Don't Be Holy! - Chapter 53
“Suspicious. How could anyone believe that?”
Though he hadn’t drawn his sword, Rubel’s voice and demeanor were so sharply honed that they made listeners’ knees weak. Through their minds flashed several legends of how Rubel Shinote had beaten even minor rule-breakers like dogs to correct them.
Of course, in Rubel’s case, he was strictly warning them about how those walking God’s path had fallen so easily for a pretty woman’s few tears, but from their perspective, it felt unfair.
Sure, they couldn’t deny a slight curiosity, expecting to see the scene where the woman would confront Rubel about how he would abandon her, but after all, they had done it as part of their chivalry.
The knights, who never knew why they were watching the woman in the first place, felt like Rubel was acting this way because he was obsessed with her.
How dare you let that woman go to the dangerous mountain alone?
Though they shouldn’t say this, even now Rubel’s eyes seemed to burn with that kind of possessive passion.
“Damn it.”
A low voice muttered a curse, laced with irritation and regret.
Of course, Rubel wasn’t worried about the woman as they thought, but rather about the people.
‘To be so careless in watching a witch.’
Because of their soft hearts, not only did they fail to warn people to be suspicious of the woman’s identity, but somehow bewitched, they hadn’t even tied her up before leaving.
Though they had put up a barrier to prevent dark shadows from entering the house to block minor spells…….
‘Even so, she’s left that house now.’
“Did she go to the mountain?”
“Huh? Yes. Definitely this way…….”
Before they could finish speaking, Rubel had already started back down the path he came from.
The woman wouldn’t have tried to escape openly anyway. With people watching, she would have pretended to go toward Rubel while heading elsewhere. With so many people scattered around the mountain, someone must have seen her.
So Rubel spent quite some time stopping people and checking one by one.
The reasons he didn’t send others to search were first, he didn’t want to admit his mistake, and second, he underestimated Eir.
But to people’s eyes, he just looked like a lovesick fool personally searching around asking about one missing woman.
“Ah, that blonde-ish hair…… looking slightly foolish, wearing unfashionable clothes?”
Of course, even love-struck, Rubel Shinote’s view of his lover hardly softened.
A passing apprentice priest, after being grabbed by Rubel, barely remembered seeing a woman walking hurriedly with an aged blanket on her shoulders.
“She went this way.”
Rubel frowned as he looked where the apprentice priest pointed. It was a place with a treacherous uphill climb. That narrow path with few people, as he remembered, led to Cliff Of Hylam.
‘Could it be that she wants to die?’
Rubel hurried his steps.
She couldn’t die yet. After all, they still didn’t know anything about what magical threats faced the Divine Empire, what had happened here, and they couldn’t let the woman holding all those keys suddenly disappear off a cliff.
Of course, somewhere in his heart, beyond these rational reasons, something else was stirring, but it was too faint to pierce through his thick faith.
Finding the white cloak with the Knight Commander’s epaulettes too inconvenient, he took it off and threw it to the ground. The cloak that only the Divine Empire’s 12 Lions could wear fluttered briefly in the wind on that high mountainside before getting caught in tree branches, discarded like trash.
Rubel returned once again to being ‘Lu,’ the twenty-seven-year-old youth who had appeared in Solvik Village covered in wounds and without memories, as he climbed the steep slope.
After climbing for some time, at the edge of a high, clean cliff that seemed made for people to jump to their death, he saw a woman in dark clothes crouching down.
With the sun setting, her golden hair fluttering in the bluish evening air was the only thing recognizable.
Rubel hurriedly reached out to grab the woman’s nape, feeling as if he was stepping on crumbling ground. But at that moment, the woman suddenly stood up, and an owl flapped its wings, soaring high into the sky.
His footsteps stopped abruptly, and Rubel asked in an incredibly cold voice.
“What are you doing right now?”
