The Empire was seizing up more with each passing day. Hiaka watched the room. The king was absent for longer and longer stretches, and the royal family created something inside Hiaka called the “Dungeon Investigation Bureau” to go looking for “dungeons” that might or might not even exist.
“Find it! Find the dungeon!!”
Everyone who had a clue now knew this was the two-horned demon Setian’s fit of madness in his search for the Demon King. Yet no matter how hard Setian tried, he could not find a “dungeon.” Only Hiaka’s anxiety swelled.
Time passed in that tangled political climate.
While the world reeled, there was someone who seemed even more shaken than that.
Dame Layme of the Shadow Guard had been increasingly on edge of late. Because of her mistress, Princess Rebecca.
For days now Rebecca had barricaded herself into a corner of her room, drunk out of her mind.
Layme visited several times, but the only answer she got was to be left alone. In all Layme’s years in the shadows, this was the first «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» time anything like this had happened.
“Your Highness. Are you all right?”
She eased the door open.
What she saw inside was a rather shocking state. Rebecca hadn’t washed properly; she was filthy, and she kept gnawing her nails.
Tuk, tuk—
She had been like that for days ever since the Hero Party selection match.
With the light gone from her eyes, she stared vacantly at the floor while something dripped. It ran down the back of her hand and fell, one drop at a time, staining her clothes and the floor.
“Your Highness.”
Layme’s heart lurched and she flung the door wide. Those dead-black eyes lifted and looked at her.
“...Would you leave.”
“Your Highness. Please don’t do this. I beg you. Do you not see the state you’re in right now?”
“......”
“For what possible reason are you like this? You yourself said this is no time to be doing this. You said you had to attend class.”
“......”
After the selection match, Professor Dante Hiakapo had gathered the Hero Party for a special lecture—Glory, Rebecca, Balmung, and Adele Mouin, all four to hear him together.
Rebecca refused point-blank to attend.
Dante had come by once or twice, but Layme had sent him away at the threshold.
‘It wasn’t this bad.’
Layme was frustrated.
The day the Hero Party selection ended—
Rebecca’s expression had been wrong.
She’d been dazed all day.
Even at meals she only pushed food around; she couldn’t bring herself to eat.
She even gagged after a single sip.
Like someone whose soul had been threshed out and gone somewhere, but up to then Layme let it pass. Rebecca, fundamentally, was not a mentally healthy person.
— Why that... that...!!
Then, when she grabbed a porcelain piece on display at home and wound up to throw it—
Layme realized something was very wrong.
— ......
Rebecca did not throw the porcelain to smash it.
She gently set it down.
Then suddenly hugged it, pressed her forehead to it, and began to snivel.
— Why...? Why...
If she had just thrown it, that would have been fine.
She often broke things when she couldn’t contain her temper.
That was when Rebecca held herself noble and decided the problem was others.
She would break porcelain in place of the offending person to vent her stress.
But for Rebecca to set the porcelain down gently like that, and to bite her nails only to a “moderate” extent even now (what she’d been dripping wasn’t blood but drool!)—it gave Layme the feeling that something was fundamentally off.
Even if she was blind drunk.
For the princess ranked among the most elegant in Hiaka to show this kind of disgrace??
“Your Highness. Icky. Icky...”
Using a word she hadn’t used in over a dozen years, Layme took out a handkerchief and wiped Rebecca’s drool.
Rebecca began crumpling every feature of her face; it was a truly ugly expression Layme had never seen before.
“Laaymeee...”
“Yes, yes, Your Highness. It’s me, Layme.”
“What do I do...”
“What is it, Your Highness. Please. Tell me something. Only then can I share your sorrow.”
“......”
With even her mouth shaped like a square, Rebecca began to whine.
“...I don’t know. Get out...”
It was enough to drive one mad.
***
‘Ah. I can’t let this go any further.’
In the end, when Rebecca—who’d spent a week in that state, refusing food and drinking only liquor—fainted, Layme’s patience snapped.
She had no choice but to take extreme measures.
“Your Highness. Out. Now!”
She was going to drag the shut-in hikikomori out of her corner by force!
“...Let me gooo...”
Rebecca, who had barely awakened from her faint only to jam the bottle back down her throat, whined and put up a pitiful resistance.
“Let go, my foot! Out, this instant! I really can’t stand it one more second!”
“...Insolent. I’m a princess, and you’re Shadow Guard...”
“Shut it. I’m the older sister here and you’re a spoiled brat who wrecked her life. You’re drunk enough you won’t remember anyway, so I don’t even need to speak politely!”
“Ughh... I said let go...”
She was no match in strength.
Rebecca, her wrist seized, was dragged out.
Layme shoved an elixir between her lips. “Mmf, mmff...!” She flailed, but with her hair clenched, resistance was meaningless. The red liquid went down in gulps.
Then Layme scrubbed her face hard with a wet towel. A face with painfully swollen eyes emerged.
“Ugly!”
“...Sob, that’s mean...”
“Smile. Now! Big and bright!”
“......”
Even in all this, the drunk Rebecca smiled wide. The sight left Layme with mixed feelings. For all her filthy temper, she was still a child who looked this cute when she smiled. What on earth had happened to her all of a sudden?
“First, let’s wash.”
“......”
Layme hauled her to the bath, tormented her a bit with cold water—“Uuugh...” (after days of emotional labor, she had no desire to pamper her)—and scrubbed her hair diligently.
She’d never thought there would come a day, as an assassin, when she’d stand bath-attendant.
But she’d done it often raising a child, so it was doable.
“......”
In that time, Rebecca seemed to be coming to her senses. Her mouth, which a moment ago had been a stiff, blocky “□,” returned to her usual slim “∧” shape.
Ssshhhaaa—
Under the pouring water—
Layme broached it carefully.
“Your Highness. If something is hard, you can tell me.”
“......”
Perhaps the warmth of the water.
Or maybe Layme’s gentle touch.
Perhaps it opened her heart.
Rebecca nodded and slowly began to speak.
“...I met the Reaper Constellation Ω a little while ago.”
And out flowed the talk from that “walk.”
To Layme listening, it was an outrageous story.
“He told Your Highness you’d be discarded?”
“...Mm.”
“In that case, Your Highness should discard first.”
“......”
She had said it half in jest.
But Rebecca’s face darkened.
What did that expression mean?
‘Oh no.’
Layme closed her eyes.
No way.
Surely not.
“Your Highness.”
“...Mm.”
“Do you... like Professor Dante Hiakapo?”
“......”
No answer came back.
Layme’s mouth slowly fell open too.
This was Rebecca, who had once given the order to kill a man without batting an eye.
That Rebecca now could not say a word.
“Your Highness...”
“No. I should be clear now. No.”
“‘No’...? Ah, so it isn’t, after all?”
“Mm. I don’t like him.”
“Ahh, of course... Your Highness is far too good for that. And this isn’t the time for such talk anyway.”
“I love him.”
The next instant, Rebecca covered her face.
Layme froze as she was.
Between the bars of her hands a dead-mouse-small voice leaked out.
“...I love Dante.”
Ssshhha.
With the water streaming down, Layme couldn’t say a thing.
***
The moment they came out from washing, Rebecca tried to reach for liquor again, and Layme hauled her by the scruff into her own room.
This was no time to get drunk again and flee reality.
‘Where do I even start.’
Somehow.
Somehow!
She had suspected as much.
Since when? Rebecca’s expression had changed a lot. She’d softened far more than before, and the sharp angles of her personality had been worn down.
“Since when?”
“I don’t know. I don’t, but...”
Rebecca then spoke frankly to Layme about memories from childhood.
The time she was betrayed by her foster father and sold off. And the fine clothes she wore once she reached the royal castle.
After repeated fights with the royal soldiers. The free time she got after smiling and saying she was fine.
Around then, she returned to her birth home and saw her foster father sleeping on the living room floor, saw the gold bars and cash piled beside him. At the end of swearing revenge, she tied a rope to the ceiling and kicked the chair.
At the very moment Rebecca, in a pretty dress, hung suspended in the air, there was a man who appeared before her eyes.
Dante Hiakapo.
“...Maybe it was from then.”
Layme’s jaw dropped.
That happened?
It was the first time she’d heard it in her life, a truly shocking episode.
“Did you realize that from the start?”
“No. When I saw him again at the Academy I didn’t. But the longer we stayed close, the more things started to come back. The voice. The expression.”
“......”
In that moment Layme began to understand how Rebecca had fallen for Dante like this. If something like that had happened, even Rebecca—who thought of people like stones—might open her heart to him.
‘Oh, hell.’
But what rose at the same time was that Dame Layme’s head had been hammered:
The way Professor Dante
looked at the warrior named “Eve.”
‘...!!!?!’
That girl with sky-blue hair who always wore her hood up.
When Dante was with her, he conversed in hand signs every day and met her gaze for long stretches. The same for Eve.
They were, so to speak, the two closest friends in the group.
Even when everyone was present, no one understood their conversation. It was as if there was a wall of isolation between them and the rest of the world.
‘...In that case, it’s enough to drive you mad.’
Dame Layme, too, had nursed a childhood crush, so she knew. The feeling when the one I like does not like me—how miserable that is.
Setting aside the conflict that came with being a princess, this was Princess Rebecca, hoisted up and adored by the whole world.
And the first person she had ever liked in her life seemed to like someone other than Princess Rebecca more.
‘Wait. What. Dante Hiakapo. That’s a total bastard, isn’t it?’
He wooed the Reaper Constellation Ω and dumped them.
He wooed the princess and dumped her.
Then won’t he end up wooing and dumping that sky-blue-haired girl too...?
...Up to that point, she couldn’t know.
“What do I do.”
Rebecca stared at the floor with vacant eyes.
What do I do.
It was, truly, a question with a thousand meanings.
After all the circling, the answer was simple.
So Layme thought.
“Your Highness.”
“Yeah.”
“But this isn’t the time for us to be like this, is it.”
“Right.”
“You have to attend class. Train your magic. You said Professor Dante would die soon. Even if he’s revived with the 「Rune of Revival♥」, you’ll have to care for him.”
“I suppose... He’ll need a mage.”
Layme pressed her temples.
In this situation there was only one answer.
“Confess.”
Rebecca’s hands, which had been fidgeting about restlessly, stopped.
“...We’re married...”
“What meaning does that measly contract marriage have? Confess. Tell him to date you properly. It may sound childish—no, who cares, human feelings are childish to begin with. Say it honestly!”
“...Say what?”
“‘Date me seriously!’”
Layme, choking up, pointed at the curse doll placed off to one side of Rebecca’s room.
And—
“Stop playing with that thing!”
Focus returned to Rebecca’s blank eyes.
“...Will that work?”
“You don’t know until you try.”
“......”
Her fingertips began to fidget again.
“......”
That night was a night neither of them could sleep.