The Partran Festival (6)
After Lucy abruptly left the dinner table, Arthur had tried to follow her, but Joy held him back.
"In my experience, whenever Lady Aln does something strange, there's always a reason behind it."
Arthur was about to argue with Joy's explanation, delivered along with an awkward smile, but thinking it over, she had a point.
He had seen plenty of Lucy since arriving at the Academy. Time and again, her various antics had raised questions in his mind, yet looking back, nearly every single one of her actions had turned out to have a purpose behind it.
Even now, her habit of calling him the Pitiable Prince surely had some hidden rationale. Wasn't that exactly what was playing out before his eyes?
The very reason he wanted to beat Lucy was so that he could ask her about these mysteries himself.
"I used to think, oh, there she goes again, throwing one of Lady Aln's fits. But that's not it anymore. The Lady of the past and the Lady of today are completely different people."
Arthur agreed with Joy's assessment.
The first time he'd met the girl called Lucy Aln, he'd taken her for an idiot who didn't understand the first thing about manners. That was no longer the case.
Before a genius rewriting the history of Soul Academy, the word foolish hardly applied. She understood courtesy and ceremony perfectly—at least, that was how it seemed to Arthur. So her leaving the table without a word of explanation surely meant something.
Convinced by Joy's reasoning, Arthur half-rose, then sat back down and crossed his legs.
"Joy. On that note, there's something I'd like to ask you."
"What is it, Your Highness?"
"Do you suppose there was some reason she called my elder brother a gloomy, friendless prince?"
"Uh—"
"And that she declared him repulsive and sickening in front of everyone—could even that have some justification beyond my imagining?"
"...Well."
Joy normally bent over backward to interpret Lucy's behavior charitably, but this question she simply could not answer. What Lucy had done was far too serious to defend.
If the First Prince hadn't let it slide. If Lucy hadn't been the daughter of House Aln. Wouldn't she have already been dragged away on charges of lèse-majesté?
As Joy fidgeted, unable to muster even a token defense, Arthur continued, unhurried.
"You see, Joy? Sometimes there's a reason behind her madness—but sometimes, there is clearly none at all."
The Lucy of the past had not vanished. Weakened, perhaps, but still there all the same.
Hearing this, Joy found herself nodding before she knew it. The time Lucy had called her brother a lecherous young master. The bizarre nicknames Lucy had slapped onto her parents. Calling her the Airhead Lady.
Not a single one of them had been justified, and yet Lucy had pushed them all with shameless confidence. That, unmistakably, was madness without reason.
"In a way, the Lucy of today is worse. She knows exactly what courtesy is—and crosses the line anyway, simply because she feels like it."
"B-but Lady Aln is a good person!"
"No rebuttal to hand, it seems. Airhead Lady."
At the sight of Arthur laughing as he declared victory and lifted his spoon, Joy made a quiet resolution to herself. Once the meal was over and they wandered the festival together, she would say to him: I lost to the Airhead Lady, so how does that feel, hm?
But her resolution would never come to pass.
Losing to Arthur at stall after stall was reason enough, certainly—but the bigger problem was that everywhere they went, Arthur brooded over the records set by the First Prince and Lucy, fuming too hard to be touched.
BOOM!
Arthur brought the hammer down with everything he had, but the board beneath it did no more than crack, holding its shape.
"Close, but it's a fail, Your Highness."
"Something's wrong with this! Look! It was one strike from breaking!"
It was a stall where competitors tested how much force they could deliver with a hammer. At every such place Arthur and Joy visited, they found themselves treated to talk of Lucy and the First Prince.
"Did you see that? The moment His Highness the First Prince put his strength into it, the board just shattered."
"Impressive. True royal blood, that one."
"Honestly though, the First Prince didn't surprise me. It was obvious he'd pull it off."
"Fair point."
"What got me was the Lady of House Aln."
"Right? How does a body that tiny produce that kind of power?"
"Scary, the bloodline of House Aln. Will she one day command the continent herself, I wonder."
Arthur and Joy had no choice but to hear variations of this at every stall they stopped at. It was unavoidable.
The moment Arthur showed his face, talk of the First Prince naturally trailed after him, and because Lucy had made such memorable showings at stall after stall, people kept comparing the boy who looked to be her age against her.
Ordinarily, that would be that—a simple gasp of admiration and nothing more. Joy herself had merely thought, they're both incredible, and moved on.
But for Arthur, it was another story entirely.
He had defined those two as rivals he must surpass. The First Prince was an object of admiration, someone he yearned to catch up to—and simultaneously, the man against whom he had been endlessly compared his entire life.
Whatever Arthur achieved, it was inevitably eclipsed by the shadow the First Prince had cast long before. The reason Arthur could never take pride in his own genius was the First Prince, plain and simple.
The other one, Lucy, was a rival newly minted since his enrollment at the Academy. The one who had, for the first time in his life, forced the score of second place onto a boy who had shone so brightly that no one his age could hope to catch him.
At their first meeting, her insolence had made him classify her as an enemy. No longer. To the Arthur of today, Lucy was a goal to be crossed over—and something close to a friendly nemesis.
With the crowd singing the praises of opponents he was supposed to defeat, how could Arthur possibly not writhe in frustration?
But an earthworm's wriggling was only ever a wriggle. He tasted defeat at stall after stall, and even where he won, he couldn't catch Lucy's record, let alone the First Prince's.
By the time this had repeated itself again and again, Arthur's nerves had worn dangerously thin. So thin that even Joy, who'd meant to needle him, didn't dare.
"One more time! One more and I'll nail it for sure!"
"Um. Well. That is..."
Just as Joy was thinking she had to stop him, watching the stall keeper's pained expression, she spotted Jeff sprinting toward them from far off.
Unlike Joy, who was always frantically scrambling because she'd skipped or forgotten something, Jeff was ordinarily the very picture of composure. But his expression now was decidedly not good. My brother losing control of his face? What on earth has happened now?
"Hah—hah. Joy. Where is His Highness the Third Prince?"
"He's over there."
How desperately must he have run? Gasping for breath, Jeff took a hurried series of deep lungfuls and headed straight for Arthur.
"Your Highness!"
"Hmm? If it isn't Lord Jeff. What brings you all the way out here?"
"Urgent news, Your Highness. The First Prince is about to face off against Lady Aln."
"...WHAT?!"
For a moment Arthur suspected a prank—but the man before him was not one to joke about such matters.
Barely hours after his clash with my brother, and now ANOTHER confrontation?!
"Where are they?"
"I'll guide you."
Setting down the hammer he'd been gripping moments before, Arthur rushed off in Jeff's wake.
Dammit all. Lucy Aln. Do you hold some grudge against the royal family itself? How many incidents can one person cause in a single day?! At this rate, Sir Benedict's stomach is going to be riddled with holes it'll look like Swiss cheese!
Arthur sprinted for all he was worth, desperate to smooth the situation over—but alas, by the time he arrived, events were already in motion.
At the table ringing the stall keeper sat the First Prince; across from him, Lucy was bent over a sheet of paper, writing something.
"...I'm too late."
At the sight of it, Arthur exhaled a long, hollow sigh.
Once the contest had begun, there was no taking it back. How could he, of all people, interject into a contest proposed and joined by the First Prince?
Prince or not, an impassable gulf of authority separated Arthur from René. All he could do in this moment was watch.
"It's already started, hasn't it."
As he bit his lip, a voice came from behind him. Joy had caught up. Given the pace she must have set, he'd assumed she'd fall behind—yet here she was, having closed the gap without difficulty.
"Is the event a Simulated Dungeon Raid?"
A simulated dungeon raid. Rather than entering a dungeon in person, the contest was to devise the optimal clearance strategy from the conditions given on paper.
It appeared constantly on the Academy's written exams, so it was familiar territory for Arthur and Joy alike.
"Well, that's a relief. That's an event Lady Aln can actually win."
"Winning is a problem, and losing is a problem."
"Winning's still better, surely."
"That may be, but..."
Within Soul Academy, Lucy Aln was the dungeon studies professor's nightmare. Whatever problems the professor cooked up, they were rendered powerless before her outlandish clearance strategies. Arthur had watched, again and again, as the dungeon professor tore at his hair over the spectacle of his handcrafted dungeons being demolished.
"Can she win it?"
Arthur knew Lucy's ability. But he also knew the genius called René Soladin—the all-encompassing, supreme talent of the First Prince, a man even that genius could only look up to.
"It's over."
The first to set down his pen was the First Prince. Without even a moment of review, he handed his paper to the stall keeper—as if utterly certain he could not possibly have erred. The stall keeper accepted the sheet with both hands, reverently, and placed it upon the magic circle at the heart of the stall.
The circle glowed blue, and a translucent image rose above it: a vanguard and a rearguard, plus a thief and a priest—a textbook party composition. Those phantoms would now clear the dungeon exactly as the First Prince had written it.
"Astonishing."
"How does he choose nothing but perfect answers?"
"It's like he's seen the future."
"At this point it's basically a copy of the answer sheet."
The First Prince's approach was orthodoxy itself. Weighing every variable and selecting only the optimal move each time, he performed at a level that would have stunned the crowd even if he'd been handed the answers beforehand.
The spectators were all certain of the First Prince's victory. Surely, they thought, no better strategy could exist.
But a fraction of the crowd—those who knew the countless eccentricities Lucy Aln had displayed at Soul Academy—thought differently.
"Lady Aln just won this."
"I was thinking about it all wrong. I'll have to plan around a Lucy Aln victory from now on."
The moment Jeff, standing behind them, began to wonder at Arthur and Joy's matter-of-fact exchange—Lucy raised her voice.
"What a pathetic, flimsy, shoddy little dungeon. It was so easy I almost messed it up."
From her contemptuously smirking face, one could feel nothing but absolute certainty of victory—and nothing else at all.