““““…”””” We all fell into dead silence.
Right. Now that she’d mentioned it, she had said that was what this course was about.
“Um, Grandmother? Setting the other parts aside, well… D-do we absolutely have to take your lectures on our nightly, um, ‘d-duties’?” Juna asked.
“L–Like Juna said,” Aisha added. “It’s just too embarrassing…”
“I’m a little interested, y’know?” Roroa put in.
“R-Roroa!” I shouted.
“Huh? You ain’t interested, Big Sister Cia?”
“That’s… Maybe a little, but…”
While we were acting reluctant, Excel gave us a look that seemed to say, “I’ve already planned around you feeling that way,” and she patted the remaining black bundle confidently.
“Oh my? You’re sure you want to pass up this opportunity? If you take my lectures to the end, you’ll receive one of these in commemoration.”
As she said that, Excel unwrapped the black bundle, and inside there were notebooks just like before. However, these books were thin, and their covers were black. Their covers carried the even more dangerous sounding, “Documents Contain Top Secret Classified Information,” and “Dispose of by Incineration After Reading.”
They were being treated like forbidden books, but Excel opened one up and began flipping through it as if to show it off to us.
“This black notebook contains the [censored] that His Majesty Souma wants you to do for him, or that he wants to do for you, and the situations involved.”
““““Huh…? Whaaaaaa?!””””
The look in everyone’s eyes changed.
[Censored]? Wait, seriously?! I thought.
“I heard all of this after plying him with even more tequeur, so I’m sure of it,” Excel said. “In short, these notebooks contain the naked truth about his desire for the four of you that His Majesty Souma normally keeps under control and hidden away.”
So this was it!
Juna and I looked at each other once again. Little wonder he had suppressed the memory. If he’d remembered blabbing about all of this embarrassing stuff, I was sure he’d never be able to look any of us in the eye again.
Everyone looked intently at the black notebooks. Excel made a show of flipping through one of them so that only she could see.
“My, how interesting. It seems he wants to do different things with each of you. With Roroa… Hoho. With Aisha… I see, so that’s how he likes it, huh. With Juna… Oh, my, to be so young again. And with the princess… Hee hee.”
Hee hee, what?! What exactly was written in there?!
Though Excel was beautiful as she gave us a sidelong glance with a seductive smile, she also looked like a demon lord. I dunno… I had to feel sorry for Souma after all this.
“Um… Duchess Walter? I think those notebooks are going a bit far…” I hesitated.
“Oh, you don’t want them, then? In that case, they’ll have to be burned like it says on the cover…”
““““We want them!”””” the four of us shouted in unison.
Excel nodded with satisfaction.
…Sorry, Souma. But I’m sure this is for the good of the kingdom. While making excuses to my absent husband-to-be, I gave in.
“Now, let’s begin the lecture,” Excel said with satisfaction.
This was how the first lecture of Excel’s Bridal Training Course began.
The course content, naturally, made us feel embarrassed sometimes, but Souma’s fiancées took the lessons seriously. That included me, too.
Well, of course, I wanted that black notebook… I felt it was necessary for building a stable household and a stable country.
So that we could all live happily ever after.
Now, about these black notebooks: it is said that, in later days, the candidates to become queens would ask Excel to produce them regularly. At first, they would incinerate them when they finished reading them, but eventually they started to store them somewhere safe, thinking they could be useful again in the future.
In later years, an historical scholar who discovered a box containing several of these booklets attempted to announce their contents at an historical conference, but he stopped just before the announcement claiming the discovered documents were “forgeries.” There were reports that a group of suspicious men had made contact with him a few days prior, but the truth of those rumors remains in the darkness.
Chapter 3.5: After the Bridal Course (Souma’s Day)
Lately, Liscia and the others had been acting weird. Liscia, Aisha, Juna, and Roroa… All of them had been acting a bit off.
If you were to ask me to put into words what exactly was off about it, I’d have had a hard time answering; but for some reason they turned pink whenever we met, turning and immediately walking off in the opposite direction as if they were embarrassed. It wasn’t like they were deliberately ignoring me, but it was a bit depressing to have them avoid me like that.
…Did I do something to offend them? I thought about that, but nothing came to mind.
Lately, we’d had nothing but peaceful days, and I didn’t think I’d done anything that would make them feel uneasy. I worried I might have done something unintentionally, so I decided to broach the issue with the four of them directly. When I did…
“I–It’s not your fault, Souma. Don’t worry,” Liscia assured me.
“Um… You could say I am embarrassed to look you in the eye, sire, or something like that,” Aisha said.
“I’m sorry,” Juna told me. “It’s absolutely an issue on our side. You don’t need to worry about it at all.”
“Well, let’s just say it’s a secret between us gals, and leave it at that, ’kay?” Roroa added.
…Those were the responses I got. Honestly, it didn’t make any sense.
Oh, right. And speaking of weird, there were other things about what they were doing and saying that was a little off.
The first happened in the morning, when I was sitting across from Roroa on a sofa in the governmental affairs office and we were having a budget meeting. When we finished talking about state industries, the conversation moved on to my personal businesses that Roroa’s company would be sponsoring. It was mainly about production on the tokusatsu program.
“So, about Overman Silvan, do you think you could raise the budget a little more?” I asked. “We can’t use the same monsters every time, and if we are going to reuse them, we need a little more variety…”
“…Uh-huh…”
Hm? Was she just nodding along? That was when I noticed that Roroa was staring at me, her mind clearly somewhere else.
“Roroa?”
“Huh?! Oh, yeah, I’m listenin’, I’m listenin’.”
…She was apparently not listening. What had her staring off into space like that?
“Is something on your mind?” I asked. “If there’s anything I can do to help, I will.”
“Nah, that’s not it, but… Sure. Let’s see if ya can play along.” Roroa moved over next to me, close enough that our shoulders were touching.
Hm… Does she want me to dote on her? I started to think.
Then Roroa looked me straight in the eye and said, “Hey… Big Brother Souma?”
“Whuh?!”
When she called me that with upturned eyes, my head shot back in surprise. Wh-What was this, out of nowhere?!
“Seriously, what’s going on, Roroa?!” I cried.
I was worried she’d come down with a fever or something, so I tried putting a hand on her forehead, but she didn’t seem especially feverish or anything.