I Became the Second-in-Command in a Romance Fantasy Novel - Chapter 58

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Mordor

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◈ I Became the Second-in-Command in a Romance Fantasy Novel ◈

Chapter 58: Don't Try to Understand (3)

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“No, if that was the plan, you should’ve told me!”

“Aaaah!”

Violet was fiercer than usual, but I could hardly blame her.

“I seriously thought I was going to die?!”

She said she thought she’d be sent straight to the guillotine after experiencing the full basement package. Of course she was screaming like that.

“I told you I’d take care of everything.”

Honestly, I hadn’t expected things to work out this way.

Still, I was the one who resolved it in the end.

“Should I... thank you? Who was it that dragged me off in the first place?!”

“I heard the Commander is considering a pay raise this time.”

“Thank you! I’ll serve with absolute loyalty!”

She was so honest about what she wanted. For a spy, that was the finest virtue.

“But where’s Daisy?”

“You said Hedrick was the main character of this part, so I threw her at Hedrick.”

“Wow...”

She looked at me like I was trash, but this was unfair.

“It’s fake.”

“Even if the relationship is fake, you handed your girlfriend off to another man...”

Wait. When she put it that way, I really did sound like trash.

...Was I?

“You’re meeting me right after that, so does that make you the other woman?”

“Are you trying to throw someone who was just released by Imperial agents right back into hell?!”

She leaped back in horror. She really seemed to hate the idea.

“I can’t die alone.”

“Then just die alone!”

“Daisy is your friend.”

“The closer you are, the less you should get involved in each other’s love lives!”

This idiot had been willing to let Silence punch a hole through her stomach before.

Right after that, she and Daisy had even slapped each other around like electric mice in a Pokémon movie.

Yet the moment the romance-fantasy heroine started dating, she was ready to cut ties with her.

“Are you afraid of the romance-fantasy heroine dating someone?!”

“I’m fucking terrified!”

She was fucking terrified.

“Me too!”

Honestly, I was scared too, so I had no choice but to agree.

* * *

When I entered the clubroom, two people were slumped over inside.

“My life...”

“...Ha.”

“Wow.”

“Adam! You’re finally here. You haven’t been around in ages. What happened?”

As I took in the sight, the man who had been quietly sitting in the corner of the clubroom sprang to his feet and approached me.

“It really has been a while.”

Unlike Hedrick, who had gotten some screen time this time, the second son of the Border Margrave was still a romance-fantasy male lead with no presence.

It was Taylor, Gerard’s guard and shadow.

Unlike us, he stayed at Gerard’s side outside of club hours, so he rarely visited the clubroom.

He seemed flustered to find two soggy clumps of seaweed sprawled around the clubroom when he finally came by after so long.

“I know what happened to Uncle Aryn, but something really fucking annoying happened.”

“What kind of thing could leave someone like him in that state?”

As a fellow Imperial, Taylor held Uncle Aryn in quite high regard.

How was I supposed to explain why someone like that had ended up like this?

“The details are secret, but... it’s like how you’d feel if you read a letter saying Gerard challenged me because he objected to me being Daisy’s lover, lost, and ran away from the Academy.”

“Just hearing that sounds fucking awful!”

“That’s it.”

As he marveled, Taylor’s gaze toward Uncle Aryn turned wistful.

“Then why is Marie like that?”

“Looks like her date went badly.”

“Waaah!”

“That was the right answer...”

Taylor shook his head as the Flame-Slinger burst into tears.

“Honestly, I thought you’d be the most broken one. Yet you’re the most normal.”

“Why?”

“From an outsider’s perspective, what would you think if you heard that someone who was called the Saintess’s lover at the start of the term became Lady Lorellia’s lover?”

“That he’s a crazy bastard?”

“Yeah, you crazy bastard. And a friend in the Imperial Intelligence Bureau told me something. Since the Founding Festival started, you brought in at least three Dark Mages every day. How the hell did you do that?”

How else? I went on dates with Daisy.

I couldn’t bring myself to say that, so I pointed at Uncle Aryn.

“That man couldn’t do his job, so Dark Mages flooded into the Academy.”

“Aaargh!”

“...The Aryn I heard about wasn’t that kind of man.”

For some reason, Taylor sounded wistful again. I narrowed my eyes.

“By the way, while someone from another country was working themselves to the bone, what were you doing?”

“What do you think? I was working.”

All he had really done was follow the Border Margrave’s second son around while he watched the festival and attended events.

“Honestly, Adam, you’re the strange one. I’m normal. We’re supposed to stay beside the people we serve. Why are you wandering around separately and beating up Dark Mages?”

“...”

It was so completely correct that I was speechless.

Seriously... why hadn’t I been helping Prince Ellen with the Leon Kingdom’s Academy Exchange Program? Why had I been catching Dark Mages instead?

“Because... Dark Mages kept appearing in front of me?”

“What?”

After thinking about it, I had never gone out specifically looking for Dark Mages to beat up.

They had just come to me.

“Besides, I didn’t even catch them.”

It was true. Daisy caught every one of them.

“Was the Saintess actually a spy?”

For a moment, Taylor seemed to wonder whether the woman his master had fallen for was a spy for the Dark Mages.

If he didn’t know this world was a romance fantasy, it was a reasonable conclusion.

“That can’t be.”

No matter how I thought about it, there was no reason for the Saintess to become a spy.

And there was no reason for a spy to beat up Dark Mages.

“Then all that’s left is...”

Unable to hide his suspicious expression, Taylor looked at me.

“Want me to actually do it?”

“I’m joking.”

Taylor snickered and immediately backed down. Then he slung an arm around my shoulders and whispered some confidential information into my ear in an apologetic voice.

“Second term, study trip. I heard they’re combining it with the final exams.”

“What kind of crazy bullshit is that?”

Violet, no, Tinky Winky, hadn’t said anything about that.

“Why else would I come here? I came to tell you.”

Taylor wasn’t the sort of person to lie, but he wasn’t someone who could get information Uncle Aryn didn’t know and bring it to me first either.

Which meant...

“No way...”

That place was...

“Yeah. They’re holding it in our territory.”

The Border Margrave’s territory.

* * *

“What?”

The next morning, Violet was dragged out before she had time to fix her hair. Her hair was a mess, and her eyes were half closed.

But the moment I told her what I had heard yesterday, her eyes flew open, and she grabbed me by the collar.

“What do you mean?! Is it true? We’re really going to the Border Margrave’s territory?!”

Judging by her reaction, she hadn’t known either.

“I heard it from someone close to Gerard, so it should be true.”

“But why?!”

I briefly summarized what I had heard yesterday for the frantic Violet.

“There have been a lot of incidents lately.”

“That happened in the original story too.”

“It did. But a lot of things are different from the original now, aren’t they?”

Silence, who had originally needed to hand the protagonist’s group a defeat, had died at our hands.

The Dark Mages, who were supposed to throw the students into chaos with the artificial magic swords they had been preparing, had been subdued by the Empire in advance, and every magic sword had been confiscated.

And there was no need to mention the Holy Kingdom. Even in this recent incident, which should have set off quite a fireworks show at the Academy, all that had happened was a few warehouses catching fire.

On top of that.

“I heard the damaged warehouses were flower warehouses?”

“Yeah...”

When I checked what was in them, they were full of flowers.

I thought they were flowers prepared for the event, but... they had simply been imported for the Flower Arrangement Club to use for Daisy.

...That insane romance-fantasy male lead bastard.

How seriously did he take flower arranging to buy flowers by the warehouseful for a club with fewer than ten members?

“Does your club work that hard?”

“...The president does everything alone.”

Since it was an Academy event, the Flower Arrangement Club was participating in the Founding Festival too.

Prince Essid was acting as the face of the Imperial family.

Gerard was in a similar position.

Hedrick was probably still checking every staff member dispatched to the Academy to clean up the mess.

Prince Ellen was working with the people from the Leon Kingdom who had come for the Academy Exchange Program.

Daisy was probably going around with the Pope as well.

“But what are the magic-slinger and you doing?”

The magic-slinger prince had rejected the Flame-Slinger’s date.

And this Tinky Winky bastard had nothing to do, so she was sleeping in late.

If their president was working themself to death, shouldn’t they help out a little?

Honestly, no wonder they were magic-slingers. Their social skills were awful.

“The president told me not to come.”

But Violet answered my look with a deeply displeased face.

“Why?”

“They said if I showed up and Daisy came too, their stomach would hurt. They told everyone to get lost and said they’d handle it themself.”

Hmm, was that so? Thinking about it, that made sense.

The romance-fantasy problem children only interfered with Flower Arrangement Club activities. They never helped.

I would have told them not to come too.

“We got off topic.”

“You bastard, you have nothing else to say, so...”

Violet scowled and muttered.

“Watch your tone.”

“You said I was on leave until the Founding Festival ended unless something happened!”

Since I was the one who gave Tinky Winky leave as a reward for her good work lately, I unfortunately couldn’t summon her.

“If you want to enjoy the rest of your leave, stop complaining and listen.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Ha. Anyway. The big incidents that were supposed to explode in the original story have all been resolved well, right? So the Academy seems to think highly of the students who enrolled this year.”

In fact, Asran, who was called the Little-Little Sword Emperor or the Doomed Sword Emperor in the Swordsmanship Department, defeated every challenger before Prince Ellen took the stage and proved why he was called the Little Sword Emperor.

The prince of Dale, who had rejected the Flame-Slinger’s date, also seemed to perform as well as Asran in the magic tournament, proving why Dale was called a magical powerhouse.

“True. Because of the nature of Academy events, there were a lot of outside challengers. Some of them even had decent reputations, but they still lost to students...”

“Right. It would be different if the students had been completely crushed like in the original story. But the problems were handled internally. The Academy decided to have the students overcome adversity rather than shelter them.”

If major incidents had occurred one after another like in the original story, the Academy would have felt pressure from outside.

But the previous magic sword incident and this attempted terrorist attack could be brushed aside as minor accidents.

So the Academy had come to this conclusion.

‘The students are better than expected...’

‘The Swordsmanship Department’s Head Professor is the Sword Emperor...’

‘The Magic Department’s Head Professor is McGregor...’

‘We were only caught off guard by the variable called Silence...’

‘It would be better to send the students out and train them.’

‘And if we can renovate the Academy while the students are gone...!’

“Based on that judgment, they’re holding a study trip and final exams in the Rias Territory, where they can safely leave the students in trusted hands while giving them a variety of experiences.”

Violet groaned for a long time at my words, then scowled and shouted.

“...Aren’t they just giving Gerard a push because he has no screen time?!”

“Who the hell would...”

“The author, obviously!”

There was no way.

...Was there?

I wanted to say no, but this was a romance-fantasy world that created incomprehensible situations for the turn-based battles of romance-fantasy male leads.

“So enjoy your leave while you can. Once the Founding Festival ends, get ready to work like hell.”

“What a wonderful vacation!”

“I don’t even get a vacation.”

“...Good luck.”

Even during the festival, I had no choice but to head to the clubroom to attend Instructor Taylor’s class on the Rias Territory.