Chapter 122

The person who heard Lapheche’s desperate plea instead of a god at that moment was the one she least wanted to encounter: the Apostle of the Sand God.

“An unpurified soul has lost its way.”

“You…!”

Why now of all times?

Lapheche, raising her tear-streaked face, shouted venomously.

“Where is Prince Austin? Let me see him! What on earth are you doing to me?!”

But the Apostle merely mumbled something incomprehensible.

“Hmm. Even the seed of magic seems to be difficult to absorb continuously. It seems to be absorbed faster than it can be replenished.”

“What are you talking about…?”

Even as she retorted, Lapheche instinctively felt a chilling sensation and recoiled. But she was soon stopped by the wall behind her.

“Let me go, please… What have I done wrong…?”

The Apostle did not bother to bend down and hold Lapheche. With just a flick of his finger, a hand emerged from the wall, bound her, and solidified again.

“Aargh!”

To Lapheche, who was struggling in terror, half-trapped within the wall, the Apostle asked nonchalantly.

“If I let you go, do you have somewhere to go, young lady?”

To the Apostle, who had observed humans for a very long time, piercing the psychology of a young, simple girl was not even a pastime.

Sure enough, Lapheche’s startled tears stopped abruptly, and the Apostle nodded benevolently, as if he understood everything.

“We are all such beings. We cling to ephemeral things, but in the end, we break into pieces smaller than sand and dirt and disappear.”

“…”

“So just entrust yourself to us from now on. You don’t need any other thoughts; you’ll be at peace if you just commit yourself to a colossal power.”

Lapheche almost nodded at his gently comforting tone.

But her pride, which had been haughty since olden times, held her neck stiff.

Seeing Lapheche bite her lip and avoid answering, the Apostle clicked his tongue a couple of times and spoke again.

A helpless child like her would eventually give in, no matter how long it took.

“Die… H-huh!”

Die?

Lapheche doubted her ears and stubbornly lifted her gaze, which had been fixed downwards. And what entered her sight was the sight of the Apostle collapsing, pierced through the mouth from behind.

How many people could imagine their last words before death would be ‘die’?

Lapheche, who had been watching the scene with a sense of unreality, screamed convulsively.

“Kyaaaaaaah!”

“Shut that pretty mouth.”

Until a dry voice commanded harshly.

Startled, Lapheche mechanically obeyed the command and then started hiccuping.

“Pr-hic-Prince!”

Still, he was someone she had seen a few times, and just being rescued by him was enough to make her forget all the past neglect.

In the meantime, Austin frowned at Lapheche’s appearance, which was a sight to behold, as if her vitality had been completely drained.

That was all. Without even asking about her well-being, he broke the hand that had grown from the wall, grabbed Lapheche’s slender wrist, and abruptly pulled her.

“Ack! Just a moment… I have no strength!”

When Lapheche’s legs finally gave out and she couldn’t walk properly, he simply hoisted her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and strode away.

Only then did Lapheche, catching her breath a little, interrogate him.

“Why did you lie to me?”

“…”

“Why did you trap me in a place like this?”

“…”

Ignoring her had its limits after twice. Lapheche screamed and struggled.

“Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me, put me down! I’m going back to Preseria!”

Only then did Austin snort briefly and sneer.

“Preseria? Where will you stay? Do you have anywhere to go?”

Lapheche tried to ignore the pain in her stomach from being pressed against his shoulder.

She couldn’t understand why everyone asked her the same question as if they could read her mind.

To her, who was biting her lip, Austin spoke a cold truth.

“If you wanted to go back to Viscount Celeste’s house, well. I should tell you it was destroyed. You shouldn’t even think of using the Celeste name. Your family was executed for treason.”

“Wh-what did you say?”

“Executed for treason. The rich hung their necks on the city wall, side by side.”

Oh my God.

Her vision blurred. She had never liked those people, no, thinking of her brothers, she was even annoyed, but she had never wished for their deaths.

“So. Where are you going?”

At his pressing voice, Lapheche’s desperate struggles intensified.

“Why are you asking that? What does it have to do with you! You lied to me! You ruined the viscounty too, didn’t you?!”

“What if I did?”

“…What?”

“You never intended to go back to the viscounty anyway. You hated it. Weren’t you sick of your brothers telling you to just hook up with a high-status man?”

“…”

Perhaps because of the inverted position she was carried in, blood rushed to Lapheche’s head, and her vision was so dizzy that she couldn’t answer.

As she frowned and struggled to clear her vision, she saw blood on Austin’s back.

Now that she thought about it, it was true. If the Celeste Viscounty was destroyed for treason, and Austin was the one who ruined it, then he was the traitor.

A failed traitor.

‘Who… whose hand have I taken?’

Again, tears dripped from her eyes.

“Haaah…”

It became harder and harder to breathe, so she opened her mouth wide, but it had no effect, and eventually, her vision turned black.

Was it a few seconds, or a few hours later?

As the surroundings suddenly grew cool, Lapheche, who had momentarily lost consciousness, slowly opened her eyes.

At the same time, the irritating smell of grass stung her nose.

“Ugh. This is the worst.”

As she recoiled in disgust, Austin realized she had come to her senses and chuckled.

“Miss Lapheche, let me tell you. The place where you should be.”

Before she could even ask where that was, Austin threw Lapheche onto the floor. She was treated like a mere piece of luggage from beginning to end.

Fortunately, the entire area was full of grass, so Lapheche landed softly, but she still felt awful.

“That’s your place.”

“Are you telling me to make clothes out of this grass?”

She wasn’t the youngest princess from the Swan Princess.

But her irritation only went so far. A light flashed around where Lapheche was sitting, and intricate patterns appeared one after another as if being drawn.

And then a suction force, on a completely different level from before, engulfed her.

“Kyaak!”

If it was questionable in the meditation room, now it felt like she was being sucked into a vacuum cleaner.

Lapheche screamed in instinctive terror, even though she didn’t know exactly what was being taken from her.

“No! I don’t want to!”

However, Austin, watching Lapheche flailing her arms in the air, spoke like an emotionless person.

“You will.”

His face was expressionless, but Lapheche could see it. In fact, Austin’s eyes were brimming with laughter.

“I’ll make good use of your magic. Of course, I have until now, and I will continue to.”

Hearing that, it felt as if something inside Lapheche, which had sustained her until now, broke.

‘Why are there only people like this around me?’

Baron Tempest, who, despite being poor enough to not even afford gruel, only had the pride of being from an ancient family.

Viscount Celeste, who was said to have died in prison but was now executed for treason, and her brothers who tried to marry her off.

Most of all, Austin Roquate. She couldn’t believe she had trusted such a person and even felt a brief flutter of excitement.

Under her slender fingers, the Yoshicho grass was crushed, oozing blue liquid.

“…Then.”

Thinking it looked like blood, Lapheche continued to speak. Her throat was so dry that the words came out in a horribly cracked voice, but she didn’t even realize it.

“Then, when you said you sympathized with me, that was a lie too, wasn’t it?”

‘I was like that too. Life is truly complex, isn’t it?’

She had fallen for those gentle words. Because she was lonely.

Lapheche herself knew. She was the type to fall in love quickly.

But at that moment, she truly… desperately needed a word from someone who sympathized with her and comforted her.

“You bastard… What did I do wrong?”

“Being excessively naive is also a fault.”

Hmm, Austin let out a sound and then chuckled, looking around at the patterns that now completely filled the surroundings.

“In your case, you were foolish.”

“Do people… always have to live with the intention of using others?”

“Because you don’t do that, you live like maggots.”

“Maggots?”

Ha.

Haha.

Lapheche slowly shrugged her shoulders. Perhaps because the surroundings were filled with grass, her vision seemed to turn green.

“You barbarians, living in this kind of status system, not even knowing what democracy is, and you call me a maggot?”

Austin’s eyes twitched. It was a completely different attitude from what Lapheche had shown until now.

“You call yourselves royalty, yet you don’t even know how people draw and drink water. You don’t know how to build a sewage treatment plant. And yet you call me a maggot?”

Originally, as the transmigator, she should have risen to a high position and changed this world. She wasn’t sure exactly how, but anyway, for the better. It was natural for her to be the protagonist.

But it didn’t work out as she wished.

Lapheche simply couldn’t bear that fact. For her, the pampered youngest daughter of a chaebol family, born to be loved, it felt like the world revolved around her.

A world where that couldn’t happen…

“I just wish it would all disappear.”

As soon as those words, carrying a hollow echo, fell, the patterns brightly filling the walls instantly lost their light.

The plan was going awry. Austin gritted his teeth and glared back at Lapheche with venomous eyes.

“What…!”

But his next words were swallowed by an enormous, blinding light.

And a few seconds later, a chilling silence was broken, and everything in the surroundings began to be sucked in. The Yoshicho grass everywhere, the stone tiles, even the power of nature.

A magic rampage.

The magic that remained like a thread within Lapheche reacted to her despairing emotions, drawing in all the surrounding power.

Temari and the other cultists outside, seeing the light that completely blew off the roof of the central building, prostrated themselves in awe and offered prayers.

But there was no god within.

There was only a deeply submerged Lapheche and a power that could explode at any moment, like a time bomb.