic education. Even the most ignorant would know.
While the beings from the demon world had long vanished from the earth, knowledge about them persisted to this day.
Monsters in their natural form could resemble animals, plants, or beasts, but were easily distinguishable by their dark color.
Unlike devilkins, looked nearly indistinguishable from humans. If only their skin were blue, their sclerae red, or their lips yellow, they could be easily identified, but even these features mirrored those of humanity.
The only true differences were that they bled black liquid when injured, and some possessed wings.
When humanity learned to unveil devilkin by making them show their backs and slicing their fingertips to see the color of their blood, the devilkin responded with more cunning disguises.
Somehow, they concealed their wings and manipulated their bodies to bleed red like humans, but the amount of red blood they could produce was limited. Once it was depleted, their wounds would exude a black liquid, as was now gushing from the nobleman’s neck.
The entire ballroom was plunged into shock.
The Middle Realm-Demon War occurred before the Empire’s formation. Afterwards, a non-aggression pact between the Middle Realm and the Demon Realm relegated monsters and devilkin to mere things of history.
For thousands of years, no one had seen them, so much so that their very existence was in doubt. Yet here they were, suddenly appearing in the midst of an imperial banquet and not everywhere else.
Just moments ago, they had mingled among humans, disguised as one.
Those who had been in close contact or conversed with the devilkin were particularly horrified.
A man who had been seated next to the nobleman realized he had been exchanging pleasantries with one just moments ago and collapsed to the floor, his legs giving out under him.
“Marquis Stingray was a devilkin!”
“Maybe they switched him with the real one. Or perhaps this devilkin devoured the real Marquis and then took his place pretending to be him…”
“We must alert the temple immediately!”
“Could this spark another war with the Demon Realm?”
“Great Mother Etoz, please save us from evil.”
As voices rose one after another, the previously silent ballroom descended into chaos.
Behind the turmoil, Regina maintained her guard until the devilkin’s breath stopped completely and its form dissipated into black smoke.
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