“Understood, master!”
“By your will!”
“Hilde, I want you to help that priest over there,” I went on. “Liscia, you stand by for further instructions.”
“Fine, fine. I guess I’ll have to,” Hilde said.
“Urgh… okay,” Liscia agreed.
Carla and Owen immediately rushed forward, and Hilde headed over to the wounded. I was going to get one of my dolls ready, in case it became necessary, but then realized I hadn’t brought any dolls with me today. Right… I had left them behind because I’d figured they would be too much luggage for a trip outside the castle walls. I drew the sword I wore as little more than a decoration and took a fighting stance.
“Can you fight if you have to?” Liscia asked me, her rapier at the ready.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Owen’s been putting me through the wringer lately, but he says I’m still little better than a fresh recruit.”
“That’s not very reassuring,” she said. “Still, from what I can tell, they have numbers on their side, but none of them are particularly strong. I doubt any of them are below the level of a fresh recruit. If it comes to it, hide behind me.”
“Pathetic as that is, I guess I’ll have to,” I said.
I didn’t like being weak, but if I butted in, I was probably just going to cause trouble for my own people. I was in a position where I couldn’t afford to take getting injured lightly. That was what I was thinking, but…
“Ah!”
“Hold on!” she shouted. “What are you moving forward for, right after we talked about it?!”
I heard Liscia’s voice behind me, but I didn’t stop. Juno had been unlucky and caught her leg on a stick that was thrown at her and tripped. That’s when one of the men who had his hair in a cockscomb tried to attack her. As I ran toward them, I picked up a scrap of wooden board that had fallen on the ground.
“Get down! Juno!” I shouted and threw the board at the man like a discus.
“Huh? Uwah!” Juno yelped and ducked.
Cockscomb slashed at the flying board. Because the attack took him completely by surprise, he couldn’t cut the board cleanly and ended up half-pulverizing it. Thanks to that, it looked like the splinters of wood had gotten into Cockscomb’s eyes.
“Ow! Damn it!” Cockscomb Head pressed on his eyes, flailing his sword around wildly as he backed away.
I took that opening to step into the gap between the two of them. His vision must have recovered, because Cockscomb came at me.
Calm down! One exchange of blows! I only need to hold out for one exchange, and then Juno will have regained her footing! Just remember the basics that Owen’s beaten into me!
Cockscomb raised his sword high over his head. He was going to try and smash my head open.
I brought my left foot forward diagonally and took a stance with my sword up above my head horizontally, the cutting edge angled slightly toward the ground. In the next instant…
Clang!
The sound of metal striking with metal echoed, then, with a scraping sound, Cockscomb’s sword slid down my blade and was diverted to the ground to the right of me.
I did it… I did it! My hands were numb, but I had somehow managed to block!
““Don’t just stand there!”” Liscia and Juno screamed.
As Cockscomb tried to regain his footing, Liscia and Juno pounded their swords into him simultaneously. Cockscomb collapsed.
Once she had confirmed her opponent was no longer moving, Liscia grabbed me by the front of my shirt. She pulled me in close to her face. “What were you thinking, charging out like that?!”
She seemed furious, but up close, I could see tears in Liscia’s eyes.
“Oh, um… sorry…”
“No, not ‘sorry’! You almost gave me a heart attack. If anything were to happen to you… what would I… what would all of us do…?”
When I heard Liscia’s voice gradually breaking with emotion, I could feel how much she had been worried for my safety. The mixture of happiness and guilt made my chest hurt.
“No, really, I’m sorry!” I said. “Someone I know was getting attacked, so I moved without thinking…”
“Hey, you!”
I was suddenly grabbed by the scruff of the neck and dragged in the opposite direction. When I turned around, Juno was glaring at me with a super suspicious look in her eyes.
“You called me Juno, didn’t you?” she snapped. “Why do you know my name?”
“No… That’s, um…”
“Hold it, So— Kazuya.” Liscia glared at me, looking upset for a different reason from before. “Who is this girl?”
She’d almost called me Souma for a second there, but with Juno right beside us, she’d switched to my undercover name.
Yeah, that had been a nice bit of quick thinking. Now, I just wanted her to not glare at me quite so hard.
I was sandwiched between two cute girls, both of them glaring at me. Some people might be jealous of this situation, but unfortunately, I was not equipped with the right fetishes to appreciate it fully.
This situation… How exactly am I going to explain it? I wondered.
Or rather, where was I even to start? Should I start by outing myself as the person inside Little Musashibo (or, more precisely, remotely controlling him)?
Juno’s glance shifted to Liscia. Something must have caught her attention, because she was inspecting her closely. “Hey, I feel like I’ve met you somewhere before, too.”
“Huh?” Liscia asked. “Ah!”
Liscia pulled hard on my arm, then whispered in my ear, “This girl, she’s the one who was at that banquet, right?”
Huh? Oh! Now that I thought about it, Liscia had met Juno, hadn’t she? Liscia had recognized Juno, but judging by Juno’s reaction, she didn’t realize who Liscia was. Probably because Liscia was lightly disguised right now.
Juno put her hands on her hips, making an angry face. “What’re you two whispering about? Seems suspicious.”
“No, it’s nothing suspicious at all, really…” I said.
When Juno stared at me with her unyielding eyes, it was kind of awkward to be there. That was when Carla and Owen, who had finished wiping out the brigands, returned.
“What were you doing, master?!” Carla yelled. “Going to the front yourself like that?!”
“Gahaha!” Owen laughed. “I saw that. The sword techniques I taught you came in handy, didn’t they?”
Seeing this as my chance to break out of the current atmosphere, I slipped out from the middle of the Liscia-Juno sandwich and rushed over to the two of them.
“Ah! Hey! I want a proper explanation!” Juno called after me.
Ignoring Juno’s complaints, I asked Carla and Owen, “Good work, you two. So, who were those guys, anyway?”
“From what I was able to gather, it seems it was a slave trader and men in his employ,” said Carla.
“A slave trader?” I repeated.
“You nationalized the slave trade recently, master,” she explained. “I hear that you made the qualification exams more rigorous, too. That drove slave traders from other nations out of the country, and slavers from our own country who’ve failed to qualify have been leaving for other countries, too. These were a group of slavers who failed the qualification exam.”
I had turned slave traders into public servants just the other day. I couldn’t abolish the system of slavery yet, but to make it something that existed in name only, I was working to make it so slaves went from being treated as objects to being treated as laborers and people. In order to accomplish that, I’d made it so that slavers who treated their slaves like objects and abused them would fail the qualification exam.