…Wait, I had that title of “hero,” too, now that I thought about it. Even though I’d been summoned as a hero from another world, I hadn’t done anything particularly heroic, so I’d totally forgotten.
“Titles, hm?” Juna asked. “Do you think they find ‘lorelei’ appealing, too?”
“Why are you getting in on this, Juna?!” I cried.
“Oh, no… I just wondered…”
Jeanne giggled. “Hee hee! You’re more fun than I thought you’d be.”
Jeanne was watching us banter with a smile.
“We’re not doing it because we want to amuse you, though,” I said.
“No, no, the closeness between you and your vassals is a mark of the stability in your country, I’m sure,” she said. “We couldn’t get away with that back home.”
“…It’s different in the Empire?” I asked.
“Our territory is needlessly large, and the empress’s power is great,” said Jeanne. “They call her a saint and half-worship her, so everyone is very reserved around her. About the only people she has that she can talk with casually are our family. On top of that, my sister takes being an empress entirely too seriously, so she tries to treat everyone equally, which leaves her in a position where she can’t open up to anyone.”
Jeanne shrugged her shoulders and looked at the crowd in the plaza.
“It was the same with this. Even though there’s no benefit to us in helping Amidonia after they ignored the Mankind Declaration…”
“For the younger sister of Madam Maria, with all the ideals she tries to uphold, you take an awfully realistic perspective,” I said.
“If the elder sister is a dreamer, the younger needs to be firmly grounded,” Jeanne said with a wry smile.
Hm… It felt like Jeanne was closer to my way of thinking than Maria. Instead of embracing lofty ideals, she was the sort who could come up with pragmatic solutions.
When you hold up ideals, people gather around you. However, if you hold up those ideals for too long, sooner or later, you lose your path. Someone has to be there to keep an eye on the ground in front of you. Having the more realistic Jeanne by her side must have been what let Maria keep holding up her ideals.
The Empire had the largest population on the continent. I didn’t know how many extremely talented people they had there, but in terms of relative numbers, they must have had far more than my country.
Jeanne pointed to image of Chris projected in the air above us. “By the way, that’s an incredible way of using the Jewel Voice Broadcast. By releasing information regularly, you use it to help alleviate the fears of your people. Do you mind if we do the same back home?”
“…Do as you please,” I said.
I mean, it wasn’t like it would be hard to imitate. It wasn’t something I could forbid her from doing, either.
“Thank you,” said Jeanne. “How do you come up with such advanced ideas?”
“This is advanced?” I asked. “It was pretty normal in the world I came from.”
“The world you came from… Of course.” Jeanne’s smile suddenly vanished.
As I was wondering what was up, Jeanne straightened her posture and bowed deeply. She bent over until her hips were at a right angle. It was a deep enough bow that, if the custom existed in this world, she might have done a formal kowtow instead.
I was befuddled by her suddenly lower profile. “Wh-What’s wrong? This is so sudden.”
“You’ve been horribly inconvenienced because of us,” said Jeanne. “In my absent sister’s place, I apologize.”
“You’re apologizing?” I asked, startled.
When Jeanne raised her face, she bore a pained expression. “This is about the hero summoning. It was our request that caused the Elfrieden Kingdom to summon you to this world. My sister Maria deeply regrets that you, who had done us no wrong, were cut off from your homeland and called to this world. Please, forgive us.”
With those words, Jeanne lowered her head once more.
…Oh, is that all? I thought.
“Raise your head. It’s all in the past.”
“But…” she said.
“Yeah, at first, I was mad, and I worked my hardest not to get turned over to the Empire,” I said. “Now, though… when I think about it more calmly, the Empire has no reason to want a hero.”
At first, I thought they’d wanted a hero to fight back against the threat of the Demon Lord’s Domain, but the more I came to understand this world, the more I realized that probably hadn’t been it.
Right now, the Demon Lord’s Domain had stopped expanding. The expansion of the border meant that the monsters that came south were spread further, and the various countries could handle them. It was a stalemate; with neither side able to push forward, the situation was more or less stable.
In other words, the Empire wasn’t in a situation where it would want a hero. A superpower like the Empire had had no need to cling to a summoning ritual that the kingdom itself wouldn’t have been sure they could pull off in the first place.
Besides, when they’d summoned a hero, they’d gotten me.
While a guy who could use incredible magic with power comparable to a weapon of mass destruction would be one thing, or a guy who could equip invincible sword and armor, a guy from another world with a power that happened to make administrative tasks a little easier wasn’t going to be of any interest to the Empire with its massive population and the large number of personnel it had as a result.
However, that being the case, the Empire had asked the kingdom to perform the hero summoning. After considering the matter with Hakuya for some time, we had come to a certain conclusion. It was…
“That was an attempt to show consideration, right?” I asked. “Towards a kingdom that couldn’t pay the war subsidies.”
Jeanne reacted with startled surprise. “…Yes,” she said with resignation.
…I knew it.
In the Mankind Declaration, which the Empire had proposed, it said, “Countries that are distant from the Demon Lord’s Domain will provide support to those nations which are adjacent to it and are acting as a defensive wall.”
The Empire had wanted the Elfrieden Kingdom, as a country that was distant from the Demon Lord’s Domain, to provide support to the countries adjacent to it. If they hadn’t, there would have been complaints from the other signatories to the Mankind Declaration.
However, at the time, with the food crisis and financial crisis slowly pushing the kingdom to the point of collapse, it would have been nearly impossible to find the money for war subsidies.
“That’s why the Empire had the kingdom perform the hero summoning, to give them the appearance of having provided support,” I said. “In order to keep down the complaints from the other signatories.”
“…That’s exactly it,” said Jeanne.
“Hold on,” Juna protested. “This country never signed the Mankind Declaration. Were we ever obligated to provide support to begin with?”
I shook my head. “It’s a fact that this country was benefiting from the defensive wall the Empire built with the Mankind Declaration. Because we have the Union of Eastern Nations to the north of us, we didn’t have to share a border with the Demon Lord’s Domain.” It was also a fact that the Union of Eastern Nations was being propped up by war subsidies under the Mankind Declaration. “If we benefit from it, but refuse to fulfill the obligations set out under it because we’re a non-signatory, that’s going to breed resentment from the signatory countries. With that as a pretext, Amidonia might have been able to create an alliance of several nations to invade the kingdom. With the Empire taking the lead.”
“No…” Juna said, at a loss for words, but this was the truth.