“Ha ha ha!” she giggled. “He would.”
“So, before we’re human beings, he wants us to be king and queen, basically.”
“…Sorry. That one I can’t laugh at.”
The two of us sighed in unison.
Hakuya was sharp, reliable, and he took his work seriously, but he could take loyalty to his post too far sometimes. Well, that wasn’t to say he didn’t have a soft side. Recently, he had started tutoring Tomoe at her request.
“Well, I’m happy for the day off, and I figure heading out somewhere is okay, right?” I asked.
“I suppose so,” she agreed.
“Oh, oh! In that case, please, come to my forest!” Aisha raised her hand, trying to get our attention, but I shook my head.
“I still have a pile of official work to get through. It has to be somewhere we can make a day trip to.”
“Ohh… Even by horse, it takes three days each way to get to the God-Protected Forest…”
Yeah, that’s out of the question.
“You’ll have to give up on it this time. But I did teach you how to do periodic thinning, didn’t I?”
“Yes. However, there are some among the dark elves who are blindly stubborn… ‘What is this nonsense? How can you suggest that we dark elves, protectors of the forest, cut down trees?’ they say.”
Ah. Yeah, you get types like that in every world.
I respected their desire to protect nature, but when that desire goes too far, it reaches a level of arrogance, and it can actually be a problem. Nature isn’t so weak that that it needs humans to look down on and “protect” it. If anything…
“That’s why I want you to come, sire,” she explained. “To give them a good shouting at.”
“…I get it. The moment I’m free, I’ll go.”
It feels like the number of things that I need to do is only going up, but… saying that won’t help matters, will it? I thought.
“Please do. If it will help, please, use my body, my life, in any way you see fit,” Aisha said, bowing her head.
“Well, then I’ve got a favor to ask right now…”
“Yes, sire! You want me to see to your needs?” she asked immediately.
“Why is that the first thing that comes to mind?!”
“Well, I did just finish pledging my body to you.”
“Souma…” Liscia said dangerously.
“Of course I’m not going to ask for that! Liscia, stop giving me that look!”
When Aisha got worked up, it seemed she had a way of letting herself run wild.
“I just wanted to ask you to be my bodyguard while we go into the castle town,” I explained.
“Y-You want me to join you two on your date?” she asked.
“Well, if it were just me and Liscia, we’d be in trouble if anything happened,” I said. “We may be calling it a date, but really we’re just walking around town together, so you don’t need to let that bother you.”
“…It bothers me, though.” For some reason, Liscia was pursing her lips.
Maybe she’d wanted to go on a date alone together?…Nah, couldn’t be. I mean, even though we were betrothed, that was just a formality.
“Well, that’s how it is,” I said. “I’ll be counting on you two when the day comes.”
“Yes, sire! Understood!” Aisha said enthusiastically.
“…Fine, I get it.” In contrast to Aisha’s enthusiasm, Liscia seemed dissatisfied somehow.
And so, our day off came.
Liscia, Aisha, and I were walking along a shopping street in the castle town of Parnam. Hakuya had said, “Please go out and show the people how close you are,” but apparently that had been a joke, because when the day came, he asked us to be discreet. Well, for the king going down into the castle town, Aisha alone probably wasn’t enough security, after all.
So, I wore a uniform from the Royal Officers’ Academy in Parnam and passed myself off as a student…Which I actually was, given that I had been in university back home.
By the way, Aisha and I were just wearing school uniforms, but we’d realized people would recognize Liscia, so she had her hair in braids and was wearing vanity glasses, giving her an honors student look as a disguise. With this, if anyone looked, all they would see was three students out on the town for their day off.
“Heya, buddy, you’ve got some real beauties there with you! If you’re a real man, how ’bout buyin’ them some of my wares as a present and showin’ off how generous you are?” a middle-aged guy at a stall with accessories on display called out to me in a Kansai accent. Apparently, the merchant slang from this world got translated as a fake Kansai accent to my ears.
While turning the man down with a tactful smile, I talked to Liscia. “Liscia, you sure do look good in glasses.”
“I–I do?…Thanks.”
“Sire! What do you think of me in a school uniform?” Aisha quickly raised her hand. Lately, she’d been downright aggressive about doing that.
“…Uh, yeah, it doesn’t really suit you,” I said.
“Why not?!”
Yeah… the Officers’ Academy’s uniform was something like a blazer, and that didn’t go with her brown skin and silver hair at all. I don’t know how to say it, but it felt like I was looking at someone cosplaying as a character from a school anime. Like how there aren’t pink haired girls in real life, and even when girls dye their hair that way it just looks completely unnatural? There was a clash between the realistic and the fantasy here, you could say…
“Personally, I don’t think it looks that bad on her, you know?” Liscia said.
“Princess!” Aisha exclaimed.
“Yeah. Well, I’m sure it’s probably just because I was judging her by the standards of my own world,” I said.
Really, this is a diverse world with many races. I should try to get used to it as quickly as I can.
Rattle, rattle, rattle…
“And, anyway, Souma, it’s not Aisha that’s bothering me, it’s that thing you’re dragging behind you,” Liscia said.
“Hm? This rolling bag, you mean?”
“That’s a bag? It has wheels on it!”
“Yeah,” I said. “There are caster wheels underneath, which makes it easy to carry heavy things.”
“My word, what a convenient thing to have.” Aisha’s eyes were wide. Not surprising, since these weren’t common in this country yet.
I had special-ordered this one from a craftsman in the castle town. The person who’d made it for me had said he wanted to sell them himself, and I’d allowed it so long as he didn’t try to keep a monopoly on the concept. If there turned out to be demand for them, they might not be so unusual a few years from now.
“But sire, if you want your luggage carried, you need only ask…” Aisha protested.
“We’re supposed to be disguised as school friends. It’d be out of place for the guy to be making a girl carry his stuff,” I said. Besides, a bunch of my self-defense equipment was in there. I couldn’t let go of it. “Also, Aisha, stop calling me sire. Technically, we’re supposed to be incognito here.”
“Yes, sire! But what am I to call you, then…?”
“Just address me normally, no formal title. If you’d like, you can even use my given name, ‘Kazuya.’”
““Huh?”” both girls exclaimed.
Huh? Why is Liscia confused, too?
“But… Souma, isn’t your given name ‘Souma’?” Liscia asked.
“Huh? Souma’s obviously my family name. Kazuya’s my given name.”
“But you said you were Souma Kazuya, didn’t you?”
“…Ah.”
Shoot. In this country, they follow the European style, where given name comes first. I should have given my name as Kazuya Souma. Oh, I see! That’s why everyone’s been calling me King Souma. Now that I think of it, it’s weird to have “king” attached to a family name. In a hereditary system, you’d have a large number of kings with the same name if you did it that way.