Noir Will Read a Novel!
Noir had always wondered what it meant to be a noble.
“Noir, you must become a noble worthy of the Leonhart name.”
Those were the words her father always said to her.
What even was a noble?
What did it mean to act like one?
She wanted to read fairy tales, not this dull mathematics textbook.
She wanted candy melting on her tongue, not the grit of pebbles kicked up while rolling around the training ground.
She wanted to draw pictures in her notebook, not stare at magic circles that made her head spin just looking at them.
The simplest desires of a child.
But desires unworthy of a noble.
Whenever Noir showed any side of herself that failed to measure up, her father brought the cane down across her thigh.
Crack.
One strike, and her skin split open.
She hated nobles.
Nobility only ever hurt her.
Crack.
Two strikes, and the wound burst open.
The eyes of the father who forced nobility upon her only ever closed around her throat.
Crack.
Three strikes, and something in her heart was scraped away.
And yet, sometimes, being a noble felt good.
Whenever she managed to look the part, her father would hold her, and in those arms she felt happy.
If she only listened to him, the way he looked at her became her hope.
Ah. So that was it.
I simply have to become a noble…
Crack.
With the fourth strike, her heart broke.
Noble.
What even was a noble?
Something that forbade fairy tales.
Something that forbade candy.
Something that forbade drawing.
Something she never wanted to become.
And something she had no choice but to become.
The day her heart broke, Noir stopped questioning what nobility meant.
She became a horse that simply ran where her father ordered, galloping toward nobility.
And her father would not stop the cane until that horse collapsed from exhaustion.
Her father died.
Noir could not believe it. She refused to believe the words that said he was gone, as if denial alone could rewrite reality.
Like a runaway horse that had lost its coachman and would no longer listen to anyone, she covered her ears and shut out every voice around her.
It can’t be.
It can’t be.
It can’t be…
What had she been running toward all this time?
What was nobility, that it left her with nothing but this hollow emptiness?
“F… Father… Aaaah…!”
Only when she saw his body carried into the manor did reality finally reach her.
Like a horse that had lost its driver and driven itself straight into the ground, Noir sank where she stood.
A horse that has fallen once cannot rise to walk again. And Noir, whose heart had already been broken, could no longer believe in the word noble.
I have to become a noble.
Do I still have to become a noble?
I have to follow Father’s will.
But Father isn’t here anymore.
What am I…?
What am I supposed to do?
Father, please tell me.
Please tell me where I’m supposed to go.
Please…
A month had passed since Noir’s father died.
She drifted.
Having lost the landmark called nobility, she found herself stranded in an open plain with no path left.
There was no one left to force a noble’s bearing upon her.
But there was also no one left to show her the way.
She no longer even knew what she wanted. She simply repeated the same daily routine, day after day.
It was pure chance.
The door to the maids’ break room had been left open, and as Noir passed down the corridor, a brilliantly colored book caught her eye.
Unlike the stiff covers of the textbooks she had always been made to read, this one was extravagantly beautiful.
Like a butterfly drawn to a flower in full bloom, her feet were pulled toward that vivid cover.
With trembling hands, she checked the title of the book lying on the table.
The Swordsmanship House’s Magical Genius Turns Back Time
Volume 1
A swordsmanship house?
A story about a martial family?
But a magical genius?
And someone who can turn back time?
She was curious.
Desperately, almost painfully curious.
After making sure no one was nearby, Noir slipped the book into her clothes and fled to her room.
The Noir who had always been forced to play the noble would never have done such a thing.
But the Noir who had begun to doubt nobility—she could.
“Th-This is…!”
The book Noir had brought back was nothing more than a popular novel sold in the marketplace.
A cheap imitation of a hit series, stuffed full of lurid thrills for the sake of a brief trend.
That was all it was.
If her father had ever laid eyes on it, he would have called it trash and thrown it straight into the fireplace.
But to Noir, who had never once in her life touched a story like this, the novel was nothing short of a revolution.
The plot was simple enough.
Born the youngest son of the great swordsmanship house Paradorn, Aiz was shunned within his own family for his lack of talent with a blade. After a lifetime of loneliness, he discovered that he possessed a gift for magic instead—and turned back time to change everything.
Noir was perfectly aware that the whole thing was absurd.
The references to great houses were pure nonsense, and magic that rewound time didn’t even exist.
“I… have I been sent back to the past!?”
“Yeah. I know. This is how Paradorn does things. So I’ll change Paradorn myself.”
“Ha… haha… Yes… Now I am the head of Paradorn…!”
And yet—
And yet it was so much fun.
This was a book?
Then what on earth had she been reading until now…?
In the end, Noir stayed up the entire night and finished the book from cover to cover.
Dark circles hung heavy under her eyes. Blood trickled from her nose. But it had been a thoroughly satisfying night.
The next morning, Lucius and the rest of the household took one look at her face and offered worried words—none of which reached her.
What she needed now was not comfort. What she needed were more entertainment novels from the marketplace.
The Blind Swordsman of the Romance Fantasy Obtained a Cheat Martial Art
Reincarnated as the Trash of a Novel, I’ll Do My Best to Survive
Let’s See How Well Those Bastards Live Without Me
I Became a Mage Obsessed Over by Nobles
It was fun.
It was fun.
It was so much fun…!
Too much… far too much fun…!
She couldn’t stop turning the pages!
So this was what a novel was…!
Ahh—she had been alive for this moment, for this exact second!
From that day on, Noir slipped out to the marketplace in secret, bought entertainment novels by the armful, and read straight through the night.
She quietly discarded the textbooks on her shelves that she judged useless, then swapped their contents for novels instead.
Noir went through at least five novels a day.
Whenever she found even a scrap of free time, she pulled another hidden volume from the bookcase and kept reading.
That she still somehow managed to complete her daily duties was already something close to a miracle.
“Hehe… hehehe…”
Really—really so much fun…!
One week before the Golden Festival—the great celebration of the major city of Preas—began.
“Ahh~ I am dying for a proper fight~”
“Please keep your voice down, Seven.”
Dante and I had arrived in Preas early to survey the state of the city.
“By the way, it’s been a while since I’ve seen your bare face.”
“Seven, you are the one who needs to cover your face when going about.”
We were only scouting Preas before the operation, so I hadn’t put on the mask. Wearing it would have drawn unnecessary attention, and since Dante already knew my face, there was no real reason to bother.
As for Dante, he had never worn a mask to begin with.
“Still. What a disappointment.”
“What is, exactly?”
“I came expecting something from the Golden Festival, but I can’t sense a single aura worth calling strong.”
An undefeated gladiator once crossed paths with a young boy by chance, and that gladiator swore himself as the boy’s knight. Together they overcame hardship after hardship until the boy became emperor of the empire, and in time he granted the rank of duke to the knight who had stood by him since childhood.
That was the founding of the Preas line.
And the Golden Festival was the celebration held to commemorate the meeting of gladiator and boy.
People from across the nation poured into the arena to compete—in martial arts, magic, painting, cooking, song, and every other discipline imaginable.
Because of that background, Preas had been used in Destiny as the stage for the PVP Arena, unlocked after clearing Stage 3-12.
It was called PVP, but in practice it was nothing more than a contest of who had better luck and who had spent more money, which made the whole thing thoroughly miserable.
“Of course. The Golden Festival is a tournament for young people just setting out on the path. Real masters don’t bother showing up.”
The Golden Festival ran for three full days.
The kind of powerhouses who could satisfy Dante were not the sort of people who had three free days to spare, and the festival itself carried the meaning of new encounters—just as the first emperor had once met his gladiator.
Naturally, the participants were green shoots looking to make a name for themselves. Those who already had skill and fame enough had no reason to enter.
In later years, an emperor and the head of House Leonhart would regret that fact and establish the Grand Arena—a tournament open only to true powerhouses—but that was still a story far in the future.
For the record, the Grand Arena was the quarterly PVP event in the actual game, a battlefield for the heaviest of whales.
And every single season, the claim that anyone outside the top one thousand in the Grand Arena—or “GA,” as it was known—should shut their mouth was the kind of bait that set the forums on fire.