Luciano, who supported me, nodded reassuringly as if to comfort me. Wait, Luciano knew I was Richeli? If I think about it, returning to the original Richeli in this situation where my promiscuous behaviour seems to be exposed is rather absurd. But still, I was happy to return to my original form, and I looked up at Zinon involuntarily. Zinon looked into my eyes and laughed with his eyes closed. The Eloise disguised in Richeli’s body and Zinon flinched a little at the sound of my throat, but the next moment, she started to rant as if this was her moment.

“Look, Zinon! Richeli was cheating on you with another man again! I exposed Richeli’s wrongdoing in front of everyone today to give you a chance to punish her!”

I realised it was Eloise’s usual way of speaking and was at a loss for words. Is it really Eloise?

“Cheating with a man? But I’m a woman…”

“Eh?”

As Luciano said this, he quickly took out a small bottle from his pocket and drank it all at once. Then, his outline started to distort and shine.

“So, Sonia…?”

The next moment, the gaze supporting me went down, and Sonia appeared, supporting my arm with an emotionless expression, wearing a silver, champagne-coloured dress. The Eloise who looked like Richeli, stared at Sonia shakily.

“What… what are you doing? Are you… pretending to drink the antidote? You must have drunk a potion to become a woman, even though you’re a man!”

“I wonder about that? I’m here. And so is Luna.”

Looking towards the voice, the ballroom was in an uproar. Luciano appeared before us, firmly hugging Luna’s shoulders to protect her. Luna was not wearing a white dress with emerald-green ribbons. She was wearing a dress with white lace adorned by a wine-red ribbon at her waist – Luciano’s colour.

“Lu, Luna…?”

With tears in her eyes, Luna stared at me, standing still in a daze.

“Richeli… I’m sorry.”

Tears fell from her mint-green eyes as if she couldn’t stand it anymore. But her eyes were brighter and clearer than usual. Is this the real Luna? Then, is the one who transformed into Richeli, as Zinon said, Eloise, after all?

“We have evidence that you, Eloise, were manipulating Luna’s magic from a distance,” Zinon urged, and the head magician, Lent, projected images from the rainbow-coloured magic stone in his hand onto the wall. It was a magic school inside the dormitory built on the campus. A video of Luna sweating while being tormented in her sleep in the middle of the night is being shown. The red beam of light entering Luna’s head like smoke causes a stir in the ballroom.

“Eloise, you took advantage of Luna Maria’s feelings when her home, the Berkeley Baron’s house, was falling into ruin and manipulated her magic.”

Zinon continued calmly, looking up at the images.

“Wasn’t it your doing to make Luna’s horse run wild on the first day of school? How dare you try to harm Richeli?”

“No, that’s not true!”

At the unexpected suspicion of attempted murder, the ballroom is in an uproar. Is that a lie? Was that intentional? I was shocked to realise this now.

“On the first day, I had a magician called in and had magic stones installed in the academy and dormitory to monitor them. You had Luna, under your magic control, put a magic plant with aphrodisiac effects into Richeli’s cage. You used the red magic stone that Luna had to summon a succubus and applied your magic from a distance.”

In sync with Zinon’s words.

Images were projected showing Luna, with a red beam of light shooting into her head, unsteadily picking the aphrodisiac plant and putting it in my cage, and the red magic stone in Luna’s hand, into which magic was being poured from a distance.

“All your misdeeds are recorded in the magic stones spread throughout the magic school.”

“This… is proof that it was me? Zinon. Just because it’s a red light doesn’t prove I did it!”

Richeli, shaking and trembling, becomes more and more fierce.

“The gardener’s nephew confessed. Do you want to meet him after two years?”

“!”

The image suddenly switched, and the scene of the gardener’s nephew confessing while crying was shown. He was squeezing out words, with tears, snot, and drool running down his face and sweat-soaking his clothes.

“One day, Lady Eloise told me that Lady Richeli was in love with me and wanted to offer her chastity to me… She told me to drag her into a hut in the garden where no one would find us and that she liked to be taken with force.”

When I heard that, I shuddered. When the gardener’s nephew attacked me, Eloise was supposed to be only ten years old. She had already planned and executed such a horrifying plan at that time.

“Initially, he thought it was a good way to make some extra money. He got gold coins directly from the daughter of the Grand Duke, just for mixing a small amount of aphrodisiac into the magic potion that Richeli drinks every day.”

As suspected from Richeli’s diary, it wasn’t that the Majiram didn’t work, but that she was being drugged with aphrodisiacs every day. So, it turns out Richeli wasn’t acting promiscuously of her own free will, was she?

“He was gradually blinded by money, and his senses numbed. He was told that he could get more money if he could seduce Richeli. Little did he know that he was also being remotely controlled by your magic, gradually falling under your control.”

“I don’t know anything about that. This man… I’ve never seen him before. This man is framing Richeli and trying to slander me.”

In her anger, Richeli, dressed in a blue dress, wouldn’t admit it, and now it was Christopher who stepped forward and spoke.

“You remember me, don’t you? First, it was through letters. When I showed interest, you came to see me directly and proposed a deal, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know anything about you!”

Richeli, with narrowed violet eyes, sharply cut off Christopher, started spewing revelations.