Absolutely Do Not Touch ELdmia Egga – Chapter 113

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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: Yuziro
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Judging that it would be better to rest a little rather than accumulating fatigue by continuing to make conjectures without anything concrete, I gave up thinking and briefly closed my eyes.

Of course, this didn’t mean I could sleep peacefully, but there was nothing else I could do at the moment.

In the room where only the ticking of the clock echoed, Asirye and I maintained silence, waiting for Renisa to return with new information.

After about an hour had passed, Cheryl appeared, just as Ekaf had predicted.

“Eldmiaaa!”

And she did so not by carriage, but by riding a horse herself at full speed.

-Neigh!

The problem was that she didn’t just appear, but she kicked the mansion’s gate with enough force to shatter it, not even waiting for the guards to greet her and pay their respects.

As I got up and looked out the window, I saw Sheryl striding in with several maids trailing behind her.

Judging by her appearance alone, she looked like a manly hero, but since she was actually a pretty girl acting like this, the difference in her demeanor was enormous.

“Eldmia! Where is Eldmia!”

“Oh, Young Miss, please be more ladylike…”

“That’s not an answer to my question! Eldmia!”

While memories of the past came flooding back, Cheryl’s visibly flustered appearance, unlike before, honestly felt refreshing.

Normally, I would have savored that sight and used it to tease her, but given the current situation, I regrettably didn’t feel like doing so.

It took only a moment for Cheryl, who had spotted me showing my face through the window, to run up with her school uniform skirt fluttering, but since this was a guest room, she knocked on the door very politely, unlike her earlier gate-kicking demeanor.

“It’s alright, Cheryl. Come in.”

Hearing me answer instead, Cheryl entered the room and acted confidently, as if she felt not the slightest shame about her behavior just moments ago.

Seeing her like this, Asirye rolled her eyes with great interest and demanded an introduction, so I briefly introduced them to each other while receiving both of their gazes.

“Cheryl, this is Asirye. Asirye, this is Cheryl. We’re all comrades united in our concern about Lagnis’s current situation.”

“So you’re the benefactor who raised him. I’m Cheryl Tsin Ogatorf. It would be nice to have a proper setting to talk, but unfortunately, it seems difficult today.”

“I understand, Cheryl.”

“Thank you. Eldmia? Is there any other news? What about Lady Renisa?”

It was very like Cheryl to get straight to the point without hesitation after asking for understanding from the other party, but since the information I could provide was hardly different from what had been conveyed to her in the letter, I could only shrug my shoulders instead of answering.

“Suddenly accused of treason. What on earth happened in the Empire?”

“It’s not that nothing happened, but I can assure you that none of it had anything to do with treason.”

“Huh… Well, tell me briefly for now, even if it’s just an overview. There’s nothing we can do right now anyway unless Lady Renisa arrives.”

It took less than five minutes to summarize the events in the Empire for her, who was trying hard to calm down while making quick judgments as always, but when I finished speaking, she looked quite flustered.

“There’s no time to question it now, but it seems we’ll need to hear a detailed account later.”

“I’ll tell you everything once the situation is safely resolved.”

After Cheryl left to return to her room with a deep sigh, we waited for about another hour.

Then, Renisa visited the mansion with weary steps.

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“The temporary detention place was… well, they called it temporary detention, but it was just a prison. It seems the Noble Council’s influence was already strong, as protesting was useless.”

The beginning of the situation explained by Renisa, who looked as if she hadn’t slept for a week in that short time, was quite perplexing from my personal standpoint, as she spoke with difficulty to me, Asirye, Cheryl, and the head butler.

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According to the Noble Council’s claims, as relayed by a third party, they had gathered circumstantial evidence suggesting that Lagnis had been acting as a puppet of the demon race and plotting treason over about five years.

However, Renisa and the other Royalists had no idea what they were picking at, not because the Royalists were incompetent, but because no one knew about Lagnis’s activities during the roughly four years before she entered the capital.

Of course, that made sense.

Those four years were roughly the time after I had saved her and arranged for her to stay at Madam Alisha’s inn, during which she had spent her time doing odd jobs in Ogwen.

I had heard that she only sent a letter to Radnelband when she was approaching adulthood, so it would be strange if they knew anything.

While I was hesitating, unsure whether I should say this or not, Asirye was similarly uncertain, but the expressions of the head butler and Cheryl grew even more serious.

Amidst all this, Renisa’s words, tinged with sighs, continued.

“There was very little information available, perhaps because they thought it might influence the verdict and were thoroughly keeping people quiet. The only stories I could barely gather through inquiries were that after the Levien Marquisate was devastated, they had been looking for people with physical characteristics similar to the Margrave in various ways… and that a small search team belonging to the Noble Council, which had been secretly dispatched to find her, had been annihilated.”

For a moment, Asirye and I made eye contact as if by agreement.

In that fleeting instant, where it felt like many conversations were exchanged just through our eyes, Cheryl’s question reached my ears.

“Knights secretly dispatched?”

Thinking ‘No, it couldn’t be,’ but still harboring a slight hope, I focused on the conversation again as Renisa added more details.

“Yes. To be precise, it was one knight and several squires. They even mobilized a wyvern and a wyvern rider, but all of them were killed, they say.”

A chill ran down my spine, making me shudder.

This was about Deltra.

How could they link their deaths to the demon race?

I even knew that Gies, the wyvern rider, was still quietly laying low in a small village near Ogwen with Lagnis’s help.

The situation was so unexpected that I unconsciously stiffened, which Renisa seemed to interpret as a reaction to the gravity of the situation, and she continued speaking with an even more gloomy face.

Indeed, the head butler and Cheryl were making faces as if they had bitten into something rotten, facing a total crisis, so it was hard to blame her for jumping to that conclusion.

“That’s about all the specific information I have. There was also talk about finding connections among some recent incidents near the capital, but given the state of the world, it wasn’t possible to narrow down what those incidents might be.”

With those words, a heavy silence began to fill the room, but in reality, Asirye and I couldn’t empathize at all and were just looking at each other uncertainly.

The reason was simple.

We knew the full story of those incidents, but we weren’t sure whether we should speak up and change the atmosphere, or keep our mouths shut for now, considering that the information might reach the Noble Council.

Isn’t there a saying that to deceive the enemy, you must first deceive your allies?

Since we couldn’t prove anything right away, it seemed right to keep quiet for now.

There was no reason not to trust the people in this room, but deciding to stay silent just in case, I decided to ask how much Lagnis knew.

“Did… did Margrave Levien hear about this too?”

“No. I was planning to tell her after asking for help from the Ogatorf family first. It’s more useful to inform those who can take action first.”

Even though she was in a situation where she might lose her lord for the second time, Renisa seemed to be making cold judgments even in such a difficult situation.

Cheryl, who had been quietly observing this, suddenly stood up.

“Eldmia. Let’s go to the guild.”

“The guild? The Adventurers’ Guild?”

“Yes. If the Noble Council is trying to link Lagnis to the demon race, and as Lady Renisa said, they claim to have found connections among recent incidents, it’s certain we can find information related to the demon race at the guild as well.”

“That’s… a valid point.”

Indeed, recently, the tendency to resolve security issues outside the capital through adventurers rather than the military had been strong.

Cheryl’s assertion made more sense than I had expected.

Just considering her and me, we had been involved with that Fabalein or whatever his name was, and I had been involved with demons in the abandoned dungeon.

If there were a few more such incidents, we might be able to find some clues.

“Head butler. What did Father say to you?”

“He ordered me to treat Lady Renisa with courtesy and do whatever I thought necessary.”

“I’ll leave it to you. I’ll go out with Eldmia to look for anything that might help. I’ll change clothes first and come back.”

Cheryl immediately left the room, and I, who was still wearing clothes from the Levien family, also decided to get up to change into adventurer attire.

Leaving the head butler talking with Renisa behind, Asirye, who got up with me, spoke to me with an ambiguous expression.

“Cheryl seems… like you, Eldi.”

“How on earth do you see that?”

“The way she acts impulsively yet doesn’t let emotions cloud her judgment of the situation? Above all, she’s confident and uninhibited in her actions.”

“I can’t believe you’re trying to put me on the same level as that violent little kid.”

I showed a genuinely incredulous reaction, but Asirye just looked at me with half-closed eyes.

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[FYI the one who fucked up the upload of 111 was my friends brother not me, i was on vacation lol. also this chapter is oddly wholsome idk why]