The Last Princess of Luciarkenel
What did I just witness?
The aerial duel unfolding before Lillian's eyes made her forget even the searing pain of the gash in her side. Kaisent had slipped on those strange gauntlets that had fallen from the sky and forged shield and sword at will, then turned Kenneth's own techniques back against him—Kenneth, a master whose skill commanded respect wherever he went. As if that weren't enough, he had raised undead with black magic and even mirrored Kenneth's swordsmanship with effortless precision. She couldn't begin to decide where to start making sense of any of it.
One thing, however, she understood with absolute clarity: Kaisent was not a boy suited to fighting.
"Nngh… kkh…"
Only after he had cried himself out did Kaisent manage to steady his emotions. Wiping his tears, he approached her.
"Wolf, are you all right?"
"Ugh… my guts aren't hanging out, so I'm fine enough."
The pain finally catching up to her, Lillian unfastened the clasps of her cumbersome armor. As the plates came away, Kaisent discovered one of her secrets. That rough, masculine-looking armor had been nothing more than a disguise; beneath it lay a beautiful fruit carefully hidden from the world.
A waist that curved in with elegant grace, and a lean, healthy abdomen like a leopard's. Narrow shoulders and that slender waist only made her H-cup breasts and peach-ripe hips stand out all the more. The dark-blue high-leg cut and over-the-knee stockings, faintly charged with some special energy, accentuated an already stunning figure until it was almost impossible to look away.
"Never thought I'd actually have to use this…"
She drew a small box from a pouch inside the armor. Inside were dried herbs and clean, sterilized bandages. Crushing the herbs between her teeth, she chewed them to a paste and smeared the mash thickly over the wound.
"Kaisent. Help me with the bandage."
"Ah—yes."
Startled out of his daze a beat too late, Kaisent took the bandage and wrapped it around her waist from behind.
There's a faint saltiness mixed with a cool, pleasant scent.
Having been sealed inside armor for so long, Lillian's body gave off a unique musk—a sweet fragrance laced with a hint of salt. And because of the high-leg cut, the elegant curve of her waist and the beautifully shaped swell of her hips kept drawing his eyes no matter how hard he tried not to look.
"I'm going to tie it tight. It'll hurt a little."
"Got it. Nngh…!"
She hissed as he cinched the final knot hard, then forced herself to regulate her breathing until the pain settled into something she could endure.
"We need to get out of here first. Talk comes after."
"…Yes."
Kaisent had been forced to reveal the strength he had kept hidden, and Lillian's mask as Wolf had cracked. Both of them had a mountain of questions, but lingering in greenskin territory was suicide.
When they were ready to move, Lillian stared down at Kenneth's corpse for a long moment.
"Kaisent."
"Yes?"
"Can you turn that man's body into an undead?"
"…I can, but…"
He wanted to obey Wolf—his benefactor—whenever possible, yet the thought of raising that thing made his skin crawl.
"Please. We need every scrap of fighting power we can get if we're going to break out of greenskin territory. More than that—we can't let his armor fall into their hands."
"Couldn't you wear it yourself?"
"He's bigger than me. It'd just get in the way. And… well… it's made for a man, so the chest is too tight."
"Ah…"
Convinced by her arguments—survival foremost among them—Kaisent raised Kenneth as an undead. His organs had been reduced to pulp, but the bones were intact; Kenneth rose again as a zombie knight. They fitted him back into the magic armor, then pushed deeper into the forest to escape the greenskin domain.
Before long, just as Lillian had feared, the distinctive guttural croaking of greenskins began to draw closer from every side.
The two of them and one corpse moved without rest through the woods. Lillian's injury slowed them, yet their steady pace still carried them a considerable distance. She had also done her best to erase their trail, and no goblin riders came hunting after them.
"Doesn't look like we're being chased. Let's rest a little."
"Yes."
She ordered the zombified Kenneth to stand watch at a distance, leaving the two of them alone.
"I get to ask first, right?"
"…Yes."
And so they entered the question-and-answer session both had been silently agreeing to. Kaisent answered every one of Lillian's questions with complete sincerity—how he had learned black magic, why he had hidden his true strength, and all the rest.
"And after you got separated from a woman named Dang Seol-yeong, you ended up in this situation?"
"That's right."
Naturally, he said nothing about the physical relationship he had shared with Dang Seol-yeong.
"All right. Last question. That strange thing that fell from the sky—it felt like it had been prepared for you from the very start. What was it?"
"It was something my father sent me from my original dimension. Looking at how limited its functions are, I think he only meant it as a way to confirm which dimension I'm in."
A father who could reach across dimensional walls to aid his child. A family powerful enough to send a superb magical item—one that could form shield and sword at any time simply by channeling energy into a fixed shape—merely to check on a son's whereabouts.
This boy wants to repay his debt to me. If I use that well…
If she handled Kaisent carefully, he could become an enormous asset toward her goals. And with talent like his, as a tool for revenge—
"Wolf…? Your eyes are scary…"
"…Sorry."
The fear on Kaisent's face as he looked at her sent a sharp spike of self-loathing through her chest. This was the soft-hearted boy who had retched and wept in shock after killing the man who tried to rape him. Realizing—too late—that she had been about to treat him as a mere instrument, she steeled herself.
No. I can't treat this child that way.
Even if Kaisent one day helped her take her revenge, it had to be of his own free will. Unwilling to sink to Kenneth's level, she passed the right to ask questions over to him.
"Your turn now."
"First… what's your real name?"
"Lillian Valen Prosteny. You can just call me Lillian."
"Female mercenaries aren't unheard of. So the reason you went so far to hide who you are—does it have something to do with your family name?"
An ordinary person might have wondered simply why she pretended to be a man. Kaisent went one step further and struck the heart of the matter. Had he been an ordinary little boy, she would have brushed him off with some vague answer. But she had lived alongside him long enough to know how sharp he was. Kaisent would not go blabbing out of childish impulse. Trusting that, she laid her secret bare.
"I am the last direct descendant of the Luciarkenel royal line."
"Luciarkenel… wait—ah? Then you're a prin…cess?"
"Drop it. That kind of cringeworthy title. Like I said, just call me Lillian. I've gotten more used to this life than to being treated like a princess anyway."
Living among mercenaries had exposed Kaisent to plenty of information, and one keyword that came up often in the Halrot Kingdom rose to the surface of his mind: the tragedy of Luciarkenel.
Ten years ago, a sudden massive dimensional rift caused the palace of a vampire kingdom from another world to overlap with the palace of Luciarkenel. Lands from other worlds merging into this one was not unheard of—but two royal palaces locking perfectly on top of each other was a miracle so improbable that even the word "astronomical" failed to capture it.
Then the tragedy began. Each side saw the other as invaders, and vampires and humans alike fought with desperate ferocity to defend "their" palace. In the end the vampires, superior in raw power, prevailed. Luciarkenel fell when nearly every direct royal present for a council session in the palace was slaughtered. The kingdom's nobles united to strike back, but the vampires—cohesive enough to form a true royal house—crushed the noble coalition. Luciarkenel became a vampire realm, known to the people of this world as the Saryeong Kingdom: a land of eternal darkness beneath thick clouds that forever blocked the sun.
Lillian had been seventeen at the time. Together with her childhood friend and fiancé, Fredrick, she had escaped through a secret passage bought with the sacrifice of everyone else.
As a dimensional outsider, Kaisent might know of Luciarkenel's tragedy, but the names and composition of its royal house were not something one learned without deliberate interest.
"Even a princess of a fallen kingdom is still royalty. The moment my identity gets out, people will come running to marry me so they can legally inherit whatever territory a restored Luciarkenel might one day reclaim—whether anyone can actually topple the Saryeong Kingdom or not."
No one knew if the Saryeong Kingdom could ever be brought down. Even so, there would always be those who married her on the off chance. And with her beauty and her attainment of the Expert rank, being in her late twenties was hardly a flaw. An Expert could still bear children at seventy.
"Among the ones hunting my bloodline, if I married into a powerful noble house or the Halrot royal family, I could live in comfort. But I refused to become a trophy that made someone else look good while I sat around doing nothing."
"So you covered your face and posed as a man."
"Even under an alias, my face is fairly well known in neighboring Halrot. If I was going to hide it, I was going to hide it thoroughly—so I used a helmet enchanted with voice-altering magic and played the man."
She had planned to grow her strength as a mercenary and, if Halrot or some other kingdom ever moved to subjugate the Saryeong Kingdom, to join that campaign. And if she somehow succeeded in her revenge, a woman with no political foundation of her own would only become another nation's puppet—so she had even prepared a quiet retirement for herself afterward.
"Um… but that helmet went to Kenneth…"
"It's fine. I keep spares for emergencies. Once we reach Munratel, you can go to Fredrick alone and explain everything."
If they could just reach Munratel, most of their present problems would resolve themselves. The real issue was breaking through greenskin territory with a party of one wounded fighter, one zombie, and one boy—a nightmare combination.
I may have to prepare for the worst…
The unexpected injury Kenneth had dealt her left her feeling bleak. In the end, the only person she could truly rely on was Kaisent.
"Kaisent. How many undead can you raise?"
"I don't really know. I've never tested it."
"Figured as much… If we run into greenskins and manage to kill any, turn them into undead too. We need every bit of strength we can get."
"Yes."
Worried how long Kaisent—brilliant in skill, fragile in spirit—would hold up, Lillian prayed they could return to Munratel as soon as possible. But she had only seen his soft side. She had yet to grasp the full measure of the resolve that drove him to reclaim Dang Seol-yeong.
Three goblins on patrol moved through the area in a loose trio.
"Bored."
"Bored."
"Don't copy me!"
"You're the one copying!"
Two of them, unable to stand the monotony, started bickering and clawing at each other.
"Kyah-kyah! Fight! Fight!"
The third, far from breaking it up, egged them on. A complete rabble—worse than rabble—and yet in a large-scale battle these creatures still managed to fight reasonably well. They were no match for hobgoblins, but the smarter ones among higher-tier clans could forge metal gear and even build siege engines. Their real problem was temperament: innately cruel, underhanded, cringing before the strong and vicious toward the weak, they rarely managed true cohesion.
Whiss—thunk—
From somewhere unseen, a long, sharpened stone punched straight through the skull of the goblin that had been watching the fight.
"Kek!?"
"Kik!?"
The two still locked in their scuffle registered the sight a beat late and jerked in alarm—
Thud-thud!
—only for more projectiles to take them through the head in the same instant, killing them outright.
"Undead Summon."
Having dropped the goblins cleanly, Kaisent quietly raised them as zombies. He checked their gear, selected the best of their arrows, and filled his own quiver.
"Hooo… All right. Let's move."
With the goblin zombies added to their forces and his emotions steadied, Kaisent signaled to Lillian, who had been watching from cover.
"Kaisent."
"Yes?"
"Did you already know how to scout in a forest?"
"The senior mercenaries taught me."
Scouting in woodland was no simple task. Greenskins might not match true beasts, but their noses far outclassed a human's; let your scent ride the wind and they would find you at once. Yet Kaisent always moved with the flow of the air, checked likely trap sites at a glance, and even picked up the faint odor of greenskins faster than she did—then executed a perfect ambush. Watching him, she felt the seasoned ease of a veteran scout who had spent decades in the field.
He grew this much in that short a time?
Her subordinates had taken him out a few times to teach him scouting, but it had only been four sessions at most. She had always believed scouting was forged by accumulated experience, not raw talent. Watching him now overturned that assumption.
If I'm going to find Seol-yeong noona, I have to learn everything I can.
Of course, this scouting skill was something he had begged the mercenaries to teach him against the worst-case possibility that he might have to search for Dang Seol-yeong alone. For her sake he was even prepared to kill, and that single-minded obsession was awakening talents that had lain dormant within him, driving them to burn ever brighter.