The Romance-Fantasy Imperial Family Is Hell (2)
January, and the cold wind still had its teeth in the world.
Even with the windows sealed shut, a chill wind blew through the Imperial Palace banquet hall.
"I-I was never fit to be Crown Prince from the start. I am grateful that you appointed someone as lacking as myself to the position, but..."
During my first playthrough, amid the endless string of "sudden deaths" among the imperial family, I had never once been caught for the killings I'd committed.
So how had the Crown Prince realized the culprit was me?
Well, if two people survived and I'm not the culprit, then the culprit has to be someone else, doesn't it?
Only then did I grasp just how absurd the things I'd pulled off in Cycle 1 had been.
The Imperial Palace possessed the finest surveillance apparatus in the world.
No one from outside could possibly assassinate a member of the imperial family living within its walls.
Unless, of course, they were someone already inside the palace.
I had pinned every last crime on the First Princess, but apparently the Crown Prince had seen through to the real culprit all along.
This insane household. I'm getting out of here, no matter what it takes.
If the Crown Prince had figured out that I was behind every incident, could the Emperor really have remained ignorant of what his son had noticed?
In the game, it was just a game, so I'd glossed over it. Now that the game had become reality, the answer was obvious.
An extreme meritocrat and authoritarian. So even with his children dropping dead one by one, the Emperor's first priority is that only the strongest ascends the throne.
The Emperor of Cycle 1 had almost certainly known I was slaughtering my siblings one after another — and had tacitly allowed it.
True, as the imperial family died off one by one, each victim's maternal relatives would hardly have sat idle.
But the Emperor of the present day had more than enough power to smooth over all of that.
Wait a second. Did the court ministers actually know I'd murdered every one of my siblings... and served me anyway?
Granted, in Cycle 1 my character was the Emperor's sole surviving child, and I'd claimed the throne through the, ahem, *official* procedure known as Duel Succession.
Even factoring that in, it didn't change the fact that the high ministers of this palace were deeply unsettling people.
Well, I suppose no one in their right mind would've joined a lunatic's quest for world domination.
The Knight Lady Wants to Be Loved — the novel I'd transmigrated into — was the story of a righteous heroine punishing villains.
And to knock down villains, villains had to exist in the first place.
Unfortunately, this world had an overabundance of scumbags one could justifiably call villains...
The sole sane member of the imperial family, the Crown Prince, continued in a trembling voice.
"Though I lack the ability, I have sat in a seat far beyond my station..."
"Enough."
The Emperor, his face carved from stone, cut him off.
"The words of an imperial prince are never spoken lightly. All the more so when they come from a Crown Prince destined to become Emperor."
"Y-yes, Father. I understand."
"Words once loosed from the lips cannot be gathered back. Head Butler."
Veins bulging at his temples, the Emperor summoned the head butler standing at the far end of the banquet hall.
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Bring me my seal and paper."
"By your command."
The head butler bowed and withdrew from the banquet hall.
Every soul in the room stood frozen like statues, waiting for his return.
In less than a minute the butler was back, and he placed the imperial seal in the Emperor's hand.
"Write it down."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Effective this very hour, Caelus von Aurelius, Crown Prince of the Empire, is stripped of his title."
Without so much as a glance at the Crown Prince, the Emperor continued.
"Caelus shall forfeit all rights of succession. Any who raise him up as the next Emperor will be punished for treason."
It didn't end with a mere dismissal. The First Prince had been stripped of every last claim to the throne.
Every faction that had backed him would now scurry from the Emperor's wrath and never come within ten feet of the man again.
And the Emperor's fury didn't stop there.
"Furthermore, all privileges of an imperial prince are revoked from Caelus. Yet a father has his duties, and I shall grant my son his final request. He is hereby dispatched to the southeastern region of Cherbel, where he will live out his days aiding the clearing of that land and the development of its farmland."
According to what I'd read in the novel, the southeastern frontier of Cherbel was a region whose reclamation had never been completed — a land crawling with monsters.
Ordered to spend the rest of his life in the back of beyond, the First Prince bowed his head to the Emperor with a radiant smile.
"Your boundless grace knows no limits, Your Majesty."
"Tch. I suppose I ought to retrain my eye for judging character."
To seat a fool like you as Crown Prince — my judgment must be trash.
The insult flew, blunt as a hammer, but the Crown Prince only grinned back like an idiot.
Letting out a long sigh, the Emperor turned his gaze to the rest of us.
"The contest for succession resumes as of now. If any of you wishes to withdraw, speak up. I'll send you off with that one."
"..."
"..."
Naturally, not a single soul relinquished their claim.
What should have been a peaceful breakfast lay in ruins, blown apart by the bomb the Crown Prince had lobbed into the middle of the table.
"Finish your meal and see yourselves out. I have work to do, thanks to one who is unworthy of the imperial blood."
The Emperor vanished without touching a bite of his food, and the Crown Prince followed soon after, unable to keep the smile off his face.
No member of the imperial family would have the nerve to keep eating in this atmosphere...
—clink.
Or so I'd assumed.
What is that woman doing.
The First Princess was slicing into her steak, knife ringing audibly against the plate.
Eating away with perfect composure, as if this whole fiasco had nothing whatsoever to do with her.
Hold on. Now that I think about it, she's the villainess, isn't she.
Even with the Crown Prince standing as the clear next Emperor, the First Princess had set her sights on the throne itself and persecuted the heroine without mercy.
In the original story, she managed to build a faction strong enough to genuinely threaten the Crown Prince's position.
But when the Crown Prince triumphed in the Duel Succession and ascended the throne, she fell with him.
So what would have happened if he hadn't won that duel?
Being outmaneuvered despite holding the official title means, in practical terms, the First Princess is the more capable one.
And right now, the one man who could check her had just demolished himself.
As far as she's concerned, the throne might as well already be hers.
The First Princess made a show of leisurely eating her meal, radiating effortless confidence.
Of course, my eyes caught the faint tremble in her eyebrows, and the way she swallowed her meat without properly chewing it.
In the novel, she was a main-villain-grade fiend who'd dined with total serenity amid a blood-spattered banquet hall.
Apparently she hadn't yet grown into the scheming demoness of the century.
Come to think of it, where exactly are we in the novel's timeline?
Given that the Crown Prince had been holed up in the palace instead of gallivanting around with the heroine, we were at the very beginning of the original story, at most.
And since he'd been delighted to be exiled to the frontier, it seemed he'd never met the original heroine at all.
I rose from my seat, determined to pin down the exact timeline and draft my plans accordingly.
As I strolled out of the banquet hall with practiced nonchalance, the First Princess flashed me a smile of victory.
I offered no response whatsoever, and slipped out quietly.
The Fourth Prince had no support base, not even a set of maternal relatives to lean on. Among the remaining imperial children, he stood farthest of all from the throne.
The best moment to turn the tables is when your enemy lets their guard down. Giving away nothing, I returned to my chambers.
The breakfast that had felt like an eternity finally came to an end.
The moment I was back in my room, I summoned a servant and requested the enrollment roster of the Imperial Academy.
I had no doubt every one of my movements would reach the Emperor's ears — but evading the Emperor's gaze inside the palace had always been impossible anyway.
So I accepted the risk and started gathering intelligence.
Last year's top first-year student was Charlotte von Berg... which means when the heroine enrolled, this girl would have been a second-year...
The original novel opened with the heroine's enrollment at the Imperial Academy, the one institution even commoners could enter.
A heroine raised in an orphanage under the sponsorship of a mysterious benefactor.
Having shown prodigious talent in both swordsmanship and magic from childhood, she aced the entrance examination and enrolled as the top-scoring admittee — that was the first major episode of the story.
The Academy entrance exam is in March... so that leaves two months.
It was early January in my new life as the Fourth Prince, meaning two months remained until the heroine walked through the Academy gates.
Running the original story through my head, I reviewed my plans for the road ahead.
The most promising candidate for the throne had just hurled himself off the board.
The factions that had backed the Crown Prince found themselves masterless overnight — worse, they now sat under the Emperor's suspicious eye.
My dear siblings would no doubt gleefully scoop up all those masterless horses and herd them into their own stables.
But no faction alive would throw its weight behind a Fourth Prince with no foundation whatsoever.
I have far too few pieces to play. Not that I could assassinate my siblings again this time around...
In the game, one click and your stats rose, your schemes executed flawlessly.
But with the game now reality, there was no way someone with zero support — namely, me — could pull off a string of assassinations.
My gaze drifted back to the paper the servant had brought.
In the year the heroine enrolls, practically every important figure in the story will be entering the Academy...
The Emperor championed meritocracy with almost fanatical intensity.
At his behest, the Academy had admitted talented commoners in significant numbers.
Children whose brains were still soft and whose heads were full of flowers — ideal pawns, easy to win over.
School ties, regional ties, blood ties. Can't manufacture the last two — but school ties I can build.
What if I recruited the key talents who'd play pivotal roles in the novel, and made them mine before the story ever reached them?
And with the original plot as my roadmap, the ways I could grow my faction were virtually limitless.
The original protagonist's brain is hopelessly righteous, but her actual ability is legit. Strip away my Cycle 1 memories, and she'd be well worth recruiting as an ally.
The problem was whether I could even pass the Academy's entrance examination.
The First Prince had been named Crown Prince back when the Fourth Prince was still a small child.
With an heir already established, the Fourth Prince had never received a ruler's education.
He'd taken sword lessons and a basic curriculum as duties of his blood, nothing more.
Falling far, far short of the bar for an academy that gathered the finest minds in the world.
The Emperor would never admit a prince with no talent just for the name... ugh. Well, no help for it. Two months of hardcore studying, then.
Suddenly I'd become a test-prep student, but with any other path to a power base closed off, I had no choice.
What a waste, honestly. With just a little more standing, I have so many moves I could make right now.
My head was already full of them — talents still buried in obscurity, hidden mines waiting to be excavated.
But information like that was useless to a man holding nothing but the title of Fourth Prince.
If only I had power on the level of a count, at minimum...
—knock, knock.
"Your Highness, the Court Count is here to see you."
"I'll receive him."
The attendant's voice came from beyond the door.
I rose at once and straightened my attire.
The Count Palatine governed the great and small affairs of the entire palace — a man even a prince could not treat carelessly.
More than that, in Cycle 1 this man had served as Minister of the Empire's Intelligence Bureau.
The talent who had presided over the empire's filthiest, darkest work.
Why would he come looking for me out of nowhere?
Setting the small question aside, I opened the door to greet him.
"To what do I owe the honor of this visit?"
The Count Palatine had passed sixty — an old man by medieval standards.
Yet he bowed to me with a sturdy frame that belied his years.
"I came upon a rather fascinating book in the lower districts, and wished to recommend it to Your Highness."
"I'm grateful for your kindness."
"I hear the contest for succession has begun anew. I believe this book will suit Your Highness exceedingly well. Do give it a thorough reading."
"I certainly wi—"
The moment my fingers closed around the book he handed me, my whole body locked in place.
The faint smell of ink rising from the pages.
A cover dyed black from edge to edge, and the red lettering across it — so painfully familiar.
Mein Kampf.
When I tore my eyes from the book and looked up at the Count Palatine,
he was smiling — a smile that crawled cold all the way down my spine.