Taming The Villainesses novel Chapter 421

Ayra had always been full of unpredictability. You could even say she was... peculiar.

Of course, it made sense—after all, in order to cloud Solomon’s clairvoyance of her future, Ayra had been forced to fill her life with improvisational and strange actions.

And yet... I’d recently begun to suspect that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t only because of the Demon King. Maybe this side of her was just part of Ayra’s natural temperament—her true self.

“Ayra-nim, what are you doing?”

I looked toward her. Ayra was simply sitting in a chair, staring at the toy hanging on the wall.

Yes—that was a toy.

“Ayra-nim?”

“......”

Even though I called out to her several times, she was so entranced that she couldn’t answer.

Reflected in Ayra’s pitch-black eyes was the image of a toy magic wand hanging on the wall.

There had to be a fancier way to describe it, but my limited vocabulary left me no option other than “toy magic wand.”

━Hioon...

Bael, you know what I’m talking about, right? That kind of thing little girls aged five or six play with.

I’d never held one myself, but the girls in the orphanage I used to live in would always growl and fight over them whenever toys arrived from donors.

━Hioooon!

Ah—right. Magic wand. I’d gotten so used to calling everything a “magic staff” that the word magic wand hadn’t popped into my head right away.

Anyway, Ayra was now staring deeply at a toy wand that looked like the kind you'd wave to transform into a princess and defeat evil.

“......”

What in the world was she thinking?

Shk.

At that moment, Leadernoi nudged me in the ribs.

“Let us continue our discussion about this business...! If Teonoi and I, the Great President Leadernoi, join forces, we could change the world...!”

So he claimed.

With no other choice, I entered the office of Fallen’s president. Once seated at the table provided, Leadernoi began.

“So, about that mysterious flying carpet...”

“Let’s make the trade. The information about the half-fairy—and if possible, could we also include a few of those toys over there?”

Leadernoi nodded vigorously.

“That much is easily doable...!”

A solid deal.

After shaking hands, I figured it was finally time to get to the conversation we’d postponed since yesterday. I asked Leadernoi,

“So, you really did see a half-fairy in this village long ago?”

“That is correct...! Half-fairies are a rare race. Once you’ve seen one, you never forget—it’s still clearly etched in my mind...!”

He wasn’t wrong. Half-fairies were indeed rare. Even now, despite my lofty status, I had never met another of my kind.

Sure, there were plenty of half-elves who shared elven blood. But as for half-nymphs like me? As far as I knew, there were none.

Which is why I couldn’t help but get my hopes up that the half-fairy Leadernoi claimed to have seen was actually me, Teo Gospel, back when I was a child.

Even if it wasn’t me—if there really was another half-nymph out there—I’d very much like to meet them. Half-nymphs are said to only be born male. If that's true, maybe he too had lived a strange, secluded life like I had.

“Hmm... So when was it that you saw this half-fairy?”

Leadernoi rubbed the space between his brows, as if drawing out an old memory.

“It was when the 8th president of this village was in office... That is to say, it was during the 8th term of this Leadernoi...!”

Leadernoi’s office was lined with framed portraits of every president from the 1st to the 13th.

All of them bore Leadernoi’s face.

...So this guy had been ruling as president for a long time.

Still, judging by how the villagers didn’t seem particularly dissatisfied, perhaps he was surprisingly competent.

I asked,

“How often do elections happen?”

“Every four years...!”

If we were now in the 13th term, then the 8th would have been... five terms ago.

Twelve, eleven, ten, nine... that would be about twenty years back.

Leadernoi said,

“Now that I think of it, that winter came early, just like this one... It was an unexpectedly harsh season...!”

“I see.”

“And back then, there were monsters all around the village as well, making things even harder...! Around the start of that difficult winter, a nymph came to us...!”

“A nymph?”

When I asked, Leadernoi’s reddish-orange eyes turned toward the window.

“That’s right... She was tall, as tall as any adult woman—and strikingly beautiful. But she was definitely a nymph...! And very strong...!”

A tall nymph, huh. Something clicked in my memory—like that imp Nar-Nar we met in the monastery recently. She had a model-like tall and lanky figure.

I didn’t know how she’d grown so much, but if even imps could grow like that, then it wasn’t impossible for pure nymphs to as well.

“Can you tell me more? Do you remember her name, or anything she said?”

“She said nymphs help each other. I clearly remember that...! That among nymphs, there is no ‘mine’ or ‘yours’...!”

Those were the exact same words Leadernoi had said to me last night. So he’d heard them from another nymph long ago.

As I found that rather intriguing, Leadernoi added a few more words.

“She was an incredible nymph...! But even more eye-catching than her was the small child in her arms...! It was unmistakably a half-fairy...!”

Leadernoi’s gaze began to glaze over, his eyes going dreamy.

“But he looked terribly sick...! He had clearly caught a severe case of anti-nymph flu, the dreaded Coronoi...!”

So the full-grown nymph had brought the sickly half-fairy to Fallen Village, nestled among the rocky mountains.

Perhaps she thought a village that survived off strange objects fallen from the sky might have the cure.

But Leadernoi shook his head.

“I, Leadernoi, have studied a bit of medicine myself...! And I concluded the small half-fairy’s illness was beyond what we could treat. So, the nymph and her child left...!”

“If they left, where did they go?”

“That, I do not know...”

“......” _{ƒreewebɳovel.com}