Breaking the Pride of Young Masters and Ladies (2)
“Gyaaaaaah!!!! I’ll never forgive you!!! I’ll never forget this humiliation!!!”
Even as they hauled him off to the infirmary, Roy kept bellowing curses at me.
The target feels humiliation.
Compliment Points: -100 (0 → 0)
Figures it’d turn out like this.
I’d done it with zero points left just in case, so it didn’t really matter.
Afraid of Roy’s grudge?
His feelings toward me were already shot to hell anyway…
More than that—if it was going to be the usual romance-fantasy whispering, I’d rather take a clean, full-throated cuss-out like that.
Feels like things are starting to normalize a little.
As if one layer of the romance-fantasy film that had been draped over Astra Radius had peeled away.
Maybe by the time I graduated, the academy would be fully “normalized.”
Still, this is going to constrain my behavior a bit.
Right now I’d only scraped together a thousand points and blown them all at once, so it was fine—but later I’d need to make purchases worth hundreds of thousands, even millions of points. Endgame-tier weapons you only got in the late game, that kind of thing.
Which meant that while I was stockpiling points, I wouldn’t be able to just say whatever I wanted, would I?
〈First Use & Activation〉
Objectives:
— Use 1 item
— Activate 1 skill
Reward: New shop category unlocked — Trait Support
Oh?
• Point Protection (30 Points)
• Next Compliment Recommendation (300 Points)
(…)
So it’s a line that assists and strengthens traits.
Then those boosts were exactly what I needed right now. Scouting compliment targets was fine for the moment, but later on it’d be a handy ability to have.
While I was browsing the shop, a girl student walked up to me.
“Gilliam Everchess.”
Sharp, exacting eyes. She was Shupi Valier, a noble among the supporting cast. Definitely not a character who got her own storyline—more like a resident NPC in an open-world game.
“That was astonishing. I never expected you to defeat Edgers so easily. I’d love to hear how you managed it—won’t you come to the party later?”
“Party?”
“Oh my, you didn’t know?”
The corners of Shupi’s eyes curved into a thin smile.
“It’s a party for the freshmen to mingle. No upperclassmen—only this year’s entrants. And of course, only fellow nobles.”
A party among the nobles of a romance fantasy. Bound to be a place crawling with exhausting, absurd power plays and endless roundabout talk.
“An invitation…”
Wait a second.
A freshmen-only party on the first day of the academy?
A beautiful girl sitting alone at the center. No one approaches her—as if they’re afraid of her.
“All right. I’ll go.”
There was someone I needed to meet now. And I already knew how the party was going to play out.
“Ah—of course you’ll be arriving as a proper gentleman-and-lady pair, won’t you?”
Shupi’s gaze raked Maron up and down.
“….”
Avoiding that look, Maron’s irises clouded over with a melancholy indigo.
Going to a party with Liam…
She hated parties. Nothing good ever came of them.
But.
If it was with Liam, she thought maybe it would be all right.
The problem was—
Even if I go with him, I won’t be any help. I’ll only be a burden.
And yet, and yet.
Didn’t Liam not really have anyone else to ask? It had almost slipped her mind amid all the shocking events in a row, but today was still only the first day of the academy.
Coming as a mixed pair was common sense for a party like this. So Liam must have already had some girl in mind when he accepted the invitation.
And if the only girl he knew was her, then he’d basically already invited her—
“Can’t I just go alone?”
The light vanished from Maron’s eyes.
Even Shupi, who had clearly come over to needle Gilliam, was thrown by that remark.
“Y-you’re saying you’ll come to the party alone?”
“Yeah.”
“You can’t just say ‘yeah’ and move on—heh… heh heh heh…”
Shupi forcibly patched together the composure that had nearly cracked.
I see. So this is what it feels like to take it head-on…
She finally understood why Roy Edgers had lost every scrap of noble dignity and started screaming.
Attending a party alone. What kind of nonsense was that?
“…Very well. I’ll put it down that Gilliam will be attending today’s party alone. That will be fine, I trust?”
Well then—what are you going to do about that?
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“….”
Shupi’s brain started to ache.
“R-right. See you later, then.”
She was absolutely not running away. It was a strategic retreat, nothing more.
Whispers about Gilliam started circulating through every little cluster of students.
What does he even want…?
How did he do that earlier?
Beating Roy Edgers so easily and then throwing out a provocation like that…
We can’t just ignore him…
Maybe I should try meeting him separately before things go any further?
As for the man himself, Gilliam—
Nice of her to invite me.
—had no thoughts about any of it. More precisely, he was thinking, just not about that sort of thing.
I should start dumping points into stats soon. This bastard Gilliam’s stats are definitely all F across the board.
How to get stronger. How to get stronger efficiently, and fast.
“Um… excuse me…”
“?”
He glanced sideways. Maron was fidgeting like she had something she wanted to say.
“You’re… not really going to the party alone, are you?”
“I really am going alone, though?”
“!?”
Truth be told, he’d wanted to take Maron. But an extreme introvert girl like her would clearly have a fit the second she got near a ballroom.
Was she thinking of coming with me for my sake?
How precious. Truly a five-star disposition. Following the protagonist around, huh.
Well, I’m the villain, not the protagonist—but whatever.
The old Gilliam the villain was dead. From here on, he’d live like a protagonist—just of a subculture open-world game, not a romance fantasy.
“G-Gilliam Everchess.”
Why the sudden formality?
“Then I suppose from tomorrow on you’d prefer to eat lunch separately as well?”
“What are you talking about?”
If they did that, he’d definitely end up watching Maron sneak into the faculty restroom with a sandwich, just like today.
“Let’s keep eating together. As long as you don’t mind, of course.”
Maron’s eyes lit up a sparkling red.
“Yes! Th-then that’s fine!”
What was fine, exactly?
Her mood seemed to have bounced back, so it probably didn’t matter.
Someone whispered nearby.
“So that’s the legendary Phantasm Star…”
“Shh. She’ll hear you.”
Subculture games usually carried one overarching theme. The theme of Astra Radius was stars.
And the Phantasm Star was the name of the star bound up with Maron’s fate.
Walk the right path, and she would become the witch who saved the world.
Twist the wrong way, and she would become the witch who destroyed it.
“Hehe…”
The five-star-disposition extreme introvert girl gave an awkward little laugh—like she was long used to being talked about behind her back.
When he arrived at the hall serving as the ballroom that evening, right on time, the party was already in full swing.
“He actually came alone…?”
“What on earth is he thinking…”
And his clothes were still just the academy uniform.
“Utterly lacking in common sense…”
“Typical Everchess scoundrel.”
“…But was he that kind of scoundrel?”
The murmuring spread, but Gilliam didn’t so much as glance at any of them. He was looking for one person.
Ah. There she is.
Exactly as described in the original—a girl sitting alone even in the middle of a freshman mixer.
Fellow first-years, and still no one dared approach her. They couldn’t.
Golden hair. A pretty face, cold and expressionless.
The Second Princess, Eletra Ksanthias.
Found her.
His living hidden piece.
Of the thousand Compliment Points he’d gathered, half—five hundred—had gone into crushing Roy. The remaining five hundred he’d poured entirely into a consumable item.
A pure-white petal with medicinal power.
Can revive a spirit creature once.
Hand this to Eletra, and the princess would become a living hidden piece for him.
“Hold it.”
A broad-shouldered male student stepped into his path as he approached Princess Eletra.
“What business do you have?”
“I have business with Princess Eletra.”
“You? Gilliam Everchess?”
Princess Eletra, who had been watching with bored eyes the whole time, lifted her head at the sound of his name. Curiosity stirred in her blue eyes.
The infamous Everchess scoundrel reputation is actually useful for once.
“Gilliam Everchess. Know your place.”
“…And who are you?”
He’d asked because he genuinely didn’t know—but veins bulged in the male student’s neck.
Why’s he so mad? He’s not even her guard or anything.
Tch.
What a pain. Romance-fantasy parties really weren’t his thing.
“Your Highness.”
Around the blocking student’s flank, he slid a letter envelope containing Syndras’s Petal. The envelope skated across the tabletop and tapped against Eletra’s hand.
“…It seems speaking politely won’t get through to you.”
The male student clenched his molars hard, about to administer physical correction to this insolent scoundrel—
“What kind of insolence toward Her Highness—”
“Wait!”
Having opened the envelope, Princess Eletra shot up from her seat in a rush.
“Get your hands off him!”
“Y-Your Highness?”
The student who’d been pestering Eletra all evening floundered, but her attention was fixed solely on Gilliam. She shoved the frozen male student aside herself and stepped right up to him, her sapphire-blue eyes shining bright.
“How did you know I needed this so badly!?”
Every gaze in the ballroom locked onto Gilliam—the man who had appeared out of nowhere and, in an instant, monopolized the princess’s attention.