Shared Lecture (2)
Having finished our meal at the Academy's student dining hall, Ethan and I made our way to the Swordsmanship Department building for our originally scheduled afternoon class.
The lecture on the docket, Fundamentals of Magic Swordsmanship, was one of the few shared courses open to students of both the Swordsmanship and Magic Departments—and Ethan and I had both registered for it.
As his personal maid, it struck me as advantageous to manufacture as many points of contact with Ethan as I possibly could, so my plan was to enroll in as many courses like this one as I could manage going forward. Of course, had Ethan himself shown no interest in the class, the whole premise of attending it together would have been impossible to begin with—but as a son of House Blackwood, he occupied a position where he needed to learn magic swordsmanship more than anyone. In that sense, our interests happened to align neatly with my own.
"Maybe it's because this is our first class together, but I feel a little nervous."
"Do you, my lord?"
"Aren't you nervous at all, Lilith?"
"As your personal maid, my lord, I have already observed the master's sword lessons on many occasions, so it didn't quite strike me as our first class together, if I'm honest."
"Hm. Now that you mention it, I suppose you could look at it that way."
Doting father or not, at the end of the day Harold was, fundamentally, a Sword Master and a wielder of magic swordsmanship. And no matter how shallow my own knowledge of the blade, sitting in on Harold's lessons beside Ethan was bound to drum at least something into my skull. Considering that history, this shared lecture wasn't exactly my first time attending a class alongside Ethan—though if I insisted on attaching meaning to it, I supposed it was the first one we'd ever sat through together as students.
With such thoughts drifting through my head, we stepped into the indoor training hall of the Swordsmanship Department building, where a number of students had already gathered to wait for the lecture on Fundamentals of Magic Swordsmanship to begin. And the moment Ethan—known to a fair few as the second seat of the Swordsmanship Department—made his entrance, the greetings started coming one after another.
"Good afternoon, Lord Blackwood."
"Mm. Thank you for the greeting."
"You're taking this class as well, Lord Blackwood?"
"House Blackwood has wielded magic swordsmanship—a fusion of blade and sorcery—for generations, so it's only natural."
...And for some reason, I was suddenly getting pissed off all over again.
I was already being treated as a person of interest in the Magic Department, without a single proper friend to my name—so why was it that everywhere Ethan went, the crowd of followers simply never let up? And the fact that a suspiciously high proportion of the people approaching him were women was, for reasons I couldn't quite name, deeply unpleasant.
"So your fiancée is joining us today as well!"
"Fiancée...? Ah, um. W-well, yes..."
"I heard your fiancée hails from the Magic Department? Then might I ask—did she happen to study swordsmanship under you separately, Lord Blackwood?"
"I did not teach her. Lilith has always handled her daggers well enough on her own."
...Whether or not I was 'originally' good with daggers is not the point here, you realize.
These dumb bitches have got it into their heads that I'm your fiancée, and you're not going to deny it—you're just going to awkwardly gloss over it?
Believe me, every fiber of me wanted to cut straight into the conversation and shout that there was no such thing as a fiancée here—but barging in like that would only have made the mood strange. Above all, interjecting unbidden into a conversation my master was having and making a scene was conduct unbefitting a personal maid, so I let it go. I might have felt differently back in the days two or three years ago, when the role had been forced upon me—but the Lilith of today had volunteered, of her own free will, to become Ethan's personal maid, and having chosen the work, I considered it my duty to see it done properly to the very end.
And so I stood there, uselessly eavesdropping on Ethan's exchanges with the other students as I waited for the professor to appear when—
...a figure of nuclear-bomb magnitude appeared out of nowhere, and my brain flatlined on the spot.
"Hey, Blackwood. We keep running into each other."
"......Cup."
The hero—protagonist of Luminor Academy and, at present, the most likely candidate for another transmigrator—Gehmajoshigi-gwat, had arrived.
"So you're taking this class too, Blackwood. Well, I suppose that tracks—House Blackwood would naturally have quite the expertise in magic swordsmanship."
"...Aren't you being rather too familiar? I have no memory of ever having grown so close with you."
"We saw each other at the entrance ceremony, didn't we? And we're the top and second seats of the same Swordsmanship Department. That's plenty to make us acquaintances, no?"
"If a connection that flimsy makes us acquaintances, then by your logic you must be acquainted with Princess Seraphin as well. There is hardly any difference between the top seat of the entire academy and the top seat of a single department, after all."
"Well, someday, maybe—ah, no. Wait. Don't be so stiff about it."
The hero, sidling up to Ethan with borrowed familiarity—and Ethan, repelled by the attitude so openly that his guard never once dropped. That subtly mismatched pairing, a combination that shouldn't have fit and somehow did, threw my mind into instant confusion.
'Why is the protagonist suddenly acting all chummy with Ethan?'
In the original game, the protagonist's relationship with Ethan had been anything but friendly—they started out on such poor terms that the game flagged them outright as hostile. The Ethan of Luminor Academy openly abused his personal maid Lilith in front of the other students from the earliest chapters, and strutted about with his gang, throwing his weight against commoner students like the piece of trash he was.
Of course, the Ethan of today had become a completely different person from that garbage, and toward me—his personal maid—there was no abuse whatsoever; if anything, he bent so far in the direction of consideration that it bordered on spoiling me. If the protagonist of this world was not merely a dummy character spat out by the game system, then this reaction was, if anything, the more natural one.
...Still, knowing how the story of those two ended in the original game, this meeting left me feeling anything but at ease.
"If you mean to build a friendship with me on the strength of the Blackwood name behind me, let me save you the trouble. I have no particular desire to grow close with you—and even if we did, I have no intention of lending you the power of House Blackwood."
"Like I said, that's not what I'm after. I just want the honor students of the same Swordsmanship Department to get along. What are you so guarded about?"
"...For a man who introduced himself with a woman on each arm, you certainly have a way with words."
"......"
"I'm sorry, but I've little interest in cultivating friendships with men who possess no self-control."
Faced with Ethan's impeccable logic, the hero Gehmajoshigi-gwat seemed to lose his tongue entirely, unable to muster a single rebuttal. The women Ethan had mentioned—the ones flanking him at that first meeting—were almost certainly Serista and Silena. Save for an episode or two in the middle, Serista would cling to the protagonist like gum on a shoe straight through to the ending, and by this point in the timeline Silena, too, already felt no small fondness for him. Both characters had their own circumstances driving them to trail after him, granted—but objectively speaking, a man who traveled with a woman hanging off each shoulder didn't exactly inspire confidence. Truthfully, even I, stripped of my background knowledge, would likely have felt a prick of wariness at the sight of a protagonist flanked by Silena and Serista.
"Those two and I aren't in whatever kind of relationship you're imagining. We simply grew a little close, and it just so happened that both of them were women."
"For all that, both women did seem to show you a considerable amount of interest."
"You're one to talk, Ethan—you've got women fawning over you too."
"But I do not parade about with a woman on each arm, self-control abandoned. If, at the very least before my eyes, you were to choose one of the two, I might be able to believe in your sincerity."
"......What?"
"It means I could never trust a slippery man who insists on keeping a woman in each hand."
"...I'm sorry, but that's an impossible request."
"Then my befriending you is an equally impossible one."
And with those words, Ethan turned his head, expression resolute, shutting out the protagonist's gaze entirely. The protagonist, on the other hand—apparently still unwilling to give up on the conversation—opened his mouth at him yet again. For whatever reason, though, Ethan's attitude remained firm from first word to last.
"Come on, don't be like that..."
"You saw what I did to Raidenhart's trash of a son. You know that I cut off his wrist."
"...Right. I saw it with my own eyes that day."
"You are no exception, Gehmajoshigi-gwat."
"......What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means that no matter how divinely blessed a hero you may be, if you approach my Lilith so carelessly, I will not stand idly by."
...What is wrong with this man? Does he genuinely still think I'm his property?
I shed the debt-maid status ages ago—what is with all this 'my Lilith' business?
Granted, given my current position, I'd be going on living as his personal maid for some time yet, so we were hardly a pair that could simply drift apart. Even so.
"...Fine. I'll keep that firmly in mind."
"As long as you do."
"But setting Lilith aside—it's true that I want to know more about you. So if you ever feel like talking, come find me any time. If it would make you uncomfortable, I won't bring Serista and Silena along."
"......"
"Until then."
With that, the protagonist picked himself up and moved to a spot some distance away. And where did he go? Straight to Nathalie, this time, opening up a conversation with her on the spot.
Good grief, that boy really does keep himself busy working the room.
Well, I supposed Nathalie was worth cultivating—he was convenient to have in the party from the early game straight through the late game. Since he'd left Thomas's enrollment untouched and undisturbed, a serious route completion was probably beyond his reach, but if all he wanted was a proper capture, it was a perfectly serviceable play.
Seeing him like this, the thought crept in unbidden—was Gehmajoshigi-gwat actually, seriously working through his routes? And while my gaze quietly tracked him, I began to feel a faintly prickly stare from the seat beside me.
"...Did you have something you wished to say, my lord?"
"That man is on your mind, Lilith?"
"...He merely seemed like someone you did not care for, my lord, so I was making a note of his face."
"Good. Remember him well—and should that man ever deign to speak to you, do not so much as acknowledge him."
"......Yes, my lord."
Truthfully, as a fellow transmigrator, this was an order that sat ill with me—but for the moment, I simply nodded. Ethan had shown open hostility toward Gehmajoshigi-gwat, and as his personal maid, I was bound to respect that choice of his. Thinking that an exchange of notes between two transmigrators would surely find some other opportunity, I withdrew my gaze—and before I knew it, the bell rang out across the Academy, tolling the start of the afternoon lectures.
Roughly a minute after the bell fell silent, a man strode into the indoor sword training hall. The man who would stand before us as our new professor—someone neither Ethan nor I had anticipated in the slightest.
"Huh...?"
"No way. That person is—"
"The legendary Sword Master...?"
At the appearance of a famous face no one had seen coming, the training hall erupted into murmurs in an instant. And Ethan and I—who knew the man's identity better than anyone present—were likewise swallowed by bewilderment the moment we laid eyes on him.
"Lilith."
"Yes, my lord."
"...Did you, by any chance, hear of this from my father beforehand?"
"...No, my lord. This is the first I've heard of it as well."
I never once imagined we would be reunited in a form like this. The stage had moved to the Academy, and I'd been resting easy on the assumption that I wouldn't be seeing him for a good long while. That son-doting fool chasing Ethan all the way here—this was a situation I had never witnessed even within the game.
"A pleasure to meet you all."
"......"
"My name is Harold Richard Blackwood. Some of you will already know it."
"......"
"As of today, I will be instructing Fundamentals of Magic Swordsmanship. I look forward to working with you."
Agh, seriously.
Why on earth did he have to follow us all the way here?