“There’s probably no one else in the world who can boss around the Crown Princess like this, except for the Master.”
“Well, if we’re going to nitpick, haven’t all the Emperors sitting on the throne done the same to you, and are still doing it?”
“…Alice isn’t one of them.”
“Oh ho.
In the dead of night, with winter still holding on and the air chilly, we hadn’t even turned on the lights.
At night, even a small glimmer of light can be seen from afar. The military rations made in my former world were designed to avoid a fire, preventing the entire unit from being wiped out while trying to fill a hungry belly.
But the worst of winter had passed, and this region wasn’t too far south, so it wasn’t freezing enough to die from it.
Just annoyingly cold.
I was the one caught up in the Sword Saint’s proposal to track down and deal with this suspicious person.
Claire and Leo wanted to help us, but after all, they were from different families.
If they were truly active as knights in the Grace’s Estate, they might have helped us naturally, but those kids still had a lot to learn and were quite inexperienced.
Even though they helped solve a major incident, that was an exception to the rule.
Alice was busy with the handover. The Emperor hadn’t educated Alice to be the next Emperor, so she had to learn everything from scratch, literally.
Since she had decided to stay at the Academy, she had to prepare for her duties as the next Emperor outside of her time there.
Everyone else also had to take over their family businesses. Even Jake and Roti seemed to be preparing for marriage already. Although they didn’t directly bring it up, the circumstances between the two made it obvious.
But I couldn’t exactly bring along Sophia, a former Cathedral knight, to catch a former Cathedral knight.
In the end, even though there was plenty of time, I was the only one firmly on Alice’s side to step forward.
The Sword Saint must have realized that fact before making that suggestion.
The two of us sat side by side, watching the enemy camp. They said it was a bandit that had suddenly popped up in this territory. It was called ‘bandit,’ but the area was relatively flat. Given that the locals lived in a pretty flat terrain, they seemed to call what I perceived as ‘a slightly elevated hill’ a mountain.
This hill we were sitting on was probably considered a mountain by the locals.
“Are you saying this isn’t being bossed around?”
“I’m here because of the Master, aren’t I?”
I continued the conversation, peering through the telescope at the faint light shining through the sparse trees atop the opposite hill.
“But at the end of the day, the one who asked is the Crown Princess. To be honest, when I suggested it, you were just standing there with your face like you’d bitten into something unpleasant. If Alice had said you didn’t have to do it, you would at least have pondered it for a bit before stepping up.”
“…How can you be so sure?”
“There are people out there whose insides are as transparent as their faces. Plus, there’s someone who’s been trying their hardest to hide their expression nearby, making it much easier to guess your feelings in comparison.”
That person trying to hide their emotions was obviously me.
I was still being careful not to expose my feelings too blatantly. So it wasn’t that I was maintaining a blank expression but rather trying to slightly refine it.
But even in that refined expression, there seemed to exist a type of ‘unpleasant’ expression.
“But didn’t you just say a moment ago that you would eventually step up after some thinking?”
“There’s a big difference between stepping up on your own and stepping up because someone asked you to. No matter if the outcome of the task is the same, the feelings involved are different.”
“What does that mean?”
“Think about it like knowing you have to clean your room but putting it off because it’s too troublesome for now.”
“…”
“In that situation, someone prompts you to clean your room. What emotions would you feel?”
“Alice hasn’t prompted me to do anything!”
“Right now, you might feel that way, but eventually, when something urgent comes up, people often ask the same favor two or three times. And as you hear the same thing over and over, you eventually get annoyed.”
“Are you saying Alice would do that too?”
“I don’t know.”
In the end, I took my eyes off the telescope and looked at the Sword Saint.
He seemed to have been looking at me for quite some time. He didn’t appear to think that camp at a distance would change positions.
“Are you saying that without being certain?”
“There are very few things you can be certain about in this world. What you can be sure of are just such clear facts like an egg falling from chest height onto a hard floor. A person’s heart is not something you can ‘know for sure.’”
“…”
“So, the certainty you have about Alice right now can’t really be called ‘certainty.’ If you think so, that’s just an illusion.”
With the Sword Saint saying that much, I had nothing to retort.
But somehow, I wanted to deny those words, so I was rummaging through my head as hard as I could when the Sword Saint spoke up first.
“So, what I mean is, don’t just accept everything passively. I don’t know how long it’s been since you two have opened up to each other, but letting the relationship become something that’s taken for granted over too long can cause cracks. And the moment one side refuses that given thing, it will shatter the relationship.”
The Sword Saint turned his head again to look at the opposite hill.
“Make sure to create opportunities to talk openly with each other. Even if it’s something unpleasant to hear, speaking about things as they come up is much less irritating and easier to forget than blowing up after it’s all piled up. If there’s something you dislike, say why you dislike it and what you would like in the future. Doing so will help maintain your relationship. It might not be necessary if you were simply a loyal subject and an Emperor, but you’re sisters, aren’t you?”
“…”
I stared at the Sword Saint, then said,
“No, how can someone who knows such important things give up on society and live in the mountains?!”
“Shut up. At night, just as light travels far, so do sounds.”
If it’s against his interest, his hands get moving first, huh.
*
But the Sword Saint was saying the right thing.
I could handle subduing the bandit-like former Cathedral knights. There were other knights with us who had been on the train back then.
Still, I didn’t want to spend all my break on such things.
Honestly, I was tired. It wasn’t that I was worn out from Alice’s attitude or such; it was just that the events had been happening one after another at a tiring pace.
Besides, I had been killing people since a very young age, after all.
With all that stacking up, it wouldn’t be surprising if I were to experience burnout.
I didn’t want to be in cold or hot places. If possible, I just wanted to hole up in my room without going far. As someone who was an otaku in my past life, home was the best.
I knew Alice was having a hard time. She had too much on her plate and needed to learn and memorize a lot. Even if there were some tasks that might reduce the role of the Emperor a bit, it was still a lot.
However, even so, it was still a situation where I didn’t want to do what I didn’t want to do.
“…”
After listening to my story, Alice was frozen, holding her teacup.
“Jay’s story ends here.”
“…Um.”
At my words, Alice tilted her head and put down her teacup.
“So… you don’t want to work?”
“Yes.”
“But you still will?”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to, but I want to help you. So if you ask me to do something in the future, please understand that I won’t always do it willingly.”
“Uh, oh… thank you?”
At my words, Alice’s face turned a bit red.
“…”
“…”
Then she tightly shut her mouth, as if sealing it with a lid.
After a brief silence, feeling somewhat frustrated, I opened my mouth again.
“This time, it’s your turn.”
“…Ah, okay.”
With a slightly dazed expression, Alice nodded and, after a moment of thinking, finally spoke up.
“Um, I would like you to address me a bit differently.”
“Are you talking about how to address you?”
“Yeah. I’d prefer if you called me by my name, not ‘you’ or ‘Crown Princess’ or ‘Crown Princess.’ We’re sisters, after all?”
“…”
I briefly thought about it and then spoke.
“Understood.”
So, it wasn’t like I was being told to call her ‘Big Sister.’
“And also, stop with the honorifics. It makes it feel distant. You used casual language that time, right? Even though I couldn’t hear it well over the distance, I saw the shape of your mouth. You said ‘It’s okay,’ didn’t you?”
Alice, who initially had a clueless expression on her face, seemed to gradually find her words from the process of speaking things out.
“…”
I thought for a moment and nodded.
Right, the honorifics I used were originally a concept.
“But completely switching to informal language all at once might be difficult. Even if the titles can change, since I’ve been doing this for a few years, I’ll gradually adjust.”
“Okay.”
“Is there anything else?”
At my question, Alice took a moment to pause, then,
“Yeah, there’s more—”
And from there, Alice’s requests went on for a while.
…Although we had known each other for years, in the end, there were still many things we didn’t know about each other. It had only been just a little over a year since we began to open our hearts to each other.
Now I understood why the Sword Saint had said such things.
If this had built up and built up, it would have eventually exploded.
Well, even so, living without fighting at all would be impossible, right? They say siblings grow up fighting.
But even if they fought—at least, it would be good to be able to reconcile. It is indeed a good idea to lay bare what each of us likes and dislikes, and where our lines are.
This alone could prevent piling on bigger problems on top of the existing ones.
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