"Young lady Pride, I'm terribly sorry for being unable to help you with the request you made during our last meeting."

The royal prince bowed his head and apologized.

​​

After some time together in the room, the trio ended up talking about were various subjects while they waited for the queen to show up.

Their seating arrangement was quite amusing to look at from the side.

The red-haired Cranberry was sitting on the best seat that was undoubtedly meant for the queen to take, then there was a the blue-skinned Zombie on her right side sitting on one of the other chairs, and right next to him was the blond Roan, timidly cowering under the pressure of the red and black right hand of the blue undead over his shoulders.

"Haa... There's nothing to apologize for - if my guess is correct, once you went straight for your concealed bodyguard, they recognized that you were under a charm skill and instantly got you away from us just so the medics could deal with it."

Cranberry breathed out and waved her hand dismissively.

"Yes, that is exactly what happened..."

Roan sighed and admitted while nodding his head with a pitiful expression.

"The skill effects weren't that much of a problem...!"

He waved his hands around while hurriedly explaining.

"What was worse is that even after I was back to normal, no one wanted to believe me about what I was telling them about the two of you!"

The blond prince furrowed his brows and clenched his fists.

"Could you imagine that?! Some of the medics went as far as to claim that your charm skill was so strong that it basically fired my brain!"

Now it sounded as if Roan was sulking - mainly because that was exactly what was happening - and he looked at both Zombie and Cranberry looking for words of sympathy.

"Truth to be told, I myself had also assumed that was what had happened."

The red-haired girl shrugged her shoulders and confessed lightheartedly.

"...!"

"...?"

Zombie felt Roan flinch so he tilted his head and looked at the dispirited prince at his side.

"The medics thought that was the case because I kept talking that we definitely get you two to join the Greed family so that you the Fruit Salad would enter the most prosperous era - but I guess it was too much for them to believe."

Roan sighed, losing a lot of the excitement that he still had just a second ago.

"And not even mother believed me - not until she received a report about what happened to the Envy family."

The prince continued, visibly sulking more and more.

"Only then did she ordered the royal investigators to launch an investigation and look into you, young lady Pride, and you Zombie - only when the reports were compiled was I released from under the house arrest. It was really humiliating to be treated like a love-struck idiot for only saying the truth."

He shook his head and sighed as he finished talking.

"Aww. Poor weakling prince, it must have been so hard - living in luxury for all that time! Did the servants snickered at you behind your back as they were delivering you gourmet food?"

Zombie nodded with understanding and started patting Roan's shoulder with an understanding expression...

"...pffft...!"

Yet it was Cranberry who broke first and snorted before hurriedly covering her mouth with one hand and looking away.

"...Zombie... I was under the impression that the rotten brain title dulls the owner's sense of humor as well as the ability to recognize sarcasm and irony..."

Roan closed his mouth and glanced at the blue undead, making a sour face.

"Oh, yeah. It's basically impossible to know when others are joking and whatnot, but that doesn't mean that I lost the ability to mock others."

Zombie shrugged his shoulders and declared.

"You were mocking me?!"

Roan gasped.

"You thought I wasn't?!"

Zombie gasped back.

"Ha ha! Haa... alright. Enough of that."

Cranberry let out one genuine burst of laughter and then she sighed and clapped her hands to calm down the prince and the corpse puppet.

The two of them instantly stopped bickering and turned to the red-haired girl.

"Roan, how much longer do you think that your mother will make us wait. Is her meeting really that important? I mean... haa... Zombie wasn't lying when he said that we hunted the titan-class monsters to extinction. If your mother is discussing some military alliance but makes two weapons of mass destruction just sit by and get annoyed, ha, let's just say that she doesn't seem as greedy as I expected her to be."

The red-haired villainess scoffed and leaned back on the armchair, looking down at the blond price taken aback by her summary.

"No! Young lady Pride, my mother would never let...!"

"Now that you've said that. The life signature of the avatar of sin is sitting in the nearby room together with another living for a while now. That other living is using some skill, but since it's not an offensive one I didn't bother to mention it before."

Roan flinched and started hurriedly explaining but got talked over by the shrugging Zombie calmly reporting to Cranberry as his eyes were glowing redishly.

"Ha. So she's spying on us...?"

Cranberry raised her brow and scoffed.

"No... I guess she's just letting her son catch up with his fiancée after almost four months of separation and is simply checking up when will be the best time to make an entrance to not interrupt something..."

Suddenly she changed her mind and shrugged her shoulders - or rather that's what it would sound like if not for the copious amount of open mockery in her voice.

"The greed of Greeds knows no bounds. It's honestly quite reassuring that this is something that we can always count on."

The red-haired girl nodded before frowning.

"You, the person using the detection skill to spy on us. Tell her that she made us wait long enough - if she won't arrive in the next minute, I'm going to raze this whole castle to the ground - and she can ask her transportation man whether I'm capable of that or not."

She said coldly, glaring at the wall in the direction that Zombie was facing towards.

"!!!"

"It's okay, the life signature of the avatar got up and began approaching us the moment I spoke about them listening in on us.

Roan stiffened at the declaration, but Zombie only waved his hand dismissively towards the red-haired villainess.

"Good. That proves that she isn't stupid."

Cranberry nodded and smirked.