I Reject the villain’s ending.

Episode 67.

For a first date, Iros and I did pretty well, considering we were both novices at what to do.

We went to the market, bought some skewers, ate cotton candy and ice cream, and enjoyed ourselves for the first time in a long time.

‘Hey, Pink, look, there’s a circus. Let’s go.’

‘Saint, you’re going to fall if you run off on your own like that. Look where you’re going.’

‘You’re the one who won’t get lost, so follow me, uh, here we go!’

I ran like an excited child with both hands full of food, deftly weaving through the crowd to get to the front.

Iros arrived beside me a moment later.

‘Come on. You’re not a kid. You like it that much?’

‘Yeah. Of course, I do. I’ve never been to a circus before, and I’ve never been out and about like this, relaxing and eating.’

‘Did you notice how your eyes are sparkling right now?’

‘Yeah. I’m beautiful. So focus on the circus. There’s a lion! Woah.’

‘Phew. Cough.’

Iros laughed at me from the side, as if he couldn’t stop himself, but I just concentrated hard on the circus.

The circus in the capital is on a whole different level. Long live the capital!

* * * *

Iros, smiling happily at Sierra’s enthusiasm for the circus, was interrupted by a very unpleasant sensation.

Squirm. His brow furrowed for a moment, but Sierra was fortunately so engrossed in the circus that she didn’t notice.

‘Crown Prince, why are you here?

Why was he out of the palace today, when he should have been at work, filing and stamping papers? My irritation rose.

And frankly, uneasy. Iros hadn’t forgotten how the crown prince had taunted him by pretending to kiss her.

The crown prince likes Sierra. Maybe it was deeper than that.

Iros had always felt that the crown prince felt something deeper than that.

‘I’m offended. How dare you touch my saint.

There was nothing she could do but kill it, or be on guard in case it came this way.

I shot the flesh without being seen by the lovely Sierra, laughing and applauding at the circus.

And the crown prince, who received it authentically, winced and pressed his robes tightly together.

Then he burst out laughing.

‘Haha. You’ve been spotted, and I’ll kill you if you come near.’

The crown prince himself had provoked Airos, so it was only natural that he should be given some kind of check and balance.

‘Still, we should be able to hold her at bay. She’s in the capital.’

Imagine my surprise when I heard had refused my offer of a place in the palace and had come to the capital to buy a huge mansion for nearly a million gold coins in a single day.

I thought she would never come to the capital, let alone the imperial palace, because of the wrong she had done, but she had taken it upon herself to find a place to live.

Her actions and execution should be recognized.

‘When I heard that you had come to the capital and gone out, I came straight to you, but I can’t stand in front of you.’

I was going to go and do what she did, get down on my knees, and beg her to give me another chance.

Somehow I was going to give her something she liked, make her look beautiful, and ask her to be a princess again, to marry me.

I resented her, but I loved her too much.

With such hopes, I rushed to her and we went on a date. I couldn’t stop her from being so excited about her first date.

Sierra was smiling so wide, so dazzlingly, that I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

I wondered, ‘Did she smile like that when She was on a date?

I thought about it, but all I could remember was her smiling as pretty as a doll like she was painting a picture.

We went on dates to jewelers and costume shops to buy her favorite jewelry and dresses, and then to the opera, but she never smiled as she did now.

‘Maybe what she wanted wasn’t the glamour, but the simple things she could enjoy.

He realized opinion hadn’t weighed a feather in his choice to give her only the best.

The crown prince smiled bitterly and muttered to himself.

‘So who am I to interfere with her little happiness?’

All I could do was watch Sierra smile from this distance. I couldn’t ask for anything more than that.

For now. At least for now.

‘By the way.’

The crown prince tugged at his robes, shivering at the stinging, sharp piercing of flesh all over his body.

He muttered, looking bewildered.

‘Lord Iros is going to kill me with flesh, why are you so desperate to eat me?’

Normally, I would have fainted at the first bite of this flesh.

But he’s a crown prince, so he’s just standing there.

He looked around and saw that everyone else was walking along with a calm expression on their faces.

That means I’m spending my life focusing on the crown prince.

‘This has been going on for minutes, isn’t it tiring?’

His life force was so intensely alert that the crown prince stood in the middle of the road, unable to move.

Iros watched the circus until it was over, and only broke his expression when Sierra looked back at him with an empty skewer, smiling happily.

‘Wow. That was fun. Wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah. That was a lot of fun.’

‘Well, let’s head over there now! I could smell something delicious from earlier.’

‘……!’

Iros’s shoulders twitched at Sierra’s words.

The direction Sierra pointed happened to be where the crown prince was standing, the one who had been hardened by Airos’s life.

Iros’s eyes grew fierce, and the killing glare he shot at the crown prince intensified.

‘Pfft! Ah, Lord Iros, I’m going to die from this.

‘Get off, get off, get off. Get the hell out of there. Get out of there forever. Go back to the palace.

‘What are you saying, just let me live first!

The two men locked eyes and exchanged intense glances. Except they weren’t communicating at all.

It was then that Sierra called out to Iros, who was staring off somewhere else, and slowly turned her head to follow his gaze.

‘Hey, Pink, what’s up there?’

At that moment, Iros raised his hand in the quickest motion he’d ever seen in his nearly 23 years of life and plucked a skewer from Sierra’s hand.

He knew that if Sierra turned her head, she would make eye contact with him, so before she could fully turn her head, he hurled the skewer full of mana at the crown prince.

The blunt, massive mana-laden skewer flew at terrifying speed toward the frozen crown prince.

Through the tiniest of gaps between the crowds of people on the street and the crown prince’s escorting knights, the skewer flew like a flash of light, striking the crown prince hard in the face, literally blowing him away.

With a loud bang, the crown prince was sent flying into the lush trees in the distance.

‘Phew.

Having safely removed the crown prince from his sight, Iros wiped the sweat from his brow and breathed heavily.

Sierra, who had turned her head completely away, hadn’t seen the entire sequence of events and only heard the loud bang and her shoulders tensed.

‘What, what, did something explode?’

‘Something must have exploded at the circus. They had a juggler with fire, so it shouldn’t be a big deal.’

‘Yeah, well, if you say so.’

Sierra nodded in agreement, then scratched her head.

‘Huh? But wasn’t there five skewers I ate, and why are there only four?’

‘…….’

Iros broke out in a cold sweat and looked away at Sierra’s muttering.

‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you sweating so much? Maybe it’s because it’s hot out.’

‘Well, I think it’s from watching the circus so nervously.’

‘Oh, yeah. I was nervous when I put my head in the lion’s mouth. I thought my head was going to split open, a hahaha.’

‘Hahaha, haha.’

Iros laughed after Sierra, wiping sweat from his hands.

‘We didn’t get caught. But is the crown prince alive? He can’t control his powers, and I hope he’s dead by now.

Sierra’s hand was too twitchy as she spotted the crown prince and confronted him.

I threw a skewer at him with the sole intention of getting rid of him, but it just hit the crown prince. …….

‘It didn’t hit there, it hit Myung Chi. It’s better to die than to become a holy Buddha, then.’

After rationalizing to himself, Iros looked at Sierra and smiled, the corners of his mouth lifting prettily as if nothing had happened.

Meanwhile, up in the trees, the crown prince was shivering, his body folded in half.

Tears welled up in his red eyes, and his limbs trembled helplessly, as if in great pain.

‘Aye, Sir Ross, you bastard. You’re so intent on killing people……. to kill a man. I’ll make sure you pay for this.’

The knights who had come to retrieve the prince, who had flown off into the distance, descended upon him, carrying him in their arms and pouring potions.

Carried by the knights, the crown prince took one last look at Sierra, smiling brightly at him, and smiled wistfully as he and Iros disappeared.

Today was a tactical retreat.

‘I’ll make you laugh next time, Sierra, I promise.’

After he was gone, Iros, whose senses were focused on the crown prince, looked back and muttered, his eyes expressionless.

‘I’m always the one who makes Sierra smile, always have been, always will be.’

‘Huh? What did you say?’

‘No? You must have misheard me.’

‘Did you?’

Sierra cocked her head and looked away again.

With that meaningful comment, Iros slowly looked away and went back to enjoying his date with Sierra.

Now that the interruption was gone, his mind was flooded with relief and wariness, and his spines stood on end like hedgehogs.

She would never be taken from him.

He would not share her with the prince.

She, Sierra, would always be hers.

My one and only.

The possessiveness in Iros’s eyes, so deep and dangerous and giddy as he looked down at Sierra, sang a hymn of death.

‘My master, my love, my saint. All mine.’

Iros vowed he would never give her away so easily, no matter who or what she became.