The Romance Fantasy Heroine Arrives
Reports of racial discrimination and hate crimes poured in without pause from every corner of the South, and the number of people about to earn themselves a one-way ticket to the Aoz Mine swelled beyond counting.
Lumina shook her head in sheer disbelief at the sight.
"On the very first day of the occupation, the humans couldn't mock us fast enough—curses and thrown stones the moment we came into view. Now they're tearing each other apart while claiming, to our faces, that they welcome us. Selfish creatures."
The rapid change sweeping the South was not limited to mutual surveillance and citizen tip-offs.
When we announced that any region living peaceably with the demi-humans would receive additional tax reductions and priority consideration for public facilities, people promptly put on masks of hospitality and began fawning over the demi-humans.
Kraktore, who had been servicing his minigun, threw his head back and roared with laughter at her words.
"Kahahat! Yesterday I went into a restaurant and they'd even set up an orc-exclusive menu—selling it for twenty thousand gil! For a human-sized portion of their regular fare you'd have paid at least forty thousand!"
"The merchants must be trying to curry favor. How transparent."
"They seem ready to die for those tax cuts. The whole meal, the owner kept coming over—asking if the food was to my taste, if the drinks were the right temperature, if anything about the service was inconvenient. Nearly choked."
An orc walking into a restaurant run by Southerners and receiving not thrown garbage, but an overwhelmingly cost-effective exclusive menu complete with genuine service spirit.
Lumina cursed the Southerners as materialistic scum, but I saw things a little differently.
"Selfishness. Money. Those are the greatest forces that move human beings. If we'd relied on human morality to erase discrimination, a hundred years wouldn't have been enough, Lumina. Touch their self-interest and their wallets, though, and you get results in less than a week."
"If I simply imposed collective responsibility on an entire city, I'd create innocent victims and lose popular support. This way, I redirected their anger toward the former Southern Archduke who taxed them to the bone, and toward the people in their own ranks whose refusal to stop discriminating was now bringing harm down on everyone else. Far more effective."
"Sometimes you frighten me, Lord Isaac. I thought that since you're human yourself, you'd at least try to see things from a human perspective."
"Being the same species doesn't mean we're all the same. Odd ones exist somewhere. It just so happens this particular odd one is in charge of the West. And you're an odd one yourself, Lumina—you like this human so much you came to me of your own free will and have been helping me for nearly ten years now."
Lumina flushed so hard the color reached her ears and shrieked.
"W-w-what…! When did I ever say I work here because I like you, Lord Isaac?! I simply judged this to be the most efficient course of action for reclaiming the rights of our discriminated West! This is sexual harassment!"
Bang!
Lumina slammed a massive stack of documents onto my desk and huffed.
"I'm taking the rest of the day off! Every single one of these documents needs your approval by end of day, so review and process them yourself!"
Then she slammed the door and left.
I stared gloomily at the mountain of paperwork and asked Kraktore, who was still servicing his minigun in the corner.
"Was I a little too hard on her?"
He looked at me with pure pity and shook his head.
"Anyone who heard that just now would call it sexual harassment, Great Chieftain."
"Damn it… Kraktore, if you happen to have any interest in paperwork—"
"Oh no! Looks like the gun's malfunctioning! I'd better go see the dwarves! Good luck, Great Chieftain!"
Kraktore snatched up his minigun and fled the office at top speed, leaving me to wrestle with the stack Lumina had abandoned.
I really shouldn't have teased her.
About two hours into my miserable struggle with the documents, a green-haired avian woman opened the fifth-floor office window from the outside and climbed in.
It was Abella, leader of the Birdmen.
"Hi, Lord Isaac. What are you up to?"
"Processing the work Lumina dumped on me and ran."
"Busy? There's something you should see."
"Unless it's truly important, later."
"It seems pretty important? I just caught an imperial messenger bird in the sky. Here—the letter."
"What?"
Abella's legs were not the human ones I usually saw; they had transformed into raptor claws, a change that only occurred when she exerted herself. Clutched in her sharp talons was a large messenger bird, normally sleek with glossy feathers—now bloodied all over, a great many of its plumage torn out, looking thoroughly miserable.
"Don't tell me you hunted an imperial messenger bird."
"I didn't hunt it. I ran into it in the sky earlier, and this little bastard's attitude was so foul I had to teach it some manners."
"Peep! Peep!"
The bird flapped its wings madly and screeched. With so many feathers already ripped out, the violent thrashing sent loose plumage swirling through the office.
Abella heard the peeping, and her pretty face twisted into something vicious.
"Shut up! A chick your age, where did you learn manners like that… Lord Isaac, did you hear what this brat just said? Hey, so what if you're an imperial messenger bird? You think I don't know the breeding pens are full of replacements for the likes of you? I could kill you right here, no one the wiser, and say an eagle got you on the way. Nobody would know."
Abella tightened her raptor talons as she delivered the death threat.
"PEEEEEEEEEEEEP!!!"
As the claws sank into its body, the bird screamed and went into convulsions.
"Abella, I don't speak bird. And let that thing go. If it actually dies, manufacturing an excuse will be a pain. At minimum we need proof it left here alive."
"Aha, so once we confirm the letter was delivered safely and we received it, after that I can do whatever I want with it?"
"Something like that."
"Ehehehe… Did you hear that? Try saying what you said earlier again."
"Pee… peee…"
Under Abella's death threats, the bird's spirit finally broke and its swagger collapsed.
I read the letter's contents and snorted.
The central imperial court—how was their thinking identical to Harth's?
"Unbelievable."
"What's it say?"
"Not something to discuss just yet. Abella, go fetch Lumina and Kraktore for me, would you? And… tell Lumina this isn't a joke—that it's because of a very important letter from the capital."
"…? Got it."
Abella switched her grip on the imperial messenger bird from talons to hands, withdrawing her power so her legs returned to ordinary human form, then headed out into the corridor.
A short while later, Abella returned with Lumina and Kraktore in tow.
"What is it, Lord Isaac? It's only been a few hours since I told you I was taking the day off."
"I'll give you tomorrow off instead—just listen for now. The capital has sent a mediation letter. Because I declared I would stop paying tribute of luxury goods to the imperial court, they're telling us not to implement any new policies rashly, to stand by for a while, and to discuss and coordinate with the person they're sending. Care to guess who that person is?"
"Is the Crown Prince coming or something?"
I shook my head at Lumina's question.
"It's Eleanor."
"…!"
Lumina, Kraktore, and Abella all flinched, and their expressions soured in short order.
"That filthy harlot is coming here? Just thinking about how we were exploited because of that woman…"
"I've heard she bewitches people with her looks and receives a ridiculous number of gifts. Word is they even made a Tsunami Stone here in the South and offered it up. The dwarves nearly foamed at the mouth—asking how anyone could give something so precious as a mere gift for a woman."
"They once pulled out Birdmen claws to make ornaments for her. The feline tribes, the tigerfolk… everyone got the same treatment."
When the North, East, and South had been hauling every treasure they had to Eleanor, the West—then known only as barren land—had nothing of value to offer. And so, to demonstrate loyalty to the imperial court, my parents had driven the demi-humans harder and squeezed them further.
Eventually a rebellion broke out among demi-humans who could no longer endure it, and my parents died. So even though I had never held any particularly deep affection for them as parents, Eleanor was, by her mere existence, something like an indirect enemy of my parents.
Of course, the reason I disliked Eleanor was not that. It was because if left alone, she would strip the empire bare down to its foundation pillars.
The imperial court was probably calculating that since I had never seen Eleanor in person, the moment I laid eyes on her I would fall head over heels like every other Archduke, bureaucrat, the Emperor, and the Crown Prince—drooling, ready to hand over my liver and gallbladder…
If I fall for Eleanor and surrender every interest and privilege, they'll seize that moment to snatch all the West's wealth for themselves. I don't care for the scheme one bit.
From the moment I had once said Eleanor needed to be removed, the empire had isolated me in the West and cut off every form of support, trying to starve us out.
Until the West was developed and amassed enormous wealth, the empire had not even treated us as a frontier—they had treated us like a foreign country.
And now that those interests looked tempting, they wanted to pull the same dirty tricks as Harth.
I don't care for the imperial court, and I don't care for Eleanor either.
Naturally I will not grant a single thing the court wants—and while I'm at it, I'll take this chance to slash Eleanor's standing as well.
I spent what free time I had before her arrival plotting how to screw over both the imperial court and her.
Then, about ten days later.
"The train from the imperial capital is arriving!"
Eleanor had arrived in the South.