I Became a Mesugaki (6)
That morning, Erin had risen before dawn as always and taken up her post outside Lucy's door.
If Lucy ever woke to find Erin absent, she would find fault with her over it for days on end. Ever since the day she'd kept Lucy waiting for a single minute and paid for it with a savage scolding, Erin had made a habit of arriving early and standing vigil at that door.
For an hour, two hours at a stretch. Usually, she would eventually hear the bell ring from within, and only then enter the room — but that day was different. While Erin stood waiting outside, Lucy suddenly flung the door open and strode out.
The moment she saw Lucy's face, Erin thought: She rang the bell and I didn't hear it. She's come out here to punish me for it.
Before Lucy could say a word, Erin bowed her head. She apologized, praying it might dull even a sliver of that anger.
But Lucy didn't scold her. She simply stared at Erin with a puzzled expression on her face. It was completely unlike the Lucy everyone knew.
And Lucy's strange behavior didn't stop there. Over the course of that single day, she did one thing after another that the old Lucy would never have done.
She ate an entire meal without finding a single fault with it, finishing everything with apparent relish. When a maid made a mistake, she offered a light reprimand and let it go. She sat quietly through her tutor's lessons. She shut herself in the library and read book after book.
As these episodes piled up, a rumor began circulating among the maids: Has Lady Lucy perhaps taken a serious blow to the head?
Still, no one believed Lucy had truly changed. A girl who had spent more than a decade being a tyrant couldn't reform herself overnight.
Erin had thought so too, at first. But when Lucy's transformation stretched past one day into two, then three, even Erin began to tilt her head in confusion.
The other maids, who did their best to avoid crossing paths with Lucy altogether, said she seemed more or less the same as before. She found fault with them less often, sure — but her signature arrogance and condescending tone were unchanged, they insisted.
Yet Erin, who had always been at Lucy's side, was convinced her lady had changed. Unlike the Lucy of old, who had been desperate to tear down everything and everyone around her, this Lucy had learned to let things slide. She scolded less. She raged less. She left Erin alone to do her work in peace.
She had even started saying things that bordered on praise.
"Not bad. For a pathetic maid, anyway."
Erin could never forget the moment it happened. Lucy, who had always shrieked that this was wrong and that was unsatisfactory every time Erin finished brushing her hair, had smiled. Actually smiled.
Of course, Lucy had accumulated so much ill will over the years that no one believed Erin, no matter how she vouched for the change. And even those who humored her declared that it wouldn't last.
But Erin didn't think so. Ask her for proof and she'd have nothing to offer — and yet she believed, deep down, that Lucy's transformation would not end as a one- or two-day affair.
"Pathetic maid."
Erin's shoulders jolted at the sound of her lady's voice, whose words she'd been replaying in her head only moments before.
"I'm thirsty. Water and a towel. Now."
"Yes, my lady!"
Erin handed over the water and the towel she'd chilled with ice magic — the only spell she knew. Lucy frowned briefly at the sudden cold, but soon a faint smile crept across her face as she pressed the chilled towel to her cheeks.
This was Erin's favorite moment. Lucy normally went about wearing nothing but a pout or an irritated scowl, but in these moments, even she seemed happy, wearing a slow, lazy smile.
You really are pretty when you smile like that, my lady.
"Pathetic maid. Why are you grinning at me like a creep? It's grossing me out."
"I'm so sorry!"
If you're going to change, could you maybe change the way you talk, too?
On the sixth morning since I'd started running, Benedict abruptly came to see me.
There was nothing strange about a father coming to see his daughter. Benedict, the hopeless daughter-dote, had ambushed me with surprise visits several times before.
"My darling daughter! Is it true?! You drank all three elixirs from the vault?!"
The problem was what came out of his mouth the moment he laid eyes on me. So word had gotten out that I'd guzzled down every last elixir in the family vault. I suppose it made sense — even for a sizable county like House Alrn, elixirs were treasures.
But what was I supposed to do? They were already down the hatch. It wasn't as if I could spit the things back out now that they'd soaked into my body.
So I simply nodded, brazenly, and Benedict's eyes went wide.
"Really?"
'Yes.'
"Well, then."
When I confirmed it a second time, Benedict bent down and carefully examined my body, checking me over with anxious eyes.
"Are you hurt anywhere? The elixirs must have hurt terribly when you took them — how did you endure that? And..."
At first I'd assumed he'd come to chew me out. I was wrong. Nothing but worry for me came out of his mouth.
Huh?
'You're not going to scold me?'
"Foolish Father. Did you come all this way just to yell at me?"
"Why on earth would I scold you?"
'The elixirs...'
"Because I drank them all."
"Who cares about a handful of elixirs! If anything, this father is proud of you for drinking them all! It means you endured pain so terrible most people would have broken!"
'Then why did you come?'
"Then why did I come?"
"To check on you, of course! In case my precious daughter's body had suffered some harm!"
Benedict was every bit as soft-hearted as he looked. In other words: a fool who had lost his mind to love for his daughter.
He'd had a rare treasure monopolized by his own daughter right out from under the household, and all he could talk about was praise and concern. Who does that?
Apparently deciding I'd taken the elixirs out of anxiety over the academy entrance exam, Benedict seized on me and launched into one doting lecture after another.
No matter how worried I was about the exam, I mustn't push myself too hard. Failing a mere test would be perfectly fine. My health mattered far more than any exam, and on and on.
ten minutes, his nagging stretched to thirty, and it was fast galloping toward a full hour. That was when I had to make a decision. If this went on, it seemed likely I'd be trapped by this troll for the entire day.
'Um. I get it, all right? So could you please stop now?'
"Foolish Father. You're annoying. Quit it."
Whoa. That came out way harsher than I intended.
Dumbfounded by my own mouth, I studied Benedict's expression. His face had frozen solid, like a statue.
He'd always laughed off being called a fool or a pushover, but the word annoying seemed to have genuinely wounded him.
Benedict soon began stumbling backward, mumbled an apology, and then — like a heartbroken little girl — fled to wherever it is wounded fathers go.
In the end I got exactly what I wanted, but... I'd have to go apologize later. If Benedict sulked, it would be a headache in a dozen different ways.
After slipping out of the mansion, I did what I always did these days: headed for the Alrn family training grounds. Mace and shield in hand, I set off running along the perimeter.
When I'd started, it had been purely to maintain my game build. Lately, that had changed. I was actually enjoying running.
In the real world — my old one — it was hard to feel any change from a day or two of jogging. Only after a month or two could you guess that your stamina had improved at all.
Here, it was different. Every day — no, not even a full day. Just a couple hours of running and I could feel my stamina climbing. It was like earning experience points and leveling up as I hunted monsters in a game; every stride made the numbers tick upward in real time.
Half the reason people hate exercise is the tedium, sure, but the other half is how impossible it is to perceive progress. When you can watch yourself improving live, exercise becomes genuinely fun.
I'd finished my target of ten laps and was resting a moment when the knight who had helped me on the day I collapsed came walking over.
"Lady Lucy. Working hard again today, I see."
This knight had kept looking out for me ever since I'd given him that brutal answer. I was grateful for the consideration, honestly — but if I'm being frank, his behavior was suspicious.
What possible reason could he have to keep approaching a count's daughter with a terrible reputation, a rotten personality, and a track record of never once saying thank you no matter how much grace people extended her? Unless he had some other motive, it simply wasn't possible.
By my own reasoning, two possibilities ranked highest: either this knight hoped to win Lucy's heart — the count's only child — and turn his life around through marriage, or he was simply a deranged masochist who enjoyed being verbally abused by a mesugaki.
Common sense said it wasn't the latter, which meant the man had to be an ambitious social climber angling to become a male Cinderella.
There was an extremely, extremely remote chance that he was simply a noble-hearted knight, but I didn't buy it. An NPC who doesn't even appear as a side character being some dignified, honorable knight? Please.
"Your stamina has grown remarkably. Truly worthy of the heiress of House Alrn."
'Thanks for the compliment.'
"You call that a compliment?"
My attempt at gratitude had once again been twisted into a jab — but perhaps because I'd grown used to the mesugaki skill's speech distortion, it didn't even anger me anymore.
"Of course not. How could I ever mock your dedication, my lady?"
Yet the knight accepted my provocation with an easy, ready smile. He was surely cursing me out behind that face, of course.
His composure management is no joke. Is this what it takes to dream of climbing the social ladder through marriage?
Not that I'd marry him no matter how hard he tried.
Hell no. Sure, I've become a mesugaki, but that doesn't mean I'm dating some guy. I'm already dying of unfairness over being turned into a mesugaki in the first place — and now you want me to have a romance on top of it?
I'd sooner bite off my tongue and drop dead. Genuinely.
Perhaps something of my murderous glare showed through, because the knight laughed awkwardly and changed the subject.
"My lady. Are you aware that the knight order enters a dungeon two weeks from now?"
'A dungeon?'
"A dungeon?"
Dungeons were one of the core pillars of Soul Academy's setting. The concept itself wasn't so different from what you'd find in any other game.
They were places where monsters and treasure awaited. They appeared and vanished at random, governed by no particular rules. If left alone too long, the monsters inside would spill out, so they had to be subdued quickly. They came in various grades, and both their scale and the enemies within varied by grade.
If there was one thing that set this world's dungeons apart from other games, it was probably who did the subjugating: the nobility.
In Soul Academy, dungeon subjugation was both the right and the duty of the aristocracy. Just as nobles were obliged to protect their people from foreign enemies, so too was the noble who owned a territory required to subdue any dungeon that appeared within it.
That said, they didn't handle every dungeon personally. When a dungeon's danger rating was low, the things crawling out of it were so pathetic that adventurers — mercenaries, essentially — were hired to clear it in the noble's stead.
But large dungeons were another matter. Once a dungeon exceeded a certain size, the territorial lord was expected to personally march to war at the head of his private soldiers.
And this knight had just said that Benedict's knight order was entering a dungeon. Which meant a dangerous dungeon had appeared in the territory.
'Is it a very dangerous place?'
"What kind of place? Big enough to make a pathetic knight like you shake in his boots?"
"Hahaha. No, my lady. It's not as though we only ever visit dangerous places. High-grade dungeons like that don't appear easily. This time we're heading to a small-to-medium dungeon for training purposes."
No wonder he hadn't shown a trace of tension while talking about going in.
'Where is it?'
"Where are we going?"
"You may not know it, but we're headed to a place called Evans. There's a dungeon out there that never disappears."
'Evans?!'
"Evans?! Pathetic knight. Are you serious?!"
When I shot to my feet and shouted, the knight nodded, looking bewildered by my reaction.
If it was a permanent dungeon near Evans, there was only one it could be.
But I knew everything there was to know about the dungeon near Evans. How could I not?
A legendary mace was hidden inside it.