Ventorino Kingdom - Toward the Second Revenge (4)
The history of the Ventorino Kingdom was longer than most people would have guessed.
About seven hundred years, in fact—roughly fifty years longer than the Ulsro Kingdom. But that long history had not belonged to a single dynasty. Including the new line founded by Marc, four dynasties had ruled Ventorino over the centuries.
If the previous dynasties had fallen because they lost a war to another nation, that would have been one thing. But that had not been the case in Ventorino. In order, the causes of the old dynasties’ collapse had been the demon race, tyranny, and the Demon King’s army.
The rulers who opened a new dynasty always thought the same thing: there was no need to change the kingdom’s name. Ventorino was a land that suffered frequent demon incursions, so its people tended to be fiercely patriotic and deeply attached to the soil they had lived on. If anything, founding a new dynasty was the easier way to win public support.
The same was true of Marc’s decision to proclaim revenge for the fallen dynasty and keep the kingdom’s name unchanged when he became king. Though he had once been a member of the hero’s party that defeated the Demon King, he had originally come from the Dezac Empire, the potential enemy state of Ventorino. Worse, he had even been born into nobility, despite the empire’s collapse. On top of that, there was the stain of a past that would only damage his accession to the throne.
That stain was...
“The royal family was wiped out because Marc’s support arrived too late... or so it’s said.”
“...I’m not sure I understand what you mean all of a sudden.”
The girl tilted her head as if she had just heard something far too difficult. It was a clumsy, almost stupid-sounding answer, but she was still young and clearly inexperienced. Anyone with a sharp eye would have seen at once that she was acting.
“You don’t have to pretend that hard. We’re not people sent by the royal family. We came here to help you.”
“......I really don’t know anything.”
Suspicion filled the girl’s face.
And rightly so. Three impossibly handsome and beautiful strangers had suddenly shown up in the slums, lone to her, and started saying dangerous things. Of course she would be wary.
The poor were, more often than not, people who had been lied to or taken advantage of too many times to count. Most of them had little faith left in humanity. And from the way the girl was acting now, it seemed she already knew the truth of what had happened that day. If so, then she would only be even more careful.
“It can’t be helped if you still don’t trust us. But what about this?”
“So I’m...”
The girl, who had been denying Valdes again, suddenly widened her eyes.
From his back rose a pair of membrane wings, and a large horn pushed up from his forehead.
“D-Demon...?”
There was no mistaking the symbol of a demon.
“Will you believe us now? That we’re their enemies—and your allies.”
“Ah...”
A normal person would have screamed and run the moment they saw a demon, shouting for the guards and knights while alerting everyone nearby. Some would have frozen in terror, too frightened to move. But the girl’s eyes were nothing like that.
There was more joy than fear in them.
In the end, she chose not flight or alarm, but to invite them inside.
“...Please come in, then.”
“Thank you.”
Valdes followed the girl into the shack. It was cramped enough to make four people feel squeezed together. There were a few pieces of furniture for a slum dwelling, but that only made the lack of seating even worse. In the end, the three of them had to crowd opposite the girl.
“Hehehe...”
“Miss Yueli, please stop laughing like that.”
“Nope~.”
“......”
At the childish bickering between the two women, suspicion immediately returned to the girl’s face.
Her expression practically asked, Are these women really demons? Feeling needlessly embarrassed, Valdes cleared his throat to change the mood, then continued.
“We’ve been investigating you for a while now. More precisely, your mother.”
At his words, the girl’s forehead twitched. Ignoring that, Valdes went on.
“Your mother’s name was Isabel Ventorino, right?”
“......”
“You still don’t trust us enough, do you? That’s a good attitude. The weak should doubt everything they can.”
They had let her into the house for the moment, but she was still uneasy. The royal family of Ventorino certainly knew the name Isabel. The boy before her might be a demon, an enemy of the continent, but one could never be too careful. There were traitors among humans, after all. Why should there not be traitors among demons too?
No one can be trusted.
That was the girl’s rule.
At the same time, it had been her mother’s dying wish.
Isabel Ventorino, who had briefly allowed herself to feel something good, who had believed a man to be a hero, only to be betrayed by him...
“Hmm. How can I make you trust me outright, then?”
“...Take an Oath of Mana, then.”
“Oh?”
“Swear that you’ll definitely kill Marc de Ventorino.”
The girl’s eyes, as she said it, blazed with rage and thirst for vengeance.
It was a gaze far too intense to belong to an ordinary girl.
“Sorry, but I can’t do that.”
“Ha. I knew it. You’re just the same as every...”
“Killing him would be too easy.”
“...What?”
“If he dies, he’ll be relieved right away. That won’t do. I’m going to make that bastard live while he’s crushed under the sins he committed... and then I’ll drive him to suicide.”
“......”
The girl fell silent. Not because she was offended, but because she was surprised.
For a boy who looked about her own age, the words were heavy—serious in a way that made her pause. She was mature enough herself, but this was a demon, and somehow that made the feeling completely different.
Was it because he was strong? There was a certainty in his voice.
But even more than that, what she liked was how much his attitude resembled her mother’s.
Her mother had not wanted Marc merely dead. She had wanted him to suffer. She had wanted the man who betrayed trust and friendship to live in torment for the rest of his life, and only then die.
That was why she had given birth to her. The child of the enemy of her family and clan.
“...Fine. I believe you.”
“Hmm?”
“Besides, I can’t do anything on my own anyway. All I have is this worthless body and a somewhat clever head. Honestly, I don’t see any hope of taking revenge alone. Even if it means giving up and relying on someone else... I need help.”
She said that, but Valdes did not believe her at face value. She was sharper and more cunning than she looked. It was obvious she wanted to use him.
He didn’t mind. He intended to use her, too.
They would both benefit from the arrangement, so it made sense to work together.
Once the conversation was going smoothly, Valdes immediately dropped the formal tone.
“Good. Then before we talk any further... pack your important things.”
“Huh?”
“I can’t leave something this important in a dump like this. If you suddenly fall sick and die, changing the plan will be a pain in the ass. Besides...”
Isabel Ventorino’s face surfaced in his mind.
“I owe her a little, too. It doesn’t sit right with me to leave things like this.”
Even though he spoke casually to her, the girl still answered with proper respect and obeyed him readily. She knew little, but judging by the clothes worn by the women beside him, Valdes was clearly of very high standing.
She could be considered royalty herself, but a girl with no country and no retainers had no real pride left to her. She had been born in the slums without ever having seen a royal castle. If not for everything her mother had told her, she might never have thought of herself as royalty at all.
“...? Okay. I understand.”
In truth, she welcomed the chance to leave this place.
It might have been a place tied to memories of her mother, but the truth was that it was too miserable and held far more unpleasant memories than good ones. The memories could stay in her heart, and in the keepsakes her mother had left behind. That was enough.
“I’ve packed everything.”
“Already?”
Valdes looked her up and down, but nothing about her seemed especially different. Her clothes were the same, and her luggage amounted to a single shabby bundle. Even that didn’t look large enough to hold much of anything.
“I was poor.”
“I see. Fine, let’s go.”
He started to head out first, but when he realized the girl wasn’t following, he turned back.
“What is it? Aren’t you coming?”
“...Tell me your name.”
“Ah. We haven’t even introduced ourselves yet, have we? I’m Valdes.”
The girl only stared blankly at the hand he held out, as if she had never seen a handshake before.
“Why are you doing that again?”
“...Nothing.”
After a brief hesitation, she carefully took Valdes’s hand.
“I’m... Rachel. Rachel Ventorino.”
The girl, Rachel, did not let go of his hand right away.
It was warm, and strangely comforting. The palm was firm, yet somehow soft in a way that felt almost unreal. It had been so long since she had felt anything like that. No—maybe this was the first time she had ever shaken hands with someone like this.
“I’m Irena. I’m the young master’s secretary.”
“I’m Yueli! I’m Master’s slave and his meat toilet!”
“...What?”
“Haah, Yueli...”
After that little incident—during which Yueli’s idiotic introduction had earned Rachel’s suspicion—the four of them headed to an inn on the outskirts of town. It was the same inn where Irena and Yueli had been waiting for Valdes.
Once they returned there and Yueli went to wash herself, Irena went out to buy Rachel some clothes and a simple meal. The clothes she had been wearing were far too worn and filthy, and the inn did not serve food, functioning only as lodging.
“Oh.”
Dressed properly, Rachel turned out to be quite pretty.
She had been underfed for so long that her frame was much smaller than it should have been for her age, and her face was thin, but if she ate well and slept properly from now on, she looked like she would grow into a decent beauty.
“Th-thank you...”
“Hmm? For what?”
“For the room and clothes... and the food, too...”
For some reason, that made him smile.
Up until coming here, she had worn herself into such a painfully abandoned, animal-like posture, and yet in the space of a short while she had become a child again. Still, when he thought of it as a look appropriate for her age, he felt a strange sense of satisfaction.
“It’s nothing. This much isn’t a big deal.”
“Yes...”
“Eat up. Don’t rush it, though. Your stomach probably isn’t in good shape, and you’ll only get indigestion.”
“Ah, thank you.”
Rachel carefully soothed her stomach with the soup first, moving with cautious hands.
“How much do you know?”
“I think... everything. But it’s only what my mother told me, so I’m not sure.”
Valdes nodded.
“Good. Then eat while you listen.”
“Slurp... Yes.”
“I can’t remember exactly when it was, but... we were crossing the Ventorino Kingdom on our way to the Demon King’s territory.”
It was the start of an important story, but he simply could not bring himself to stop there.
“We?”
“Ah, right now I’m Valdes, the Demon King’s son, but I suppose you could call it my previous life? Before that, I was human. I was the hero Pedro.”
“I see.”
“...That’s a very normal reaction.”
Her calm response only made him feel awkward. She didn’t look surprised at all, so there was no real satisfaction in the reveal. It was less fun than seeing Serenia react.
“Does the fact that you were the hero Pedro affect my revenge, Valdes...-sama?”
“No, not really... I mean, it doesn’t, does it?”
“Then it doesn’t matter.”
“Hmph. Fair enough. All right, then I’ll start again.”
It had been around the time the hero’s party stopped at the Fifth Fortress on their way to the Demon King’s domain.
After a fierce battle, the group had taken a short rest there when an urgent message arrived: the capital of the Ventorino Kingdom had been seized by a special detachment of the Demon King’s army, and the king, along with the royal family, had fled the city in haste.
Because the entire kingdom had been invaded, most of the royal family who stood in the line of succession had gathered in the capital. One wrong move, and the dynasty itself could collapse.
But the Fifth Fortress was still surrounded by demons, so the party decided to send out an advance force first.
With more than five hundred cavalrymen, the warrior from the hero’s party—the man who was then using the name Marc Hazen and who would later become king—set out to rescue them. Carrying only a little food and placing all their focus on speed, they raced toward the royals at full gallop.
As a result, they were able to reach them at a rather hair-raising moment.
Since they were living beings after all, they had stopped to rest now and then along the way, and when Marc moved ahead to scout the road, he found the royal family just as the attack had begun.
But he did not rush in to help.
Only when the royal guards protecting the nobles were on the verge of annihilation did he return to the cavalry and report what he had seen. By the time he and the cavalry finally attacked, most of the royals were already dead, and the few survivors were so badly wounded they were on death’s door.
In front of the surviving guards and the cavalry he had led there, Marc threw himself over the king’s corpse and wailed.
Then he swore revenge.
Before long, that rumor spread across the entire kingdom. It became the spark that won Marc the fierce support of the people of Ventorino and laid the foundation for a new dynasty.
But there had been a royal survivor in that battle. It was the third princess of the time, Isabel Ventorino.
As absurd as it sounded, she had survived because some lowly demon had secretly abducted her. She had later escaped and barely made it back to the capital, but by then the war was over and Marc had already become king.
“Hearing it again like this... he really is trash.”