It wasn’t until this evening that the wagon that left the nursery school yesterday morning returned.

The wagon was loaded with supplies for a month’s supply.

New clothes or cleaning tools for growing children. Or, it was something like seasoning that the farm could not produce on its own.

Hermia-san was coming down from the driver’s seat of the arriving carriage, moving her body carefully as if something was uncomfortable.

Upon closer inspection, the bandage wrapped around his left hand appeared to be the cause of his inability to move.

“Student Stella, student Conrad. Excuse me, could you help me carry the luggage into the building? I don’t think I can move it all by myself… .”

“Doctor, what happened to that wound!”

“It’s getting chilly, so I was thinking of buying a magic stove with my spare money, but I accidentally touched the controls and burned my hand.”

“You must have been very sick. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. He said that if I don’t use my hands for a week or so, I’ll get better.

If I show it to the priest at the church, it should get better right away, but I thought it would be better to buy a few more clothes for the children than to spend the money on it, so I just returned.”

It was an excuse that felt really plausible.

If I hadn’t noticed that Hermia-san’s true identity was the guy I met last night.

I might have dismissed the wounds in the same area as the ones I inflicted on the monster yesterday as mere coincidence.

Do you want to make up for the excuse that you got hurt while touching the stove?

Certainly, there was a high-powered stove inside the wagon, enough to heat a large room.

It was strange that he had to bring a wound that healed in less than an hour when he went to church.

He was making excuses like lack of money, but it probably wasn’t enough to put up with the inconvenience of not being able to use his hands for a week.

For an injury of that level, even ordinary people were willing to pay for treatment and receive treatment at the church.

There was no way that Hermia, who had been a mercenary for a long time, did not know the importance of treating her injuries in a timely manner.

If not, there were other circumstances that the church could not treat.

“Of course I will help, Director. Even if you didn’t tell me, of course I was going to help you!”

“Thank you, Miss Stella.”

“You must be tired from driving a long way with one hand, but Hermia-san, you’d better go in first and rest.”

“Then it’s cumbersome, but I’ll ask you. Everything in the box is labeled, so please move only the food to the kitchen and move everything else to the storage room.”

“”Yeah.””

After saying that, Hermia-san brought her injured body into the nursery school building with only a load that she could carry with one hand.

“Let’s move slowly. We have to move quickly and prepare dinner.”

Around the time when he pretended to be calm and pretended to take out luggage from the wagon.

Suddenly, I felt a different gaze from Stella.

“Senior Conrad.”

“… why?”

“Wouldn’t it be better to tell the director about what happened last night?”

It was a very serious look.

Stella did not yet know that Hermia was the same as that monster, and there was a high possibility that she did not even know about the rumors about a ghost that appears once a month among children.

Certainly, the matter was quite serious to move on without saying anything.

As Stella said, it would normally be correct to tell the head of the orphanage the truth.

“Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“I guess so, right?”

“I’ll tell you later. Last night, an unidentified guy came to kidnap the child, so I think I need to be careful from now on.

First of all, I fought closer than Stella.”

“I understand, Senior Conrad.”

It was impossible for Stella to have an apostle of the Dark Church alone.

I replied to her in an appropriately evasive way, saying that I would tell her.

I was the one who witnessed him up close, so it wasn’t too difficult to convince Stella.

“It’s a sudden thought.”

“yes?”

“Weren’t the wounds that Senior Konrad inflicted on the monster last night, the tentacles protruding from his left arm?”

“It did.”

“The director who returned today seems to have a wound on his left hand too, so maybe it has something to do with it?”

It was a sharp eye.

It seems that she came to the same conclusion as I did after seeing the wounds on the parts similar to those of the monster that appeared while Hermia was away.

Like Stella, who had killed the Apostle of the Dark Church in her previous life, she naturally came to terms with the identity of the monster.

Unlike me who was sure, it was a tone close to cautious speculation.

“stellar.”

“Yeah.”

“The elixir is too severe.”

But even if she had come to the same conclusion as me, Stella would have been far better off not knowing.

It’s probably going to be a bad experience for Stella.

The reason why Stella silently put on a distressed expression whenever the story of the nursery school incident came up in her previous life.

And the reason why I continued to regret it even after I did enough to end the situation with less damage.

The story behind it was vaguely inferred, so he didn’t want to tell Stella all the more.

“Is that so?”

“There’s no way that Hermia, who is kind enough to open an orphanage in a place like this with her severance pay, is a monster who appears to kidnap children in the middle of the night. It must be a coincidence.”

“… Certainly it is. I think my thoughts were short-lived.”

I’m sure he didn’t want to admit it at first.

That the guy in the form of Hermia who raised her is a monster who kidnaps children.

Her mother, who was already like her mother, died at the hands of a monster, and the identity of the existence she had been laughing with for the past month was that monster.

In my previous life, I didn’t admit those facts and put it off, but I must have responded too late and increased the scale of the damage even more.

In order not to repeat the same thing, he had to postpone telling Stella the truth until later.

At least it had to be after all the cases were wrapped up when she knew the whole truth.

⁎ ⁎ ⁎

It was midnight.

All the children in the orphanage have fallen asleep and even Stella has made sure to go to bed.

It was the time when only I was awake to finish the work.

Hermia’s bedroom in a corner of the first floor, quite far from the other bedrooms.

In order to end the disturbing events in this orphanage, my steps were moving towards it without stopping.

Hermia Cere.

No, it must have had a different name.

Because Stella in her previous life couldn’t accept that the name of Director Hermia, whom she considered her mother, was floating around like a villain.

Anyway, the important thing wasn’t the guy’s name.

To reserve a place in a corner of hell for that monster.

That was what I had to do, and it was the last courtesy for Hermia, who had already passed away.

It’s a story of maybe, really maybe.

There is, of course, the possibility that all these speculations I have made so far are inaccurate.

So far, it’s just an estimate based on the testimonies of Bell and Chris.

She was probably sleeping in her bedroom by now, so it wasn’t clear that she was a monster.

If, in reality, Hermia was just a benevolent and kind nursery school principal, there was a possibility that I would believe the words of the children mixed with lies and make wrong judgments.

The wound on her left hand was just an accidental injury on the same day, and of course there was a possibility that she wasn’t lying.

If the truth was really like that, of course you would have to pay for the wrongdoing.

It might be better to be misunderstood as a pervert secretly breaking into a middle-aged woman’s room in the middle of the night.

It was something that might lead to an irreversible mistake if she decided that she was an apostle of the church and swung the sword recklessly.

That’s why, one last time, you should properly distinguish whether the opponent is human or not.

Most of the apostles of the church felt the magical flow completely different depending on the morning and afternoon, even if they were the same person, because of their unstable physical abilities.

In other words, just by facing the monster again at the time of the first sighting, it was enough to tell if the monster had been seen before.

I wasn’t sure until evening.

The magical energy I felt in Hermia-san, who returned by carriage this evening, was in a markedly different form from that of the monster I met at night.

The problem was that it wasn’t just that.

The form of Hermia-san’s magical power returned, and as soon as about two hours passed, it changed into another person’s form again.

I didn’t notice it when I wasn’t conscious, but as soon as I paid attention, I was able to confirm the form of magical power that was clearly changing.

There are probably two possibilities at most.

One is that Hermia-san was actually twins, and they secretly changed their appearances without my knowledge.

The other is that he was an apostle of the Church who had made a blood oath with the Dark Church and had unstable magical power.

Which of the two was the correct answer, I was able to find out clearly at night.

The flow of magic power that I could feel even through the doorway was exactly the same as the magic power of the monster that tried to run away with Bell last night.

“Miss Hermia.”

After knocking on the door twice, he called the name of the director of the Cherryfield Orphanage who was inside.

It was already a settled matter that he was an apostle of the church, but blindly breaking down the door and entering was a foolish way.

Not only would it cause needless vigilance, but Stella and the children might come down after hearing the commotion.

Above all, for the Apostles of the Dark Church, a surprise attack tailored to sleep time was meaningless.

“Are you sleeping, Hermia?”

“… Wait.”

A voice came from inside the door.

It was a voice that came quite late, but it didn’t sound like he had woken up.

For the followers of the Dark Church, sleep was like a luxurious rest.

“Come on in.”

When I opened the door to the director’s office and entered, she was half-sitting on the bed in casual clothes.

As if to some extent expecting my visit in the middle of the night, she met my eyes quietly.

“To break into the room of a woman living alone in the middle of the night like this, even Conrad student is more sneaky than I thought.”

“… … .”

“… sorry. I have no talent for jokes.”

Seeing my eyes, she thought I wasn’t in the mood to talk nonsense, so she hurriedly picked up a joke that wasn’t even funny.

“Miss Hermia.”

“Seeing you come in the middle of the night like this, you must be serious, right?”

“When Hermia-san was out last night, there was a guy who attacked the nursery school.”

Hermia’s eyes widened as if she were genuinely surprised.

“Is that true?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Is the children, are all the children all right?”

“It looks like they tried to kidnap a girl, but I managed to rescue it because Stella and I were there.”

“I’m glad, I’m really glad.”

The smoke that sweeps the chest pretending to be calm was excellent.

If I wasn’t sure, even I could be fooled in an instant.

“So, what happened to the monster?”

“I tried to deal with it right away as soon as I protected the child, but I was caught off guard and quickly ran away into the darkness.”

“So that means, maybe it could reappear.”

“Perhaps.”

“I have to be careful. To think that such a thing would happen on a day when I was away… .”

This time, she put on a serious expression and blurted out her words, but it was right after the words that shouldn’t have come out of her mouth.

“I managed to hurt him before he disappeared, though, so he probably didn’t get far.”

“… is that so. That is a very fortunate story.”

Hermia’s expression subtly changed in an instant, and my eyes did not miss it.

I had already figured it out before entering the room, but the longer the conversation went on, the more my doubt turned to certainty.

I held the broadsword inside the cloak with essence.

It was an attack that was too quick to react.

The solid silver line extending from my hand split the space in an instant, and the blade of the sword passed through Hermia’s wool belt.

blank. With the sound of an empty bucket falling, her lost body rolled across the floor.

In such a 10-pyeong space, only the sound of one person’s breathing remained.

“I got caught.”

The head that was rolling on the floor let out an unfamiliar voice.

It wasn’t Hermia-san’s voice that I had heard until now, but in a muddy voice that was extremely unpleasant.