Points of Doubt (1)
After leaving the annex, I found a quiet place to sit and sort through the tangle of thoughts left by the shocking discovery I had just made.
The first matter I forced myself to confront was the question of Serpina's successor.
Serpina almost never died until the very end.
True to her status as the game's final boss, she was almost never taken prisoner. She would cling to life as a sovereign until her territory had been reduced to a single holding.
That was precisely why, in the early days after I possessed this body, I had concluded that Serpina was unlikely to perish from some sudden illness.
Time and again, that arrogant golden-haired ruler had fought to the last to stand in my way.
And once her nation fell, she would simply be recruited.
Given that unification itself was the ending of the game, the destruction of Serpina's forces usually meant the game was over — so I had never really put her to proper use. The only way to make full use of her was to play as her faction from the start.
But on the rare occasions when she stepped down from the throne, her successor was different every single time.
With her overwhelming legitimacy, her youth, and her exceptional ability, there was never any real need to designate an heir — so the fact that a different person took over each time was hardly surprising.
The problem was—
None of them were particularly outstanding.
Surprisingly, the usual pattern was for some middling B-rank officer with a long service record to inherit the throne. Serpina's faction had been so strong in every other respect that the game had to balance it through the quality of her subordinate officers.
The one succession that stuck in my memory was when Jena took over. As the state's strategist, she had been one of the more prominent figures in Serpina's army.
The nation itself is so powerful that whoever inherits it will look reasonably formidable as long as they perform at an average level or better. But is that enough to produce a destiny of continental unification? I don't think so…
Was there something I still didn't know?
Well — there had been people like Irian, whose face I had never once seen across ten thousand hours of play. And the very premise that Lunarien Iniang was destined to become the unifier of the continent was already a timeline utterly foreign to me.
Still.
If I could pin down exactly who the successor would be, I might be able to prepare countermeasures in advance…
I shook my head hard and cleared my mind.
Enough. Stop thinking about it.
My goal was to make Lady Luna the unifier of the continent.
To do that, I could not allow Serpina to die.
So there was no need to concern myself with her successor. As long as she remained sovereign, the question was irrelevant.
No matter what happens, I will protect Lady Serpina.
It was the kind of thought that, overheard by a third party, would have made me sound like a deeply loyal retainer. I rose slowly from my seat.
Right. Instead of fretting over problems I couldn't solve, I should think about something else.
Will Irene be moving into a house soon?
I still had to go through the formalities of leaving the lodging myself, so it would take some time. Even so, the prospect of living together again was something I found myself genuinely looking forward to.
It had started by chance — but by now, not living with her felt stranger than the alternative.
If the residence was large enough, would Reika live with us as well?
I didn't mind the idea. But sooner or later, I would have to think seriously about where our relationship was headed.
The marriage talks Zinor had set in motion had been thrown into chaos by everything that followed… yet my position hadn't changed. Her wishes mattered most. If she wasn't opposed, I saw no reason to refuse.
Marrying two women at once still felt a little uncomfortable from the perspective of a modern man — but in this world, it didn't seem particularly unusual.
Thinking of Reika, my gaze drifted naturally to the rapier hanging at my hip.
Yes.
This rapier.
I had taken it for an ordinary item, but I had seen with my own eyes that it functioned as a kind of mana amplifier.
Reika… is someone who would be an enormous help if she stayed by my side.
Of course, I had no intention of courting her purely for the sake of efficiency.
At the beginning, efficiency had been all I thought about. With no information about her at all, I had simply acted on the logic that I had lucked into meeting the continent's first mage and therefore needed to raise her favorability. That much was true.
But now—
This was a woman who had stepped forward for my sake into places she had no business entering, who had stayed by my side even up to the moment she was sold into Serpina's forces. I no longer wanted to drag her along solely because I needed her. That was my honest feeling.
She longed for freedom.
She wanted to wander wherever she pleased, bound to nothing.
I remembered her on Saint Valentino's Day — making chocolate with Irene, then handing it to me with her face flushed and her head bowed.
If what she wanted was freedom, I would gladly give it to her.
I had already received more than enough help from her as it was.
If Zinor and everyone else saw her only for her value as a Mage—
Then at the very least, I wanted to see her as Reika. As a person.
Wasn't a life in which everyone looked at her only as a mage, and never as herself, simply too sad?
There's still time. I can take this slowly.
Lost in those thoughts, I soon arrived at the lodging.
I hadn't done anything particularly strenuous, and yet it had been an exhausting day.
I should bathe as quickly as possible and get to sleep.
Without much thought, I opened the door to my room.
"Ah— aah…!"
A startled voice reached my ears.
More accurately, it was a sound that would have been a full scream if the speaker hadn't managed to hold it back.
The real problem was that the voice's owner was unmistakably female.
"????"
I stared blankly at the scene inside my room.
…Senior Jennis was changing clothes right in front of me.
The face, the features — it was unmistakably Senior Jennis.
But that made no sense.
Because Senior Jennis — that is, Jennis Al Kaski — was a man.
And a man was not supposed to have a chest that protruded quite like that.
Nor was a man supposed to be wearing lace panties that provocative.
Granted, the human world offered no absolute guarantees about such things — but the odds strongly favored the conclusion that men did not, as a rule, wear underwear like that.
Add to that the porcelain-white skin, the softly rounded breasts that announced her sex without apology, and the curve of her hips — and even if you brought a hundred people to look, every last one of them would have no choice but to say: that person is a woman. Her figure was thoroughly, unmistakably feminine.
Then… what is this?
Had Senior Jennis… been a woman all along?
A woman who had been hiding it this entire time?
It was true that his face had always been pretty enough to pass for a courtesan's younger brother, and that neither his mannerisms nor his speech had been especially masculine… but he hadn't exactly seemed like a woman either…
I was still turning over whether such a thing was even possible when—
"I— I'm not…!"
"Pardon?"
She squeezed her eyes shut and pleaded with me.
"I'm not Jennis oppa! So… I— I can explain everything, so please… please don't throw me out…!"
…What?
I stared at him — no, at her — in a daze.
Jennis… oppa?
Someone who looked identical to Jennis, yet was clearly a woman, was calling him her older brother.
There was only one conclusion that followed — and you didn't need an Intelligence of 100 to reach it. Anyone could have figured it out.
Twins?
And since she had called him oppa, the picture of which twin was which came into even sharper focus.
"Are you, by any chance, Senior Jennis's twin younger sister?"
"Yes, that's right! I'll explain everything, all of it…! So please…!"
She looked up at me with a pitiful expression, practically begging.
I still had no idea what was going on — but—
Fine. I might as well hear her out. It doesn't cost me anything.
I had no hobby of tormenting people who pleaded with me this desperately.
"Very well. I won't throw you out, so please calm down."
"I… um, I— I'm terribly sorry, but could you… turn your head a little…? I— I still need to finish getting dressed…!!"
Ah.
I had been standing there in a complete daze, staring straight at a woman in her undergarments.
Surprisingly, it left me largely unmoved.
She had a beautiful, appealing figure with a decent amount of volume — but it couldn't begin to compare to the sight of Irene changing into her training clothes, which I had once stumbled upon half-asleep. That had been a landscape so dizzying it had snapped me wide awake in an instant. I was certain I would never forget it for the rest of my life.
"I'll step outside, then. Call me when you're finished."
I closed the door and sank into thought.
So he has a twin sister. But why? And where did Senior Jennis go?
As the initial shock settled, a more fundamental question rose inside me.
No… if it were just a matter of going somewhere, there would be no need to plant a twin sister inside the barracks.
Think simply, and the answer presents itself.
Couldn't he just leave his post empty?
This place had the feel of a dormitory, but there was no curfew and nothing resembling roll call. It wasn't an academy dorm to begin with — it was a kind of welfare facility the state provided for officers who had nowhere else to stay within the castle walls.
There was, however, exactly one situation in which such a cumbersome arrangement would be necessary.
And that was—
When you need to create an alibi.
It became obvious the moment you asked what Jennis gained by putting his twin sister — a younger sister, no less — into the men's barracks.
An alibi.
The real Jennis was elsewhere, but as long as a third party believed he was inside this room, he would be treated as someone who had been here the whole time.
For that purpose, a twin was the ideal instrument.
If whatever he's doing requires an alibi… then what on earth is he up to?
Perhaps it was the image I had of Jennis in ordinary times, but I couldn't begin to guess what he was trying to accomplish. And then—
"…You can come in now."
From beyond the door came a voice similar to Jennis's, yet subtly different.
Apparently she had finished changing.
For now, it was time to hear her story.
I opened the door and stepped back into the room where she waited.