Chapter 101: Chapter 101: Incident

When we had finished buying weapons, I told Ruby to return to the carriage first while I paid for our purchases and took care of the final formalities. The girl nodded in agreement and hurried out of the shop, her light footsteps disappearing behind the door.

I paused for a moment, watching her receding figure, then turned back to the counter. After paying the owner, I asked him to deliver the remaining purchases directly to our estate. The owner bowed respectfully and wished us luck on our upcoming hunt.

I politely replied, thanked him for his service, and headed for the exit.

I looked around, trying to spot our carriage. It was on the opposite side of the street, and I was about to cross the road when suddenly, completely unexpectedly, I heard the loud clatter of horses’ hooves and the creaking of wheels coming from somewhere to my right.

I turned around.

A carriage drawn by four horses was rushing straight at me. It all happened so quickly that I didn’t even have time to realize where it had come from. My body seemed to freeze — my legs wouldn’t move, my breath caught in my throat. All I could do was stand and watch as the dark mass approached me at terrifying speed.

The wheels screeched, the horses reared up in panic, and in the next moment, the carriage came to a sudden stop just a few steps away from me.

I stood motionless, feeling my heart pounding wildly in my chest. Everything around me seemed to simply cease to exist at that moment.

I took a deep breath, trying to regain my composure. It all seemed almost ridiculous — standing in the middle of the road in the center of the capital and realizing that a few seconds ago my life could have been cut short by accident.

But before I could fully recover, a loud, angry shout came from the rumbling carriage.

"Hey! Are you even looking where you’re going?!"

I blinked, still not fully understanding what was happening. The coachman, sitting on the box, was struggling to control the frantic horses, but he didn’t look frightened, rather indignant — as if it were my fault that he had almost run me over.

"Excuse me," I began calmly, although my voice was slightly trembling, "but weren’t you the one who almost hit me? I was just crossing the road!"

Yes, at moments like this, I especially regretted that there were no traffic lights, road signs, or even basic rules of the road in this world. People, carts, horses — all mixed together in one chaotic mess, where everyone moved wherever they wanted and relied solely on luck and their own reactions. Sometimes it seemed to me that crossing the road in this world was like participating in some kind of survival test.

The man snorted contemptuously, glancing at me from under his frowning eyebrows.

"Crossing, you say?" he asked angrily. "If you hadn’t jumped right under the wheels, nothing would have happened!"

I bit my lip, feeling irritation slowly rising inside me.

"Great. I almost died, and now I’m to blame," I sighed mentally, feeling a shadow of irony cross my face.

"But it was you..." I began again, but he rudely interrupted me:

"Watch your words!" shouted the coachman, turning sharply toward me. "Do you even know who you just blocked the road for?!"

His voice was loud and haughty, and passersby standing nearby began to turn around. There was whispering in the crowd, and someone even gasped.

I frowned in confusion, feeling a slight irritation and hostility growing inside me.

My gaze involuntarily slid to the carriage. Yes, now I noticed — it really did look too luxurious for an ordinary citizen. The richly decorated body, the wheels polished to a shine — everything indicated that it clearly belonged to someone from the aristocracy.

I sighed heavily, feeling irritated by everything that was happening. To be honest, I had no desire to get involved in any conflict, especially with someone from the nobility. But at the same time, I wasn’t going to just stand there and put up with rudeness.

My sense of justice and inner resistance pushed me to fight back in some way.

My fingers clenched into a fist, and my eyes lingered on the coachman, who continued to look at me with obvious resentment, as if trying to read my reaction.

"I apologize," I said, trying to speak calmly. "But you should probably apologize to me too for almost knocking me down."

My words sounded even, but there was firmness in my tone. I saw the coachman’s face change instantly, reddening as if from a sudden rush of rage. The veins in his neck bulged, and his fingers, clenching the reins, turned white.

"You...!" he began, choking with indignation.

It seemed that if it weren’t for the presence of witnesses, he would have stopped holding back and said everything that was on his mind, without caring about propriety or consequences.

But before he could add another word, a muffled but distinctly masculine voice came from inside the carriage. Its tone was low, deep, and so calm that all the other noise seemed to die down for a moment.

"Lady, are you hurt?" he asked.

I froze.

The words spoken from inside the carriage sounded unexpectedly gentle—without arrogance or irritation. Only calm interest, perhaps even tinged with slight concern.

I blinked, not immediately realizing that he was addressing me. My heart skipped a beat, and a slight feeling of awkwardness mixed with surprise.

"I..." The words seemed to get stuck in my throat, and I had to take a short breath to find my voice. "No. Everything’s fine."

"That’s good," came the reply from inside the carriage. "I apologize for this incident. I’m really sorry that it happened."

The gentleness in his tone was so unexpected that I instinctively straightened up, not knowing how to react. An aristocrat apologizing to me—a random woman standing in the middle of the street? It sounded almost unbelievable.

The coachman seemed to think so too. His face lengthened, his eyes widened, and his eyebrows rose in obvious bewilderment, as if he couldn’t believe his own ears.

He opened his mouth to say something, but his voice trembled with confusion and discouragement, and the sound he made was more like a wheeze than confident speech.

"But yours...!" he began, but was interrupted by that same steady, confident baritone.

"Enough," said the passenger, this time a little more firmly than before. "If everything is fine and nothing has happened to this lady, there is no need to dwell on what happened.

There was no trace of irritation in his words, only calm reasonableness. He spoke as if he was accustomed to giving orders, and even a short phrase sounded like an indisputable command.

The servant clearly wanted to say something else, to challenge his master’s words, but in the end he did not dare to do so. I saw his shoulders tense before he quietly resigned himself to the inevitable.

"Yes, sir," he said with obvious reluctance, almost gritting his teeth, as if each phrase came with difficulty, but he obeyed nonetheless.

And in that pause, I heard that calm, even voice from the salon again:

"Once again, I apologize for what happened. I hope you have a good day."

I raised my eyebrow slightly and then replied, still slightly bewildered:

"Yes... You too."

After these words, the carriage door swayed slightly, and I heard him give a short order to the coachman:

"Let’s go."

The carriage started moving, and I barely noticed how the curtain covering the cabin window swayed slightly in the gust of wind. For a moment, a golden strand of hair flashed before my eyes, like a sunbeam, flashing for just a second before disappearing behind the fabric of the curtain.

I blinked, as if trying to understand what I had just seen. But then the carriage quickly drove away.

I stood in the middle of the road, feeling the light wind ruffle my hair, and tried to collect my thoughts. But it wasn’t because I was so overwhelmed by what had happened.

It was because... in that fleeting image, in that brief moment, there was a strange, inexplicable familiarity that seemed to hook into something deep inside me.

I stood motionless for a few more seconds, watching the carriage recede, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that this man’s voice... seemed vaguely familiar to me for some reason.

But why? Where could I have heard it before...?

A flash of memory seemed to rush through my head — a quick, barely perceptible glimmer of a familiar intonation or an old, long-forgotten scene — and then it vanished, leaving only a strange feeling of uneasy foreboding, a slight shiver down my spine, and a quiet, almost inaudible tension in my chest.

In the end, I just frowned, clenching my hands into fists and feeling my fingers tense involuntarily. For a moment, it seemed to me that the rest of the world around me had simply ceased to exist.