Self-Confession
The knights pressed forward at the command. Since they were subduing civilians, they didn't bother to draw their swords.
“Noona, stay in the rear.”
I reached out to shield Aria as she pushed ahead of me, but she only stopped briefly, brushed my hand away, and spoke.
“I'm not so frail that I need you worrying over me.”
“But—”
Before I could tell her not to be needlessly stubborn, Aria pressed my head down with both hands, then hooked her leg around the neck of a vagrant sneaking up behind me and slammed him to the ground.
Where on earth had she learned to do that?
As I stared at her in a daze, she swept her platinum-blonde hair, tousled by the wind, behind her ear.
“There was never a knight to protect me. Not from the day I was born.”
That kind of self-mockery seemed to have been carved into her like a habit by now, so I stepped to her side and lifted her lightly into my arms.
“What are you—?!”
Chaeng!
“Th-that's impossible!”
The vagrant who had just been knocked down swung his sword in a flash, but thanks to my quick reaction, Aria escaped uncut. Rather than being alarmed that his attack had been dodged, the man's eyes went wide with sheer disbelief that a mere blade could not sever a human ankle.
I had spent decades pushing this body past its limits, tempered under the effects of rapid ascension—and the end of that road was not far off. If I took a wound from a bare lump of iron without even a layer of Aura, that would be the truly strange thing.
Thwack!
“Ugh!”
I drove my foot into his jaw, knocking the vagrant unconscious, then looked down at Aria in my arms with a faint smile.
“Do you really think you have none?”
“……Put me down.”
Whether she disliked being rescued or hated the smile on my face, I couldn't tell. Scowling, she pushed both hands against my chest and stepped down onto the ground.
Then she strode straight toward the knights at the front line, turned her head back, and looked at me. She said nothing, particularly. She simply tilted her chin forward, wordlessly telling me to hurry up and follow.
What could I possibly do with a princess who carried herself like the sole sovereign under heaven? I swallowed a wry laugh and walked after her.
Once Aria and I had fully joined the fray, the situation itself settled into a routine pattern.
“R-run!”
The vagrants belatedly realized something had gone terribly wrong and resolved to retreat, but with Aria there, even that route wasn't freely open to them.
Her magic blocked their path of escape with an almost glacial cleanliness. Cornered with no way forward or back, the remaining stragglers gnashed their teeth and flailed their weapons in desperation—but deciding none of it was worth invoking Thousandfold Suppression, I simply reached out with my bare hands.
They say a lion gives its all even when hunting a rabbit, but would the same hold true if the prey were an ant?
“Gwahk!”
I swept the legs out from under a vagrant swinging his sword at my side, snatched the blade spinning through empty air, and brought its hilt down on the skull of another attacker rushing me from behind.
'Is that all……'
And I had only subdued two. The knights, meanwhile, had already cleared out the rest as efficiently as I had, so I grabbed the napes of my two victims, handed them over to the knights restraining the others, invoked Self-Confession once more for a swift round of questioning, and spoke.
“Why are you doing this?”
“We need money!”
“Is that so?”
“If you're going to hand us over to the jurisdiction, then just do it!”
Since I'd never expected to hear the answers I wanted meekly from their mouths in the first place, I had already spread the power of Lingual Magic across the entire area. The word to apply was fixed.
⟨ Self-Confession ⟩
Before long, fragments of the truth began spilling colorfully from the mouths of the kneeling vagrants. To summarize briefly: they had been hired to raid merchant caravans; once an investigation was launched by the local jurisdiction, they would deliberately allow themselves to be caught, complete the job, collect their payment, and after a token execution procedure be given a false death and quietly spared.
But realistically—would anyone truly fake their executions and preserve those lives? The risk of information leaking would be enormous.
“How many casualties were there?”
“Four of the mercenaries guarding the other caravans are dead.”
“Then your executions are all but certain.”
A life can only be repaid with a life.
“We're returning to Baron Beara's territory.”
“H-haha! Wh-who do you think you are, making judgments like that! A mere merchant's brat!”
At that outburst, I turned my back indifferently and spoke.
“There is only one person in the entire Empire whose rank compels me to look up.”
Whether or not they grasped the meaning of that, I didn't particularly care. With my back turned, I asked the surviving merchants for the favor of a ride in their carriage—they likely wanted to repay their savior, and they had no doubt faintly noticed that I was someone of high station.
So as we rode toward Baron Beara's territory, Aria looked at me and spoke with what sounded like surprise.
“I thought you'd forgive them. Show them mercy.”
“Me?”
“They have their circumstances, don't they? They only did what they were hired to do. Probably on Baron Beara's orders.”
Did Aria take me for something of a paragon of virtue?
“I'm not that good a person.”
“……”
“I'm not magnanimous enough to go irresponsibly saving people on a whim.”
If they hadn't happened to be there, every merchant on that road would be dead. The hired mercenaries wouldn't have merely lost four men—they might have been wiped out entirely. Those vagrants had come armed, artifacts included.
And suppose I truly had been merciful and pardoned them. They would feel grateful for that one moment, and then go right on living their same pathetic, miserable lives.
Not everyone who is driven to the wall turns to crime. There are people who claw their way forward tooth and nail. By the time you think it's too late, it truly is too late—so to close the distance with those ahead of you, you need that much more sweat and struggle. But because it's hard, they give up, console themselves with the claim that their circumstances were simply unfair, and then shamelessly plunder other people's happiness. Why on earth would I show mercy to such people?
Real mercy would mean educating them so they never fell back into that life—and I had no leisure for that. Reach out a hand to a kitten left by the roadside out of cheap pity, and your scent clings to it; the mother cat then refuses to care for her own young.
So unless you intend to take responsibility for the whole, there is nothing more foolish than extending a hand out of paltry sympathy.
“Unless I can take responsibility for someone…… I don't save them. Maybe that's cold of me. You could say they're my subjects too, after all.”
If I can't take responsibility for someone, I don't save them.
Hearing Rohen's words, Aria gazed blankly at the scenery passing outside the carriage and thought quietly to herself.
Then what about me—how did he intend to take responsibility, holding my hand so stubbornly through all that despair when we were children?
Her throat felt a little tight. The question she wanted to ask was on the verge of spilling out right then and there, but she forced herself to swallow it and rested her chin on her hand.
The younger brother she was meeting after so long hadn't changed at all. He was still watching over her, unwavering, from exactly where he had always been.
For right now…… she thought this alone was enough.
The moment we returned to Baron Beara's territory, I headed straight for his mansion.
“What's going on?”
“Who knows. Maybe they all committed a crime together?”
With a crowd of bound prisoners being marched away, onlookers were watching us from the sides with curious eyes.
There was no longer any need to hide my face, so without pulling up my hood, I flicked a pre-written slip of paper to the mansion's butler, who had come hurrying out, breathless.
“Bring me the Baron.”
My habit of communicating in writing rather than speech. Seeing my distinctive silver hair, the butler before me apparently pieced together who I was, for his face went pale at once—he left me in the drawing room and sprinted off to fetch the Baron.
“Are you going to kill the Baron too?”
“We'll see.”
The crux of this affair was how many people were entangled in it. If more nobles were involved than I'd anticipated, then raising their taxes or banishing them to the frontier would likely be how it was handled. Unfortunately, I was not yet Emperor, so I had no authority to issue direct orders of punishment.
“To what do we owe the honor of Your Highness the Prince visiting such a shabby place?”
“Sit.”
“I'll be outside.”
Under normal circumstances, even as a prince, I was shown a measure of deference—but for the Baron before me, I couldn't be bothered to grant even that. I watched Aria leave through the door for a moment, then showed the Baron my writing.
“I came knowing everything. Why not cough it up yourself?”
The Baron's eyes darted about, and then his whole body flinched. And then—rather unexpectedly, instead of dancing around the matter, he obediently confessed his crimes to me.
With Mary's wedding coming up, I couldn't afford to waste my precious time loitering here, so I'd been prepared to invoke Self-Confession the moment he tried to shift blame. For things to go this smoothly was, oddly enough, unsettling.
That said, what mattered alongside the truth of this incident was how many more nobles were implicated, so I invoked Self-Confession and Conversation once more in rapid succession. Immediately after, as far more detailed crimes came pouring smoothly from his lips, I felt an unexpected emotion.
Because the quality of the offenses he'd committed was lower than I'd expected—vague enough that deciding on punishment felt awkward.
Granted, a man of his low rank probably never had the gall to attempt anything grander in the first place…… And yet precisely because of that, I found it strange: why had Baron Beara, who had only ever indulged in petty transgressions, reached out this time for a crime of such scale?
Fortunately, the answer came from his own mouth before long.
“If Your Highness the Prince takes seat in the Altair Dukedom Territory, we thought we might naturally be pushed out to the frontier. So I made a certain proposal to the Neutral Faction nobles, quite unofficially. I told them that we would deliberately provide the pretext—make ourselves retreat all the more quickly—and in exchange, they were to pay us the sum we desired.”
Listening to the Baron, I blinked.
The Neutral Faction nobles were involved too?
“Among the Neutral Faction, the great magnates are probably beyond reproach, but the nobles beneath them scurry about busily scraping up whatever crumbs they can find. So they agreed to the transaction readily enough. Most of the viscounts and barons residing in the current Altair Dukedom Territory are implicated—so you can't kill them all. And since the Neutral Faction nobles, Your Highness's core power base, are entangled as well, I judged you'd sweep it under the rug and move on.”
Once his mouth—which had been moving against his own will—finally ground to a halt, the Baron looked at me in silence. There was nothing wrong with what he'd said.
If every noble residing in the Altair Dukedom Territory were executed, there would be no capable people to fill the vacancy, and chaos would follow. What's more, with the Neutral Faction nobles implicated as well, I would have no choice but to bury the matter and move on, willingly or not……
If anything, I felt relieved the involvement hadn't been greater. It seemed the ones who had acted on their own initiative were, for the most part, only the barons and viscounts belonging to the Altair Dukedom Territory.
'Ha……'
Having grasped the full picture, I sighed inwardly.
What had looked meticulous had betrayed a blind spot—which was as much as saying the culprit had deliberately left the evidence behind, all but begging to be caught.
“Baron.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Do I strike you as a tyrant?”
“……”
“Do not look down on me because I have not yet had my coming-of-age ceremony. I am more than capable of separating public duty from private grievance. Everyone connected to my mother's case died that day. And though yours was a faction that backed Duke Altair, I knew you were not directly involved—which is why I have left you untouched until now.”
And yet these people had spun their own delusions all on their own, let them swell steadily, and then detonated the whole thing. From where I stood, it was absurd.
“How can a bird that has lost one wing hope to fly?”
Perhaps not today. But if I kept favoring the Neutral Faction nobles exclusively, the time would surely come when they used that position to lord themselves over everyone around them.
Because they are people. Because they are human.
This is an inevitability that cannot be avoided—in other words, fate. And so, with my coming-of-age ceremony as the turning point, I intended to open relations not only with my father's court-friendly factions, which I had until now ignored, but with the nobles who had backed Duke Altair as well.
……Honestly, the last thing I wanted was to associate with them—but they were also the very counterweight that could keep the Neutral Faction nobles from entertaining any unnecessary ambitions.
'Come to think of it, that period of time was rather long, wasn't it.'
All those years without a single point of contact—except with the Neutral Faction nobles. I had thoroughly ignored everyone else and vented nothing but my anger. Looking back, I couldn't quite deny that incidents like this one might, in part, be the harvest of my own long negligence.
“A ruler's power comes, in the end, from his obligations.”
“Words I hear often, Your Highness.”
“So long as you didn't rot to the point of death while I drank from the cup…… I have no intention of cutting you out one by one.”
“You seem to think my vessel rather small…… but spilled water cannot be gathered again.”
“The viscounts will see their taxes raised. The barons will be banished to the frontier. Sweeping this affair under the rug while still dealing with it—that is the most fitting solution, I'd say.”
“People fret and tremble endlessly over a future that has not yet arrived, yet when they finally face it, most of it turns out to be far less than they feared. You will regret today, over and over, out on the frontier. Mark me.”
“……”
“Wait quietly for your punishment.”
The Baron said nothing at all.
Bang!
When I flung open the drawing room door and stepped into the corridor, Aria was nowhere to be seen. And I'd expected her to be waiting.
Wondering where she'd gone, I wandered the unfamiliar layout until, before long, I spotted her standing face to face with a woman in the corridor. Judging by her dress, she didn't seem to be a maid of this castle—perhaps Baron Beara's daughter?
“What brings Her Highness the Princess to a place like this?”
“None of your concern.”
“Wouldn't your time be better spent at the Imperial Palace, meeting His Highness the Prince, than loitering here?”
The words themselves didn't quite cross the line—but her tone dripped with sarcasm, needling and sharp.
Since they clearly recognized each other, they must have met at the Academy, yet they didn't look remotely friendly. So I walked up slowly, wrapped an arm around Aria's shoulders, and drew her back against me.
“Do you have some business with my sister?”
“Y-Your Highness the Prince……!”
The sardonic lilt in her voice abruptly transformed into that of a bright young girl, and she bowed with flawless, impeccable form—the Baron Beara's daughter. I wrote again.
“Unless your business is truly important, I'll be taking my sister now.”
“Y-yes! We weren't at the Academy, so—since we met here, I only wished to pay my greetings!”
Perhaps something in her conscience pricked her, because after her bow she hastily vanished from before me. Then I glanced down at Aria, still tucked quietly in my arm, and she tilted her head back naturally to look up at me—our eyes meeting.
With an expression asking when did you get here, she pried my arm away from her.
“Done already?”
“Done.”
Letting out a small sigh, Aria said a short let's go and began walking ahead of me. Following slowly behind, I posed a question—because her life at the Academy looked far less smooth than I'd imagined.
“How is life at the Academy?”
“It's not bad.”
Truly, I thought, this woman was hopeless at keeping a poker face.
“Tell me about your life at the Academy in detail. This is an order.”
Reading my writing, Aria immediately furrowed her brow. But bound as she was to me, she had no right of refusal. Honestly, it was a blow to her pride…… but then, to whom else could she ever pour out the things she couldn't tell me? Better that I take a little abuse, so long as nothing festered inside her.
“There are rumors that because you and I are close, the nobles of other kingdoms twisted it around and tried to seduce me with their bodies. Thanks to that, the men among the imperial nobles at the Academy look at me like I'm cheap, and the women sneer at me as vulgar.”
How did it even get twisted into that? Granted, she was the daughter of a traitor, and short of something extraordinary, I suppose no one expected the two of us to grow close.
My own habit of confining my public contacts to the Neutral Faction nobles must have played its part in that, too. Still, no matter how you looked at it, nothing was as terrifying as propaganda.
A single sentence is enough to spread it—but to refute it requires dozens of pages of documents and evidence. And by the time you've prepared all of it, the propaganda has already done its work.
So once I could roughly picture what Aria's Academy life must be like, worrying about her became an ache all over again.
“Satisfied?”
Aria glared at me with an exasperated face, sighing. Meeting that gaze, I moved my pen.
“Stop taking it lying down. Why not turn it around and use it?”
“What?”
“The rumor that I'm caged inside your skirts—you're free to make it your own weapon. Don't worry about my reputation.”
Slanting my eyes subtly to the side, I caught the Baron Beara's daughter peeking at us from around a window frame. Sunlight streamed across that spot, so it would have been invisible to ordinary eyesight—but it was no trouble for me.
And thanks to my glance, Aria seemed to notice as well and turned her head toward where the girl stood—
Flinch!
I reached out to stop her, cupping her cheek in my hand.
“I told you, didn't I? That I'd help you find the happiness you lost—together.”
After conveying it slowly through the shape of my lips, I lowered my head. It was not a kiss. It merely looked that way—from the angle, to anyone watching—arranged precisely so that the Baron Beara's daughter would see it as one.
Aria froze for an instant in shock, but I stopped at a proper distance, and she seemed to grasp my intent a beat too late. By then the baron's daughter, caught by the movement, had already vanished from the window, so I gently drew my body away.
“……You might regret that. I may be fine with it, but because of what you just did, Lapis is going to have a hard time.”
Oh.
It was something I hadn't considered for even a moment, so my face went blank—and Aria snorted, the corner of her mouth curling up.
“Let's go.”
Click, click.
Aria's footsteps as she strode ahead had a distinctly proud, confident ring to them. I followed behind, boarded the carriage we'd left waiting, and under the knights' escort began our return to the Imperial Palace.
'I should…… write Lapis a separate letter, I suppose.'
Just as Aria said, Lapis too could be stressed by the groundless rumors, so if I didn't explain in advance, nothing but needless conflict would follow. As I organized my thoughts and looked across at Aria sitting opposite me, her lips—those lips I had gazed upon from so close a distance, frozen mid-moment—flickered suddenly through my mind.
Perhaps it was her scent, faintly perfuming the carriage despite the wind blowing steadily past outside.
“……”
Then she turned her head, chin propped on her hand, and our eyes met. I smiled awkwardly.
But Aria didn't let me gloss over it. She smiled with her eyes and extended the back of her hand toward me.
“What. Even if my lips are off-limits, I can permit the back of my hand.”
“Do you know what a kiss on the back of the hand means?”
“I don't bother taking interest in such tedious trivia.”
“A courtship.”
A short silence. Aria jolted and snatched back her outstretched hand.
Watching her, I smiled quietly—and she shot me a glare of pure displeasure, though somehow, it didn't look the least bit threatening.