Unexpected Questions
Recently, while receiving constant help from Kyle, I realized one thing.
It was that I had raised him into an incredibly good man.
Even if it was inconvenient for him, he helped without a single harsh word, and he was so devoted to helping his servants.
Wouldn’t this make him an incredibly good man?
When I saw Kyle worrying about me to the point of discomfort, it felt strange. Was it because he looked at me with eyes full of guilt? It was an extremely weird feeling.
“Kyle… will he come in about an hour?”
At first I had assumed Louise or Elin would help me more. After all, Kyle was a prince. He wasn’t the type to assist a servant or nurse someone back to health. I figured he’d spend more time with his other friends.
But when Kyle insisted on helping me no matter what, I ended up staying with him almost the entire day.
Kyle had even woken up early to wait for me, and I had woken up earlier than usual to wait for him too.
We would sit together on the chair beside my bed and have a light breakfast.
At least he didn’t want to disturb me too much in the morning, so he joined me for breakfast in the room.
It was incredibly inconvenient given how sore my legs were.
If I hadn’t been injured, Kyle could have had a normal morning meal.
Instead of the light breakfast we had today, it would have been a proper one.
“Ugh…”
Still, I was incredibly grateful to Kyle.
He helped me bathe even though I could barely manage it alone after the bandages came off.
He also supported me every time I went to the bathroom, despite the pain in my legs.
It made me wonder if even a noble would treat a servant this well.
Anyway, I had raised Kyle into an incredibly good man.
“Haah… I wonder when he’ll come…”
With Kyle away at lessons, there was nothing left to do.
I had already read all the books I’d been given, and just being cooped up in the room all day made me bored.
Louise and Elin only came by once or twice a day, and they had already visited today.
So today they wouldn’t be coming again.
I would just wait for Kyle.
He always came to see me after his lessons.
His clothes often smelled faintly of sweat from how hard he had worked outside.
It was so thoughtful of him to come help me without even having time to bathe first.
And the scent of his sweat wasn’t unpleasant at all, so I even enjoyed it.
“Speaking of which, I haven’t been smelling that scent lately.”
The sweet fragrance I used to catch from Kyle occasionally had stopped coming through.
It had been nice to smell it.
Was it because of his perfume?
I wasn’t sure.
I didn’t know much about perfume or cosmetics.
“Hmm…”
No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t come up with an answer.
It wasn’t something I could figure out.
*
“Miss Sophia, what kind of place is the academy?”
“The academy…?”
While we were spending time together in the room, Kyle asked me that.
The academy…
It had been quite a chaotic place in many ways.
At least for me.
“I know you graduated from the academy, but I haven’t heard much about it.”
“Hmm…”
To be honest, I didn’t really want to talk about it.
Unlike the adventurers who were lively, fun, and a little crazy, those people were a bit… rough.
It wasn’t that bad in the lower grades, though.
“The academy is a place where many students with lots of inferiority complexes and pride come.”
“Really?”
“Straight up. They hide enormous inferiority complexes inside but show off enormous self-confidence on the outside.”
The students at the academy were mostly those who felt lacking in some way.
“The academy is a place that specializes in training maids and servants. You know that, right?”
“Yes. So Miss Sophia is a servant for now, too.”
“That’s right. It’s operated with that purpose in mind. And the students who come there to achieve that purpose rarely do so willingly.”
The special case of my mother suddenly sending me there was the exception.
Most were pushed there against their will.
“Most of them are from the very lowest class among nobles—those whose family power is so weak that they only have the name ‘noble’ or whose position within their family is weak.”
Among them, the ones who came because they lacked position were the biggest fools.
Thanks to those idiots, I had a really hard time.
“Imagine having the noble class but thinking you’re learning to be a servant or maid.”
Attending the academy required money.
It was a specialized field, after all.
Of course, finding cheap servants or maids wasn’t a problem.
But the higher the noble family, the more they wanted high-quality servants and maids.
And the academy was the place that produced those high-quality items.
“Nobles attend the academy to work as servants or maids for other nobles. They probably wouldn’t like that very much, would they?”
“That’s right. Because of pride.”
“That noble pride is the problem.”
Truly, I worried that nobles had been made arrogant by their confidence and self-esteem.
Of course, after meeting Kyle, I thought differently.
Anyway, that was how it was.
“The ratio of noble students to non-noble students is quite different from what you might expect. You need a certain amount of capital to pay for the academy.”
Thinking about it, I had no idea how my mother had sent me there.
Was our family actually rich?
“Anyway, those proud nobles gritted their teeth and spent time at the academy. Naturally, their stress only piled up.”
“Ah…”
“And there were a few weak points nearby. Commoners who weren’t even nobles at their level.”
People like me.
Especially me, I stood out a lot in their eyes.
“A commoner who scored higher than them, a commoner who received a lot of attention from the academy instructors, a commoner who was glaringly noticeable.”
They were really despicable.
If they had time to bully someone like that, they should have spent it studying instead.
I still don’t understand why they targeted me.
“Anyway, the academy is a place where nobles who harass commoners like me extremely heavily come.”
“…”
“The staff who work at our estate have been there for a long time, so they’re probably good people. They’re different from the fools who do those things at the academy.”
That was true.
The people who had bullied me were nothing like the proper servants and maids.
Thinking about the academy suddenly made me angry.
Thanks to that, I could momentarily forget the pain in my legs.
“Ah… I see.”
“I’m sorry for giving you an answer you didn’t expect.”
It was probably a completely different response from what Kyle had been thinking.
I knew that well too.
But I had decided to tell the truth anyway.
It was better to say the truth than to lie, in most cases.
“No, I’m glad you told me something I didn’t know.”
“Really…?”
That would be good.
I had been worried the atmosphere was getting bad because of my answers just now.
By suddenly criticizing nobles.
“Did you also… get bullied, Miss Sophia?”
“…”
Oh, damn.
This was how it turned out.
If I had known, I should have just let it slide.
After all that talk about telling the truth, I was about to lie.
How was I supposed to get out of this…?
“……”
“Miss Sophia?”
I thought about it.
Was it okay to explain the things that had happened at the academy?
My memories of it weren’t particularly good.
The reason my body felt so terrible was also because of that.
That was why, during my adventurer days, I had tortured myself trying to lose weight.
“Ha… Do you really want to hear it?”
“…Yes.”
Yeah, curiosity was a good thing.
It was better to know something than to know nothing.
Well, not knowing might be more pleasant, but still.
“To answer your question directly, yes. I was bullied. A lot.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I was a commoner who scored higher than them, I was friendly with the instructors, and when we commoners were together, I felt like I was the center of the group.”
It had just been casual talk while eating and resting together at the academy.
But I had felt that way.
I really don’t understand why I felt inferior about something like that.
Those were strange guys.
“That’s why they suddenly started bullying me. A commoner like me, who wasn’t even a noble.”
I didn’t know why they were bullying a commoner like me in the first place.
“They would curse behind my back, and when I was talking with other students, they would suddenly drag me away and pull my mouth open.”
It didn’t reach my body.
If it had, I would have been reported immediately and expelled from the academy.
That was why I couldn’t do anything about it either.
Just pulling my mouth open hadn’t been enough for expulsion.
“And as the years went by and the bullying got worse…”
I knew it was wrong to use those words with Kyle, but I couldn’t help it a little.
Was the thing I had been holding back bursting out now?
“When the grades went up and I started going through a slightly late second puberty, my chest began to swell. Thanks to that, the guys started bullying me over it a lot.
Because of that, among the nobles, they started thinking that having big breasts or big hips was a sin or something.
At first, I had thought that women with big breasts were attractive.
In my previous life, most of them were.
It had felt like one of the symbols of an attractive woman.
But thanks to those idiots, I learned that the world was a little different.
“From class time, starting with ‘it would be uncomfortable if my chest was big behind me,’ how much they messed with my body alone… really…”
“……”
“I’m sorry. That was a slip of the tongue.”
No matter how close I was to Kyle, this was too much.
Yeah, I had almost crossed a line.
Kyle was a noble too.
I couldn’t make a statement that crossed the line with such a Kyle.
I had already crossed the line a few times, but this was still not okay.
“Anyway, that’s how it was.”
Was it because I had crossed the line?
Kyle’s eyes turned slightly cold.
His usual warm blue eyes were now completely different.
“… I’m sorry. I got carried away for a moment.”
“No. You didn’t do anything wrong, Miss Sophia.”
Kyle changed his expression, looked at me, and smiled.
But Kyle’s eyes remained the same.
They were a little scary.
Enough to make my lower abdomen tremble for a moment.