First Friend
If you couldn't raise your child properly, then you should be the one to bleed for it.
For the record, Count Merdin was no ordinary civilian who'd never trained a day in his life.
Plenty of people knew him only as a count who'd made his fortune in mining, but anyone who was anyone knew he could hold his own in a fight. He had never reached the stage of Blooming, true—but if he had abandoned the family business and devoted himself purely to the sword, he might well have gotten there. He had that kind of talent.
And the fact that he hadn't Bloomed… meant I had more than enough room to work with.
My reason for dragging things all the way to a duel in a place like this was simple.
I wanted to swing a sword at this boring ball.
And as luck would have it, there were quite a few people around of roughly my own skill level.
Anyone who could read my true intentions would probably write me off as insane.
They'd be right.
From the day the sword claimed me, I had been little better than a sword maniac. And what else would a sword-crazed woman want to do, if not swing a blade?
Conveniently, I had an opponent of roughly equal skill who was practically drowning in rage directed at me… the perfect setup for a proper fight.
"Sister, have you lost your mind?"
"I'm perfectly sane, Ragnar. And you need to start watching your own behavior. How little must they think of you if they're running their mouths about you so freely?"
That was all I had to say to Ragnar, who was staring at me with a look of pure disbelief.
In the past I might have let it slide. Not anymore.
Around us, the guests wore nothing but expressions of delighted interest. Wasn't that half the reason they came to balls in the first place—to harvest a little dopamine from tearing someone down? And now a scandal far beyond ordinary gossip had erupted right in front of them. They had every reason to be thrilled.
I glanced toward Adelaide and the Emperor. Both of them looked thoroughly satisfied, their bearing making it clear they had no objection to a duel.
Come to think of it, hadn't the nobles of the Lumière faction—Count Merdin among them—been pushing back against the Emperor lately?
Fine by me.
With the Emperor and the Princess's tacit permission already given, all that remained was for me to swing my sword.
Preparations for the duel moved with remarkable speed.
What was a duel, after all? A barbaric method of proving you were right by crossing blades and leaving a lasting wound on your opponent. People dressed it up with talk of chivalry and honor, but at its core a duel simply meant: I am stronger than you, therefore I am right. That was why so many of them ended with one party dead or maimed.
Heated arguments between people so often escalated into duels that a fair number of nobles had been dying from them—enough that the Imperial family had eventually imposed formal rules. Combatants wore armor, and the moment either party took a critical wound, the Empire's court mages would intervene to heal them. Something like that, if I remembered correctly.
So I didn't have to worry about killing anyone.
I had declared the duel with such confidence because I was certain I could win—easily, even.
Everyone else's reaction, on the other hand, was that I had gone mad. The woman who had always lived as dry and colorless as dust had suddenly slapped a rival noble's daughter, then challenged that girl's father to a duel. But underneath the shock ran a current of pure entertainment. Of course the dopamine was flowing. They might get to watch the eldest daughter of Berce make a spectacular fool of herself—or they might get to watch Count Merdin get thoroughly dismantled by a young lady who, as far as anyone knew, had never so much as held a sword. Either picture would make for excellent amusement.
Once I had my armor on, I looked over Count Merdin's stance and felt a smile tug at the corner of my mouth.
Yes—I could feel it at once. He was genuinely skilled. If he hadn't been burdened with a count's responsibilities, how far might he have climbed? A pity, really.
But that was that, and this was this.
He had reined in his fury and was studying me with cold composure, as if checking whether I had some hidden trick up my sleeve. His movements suggested he had chosen to take the defensive, waiting to see how I would come at him.
I stepped forward slowly.
A razor-sharp presence radiated from Count Merdin.
It felt good.
That blade-like aura prickling across my skin. Imagining the arc the sword was about to draw. The feel of my toes pressing into the floor. Mapping the coming trajectory of the blade in my mind. Anticipating how he would meet that strike—all of it was pure pleasure.
I swung.
My target was his collarbone. Even through armor, the heavy impact of a blade transferred into the collarbone could do serious damage.
Count Merdin read my trajectory with a sharp eye and tried to bat the descending edge aside with the flat of his own sword. A keen counter—if I had charged in with pure aggression, it would have left me in a bad spot. For a man of his heavy build, the strike was astonishingly fast.
But I had already read his movement.
Before his blade could even touch mine, I twisted my wrist just enough to let his sword slide past. Then I caught his edge on my crossguard, wrenched the trajectory aside, and laid my blade against his throat.
The match was over in a single exchange.
Count Merdin stared at me as if he couldn't believe what had just happened.
"Will you concede defeat?"
"…I lose."
With a sword at his throat, the victory was absolute. The Count seemed to understand that any further stubbornness would only cost him more, and he accepted the result without protest.
The spectators watching the duel could not contain their shock. Count Merdin's skill was reasonably well known—but more than that, they had just realized that mine was anything but ordinary.
Once the commotion had settled somewhat, I felt countless eyes boring into me from every direction.
"When did she even learn the sword…?"
"She's from a sword family—surely she picked it up somehow? No, more than that—she just beat Count Merdin…"
And so on. Under normal circumstances, a single slap alone would have been enough to bury me socially. But the other side had been so blatant in their slander that no real negative opinion seemed to be forming against me.
The reaction wasn't bad, but the perfume in the air was giving me a headache, and I was about to slip away when I felt someone approaching.
"An impressive duel, Lady Berce."
Adelaide Drakar.
She was looking at me with eyes full of open interest.
Why is this woman taking an interest in me?
"I apologize for causing a disturbance on such a sacred birthday, Your Highness. It should have been a day of nothing but joy."
"Oh, don't worry about something so trivial. It was entertaining."
Her eyes curved into crescents.
Black hair and silver eyes that looked as though the galaxy itself had been set into them—beauty enough to blind anyone who looked too long. Classic Rofan villainess. These days even the villainesses couldn't afford to be plain, so their looks had left the celestial realm behind and punched straight through into outer space.
Why on earth had Ragnar turned down a beauty like this?
Well… her personality was completely willful, and she had a cruel streak now and then. That might have been it.
But something about the situation felt off.
At this point in the original story, Adelaide's interest should have been fixed on Ragnar…
Wait. Thinking about it—hadn't today's little incident originally been something Ragnar went through?
The original plot finally surfaced in my memory. Maybe… I had just stolen a scene that was supposed to be his.
"I never knew the Lady of Berce was this kind of person. I'm seeing all sorts of new sides of you today."
She regarded me from behind her fan.
"Is that so?"
"Yes. I used to think you were dull and uninteresting. I've changed my mind."
With that, Adelaide suddenly seized my hand and started leading me somewhere.
"Shall we talk for a moment, just the two of us?"
"What? W-wait a second—"
The place she took me was the terrace.
The moment we arrived, Adelaide spoke.
"I'll be direct. Will you be my friend?"
Her eyes sparkled.
"How could I possibly dare…"
"Is the House of Berce so obscure that 'dare' even applies? The Imperial family holds Berce's loyalty in very high regard, you know."
"Then I'll be direct as well. What exactly about me did you like?"
I looked Adelaide straight in the eye as I asked.
There were exactly two people in the Imperial family you should never lower your guard around just because they approached you warmly—and those two were the First Princess, Adelaide, and the First Prince, Kaizen Drakar.
"That attitude, right there. You don't lower your eyes even when facing me. There's a confidence in the way you carry yourself… and above all, that bold decisiveness—the way you cleanly punish the people who badmouth you. That's exactly the kind of person I like best."
Was that so…?
"Is that right?"
"Yes. From the moment you slapped Count Merdin's daughter, I decided I wanted to be your friend."
I turned it over in my mind. Was there any real downside to getting close to Adelaide?
At this point in the timeline, she hadn't blackened yet. And given her status as First Princess, becoming her friend would also raise my odds of becoming the Sword Saint's disciple. More than anything… if I stayed close to her, then even if Ragnar eventually got tangled up with the heroine Eleanor, I might be able to ignore all the useless male leads' advances without a second thought.
The deliberation didn't take long.
"I look forward to working with you, Your Highness."
"Doesn't 'Your Highness' sound a bit stiff between friends? Just use my name. Drop the formal speech, too. I'll do the same. Oh—and Bella sounds better than Bellatrix, so I'll just call you Bella, all right?"
"Yes… I mean, yeah. Looking forward to it, Adelaide."
"Looking forward to it, Bella."
The expression on Adelaide's face as she said it was exactly like a well-fed cat settling into a thoroughly satisfying nap.