Proof (5)
Proof (5)
"Or should I say, Your Imperial Highnesses?"
It figured. Just as I expected, Chiara Berati knew exactly who we were.
She was, after all, someone who had infiltrated the Empire itself. She would have come in with that level of intelligence.
We hadn't even sat down yet, but she simply claimed one of the terrace seats, sat, and crossed her legs.
Her whole manner was markedly different from how she'd treated me when I was alone.
Well, thinking about it, that made sense. Back then I hadn't been wearing this sort of... attire, and I'd simply walked right up to her, without asking a single question, and tucked banknotes between her breasts.
I hadn't looked like I was trying to infiltrate anything. I'd acted as if I knew her entire identity from the start, so she couldn't afford to underestimate me.
And now it was the same. At a glance she looked relaxed, but her gaze kept returning to me.
If she'd received a report about how I conducted myself at the Trilateral Summit, she'd find me hard to dismiss.
Yet that constant shift of her attention toward me seemed to bother Alice a little.
Alice seated herself at the far end of the long semicircular bench, directly opposite Chiara Berati. She crossed her legs with proud deliberation and folded her arms.
Because of that, her appearance became a bit more... well, embarrassing to look at, but it seemed that, at least for now, her pride came before her embarrassment.
I sat down a short distance beside her. Next to me sat Claire, and next to her sat Leo, whose expression was unimaginably tense.
"And how about you, handsome? Why don't you come sit here?"
As if seizing the initiative in the atmosphere, Chiara Berati patted the spot beside her.
"You do seem a little naive, but I can't say I dislike that sort of man."
"You're a knight and a nun—can you afford to covet men?"
"Well, the Goddess did tell us to diligently bear children. If all the children she created locked themselves away in their rooms and died alone without ever having any children of their own, I doubt she'd be too pleased."
Having said that, Berati shrugged.
"Not that it is wrong. I am currently keeping my chastity, after all. But even if I didn't, would the knightly order expel me for it? More likely they'd choose to eliminate whatever man I slept with in order to preserve my position."
"His Majesty would be delighted indeed if you killed the next head of House Grace, the family that has served the throne so loyally."
"Who can say? Even the Empire can't casually start a war with the Holy State, can it? Killing one noble might just get quietly buried."
It was obvious bluster.
The very reason the Holy State and the Kingdom had sought an alliance in the first place was that, state against state, they could never defeat the Empire. Moreover, they were on guard because the Empire had significantly expanded its military in recent years and kept subtly shifting troops toward the border.
I glanced toward Alice.
Her expression didn't change in the slightest. She wasn't simply maintaining a poker face. Alice knew the situations of the Holy State and the Kingdom as well. I had reported them to her in detail on the day of the summit.
"Spare me the nonsense. My father is exactly the sort who would use that very excuse to invade the Holy State and still have cause to spare."
"......."
Exactly.
The most important element in war is a just cause. No matter how much power one wields, without a cause the people beneath you won't follow—whether it's something intangible like inflated patriotism or ethnic pride, or the real fear that unless you go out now and crush all of them, you might also die like that. A soldier needs a reason to fight.
The Emperor was entirely capable of whipping up the death of a single noble into a nationwide cause.
The fact that the Autonomous State had requested aid while simultaneously paying a price up front to prevent Imperial forces above a certain level from entering was driven by a similar logic. At least those people understood what kind of man the Emperor was.
"So? I've heard the Emperor has both sons and daughters. If you think you can threaten me by hiding behind the Emperor's authority, you'd best not. A mere imperial princess of an empire that hasn't even named a crown prince yet—nothing you say can possibly benefit us. Unless, of course..."
Berati smiled slyly and went on.
"...shall I help you become the next emperor? If we can grow close, I wouldn't mind sharing information. Someone who becomes a true friend rising as the next emperor would be a fine thing indeed."
"Don't talk rubbish."
Alice responded instantly.
"Do I look that naive to you? The right to inherit the Imperial throne belongs entirely to the Imperial family. Foreign nations aside, not even the Council can touch that right."
"In that case, the conversation is finished. You aren't a candidate for the next emperor—"
Berati's gaze swept over me again.
"—and you don't possess any remarkable abilities like the other princesses or princes. All you have is a fine pedigree. We have no intention of joining hands with such a princess. If it came to that, we'd simply use the intelligence we have, take what we want, and leave."
"... So there is something here that you want."
At Alice's words, I almost laughed without meaning to.
She showed real signs of having studied hard.
"That means there's something here you'd like to extract. Isn't that right? And it also means you haven't yet obtained the precise intelligence you need. If you had, you'd have already taken what you wanted and fled before being discovered. I'm relieved it isn't too late."
"So what if it is?"
But Berati, too, didn't change her expression and merely shrugged.
Every time the two of them exchanged words, the heads of those seated between them swiveled back and forth as if they were watching a table tennis match.
"As long as I keep my mouth shut, you people won't have any idea what it is we came to take."
"......."
Alice straightened her back as she sat. Her legs remained crossed, but with both hands laced together and resting on her stomach, she looked exactly like the Emperor.
"You seem to be under a misapprehension."
Nothing could be sensed from the calm manner with which Alice spoke. No killing intent, no aura whatsoever.
Well, I was physically incapable of sensing such things in the first place.
What about the others? Did Claire or Leo sense something from Alice?
At the very least, they seemed to perceive that the atmosphere was different from Alice's usual one. Both of them were staring at Alice with their mouths slightly open.
"I am a princess of the Empire, and I shall become the next emperor. What you think of my abilities doesn't matter. In the end, I am the only one who carries on the blood of the Imperial family, and I alone will inherit the legitimacy of the Imperial house."
Alice went on without a single shift in expression.
"And this is the Empire. Not the Holy State. No matter how many troops you may have brought with you, all you can do is move in secret. You couldn't have infiltrated the whole of the Holy State's knightly order here."
"......."
Berati, too, seemed to sense something within that composed manner of Alice's.
As Berati stared fixedly at Alice as if taking her measure, Alice spoke as though delivering a verdict.
"Knowing I'm an Imperial Princess, you certainly had nerve following me all the way here. Or did you genuinely underestimate me and deliberately follow to this spot? Well, it doesn't matter either way. Thanks to you, I've succeeded in drawing you to a place where cutting you down won't produce civilian casualties. And above all, I managed to bring you to a place this exposed."
"If this is a threat—"
"A threat? Do I look that stupid?"
Alice tilted her chin up slightly. The moonlight caught her blue eyes and made them shine brightly.
She addressed Berati, who moments ago had been speaking dismissively of Alice as a mere princess.
"It's not a threat. It's a plan I devised two weeks ago when I heard you were here."
Two weeks ago. That was when we'd sat in the café and heard the intelligence from Bella.
"From the moment you followed us here, you'd already walked into a trap. Now you have only one of two options. Either keep breathing and hold on to your faith, or attempt an escape that amounts to suicide."
Ah.
So that's how it was.
I'd noticed earlier that Bella was nowhere to be seen.
Berati, who had just grasped the situation, tried to bolt upright from her seat, but before she could fully rise, the curtain tore open with a vicious metallic hiss.
Something resembling a toy came crashing down hard onto the table. A glove mounted at its end would shoot forward and strike the opponent when the trigger was pulled.
Of course, it was no real toy. Blades were lethally mounted at every joint of its extension, and compared to such a toy, its flexibility was incomparably greater.
With a metallic hiss, the blade retracted to its original position and clacked back into a single sword. What had resembled a barbed, double-edged chain sword transformed once more into a slender, elongated blade.
The person standing there,
"Hi~"
was Bella, waving her hand cheerfully at Leo and Claire as if delighted to see them. Leo stared at Bella blankly, his mouth hanging open.
But the two of them wouldn't be able to recognize her.
She wore a fox mask of the sort one might see at a Japanese festival, and her hair was dyed black rather than its natural color.
Her black outfit clung tightly to her body, revealing her figure, but left no skin exposed. Perhaps because she had deliberately tightened her throat, her voice was high-pitched and girlish rather than her usual tone.
Since Bella's greatest advantage was that strangers did not know her face, this disguise made sense.
The deliberate addition of the fox mask was unmistakably a developer's touch. In this world, it was probably meant to be a souvenir imported from the East.
"Chiara Berati. Baptismal name Eliza."
At those words, Berati glared at Alice.
"Congratulations. You have just become the first person in the Empire to meet all the imperial princesses in one place at once, an honor no one else has experienced."