115. The Empire's Fate
115. The Empire's Fate
A formal meeting that would decide the empire's future had been arranged.
Although the first encounter involved a rather embarrassing situation, we somehow managed to smooth things over and picked out a suitable restaurant.
The meeting, conducted without the groom's mother present, proceeded smoothly with two outsiders (me and my father) in attendance.
The meeting began to wind down with what was practically the Emperor's closing line.
"So when are the two of you getting married?"
This being a medieval world, dating was practically the same as engagement.
The concept of free dating was a luxury in this world.
To be precise, commoners could have it, but among the nobility, where marriage was a transaction, breaking up was as weighty as divorce, so dating was equated with engagement.
And this was the lighter version only because this was a fantasy world with more advanced technology. Had this been my previous life, Leon would have had a fiancée arranged before he was even born and at least one child before entering the academy.
Still, the fact that you could choose the person you loved yourself meant this world was far better to live in than my old one.
Leon and Anna also understood what dating meant for the nobility, so they weren't flustered by the Emperor's question.
"I still want to fully enjoy academy life, so I think we'll hold it after graduation."
"That seems appropriate. The Empress and I married around that time as well."
I'd heard my parents married around then too.
It seemed that timing was the unwritten rule here.
Just as the meeting was wrapping up, my father whispered to me.
"You don't have anyone you're seeing separately?"
"No. Dating? I’ve been running myself ragged making films."
My father's expression turned grave when he heard my answer.
After a sigh and a moment of self-reproach, he clapped my shoulder and led me to a different table.
He sat me down right next to him and, with a serious look, began to speak.
"I'm sorry. I, too, spent a long time training to become a hero before I courted your mother, so I was indifferent to the opposite sex. It seems you take after me."
"Hm. Is that a compliment?"
"...How is that a compliment?"
"Taking after a father I respect—what else would it be but a compliment?"
"I'm flattered, but I wish you hadn't taken after me in this."
My father coughed once in embarrassment, then first asked if I had any thoughts of marriage at all.
Of course I had thoughts of marriage.
The problem was that according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs—or whatever it was—I hadn't achieved self-actualization yet, so I had next to no interest on the sexual side of things.
When I said I at least had thoughts of marriage, my father breathed a sigh of relief and tried to pass on some tips.
He tried to pass them on, to be precise.
The problem was that, when he actually tried to impart them, he seemed to be racking his brain as if nothing came to mind.
"..."
"From what I know, Mother had to confess first and propose because you failed to notice her advances for two years."
"..."
"She badmouths you about it at dinner all the time. That she had an exhausting time fending off all the women who went after you."
"..."
"Honestly, wouldn't consulting Mother be the right move instead of you?"
"Hold your tongue for a moment. That's exactly why I'm trying to tell you this. Do you want to get nagged about it your whole life like I have?"
I shut my mouth at my father's sharp rebuke.
After racking his brain, my father produced a conclusion.
"How about just directly asking a woman you're close to if she likes you?"
"...What kind of fucking bullshit is that? Ah, sorry."
The profanity slipped out before I could stop it at my father's suggestion.
But this was force majeure.
Even if he was my father, that was just a little...
If I actually tried that and got rejected, the sheer embarrassment would make academy life unbearable.
There was no military enlistment as an emergency exit here, so I couldn't even make a quick escape.
Even my father seemed to think that one was a bit off after saying it, and he awkwardly downed a glass of water.
He didn't seem particularly bothered by my cursing.
In the end, after father and son put their heads together over this, Uncle Emperor, who had returned after finishing the meeting, approached us with a sly grin.
"If you really have no one, how about taking Pia with you around graduation?"
"Proceeding with something like that without asking for her opinion is a bit much. I doubt she'd like it either."
This was normally the sort of thing neighborhood ladies said as a joke, but I had never expected to hear it in this life too.
Honestly, what do older folks get out of teasing younger people like this?
Well, if it were me, watching a kid young enough to be my son get flustered would probably be pretty entertaining.
Still, I had already systematized ways to handle this kind of mischievous teasing in my previous life.
For a distant or purely business relationship, I politely declined while expressing gratitude for the thought.
For a slightly ambiguous relationship, I laughed it off and deflected vaguely.
For an extremely close relationship, I joined in on the joke.
And my relationship with the Emperor fell into the third category.
"If nothing happens by graduation, I'll do that."
"...Do you genuinely mean that?"
"If you react like that, what does that make me?"
Wait, wasn't this a joke?
The Emperor, Leon, and Anna, the prospective Imperial Princess, all looked at me, covered their foreheads, and stared at the ceiling.
"Good heavens..."
Seeing my reaction, the Emperor tapped my father’s chest and suddenly began berating him.
"Is this a problem with his blood, or with his upbringing?"
"I don't know."
"What do you mean you don't know? What were you, his parents, doing while the boy got to this state?"
"My heart aches too, so stop."
My father couldn't rebut the Emperor's interrogation.
The atmosphere suddenly went cold.
The two fathers were looking at me with pitiful eyes, and my friends, the soon-to-be newlywed couple, were also gazing at me with mournful expressions.
What, why.
Don't look at me with eyes like that.
*
The prospective Imperial couple’s formal meeting abruptly devolved into a hearing on Allen’s love life.
If my memory served, this was usually the kind of thing you heard from relatives on holidays. Why was I hearing it on a festival day, and from my friend's father and my own father?
When are you getting married—go out and meet some women—your friend is already preparing for his wedding, so what are you doing holed up at home?
After that smooth combination beat me to rags, their final conclusion was that I should use the time to meet a decent female student and enjoy the festival.
Like a cat grabbed by the scruff of the neck and tossed out the door, I was marched out by my father and thrown into the middle of the festival.
I was thrown, sure, but the problem was I couldn't think of a single female student.
Did they think a girlfriend was some ready-made product you could just order from a merch shop and receive immediately?
There was no way a decent person would just drop out of the sky.
Then, out of the blue, the female students I was close to came to mind.
'Those girls?'
For a very brief moment, the thought of asking one of them on a date crossed my mind, but I quickly dismissed it.
'It's rude to mess with someone who already has an intended.'
Hadn't the unicorn horn reacted last time?
It meant they already had someone in their hearts.
Of course, for a fleeting instant, the thought that they might like me did cross my mind.
But Pia and I were essentially like brother and sister, and Ceres, judging by how she treated me, at least didn't seem to like me in that way.
Diane did like John, but... I could say it as many times as necessary.
John was not Allen Price.
"...Still, you never know."
I reasoned with myself that way, but being a man, I couldn't help entertaining the what-if.
I couldn't rule out the slim possibility that one of them truly had feelings for me and I simply hadn't noticed.
'Because I have my father's genes.'
Back when I was taking classes at the magic tower, I had been taught that a scholar's fundamental virtue was "Do not deny before you have proven."
Therefore, to rule out that possibility, I needed to borrow a third-party perspective.
Having organized my thoughts, I set off.
My destination: the custom merch workshop.
Ailey was there.
*
Once you had decided, you should act immediately.
Faithfully executing his motto, Allen headed for Ailey.
"Ailey! Do you have a moment?"
"It's Ailey. You're really pushing it now."
"Just a sign of how comfortable I am with you."
Allen's reason for going to Ailey.
It was because he was certain that, at the very least, she was a third party to his romantic battlefront.
He had already overheard her true feelings at the magic tower.
- Me, liking Allen? Haha. I can see how it might look that way, but I really don’t.
- Child, you may speak honestly. The elders and I will help you, won’t we?
- That’s not what I mean. I really don’t love him. If I had to describe it... maybe it’s more like wanting to repay a favor.
- Hoh...
Back in Allen’s first year at the academy.
When Allen had been researching transformation belts on his own for a while.
When his research stalled, he once installed a listening device and CCTV in the Tower Master’s laboratory.
He knew stealing research from another person’s lab was an unforgivable crime in the Magic Tower, but Allen lived by the principle that it was fine if he was not caught.
But the only thing he gained from the wiretap was the above conversation.
As it happened, Ailey had suddenly fallen into a slump around that time and was making no progress in her research, so the worried tower master had been looking after her every day.
Because that period overlapped with Allen’s wiretapping, Ailey became fixed in his mind as a cute junior who felt indebted to him.
Allen laid out his situation to Ailey and asked to borrow her wisdom.
"Is this... love-life advice?"
"Uh... I suppose you could see it that way?"
Ailey could only lament Allen's insensitivity in bringing such advice to her, of all people.
She knew.
The fact that Allen thought of her as nothing more than a cute junior.
But as the person who knew the truth behind the incident Allen had misunderstood, she found it unbearably frustrating.
The truth was a bit more complicated.
For starters, back in her first year, Ailey hadn't genuinely liked Allen.
To be precise, her feelings had been somewhere between a sense of debt and admiration for Allen, yet below romantic interest.
Flustered by emotions she had never felt before they could develop into love, she tried to explain them rationally, and the effort turned into a slump.
The problem was what followed.
Right after Allen overheard the conversation revealing her slump, he resolved it for her, causing her sense of debt to begin tipping decisively toward love.
In other words, the timing was bad.
By the time the tower master, who later detected Allen's wiretapping, grasped how the situation had unfolded and informed Ailey, she had no choice but to voice her resentment at fate's mischief.
Nevertheless, up until then, she had been in the stage of rationally persuading herself and denying her romantic interest, calling it indebtedness.
It was only after rivals like Pia, Diane, and Celestia appeared that she began to fully acknowledge her feelings.
Because by then, the jealousy she kept feeling was far too clear a piece of evidence to keep denying.
Even so, there were broadly two reasons she didn't join the competition after that.
One was that she was afraid that approaching him too rationally might even destroy the relationship they already had.
And the other was...
'Because no matter how hard I appeal to him, Allen would never respond anyway.'
As a rational scientist, she had already analyzed Allen's condition.
The analysis result: Allen was in no state to accept anyone.
To use a marathon analogy, the starting signal hadn't even gone off yet.
To a scientist, input and output were very important factors.
And according to Ailey's calculations, no matter how hard anyone ran right now, Allen, for whom the starting signal hadn't sounded, wouldn't even react.
That was why she hadn't entered the fray until now...
'To think it would turn out like this...'
Romantic advice from someone tentatively participating in the same romantic race.
Ailey swayed for a moment at this dizzying situation that seemed straight out of a romance novel.
But she quickly pulled herself together.
Now that Allen had come to her for love-life advice, she had two options.
One was maintaining the status quo.
She could leave Allen in his current state.
By falsely telling Allen that none of the women around him had romantic feelings for him, she would prevent the starting signal of the race from going off.
With this method, Allen's obliviousness would probably be preserved for several more years.
But she didn't like this method.
Partly because Ailey would also be forced to maintain this state herself as the price, but the bigger reason was that she didn't want to obstruct the happiness of the person she loved.
Doing something like that blinded by jealousy... wasn't that far too ugly?
Then there was one approach left.
'It can't be helped.'
To tell the truth.
This method had just one downside.
The outcome was unknowable.
There was no telling where Allen's heart would turn, and the moment the dam broke on the race her rivals had been held back from, there was no predicting what emotions would burst forth.
But even so, Ailey could not help but choose this option.
Partly because she, too, couldn't deny that this time was a real chance,
'I can't hold it in any longer.'
and because her reason was no longer calm enough to control the romantic feelings that were beginning to overflow.
In the end, she decided to tell Allen the truth.
That all the women around Allen had given their hearts to the same person.
However, in the process of telling him that, she decided to add a slight distortion.
Wasn't it ugly?
'I was the one who opened the floodgates, so this much of a cheat is my right.'
She had already steeled herself to participate in the race.
With her resolve set, she opened her mouth with a serious expression.
"So what you’re asking is whether there’s someone in the club who likes you—especially among the people who tested the unicorn horn?"
"Yeah."
"There is."
"As I thought, there isn't... Huh? What did you say?"
"I said there is."
"....Who?"
Ailey took a deep breath and answered.
"Me."
Allen turned rigid as stone.