The Beauty of Violence
The King of Cartadia had three children.
The First Prince, the Second Princess, and the Third Prince.
The First Prince took after the king; the Second Princess took after the queen. The Third Prince was harder to place — he resembled neither parent in any obvious way. Different as they were, none of them was wanting in looks. All three were strikingly handsome.
In temperament, though, the Second Princess stood apart. She loved the freewheeling life of a hunter.
She herself was bound hand and foot to the kingdom. Hunters, by contrast, were free — always free.
Even if a hunter's life meant walking a tightrope over death, wasn't that still better than surviving inside the gilded cage of royalty, stripped of every choice?
That was how Adelaide Giovane, the Second Princess, saw it.
Her elder and younger brothers could not understand her at all.
Hunters were dangerous people. They moved for coin and contracts, armed to the teeth yet belonging to no kingdom.
There was even a saying: a hunter is nothing more than a butcher who slaughters monsters.
Yes, they pioneered and protected the kingdom's frontier regions — but the royal army could do that just as well.
The king himself spent his days fretting over how to keep the hunters in check.
If it was common hunters who struck down the monsters threatening the people, then the king would look like nothing more than a powerless scarecrow.
He wanted to bring the Hunter Association itself under Cartadia's authority — to strip those dangerous freelancers of their autonomy and rule them outright.
What a foolish idea.
Adelaide found her family faintly ridiculous.
A hunter's worth lay precisely in that autonomy.
The potential they carried. The things they could do precisely because no nation held their leash.
In Adelaide's eyes, all of it was beautiful.
Yes.
The hunter standing before her was beauty itself.
Crack!
"Gyaaah!"
Who could have imagined it?
That someone would beat a man over the head with an empty beer mug like that.
Had the royal attendants always been this helpless?
They carried clubs, and still they could not overcome a woman armed with nothing but a beer stein.
The fight spilled in every direction. Civilians nearly got caught in the crossfire, but a quick-thinking waiter had already herded the other patrons outside, so the chaos stayed contained.
Alice used everything that came to hand — so thoroughly that one might have wondered whether she had forgotten this was someone else's business. Adelaide fully intended to cover every last scrap of damage to the tavern, but even knowing that, Alice's movements never once hesitated.
She hurled chairs to drive back the men closing in from behind.
When the last chair left her hands, the space around them became a dueling ring. Overturned tables and chairs ringed them in an empty circle. Had she been aiming for this from the start?
The lead attendant swung his staff.
Alice lifted a table like a shield and deflected the blow aside.
Clang.
The staff glanced off the table at an angle. In the same motion she turned his force against him, batting the staff cleanly to the side.
Just Guard.
"Wha—"
The attendant staggered sideways.
Alice's eyes flashed.
An opening wide enough to drive a cart through.
She pivoted and drove a merciless kick straight into his exposed chest.
Thud. The blow landed dead-center on his solar plexus.
"Guh—!"
He crumpled backward, limp.
To the attendant testing her flank, she flung a fork.
It flew true, striking the fingers wrapped around his club.
"Aaagh—!"
The fork punched into his hand; the staff clattered to the floor. Before he could recover, another kick followed.
It was the first time anyone present had seen a single kick launch a grown man into the air. Her leg snapped upward, caught him clean under the jaw, and he dropped like a puppet with cut strings.
"Ohh…"
Adelaide found beauty in the raw violence unfolding before her eyes.
This was what she had wanted to see.
Not the dull, bloodless etiquette of knightly combat — a beast's fight, unbound by form or code.
The men Alice was thrashing were not assassins come to seize Adelaide. They were her own excellent attendants and knights, acting on her orders alone.
The whole affair had been arranged between Adelaide and the knights who served her.
Lure the hunter into a tavern. Ambush her. If the knights won, Adelaide would swear off this hunter nonsense for good.
They had carefully selected their strongest fighters, and every one of them had assumed the hunter would fold under their hands without a struggle.
Not one of them had managed it.
They floundered against a single beer mug, milling about in confusion.
The tavern had erupted into chaos as a result, but the owner had been briefed in advance. Everything had been planned — and still, Adelaide had never imagined the results would be this spectacular.
Were other hunters like this?
No. Adelaide could shake her head at that question without a second thought.
A hunter who had stared death in the face against monsters time and again would never flinch before mere humans.
Being outnumbered meant nothing to them.
They had always fought from behind, always clawed their way through adversity.
Alice clenched the beer mug. The handle screamed under her grip.
An unyielding hold that would not release a weapon even under a monster's assault.
The sheer presence rolling off her was closer to a monster than anything human.
"…Come on, then."
The last two bristled at the taunt, rolling their shoulders as they advanced.
"…We won't go easy just because you're a woman."
"You don't need to."
Alice planted her feet, beer mug in one hand and a half-wrecked round table in the other.
"There's no way I'm losing."
"…I'll take her."
The larger of the two stepped forward.
Royal Knight Evan. He slapped his staff against his palm and looked down at Alice with open disdain.
Why does a woman like this have the princess's favor?
In Evan's estimation, he could handle her easily enough. Hunters were butchers at best. Slaughtering monsters and fighting people were entirely different domains.
This was not the same as killing some mindless beast. Facing a human opponent — that was a royal knight's specialty.
Here I go.
Evan thrust his staff forward and charged.
And then—
"…Huh?"
He was on the floor.
Evan could not make sense of his own situation, face-down on the boards.
What just happened?
Alice had used the table as a shield and the beer mug as a weapon. There was no classical form to her stance, and yet something systematic flickered through every motion.
Evan pieced the memory together.
His staff had struck the table and rebounded as if hexed — and then the beer mug had cracked him across the jaw.
He must have blacked out for a moment.
Impossible.
Evan pushed himself up, leaning on his staff. His head still swam.
"…Tough bastard."
Alice was genuinely surprised he had weathered a swing she had meant to put him down for good.
She glanced over her shoulder.
Adelaide watched her with eyes bright with excitement. Beside her, Pina's face was tight with worry.
Alice was done being the princess's entertainment. Time to finish this.
She exhaled. Then she set the beer mug down.
The handle, already shattered, gave way completely. The mug hit the floor and burst into pieces.
"If you go down, stay down."
Alice hurled the table straight at them.
To cut to the result: it was a complete walkover.
I hadn't gone all out, but it looked like the other side had been pulling their punches too.
In other words, these people probably hadn't shown their real strength either.
Royal attendants ought to be knights at minimum — there's no way this was the best they could do!
Just carrying clubs instead of swords was already a massive handicap, and on top of that they'd been going easy on me…
It was a slightly unsatisfying fight.
Unsatisfying because the battle ended before I even got warmed up. They went down too easily, if anything.
The attendants probably hadn't wanted any part of this either. They took their hits and dropped with the air of men just going through the motions. All of them looked thoroughly exhausted from playing along with the princess's schemes.
"Magnificent! Simply magnificent!"
What I got for fighting so hard was a round of applause from the princess.
Adelaide clapped with a look of pure satisfaction, then pushed back her hood. Her black hair with its gold streaks spilled free and shimmered.
"I've never in my life witnessed a fight so utterly without rules or restraint. I knew it — my eye for people is flawless. Of course you're my client. Just as I expected, you protected my life."
Was that supposed to be a compliment?
I frowned at the princess's baffling praise.
"I'd stake everything I have on you. Come, come — let's be off. I'll treat you to a proper meal."
"…And the cleanup?"
"Those fellows on the floor will handle it. That was the arrangement. You already figured it out, didn't you? That this was all my little prank."
"What? Th-this was a prank?!"
Pina hadn't known.
She stared at the princess with her eyes gone round as saucers.
Adelaide blinked her crimson eyes at Pina for a long moment, then laughed belatedly.
"…Yes, didn't I tell you? In the capital, the moment you let your guard down, someone hits you from behind—"
"I-I really thought something terrible was happening… I was so worried…"
And the person who said that was the one proving it right.
"…Th-then the people targeting Your Highness aren't actually them — there's someone else?"
"…Uh. Uh-huh… That's right?"
Adelaide looked uncharacteristically flustered.
"As I thought, the life of a kingdom's princess is truly hard…"
"……Yes. Thank you for understanding someone like me. Well then, shall we go? Before some other assassin comes looking for me."
"Yes, ma'am."
Your Highness, our Pina isn't a bad kid.
Adelaide was the bad one for pulling a stunt like this. Pina wasn't stupid — she was just pure-hearted.
Still, watching someone protect that innocence was a pretty nice sight.
We left the shop.
Outside the thoroughly wrecked tavern, a crowd had gathered — and the soldiers among them made it clear someone had filed a report.
The soldiers leveled their spears at us.
"Eek, what do we do?!"
Pina flailed in panic.
It's fine. We've got a princess with us, so—
"What are you waiting for? Hands up."
The princess had already slapped both hands over her head and was looking back at us.
Oh…
I had nothing to say to that.
And so we were taken into custody by the capital guard.