Breaking off the engagement with Victoria Arkwright.
The decision Victor, now I, made to separate was inevitable.
Let’s say I became a character in a movie boarding a luxurious cruise ship.
Let’s call it Titanic 3 for the sake of argument.
What if I, as the character, somehow learned about the future that this grand ship would sink?
Wouldn’t the first instinct be not to board the ship?
The Arkwright family was no different from a ship confirmed to sink in the future.
If the moment I became Victor was back in the young days when the family was still intact, maybe I wouldn’t know, but now the holes are so big that even I can’t fix them.
So, I decided to escape the Arkwright Ark.
Getting Victoria’s contempt in the process was just an added bonus.
I made a grand escape, even after being scolded by the prettiest girl in school.
“Victoria, if you and Victor haven’t really separated, it should be easy to reconcile, right? Isn’t holding hands something engaged couples do easily? Anyone engaged would do that much, right?”
“Of course. Holding hands. Engaged couples all do that much…”
But why did the ship keep following me?
Even though I fled from the ship to safe land, it felt like the ship was still chasing me!
“Sister, is it natural for fiancés to hold hands?”
“What kind of nonsense are you saying? Even during vacation, you only stayed at Ludens. Don’t you know what the world is like? Nowadays, even before the wedding, having a child with a fiance… No, was it too early for such talk with you?”
“I was just asking. I know about that much too, you know?”
Since I became Victor, escaping the shadow of the name Arkwright might have been impossible from the beginning.
That’s when it happened.
Victoria reached out her hand to me, lost in thought.
“What?”
“What do you mean, you seem to have trouble believing what I said. Holding hands between engaged couples is ‘ordinary,’ isn’t it?”
“Of course.”
Between engaged couples.
Assuming the engagement was certified by parents and the family, it was acceptable to show affection or even more.
But if it was Victoria and Victor, the story was different.
These two, who barely talked to each other, let alone hold hands for a long time.
“…”
“…”
“…”
A silent silence swept over like waves again.
The cramped club room felt unusually spacious.
The gazes of the two similar-looking girls pierced Victor’s tough steel-like skin as if trying to penetrate it.
“Victor, what are you doing? My sister is watching. Holding hands should be easy. Right?”
Holding hands was easy.
Just reach out and grab it.
But neither I, Ha Seung-ri, nor Victor had been able to do that simple thing for a long time.
I suddenly became curious.
Was it really an easy thing to do?
Holding a woman’s hand.
Perhaps it was even more difficult than paying off 200 million in debt.
Flora spoke at that moment.
“What are you guys doing now? After all, you guys really broke up, right? Victoria, you and Victor should go back to the mainland after this semester and tell father what happened.”
Return to the Arkwright family.
Meet that monster-like Cain?
It was almost like telling me to die.
I thought I had escaped to a place where the ship could never reach.
But the Titanic was chasing me all the way to the mountain.
If a ship came up to the mountain to pick me up, it might have been appropriate to board it. But I didn’t want to board that ship even if I died.
Here, it was right to follow Victoria’s words.
So, I reached out my hand.
The hand I grabbed was smaller and thinner than I thought.
I wondered if she had really lived in this world with such delicate hands. It was a completely different feeling from my manly hands.
Both Victoria and I also held hands and froze in action with a chilling feeling.
The trembling must have been from Victoria’s hand.
If I forced myself to hold hands after breaking up, it was natural to dislike it.
While wondering if I should say something, Victoria gathered courage and spoke.
“How was it, sister? Could you believe this much?”
“Hmm…”
“More than that, sister, we have to get going! We have to go through the back-to-school formalities. This is your last year at Ludens, you should be more organized.”
Swish.
Ignoring my outstretched hand, Victoria pushed her sister Flora out of the club and into the outside world.
* * *
Flora Arkwright.
The noble and righteous eldest daughter of the distinguished Arkwright family.
Simultaneously, she was a senior in the graduating class at Ludens.
Even though she had consistently failed to become a student council executive and never became a council member, Flora found contentment in her own life.
If she had only lived a life constantly compared to her overly competent older brother, she, who was strangely stiff and lacked finesse, she believed she had done her best.
But then, one day during the lazy summer vacation, as Flora lay on the sunbed in the quiet garden of the family estate, astonishing news reached her.
“Broken engagement? Victoria broke off her engagement?”
It was an unbelievable story.
Flora knew better than anyone just how ‘deeply’ Victoria understood the man, Victor, who was her counterpart.
Simultaneously, she felt anger.
‘A daughter of the Arkwright family is breaking off her engagement? It can’t happen twice.’
‘Whatever the reason, Father will scold Victoria. He won’t let any disrespect to the family name slide. Father is that kind of person.’
Memories of past pain resurfaced, but thinking of her younger sister going through a similar sorrow made Flora unable to remain silent.
Flora immediately took a boat to Ludens.
Upon arrival, she heard even more unbelievable stories.
“Sister, you just saw it, right? Victor and I pretended to break off our engagement. Otherwise, would we be able to hold hands like this?”
“Hmm…”
Her younger sister, brushing her backside, seemed somewhat unsatisfactory.
Her face was as red as a ripe radish, shy like a maiden.
‘She seems too embarrassed to have barely held hands after being engaged for over 10 years.’
She had her doubts, but she thought there was no way Victor would join hands with a woman he had just broken off an engagement with.
It was Victor, after all.
‘When I was very sad because my engagement was broken off. I asked him to comfort me just once…’
At that time, Victor said this.
━Flora, you and I are strangers. I have no obligation to do such things for you.
Thinking about that day still made her face flush and sweat.
It felt like being rejected twice by different men on the day she broke off her engagement.
‘No, it’s really laughable. Who asked him to hug or hold hands? Is it so difficult to say a comforting word?’
Victor was that kind of man.
But to say such things in front of Flora, who was crying loudly?
That showed just how naive and rigid he was.
He was a man more strict and unyielding than his older brother Orca, who was also their father Cain’s successor.
Her father probably thought so too, it seemed that Cain wanted to pass on the family position to Victor, his son-in-law, rather than the perfect eldest son Orca.
Because of that, when Flora heard about Victoria’s broken engagement, her head seemed to shake in disbelief.
‘But if a man like that holds hands… Could it be that they didn’t really break up? Are they just pretending? Why?’
Flora couldn’t understand.
So, she asked.
“Who is this supposed ‘enemy’ that you have to put on such a performance for?”
“The enemy… they’re everywhere. Maybe even within the Arkwright family.”
“Hey, that’s really a funny story. Maybe if it were those cunning Blackstar family people, but why would our family members be enemies?”
“I thought the same way. But…”
Her younger sister Victoria closed her mouth.
She was trying too hard at everything, saying it was a disguise.
Flora lightly smiled and said.
“If the situation within the family is not trustworthy, then I could be your enemy too, right? Can you tell me the truth?”
Her younger sister Victoria responded immediately as if she hadn’t even thought about it.
“That’s okay. Sister, you’re a fool. You wouldn’t be my enemy.”
“What did you say!”
Flora was upset, but it was a valid point.
In the first place, she didn’t want to bother with enemies.
‘It’s giving me a headache.’
What intrigued Flora was the opposite.
“But Victor and you even held hands and talked. That Victor… no, that b*stard, he looks really tough, but did he do everything he was supposed to? How far did you two go?”
“Uh, um? We, we did things like other engaged couples normally do…”
“If it’s normal, does that mean…!?”
As Flora made a squealing sound, Victoria seemed to become dizzy just from looking at her.
Perhaps she was more terrifying in the sense that she lacked malice compared to unidentified enemies…
* * *
“It looks like the typhoon has passed.”
The dilapidated building that Flora and Victoria barged into looked like an old cabin after being swept through by a storm.
With people constantly coming and going, it might be a good idea to put up a sign that says ‘No Entry for Outsiders.’
But more importantly,
“Victoria should handle this well.”
Flora, despite her sharp appearance, had a clean and noble aura and mind.
Although she seemed perfect, she was the black-hearted sister stuck between her perfect, rigid brother and her virtuous sister. She had given up on trying to live up to expectations and chose to live life as she pleased.
It might be the survival strategy of an ordinary person stuck among geniuses.
“Still, meeting her in person is quite moving.”
Flora was a popular character in her own way.
Episodes featuring Flora, such as the special sub-episode ‘Miss Ludens, Miss Flora’ were bright and cheerful, leaving a strong impression.
In that particular subplot, the protagonist Luke helps Flora, who was always a perennial underachiever, win the Miss Ludens contest in the second semester.
The reward Flora gives to Luke for helping her, the 「Miss Ludens Trophy」.
━We don’t have a place at home to decorate with something like this. Underclassman, take it with you.
This is also a piece of furniture with excellent performance for decorating.
Being a Tier 1 furniture, it’s obvious, but…
That.
I wished I could receive it instead of Luke.
“I should do some renovations in advance.”
There were discussions to be had with Flora, like why she disliked Victor.
I also want to know more about the internal situation of the Arkwright family with the broken engagement story spreading.
So I wrote Flora a letter addressed to her dorm room number where she would get it.
