The Next Goal
At a glance, she really was a woman of ambition. Ask whether she actually had the makings of a sovereign, though, and—well.
In this age, a ruler who supports the Hero without stinting may be called a wise one. They would have promised each other at least that much. Which meant it might be worth handling that side of things as well.
"Yes. One moment—surely you aren't planning to cultivate a friendship with the imperial princess?"
"No reason I couldn't. So long as she does as I say."
In the end, that was what a noble's life amounted to. This, too, was a sacrifice of a sort: a princess who would draw every eye in my place and sound the opening of the struggle for the imperial throne.
Laura only tilted her head, as if she couldn't see what the trouble was.
"Do you not know that princess's temperament?"
"She's obsessed with power. A woman set on becoming the Empire's first empress. And she hasn't a single foundation under her."
Why she had ever dreamed such a dream, I had no idea. She was simply a princess who had wailed that she would be emperor, like a child. Not the Hero. The Emperor.
"So you do know. Don't tell me you mean to throw your weight behind the princess?"
"I'm saying we ought to use what we have."
I can't do it alone. If there's no one else to offer up as a sacrifice, isn't this the answer?
"Then what of the third prince?"
"The West is already behind him, isn't it?"
The second prince had the East and the South. The third had the West. And the North had no one.
The first prince? Sickly, forever creaking along, with no hunger for the throne and sense enough to know his place—what grand duke would bind himself to that? The capital-faction nobles, at the very most, and that would be all of them.
"So it really is about keeping the balance. Even so. The princess? It's absurd, isn't it? And she's a woman. It isn't as if no realm is ruled by a queen or a grand duchess, but the Empire has no such precedent, and every rival she faces is a formidable prince."
"That's none of my concern. I just want to see what happens if we give that absurd woman a little help from behind."
In any case, all that mattered was keeping the balance. Even with two grand dukes—the East and the South—stuck fast to the second prince's side, the title of Guardian of the North was not one that could be ignored.
"It certainly doesn't seem impossible."
"Once the imperial family balances itself and the contest turns serious, talk of me will die."
However high a grand duke's station, imperial blood comes first. Who would dare make a subject of me? The nobles would all be scrambling over whose coattails to seize, and even foreign nobles would be calculating where to cling if they wanted to wheedle the slightest scrap from the Empire. All of it, in the end, led to one thing: securing my own footing at Felione.
"On the other hand, if a young lady cast off in a broken engagement is seen helping the princess, she may only draw more scorn for it."
Laura worried far too much about things that didn't matter. I shook my head.
"On the surface, there's the crest. Evan must have given it to me with a moment like this in mind."
"Ah. There is sense in that."
"So tell her I want to meet the princess."
Time to see her for myself. What sort of person was the princess who would be looking upon Grand Duchess Tatiana—and not the Hero, Tati?
Now that Carn had become the Hero, the party threw itself into monster hunts with frantic diligence, trying to fill the hole Tati had left. Drawn along by the Holy Sword's Guidance—the sacred blade's power to point the way toward the Demon King—Carn and his companions pushed deeper into the Night, and fought.
But.
"Kieeeek!"
"What is this? What the hell is going on? Why are they swarming like this?!"
The monsters were far too strong. Their numbers were bad enough, but the strength was worse. Not beyond what could be faced—and yet what Tati had cut down lightly, Carn was laboring to put down.
"The Holy Sword's Guidance?"
"It's giving off light. Damn it. We have to kill every last one of them!"
"There are too many!"
The aberrant monsters welling out of the Abyss were nothing like the kind that at least belonged to a race. These were creatures born feeding on human dread and terror, and every last one of them was grotesque.
"No. In the first place, there was never any chance the monsters before the Holy Sword's Guidance would be few."
"True enough. It shows the road to the Demon King. It doesn't show a shortcut."
Once the enemy was down and they had caught a breath, Saintess Angelica and Divine Archer Lucia murmured it between them.
Carn could hardly believe it. He broke through a region of this insane difficulty alone?
"He got through country like this? Easily?"
"So they say."
The hero's party was not weak. Put bluntly, they were strong. The seats of Saintess, Archmage, and Divine Archer were granted only once one's skill had been proven, and however much they had left the work to Tati, ability once held did not simply dwindle. Worried the party might slacken without him, they had already tested each of their skills over again, just in case.
Even so, the time had come to start admitting it.
"I think it's about time we admitted it," said Lea, sweat pouring off her as she fell back a step.
Tati had slaughtered countless monsters along the Holy Sword's Guidance, and now Carn and the others were following that same path, step for step. It was a road through the Abyss that showed itself like a phantasm only to those who walked the Guidance. Along the way Tati had once taken, the monsters had multiplied again, as if to gnaw the world hollow; fill that road, and the aberrant things would spill over into the human realm. Even those had fallen easily beneath his hand. The very monsters he had once cut down without effort were now giving Carn's party all they could handle.
"Enough."
He knew every bit of it, and still he did not want to admit it. Admit it, and it would mean they had lost the greatest Hero who might have saved humanity.
"That this is a region beyond our level."
For years they had followed the Holy Sword's Guidance. They had been certain they had drawn a fair way toward the Demon King. But that region was too much for Carn and the hero's party. The road to the Demon King was far too harsh.
"Stop."
He wanted that mouth of Lea's shut—the one that did not know how to close.
"Tati used to cut down monsters of that level the way you'd slice a slime."
"So what do you want me to do about it? He's already dead! You think wailing and sniveling here is going to bring him back to life?"
The one they regretted now—the one they wished they could apologize to, and beg forgiveness from—would already be dead, and in truth had never even been found.
"Yes. That's right. This is the punishment Tati laid on us, too. So however hard it is, it's ours to bear."
"Before that, we have to regroup. We aren't Tati. We can't keep running here without rest."
Because they weren't Tati. At the Saintess's words, Carn bit down hard on his lower lip.
He couldn't even catch a dead Tati?
"......We're returning to Elita."
Wanting only to flee reality, the false Hero Carn chose retreat in the end.
Felione — The Women's Dormitory
Irene Roswell was the fourth princess of the Empire.
She stood at the very bottom of the line of succession, and yet her hunger for the throne was anything but ordinary. In truth, the reason was nothing grand. It was not ambition for power. Anyone who was not a fool knew that in an empire steered by the Four Grand Dukes, no emperor was ever going to appear who could truly swing power of that kind.
What Irene Roswell wanted from the throne was simpler than that. Until now she had been a presence so faint she might as well not have existed. Her mother was common-born—there were even rumors she had been a woman who sold her body—and so the nobles had never looked kindly on the daughter. The most Irene could do was take the common folk in hand, and assert through them that she existed at all.
Yes. To make her own existence stand out. To show that she, too, could become emperor. Under an imperial order run by the Four Grand Dukes, becoming emperor was no different from winning the Four Grand Dukes' support. That alone could be called a remarkable thing.
Hah. I thought that if it were Tati—the commoner Hero, not the royal Hero of some kingdom—he would have been my strength.
Irene clutched at her hair.
Who could have imagined that the man praised as the greatest Hero in all of history would hand over the Holy Sword so easily? It was strange. Had he wanted to die that badly?
As things stood, she could not tie herself to Carn. Her position was strained enough already. There might be talk that an imperial princess had spread her legs for a kingdom's prince and Hero, and at a station like hers that talk could swell into a diplomatic incident.
And so a student from her inner circle came looking for Irene, who had kept away from class for some while after the Hero's death.
"Your Highness."
"What is it?"
"Grand Duchess Tatiana of the North says she wishes to meet with Your Highness."
At those words, her eyes flew open.
That Tatiana? Wanted her?
"That lunatic?"
Felione's Lunatic. Tatiana von Clyde, young lady of the North.
Once, she had simply been called the young lady of the North. The name had stuck on the first day of the new term after Tatiana's return, born of the steel she had drawn in the middle of an etiquette class. It had gone far enough that even the nobles conceded the word lunatic. Swinging a blade during class—she simply hadn't drawn blood, that was all. Word was she had denied the very subject of refinement to the professor's face, and done it while shoving forward a Grand Duchess of the North's rights.
Until not so long ago, Tatiana had been a daughter of the North and of a grand ducal house still counted a latecomer, carrying a keener inferiority toward the old noble lines than anyone, and treating aristocratic refinement as more sacred than the rest of them combined. A reversal that complete was strange enough that lunatic was hardly the wrong word. Of course, it was said beneath the surface, and mostly behind her back.
"Hm. Why would that woman want me?"
"That, I couldn't say. But this is a note sent by that aide of hers—a girl named Laura."
"Out of nowhere? What—hm."
Don't you want to challenge for the throne?
Irene let out a short laugh, then folded the note neatly away.
"A true lunatic. This one."
"But, Your Highness. With the Hero Tati dead as well, if even one of the grand dukes took your side, there could hardly be anything better."
"Even so. A lunatic like that..."
She had only heard the talk, and yet the word lunatic seemed to reach her more often than any mention of a young lady cast off in a broken engagement. If, in a single day, lunatic was circulating more widely than jilted lady, then she was no ordinary lunatic. To that degree—and quite contrary to what Tatiana herself had expected—what had settled on her from the very first day was not the name of a discarded young lady, but lunatic.
The house this lunatic belongs to will watch my back?
No. Before that—wasn't this a matter with no choice in it at all? If the lunatic had fixed her eye on her, she would try to get something out of it even by threats. An imperial princess in Irene's position was in no state to be picky.
"What kind of note is this? 'Don't you want to challenge for the throne?' Who writes a thing like that outright? No—there is someone. That lunatic."
"What should we do?"
Instinct said the sensible thing was simply to ignore it.
"Noble standing, circumstances, the lot of it—she's a bitch who'd throw it all away. Ignore her and she'll come straight here herself, won't she? What do you make of her?"
"That face, the one that doesn't let a single feeling show... it did seem a little mad."
If the woman was like that, better to take her in first than ignore her and be overwhelmed by force. She was someone who drew a blade and swung it in a classroom. There was no reason at all to go poking carelessly at whatever lay inside her.
"Of all people. And I don't even know what kind of bitch she is."
"Your Highness, you are still an imperial princess. You ought to mind your tongue a little."
"I don't know. Anyway, set a meeting. I have to keep up appearances, at least."
She said as much. And yet, if it went well—if it went very well—this might even help her in the succession as things stood now. That lunatic's house was certain in one thing: military strength. Guardian of the North, a house that swept away the magical beasts and the barbarians pressing down out of the northern wilds. If she could lay hold of that house's power...
If that were truly so, then—
Could I aim for the throne?
All at once, the greed stirred in her.