The Butterfly Effect
The Butterfly Effect
"Haha, right. This must be the first time you've seen me, isn't it?"
Rupert wore a bewildered expression at the Crown Prince's inexplicable greeting.
The Crown Prince paid no mind to Rupert's reaction and continued to act warmly familiar, and everyone around them looked just as baffled.
"I, at least, know how hard a fight you've been waging alone."
"Your Highness...."
Rupert's mind was spinning faster than it ever had before.
If the Imperial Princess had come, it would have been surprising but understandable. The obsession she had shown toward his work was something he had only glimpsed briefly, but it had definitely been at a slightly dangerous level.
But with the Crown Prince, they had only exchanged letters.
And those letters had been rather uncomfortable ones to receive and send. If he had come to cause trouble, that would be one thing, but Rupert could not understand why he was reacting so warmly.
'Looking back, that was insane.'
Rupert recalled the days when he had used the Imperial Princess as a shield against the Crown Prince's letters telling him to restrain himself.
Looking back, his past response had been so outrageous that he could barely believe that reckless bastard had been himself.
"Anyway, the mansion is quite noisy. Is something going on?"
"I'm afraid another guest arrived at the mansion before you."
"Oh? Then it seems I've come at an awkward time. Who is the guest? If they're a noble, I might know them."
"Well... the Saintess of the Goddess Church is visiting."
"The Saintess? Huh, to think she would be here. What in the world is going o...!"
The Crown Prince reacted with shock upon hearing the identity of the guest who had arrived first.
That was only natural, since within the Empire there were exactly two people whom the imperial family could not treat carelessly.
Those two were the Pope and the Saintess of the Goddess Church.
Even the Emperor, the Crown Prince's father, treated those two with caution, so there was no need to say more.
In the Saintess's case especially, she was a difficult person to meet, and even Alex, the Crown Prince, had only seen her a few times.
And as the Crown Prince mulled over why such a Saintess would visit this rural Somerset Count's House, a sudden ominous feeling came over him.
"Where is the Saintess right now?"
"...The Saintess is currently in the family workshop."
"Lead the way!"
At the Crown Prince's stern command, Rupert began guiding him reluctantly, like someone forced to do a task he did not want to do.
"Hm...."
Along the way, the Crown Prince made eye contact with Count Bradley.
The Count naturally bowed his head in courtesy. Then he heard the Crown Prince click his tongue in displeasure.
The Count inwardly wondered what he had done wrong, but he could not even begin to guess.
This was his first time meeting the Crown Prince, so how could he have committed any discourtesy?
"The workshop is quite large."
"It is. It was small at first, but it grew as we kept expanding it."
"I see. When I saw it last time, it seemed smaller than this."
"Last time?"
"I stopped by once before. I left a letter too, didn't I?"
At the Crown Prince's words that he had visited the mansion before, a memory Rupert had shoved aside resurfaced.
An anonymous letter he had tried to ignore, thinking some lunatic was playing a prank, but an inexplicable ominous feeling had warned him to keep it safe.
Only now did the contents he had not understood begin fitting together like puzzle pieces.
The Crown Prince had personally come after receiving the irreverent letter Rupert had sent.
'But why did nothing happen?'
The Crown Prince, who bore the nickname of a mad dog, had come in person, yet he had not caused any trouble and had instead just left a letter and gone back.
It was not easy to understand.
"Right! Mister said Ada was chubby!"
"Haha, Ada, I was sorry about that. To say such a thing to such a pretty young lady."
Watching the Crown Prince and Ada, who seemed incomprehensibly close, a hypothesis occurred to Rupert.
'This bastard, don't tell me his tastes...?'
He erased from his mind the thought that would have made the Crown Prince not merely offended but ready to cut off his head, and reasoned in a more realistic direction.
"When you visited last time, did you perhaps spend time with Ada?"
"Ah, yes. It was a most enjoyable time."
"Right! Mister, play with me again!"
Rupert, who had almost unconsciously grown accustomed to Ada's rude form of address, pulled himself together again.
"Ada. You mustn't use such a rude title for His Highness. You should call him Your Highness the Crown Prince."
"It's fine. Ada, I grant you the right to address me freely."
Rupert's mind grew complicated as he watched the Crown Prince pat Ada's head with an exceedingly benevolent expression.
The Crown Prince from the original work that he knew should have been disinherited by now, after his outrageous behavior had gone too far and earned the Emperor's disfavor.
Of course, it was not a complete deposition, but rather the Emperor's bombshell announcement that he would select a new successor.
It was an important event signaling the start of the original work's main story, the rise of the Third Prince to the throne, so I had been keeping track of rumors about when it would happen.
But no news of the Crown Prince's disinheritance had come, and that had left me uneasy.
'Am I the problem?'
A phenomenon commonly called the butterfly effect.
I had wondered whether my arrival as Rupert and the resulting butterfly effects had already changed much of the original story.
To say I had stayed quiet would have made the people around me look at me like I was insane.
But what exactly had changed so that the Crown Prince had not been disinherited?
The deliberation could not go on for long.
"Did something happen in the workshop, Sir Rupert?"
"Pardon?"
"I couldn't say it earlier because there were too many eyes watching. But I already noticed that something happened in the workshop."
"How... how does Your Highness the Crown Prince know that?"
"The fact that the Saintess remains in the workshop even though she knows I have arrived means something must have happened."
Rupert realized his mistake.
The Crown Prince's image as a mad dog was so firmly entrenched that he had underestimated him.
The man was more perceptive than expected.
"I assume the people in the workshop have collapsed."
"...That's correct."
"I was also informed that you collapsed as well."
"I merely collapsed from fatigue...."
Shh.
The Crown Prince nodded as if he knew everything and extended his index finger to stop him.
"Did the Saintess also notice this massive conspiracy?"
What conspiracy?
The Crown Prince opened the workshop door and entered before anyone could stop him.
"Ugh... Mother...."
"No!! If you eat that...."
"It's an assassination... someone attacked us...."
The workshop staff were gathered in one place, lying down. Still unconscious, they were muttering as if having nightmares.
"Hello, Your Highness the Crown Prince. Forgive my discourtesy in not coming out to greet you, as the situation is urgent."
"Greetings can wait, Saintess. I already know the situation is urgent."
"Pardon?"
"I thought we hadn't let those dark wizards get away, but to think they've already done harm!"
"Search this entire area thoroughly! The remnants we missed must still be nearby."
At the Crown Prince's stern order, the knights escorting him scattered into the surroundings in an instant.
"Saintess! Can you save these people?"
"Yes, treatment is possible... it's simply food poisoning...."
"That's a relief! And who is that person over there?"
The Crown Prince, without even listening to the end of the Saintess's words, urgently surveyed the situation.
His eyes landed on a woman huddled quietly in the corner.
A beautiful woman with blue hair.
But her expression was downcast, like someone who had committed a crime, and she was watching for people's reactions.
"That is Lady Amelia of the Bluewell Ducal House."
"So the ducal house also knew of this matter and sent someone? But why did she come alone?"
"Well, that is...."
The Crown Prince, enraged as he looked at the people lying down, continued saying incomprehensible things.
'What do dark wizards have to do with this food poisoning incident?'
The artisans had lost consciousness after eating food made by Amelia.
And the Crown Prince had visited the family at exactly the same time.
Just as things had become so tangled that he did not know what to do, the Saintess had said she would go to the workshop and treat the collapsed people, and had told Rupert to go greet the Crown Prince.
Thanks to that, they had avoided the discourtesy of making the Crown Prince wait. But Rupert had no idea how to explain this situation to the Crown Prince, who had now visited the workshop.
Lady Amelia had learned that he had collapsed and had tried to make him a meal as a get-well visit.
And that meal had turned out to be not a meal but an assassination?
Amelia looked at the collapsed artisans, startled and at a loss for what to do.
For a young lady of a noble house, this was an incident that was not merely shameful but humiliating.
'I don't want to see her like that.'
She, the original work's female lead, was actually a character I had liked. In a novel that was a typical romance fantasy, Amelia had agonized between her family and love.
There was one line of hers that I still remembered.
'Even if the world ends tomorrow, we loved today.'
It was a line Amelia had said to the Third Prince in a crisis, and in some ways it was a predictable one.
But the scene where she, who had always dreamed of romantic love while hiding her feelings because of her family's burdens, uttered those words was the moment the character Amelia was completed for me.
"Your Highness the Crown Prince. Lady Amelia has nothing to do with this incident. She merely visited to repay me for a book and happened to witness the event."
I did not know what would come later.
For now, I wanted to get her out of this place.
"Of course Lady Amelia is uninvolved. This is clearly the work of those wicked dark wizard remnants."
"Your Highness... do you perhaps know something about this incident?"
"Know something? Rupert, it was thanks to you that we were able to thwart their scheme in advance."
"Though I did lose an arm in the process."
The Crown Prince held up the empty side where his arm had been as if proudly showing it off.
Rupert felt the pieces of the strange feeling that had been building since earlier click into place at the Crown Prince's words.
"As soon as I arrived here, I caught a bastard who was about to do something terrible to your younger sister Ada and a dog. I never imagined the mansion would also be attacked."
Rupert memorized every word the Crown Prince excitedly recounted, even though no one had asked.
There were three key points.
Dark wizards, Ada and Rash, and <Iron-Blooded Alchemist>.
Rupert could see a way to overcome this situation.