Rebecca remembers.
The moment she first entered the royal palace.
That mysterious space filled entirely with swords.
The colossal statue honoring the former king held a sword.
The most knights in the royal household wore swords.
Even the interior of the palace was decorated with swords.
For generations, Hiaka was a nation that worshiped the sword, swordsmanship, and warriors.
Wasn’t her father, Hiaka III, himself a swordsman?
“Your Highness. If you are a girl, there’s no need to bother taking up a sword.”
What if she had listened to the head maid grandmother’s words.
Rebecca often thinks such thoughts.
But unless it was an achievement she built with her own hands, someday it could be swayed by others.
Ten-year-old Rebecca knew this.
“I want to learn the sword.”
She approached a royal knight and made her request.
......That was the beginning of her misfortune.
She didn’t improve.
No matter what she did.
There was no progress in swordsmanship.
“Let’s stop here.”
Rebecca was precocious; from childhood her selfhood was firm and her memories vivid.
Around the age of ten.
Though she’d never even held a kitchen knife, when she gripped a wooden sword, blisters formed. They burst, formed again, and burst again.
Her hands hardened as they were, and it became embarrassing to show them at the young ladies’ socials.
“Wait. I’ll do more.”
“No, Your Highness. Let’s stop here for today.”
“I’m telling you, I can do more.”
“......Your Highness. In the royal household there are things more important than swordsmanship.”
She could understand the knight’s response.
It must have been frustrating.
He’d been called a genius at her age.
She might have looked pitiful.
What he could do with one stroke, she could not do even with constant practice.
And yet......
“No one is good from the start.”
The knight affirmed her and turned his head.
And then.
When a downcast Rebecca was resting alone in a small palace garden, voices came from beyond the garden trees.
“......They say no one is good from the start.”
“Oh ho. That young lady said that?”
“Hey, watch your mouth. She’s a princess now.”
“Hm. Right. Still, that’s unexpected. I thought she’d turn her life around and laze about, but she’s got quite the will, doesn’t she?”
“That’s why, as a sword instructor, I’m getting impatient.”
“Huun. Is that so?”
“I think those who work hard should be rewarded. I hope Her Highness is rewarded.”
This was half a year after entering the royal household.
Peasant maids ignorant of the ways of the world would praise and fawn over her as a princess, but with the maids who were daughters of nobles, it was a different story.
Maids, knights, retainers, elders...... No one Rebecca met in the palace cheered her on like this.
“.......”
Looking at her callused hands.
I should do better.
As she was thinking that—
“Heh heh, oh my. But what are we to do.”
The words flew like knives.
“There are people who are good at swordsmanship from the very start.”
Rebecca, startled, clutched her chest.
“.......”
“Hey. Just go and say it honestly. That it won’t work. That it’s a waste of time.”
“......Watch it.”
“Why? Am I wrong? Can’t you tell from the way that young lady swings a blade? She has no athletic sense. Floundering around. She doesn’t understand her center of gravity. She can’t ride the line of the sword. She swings with the flat and doesn’t even know she’s doing it. She must think that falling and getting back up looks like spirit, but to me it looks like a duck waddling.”
Heat ran from the nape of her neck across her cheeks.
Rebecca’s face flushed hot.
So that’s how others saw her?
“These things are innate. We can tell what will grow from the sprout. Whether it’s a sweet potato. Or a wild ginseng.”
“......You there. Watch what you «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» say in public. You’ll get in serious trouble.”
“Oh dear, yes sir. Let’s go eat, Sir Knight.”
What shocked her a bit more here was that the sword instructor didn’t take her side.
“.......”
Even so, left alone, Rebecca steeled her heart once more.
No one is good from the start.
If she worked, it would come—she vowed firmly.
And indeed, there was real progress.
“You’ve improved a lot.”
On the single day she received praise from the sword instructor,
Rebecca buried her head in her pillow and rejoiced.
“Your Highness. I hear your swordsmanship has improved a lot lately.”
“Amazing. I’m impressed by your effort.”
In fact, even in the royal household, more people had begun to speak to her with words laced with praise.
In the end, in a royal household that worshiped the sword, one had to prove oneself with the sword to be recognized by all.
She had now, she thought, stood at that starting line.
......Or so she thought.
Then, in Rebecca’s life, a certain person appeared.
“Who are they?”
A group of young ones were entering under the guidance of a knight.
“Yes, Your Highness. This year’s ‘Genius Knight Training’ graduates. Every year the kingdom brings in outstanding prodigies and trains them. The excellent ones are even appointed knights.”
“Genius......”
Until now, the words Rebecca had guarded like a creed were “No one is good from the start.”
That was something Rebecca could say because she was young.
The “young” are capitalists of time. You don’t know how that asset will compound.
And when she looked only at the front of the graduates’ line, it was fine. Most were around fifteen, much older than Rebecca.
But at the very back of the line.
When she saw a sky-blue-haired girl wearing a strange beret, Rebecca had to feel something odd.
“.......”
The first impression was cute. And her eyes looked truly kind.
Unlike Rebecca, who practiced smiling at the mirror every day because of the maids’ gossip about her “savage eyes.”
But why was a child that young in the Genius Knight Training?
“......Dame, how old is that girl?”
“That one? Ah, you must mean the daughter of Baron Lemontree. I understand she’s about ten.”
“Ten? Is she any good with a sword?”
“They say in the Lemontree barony’s sword class she could fight three or four adults and still win.”
“......You know a lot for someone who arrived today.”
“Well, I’ll be the one to instruct these children in the Strong Sword system going forward. Now, it’s about time to head to training.”
Even as she turned to walk after the instructor, Rebecca could not shake the ominous feeling.
Same age.
Different talent.
And this was a royal household that loved to attach gossip.
Before long, Rebecca’s unease became reality, and she came to feel in her bones the saying “From the sprout we can tell what will grow.”
⋮
It began, first, from Setian’s mouth.
“She’s truly an excellent child!”
As Chair of the Elder Council, he was a strange old man. In front of everyone he pretended not to know Rebecca, but when alone he would treat her well. Young Rebecca did not understand such behavior.
That Elder Setian now went around openly praising the daughter of Lemontree.
“A genius among geniuses. It’s no exaggeration to call her a god of swordsmanship.”
The words passed from mouth to mouth until they reached Rebecca. So she went to see the swordsmanship for herself.
Lemontree, who had been training, swung her sword lightly with a whoosh.
Her precision. Her center. Looked middling.
“What’s supposed to be good about that?”
But when the sparring period in training came, Rebecca realized.
“Ugh! Defeat! I lost!”
“Wow, lost. I can’t possibly beat her...!”
Swordsmen several years older than Rebecca were dropping their blades in barely a dozen exchanges or being stabbed in vital points and collapsing.
Even the ones with pride weren’t exceptions.
“.......”
How is that possible?
No matter how she watched, she couldn’t grasp the knack.
But when the sword instructor began sparring with Lemontree, she understood one thing.
Tack, ta-ta-tack, tack!!
They were even.
The sword of the sword instructor—whom Rebecca had never once thought of as a rival to compete with—that ten-year-old was matching him even.
The Strong Sword system was Hiaka’s traditional swordsmanship: a sword of power that takes pure destruction as its virtue.
Keep pressing. Pin down. Detonate strikes in succession.
Because it is a swordsmanship that tempers oneself solely to raise destructive force, there are few weapons that can overturn a difference in stage.
And yet they were even.
“The Chairman’s words were true. Truly astounding....”
“How can she wield such delicate swordplay at that age....”
And everyone was praising Lemontree. The knights. The graduates.
Even though Rebecca couldn’t understand at all what was supposed to be astounding.
Here Rebecca realized one fact.
“.......”
From the start, the scenery they saw and the one she saw were different.
No.
More precisely, she alone could not see what all of them were seeing.
“So Lemontree—what’s her name again?”
“Eve.”
After that, the attention given to Rebecca was cut off as if by a ghost.
“Did you hear, Your Highness? The Lemontree young lady sparred with Sir Dorian, a lower knight, and won!”
“She’s really amazing. How can something that tiny do that? Your Highness, why don’t you learn swordsmanship from her once?”
The maids had no tact.
When everyone in the palace hated her, they had tactlessly liked her.
Now, even though Rebecca felt burdened, they started going on about Eve.
“Who? Ah, that girl with the blue eyes? I caught a glimpse yesterday too. She was incredible.”
The king, whom she could hardly meet, said at the royal breakfast that he had taken time from his busy schedule to watch Eve’s sparring.
If it was yesterday, he hadn’t come to see Rebecca.
“That child is truly remarkable.”
“A new Constellation of Hiaka may be born.”
“Really? That level?”
“They say she already operates a Level 7 inner method.”
So too the knights and retainers. Everywhere, they piled mountains of talk about Lemontree.
“Let’s stop here for today.”
The sword instructor was the same as always, but Rebecca had already seen it.
The expression he made when sparring with Eve.
“.......”
Even so, Rebecca did not put down the sword.
Today, she herself could still run.
Tomorrow was unknown, she believed firmly.
Even as her anxiety grew.
There was nothing for it but to believe in herself.
But fate did not leave Rebecca alone like that.
“Your Highness. You said you would not attend today’s function?”
“Yes, I’m sorry....”
She had declared she would not attend, knowing that without legitimacy, if she went she would only be cursed at.
“Then you must go to Prima Luna.”
“Pardon?”
“That is the royal household’s custom.”
“.......”
Prima Luna.
A social gathering for young ladies under fourteen.
And Rebecca, the royal household’s punching bag, of course was chewed on even by the young ladies.
In truth, it was worse.
At least adults, when they met her eyes, did not brazenly curl their lips and turn their heads.
As if they’d seen dung.
“......Must I really go?”
When she asked two or three times, the retainer’s eyes twitched with annoyance.
There was no choice.
There, Rebecca faced Eve for the first time.
Eve was deaf and could not speak, and even seemed to have a timid personality.
Even so, she was adored among the young ladies.
She was grabbed here and there to be made up, dressed in pretty clothes. They kept putting food to her lips; at the slightest action she gave everyone peals of laughter.
“......Unfair.”
It was the first thought that came to Rebecca’s mind.
A princess without legitimacy. Brought in only because some senile prophet said she would become a great person in the future—she had to be shoved into a corner seat the moment she arrived at the social.
That girl, an orphan adopted, merely a graduate, was conversely at the center of the social, continuing to make everyone laugh. Yet she herself seemed tired of it.
“.......”
It was fine. She could let it be. She knew the world wasn’t fair. If anything, she was a beneficiary. Looking at her, many would think it unfair.
As she sat there blankly in the corner—
Suddenly, Eve’s face came right up to the tip of her nose.
Rebecca froze.
Eyes blue like gems.
That round, benevolent gaze.
She cocked her head at Rebecca.
“Eve, the princess likes being alone!”
“Not there—come over here!”
Words from the young ladies as if telling her to avoid filth, and a shocked Rebecca spoke reflexively.
“What do you think you’re doing.”
“......?”
“Get lost. Don’t shove your—”
Right after the words left her mouth, Rebecca covered her lips with her wrist; fortunately, it seemed the young ladies hadn’t heard.
Up to now she had thoroughly managed the image of the “pitiful young princess.”
Even if others hated her, she had always done well at acting the victim. The harsh words slipped out before she knew it.
“.......”
“......?”
After she calmed her startled heart, Rebecca thought something to herself.
Ah, she’s deaf? Thank goodness.
“......Ah.”
Right after that. She began to loathe herself.