The Position I Cannot Yield (1)
About a month had passed since Seraphin and Ethan first offered to enroll me at the Academy.
It was only a month, but a great deal had happened in that time. There was the brief visit to the imperial palace and back over our slaying of the King Serpent — I still had no formally settled status, so I'd been obliged to keep my identity hidden — and the substantial reward money that came through in the process, paid out not only to Ethan but to me as well.
…And the fact that, with that reward money in hand, my position as exclusive personal maid had abruptly turned into a countdown to termination.
It couldn't be helped. The payout for the King Serpent was so enormous that it automatically settled every last shred of Lilith's outstanding debt.
Since I held no noble title and belonged to the Blackwood household, the reward issued in my name naturally had to be routed through the family — and somewhere in that process, whether I wanted it or not, the whole sum was funneled straight into repaying what I owed. When I'd taken down the Hookfang, the money had only reached my hands thanks to the goodwill of Ser, the captain of the guard; under the normal rules, anything a debt maid earned went toward her debt first. That was simply how the system worked.
The upshot was that my contract now had barely two weeks left on it.
Somehow, within those two weeks, I had to broker a deal. I had to get Ethan to keep me on as his exclusive personal maid — and take me with him to the Academy.
Which was why now, roughly three years since my life as Ethan's maid had begun, I was throwing myself into the role with more fervor than at any point since I'd taken the job.
All to persuade Ethan to rehire me as his exclusive maid.
"Have you finished your meal, Young Master?"
"Ah, yeah."
"You have your sparring session with Master this afternoon. I'll have your training clothes laid out and ready for you to change into."
"…So, uh… you're coming to watch training again today?"
"Yes. That is an exclusive maid's duty, after all."
"You never bothered coming to watch before, but lately you've been awfully diligent about it. It's been getting hot these days, too…"
"Until now, Young Master, you never told me I was permitted to come watch."
"…I haven't exactly asked you to come lately, either."
"…Even so, as your exclusive maid, I believe standing by — ready for the moment anything should trouble you — is the most basic posture of the position. Is it not?"
"……"
Ethan gave me a single, utterly incredulous look at my textbook answer.
I knew. I knew perfectly well how shameless I sounded in front of him.
But if it meant securing the exclusive maid position, I could get far more shameless than this. For someone like me — bound for the Academy with some awkward half-status like a baronet's — the position was that indispensable.
"Is my… watching your sparring sessions, perhaps, an intrusion, Young Master?"
"N-no, that's not what I meant — it's just, you've been working so hard lately, that's all."
"Surely one ought to give one's utmost to every task. So that even after entering the Academy, I may continue to serve at your side as your exclusive maid—"
"I-I'll go change into my training clothes before we're late! Maid, go on ahead and wait at the training grounds!"
…Lately, whenever I so much as mentioned the Academy exclusive maid position, that was always how he dodged the subject.
The Ethan of the original story wouldn't have hesitated for an instant at such an offer — he'd have ordered me to come along before I even thought to ask.
It was a blessing that he hadn't grown into the lust-driven fat pig of the source material, but his hopeless greenness in that department was, I confess, a small disappointment.
Even so, the exclusive maid position was one I absolutely could not yield, so these days I stuck to Ethan's side every chance I got, doing whatever it took to advertise my competence in the role.
That's not to say I'd been slacking before this. I had never once crossed Ethan as his maid, and I'd faithfully carried out every mandatory duty without a single lapse. I was simply applying myself harder now, because that alone might not be enough to earn my reemployment.
In practice — subtracting only the time he spent dressing, bathing, and sleeping — I was practically glued to him for sixteen or seventeen hours out of every twenty-four.
Among my newly added duties was observing Ethan's daily sparring sessions with Harold.
Thwack! Thaaack!
"Ghk, hnngh…!"
Thaaack! Crack! Thwack!
"Gahk—aaargh…!"
Wham!
"Hk—aaaah…!"
However tightly Ethan gripped his wooden sword and swung it with both hands, a single strike from Harold would crack against his wrist and knock the blade clean out of his grasp.
Where Harold swung in calm silence without so much as a word, Ethan collapsed to the ground in a thoroughly battered state.
Dietmeier, who had been observing the match, raised one hand and called a brief halt.
"The victory goes to the Head of House! We shall now take a short recess!"
"…I'll give you five minutes. Then take up your sword again."
"Haah… yes, yes…"
Ethan hauled himself up, clutching his struck wrist in agony, while the household healer rushed over at once to cast a recovery spell on him.
I quietly approached and, with a handkerchief, gently dabbed away the sweat beading on his forehead.
"……"
"……"
The first time I'd thrust a handkerchief at him, he'd been so baffled he didn't know what to make of it; now, after ten days or so of this routine, he simply accepted it without a word.
Building up goodwill little by little like this was crucial.
Even if Ethan didn't feel any pressing need to drag me along to the Academy, I at least had to make him aware that I was genuinely useful as an exclusive maid — that much might plant the seed of wanting to keep me on.
…Truthfully, I already knew there was a far easier method than this tedious affection-grinding.
Namely: using this body — Lilith's single most conspicuous asset — to rouse male instinct and seduce him outright.
Naturally, that was a method I would never use.
'Even if the target were Ethan, that's just… a bit much, isn't it?'
It wasn't that I found the idea uniquely repulsive because it happened to be Ethan. If anything, the thought had crossed my mind once or twice that he might be the least objectionable option imaginable. The current Ethan was, from head to toe, a completely different creature from the vile pig I'd watched in the game, and by any measure — looks or personality — he was undeniably decent.
But entirely apart from all that, I simply did not want to end up in a man's arms. That was that.
Above all, it would have cheapened everything I'd done to dodge a future where I ended up beneath a man — chewing raw garlic in the kitchen in the dead of night, throwing down in free-for-alls with the likes of Ayria and Alicia, even fighting for my life against a monster like the Hookfang.
Letting a man handle my body now, just because it "wouldn't really matter," ran utterly counter to everything I had been.
'Of course, whether or not I did that sort of thing with Ethan, the future I've already changed will keep flowing on regardless.'
My absurd growth since becoming Lilith. The fact that Lizzie — a girl who should have died — was alive. And Ethan's transformation into someone unrecognizable, though I couldn't say where my influence on that one began.
When I weighed all of that, the idea that trading my body to Ethan in exchange for protection at the Academy might not be so terrible did flit through my head now and then.
Of course, that line of thinking was so hopelessly whore-brained that I scrapped it in its entirety not long after it occurred to me.
And for reasons I couldn't quite name, I didn't think Ethan would care for me behaving that way, either.
If Ethan had harbored even a sliver of that kind of desire for me, he'd already had countless opportunities to leverage his status and power and pounce.
The fact that he never had meant, presumably, that the current Ethan simply wasn't that interested in my body.
"Match — begin!"
While my mind wandered, Ethan and Harold's training picked right back up the moment their break ended, launching into the next bout.
As expected, Ethan once again failed to land anything of consequence and went sprawling before Harold's blade.
Wham!
"AAAAAAGH…!"
He'd already hit the ground something like seven or eight times in today's training alone.
Watching him fall without managing a single decent blow stirred an odd pang of pity in me.
Not that I could really fault him for it — an even match against Harold, a Sword Master, had been impossible from the outset.
If anything, for his age Ethan fought extraordinarily well. Merely holding his ground for ten, even twenty minutes in a bout against a Sword Master like Harold was, in itself, an absurd feat.
So much so that I caught myself wondering whether, by present standards, Ethan might already be stronger than the protagonist.
"Hah… hah… hah…"
"…We'll end today's training here."
Lost in those thoughts as I observed the two of them crossing blades, I realized before long that the match between Ethan and Harold had drawn to a close.
Drenched in sweat after hours of training, he stood there while I quietly wiped his face for him.
"Well done today, Young Master."
"Yeah… thanks, Maid…"
…Come to think of it, I'd felt this very same thing back when I first watched Ethan taking sword lessons from Harold.
Back then, I never could have imagined he would grow up this… well-adjusted.
Every time I observed his training these days, I couldn't help feeling, unbidden, just how relentlessly he'd worked to get here.
What exactly had driven Ethan to steel himself this way, though, was still difficult to guess.
"You've sweated a great deal, so I'll prepare your bath right away. I'll fetch fresh clothes for you now, and send your training wear down to the laundry…"
And so today as well I tended to Ethan from morning till dusk, determined to make him reconsider keeping the exclusive maid position by any means necessary —
until Harold's voice, out of nowhere, stopped my plans cold.
"…Lilith. A word."
"Yes, Master?"
"Once you've seen to Ethan's bath, come straight up to my office."
"…Pardon?"
"There is something I must convey to you regarding your conduct on the job of late."
"…Understood, Master."
…What was that about?
Had I… done something wrong?