Ciaccona's idea was simple.
She would use her beauty as bait to lure Noah in, exposing his true scumbag nature.
Then, she would present the corresponding evidence to Carlotta, allowing Carlotta to see this man's true colors clearly.
Facing a beauty who proactively threw herself at him, as long as Noah was a normal man, he absolutely would not refuse.
Even if Noah cared about appearances and might pretend to refuse on the surface, he would definitely secretly find her afterward and get her contact information.
Having calculated everything, Ciaccona finally trotted up to Noah. She looked up and gave him a charming smile:
"Mr. Laureate, I've admired you for a long time. Can we be friends? The kind of friends for a day, you know~"
The moment the words fell, Cartethyia was shocked, Phoebe was shocked, and Noah was shocked.
Was this something a normal person could say?
"Ciaccona, I didn't expect you to be this kind of person."
"You... You know me?"
Ciaccona was even more shocked.
"Of course." Noah listed them one by one: "Ciaccona, the surviving orphan of the Toccata family, a bard, a poet wanted by the Order of the Deep, Carlotta's childhood best friend who grew up with her, codename Topaz."
Listening to Noah slowly exposing all her details, Ciaccona recalled what she had just said to him. Her face grew redder and redder, becoming increasingly embarrassed.
Did this guy open her profile? How did he know everything?
And what had she just said to Noah?
Admired him for a long time? Be friends? The kind of friends for a day? She was done for... This was so socially mortifying.
"No, I'm not..."
Ciaccona tightly covered her burning face, dying of shame and anger. She wished she could turn back time. Shaking her head in panic, she turned to run away:
"Noah, you've got the wrong person."
"Stop right there!"
At Noah's heavy shout, Ciaccona froze in her steps.
"Come back!"
The antlered girl hesitated for a moment, then slowly walked back in front of Noah. Feeling guilty, she lowered her head and pleaded softly:
"About what just happened... Could you please not tell Carlotta..."
If it were the usual idle Noah, he would have seized Ciaccona's weakness at this moment and said: You wouldn't want your good sister to know about what just happened, right?
But the current him clearly had no interest in teasing Ciaccona.
"I can pretend what just happened never occurred. However, you have to help me with one thing. First, take a look at this."
As he spoke, a pile of scriptures given by Fenrico was stuffed into the antlered girl's hands.
Although Ciaccona's arrival was very sudden, Noah had precisely found a suitable candidate for the speech because of it.
The event quest "Your Eternal Long Summer Shall Never Fade" had content actually similar to Companion Stories, and the rewards were also the same as Companion Stories.
In the original plot, through investigating the Golden Song, the Rover met Ciaccona and gradually learned about the relationship between the Golden Song and Ciaccona.
The Toccata family, once one of Ragunna's noble families, discovered through a stone tablet that the Sentinel was originally a noble steed and not a horse-headed fish-bodied being.
This truth shocked the Toccata family. In order to spread the truth to the deceived world, they composed songs of the people, with the Golden Song being their representative work.
Because of this, the Toccata family was sent by the Order of the Deep onto a pilgrimage ship and perished in flames. From then on, only Ciaccona remained from the once-great Toccata family.
It is worth mentioning that the person who helped the Toccata family discover the stone tablet was none other than Cristoforo from the Fractsidus.
Cartethyia tugged at the corner of Noah's clothes from behind and asked quietly:
"Who is she? Do you know her?"
"Her name is Ciaccona, your signature support."
"Signature support?"
The complex term left Cartethyia confused. She turned to look at Phoebe beside her:
"What is a signature support?"
"I don't know. He said before that I was Zani's signature support too." Phoebe shook her head, equally confused.
Opening the panel, Noah clicked into Ciaccona's banner.
Should he pull for Ciaccona as Cartethyia's signature support?
0+1 Cartethyia plus 0+0 Ciaccona is greater than 1+1 Cartethyia. 3+1 Cartethyia plus 0+0 Ciaccona is greater than 6+1 Cartethyia.
Therefore— pull! At the very least, he needed to get the character. As for the signature weapon, forget it. He didn't lack those negligible 10 points of Aero Resistance reduction.
Ten-pull summoning!
After 40 pulls, he successfully got Ciaccona at 0 dupes early.
"Where did you... get these things?"
Ciaccona tightly gripped the Golden Song in her hands, throwing everything from before to the back of her mind.
She had originally wanted to expose Noah's "true nature" for her sister, but she never expected that Noah would actually have these Golden Songs and the Order's original scriptures.
With these items, the truth hidden by the Order could be completely revealed to all the citizens.
Her lifelong dream was to fully expose the truth concealed by the Order and clear the names of her family members who had been sent to the pilgrimage ships with false charges for revealing the truth.
At this moment, Ciaccona knew that no matter what, she had to obtain these scriptures.
She raised her head, her gaze filled with desperate determination.
"Although I don't know how you obtained these, they... are very important to me."
The antlered girl gritted her teeth tightly:
"As long as you give them to me, no matter what conditions you propose, I can agree to all of them..."
"Great."
On the other side, Noah smiled and handed the speech script and megaphone in his hands to Ciaccona:
"My condition is that you loudly read out the script I wrote."
Just... that simple?
Ciaccona felt relieved. As a bard, performing or singing on the streets was her daily routine. She wouldn't feel any social embarrassment because of it at all.
Taking the script, she scanned its contents. Her gaze suddenly focused. She pressed the manuscript tightly, looked around left and right, then looked up and hissed:
"Are you crazy? You actually want to give a speech in this kind of place about the truth the Order has always hidden?"
"Is there any problem?"
"There's a huge problem! The true form of the Sentinel is the Order's biggest secret. Those hypocritical existences who appear dignified on the surface will not allow anyone to infringe on their interests."
The more she spoke, the more agitated she became. Her breathing quickened, but she suddenly stopped.
Following her gaze, Noah saw Phoebe beside him guiltily lowering her head. Turning again, Cartethyia on the other side also didn't look too happy.
"Little Cart, I don't have much Shell Credit left. Could you take Phoebe to the Montelli bank to withdraw some money for me?"
Using an excuse to send Cartethyia and Phoebe away, Noah spoke unhurriedly:
"There are no people from the Order now. You may continue."
Ciaccona nodded:
"If you publicly promote this matter, you will undoubtedly be pulling the reverse scale of the Order."
"The Order will send you, your friends, and everyone you might know onto the pilgrimage ships under the charge of blasphemy, leaving you to wait for death on those ships."
"The Order is a colossal giant. It is not an existence we can casually provoke. Even if you are the Laureate, it's the same. You must think thrice before acting on this."
Pfft. Noah couldn't hold back his laughter.
"After hearing you say that, I'm actually getting a bit impatient."
He took back the speech script from Ciaccona's hands. Under her shocked gaze, he turned on the megaphone in his hand and raised the volume to the maximum.
The enormous voice spread throughout the entire Freedom Square via the megaphone.
"Everyone, eyes on me!"
The entire Freedom Square naturally turned their gazes toward him. Noah raised the speech script and read out the second sentence:
"I have something to announce!"
Just as he was about to recite the third sentence, a voice even louder than Noah's megaphone immediately drowned him out.
"Today, what I want to talk about is precisely the story of those who blasphemed against the divine."
Ciaccona held a microphone, standing in front of Noah. Her gaze was as firm as if she were joining the Party:
"They were once poets who sang for the gods and the Order. Their melodies therefore became known to every household, until they discovered a truth—"
Noah glanced at his own megaphone, then at the microphone in Ciaccona's hand, and stood frozen in place.
At this moment, the difference between having a signature weapon or not was displayed to the fullest.
His voice was not as loud as Ciaccona's.
...