Prince and Prince (3)
Antonio Robert Valtoria.
The fifth prince of the Valtoria Empire, and the ill-fated royal who had been suddenly swept into a succession contest he never asked for, all because of the assassination of the first prince.
In the game *Luminor Academy*, his original role was that of a middling support character.
You could recruit him as a companion, but his stats were too mediocre to justify keeping him around long-term; instead, he was the kind of royal NPC you'd occasionally call on for help whenever Seraphin wasn't available.
In fairness, that was only natural given Antonio's circumstances. By the time the succession had been settled in favor of Philipson, Antonio was barely ten years old.
How was he supposed to predict that five years later, Philipson would die and he'd be dragged into a fight for the throne?
Seraphin, at least, had made some preparations thanks to her Future Sight—but Antonio possessed no such ability.
As a result, from the player's perspective, he sat in the niche of "royal character you can use without really obstructing Seraphin." A character whose entire purpose was to keep his head down and stay alive.
Objectively speaking, though, he was one of the more likable characters. Of all of Seraphin's siblings in *Luminor Academy*, everyone except Antonio and the youngest princess was either a rival or an outright saboteur.
Which meant that, in the original story, Antonio was supposed to live quietly in the shadows of his siblings, playing the recluse and occasionally lending the protagonist a hand—nothing more than a reserve companion….
"Please, accept my feelings, Lady Agnes Elizabeth Blaze!"
"I'm… what?"
I couldn't, for the life of me, understand why on earth he would blurt out a confession to Agnes out of nowhere.
…What exactly did I screw up this time?
No, wait—thinking about it, maybe it wasn't me at all. Maybe that bastard Gehmajoshigi-gwat was the one who meddled. This time, more than any other, I was genuinely innocent.
After all, I'd only known Agnes for barely half a year, and with Antonio, today was practically our first meeting.
Any reasonable reading of the situation pointed to the Hero being the one who'd messed something up.
…Yeah. That had to be it. I wasn't the only variable that had appeared in this world, after all.
And unlike me—unable to go anywhere without Edan—Gehmajoshigi-gwat was in a position to enjoy this world like a proper open-world RPG, free to roam wherever he pleased. If he put his mind to it, building a connection with Antonio before the second act even began wasn't impossible….
"From the very first moment I saw you, I fell completely in love with your beautiful magic!"
…Huh? Magic?
"Two years ago, you appeared like a comet and defended the eastern gate of the imperial palace, and thanks to you, I too escaped that day's danger unharmed."
…Two years ago? The eastern gate of the palace?
"I cannot tell you how many nights I dreamed of seeing you again. There were times I truly believed I never would."
Wait a moment. If this story is going where I think it's going….
Two years ago. The palace's eastern gate. Magic.
As far as I knew, there was exactly one incident where those keywords could overlap with Agnes.
The moment it clicked, the masked ball held for Seraphin's birthday celebration surfaced naturally in my mind.
Hold on—then when Agnes mentioned having met Antonio before….
You're telling me she met him while slaughtering monsters at the eastern gate?
Seriously, why does that girl never volunteer important information?
Granted, I never asked properly and let the subject slide, but still—an incident of this magnitude was something she should have explained on her own!
Meanwhile, every bombshell Prince Antonio dropped sent fresh waves of murmuring rippling through the hall.
…And Agnes, suddenly drowning in everyone's stares, was rolling her eyes around with the most flustered expression I'd ever seen on her face.
"I—I…"
"Yes, Lady Agnes!"
"I—I don't know anything about this…!"
"…I beg your pardon?"
"Aa—aaah, aaaAAAAHH…!!"
"W-wait just a moment! Lady Agnes!!"
BANG!
Unable to bear the avalanche of attention a second longer, Agnes chose flight.
Prince Antonio stood there staring blankly at the spot where her back had vanished through the kicked-open doors of the Sunflower of Noon Hall, reaching out with empty hands.
"S-someone retrieve the lady who just left, at once! She may yet become our prince's consort!"
"YES, SIR!!"
And with that, the palace guards stationed around the banquet hall came pouring out through the doors in pursuit of Agnes.
Seizing the chaos, I slipped out of the hall after them.
"I'll bring Agnes back! Edan, please wait here just a moment!"
"Lily?! Wait—do you even know where Lady Blaze went—"
"Don't worry, I'll find her!"
Even if I'd never bothered with Agnes's route in my past life, I still knew her basic habits by heart.
Which meant that for now, my only option was to find her before the palace guards did.
Whether I talked her into coming back or sent her home, that was a problem to solve after I tracked her down.
⁎ ⁎ ⁎
Finding Agnes turned out to be surprisingly simple.
Whenever trouble or embarrassment struck, her feet carried her in a direction that followed a certain predictable pattern.
It was a pattern I'd learned naturally, without ever deliberately pursuing her route—for whatever else you could say about her, Agnes was a top-tier character in raw performance, the kind I'd brought along as a companion in nearly twenty of my twenty-four playthroughs.
The palace guards have probably split up and fanned out toward the ground-floor exits.
In situations like this, most people would assume the runaway was bolting straight out of the palace.
Granted, the guards had no real authority to stop a departing guest from heading home—but Agnes had, after all, unilaterally cut off a conversation with Prince Antonio, the guest of honor of this entire banquet. That gave them at least some pretext to try persuading her, if only briefly.
Not that the premise of Agnes "running away" is even correct in the first place.
Flustered as she was, Agnes was still here representing the Elizabeth family.
Even if only to keep the self-styled "family elders" off her back, she would never actually go so far as an unauthorized departure.
Right now she'd simply be looking for somewhere she could be alone for a while—and I had a pretty good idea where a girl like her would go.
Because whenever Agnes had something to agonize over, she had a habit of fleeing to somewhere high.
And there's really only one place high enough to flee to from the Sunflower of Noon Hall.
Twin staircases flanked the hall's main entrance, and climbing them led up to an open-air garden on the fifth floor.
It was one of the few palace gardens kept open to guests outside of nighttime hours, so guessing the direction of Agnes's footsteps wasn't difficult.
Click.
"……"
The moment I pushed open the door to the open-air garden, the red-haired noble girl stood there in plain view.
Judging by her height and her frame, there was no mistaking her—I made my way slowly over to Agnes's back.
"Why did you run off like that, Lady Agnes?"
"…Oh. It's you."
"Who else were you expecting?"
"…Seraphin, or that who-knows-what prince."
That who-knows-what prince, huh.
From Agnes's perspective, it wasn't exactly unfair. After all, she'd just been ambushed with a confession by Prince Antonio in a situation she never could have anticipated—of course the man felt like a total stranger to her.
Judging by our conversation a week or two ago, there didn't seem to be any deep connection between them. Antonio hadn't even known Agnes's name until today, apparently.
Curiosity about how such a bond had formed rose up in me naturally, and hoping it might help untangle her distress, I decided to start with the beginning.
"What exactly is your relationship with Prince Antonio?"
"…No relationship at all. We're barely acquaintances—faces, nothing more."
"Well, clearly the prince doesn't see it that way. You said you'd met him once before, didn't you? When was that?"
"…You remember the incident two years ago? The day the serpent swarm attacked the palace."
"Ah—yes, of course."
"…Antonio was the one I fought beside at the eastern gate that day."
…Yeah, that tracks.
Honestly, considering the original game's story, it was only obvious.
The reason the palace's northern and western gates never fell during the King Serpent attack was that reliable, major characters had been assigned to defend each of them.
In *Luminor Academy*, it was something you learned naturally as you played: Orion held the northern gate during the incident, while Agnes and Seraphin together repelled the boss monster that emerged at the western gate.
And the southern gate, short on defenders, had been breached—leading to Lizzy's death.
As for the eastern gate, all the game ever told you was that the defense held there, at the cost of many casualties. And strictly speaking, that had always felt a little off.
If the eastern wave was weak enough for mere palace guards to repel, then how was it that the southern gate—farther from the lake—had fallen while the eastern gate held? Something didn't add up.
But if Antonio had been part of that defense, the story changed.
However middling his stats, the fact remained that he was a recruitable companion candidate—a man of genuinely serviceable ability.
At the time, of course, Antonio had been only about fifteen, which was presumably why he couldn't perform at the level of the older characters, and why the eastern gate's defense had bled so heavily.
"At first I didn't even know he was a prince. I just thought the guards had one slightly young knight among them."
"Is that so?"
"Yeah. Soon as I got there, I saw a couple of people about to go down, so I covered their rear with magic. The prince looked exhausted too, so I pulled him back for a bit, and after that the rest of us just rotated through the defense line. That's it. The whole story."
"Huh. That's a lot more mundane than I expected."
"…What, were you expecting some sweeping tale of a prince on a white horse saving a damsel in distress? That's all there was."
…Well, I suppose since Agnes isn't much of a physical type, she wouldn't have found it all that harrowing. Antonio and the other guards who'd been holding the gate before she arrived would certainly remember it differently.
Though there was also a very real chance that a heart pounding in a moment of mortal danger had been mistaken for something else entirely.
And it was an undeniable fact that casualties dropped once Agnes arrived. In the original story, Prince Antonio would have survived one way or another—but a good number of those other guards would have died.
"So you never even exchanged names back then, either?"
"Huh? No, we didn't exchange names."
"You didn't?"
"He collapsed around the time the battle ended, and by the time I heard the guards gushing about how I'd saved their prince, he was already being carried off. I only learned his name from them."
"Oh, I see…."
"And after that we never crossed paths again, so that was the end of it. …Which is exactly why I have no idea why he's suddenly saying all this strange stuff to me."
…So, let me get this straight.
From Antonio's perspective: the girl who appeared out of nowhere while his life hung by a thread saved his fellow guards' lives.
She fought alongside him on the front line against the swarm.
In the middle of all that, swept up by the classic shaken-bridge effect, he developed some confusing feelings for her—then collapsed from exhaustion.
And when he woke up, the woman who saved him had vanished without so much as giving her name…. Something like that, then?
Yeah, getting worked up and pouring his heart out the instant he saw her again isn't exactly hard to understand.
Though holding a public confession at his own birthday banquet was crossing the line by, oh, quite a lot.