WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Mordor
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became the Second-in-Command in a Romance Fantasy Novel ◈
Chapter 12: Anyway, I'll Serve You Like a King (1)
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Like a Flower Blooming in a Parched Land.
This world was a romance fantasy.
My suspicions had been proven right.
“It really is a romance fantasy?”
“Yeah.”
Unlike me, Violet had crossed over after leaving a comment on the original novel, so I had no choice but to believe her.
“Then there’ll be terrorist attacks at the academy, people getting dragged into wars, and things like that?”
“Of course.”
Normally, I would’ve asked what the hell that was supposed to mean, but if it was a romance fantasy, it couldn’t be helped.
“So Bellian Erich really is the culprit?”
“What are you talking about?”
I named the obvious suspect, but her response was far from satisfying.
“He’s the president of the Flower Arrangement Club. Isn’t he at the center of the academy terrorist attack?”
“No?”
“Why?”
“Why?”
She looked completely unable to understand.
I probably looked the same.
“Come on, he’s an eyes-always-closed character.”
“Are all eyes-always-closed characters secret masterminds?”
“Usually, aren’t they?”
“Uh... I suppose they are.”
See? My suspicion was perfectly reasonable.
Anyone who had read a few novels would agree.
“But President Bellian is genuinely an ordinary person.”
Don’t lie to me. How could someone with that face be ordinary?
And that wasn’t all.
“I looked into him, and last year he completed all the credits he needed to graduate, including the required courses. Usually, that means you spend your fourth year taking it easy, right?”
“Right?”
“But he filled this semester with classes too. Does that make any sense?”
“Not really.”
See? Even someone who had transmigrated after reading the original agreed it was suspicious.
“On top of taking all those classes, he doesn’t have any close acquaintances.”
“Isn’t that a little unfair? People can just not have friends.”
“And he’s deeply devoted to flower arranging? A nobleman?”
“Flower arranging can be someone’s hobby.”
There were so many suspicious details, yet she trusted him too much just because he hadn’t appeared in the original.
We hadn’t existed in the original either. Wasn’t she putting too much faith in it?
“But eyes-always-closed characters can’t be like that.”
“You’re judging people solely by their appearance!”
That made me sound like a bad person, but appearances mattered.
The outcome of the same confession differed depending on whether the person was handsome or ugly.
Even the same person gave a different impression depending on whether they dressed up.
And this was an eyes-always-closed character in a romance fantasy.
The moment he opened his eyes, he might turn out to be a monster capable of taking down even Prince Ellen.
Even Prince Ellen was bound to lose at least once, given how romance fantasies worked.
“Are you insane? How did you even manage that?”
Apparently not.
“No, it was only once.”
Right after Violet told me about the original story, she asked me to tell her about the past.
She said we needed to figure out where the original story had gone off the rails.
I thought it was a fair question, so I told her roughly everything except the royal secrets.
Then I mentioned that, after a tearful amount of effort, I managed to beat Prince Ellen about once every thirty times.
She practically lost her mind.
“Do you know Prince Ellen’s latest nickname?”
“What is it?”
“The Sword God.”
“Wow.”
Unless it meant something else, it had to mean what I thought it did.
The god of the sword.
The scarier thing was that I could hear that nickname and immediately accept it.
“Do you know who Prince Ellen first lost to after awakening to the sword in the original story?”
“First of all, what point are you using as the moment he awakened?”
“The point when Princess Hestia got completely crushed.”
Ah, fuck. When was that?
Prince Ellen had suffered one loss when he had only just started learning swordsmanship, and he had occasionally lost afterward, so it was hard to pinpoint the exact moment.
She said he hadn’t lost since around then, which made it seem relatively recent.
“When exactly was it?”
“When Princess Hestia gave up swordsmanship.”
“...?”
That sword-crazed lunatic?
“That actually happened? When was it?”
“All I know is that it happened before she enrolled at the academy. It was in a flashback, so they didn’t show exactly when.”
From Violet’s rough explanation of the flashback, Princess Hestia had despaired at the overwhelming gap in talent and given up swordsmanship.
The fact that he had made his sister lay down her sword made Prince Ellen even darker.
“Then why didn’t she quit?”
If it was because of me, I felt bad for Senior Lucia.
It meant Lucia could have had the chance to participate in high society like the other senior instructors she had envied.
“You said she lost to you too. After getting beaten by two people, maybe she thought she was just weak?”
“Is that it?”
It seemed I had prevented it.
I definitely hadn’t intended to.
“They didn’t explain this part clearly, so I don’t know either. But that isn’t the important thing.”
“Then what is?”
“Do you have early-onset dementia? I asked who Prince Ellen first lost to after awakening to the sword.”
“You did?”
I thought of several people.
Someone who could have beaten Prince Ellen.
Other than the commander and the Sword Emperor, no one came to mind.
“Was it after he entered the academy?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it could only have been the Sword Emperor.”
“That’s right.”
Even the Little Sword Emperor was a perpetual runner-up, so the only person at this academy who could beat Prince Ellen was the Sword Emperor.
“But do you know what’s even more important?”
Violet furrowed her brow as she said there was something more important than that.
“What else is there?”
“After he lost, there was a description of Prince Ellen’s feelings. He was incredibly disappointed.”
“Wouldn’t anyone be disappointed after losing?”
“If that were all, it wouldn’t matter. He wasn’t disappointed because he lost. It was the opposite.”
“The opposite?”
“Even though he lost, he felt it. That he would catch up soon. That the gap wasn’t that large.”
Oh, fuck.
“...The Sword Emperor?”
“Yeah. And he was exactly right. He actually beat the Sword Emperor just before graduating from the academy.”
There were fewer than four years until graduation.
In other words, Prince Ellen was going to beat the Sword Emperor within four years.
“Why?”
Ellen, Ellen...
If you do it, I have to do it too...
Even if I couldn’t beat you, I had to at least catch up...
If you beat the Sword Emperor, then I needed to be at least capable of holding my own against the Sword Emperor...
“That’s the kind of character he is.”
I didn’t like calling someone alive and breathing at this very moment a character, but it was also the most important piece of narrative logic for explaining Prince Ellen’s talent.
He had been made that way.
Otherwise, Prince Ellen could never have reached such a level.
“Prince Ellen is an incredibly important figure. He’s a supporting male lead, but whenever the plot gets stuck, he’s basically a cheat key that breaks through it.”
As she said that, Violet summarized the developments to come.
She told me roughly what incidents would occur and which male lead Daisy would get tangled up with during each one.
Prince Ellen’s role in those developments was crystal clear.
“He really is a cheat key...”
While the Sword Emperor was briefly away, a terrorist group took the chance to invade the academy.
Daisy found herself in danger, then she and a male lead became the focal point for the students as they fought the terrorists.
They won the small-scale battle, but the academy was still in grave danger!
...Or so everyone thought, before Prince Ellen wiped out all the remaining enemies!
“Was that novel, Like a Flower Blooming in a Parched Land, really popular?”
“Unfortunately, it was...”
“With such a shitty plot?”
“It was a romance fantasy. The fighting wasn’t that important. Why read a romance fantasy if you care about that? Just read a martial arts novel where people fight nonstop.”
The idea that what mattered was the never-ending romance was absurd, but it also pierced straight to the essence of romance fantasy.
“Even after Prince Ellen starts truly shining after academy graduation, there are barely any battle scenes. Whenever Prince Ellen moved, the battle was already over.”
In short, the author had officially declared him the ultimate combat powerhouse.
“Then what was the Demon King?”
“The Demon King used not only a sword, but magic and sorcery too. Even so, the Demon King couldn’t beat Prince Ellen.”
That was why the Demon King thoroughly avoided fighting Prince Ellen and targeted Daisy, the center of it all.
“Fuck, it was a problem that the Demon King even went after the maiden.”
I almost spat out a laugh, but I held it in when I saw the expression on her face, as though she were suppressing fury strong enough to burn down the world.
Rather than sexual harassment, it felt like she was simply stating a fact.
“Anyway, that’s as far as I got. I don’t know what happened after that. So I was going to get things rolling early and build up a snowball effect, but...”
She scowled at me.
Her expression had already been awful while talking about the Demon King arc, but when she twisted it even further, I honestly got a little scared.
“We’re in an emergency.”
“What is?”
“Because of you, the entire plan has fallen apart.”
That was unfair.
What had I even done?
“First of all, Prince Ellen became a different person.”
“That’s unfair.”
I had only worked hard.
Didn’t she say it herself?
That he was the future Sword God. I had worked my ass off trying to catch up to that Sword God.
“And you beat the Little Sword Emperor. Thanks to that, their relationship dynamic collapsed.”
“That’s unfair too.”
The Little Sword Emperor was simply weak.
Considering he had been a lifelong runner-up even without me, he must have slacked off on his training.
He should have worked harder.
“There are a lot of variables caused by those two things, but the biggest is that Prince Ellen is already running.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Prince Ellen was supposed to be a cheetah lying in wait. During the academy arc, he had the flavor of a supporting male lead, but he was basically the final boss of Asran’s route!”
But with Prince Ellen’s personality completely reversed, Violet said he was actively making moves.
“Isn’t that good for you? At least there’s no chance of getting NTR’d by the Demon King now.”
“The story before that has been completely wrecked! The leads of the academy arc are Prince Essid and Asran, the Little Sword Emperor!”
Listening to her talk like that, it seemed our Ellen was making very aggressive moves.
“If this keeps up, the other male leads will get different amounts of screen time from what I know. And there could be a gap in Prince Ellen’s role, where he circled around Daisy and secretly eliminated the threats around her.”
The romance fantasy plot would begin in earnest after the first-semester midterms.
Naturally, terrorist attacks, the hallmark of any academy story, were supposed to happen often.
“And even if he isn’t as important as Prince Ellen, there could be problems with the Little Sword Emperor’s growth. He’s responsible for an important part of the combat power.”
We were at risk of losing the advantage of knowing the future.
As Violet spoke, I held up two fingers.
“I can take responsibility for two things.”
“What?”
“The gap left by Prince Ellen. If you explain more of the original story to me, I can deal with that.”
If trouble at the academy was certain, I would have more room to act.
After all, I wasn’t merely a student. I had the hidden status of a royal instructor officially recognized by the royal family.
Several other kingdoms had sent prince-level students as well, so they had to have agents similar to me.
If I could coordinate with them, I could protect the academy better than Prince Ellen did in the original story.
“And I can more or less solve the Little Sword Emperor problem too.”
“Really?”
“Do you have early-onset dementia too? What did I say the swordsmanship I learned was?”
The Doomed Sword.
A swordsmanship created solely to lose.
It had become useless after Prince Ellen’s talent blossomed.
But when it came to talent for this swordsmanship, I surpassed even Prince Ellen.
Even against a junior instructor who had just joined, I created a tense, nail-biting battle!
“Leave Prince Ellen to the Sword Emperor. I’ll raise the Little Sword Emperor. So take care of everything else.”
The knightly nation, the Leon Kingdom.
At that moment, I decided to reveal the royal family’s secret swordsmanship, passed down in secret there, at the academy.
Author’s Note
I succeeded in getting tickets for Blue Archive Sound Archive.
And I got front row seats too. Now this is what I call sex.
Footnotes:
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