A Proposal Over Tea
Rio Cardein. Though she was the Fourth Princess of the empire and only ninth in the line of succession, her beautiful appearance had won her the love of countless people. Today she was having a rather unusual experience.
Ordinarily, the tea parties held after lunch would see only her younger sister Ekaterina or her older brother Victor joining her as company. Today, however, an unexpected guest filled the scene before her eyes.
Evan Farcion.
One of the empire’s sharpest blades and the knight assigned to guard her younger sister, he was for some reason not standing behind Ekaterina as he usually did. Instead he sat right beside her, taking part in the tea party itself.
With his striking looks and glittering achievements, he was the man every child in the empire looked up to. Yet he seemed utterly oblivious to the thick affection hidden in the way Ekaterina kept poking and prodding at him, flustering about in front of his little sister like a helpless puppy.
Surely her adorable younger sister had a reason for dragging him along to tea today.
And Rio was not the sort of person who would fail to notice a reason that cute.
“…No, Your Highness, what I mean is…”
“Sir Evan.”
“Yes, Fourth Princess.”
“I believe Sir Evan is twenty years old now… is that correct?”
“Yes. That is correct, Your Highness.”
“And yet… I heard you have not even become engaged, let alone married. Is what I heard true?”
“…Embarrassing as it is, Your Highness heard correctly.”
A flicker of impatience, regret, and injustice crossed Sir Evan’s face as he answered, only to vanish the moment he checked his younger sister’s expression beside him.
“The Farcion family loses its hereditary ability if they fail to have a child before the age of twenty-five, correct?”
“…That is so, Your Highness. Of course, since I still have a younger sibling, there is no worry of the ability dying out in my generation…”
Sir Evan shot a sharp sidelong glance at his sister, but she blithely ignored it and pretended to look elsewhere.
Watching them, Rio thought the girl really was a piece of work.
“In that case, would you mind showing me a little of that ability right now? The power of the Conductor. I’ve always wanted to see it up close.”
“Well… there’s no reason I can’t, but… is that all right with you, Your Highness?”
“…It’s fine. I don’t think I’ve seen it since that time either.”
“Then… I’ll demonstrate with this fork.”
Sir Evan picked up one of the dessert forks laid out for the tea and cakes. A low wooong sounded, and the fork rose into the air, trailing a spray of blue light beneath it.
It was the Farcion family’s unique hereditary technique—the Conductor—which allowed free manipulation of any object the user was capable of cutting.
“Wow… I’ve seen it a few times at official ceremonies, but never this close… It’s truly beautiful…”
“Haha… I’m a little embarrassed. It’s just something I was born with.”
The fork danced through the air at Sir Evan’s slightest gesture—spinning, accelerating in sudden bursts—before settling gently back onto the table where it had begun.
“So this is the technique that held an entire army alone at the Lellion Siege… It’s beautiful.”
“Heh heh… Our Sir Evan really is something, isn’t he?”
Ekaterina puffed out her chest and squared her shoulders as if the achievement were her own. Sir Evan gave her a look of pure, weary saltiness.
If he left things like this he would only keep staring at his sister in despair, so a change of subject was needed.
“Then… Sir Evan, would you tell us about the Lellion Siege?”
“Mm… Very well.”
The Battle of Lellion. In the days before the empire was even called an empire, a kingdom that had been steadily devouring its neighbors with overwhelming might suddenly found itself pushed back by a coalition of those same neighbors. The final defensive line—Lellion Fortress—was about to fall when a seventeen-year-old boy held it alone. That was the legend.
“It began, I am ashamed to say, with the corruption of the nobility.”
A string of discoveries—gold, mithril, cold iron—had set off a gold rush that rapidly bloated the kingdom that would one day become the empire. Riding that momentum, the kingdom began raising armies. A few years later, judging the time ripe, it declared war on its neighbors and opened the curtain on the continental war.
With a mighty army and the vast wealth of its gold-driven industries, the kingdom crushed the others by force and expanded its borders.
As the frontiers grew, so did industry and manpower, more than enough to fill the kingdom’s belly. And so, exactly as every kingdom in history before it, corruption took root.
It started with the smallest enterprises and spread, until even in the middle of a continental war the military budget itself was being siphoned and stolen.
“Ugh…! This—there’s sand in it!”
“Commander! The weapons we just received aren’t mithril—they’re ordinary iron…!”
Sand and stones mixed freely into the soldiers’ rations; weapons that should have been hard and keen became soft and blunt.
Like clothes slowly soaked by a fine rain, the kingdom began taking heavy casualties in battles it should have won overwhelmingly, and at last it began to retreat.
Inadequate food and weapons so dull one doubted they could kill an enemy were more than enough to shatter morale, and shattered morale led straight to desertion.
Once the first window cracked, desertions began happening by entire units in the middle of operations. After years of being whittled away, the kingdom finally stood on the brink of its capital falling to the allied assault.
“Lock the gates tight. Leave only the bare minimum of swords inside and throw every other blade over the walls.”
“B-but, General…!”
“All soldiers, stop the enemies climbing the walls and pin them with arrows. War mages, prepare Imperial-class magic. I will buy the time.”
“Kh… We will never… never forget this.”
A boy who had been recognized for his talent at only seventeen and risen to general through battlefield merit threw himself alone from the sealed walls, countless swords raining down with him into the enemy below.
When the boy known as the enemy general leapt from the ramparts, the coalition took it for surrender and briefly halted the storm of attacks pouring against the fortress.
It was a choice they would regret until the day the empire destroyed them.
A single clear, crystalline ting rang from one of the fallen swords.
No one paid it any mind.
But when that sound multiplied into the thousands, the tens of thousands, no one standing on that field could ignore it any longer.
The wide sky filled with crimson blades, and soon the place became a graveyard of swords.
“Stop him!! There’s only one of—gahk…!”
As if possessed of will, the swords embroidering the heavens began to pierce the enemy one after another. At their center the boy conducted them with beautiful, restrained movements.
“Two hundred seventy-five… two hundred seventy-six… two hundred seventy-nine… Faster. Faster still.”
Allegretto.
As the boy’s gestures quickened, the enemy’s screams only grew louder. Those who somehow closed the distance found their heads flying from the sword now in the boy’s own hand.
“A-aah… A nightmare… This is a nightmare…”
The sounds ringing from thousands upon tens of thousands of blades were like a funeral march.
The boy wielded tens of thousands of swords at once and reaped lives, yet the enemy was a coalition of multiple kingdoms. There was no shortage of powerhouses on his own level.
Heroes who casually swatted aside attacks that would have killed ordinary soldiers in a single exchange finally reached the place where the boy conducted his blades.
A necromancer who commanded corpses and was called a one-man legion.
“Cute. Once I cut off his limbs he’ll make a fine slave.”
A madman who controlled blood and grew stronger the longer a battle continued.
“Your blood…! It looks delicious.! Give it…! Give it to me…!!”
And last, a girl who had begun as a slave soldier, awakened her talent on the battlefield, and risen to the rank of Sword Saint.
“…”
The moment their eyes met the boy’s, all three launched themselves forward without a single signal.
Fwaat—!
The three heroes ignored the soldiers dying around them and attacked the boy.
Necromancy bound his feet; blood magic punched through his shoulder; a clear sword aura sliced open his chest.
The screams of the dead split his skull with pain; the blood circulating through his body moved thickly and failed to deliver proper strength to his muscles; a strange energy that had invaded him began to wrest control of the swords he was conducting and turn them against him.
Even so, the boy never released the blades he commanded.
Seventeen minutes and thirty-three seconds. That was how long the boy held the entire coalition alone.
Past the fifteen-minute mark was more than enough time for the war mages of the fortress he was protecting to complete their Imperial-class magic. In the end the Lellion Siege concluded with the kingdom’s victory under the war mages’ Giga Gravity spell.
“Well… in the end I overused the ability and took a permanent injury, so I can’t stand on a battlefield anymore.”
“I see… Then how did you end up as Ekaterina’s escort? A war hero of Sir Evan’s caliber could have spent the rest of his life in comfort.”
“Ah… that’s…”
Here Evan absolutely could not say that he had thrown a tantrum refusing to inherit the headship from his father—the head of House Farcion—and had been kicked out to become Ekaterina’s knight as a result.
So the excuse he settled on was simple: he would use the superior sitting right beside him, eyes sparkling.
“Because I saw light in Her Highness Princess Ekaterina.”
“W-w-w-what…?!”
“Light? What do you mean by that?”
“Mm… it’s hard to explain, but… to someone who had lived only on the battlefield, Her Highness Princess Ekaterina felt like the sun… something like that.”
“Huuung… I see… Well then, this is sudden, Sir Evan.”
“Yes?”
“Would you care to marry me?”