The Club and the Self-Proclaimed Imperial Princess (1)
They say Trinity Academy was rife with conflict among its students.
Real, tangible social rank. The presence or absence of wealth and factional backing. Contempt and segregation aimed at particular departments. All of these factors wove together into a tangled web of strife, rendering the Academy's founding ideal of equality all but meaningless.
It was only natural. Cram opposite extremes into one place and they're bound to clash. Gathering commoners and prideful nobles together without distinction made the discord inevitable.
And this time, that inevitable arrow was pointed at me.
"The guy who was with Lily yesterday. I looked into him."
One of them pushed up his glasses with a finger and slapped a crumpled stack of papers onto the desk.
The students gathered around passed the dossier among themselves, examining it closely.
"A commoner, and an orphan. Doesn't look like he has money, either."
From the looks of it, they were trying to determine whether I was someone they could mess with or not. After all, it wouldn't do to lay into a guy without a background check and then discover, too late, that the supposed street urchin was actually a duke's youngest son. Wait, he's the son of a Duke?!—that sort of situation.
To be fair, their homework wasn't bad. They probably had a friend with connections inside the Academy administration. But there were two things they'd missed.
First: the records I'd submitted to the Academy were falsified. I'd gotten everything approved through Muriel's puppet, which meant that even though the documents were riddled with lies, the administration accepted them at face value. Granted, the part about me actually being an orphan was true enough.
Second: that I was, in fact, loaded. Combine the money from selling the Paternity Test Kits on the black market with the revenue from the Air Conditioners, and I was sitting on a rather considerable sum for a private individual.
And lastly—
That young master of a Count's house, sitting there at the top of their little hierarchy. I happened to be holding his weakness in the palm of my hand.
"He looked like he had some money when I saw him eating yesterday. Turns out that wasn't it, huh?"
"Probably just posturing to impress people."
So they were treating me exactly like that guy I'd met at the coffeehouse before.
This makes me angry!
Though I'll admit, the part about me trying to impress Lily left no room for rebuttal. But still—this makes me angry!
"That Lily bitch, turning Luke down flat when he proposed, so why is she hanging around with this guy?"
A brief silence settled over the group.
Why, you ask? Because he's hideous, obviously. That, or she caught a whiff of his rotten, festering core and realized what a genuinely rotten piece of work he was.
Either way, the reason was plain as day. And yet everyone else kept their mouths shut, wary of poking that particular hornet's nest and ruffling the wrong feathers.
Amid the chilled atmosphere, the bespectacled one—ever the careful observer—spoke up. "You know what they say. Birds of a feather. Do those two really match in caliber?"
"Oh, true, fair point."
His classmates rallied around him as if they'd been waiting for an opening. Then Luke, the Count's heir who had been sitting quietly until now, finally opened his mouth.
"A commoner, and a beggar at that. He's bottom-tier trash, plain and simple. Scum like that should learn his place."
Luke was clearly trying to make it known that he wasn't just venting his frustration at having been rejected by Lily. Even so, it came across as nothing but an excuse.
"Doesn't seem like he understands what kind of place this Academy is yet. Someone ought to teach him."
"Yeah."
Well, it seemed I'd heard everything worth hearing. I rose from the shadowed corner where I'd planted myself.
Screeeeech.
The chair's legs scraped across the floor, announcing my presence. Heads turned toward me—heads that had assumed they were alone.
"What the hell is he doing here? How long has he been sitting there?"
"Looks like he was eavesdropping. Creepy bastard."
Unlike the others, who kept up their swagger, the one at the center of it all—the Count's heir, Luke—did not.
"You—you're that mage...! How are you still alive...?!"
Luke's eyes went wide as if he'd seen a ghost, and he looked ready to collapse on the spot.
"Hey, is that the guy you were all talking about?!"
"Huh? Uh, yeah. Why, what's wrong?"
The fact that he was involved in some kind of relationship with his own mother, the Countess, had yet to become public knowledge. The rumor mill in high society only churned out whispers that the Countess had been unfaithful, nothing more.
But that truth could come to light at any moment—by my hand. And the Count knew it, too. Why else would he have offered me a fortune in hush money, nearly threatening me in the process?
The real reason the Count hadn't simply made me disappear was that I was a mage of unknown affiliation—and because so long as I, the living proof of his wife and son's relationship, remained around, he could one day wield the Countess and her family like puppets on a string.
Which meant that to Luke—who knew none of this—I must have seemed like a vengeful spirit. The Count had surely told him he'd "handled it," and Luke had clearly interpreted handled it as had the bastard killed and silenced.
I quietly raised a finger to my lips. A threat in spirit only, really—an empty gesture meaning, if you don't want your secret getting out, leave me be.
I couldn't tell whether he understood my intent, but Luke pressed his lips into a tight line and nodded his head up and down furiously.
"I've changed my mind. You lot, stay quiet...!"
"Why all of a sudden?"
"Don't ask questions! If I say stay quiet, you stay quiet! And don't you dare touch Lily Elphin, either!"
After barking his warning at the group, Luke turned his eyes toward me, as if to ask, Is that enough for you?
I gave him a small nod. Only then did a trace of color return to his face. He flopped back into his seat and muttered something along the lines of how the hell is that bastard still alive? while scratching at his head with both hands.
"Hm. Well, that worked itself out nicely."
Lucky me. Who would have guessed that the ringleader of Lily's classroom tormentors was the Count's own heir?
Before long, Lily arrived at the lecture hall as well. She was scanning the room, clearly hunting for the emptiest spot she could find, when our eyes met.
I waved and greeted her with a friendly nod, and she answered with a tiny, self-conscious flutter of her hand before shuffling over in quick little steps. She set down her bag, sat beside me, scooted her hips over close, and cupped a hand around her mouth to whisper.
"I know it's kind of rude to ask, but... do you think we could move to a different seat? The kids in the back are going to pick on me."
"Ah, don't worry about that anymore. It's fine now."
Lily gave me a look of pure disbelief—but from the moment class began until it ended, no. Even after it ended, all the way until the instant we walked out of the lecture hall, the students who usually tormented her tormented every commoner except her. She looked more bewildered by it than anything.
"What on earth did you do?"
Lily asked as we walked side by side down the corridor after class.
What did I do? Honestly? Nothing, if you're being strict about it. The Count's heir, Luke, had simply gotten scared of me all on his own. Not that I could exactly explain why he'd been scared.
So I'd done nothing, and I had nothing to explain—but then again, if you wanted to split hairs, wasn't this all thanks to me? Hence, the words that left my mouth:
"You may thank me at any time."
A man who demands gratitude for any service rendered, however small. A man who could never understand why anonymous donor angels insist on hiding their identities. That, dear reader, is me.
Why hide? A little thanks does a man good.
"People don't usually just tell you to thank them, you know."
"Well, I'm not your average man."
"I think I'm starting to get a picture of what kind of person you are."
Lily laughed awkwardly. "...Thanks."
And then, as we walked, she slipped the rest out casually, as though it had just occurred to her.
"I really want to focus in lectures, you see. I don't know if you noticed, but I kind of need the scholarship money."
Her expression had brightened noticeably. Before, she'd kept her eyes glued to the ground, afraid of meeting anyone's gaze—maybe today she was simply too busy looking at me to bother.
"Plus, I actually got a breather for once. Normally I'd be getting the cold shoulder all the way until I got back to the dorm."
"Glad to hear it."
"It is, isn't it."
The corner of Lily's mouth curled up, just a little.
"That son of a bitch mage...!"
With nowhere to direct his fury, Luke took it out on a perfectly innocent row of street trees. His kicks sent the branches swaying, and leaves came raining down in a whispering shower. The eyes of passing students flicked toward the commotion—then scattered just as quickly under the glare of his stare.
"If it weren't for that Paternity Test Kit or whatever it's called, he'd be nobody. And that nobody is blackmailing me?"
The ultimate humiliation—being jerked around by a commoner orphan—sent his blood boiling. Because of that man, his father had beaten him within an inch of his life. Because of that man, he'd had to swallow the indignity of kneeling and weeping and begging for mercy.
What infuriated him even more was the corollary: he couldn't touch Owen precisely because of all that. If he ever crossed Owen and the man spilled every last secret from his lips, his father would show no mercy. A divorce from his mother would be a given, and he would surely sever ties with Luke himself. Worst case, he might have them all put to death for staining the family name.
Of course, if it came to that, his father wouldn't let Owen off the hook either. But what good was the death of a commoner orphan as consolation? No—so he had to keep still.
"Goddamn it!"
Luke kicked the street tree one last time and was just turning to leave—
"The Paternity Test Kit?"
A head popped out of the bushes without so much as a rustle of warning. Luke stumbled backward in shock, caught his heel, and crashed down onto a bench. Bloodshot fury flooded his eyes at the sight of the girl's flustered, graceless scramble—but she paid it no mind whatsoever and simply fired off her question.
"A mage? A nobody, if not for the Paternity Test Kit? You... do you know the mage who invented it?"
She was obsessed with the Paternity Test Kit. And it was all because of what her mother had always told her:
Your father is the Emperor of this Empire. He fell for another woman and abandoned me. I am this Empire's Empress, and you are its one and only Imperial Princess.
She had dismissed it as the ravings of a madwoman. Her mother, to put it kindly, had never been quite right in the head.
But then one day—on a day when the Emperor processed through the streets, on the day she happened to look up and saw that he was the spitting image of herself—on the day she felt an inexplicable pull toward him, she had no choice but to believe her mother. No choice but to think it.
Ah. I really am the Imperial Princess.
And so.
She had believed herself to be the Imperial Princess, ever since.
"What's your problem? Aren't you going to get lost?"
"...Yeah."
But for now, she was nothing more than a lowly commoner student.