Chapter 2

I Guess I’ll Have to Become a Delinquent (2)

My fiancé had started a rebellion.

And he had killed my younger brother.

At some point, the Emperor’s Seal had been spirited away and fallen into the traitor’s hands, leaving Regina with no choice but to flee.

With the help of the head maid who had cared for her since childhood and her escort knight, Regina barely managed to escape. She then took up the sword to restore the Imperial Family that had been robbed of its throne and the empire that had fallen into ruin.

As an unexpected bonus, she discovered after twenty-three years that she had a talent for the sword.

The beginning had been promising.

The remaining nobles of the Imperialist Faction and the common people supported and followed Regina, who held both a just cause and legitimacy in her hands.

But as one month, two months, half a year, one year, and finally two years passed, that just cause and legitimacy scattered like grains of sand slipping through her fingers, and the exhausted nobles and common people began to leave Regina’s side one by one.

To be honest, the fact that they had trusted her and followed her for two whole years was remarkable in itself.

And so, the end came.

Left alone amid ruins where the smell of burning corpses mingled with the stench of blood, Regina leaned against the sword she had driven into the ground, barely managing to keep herself upright.

Her ragged breaths carried the stench of blood, while her short black hair, soaked with sweat and blood, hung in a filthy, disheveled mess.

Forcing her unsteady body upright despite looking ready to collapse at any moment, Regina glared at her former fiancé and his woman—or rather, his Sorceress—who stood at the head of countless soldiers.

“Just give up now. It’s over.”

The traitor spoke calmly.

“You. I’m the one who decides when it’s over.”

At Regina’s reply, roughened by a harsh metallic rasp, the Sorceress stepped forward with a curl of her lips and repeated the traitor’s words.

“Give up.”

“As long as my name is Regina B. Alpheir, that will never happen.”

“If you give up now, I’ll let you live. It’s not as though you have anything left anyway, is it?”

“Why are you saying you’ll let me live?”

“Because you have a duty to survive and watch this empire be completely torn apart and thrown into the gutter.”

“Just as you did to my father and my younger brother, killing me would be more beneficial to you traitors.”

It was one of the things Regina had realized while fleeing the Imperial Palace and fighting countless battles against the traitors.

The Emperor, whom she had believed had died suddenly, had been murdered.

And it wasn’t as simple as merely killing him.

They had toyed with him, ensuring that he could be made to cross the River of Death whenever they wanted.

“Why don’t you use it on me, too? It was called Witch’s Tears, wasn’t it? You used it on plenty of others besides my father.”

“Provoking me after preparing an antidote only makes you look petty.”

“You can’t put such a label on something done by the Imperial Family.”

“Yes. Only God can judge what the Imperial Family does.”

At the mocking tone, Regina clenched her teeth.

She hated Herman, who watched the situation unfold like a mere bystander, even more than the Sorceress who kept chattering away.

‘If only I had realized it back then…!’

The Emperor had been poisoned at the eleventh-birthday banquet of Theor, Regina’s younger brother and the Crown Prince of the Elias Empire.

At the time, no one had noticed that the dagger wielded by a servant who approached the Emperor had been coated with a poison called Witch’s Tears.

They had simply breathed a sigh of relief that it had ended with nothing more than a slight graze.

They had tested the wound for poison just in case, but no one had imagined that an ancient poison called Witch’s Tears—something that could never be detected with the technology of the present day—had been revived and applied to that dagger.

Nor could they have known that Witch’s Tears allowed its creator to freely determine when the poison would activate.

That had been their greatest mistake.

“Tell me, Sorceress of the traitor. My younger brother… Was my younger brother, who died at the hands of that damned traitor, also your doing?”

Her younger brother had supposedly changed after suffering an accident, his personality transforming overnight from that of a delinquent into a pushover.

She hadn’t given it much thought at the time, but looking back, she couldn’t help wondering whether a person’s personality could really change that drastically.

“What difference does knowing the truth now make?”

At the Sorceress’s answer, Herman, who had been standing silently until then, moved his hand slightly, signaling the soldiers waiting behind him to advance.

As the traitor’s soldiers approached slowly, their spearheads pointed forward as though they were tightening a noose around her neck, Regina clenched her teeth.

Drawing upon every last bit of strength she had left, Regina straightened her back and glared at the traitor and his Sorceress standing behind the soldiers.

Overwhelmed by the sudden change in her presence, the soldiers stopped in their tracks and nervously glanced toward their master.

Seeing this, Regina slowly smiled. She slipped a hand inside her armor, which was crumpled and torn in places, and pulled out a necklace.

“Th-That!”

It was a relic of the First Emperor.

Regina had no idea how the traitor’s Sorceress had recognized a relic known only to the Imperial Family, or why she was so shocked that she could barely stammer out her words. But the sight of her face turning deathly pale was quite satisfying, and Regina was able to smile.

“I’m going to bet on this.”

A red stone said to grant a wish in exchange for a life.

When the Sorceress saw it dangling from its silver chain, she immediately tried to rush toward Regina, but the soldiers blocking her path made it impossible for her to approach quickly.

That became Regina’s opportunity.

To be honest, it was nothing more than a legend passed down from the days when God still existed.

But this was the only thing Regina had left to cling to.

If it worked, good. If it failed, it didn’t matter.

At least she would be able to avoid the humiliation of handing her life over to those traitors.

Smiling at the Sorceress as she pushed her way through the soldiers toward Regina, and at the traitor frantically ordering his soldiers to clear a path, Regina lifted the sword she had driven into the ground and cut his throat

Her sword, its edge chipped in places from the battles she had fought, was once again stained with its master’s blood.

The Sorceress’s scream echoed in the distance, and the world began to move in slow motion.

As Regina began to collapse to the ground, she caught sight of the red jewel, drenched in her blood, beginning to emit a brilliant light.

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to correct my mistake….’

‘What mistake?’

‘…My younger brother….’

Why was her younger brother’s face the one that came to mind when several different voices became tangled together and asked their questions?

Then again, for the past two years, the thought she had repeated time and time again was, ‘If only I had left Theor to live as a delinquent, things never would have gotten this bad….’

‘Will that really be enough?’

So Regina nodded.

If Theor had been a delinquent, he wouldn’t have been fooled by con artists and committed the absurd blunder of handing over the Emperor’s Seal. He wouldn’t have been manipulated by Herman into increasing the traitors’ wealth, either. And instead of becoming a pushover Crown Prince who shouted nothing but ‘YES,’ he would have become a damn delinquent of a Crown Prince who could twist the nobles around his finger…

No, wait a second.

‘All right. I understand.’

‘Wait, wait a minute!’

‘I’ll grant your wish.’

‘Ah, no. That’s not what I meant…!’

Before Regina could even clean up the mess she had caused, the jewel’s light grew brighter and swallowed her whole.

The world flashed brilliantly for an instant, then turned pitch-black in the next, and everything flipped upside down.

When she first opened her eyes, she had been too frightened because she had no idea how the necklace had interpreted her wish to even have a chance to recognize this abnormal situation.

And once Regina confirmed that she herself had simply traveled backward through time and returned to the past, she could no longer doubt the absurd situation known as ‘regression.’

She had fallen asleep trembling with fear that the necklace might have done something ridiculous, then woken up the next morning, repeating the process several times. By now, enough time had passed that there was little reason left to doubt this situation.

“Fifteen, in winter.”

Even the point in time she had returned to was perfect.

If she had returned any earlier, there would have been almost nothing she could accomplish in her own name, while if she had returned any later, it would have been after the Emperor had been poisoned.

“Maybe it’s because it was an item left behind by my ancestor? It brought me back at a very advantageous point in time.”

After offering her thanks to the First Emperor, whom she knew only from his portrait, Regina rose from her bed and walked toward the window where the morning sunlight was filtering in.

She had returned.

So what should she do now?

For a very brief moment, she considered throwing everything away and running off somewhere, but she discarded the thought the instant it occurred to her.

She was the Imperial Princess of the Elias Empire.

She had enjoyed everything she had been given from the moment she was born until now. She couldn’t simply enjoy the rights of the Imperial Family while abandoning its duties.

Someone else might have laughed and called her foolish for thinking that way, but Regina had no desire to do something so undignified.

It had always been Regina’s belief that, even if her opponent behaved in a lowly manner, a member of the Imperial Family had to maintain their dignity.

That belief had allowed her to hold on until the very last moment before her regression, and she had no desire to change it now.

Then the conclusion was obvious: she had to deal with Herman, her fiancé and the man who would one day become a traitor to this empire, along with his Sorceress…

“No. Before that, I need to do something about Theor.”

What should she do about Theor?

She would prevent the future in which he became a pushover like he had before her regression.

But she couldn’t simply let him run wild as a delinquent, either.

“How can that idiot have no middle ground…?”

Regina sighed and fell into thought.

To be honest, she had already found the answer.

Before her regression, she had lamented that things would have been better if Theor had grown up as a delinquent, thinking every day, ‘If that had happened, I would have done this….’ and imagining countless ‘what-ifs.’

The thought occupying her now was simply, ‘Is there any other way besides that?’

When she gently pushed the window open, the cold winter wind brushed against Regina’s soft cheeks and her glossy black hair, which fell all the way down to her hips.

The chill instantly cleared her mind.

Why was she hesitating when there was a way to achieve the most certain results?

“Yes. Let’s do it. It’s the only way.”

Regina had a lot to do.

So she would throw away pointless worries like these.

Having made up her mind, Regina’s violet eyes sparkled.