The Play
The Play
After entrusting the workshop staff to the Saintess, Rupert escorted the Crown Prince to the drawing room.
He had struggled to calm the Crown Prince, who insisted this was no time for pleasantries and that he needed to pursue the remnants of the dark wizards, but it had not been wasted effort.
Though he still did not know why, Rupert could now see that the Crown Prince was convinced the incidents at House Somerset were the work of dark wizards.
And it appeared that even before arriving at the mansion, the Crown Prince had been carrying out some mission related to dark wizards.
'For the Crown Prince to lose his right arm... The only dark wizard organization on the continent capable of that would be the Abyss Cult.'
In the original work, the Abyss Cult had been one of the forces that attacked the academy where the Third Prince and Amelia were.
The continent's last dark wizard group and a secret society, they were the villains who drove the academy into crisis.
The Imperial Family's Youngest Son was romance fantasy by genre, but since its setting was an academy, the original—true to academy-story conventions—featured all sorts of evil organizations that attacked the school.
The Abyss Cult were the ones who appeared around the middle.
'Their leader's name was Bialom, wasn't it?'
He remembered him as a rather vicious one. A brutal dark wizard who treated even his own subordinates as expendable.
Moreover, his personal skill was outstanding enough to serve as the mid-part boss, and Rupert remembered the Third Prince having a hard time against him.
The Third Prince had defeated him after awakening following the sacrifice of another male supporting character from the academy, but as the first villain to cause people to die, he was by no means an easy opponent.
"Have you become entangled with the Abyss Cult, by any chance?"
When Rupert brought up the Abyss Cult, inferring from the Crown Prince's inexplicable wariness toward dark wizards and his injuries, the Crown Prince nodded with a stiff expression.
"Vicious bastards they were. To think they could control tunnel snakes. If not for Sir Yustaf and Sir Harun, it might have been a true disaster."
Why was Yustaf's name coming up again? And Harun? If it was Harun, Rupert knew him as the master of the Alchemy Guild—was he involved too?
No matter how Rupert tried to connect them, the Crown Prince, Yustaf, and Harun were an utterly bizarre combination.
"Thanks to Yustaf, who found a clue in the transmutation circle you drew in your manga, the investigation was able to begin."
The Crown Prince reminisced about the past as if he had become an adventurer who had just completed a great expedition.
But Rupert listened with full attention, busy piecing together the situation from every word.
He suddenly recalled Yustaf visiting the mansion and interrogating him about every detail of the transmutation circle that had appeared in his manga.
The Archwizard had stared at him with suspicious eyes, demanding to know where he had seen this transmutation circle to draw it.
'The plot has changed.'
Rupert could no longer deny it.
The Abyss Cult was not supposed to appear yet. And while it was true that they used tunnel snakes, he had never heard of the plan the Crown Prince was now excitedly describing—their scheme to draw a black magic circle in the imperial capital.
'Originally, they used tunnel snakes to burrow underground, bypass the academy's barrier, and launch their attack.'
To try to summon the Demon God using the residents of the imperial capital Chaldea as sacrifices—the scale was far too enormous.
Those guys were at best losers of the era who failed trying to take over a single school, like some bald villain from a novel.
Thump!
But that was not what mattered right now.
Listening to the Crown Prince, Rupert had pieced together the gist of what had happened.
And realizing that whether this became a crisis or an opportunity depended on what he did from here on, he immediately sprang into action.
Rupert rose from the drawing-room sofa where he had been sitting across from the Crown Prince and prostrated himself.
"Why the sudden formality again? Did I not say you may be at ease?"
The Crown Prince, flustered by Rupert's abrupt behavior, tried to stop him, but Rupert remained prostrate and unmoving.
"Your Highness... In truth, even as I drew my work, I never imagined there would be anyone who would recognize the truth I had hidden within it."
"That is only natural. Had it not been for Sir Yustaf, I would have taken it all for fiction."
"Of course, Sir Yustaf's wisdom in discerning it is astonishing, but I felt the greatest gratitude for Your Highness's discernment in believing that story."
"Sir Rupert...."
The Crown Prince seemed moved by Rupert's words and could not continue. Watching him, Rupert raised a hand as if wiping away tears of his own and lightly poked the corner of his eye with a finger.
Tears welled up naturally, and his eyes turned red and bloodshot.
With an expression anyone would read as deeply moved, Rupert tensed his throat and forced out a strained voice.
"Your suspicions are correct, Your Highness. My family was caught up in the schemes of those vile Abyss Cult bastards and driven into crisis, so please forgive us for having no choice but to reveal it in such a manner!"
The Abyss Cult, already in the afterlife, might cry out in protest if they heard this. But only the king of the underworld would be listening.
The living have to keep living, do they not?
They were guilty of plenty anyway, so Rupert figured one more charge piled on them would do no harm.
"Not at all. Rather, it was because you revealed it that catastrophe was averted. I am the one who initially misjudged you as an insolent and impertinent fellow."
At the Crown Prince's words, Rupert thought, Uh-oh.
But since he had already thought of a way to handle this too, he did not panic. He rose from his spot, went to the drawer in the corner of the drawing room, and brought back a letter.
"From the moment I received Your Highness's letter, I resolved to become wholly your loyal servant."
The letter Rupert had taken out was the one the Crown Prince had left anonymously during his previous visit.
"As expected! I believed that even without revealing my name, you would recognize it."
The Crown Prince was delighted to see the carefully preserved letter in Rupert's hand.
'Good thing I didn't actually fold it up and throw it away back then.'
Back when humans were still beasts. It is said that because what was needed for survival then differed from now, the body possessed organs that no longer exist.
For example, wisdom teeth—before the use of fire, primitive humans needed that part of the body to eat tough food, but now it has become useless and degenerated.
Many things changed to make humanity what it is today.
But there is a theory that the inexplicable fear people still feel when seeing snakes is encoded in our DNA—the knowledge that they carry venom.
Rupert gave thanks to the survival instinct engraved in his own nature for not letting him throw away the letter.
Of course, not all his questions had been answered.
'Pay no mind to the rumors circulating in society, and continue to press forward with your own actions. Others may not understand, but I can.'
The contents of the letter, which he had not understood when he first read it, were of course still incomprehensible now.
What rumors was the letter talking about, and what did it mean that others might not understand but he alone could?
Did he and the Crown Prince have anything in common? No matter how he thought about it, he couldn't think of a single thing.
Even their hair colors were blond and black. Their ages weren't even close, with the Crown Prince already in his mid-twenties.
Surely being men wasn't the commonality.
"A father who does not look after his children, and a mother who departed first... Growing up in such a household must be truly lonely."
"Pardon?"
"Hoo... Still, you are better off than I am. I am a worthless older brother who could not even look after his younger sibling."
At the Crown Prince's sudden "You don't have a mother, do you?" remark, Rupert did not know how to react.
In truth, after living day in and day out with Count Bradley and Ada, they now truly felt like family, but he had no memory at all of the Countess.
'Come to think of it, the birth mother of the Crown Prince and the Second Prince had died.'
Of the Emperor's four children, the first and second had a different mother from the third and fourth.
So later, when the succession struggle intensified, they split into factions and waged a fierce covert power struggle.
Realizing that the reason the Crown Prince felt a sense of closeness to him was probably the absence of a mother, Rupert was dumbfounded.
'What is this, some kind of Su—man and Ba—man situation?'
Heroes who achieve a dramatic reconciliation through a single line about their mothers and then go off to save the world together.
But Rupert did not dislike the Crown Prince, who felt a sense of closeness to him and excitedly recounted the investigation process and moments of crisis he had experienced.
'So this is who he was.'
Trapped in the vague image from the original work, Rupert had thought of the Crown Prince as a simple scoundrel, but what he saw now was an ordinary—no, genuinely admirable—person.
One who raged at the innocent deaths of his people and, though he might be afraid before dark wizards, did not retreat.
He looked like a hero with true courage.
Rupert suddenly realized that since taking over this body in the other world, he had treated the original work's main characters as if they were NPCs.
But this place was already the reality he lived in, and the people living and moving within it were not characters.
They all change and transform. Like the Crown Prince before his eyes right now.
"At any rate, you must have been cursed as well. Are you all right now?"
"Pardon? Ah, yes! Of course. Thanks to the Saintess's care, I have recovered completely."
"That is a relief. But how did the Saintess come to know of the dark wizards' scheme and find her way here?"
At the Crown Prince's question, Rupert once again racked his brain desperately.
But he could not answer rashly.
The Saintess was not someone he could speak about carelessly and then patch together a consistent story afterward.
She might even fly into a rage, demanding to know if he had sold her out, so he could not answer recklessly.
"What is the matter? Sir Rupert, is there something you cannot speak of...?"
Rupert was in crisis.
Creeeak.
"Excuse me for a moment."
As if sensing that she was being discussed, the Saintess suddenly entered the drawing room at just the right moment.
"Saintess, did everything at the workshop go well?"
At the Saintess's unexpected entrance, the Crown Prince also rose to greet her and asked about the workshop.
Normally, he might have rebuked someone for rudely entering mid-conversation, but given who she was, the matter passed naturally.
"Yes, I have finished treating all of them."
"That is truly a relief. To heal those afflicted by black magic so easily—it is a miracle befitting a daughter of Gaia."
Rupert's stomach clenched at the Crown Prince's tactless mention of black magic.
Since the Saintess did not know the current situation, if she said it had simply been food poisoning, the whole lie would have collapsed at that moment.
However,
"Yes. It was not easy, as they had been afflicted by a black magic curse, but fortunately Mother granted her grace, and I was able to heal them safely."
"Oh, Goddess. Truly, we are grateful."
The Crown Prince was relieved.
And the Saintess glanced at Rupert and gave a subtle smile.