## Chapter 73 – Charlotte. That Day’s Promise # 1
The blood flowing down her throat spread throughout her body, and at the same time, her lower body, specifically her genitals, throbbed unbearably.
Just before stopping herself from sucking blood, Charlotte grazed her squelching crotch against Number 25’s hard groin, trying to calm her burning lust.
However, once ignited, her desire showed no signs of stopping. Rather, it slowly grew in size, commanding her to ravage the male in front of her.
Barely regaining her reason, Charlotte slowly pulled out her fangs from his neck. As she did, the heat that had dominated her body vanished without a trace, like a mirage.
She had no intention of using the false lust derived from vampirism to covet Number 25.
“Charlotte… I’m sleepy…”
Besides, he had been drained of a considerable amount of blood, so he would be more dazed than usual, and he probably didn’t have much energy left in his body.
In this situation, if she manipulated Number 25 as she pleased and something went wrong, Charlotte’s body and mind would collapse.
“It’s okay. Lie down here and get some sleep.”
With a now familiar motion, he laid his head on Charlotte’s luscious thighs, blinking his sleepy eyes.
Charlotte watched Number 25 fall asleep, breathing softly, and gently stroked his hair. She then shifted her gaze to the moonlight streaming in through the window.
The moonlight was so blue it stung her eyes, and perhaps influenced by Number 25’s question that evoked the past, she felt more desolate and melancholic than usual.
‘A promise…’
Charlotte listlessly laid back, closed her eyes, and quietly sank into a fragment of memory buried deep within her heart, never to be taken out again.
●
The back alley seemed to have gathered all the darkness of District 7, and screams of pain echoed endlessly.
The screams, seemingly drawn from the depths of the abdomen, were so terrible that they didn’t sound like they came from a human, let alone a specific gender. It sounded like the roar of a wounded beast.
“Kkeuaaaaaaaak!”
Charlotte spat a glob of thick saliva, gathered with a “kaak!” sound, directly into the face of a woman whose limbs were bent in grotesque directions and who was trembling. She then said in an icy voice,
“Try acting up in front of me one more time. It won’t end with just your limbs then. I’ll really kill you.”
“I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”
Charlotte clicked her tongue, still not appeased, and kicked the vagrant, who was crawling away from her, hard in the stomach.
“Keuheok…!”
The vagrant flew about 3 meters and crashed into a dilapidated wall, clutching her stomach with her only intact hand, curling up like a heated shrimp. Charlotte approached her, who was grimacing in pain, and took the wallet as a trophy, the evidence of her victory, and immediately counted the coins.
Three silver coins visible among the small change brought a smile to Charlotte’s face.
“Not bad.”
If she saved them, she could last at least a month.
She was about to move her steps, excited at the thought of relaxing in a bathhouse for the first time in a while and buying new clothes at the market to replace her blood-stained ones, when another person’s shadow fell in front of Charlotte.
Hair and eyes of a burning gold color.
Except for a deep scar on her left eye, she had a refined appearance that didn’t suit the back alley at all.
She fearlessly walked towards Charlotte and spoke her first words.
“You’re the rumored vampire?”
Charlotte frowned fiercely and opened her mouth in an annoyed tone.
“Who are you?”
“You know what it means for me to come all the way here, right? Is there really a need for conversation?”
Charlotte roughly shoved the silver coins into her pocket and glared at the woman standing in front of her.
There were occasionally people like this. Arrogant. Not knowing the height of the sky, living intoxicated by their own strength within a well.
Trash who acted as righteous heroes against the vagrants of the back alley.
Charlotte loathed them.
Thinking that she would back down if she just showed her a little, as usual, Charlotte loosened her body and rushed straight at her.
The result was Charlotte’s complete defeat.
And that too, in a single exchange, a fleeting moment that didn’t even last a second.
The moment she rushed at the woman in front of her, her vision spun, the world turned upside down, and she was lying on the cold, hard ground.
There was no time to even feel pain.
“What…?”
This was a first.
The woman’s face reappeared in Charlotte’s vision as she lay there with an expression of bewilderment. Unlike Charlotte, she was smiling with a relaxed expression.
“You have an expression that says you can’t understand? Should we do it again? I can keep going until you’re satisfied.”
For Charlotte, who had never experienced defeat in her life, it was a humiliating first loss.
Moreover, the way she spoke as if she were dealing with the weak, Charlotte gritted her teeth at the unprecedented humiliation and immediately got up.
Charlotte, who had dusted off the dirt on her clothes, glared at her.
“I was careless just now.”
Yes, otherwise, it didn’t make sense.
Even when catching a rabbit, a lion gives its all, but recently, Charlotte hadn’t met an opponent who required her to use her full strength, so she was gradually losing the need to exert herself.
Who knew that the person who came along in the midst of that would be such a strong person?
The joke was over, and Charlotte’s demeanor changed as she decided to go all out from now on.
Ssssk – As if a snake was silently crawling on the floor, Charlotte’s foot moved forward one step.
At the same time, Charlotte’s body shot forward like an arrow.
With the intention of tearing out the person’s vital point, specifically the Adam’s apple, she sharpened her nails and stretched out her hand.
With the sound of cutting through the wind, it felt like her fingertips were accurately touching her neck.
This was the end, she could be sure of it.
But the result was the same this time as well, and the process was also the same.
The moment her hand touched her neck, Charlotte’s body flew into the sky. Perhaps because it was her second experience, she could clearly see the clouds flowing slowly through the inverted world. She even had the illusion that time was moving slowly, but unfortunately, the fall happened in an instant.
Kuang!
From a height of about 180cm, Charlotte, who had been thrown down on the hard floor with her back first, had no choice but to take the impact with her whole body. She didn’t forget to strengthen her body with magic in the fleeting moment she was in the air during her first exchange.
She could feel that it was useless from the subsequent excruciating pain.
The excruciating pain that had penetrated even her body-strengthening magic spread throughout her body. Her head was ringing, and she couldn’t breathe properly.
A moan similar to the vagrant from earlier flowed through Charlotte’s throat like a death cry.
“Keok…!”
This time as well, the mysterious woman had a bright smile on her face and uttered the same words.
“One more time?”
Charlotte bit down so hard that her teeth made a creaking sound.
She could tell for sure after two exchanges.
This woman wasn’t giving it her all.
She had no intention of going back after experiencing such humiliation.
Charlotte didn’t give up after that and frequently challenged her in order to somehow draw out her full strength, but she was only thrown around without being able to touch her even once.
Eventually, the woman lost her initial momentum due to Charlotte’s near-mad obsession with victory and defeat, wiped the sweat flowing down her forehead, and made a suggestion.
“Aren’t you getting hungry? Follow me.”
It was absurd. Charlotte brushed back the disheveled bangs that were covering her vision with her hand, wiped the blood from her mouth with her sleeve, and answered her with a sharp glare.
“You make someone look like this, and then suddenly tell them to follow you?”
“So, are you not coming?”
As if answering those words, Charlotte’s stomach rumbled without any tact.
Charlotte, who had initially rushed at her as if she were going to kill her, approached her with listless steps at that one sound.
“I’m just going to eat and leave.”
This woman was different from the trash who came to the back alley to relieve stress. She had realized that her purpose was herself from the middle of the fight. She could also intuitively tell that she didn’t harbor impure intentions. It was a natural intuition that had never led her down the wrong path in her life, so she trusted it this time as well.
If that weren’t the case, she wouldn’t be following her obediently now.
She couldn’t understand the woman’s appearance, exposing her back defenselessly to the person she had just fought, humming as she walked.
It was the first time she had an opponent who made her feel a sense of futility that she had lost to someone with a flower garden in their head and a sense of awe that even if she attacked from behind, it wouldn’t work.
The place they arrived at without a single word of conversation was a huge castle.
With strength that defied common sense and a classic castle that didn’t suit District 7, Charlotte asked as if confirming before passing through the castle gates.
“Don’t tell me you’re the Demon Lord?”
The woman turned around and looked at Charlotte with an absurd expression.
“You were fighting me until now without even knowing that? I didn’t even think there would be anyone in this district who didn’t know me…”
“I’m not interested in that kind of thing.”
“Let’s go in for now.”
The woman entered the castle and headed straight to the kitchen.
The castle, without even a decent maid, was filled with only a desolate chill. Except for the chef cooking in the kitchen, no one else’s presence was felt.
Charlotte, who was planning to simply fill her stomach and leave, wasn’t interested in the internal affairs of the castle. Charlotte, who was gobbling down the food that came out next, asked a question.
“Why was the Demon Lord of a district wandering around in a place like that?”
“There were rumors that you were bullying the weak, but after seeing you in person, it doesn’t seem like that’s the case.”
Bullying the weak, she had made the opponent who attacked her first look terrible, but Charlotte had hardly ever started a fight first. Bad rumors piled up, and the initial meaning was distorted to the point where it couldn’t be found, eventually driving a person to ruin.
Charlotte didn’t like all those aspects of humans.
The woman who was eating asked Charlotte cautiously.
“You don’t seem to have anywhere to go, do you want to work in this castle?”
Charlotte answered immediately without a moment’s hesitation.
“Why would I? I clearly said I was just going to eat and leave, right?”
She thought she had refused firmly, but the woman smiled brightly and showed no signs of giving up.
“I quite like you. I have a personality where I have to get what I want no matter what. I’m planning to make you my right-hand woman someday.”
Suddenly saying she would make her her right-hand woman to someone she had just met, Charlotte chuckled in disbelief and shrugged her shoulders.
She couldn’t even remember when she had laughed like this.
The woman, who had finished speaking with a confident attitude, suddenly bent over and started gagging.
Charlotte, who had been bursting into laughter, also looked at her condition with a somewhat worried gaze.
“What’s wrong?”
Before long, the woman straightened her back and still had a smile on her face. Charlotte also felt relieved at that and put the food back into her mouth.
The woman, who was sitting upright in her seat, opened her mouth again.
“Thanks for your concern, but it’s nothing. I’m pregnant.”
Upon hearing those words, Charlotte coughed violently and spat out all the food that was filling her mouth onto the table.
The woman pulled her chair back in horror and said with a disgusted look.
“Ew, what are you doing, making a mess like that?”
Charlotte couldn’t even think of wiping the food from her mouth and asked with her upper body close to her, resting her arms on the table.
“Then you fought me with a pregnant body?”
What kind of crazy mother goes around fighting from broad daylight with a child in her stomach? She had never heard of such a thing.
Unlike the surprised Charlotte, the woman answered in a calm voice as if it were nothing.
“I was confident I wouldn’t get hit. Moderate exercise is good for prenatal care, right?”
“You’re crazy.”
Even at Charlotte’s curse, which was filled with sincerity, the woman laughed heartily and brushed it off, saying she heard that often. How easily did she have to be seen by the people around her to be called crazy even in her position as the Demon Lord?
“If you’re pregnant, where’s your husband? Does he know that a woman who’s not even alone is going around fighting?”
“He died from exhaustion during sex. I shouldn’t have held onto someone who said they were tired and made them do it 7 times in a row. He died happily under me, so isn’t that good enough? Ah, then is it death by overexertion from below instead of above?”
Charlotte stopped cutting the meat and stared blankly at her as she joked and laughed about a person’s death.
Charlotte was aware that she herself was a person who was outside the bounds of normal.
But this woman was not someone who could be described as just crazy. Charlotte was sweating at her words and actions, which even hinted at pure madness.
She was planning to leave the castle as soon as she finished eating the remaining half of the meal and never encounter her again.
Charlotte, who had finished her meal at a faster pace than before, immediately got up from her seat and said briefly to the woman, who was still eating with a relaxed look.
“I’m done eating, so I’m leaving.”
“Wait a minute.”
She couldn’t guess the reason for being stopped. Was it perhaps because she kept thinking of her as a crazy woman in her head? Well, if she had reached the position of Demon Lord, it would be more than possible to read people’s thoughts.
Contrary to Charlotte’s expectations, she smiled gently and opened her mouth.
“Come to think of it, we haven’t even introduced ourselves. My name is Arwen, remember it because we’ll be seeing each other often.”
There would never be a time when they would see each other again. Charlotte, who had vowed to herself, didn’t tell her her name and left the place with a cold appearance, never looking back even once.
