Chapter 77

Episode 77: The Chased, Chaser and Other Roles in Between

“It’s trash to be landfilled nearby.”

“Hmm, open it.”

I swallowed my breath at the unexpected situation.

However, the horseman did not hesitate to get off his seat, go to the back and open the box. The odour trapped in the box spread.

“Do I have to open another one? It must smell bad.”

“…It’s done.”

I held back my pounding heart until the horseman closed the box and drove the wagon again. I couldn’t even tell how much time had passed because I couldn’t see outside and I didn’t even have a wristwatch.

The wagon gradually slowed down and soon stopped completely. After the coachman pulled me out, he hurriedly unlocked the link between the wagon and the horse.

“That’s as far as I’ve been told. I’ll give you a horse, so you two have to go on your own from here.”

We moved our luggage onto the horse and ran nonstop to another nearby village.

Under the flurry of light, two running shadows fluttered.

As soon as we left the capital, chasers immediately caught up. Maybe the marquis sent them. Anakin measured the number and asked if he should kill them, saying that there were about two.

“No, not yet. Since it is near the capital now, if we kill them, the Marquis, who will find it strange that no contact has been made, will send new chasers.”

If we were going to kill them, we had to kill them as far away as possible. So he would misunderstand that the delay in contact was because of the far distance.

Anyway, it would be all useless if we got caught before that so we had to disguise ourselves.  And in order to confuse them as much as possible, we tried to change our appearance by changing clothes every time we visited a village.

Sometimes we were siblings, sometimes newlyweds, and sometimes Anakin dressed as a woman and I dressed as a man.

Anakin looked pretty good dressing up as a woman.

It wasn’t because he looked particularly pretty, but because he was tall, his original features were faint, so there was no incompatibility in whatever he wore.

Anakin accepted however I decorated him, so it was very fun because it seemed like playing with a large doll.

But we couldn’t ignore the height difference between the two of us, so to overcome it as much as possible, I pretended to be Anakin’s younger brother instead of wearing a clumsy mustache.

The big woman and the small man sometimes caught the attention of others, but the chasers did not even suspect and thought we would hide ourselves so thoroughly.

I deliberately wandered around the cheap inns. This was because the chasers judged that the picky marquis’s young lady would be in a good accommodation, so they searched thoroughly in the best accommodation.

The bed creaked, and the curtains smelled of dust. In addition, compared to what I ate at the marquis, the meal was terrible.

But it was still good. I didn’t have to imitate Eris. Now, Eris no longer had to think about what to say, what facial expressions to have and how to act.

Rather, I had to try not to imitate Eris as much as possible, so gradually I was getting my way of speaking and thinking back. I felt like I was doing rehabilitation training.

We discussed again and again about what to do next in our spare time. At first, I taught writing, and then Anakin asked to become a hunter and make money.

The writing might be different from the empire, but…… I felt groundless confidence that I would learn soon.

Just in case I couldn’t learn to write and Anakin wasn’t good at hunting, there was also a plan that if Anakin knitted, I would sell it.

No, I thought it would not be bad to work in the field or help with the inn for a while. Anakin was more physical and versatile than me, and I also had no part-time job when I was in Korea.

That way, when seed money was collected, I could buy an instrument and get paid after I went out on the street and played it. It wouldn’t be bad to achieve my dreams here that I couldn’t achieve in Korea.

I would watch the stars at night. Anakin said he could tell me all the constellations that appear in all four seasons. During the day, I wanted to learn this world anew under the sun.

Since I decided to stay, everything looked different. It would definitely be fun. Maybe it would be a life with nothing more to ask for.

We headed north without hesitation. What existed in the north was the so-called ‘land of barbarians’, and it was said that it was still a country that strongly believed in witches and magic.

It was also a country that signed a nonaggression treaty after a long war with the empire, so if we crossed the border, it would have been impossible for the marquis to chase us, no matter how much he tried.

Since it was a country that believed in witches, I thought I should sell Medea’s name if I could. The contract to send me back had been broken, so I couldn’t ask her for help anymore.….

She was not going to kill me for selling her name. I was not afraid at all if a witch would harm me, but I was afraid that Anakin would be disappointed in me.

What on earth do you think about running away with me? I couldn’t promise you anything now, but there would be no more ‘mainstream’ in our future. Why did you agree and accept it casually?

Watching Anakin’s profile as he disposed of the chaser’s body, I hoped Anakin would convince me of why he was so blind.

Yeah, I hoped it was a very common and cliché reason. You eventually fell in love with me. You wanted to hold my hand, and you wanted to run away forever, it was not just me…… I dared to ask you to say so.

I wonder, how far have I strayed from the story? So far, I know the ending and development of this story, so I tried not to deviate too much from it. Yes, that was why I killed the crown prince and turned back time.

Knowing the future had more advantages than I thought, and I now had to give up all of them. This was because I had never read about what happened to ‘Eris Misérian,’ which was out of the story.

Little by little the further away from the capital city I got, the more the law of causality was pulling me. The wheel of the wagon suddenly broke, or the horse untied the rope and ran away.

Even in disguise, there was a time when we caught a person who tried to report us. After burning the correspondence while thinking about killing him, we threatened to kill all of his family and released him.

I knew that there would be no future troubles only if we killed him, but I didn’t want to see blood.

The village near the border, which we arrived at after many twists and turns, was as quiet as all rural villages.

Since it was like an alpine area, it was not suitable to do agriculture, so the entire village seemed to make money by offering people across the border a place to sleep and feeding them.

Perhaps because it was winter, the border door was closed by a short margin.

I tried to convince him with a bribe, but it quickly got dark, and because the next village was a little far away, it was said that there were many cases where people often died after not being able to withstand the drop in temperatures and the wild animals while crossing the hill at night.

I didn’t want to be suspected if I kept insisting to the person shaking his head, saying that he hated removing corpses during this winter. As soon as the sun rose tomorrow, we decided to cross the border and get accommodation.

We killed the chaser and had to wake up early in the morning, but I didn’t want to spend the last day at a cheap inn. In order to make a move early tomorrow, I hoped it was a place where the bed didn’t smell like dust and there were less creaking sounds.

In the end, the price was much higher than the usual accommodation, but I took a room at a moderately neat and well-equipped inn and unpacked.

I looked around the quiet village and entered a nearby store. It was embarrassingly shabby and old compared to the capital’s dessert store, Launte, but it was also a perfect place for travelers who had to hurry to cross the border to relax their feet for a while.

When I ordered drinks and refreshments to eat briefly and watched people outside the window, I remembered when I went to see Metheus.

There were twists and turns, but I had a lot of fun until Jason intervened.

We watched a play together with a lot of food in our hands.….

Come to think of it, Anakin said he was curious about me. In response, I brought up first ‘my story’ and then lastly, ‘my family story’, to be exact.

Oh, and I think I told him once more about my past when we lived together in a separate house.

It wasn’t a big deal. When people had nothing to talk about, they would usually bring up their school days. In fact, Anakin never went to school, so he wouldn’t have understood half of my story.

In fact, that was why I didn’t really want to talk to Anakin about what kind of life I had lived.

This was because it was not a pleasant life for others to hear, and there were many things that were difficult for Anakin to imagine because the world in which he lived was literally different.

Rather than a meaningless past, I wanted to talk about the present we were in together and the future where we wanted to be together. If I was to tell him about myself, I wanted to show myself who changed because of him rather than the me in Korea he didn’t know.

After I said that, I bit my lip. It was the same as trying to wrap it up somehow. Let’s be honest. I was afraid that Anakin would be disappointed in me.

My normal face, not the beautiful Eris. I pretended to be strong, but in reality, my personality was full of inferiority. I was afraid that Anakin, who had been my support so far, would no longer want me to be his master, because I was afraid that the past times that I had been miserable rather than wealthy like Eris would be revealed.