Nightmare (4)
Bang!
“This is ridiculous! To commit such a barbaric act against a single cadet from the Lutra dimension is simply unthinkable!”
In Lutra’s faculty office, Cartesia was pounding her fist hard against the dean’s beloved desk as she protested to him.
And for the first time in his life, the dean was seeing Princess Cartesia vent her feelings at someone like this.
At the moment, Cartesia looked nothing like her usual self, the one who treated everyone else with such cold, almost indifferent detachment.
“Princess… no, Cartesia. You can’t do this here. No, you mustn’t. Whatever the case, you’re a cadet and I’m the vice dean in charge of Lutra’s students, so it’s a little difficult for you to chew me out like this…”
“If you hadn’t made such an absurd order to a mere cadet, I wouldn’t have had to come here in the first place!”
Unable to contain her fury any longer, Cartesia’s face flushed bright red as she glared at the dean with all her might.
“I heard everything! You’re planning to have Sian duel his own younger sister, aren’t you? How is that something you’d do to a single cadet?”
On the surface, the duel between Sian and his younger sister, Eli, seemed perfectly fair.
After all, both Sian and Eli were first-year cadets who had only just enrolled in Lutra.
But Cartesia knew all too well that this duel was monstrously unfair to Sian.
His younger sister, Eli, had entered Lutra on the strength of nothing but her talent for the sword.
In the field of swordsmanship alone, she was the kind of prodigy who would be hard-pressed to lose to anyone in the world.
Even if Sian gave it everything he had, there was no telling whether he could beat Eli head-on. And on top of that, Eli was his younger sister.
Knowing Sian’s personality as she did, Cartesia was certain he wouldn’t be able to bring himself to swing his sword at Eli with full force.
Because the Sian she knew was a hopelessly good person… an idiot.
“I won’t accept it, no, I can’t accept it! I will never accept this duel!”
“P-please, calm down and hear me out first, Lady Cartesia. There’s a clear reason we proposed such a duel to Cadet Sian!”
At the dean’s clumsy excuse, Cartesia narrowed her eyes, then silently stared at him.
It was her permission for him to spit out whatever excuse he had, and see whether she’d bother listening.
“W-well, you see, Lady Cartesia. Arranging a duel between Cadet Sian and Cadet Eli was… our own form of leniency, a compromise. We did want to accommodate Student Sian as well, but… there was nothing more we could do!”
“...Leniency? Accommodate him?”
Cartesia made a dumbfounded face at the shamelessness of those words coming from the dean’s mouth.
So a man in the dean’s position at Lutra’s very own academy had “accommodated” a student by forcing him into a duel he had no chance of winning?
“You know this too, don’t you, Lady Cartesia? Lately there have been all sorts of rumors circulating about Student Sian. For example, that he entered Lutra through some underhanded method, or that he was so hungry for power he even sold out his own younger sister to gain unfair advantage…”
“Those are all baseless rumors!”
“And yet there’s no proof that they aren’t rumors, is there? Isn’t that right?”
At those words, Cartesia clenched her teeth.
Of course she didn’t believe any of those rumors about Sian.
Anyone who spoke with Sian even a little would understand how much he cared for his younger sisters, and personally, she was absolutely certain he was not the sort to be the subject of such filthy gossip.
That was why, even when Sian had been walking around lately with a strangely downcast look, she hadn’t once brought up the topic.
But other people didn’t know that side of him. No, they didn’t want to know, and they weren’t even interested.
To the other students, Sian was nothing more than a lowborn mercenary who’d grown up on the streets, and a lucky bastard who had gotten into Lutra “by chance” thanks to his talented younger sisters.
And when disgusting rumors like that started flying around, there was no way they wouldn’t spread quickly through the student body.
From their perspective, the rumor would have looked like something with plenty of evidence and proof behind it.
“Though it is a baseless rumor, everyone in Lutra has heard it by now. And there are even people who take it seriously. That’s because the people involved themselves haven’t said a word.”
“...What?”
So Sian hadn’t offered even a single defense, even though filthy rumors were circulating and falsely pinning a crime on him?
That idiot, seriously!
She knew, of course. Even if Sian had desperately gone around trying to explain himself, no one would have believed him.
She also knew he’d have kept his mouth shut for the sake of his sisters.
But that was one thing, and this was another. No matter how she looked at it, wasn’t it absurd to not utter a single word in defense against something he hadn’t done?
And those damn bitches are no different.
She had kept quiet for so long because Sian coddled them day after day as his “younger sisters,” but the truth was, Cartesia had never liked the women who called themselves his sisters.
The way they gave him a perfunctory greeting whenever they happened to run into him at Lutra, as though they couldn’t help it. The way they kept their mouths shut now that some bizarre rumor about the family was spreading, as though they had nothing to do with it. Everything about them.
“Of course, Lutra’s faculty doesn’t believe that malicious rumor. But that doesn’t mean we can simply ignore it. Lutra is a place that cultivates talent for the future of the Empire, so rumors of preferential admission or fraud must be avoided at all costs.”
That was… certainly true. The Imperial Family itself, Lutra’s greatest patron, would hardly welcome such nonsense.
“That is why we assigned such a task to him: to prevent those baseless rumors from spreading, and to prove that Student Sian did not enter through any kind of fraud. If he can defeat Cadet Eli head-on in a duel, then at the very least it will prove that he is fully qualified to be here.”
“Th-that may be true, but… this is still an unfair duel no matter how you look at it!”
“And in fact, this was a request that the Imperial Family specifically made to Lutra. They judged that anything less would not be enough to settle the matter. Student Sian may be young, but he was a mercenary who made quite a name for himself in the past.”
“...From the Imperial Family?”
At the dean’s words, Cartesia asked back in disbelief.
Impossible. Unless the situation had become enormous, the Imperial Family would not be so free as to intervene this quickly in a simple rumor of fraudulent admission involving one student at Lutra.
What possible reason could the Imperial Family have to get involved in an issue related to Sian…
Lobelia.
Suddenly, Cartesia remembered that her older brother Ricardo and Sian’s younger sister Lobelia were maintaining some kind of lover-like relationship.
...No way.
Impossible. However evil she might be, no younger sister would go so far as to set a trap for her own brother and shove him into it personally.
Of course, if it were Cartesia herself, she might not have bothered with a trap for Ricardo at all—she might have just shoved him off a cliff herself…
Damn it.
If Cartesia’s suspicion was right, then bickering with the dean here was useless.
The dean was nothing but a puppet, someone who didn’t even understand what it meant for the Imperial Family to issue such an order to Sian.
“...Understood. In other words, you’re saying that with your authority alone, there’s nothing you can do about the current situation surrounding Sian.”
“That’s right, Lady Cartesia. I’m just grateful you finally understand my position…”
“Excuse me.”
She quickly shut the door behind her and left the faculty office, then headed as fast as she could toward the place where Sian would likely be.
Her heart was already racing. No matter how she thought about it, this was a trap.
A trap aimed at Sian and Sian alone, one filled to the brim with malice.
Absolutely not.
This could not happen. And more than that, she could never accept it.
She couldn’t lose him like this, and she certainly hadn’t stayed by his side all this time just to watch something like this happen.
Hadn’t she sworn long ago that she would never lose him again in such a hollow, meaningless way—
“…Ah.”
And then she saw him.
Sian, speaking with someone at a distance.
“Sian!”
Cartesia hurried toward him, but before she could reach his side, she stopped short when she saw the woman talking to him turn toward her and offer a greeting.
“...That woman is.”
A woman of stunning beauty, with the same kind of haughty poise one might associate with nobility.
And at the same time, one of the women she believed to be responsible for all this.
Sian’s younger sister, the mage Letitia.