13. Flashback (6)
About an hour later, a woman's piercing scream rang out near the Millane Bookstore, then quickly faded away.
Of course, no one paid attention to it, not wanting to be involved in any trouble.
'That's it, haha...... please die quickly......'
When Anna asked Lizé, "Where is Miss Edith?", she told her that she was also looking for Edith.
In her urgency, Anna ran down the alley to the Millane Bookstore, but her strength was not enough to stop Fred Sicily.
[Edith Ludwig's death as a villainess puts the story back on its original flow. Three minutes to go until death.]
It was the notice she'd been waiting for.
And as soon as Lizé heard it, Killian appeared in front of her.
'What's going on? Why is Killian here?'
Lizé was surprised, but Killian was even more surprised.
"Lizé, why are you alone? Where's Edith?"
"I've been looking for her, too, because she suddenly disappeared......"
Although surprised, Lizé took it easy. Edith would be dead soon, and dead people don't talk.
Just then, Anna, who had been searching the alley, burst out and grabbed Killian.
"Miss Edith has never come out of that alley!"
At the same time, the system repeated the notice.
[Edith Ludwig's death as a villainess puts the story back on its original flow. Three minutes to go until death.]
The time until death has been extended.
It was like a déjà vu of the yacht accident.
'How the hell did she buy time?'
While Lizé's eyes widened in surprise, Killian quickly began to search the alley.
As Lizé prayed for Edith's death, and Killian and Anna prayed for her to hold on just a little longer, the time to death was extended twice more.
Finally, a loud bang echoed down the alley.
Killian and the knights ran into the abandoned house at the far end of the alley.
"No......!"
Lizé groaned lowly, but the system mercilessly declared her defeated.
[Some of the flow of the original story has been broken by the author's excessive intervention. The original story has been further damaged. The author's control has been severely weakened.]
Lizé was devastated.
After listening to the system's notice, she realized that her control over Killian had dropped to zero, and the other characters were down to about 30%.
When she returned to the mansion, frustrated, she heard the story behind the scenes, and it seemed that Edith had convinced Fred Sicily with 'words'.
The kind of luck that would never have happened if Edith was still a 'villainous supporting character.'
In reality, Edith would have died before she could properly rebel.
But this is a Rofan world, and Rofan's clichés don't allow the main characters to die easily.
It was evidence that Edith was becoming more and more of a female lead.
'There can't be two female leads in one story......'
Lizé's hands shook at the thought.
'I must kill her before she meets the third exception condition!'
Feeling like she had a knife pointed at her throat, Lizé began to prepare for the final episode: the territorial war and the kidnapping.
Just before declaring war, Shane had written to Edith, offering her one last chance, but she had refused.
Furthermore, the Riegelhoff spy had been whipped and kicked out as soon as the territorial war was declared.
The spy was the one who stayed at the mansion and plotted with Sophia until the end of the original story, but was discovered this time because Edith met the second exception condition.
So now it's up to Shane to storm the mansion.
'But I can't just rely on Shane.'
The Riegelhoffs had failed in the original, and now that Edith's narrative was stronger, they were no longer reliable.
Lizé sent a letter to the Riegelhoffs, with the sender unknown.
– I work at the Ludwig mansion. If you're trying to bring down the Duke, I'd like to lend a hand.
Count Riegelhoff and Shane had no choice but to accept the offer, despite their suspicions.
Having set the stage, Lizé made one last attempt to seduce Killian before he left for war.
She purposely wore an off-the-shoulder, risqué chemise that Edith would probably wear to visit him in the middle of the night, but Killian frowned at the sight of her round, white shoulders.
'What? I thought you liked this kind of thing?'
Momentarily flustered, Lizé summoned memories of a beautiful past to lighten the mood, and slowly approached Killian.
"Actually...... I knew about your heart, Killian."
Naturally, Killian looked surprised.
After seducing him with a sad smile for a while longer, Lizé spoke, intent on shaking him to the core.
"Before you leave, can't you just kiss me once?"
Killian paused.
Lizé was sure there was no way Killian would refuse this.
Kilian's hand came closer to her, but instead of cupping her cheek, his fingertips flicked her forehead.
"Killian......?"
"You don't have to say it like you're sending someone off to die, you idiot."
Killian laughed merrily, his face devoid of all emotion. Lizé realized something.
'Killian is...... no longer mine......'
Even the smallest part of him was no longer hers.
Feeling abandoned by the character she'd created, Lizé returned to her room feeling depressed.
At the front of the room stood Cliff.
"You don't look good."
"Cliff......"
He seemed to already know where Lizé had been.
But he didn't criticize her or show any open displeasure.
'Yeah, I still have Cliff.
Cliff kept trying to get Lizé to be honest with him in subtle tones, but she couldn't bring herself to reveal her true feelings, even to her most faithful admirer.
'If you know what I'm thinking, you'll abandon me, won't you?'
Finally, it was time for them to set off for territorial war.
Edith's appearance, not even received a farewell from Duke Ludwig, was pathetic, but Lizé rejoiced in such a simple thing.
Princess Catherine came to visit and offered to send them unsolicited imperial knights, and Lizé mustered what little power she had left to make the Duchess reject the offer.
Her power had waned to the point where her nose was dripping with blood and she had to rest for a while.
'Now, I can't even use my power.'
After losing her seemingly omnipotent power, Lizé had no choice but to make her own moves. But even that didn't come easily.
She'd hidden sleeping incense and installed an anti-lock device to make it easy for the Riegelhoffs to raid the mansion, but Edith had found and destroyed them all like someone with an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Eventually, Lizé wrote a letter to Cliff about Edith's strange behavior.
'The raid on the mansion is unlikely to succeed at this point. I need to change tactics.'
Lizé pondered, then wrote to Count Riegelhoff.
– The mansion is too heavily guarded, especially with Miss Edith in the way.
Perhaps we should change our tactics.
The Duchess and Miss Lizé will be at Count Windham's party on the day Archduke Langston makes his grand entrance.
I suggest you make your move when they ride home from there.
As expected, Count Riegelhoff and Shane decide to follow Lizé's advice.
At the Windhams' party, Lizé met Leila, who apologized to her, and waited for the time when the Emperor's assassination would fail and the party would be stopped.
When the imperial knights finally arrived and she was hurried into the carriage, she chewed her lip nervously, afraid that she would fail again.
'I have to succeed this time, I don't know about anything else, but Edith's death is the only way......!'
There was no way that Shane or Sophia would let Edith slip through their fingers, especially since her letters had emphasized that she had completely abandoned the Riegelhoffs.
Suddenly, she heard the knights' voice, the horses' braying, and the carriage shook.
'That's it!'
Lizé screamed, but inside she was celebrating.
But instead of killing Edith immediately, Shane burst into the carriage and dragged all three of them to the Wellesley's abandoned villa.
Even there, he wasted time by locking Edith up separately.
'You stupid bastard! Why don't you kill Edith? Hurry up and kill her!'
Cliff will be here any minute, and you must kill Edith before then.
That was all Lizé could think about as she dealt with Shane trying to rape her.
So when there was a knock on the door and Shane was sprawled out on the floor, she was a little annoyed.
'It's too early...... what happened to Edith?'
Of course, even as she thought that, she didn't forget to cry and cling to Cliff, who walked in with a worried look on his face.
But Sophia did the right thing until the end.
She refused to reveal Edith's location, even as she was being captured and dragged away.
"Pfft, do you think my lady belongs in a place like this?"
Despite her words, which were meant to hide Edith, there was a venomous malice in her eyes.
'Yeah, you would freeze to death or starve to death if you were locked up in an abandoned place in this weather.'
To the Duchess, who cried out that Edith could not have betrayed her, Lizé said, "When I woke up, she was not there," urging the knights to hurry home.
But time passed, and no notice from the system was heard.
At this point, the system should have notified her that Edith had only minutes to live, but it did not until the Duke and Killian returned to the capital.
'Edith Riegelhoff, where the hell are you and what are you doing?'