Not Young Master—Senior
“Nnngh!”
Making some thoroughly undignified noise, I pushed myself up from where I’d been lying. The sofa was soft enough, sure, but it still couldn’t hold a candle to the bed I normally slept in. My body felt a little stiff as a result, and I’d woken earlier than usual.
Morning sunlight was just starting to pour in through the window, and before long it fell across my master, who was still sound asleep in the bed. I quietly approached her side. Careful not to wake her, I first reached out and touched her tail.
…Soft. Really, ridiculously fluffy.
Her tail gave a little swish. Next I moved my hand to her ears, stroking those plush cat ears for a moment.
“Haht!”
She made a strange little sound and flinched, so I yanked my hand back at once.
That scared the hell out of me!
She hadn’t woken up… right? What even was that just now? Her tail had been swaying so invitingly that I’d just wanted to touch it. You know how, when you see a cat or a dog, you get this overwhelming urge to pet them? It was something like that.
Anyway, I pretended nothing had happened and headed for the bathroom to wash up. The sound of water eventually woke my master, and another noisy day began in earnest.
“Louis, Young Master!”
I turned around and found Lucy standing there.
“Ah, Lady Lucy! It’s been a while!”
Her complexion, after not seeing her for so long, was… honestly not good at all. With everything that had happened to her family, of course it wouldn’t be. And judging by how the students in our class were treating Felice, Lucy was probably getting a similar amount of grief—maybe not quite as bad, but still.
I suspected there was another reason for her state as well, though I couldn’t exactly come out and ask her about it.
“I’m so sorry I only came to find you now. I wanted to talk to you right away, but…”
I waved her off. It was obvious enough. The countess had probably blocked her again. Formal apologies and the like had already been handled at the head-of-house level, after all.
We talked for a while. Most of it consisted of me stopping her from apologizing over and over. What was Lucy supposed to do about something the countess had decided?
I asked her casually, “Things with the family… they’re pretty difficult, aren’t they?”
I had already washed my hands of the Ansberg count family completely—except for Lucy—but the chairman had publicly praised my contributions in the process of everything falling apart, so it still nagged at me a little.
Not that the countess didn’t bring that on herself.
Lucy just gave a weak smile and said she was fine. “We’re still receiving help from other houses, though. Oh—last time, even the Red Magic Tower sent support funds.”
“The Red Magic Tower?” I asked, puzzled.
“Yes. Senior Veronica Eltwin said to use it for relief for the people of the territory…”
That genuinely surprised me. Veronica had done that?
We wrapped up the conversation without digging further.
“Oh, Young Master Louis. We’re both academy students now, so you don’t have to treat me so formally.”
She said it was fine to be casual with her, but something about the way she said it felt more like she was asking me to drop the titles. I nodded.
Then she asked, cheeks faintly pink, “Then… would it be all right if I called you Senior?”
I found myself nodding before I could think. “Y-yeah…”
Her face lit up at my answer. “Then I’ll see you next time, Senior!”
I watched her retreating back and sank into thought. The bit about Veronica had been unexpected, but more than that—
Yeah, I was probably right about her. Still, if I push too hard and mess it up, it’ll be a disaster…
For now, I decided to just keep an eye on how things developed with Lucy.
A fair amount of time had passed since the semester began. A lot had… well, not really happened. More accurately, plenty of things had happened—they just all turned out to be trivial. “Trivial” by the standards of demon king invasions and saving the world, of course. To me they were plenty irritating.
As for the matter of swapping out the Hero… I still hadn’t made any real progress. Classes, training with my master, training with Leonhardt on top of that, and digging through the library until I thought I was going to die of exhaustion—and I still hadn’t turned up a single useful lead.
The other thing that kept getting under my skin was Felice Ansberg. Not that she was doing anything. If anything, she sat there in silence with the hollow, haunted eyes of someone already dead. The problem was everyone else.
After the chairman’s revelations at the funeral, her fall from grace had been inevitable. The academy students I’d dealt with so far might not drop their prejudices against me because of this, but they would jump at the chance to tear Felice down faster than anyone. The bullying aimed at her was vicious and relentless—enough to make the way they’d cursed me behind my back look like nothing. They tore into her and her entire family in the same breath. A few students from houses that had always resented the Ansbergs even stood in front of her and sneered about her father. Beaten by a mere gargoyle? Didn’t you kill him yourself?
Even I, who held no fond feelings for Felice, thought it was excessive. I wondered whether she could endure it. Of course she couldn’t. The times I happened to catch her crying made it clear she was anything but fine. That didn’t mean I went out of my way to comfort her, though.
I turned my head slightly and looked toward her desk. It was covered in graffiti again today. Without even looking I knew it was all mockery aimed at her. The sight put me in a foul mood, because the exact same thing had been done to me at the start of last year. The game might have skipped over it, but there had never been a scene of Louis Wallenstein getting that treatment. Why had something that never happened in the original happened to me? The answer came surprisingly easily once I thought about it.
The original Louis Wallenstein had been such an unchecked, out-of-control bastard that no one knew what he might do if they crossed him. The Wallenstein house was already ruined, sure—but a man with nothing left to lose is the most dangerous kind. And purely in terms of rank, there weren’t that many people higher than Louis Wallenstein to begin with. Imperial counts weren’t exactly common.
Compared to that trashy original, I had been far too well-behaved, so of course they tried it. When one of the ones snickering at me over a desk full of graffiti got that desk lifted and smashed down on him, the incidents stopped. The whispering behind my back only got worse, of course.
And now Felice was going through the exact same thing. I didn’t particularly care what happened to her, and I no longer had any sense of obligation to step in for her sake. But the fact that they were doing to her something that had once been done to me still left a bad taste in my mouth.
“Heh, look at that face.”
A few students laughed at Felice. Her already gloomy expression cracked; she looked ready to cry. The others weren’t about to miss that. She bit down hard on her lip and silently began wiping away the graffiti. The moment she finished, the students started writing on the desk again right in front of her. Even watching it happen, Felice couldn’t even manage to tell them to stop.
My master disliked Felice after hearing my side of things, but even she muttered under her breath, “That… might be a little much.”
I honestly agreed. Especially the one leading the pack of mockers—that bastard had done the exact same thing to me last year. My mood turned black in an instant.
I stood up and walked slowly toward Felice’s desk. She was still trying to clean it while the students stood around her, snickering as they scrawled insults across the surface.
“P-please… stop…”
Felice’s voice was barely a whisper.
“Hahaha!”
“Listen to her talk!”
“Hey, she said stop!”
Her plea just became more material for them to laugh at. I slipped in among the cackling group.
“That’s hilarious… huh?”
“Yeah. Looks pretty fun.”
The students eyed me warily. Ever since my match with Leo, they’d been even more careful around me. Felice looked up at me with those sad eyes of hers. She probably thought I’d come to join in on mocking her. Her lips parted a few times, but in the end no words came out.
Looking at her like that, I—
Bang!
“Hey. You still haven’t learned your lesson from last time.”
Bang, bang!
“PTSD’s kicking in. PTSD. You getting this, asshole?”
Bang, bang!
“After they did this to me last time I got trauma so bad I still can’t eat properly. Yeah?”
Bang, bang!
With every word I slammed the bastard’s head into Felice’s desk. Blood from his nose soon covered the graffiti nicely. I shook him by the hair and said, “Let’s keep this kind of crap in moderation, yeah?”
Good. This was a far more gentlemanly solution than last time when I’d smashed him with the desk. This time I’d smashed him into the desk. If any trouble came of it, maybe I’d just ask the chairman for a favor.
The other students hauled the guy up and fled in an instant. In the end, only Felice and I were left in the corner of the classroom.
“……”
Felice’s lips moved again, but every time she tried to speak she hesitated. I wasn’t curious, and I had no desire to wait.
“Tch.”
The look in her eyes—disbelief mixed with what almost seemed like emotion—irritated me, so I clicked my tongue and headed back to my seat.
“Wait…”
It was the first time Felice had spoken to me since the funeral. I ignored her.