“Of me?” Juna asked.
I nodded. “For about three days, starting tomorrow, I’m going to be away from the castle to meet with someone. I’d like to have you escort me.”
“I don’t mind, but… you’re leaving the capital unattended for three whole days?” Juna tilted her head to the side, looking slightly perplexed. “With all due respect, won’t the government’s work be impeded by your absence?”
“Oh, that should be fine. That thing I had Genia developing is complete now.”
“What… am I supposed to say…?” Juna was at a loss for words.
I had waited for Juna to get changed, then we’d gone to the office. Now she was looking at the thing I had been talking about.
Yeah… I could understand.
I had put in an order with Ludwin’s fiancée and self-proclaimed “overscientist,” Genia Maxwell, to have her develop a certain thing for me.
My ability, Living Poltergeists, could imbue objects with a part of my consciousness; could make them float; and could allow me to see them from an overhead view; but it was only effective within a range of a hundred meters or so. If I had a pen doing paperwork in the governmental affairs office, I had to stay within a one hundred meter radius of it at all times. Because of that, during the time just after the handover of the throne when things had been really busy, I’d never left the capital for more than a day unless there was a crisis.
Also, as you already know, this ability’s effective range could be ignored if the target was a doll; but, unfortunately, dolls weren’t able to write very well. It was easy to write when I was controlling the pen directly, but for some reason, it was unusually hard to do it when I had a doll holding the pen. It was like using a remote control to operate a robot arm that was holding a pen. It took an awful lot of focus, and what I wrote still ended up looking like chicken scratch.
I couldn’t have messy writing on important documents. There were a lot of documents where it could cause major problems if they were misread.
In the end, even though dolls negated the range limitation of my ability, that hadn’t changed the situation which was keeping me from leaving the castle for an extended period of time. I’d known that if I’d had a machine that could write letters, I could do my work from a distance, and that would let me leave the castle without worries.
That was around when I’d discovered the highly capable Genia.
She had used dragon bones as a basic frame, combining them with various mechanical and organic parts to create the mechanical dragon, Mechadra. I’d figured, Maybe she could create a doll that moves like a human hand.
With that thought in mind, I’d made the order, and just the other day, Factory Arm #1 (named by yours truly) had been completed.
From the side, it looked like an arm had bizarrely sprouted from an L-shaped platform. In simple terms, it was like a prosthetic arm or a manipulator. However, it was strangely realistic and human-like in a way that was creepy and off-putting. That much was evident from Juna’s reaction to seeing the thing.
Oh, Genia, why did you have to make it so realistic?
Well, I’d experimented with using Living Poltergeists to control Factory Arm #1. The artificial arm moved smoothly, grasping the pen and writing letters on a piece of paper.
…It was twice as creepy in motion. So this was the “uncanny valley,” huh?
“When the bureaucrats see this thing doing work, they’re always scared stiff,” I said. “Oh, and when the maids bring tea, they often scream and faint.”
“I completely understand how they feel.” Even Juna’s smile was twitching a little as she said that. It did look like something out of a horror story, after all.
“In any event, now that I can have Factory Arm #1 do work for me, I’m able to travel outside the capital,” I said. “I’m already having a number of them made.”
“Having a whole bunch of them moving… I don’t even want to imagine what that looks like,” Juna said sounding apologetic, but I agreed with her.
The arm dolls, in an empty room, writing endlessly. Even imagining it was grinding away at my SAN stat.
Juna shook her head, trying to put the image out of her mind so she could get things back on track. “But, sire, why do you want to have me with you as your partner? Wouldn’t the princess, Aisha, or Roroa do just as well?”
“Hmm… Considering who I’m dealing with this time, I want you to lend me your strength,” I said. “I think for the others… they’d be no match for her.”
“Her? Who are you talking about?”
“National Defense Force Commander Excel Walter.”
“…I see. Grandmother, huh? That’s why you want me.”
Juna seemed satisfied with that explanation. However, she soon cocked her head to the side quizzically.
“But, sire, Grandmother has been your ally all along, hasn’t she? When you say they’d be no match for her, is there some reason you would be taking a stance against her?”
When I saw the worried look on Juna’s face, I said, “Oh, that’s not it,” and shook my head. “The reason we’re leaving the capital for three days is to survey the progress on a project I’ve had Excel working on; but aside from that… I’ve heard that Marx recently made contact with Excel.”
“The chamberlain? Now why would he do that…? Was it for something important?”
“Oh, no, nothing that important. He didn’t seem to be making any secret of it. He was just getting her advice on some things, but… it’s what he was getting advice about that worries me…”
“…And what do you think he was getting advice about?”
“It seems… it had something to do with a ‘sexual instructor’ for me.”
The moment I said that, Juna winced a little.
Sexual instructors were a custom of the upper classes in this country. (The knights, the nobility, and higher.) When a man came of age, an “experienced woman” would be dispatched. To ensure that he wouldn’t embarrass himself when he took a wife, she would teach him, well… “bedroom etiquette,” and other such things.
It was standard for those lessons to be taught at a desk like a health and physical education class, but there were some houses that included “hands-on learning.”
I scratched my head awkwardly. “I’m turning twenty this year, and I’ve got beauties like Liscia, Aisha, and you by my side. I guess they thought that, as a healthy young man, if they just left us alone, I’d lay my hands on at least one of you eventually, so it never came up before. But because I’ve taken so long, Marx has gotten impatient, and he’s been saying that maybe some education is needed. It seems Hakuya agreed with him on that.”
“I see… So that’s what it was.” Juna nodded, her expression still twitching.
This country’s Royal House was on the verge of extinction due to the succession crisis that had broken out upon the death of the king before the last one, so Marx was always badgering me to “hurry and produce an heir.” While the wedding had yet to take place, I was already betrothed to Liscia and the others, so it apparently didn’t count as premarital sexual relations in his mind. That was how bad the shortage of royals in this country was.
“And so, the two of them turned to Excel, who’s five hundred years old and has a bounty of experience when it comes to romantic affairs,” I went on. “‘We don’t have a good woman for the job in mind,’ they said. When they did…”
“…I have a bad feeling about this.”
“…Excel raised her hand and volunteered herself.”
“The nerve!” Juna shouted, something she rarely did.
It seemed that, when she imagined her betrothed (even if that was still a secret) possibly having relations with her grandmother, she couldn’t maintain her composure. She showed a mixture of panic and anger.