WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Mordor
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became the Second-in-Command in a Romance Fantasy Novel ◈
Chapter 8: My Life Was a Romance Fantasy (1)
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It went without saying, but a medieval fantasy world was fundamentally a class-based society.
Then again, my previous life had felt similar if you looked closely, even without formal titles.
Officially, it had not been a class-based society, and though it was difficult, people could earn that unofficial status through their abilities.
Of course, it was not impossible to overcome the barriers of status here either.
It was simply harder than in my previous life. Still, if you crushed everyone through sheer skill like the Sword Emperor, status would come looking for you on its own.
The Sword Emperor himself had rejected the status others could never obtain, but most commoners did not let that opportunity pass them by.
Even the Sword Emperor’s children had benefited. His eldest son, who had reached Sword Master, received a countship from the Empire.
Put another way, a countship was the highest title one could rise to in a single leap.
Even then, countships were not handed out freely.
You had to at least become a Sword Master or a seventh-circle mage, the minimum requirement to lead a Magic Tower.
And that only applied to the person in question. From the next generation onward, the title was reduced to a viscountcy.
Of course, if the next generation reached Sword Master or became a seventh-circle mage, or maintained achievements worthy of the title, they could keep the countship.
Still, among ten families, there might not even be one that managed to preserve a countship.
Most families failed to maintain what one genius had achieved and gradually declined.
That was how unforgiving noble society was.
And this was a world where your status was decided at birth.
In such a world, simply being royalty carried tremendous meaning.
They were people capable of becoming a king who ruled an entire nation.
The succession in the Leon Kingdom had already been decided, and Prince Ellen was the fifth prince, far removed from the throne.
Still, the chances of him becoming king were not zero. No one knew what might happen.
History alone had plenty of cases where war wiped out the royal family, leaving a noble house from a distant branch to inherit the throne.
Even without considering the worst-case scenario, royal romance was no small matter.
No matter how much they insisted their love was pure and free of ulterior motives, the royal family had no choice but to investigate their partner from birth to the present.
Unfortunately, this was not the Leon Kingdom.
So, as a royal Instructor, I had to conduct the preliminary investigation.
“Tell me everything. Don’t leave out a single detail from when you first met.”
“Th-the first time I met her was a little while ago, when I got lost in the academy grounds.”
They said every genius had a screw loose, and in that sense, Prince Ellen truly was a genius.
He had been born with no sense of direction.
No matter how large the royal castle of the Leon Kingdom was, it was still his own home.
Yet Prince Ellen got lost there from time to time.
I had returned first to speak with the Commander, and apparently he had gotten lost again in that short time.
“I was lost and standing there by myself, but everyone pretended not to notice.”
I understood.
Not even a day had passed, but rumors about Prince Ellen must have already spread through the academy.
Even when I came out to eat, I could hear people whispering around me.
An unknown swordsman from the Leon Kingdom had beaten the Little Sword Emperor.
That alone was shocking, but then someone had casually beaten that swordsman?
And that person was a prince of the Leon Kingdom?
Even if I had been an ordinary Imperial Academy student, I would not have approached a foreign prince standing around alone.
If that prince was Ellen, who had become the top dog of the Swordsmanship Department on his first day, I would have run away immediately.
So I could not blame those students.
If anything, I wanted to praise them for not running.
“But then... she came up to me.”
That was why I could be certain.
Suspicious as hell.
She was either a complete airhead or a femme fatale. It had to be one of the two.
“Her name was Daisy.”
Fuck, even her name was a flower.
“What House is she from?”
“Th-that, I don’t know yet.”
This was frustrating.
Daisy was not exactly an unusual name.
Among the first-years alone, there were probably fifteen or so!
“You need to know her surname too.”
“I-I was too embarrassed.”
Well, he looked like an overbearing conqueror when he held a sword.
Normally, though, he was so shy that he could barely approach anyone he was not close to.
“Please continue.”
“Well, you see.”
That shy guy, unlike his usual self, began excitedly talking about his meeting with the woman of his destiny.
Prince Ellen described it as a beautiful, fateful encounter.
“It doesn’t sound like much.”
The prince had dressed it up with all sorts of flowery language, but summed up in one line, she had simply shown the lost Prince Ellen the way.
“Th-that’s true.”
“And if we’re being objective, wasn’t she just recruiting for a club?”
She had not even tried to hide her ulterior motive.
It was not as though she had been flirting with a prince from another country.
Nor was she trying to make a good impression on the Swordsmanship Department’s latest sensation.
She was just promoting the Flower Arrangement Club, which was on the verge of shutting down. That was absurd enough.
Still, that was probably why she could naturally speak to a prince from another country, one who might have been the most famous student in the academy that day.
There was a high chance she had not even known who Prince Ellen was.
Had she simply seen him as prospective member number one?
“S-so, anyway!”
Prince Ellen swallowed hard and started to speak, but I had a rough idea what he was going to say and cut him off immediately.
“I’m not going.”
“I-I haven’t even said anything yet.”
“You were going to ask me to go to the Flower Arrangement Club with you.”
Come to think of it, even the club involved flowers.
At least she had committed perfectly to the concept.
“Th-that’s true, but...”
He looked at me with sparkling eyes, as if asking whether I really would not go.
I really would not.
“I’m not joining any clubs.”
No, more accurately, I could not.
Clubs.
They were the flower of academy life, places where students from different social classes and academic backgrounds could meet and interact.
Each student could join up to three clubs. Most either focused intensely on one or filled all three slots.
The former were genuinely devoted to their interests, while the latter wanted to expand their connections or participate in various events.
“I’m going to train on my own.”
I meant it.
It was not as though there were no sword-related clubs, and many people said interacting with upperclassmen there helped them improve.
But my duel with the Little Sword Emperor had taught me something today.
Prince Ellen standing before me was something beyond a monster.
In the world of swordsmanship, he was practically a cosmic horror.
Honestly, Prince Ellen might gain enlightenment even while arranging flowers.
It had started as a joke, but the more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed. A chill ran down my spine.
I had to face that monster. I could not leisurely arrange flowers.
Unlike Prince Ellen, I was not someone who could gain enlightenment from flower arrangement.
“Flower arrangement... is fun, though.”
“You haven’t even tried it.”
I was sure it was fun.
Looking at Prince Ellen now, he would probably say anything was fun as long as he could look at that Daisy girl’s face.
“Do you like her that much?”
“...Yeah.”
His shy answer made my head spin.
No, at this point, I was genuinely curious.
How pretty was she that Prince Ellen had fallen for her at first sight over something so trivial?
“Th-then, I’m going to sign up for a club tomorrow.”
He was probably worried about finding the clubroom when he could barely find his own dormitory.
“I’ll only take you to the clubroom.”
At his hesitant sideways glance, I nodded as though I had no choice.
“W-what about getting back?”
“Figure it out yourself.”
Or ask that kind Daisy to go with you.
When I said that, the prince jumped in surprise and blushed. Then I took him to eat at the dining hall.
Afterward, we returned to the dormitory, and I dropped a nuclear bomb on the Commander, who had said he would see me in a week.
That was yesterday, when I heard the royal household had gone into an uproar and was conducting a background investigation on someone named Daisy.
Then I slept.
Woke at dawn and did my morning training.
Attended two lectures that were not particularly important.
The moment the lectures ended, I led Prince Ellen, whose eyes were sparkling again, to the Flower Arrangement Club room tucked away in a corner of the Old School Building and opened its door.
Fuck.
“...”
With superhuman patience, I managed to keep the words trying to burst from my mouth inside.
“Oh.”
Honestly, I had wanted to see her once.
What kind of face had made Prince Ellen, whose looks and swordsmanship were among the continent’s finest, lose his mind at first sight?
But the face that greeted me when the door opened was extremely familiar.
We had only met a day ago, but that person had left a huge impression on me.
“Little Sword Emperor.”
“...Call me Asran.”
His blunt response, unlike yesterday, caught my attention.
Yet the faces beyond him were also far too familiar for me to focus solely on Asran.
“...”
What the fuck?
I stepped back for a moment, then looked up to check the plaque outside the classroom.
-Flower Arrangement Club
The flowers I had imagined were roses and chrysanthemums.
Apparently, this place intended to collect flowers that grew in a hellscape beyond human reach.
* * *
Naturally, the only reason I attended the Imperial Academy was for Prince Ellen.
If I added a little selfish motive, it was also to improve my own abilities.
And this was the Eleras Empire, not the Leon Kingdom where I had been born and raised.
I barely knew anyone even in the Leon Kingdom, so there was no way I would know people from the Empire.
That was why familiar faces should not have gathered in one place.
More precisely, even if they did gather, it should have been at an important academy event, not in the tiny clubroom of the Flower Arrangement Club.
The familiar faces I knew were people the Royal Intelligence Bureau had investigated, figures who could greatly influence continental affairs.
“...”
For one, there was the bastard glaring holes into me, the Little Sword Emperor.
“A club applicant, huh.”
There was also the prince from that magic-crazed country, who had only applied moments ago and was not even an official member, yet was acting like some senior deciding whether to accept the application.
“...”
The child of the Border Margrave guarding the frontier between the Demon Realm and the Empire was leaning against the wall with their eyes closed, as though they had no interest in any of this.
“There are many applicants. She’ll be pleased.”
And why was the Empire’s prince, the only official member here after joining a day earlier, here in the first place?
Fuck. No, I think I understood.
This was the opening of a romance fantasy novel.
Miss Daisy, were you the heroine of a romance fantasy novel?
All at once, dozens of reasons to join the Flower Arrangement Club came to mind.
At the same time, dozens of reasons not to join came to mind.
The former came from my sense of responsibility as a royal Instructor. I needed to investigate and report everything that happened in the Flower Arrangement Club.
The latter came from remembering all the fantasy and romance-fantasy disasters I had read about in my previous life.
Fuck, should I join them? Should I run?
While I was agonizing over it...
“Huh?”
Perhaps because of the old door, it creaked as two women and one man appeared.
They were probably the heroine’s friend and another male lead candidate.
I checked the man first, and sure enough, his face was familiar.
The heir to one of the Three Major Merchant Houses of the Continent.
I had wondered why someone like him, who should have been doing business, had enrolled in the academy.
So he had come to join the male leads of a romance fantasy novel.
“...”
Then I shifted my gaze and saw the two women.
One was blonde and had a radiant, heroine-like impression.
The other had long purple hair and looked like the heroine’s friend.
Fuck, I was doomed.
Everything was starting to look like a romance fantasy novel to me.
“Are you new members?”
At that moment, the woman I suspected was the romance-fantasy heroine, no, Daisy, spoke.
“Ahem, yes.”
“I just...”
“I met her yesterday...”
The Little Sword Emperor, the magic-crazed prince, and Prince Ellen answered at the same time.
A voice in my heart screamed.
“Oh, I’m not.”
Run.
With that answer rising from the depths of my heart, I quickly fled the clubroom.
Author’s Note
I prefer a five-day workweek, so today was supposed to be a day off.
But I was bothered by the fact that coin refunds were unavailable, so I ended up publishing for six days straight.
If I receive the forty coins sent by the four people who donated, I’ll buy the emoticon pack I wanted.
As a bonus, a little piece of trivia: the real reason I first joined Novelpia was for the concubine emoticon pack from Academy Convenience Store.
For reference, next week’s first break will be tomorrow.
The reason is that my wisdom tooth has come in and needs to be pulled.
It might be easy to pull since it has already poked through, but my previous battle with an impacted wisdom tooth was too brutal...
P.S. Next week’s 3% chance will happen if I pull both Idol Mari and Idol Sakurako from Blue Archive within 100 rolls.
P.S. 2. I got bored and ran AI image generation for the cover. Apologize, humans. AI draws fucking well. (Even the person who drew the cover admitted defeat.)
Footnotes:
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