The Wild Princess
Lupin kept receiving people long after that.
Was this what it felt like to be a celebrity dragged out to a fan meeting? How did anyone stand in one spot and keep smiling and talking to nearly a hundred people? From now on she was going to worship every idol as a god. That kind of grit and effort left her no choice but to applaud.
Oh, gods above!
But I can’t do this!
At this rate, etiquette and everything else could go hang — she was marching straight on the Holy Ark———.
Ting.
“Eek. What?”
Something cinched around her body and yanked, and the source was the second floor. She turned her head and found Yegor beckoning with little flicks of his hand.
“Can you hear me.”
A low male voice spoke all at once, right at the mouth of her ear, and Lupin nearly toppled over. She didn’t actually fall — she just shook like an aspen, hard enough to startle everyone around her.
“God, the chills. What the hell?”
No one had ever come strolling up to Lupin’s ear like that. They were cut down before they could get close, or they were never granted permission to approach in the first place. The only recent exception had been Klein.
“Seems you can hear me well enough.”
“What? How’d you do that?”
“You look like an idiot talking to yourself. Lower your voice first.”
“Ah. Right.”
Lupin covered her mouth with her left hand. Even so, she rested the arm atop her chest, and the pose was somehow elegant.
“So. How’d you do this?”
“I’m hanging a thread of aura on your ear and sending sound along it. You’ve used a string telephone, haven’t you?”
“Obviously. They teach you that in elementary school. Whoa, though — this is stupidly cool.”
She couldn’t see it, but she could feel, without a doubt, that something was there. Delighted by the novelty, Lupin plucked the aura a few times like a rubber band. Twang, twang.
Yegor waited for the vibration to die down before he asked.
“You hungry?”
“Stomach’s not empty yet. I ate a lot earlier.”
“The drinks.”
“I want more, but… there are people around. I’m holding back.”
All this painstaking effort, just to get her hands on a single Holy Ark. The sight was commendable enough that Yegor wanted to keep her from regressing into a beast, if nothing else.
“From here on, I’ll help you deal with the people.”
“For real?”
“For real…? Anyway, I’m saying it because you look tired. Make a mistake and the Sword Emperor will be put in a difficult position, won’t he.”
“True. We can’t let Master get stuck in a mess over nothing.”
The Holy Ark was a potential asset, not a realized one. Even if Lupin’s treasure-chest craving looked satisfied for the moment, the instant she failed to open it, the thing would be empty. And the moment that emptiness turned to rage, something troublesome was guaranteed to happen. It was a safety rule of Yegor’s own making — something close to a law — hammered out after he’d been dragged into the same kind of incident more than once.
It’s only a little tour of the Holy Ark… I can talk her into it.
A vast vault storing a Fragment of the Stars: the Holy Ark. Anyone other than Royal Blood went inside, saw nothing but a black void, and came back out. That was normal. It wasn’t as if Lupin was going to steal the Fragment of the Stars from within. If all she wanted was a brief look around, who was going to stop her?
In any case, whether Yegor was tying himself in knots or not, Lupin was simply delighted that she no longer had to think about it.
“Now this is auto-farming~.”
Lupin (avatar), redeployed. The fan meeting of no known end resumed.
The fan meeting that had started up again, however, did not last very long.
“Lord Lyurikovich!”
With a sudden blast, Palata Palace — the party still in full swing inside it — shook hard.
People usually notice that something has gone wrong in two ways. The first is a loud noise. Bang! Crash! Clatter! Exactly the assortment of bursting sounds pouring out of the palace entrance at that very moment. The second is screaming. It usually arrives together with the first. The people now noisily fleeing deeper into the palace, toward the dance hall, were a fine example.
Dmitri ran the other way, straight toward the uproar.
“So what’s been coming has come at last. I stalled for every minute I could stall, and still.”
Two doors had been blown clean off, along with a section of wall. He clutched his forehead. How many scars did this precious building already bear? No wonder everyone went on about bombs and terrorists.
Lupin, for her part, was busy watching with round eyes, trying to figure out what on earth was happening. Once an incident broke out, she was usually the type to stick her head in first. If something fun came of it, great. If not, oh well. Anyone confident they could dodge any attack was like that. When your body was fast, you didn’t have to plot an escape.
Still, the demure-lady act wasn’t over yet, so she stayed where she was. Both feet planted, she only craned her neck this way and that.
Thud!
A knight came flying in a long arc, slid past Lupin’s side, and kept going. Roll, roll, roll. Crash! He slammed into a buffet table, and a tragic quantity of food spilled across the floor.
Aigoo. Should’ve eaten that before it went over. No — should I pick it up now?
Fwip. Fwip-fwip.
Bread and a few pastries that had been on the floor for less than three seconds were set neatly atop Lupin’s chest. Four cheese balls rolled along and settled themselves, unprompted, in the soft valley between. Still nothing better to use as a tray. A little powder got on it, but a brush took care of that.
In the meantime Dmitri bellowed toward the outside of the entrance.
“Emelin. That’s enough!”
The imperial princess released the knight whose collar she had been gripping. Crushed under the pressure of aura, he lost consciousness and collapsed in a heap.
Hmph! Emelin tossed back the mass of curls bunched over her shoulders. Then she produced a round comb and worked briskly through the snags and tangles, grooming herself as if to say look closely. Glossy blonde hair was the symbol of the Blumang Empire’s imperial house. It was never, under any circumstances, to be managed carelessly.
After that she checked whether her skin — glossy as a teenager’s, by her own account — had been damaged, taking out a small hand mirror and patting at her face with the cotton pad that came with it. Mm. This is fine. Satisfied, she smiled brightly and tucked the mirror away.
The boldness in those sharp eyes held, intact, the character of a woman who had grown up never knowing defeat. She rolled her eyes — the color of daybreak — this way and that, inspecting the dress she had worn in for any flaw. The meticulous grooming, wholly unsuited to the situation, ended only after another five minutes had passed.
“Lord Lyurikovich. Only now do you come out? You know it’s a bad habit, reacting only after I’ve broken something, don’t you? At this rate I suppose everyone would rather I actually become a faction out to overthrow the state?”
As if Dmitri had wanted things to go this way. He’d only been stalling because a more important guest was inside.
“Looking at the state you’re in now—”
“If the way you receive guests hadn’t been like this, nothing much would have happened. I wanted to come in quietly too, you know?”
“If you hadn’t stormed in on the very day, we would have welcomed you in grand style. I clearly told you today was important.”
“Which is why I showed up two hours late, didn’t I? And then making me wait another hour at the entrance — what kind of treatment is that supposed to be? I may be a merciful, generous person, but an hour is a bit much, don’t you think?”
A terrifying war of words raged between the former grand duke and the reigning imperial princess. Even so, they were old acquaintances of long standing, and the fight was not purely vicious. More like a stubborn uncle quarreling with a niece who went wherever the wind took her.
But Dmitri had his reasons for going this far. Yegor had run away from home and spent all this time shooting around every corner of the continent, and Emelin had wandered the whole of it in order to drag him back. Along the way, the clock tower of the Victoria Holy Empire had been left leaning. The nine-story wooden pagoda of the Asakura Divine Nation had burned. One of the Cheonghwa Empire’s bizarre rock spires — a celebrated scenic wonder — had been sunk. How could a visit from Emelin be anything but unsettling? If she arrived and Palata Palace, both the venue of the party and a historic landmark, was destroyed, then not even Dmitri, Speaker of the Assembly, would be able to escape responsibility.
He could not, however, turn her away at the door outright. The Blumang Empire’s political position within the Alliance would not allow it. The war with the North Country had entered a ceasefire, but it was not over. And the power holding one axis of that front was the Blumang Empire. She might be in a dress now, but the insignia and medal ribbons on the knight’s uniform Emelin wore when she took the field numbered more than twenty by themselves. People might be wary of the accidents she left in her wake. They could not hate her, and they could not shut her out.
A subordinate organization, born to stand in for the Rounds, whose feet were bound to their own domains and who could not move. Such was the presence of the one who occupied the highest seat of the Sub-Rounds.
“Anyway. May I go in? Thanks to my little brother, I have far too much to ask your guests.”
Dmitri muttered, half resigned.
“I’m begging you. Please refrain from breaking the palace any further.”
“Do you take me for some crazy bitch who smashes everything she sees? I really just came to find a person. I heard people were pouring in from all over the country, so I came because it seemed like an easy place to ask around.”
“…I see. If that is the case, then it is truly fortunate.”
And so the heightened situation seemed, at last, to be coming to an end.
She was demolishing the building, so I thought some crazy bitch had shown up!
Lupin let the disappointment show plain on her face and dropped her shoulders. The cheese balls she had lined up in the valley had just run out, too. This had gotten boring. Guess she’d have another drink———.
“You there.”
Lupin bent at the waist like a drawn bow. Something had reached for the nape of her neck. She slipped free the way a wave pulls back, whipped around, and dropped into a guarded stance. Two skin-toned water balloons teetered on the verge of spilling out of the dress.
Emelin, having recognized at a glance that Lupin was the star of tonight’s party, asked, “I thought it was suspicious, the way you kept flying around up in the sky. Don’t tell me you’re an atypical Aura User?”
Lupin answered on reflex. If someone recognized you, answering was only human nature.
“Yes. I account for one percent of all Aura Users.”
Emelin held out her hand as if asking for a handshake.
“A pleasure. I am the Third Imperial Princess of the Blumang Empire, Emelin Marie Austria de Blumang. Your name?”
The name was longer even than those of Rostov’s nobles. But the first three syllables were, to Lupin, genuinely familiar.
Where had it been? The tutorial? The one who chattered on about explaining the world. Who nagged her about how someone that dense was supposed to survive. Who lamented that without her, Lupin would have rolled around in the street and died….
So this was that Emelin. The official face of the franchise, locked in as the poster girl for every collaboration event alongside the Dimensional Drifter. Lupin remembered her clearly — clearly enough, over five days of annual leave, to have ordered hamburgers and fried chicken more than once while looking at her.
But where were the knight’s uniform and the enormous axe? The things that were practically her symbols were nowhere to be seen. At least Lupin remembered, perfectly, the nickname they used for her on the galleries. And there was no surer way to confirm that the woman in front of her was someone she knew.
“Golden Gorilla?”
The problem, if it was a problem, was that the effect was far too certain. To Emelin, the words Golden Gorilla were a taboo among taboos — something that must never, ever be said. One eyebrow dropped all the way down, and she lowered her voice to a dangerous register.
“What you just said. You’d better take it back.”
But Lupin, who had never actually gone through the story, had no way of knowing what Golden Gorilla meant. She was simply thrilled to be meeting a familiar face for the first time in five years.
“Whoa, so you really are the Golden Gorilla?”
