Ventorino Kingdom - Collapse or Capture (11)
It was then.
"Haa… ahh, ng, ngh…."
"…?"
A strange sound drifted from somewhere nearby.
"What…?"
Lloyd tilted his head. The noise was too faint for him to tell exactly what it was, so he looked around, searching for the source. It was not hard to find. Aside from that sound, the corridor was filled with nothing but silence.
With every step he took, the noise grew louder. Proof that he was drawing closer. And the nearer he came, the more clearly Lloyd understood exactly what it was.
"T-this is…."
His face gradually began to flush.
For all that Lloyd was a sturdy young man and old enough to know what he needed to know, he had never heard someone’s moans this nakedly before.
For one thing, he was still a virgin, and he despised the decadent culture of other nobles. Brothels were one thing, but he also loathed the secret gatherings some young aristocrats enjoyed. He was especially sensitive to the peculiar perfume prostitutes used, the cloying scent they seemed to leave everywhere.
Of course, being young did not mean he disliked erotic things. Like any ordinary young man, he was interested in sex; he had even given Prince Alfonso a collection of bawdy pictures. But his interest was limited to the woman he loved.
"…Here."
At last, Lloyd reached the source of the obscene sounds.
He stopped in front of the door.
"H-hee, heh, kyahh…!"
He had come looking because his curiosity had surged so violently, but once he got here, he had no idea what he was supposed to do.
Whoever was inside, making those sounds while tangled together, was almost certainly a servant. In this mansion, aside from him and his fiancée Clara, there were no other residents or guests. The culprit was obvious.
And yet he found himself wondering what he was supposed to do about it. Even if they were secretly coupling in one of the mansion’s rooms in broad daylight, could he really scold them for it?
For one thing, he had not hired them. The mansion was his property, yes, but the servants who worked here had been hired by his father, the head of the ducal house. Punishing the servants was the lord’s authority; for him to overstep that boundary would not be right.
Besides, this might not even be working hours. It could simply be a brief break. The Antifeol Ducal House was not the kind to exploit their servants, so their leisure time was properly protected. And there was also the fact that this was an empty room whose intended purpose had not yet been decided.
Of course, even considering all that, it would still be wrong….
He felt there was room for leniency.
An ordinary noble would have snapped in anger and opened the door at once, but Lloyd was not like that. He was the sort of true noble who was always mindful of other people’s eyes and even, by nature, cared for commoners.
Deep in thought.
Meanwhile, inside the room, where the soundproofing magic had not been activated, obscene moans continued to spill out. Even without being an ordinary noble, the sounds were enough to stir lust and make one want to force himself on the woman servant in the room under the pretense of punishment.
……
Enough to make a sturdy young man in his twenties throb hotly.
F-for now… for now, just… yes. Let me confirm it….
He needed to find out who was inside. Only then could he decide whether to warn them in secret or punish them. Convinced that barging in was probably not the right move, Lloyd carefully reached for the doorknob.
The door to the noble mansion, still practically new, moved smoothly and without a sound, doing its job perfectly. Through the narrow gap opening little by little, the young man’s eyes locked forward, unblinking.
"…Gulp."
He swallowed unconsciously, then jolted in surprise.
He did have an interest in sex, yet he disliked anything promiscuous. And yet, for some reason, he kept wanting to know what was happening in this room. In other circumstances, he would have shouted in outrage and simply walked past, then gathered all the servants later to warn them.
But now, for some reason, he was trying to convince himself of one thing after another while sneaking a look inside. His face was burning red as he did it. An unusual situation. Lloyd could think of the reason almost immediately.
"Haa, ahh, huhh, huhh…♥"
Clara’s voice….
"It’s similar."
The word slipped out of Lloyd’s mouth before he could stop it.
That was it.
The moans of the woman servant inside, probably a maid, sounded far too much like Clara, his fiancée and beloved. Or rather, it was exactly her voice.
It was almost identical to the voice he had imagined, the one he had thought that Clara might make if she ever moaned. The only difference was that this was far more licentious. So sticky and indecent it almost sounded like a whore’s moans.
It bothered him a little that someone with a voice so similar to his eternal love and future wife was making such noises. It was like Clara herself was whimpering like a prostitute.
I’d like to see what kind of woman she is.
As he thought that, he finally caught sight of the bed through the gap in the door, and of a half-naked man and woman rolling around on top of it.
"Haa, haa…!"
"Heh, heh…♥ Huh, hehheh…!"
In that instant, two things seared themselves into Lloyd’s mind.
White hair?
The first was that the woman’s long hair had a pale white sheen.
It was a little absurd that even her hair resembled his fiancée’s, but he never once thought that woman was Clara.
True, the current royal family had natural white hair in all but the king, but that trait was not exclusive to them. In fact, white hair was fairly common among nobles. In the Ventorino Kingdom, nearly half of the aristocracy had white hair.
The neighboring Ulsro Kingdom was much the same. There, blond hair—the color of the royal family—was also quite common among nobles. Of course, both countries had plenty of those colors, but only among the nobility, and the finer details of shade differed wildly from house to house.
Katarina’s white hair, at least, was not unusual for a woman born to a count’s house.
Which meant what shocked Lloyd was not that the woman had white hair, but that she was a maid—in other words, a noblewoman. It was not unheard of for a commoner to have white hair, but if such a maid existed, she would inevitably stand out. So in his mind, the half-naked woman servant was now definitively a noble.
It was not uncommon for bastard daughters from baronial or viscount houses—houses far below ducal or marquis rank, the sort that were all too common in royal residences—or for the lowest daughters of large families, to enter service as maids.
Still, if she’s a noble, she should at least have some basic education. Even if this is an empty room, to be doing something like this in broad daylight… tsk.
He clicked his tongue reflexively.
Whoever she was, she was a pathetic and foolish woman.
A white-haired maid like that could not be all that numerous in the mansion, so even if he could not see her face, identifying her should not be difficult. Whether by physique, voice, or simply asking around about her whereabouts at this hour, it did not seem like it would take long to narrow down which maid she was.
Once that thought ended, another followed in his mind.
And what’s more, he has atrocious taste. …To be thrusting himself so wantonly into something that isn’t even human….
Lloyd’s eyes had gone cold before he knew it.
No matter how much the woman resembled his fiancée, if the man was like that, he could not sympathize in the slightest. If anything, he only felt irritated, as though Clara had been stolen from him. And stolen by something that wasn’t even human, at that.
How can he play so obscenely with something like that? I can’t understand it at all. Is that what they call a perverse fetish? As a fellow human being, as a noble of the kingdom, it’s unbearably shameful.
Then he felt a flicker of confusion.
Whether pure-blooded or mixed, there was definitely no such thing among the servants of the ducal house. Of course there wasn’t—they weren’t human. There was no reason to hire something that wasn’t human. That was the understanding not only of him, but of the entire Antifeol bloodline.
And it can’t be one of the things from the basement either, and there’s no way anything that came outside would still be alive. Then did they bring it from outside?
A bright smile spread across Lloyd’s face.
It was a splendid expression on the face of a handsome young nobleman, but the thoughts forming in his head were nothing but vile.
"…With that much cause, I should have enough grounds to expel that maid even if there’s nothing else."
So satisfied with himself that he muttered it aloud. But it didn’t matter. Those beastlike pair seemed to be lost in their own little world and had not noticed him at all.
To preserve his precious eyeballs, Lloyd decided he should close the door and go find Clara. He hesitated briefly. It was not a very important matter, but his mood had sunk so low that his face had twisted into a frown.
A blackish-red head of hair… it reminds me of that thing His Majesty is working on as a hero. Damn it.
The blackish-red-haired demon hybrid whose name he could not even remember.
Something like that had been treated as a fighting asset by the neighboring country’s knightly order. And it had supposedly saved the royal family and many nobles of the kingdom, himself included. But in Lloyd’s view, all of that had been Heik’s achievement.
It was tragic, the way this kingdom treated things like that just because they happened to survive by luck. Even if this was his beloved homeland, a true noble had to be able to say what was wrong.
But speaking alone on his own behalf was difficult, because public sentiment among the commoners was not very good at the moment. So bitterly, they had to keep quiet. Still, if this helped gather public support, then perhaps it was fortunate; otherwise, many nobles would have risen up in protest.
"…Still, I don’t like it. From the look of it, Her Majesty seems to cherish that thing as well, and…."
Lloyd’s face crumpled.
His beloved Clara had, since that thing appeared, seemed to grow slightly more favorable toward the demon hybrid. She was not the only one; some nobles and commoners had begun to show that tendency as well.
As if that made a difference. It was hardly even worthy of being called a beast. For that category, beastmen still existed, don’t they? They were much closer to orcs or ogres, monsters one would find in a dungeon.
Things that deserved hatred, things that were fit to be used to relieve stress in the basement after spending a fortune on them. Monsters were killed for the benefit of humans and their remains taken, weren’t they? The same was true of demons. There was nothing wrong with tormenting and killing them for the sake of human stress relief.
"Haa, damn it. I was thinking too long."
Because of that strange sight, he had ended up reconsidering what should have been obvious in his head.
And all that had brought him was wasted time and a foul mood.
Lloyd grimaced and turned, intending to shut the door irritably and leave.
"A-ah, uh…!! Y-yes, that feels good…♥ Hnngh!! H-hehheh… j-just a little more… shove it in a lot deeper…."
……
But the woman inside had grown much louder, and had started speaking far more openly, so he had no choice but to stop in his tracks.
Dammit….
He silently cursed himself.
The organ that had just gone limp was hard again.
What a humiliation, for his manhood to rise while listening to the voice of a woman who was out there engaging in interracial sex with some demon. No matter how similar her voice might be to that of the woman he loved, this was a woman with a sexual appetite he could never accept. And perhaps that was why Lloyd felt, absurdly enough, as though he himself had been defeated.
…What should I do…?
Lloyd hesitated.
Should he charge in right now, drag them both out, throw the woman out, and bury the man in the basement? Or should he swallow his anger and leave? Or perhaps he should look for another way.
He chose the third option.
Just a little longer. He wanted to watch them just a little longer.
He wanted to etch into his heart the truth that he did not get aroused by filthy women like that. He wanted to heal his wounded pride. And if, in the end, only he would ever know about this anyway, then doing something no one else would ever hear about for his own sake hardly seemed difficult at all.
…I’m sorry, Clara….
Anyway, whether he wandered for five minutes or ten, getting lost and roaming the mansion would be the same either way.
Thinking that, he slowly turned his back.
Then he fixed his gaze on the white-haired woman and the blackish-red-haired thing.
They were just changing positions into a new one.
The woman pressed her head into the bed and raised her hips, while the thing clung to her backside from behind like an animal. A beastly coupling scene. Lloyd thought it suited those monsterlike creatures perfectly—beings so vile they were less than beasts themselves.