The World of Otome Game

 is a Second Chance for Broken Swords

Story Starts

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Chapter 10.2 -

Of Pre-Mature Story Progressions

and Wagers

Marie Interlude

Marie adjusted the ribbon at her collar as she crossed the covered walkway connecting the eastern lecture halls to the academy's main courtyard, her footsteps measured and unhurried—every inch the well-bred young lady taking the afternoon air.

Inside, she was practically vibrating.

'Today's the day.'

She knew the script by heart. Had known it for years, across lifetimes, across thousands of playthroughs that blurred together like watercolour left in the rain.

Marie stopped and frowned at her own metaphor. She shook her head—she really had embraced the nobleman's daughter act. Though said nobleman's family had been teetering between destitution and outright debt ever since their promotion to a viscounty.

Hopefully they'd appreciate the crop yield analysis she'd sent. And hopefully whatever deity had dropped her into this world would see fit to inspire them to send her some allowance—otherwise it would be the same as always: dungeon, dungeon, dungeon.

Marie shook her head again. Focus.

The villainess—Angelica Rapha Redgrave—would appear in the courtyard to confront the prince about his tea party arrangements. It was the first real collision between the protagonist and the duke's daughter, the opening salvo of a war that would escalate across the entire first act. Marie wouldn't need to say much. She barely featured in this particular scene—just enough to be noticed, to be marked, to lodge herself in Angelica's awareness like a fish bone in the throat. The kind that wouldn't dislodge until the duel challenge forced it out.

She hated fish bones. Not the duel challenge—well, not particularly—but the actual experience of a bone lodging sideways in your throat, where you had to swallow whole clumps of rice and pray it shifted. She remembered being scolded by the school nurse when she'd recommended that exact technique to a student. Apparently it could send the bone down the wrong pipe entirely.

Another distracting thought.

Either way, this event mattered. Every flag mattered.

The courtyard opened before her, sunlight falling in bright columns between the arched colonnade. Students clustered in loose groups across the flagstones—girls in their crisp academy uniforms, boys in their waistcoats and pressed trousers, everyone jockeying for position in the elaborate social theatre that passed for leisure at this institution.

She was early. Good.

'Now then.'

Marie drifted toward a bench near the fountain, smoothing her skirt beneath her as she sat. Hands folded in her lap. Back straight. Chin level. The image of composure.

'Taiga, you absolute fraud,'  she thought, and nearly laughed.

The prim act had taken years to perfect. Eleven years, in fact, since she'd woken up as a seven-year-old girl at a royal parade and realised that the world around her was the otome game she'd spent two decades replaying in a dingy flat in Fuyuki. Eleven years of learning to walk with small steps instead of her natural long stride, to speak with measured softness instead of the booming voice that had once terrorised students and yakuza underlings alike, to eat with delicate bites instead of tearing into food like a woman who'd grown up in the Fujimura household, where meals were competitive bloodsport.

She'd done it, though. Built the mask piece by piece. Marie Fou Lafan—gentle, demure, the kind of girl who made boys want to protect her.

But the mask was only for public consumption.

Her gaze drifted across the courtyard and snagged briefly on a cluster of students seated on a weathered stone bench some distance away. A girl with honey-blonde hair sat amongst a group of boys—two of them obviously minor nobility from the cut of their clothes, and one who—

Marie's breath hitched.

Olivia.

She recognised her immediately. The original protagonist. The commoner scholarship student who, in the game's canon, would have stumbled into the prince's orbit and set the entire romantic catastrophe in motion. Marie had spent the first weeks of the academy term in a state of suppressed panic over this girl's existence, scouring every corridor and lecture hall for signs that Olivia was pursuing the same capture targets.

She'd found nothing.

Every pivotal event—every scripted moment where the protagonist was meant to cross paths with one of the prince's retinue—Marie had arrived to find the stage empty of competition. The library encounter with Brad. The training ground where Chris practised his forms at dawn. The guild office where Greg submitted his boons from solo dungeon runs. The garden path where she'd bumped into Jilk. Every single one, Olivia had been absent.

Marie had investigated, naturally. Discreetly. A question here, a rumour followed there. And the answer had been anticlimactic enough to make her suspicious.

Olivia was a vassal knight. Bound to some border baron—a Bartfort, she'd heard—who'd apparently been showered with accolades from the palace for dungeon discoveries or some such adventuring nonsense. The commoner girl who was supposed to capture the hearts of the kingdom's most eligible bachelors had, for reasons Marie couldn't fathom, attached herself to a minor noble and removed herself entirely from the game's narrative.

'Lucky me,'  Marie had thought at the time, and meant it.

She glanced at Olivia's group once more. The girl was leaning forward, making some gesture with her fingers—a circle, like a coin—whilst the two boys flanking her reacted with visible surprise. The third figure, seated slightly apart, had his arms crossed and eyes closed in what looked like affected meditation.

'That's probably the baron.'

Marie studied him for a fraction of a second longer than was strictly necessary. Something about his posture nagged at her.

She dismissed the thought. Irrelevant. He wasn't a capture target, and Olivia wasn't a rival. At this point, they were just background characters. The board was clear.

Marie turned her attention inward and let the warmth of her progress wash over her like a bath she'd been waiting all day to sink into.

'Four weeks. Four weeks and I've already—'

She pressed her lips together to suppress the grin threatening to split her face.

The game's events and reality diverged in texture but not in structure. The scripted encounters still happened—the same locations, the same triggers, the same emotional beats that she'd memorised across thousands of playthroughs. But in the game, building affection had been a slow grind of repeated interactions, gift-giving, and dialogue trees. Here, in this world of flesh and blood and warmth, things moved faster.

Because here, she wasn't selecting dialogue options from a menu. She was herself.

Marie let her mind wander back through the past few weeks, savouring each memory like sweets she'd been rationing.

Brad Fou Field had been first.

The library, third floor, magical theory section. In the game, the protagonist found him struggling with a rare text on elemental convergence—a subject he excelled at practically but found tedious in its theoretical underpinnings. The scripted interaction was simple: offer to help, demonstrate knowledge, earn his grudging respect.

Marie had followed the script to the letter for the initial approach. Found him scowling at the open tome, his dark hair falling across his forehead as he muttered calculations under his breath. She'd positioned herself at the adjacent desk, opened her own textbook, and waited.

When he'd glanced up—irritated at the intrusion on his solitude—she'd offered a tentative suggestion about the passage he was reading. She already knew the words by heart.

But then the script had ended, and Marie had kept going. Especially once she'd shared her own approach to magic—though that was a story for another time.

"You look like you'd rather set that book on fire than read another page," she'd said, dropping her voice low enough that the librarian wouldn't hear.

Brad's scowl had cracked. Just slightly.

"Is it that obvious?"

"Your left eye has been twitching for the last ten minutes."

He'd stared at her. Then laughed—a short, surprised bark that earned them both a venomous glare from the librarian. Marie had covered her mouth with her hand, the picture of ladylike mortification, whilst her eyes danced with mischief above her fingers.

They'd been shooed from the library together, and she'd spent the walk back to the dormitories explaining the theory in plain language, punctuated by analogies so irreverent that Brad had stopped walking twice just to process them.

"You're not what I expected," he'd said at the corridor junction where their paths diverged.

"What did you expect?"

He'd considered this. "Someone quieter."

Marie had smiled—her real smile, not the measured one—and watched his ears go pink.

Chris Fia Arclight had been different. Sharper.

The son of the Sword Saint trained before dawn, when the practice grounds were empty and the only audience was the morning mist. Marie had found him exactly where the game said he'd be—alone with his blade, running through forms with a precision that bordered on mechanical. Beautiful technique. No joy in it whatsoever.

In the game, the protagonist simply watched, was noticed, and complimented his skill. Chris, starved for recognition outside his father's shadow, responded with flustered gratitude.

Marie had watched. She'd been noticed. And then, instead of complimenting him, she'd picked up a practice sword from the rack.

"Your footwork's perfect," she'd said, settling into a stance that was decidedly not in any noble lady's curriculum—a two-handed grip, low guard, rooted in the kendo she'd carried from her previous life and beaten into something functional across eleven years of dungeon work and reluctant adventurer tutors. "Show me what you fight like. Not what your father taught you. Not what the textbooks say. You."

He'd been offended. Then curious. Then, after she'd parried his first exploratory strike with a timing that made his eyebrows climb towards his hairline, genuinely engaged.

They'd sparred for twenty minutes. Marie lost, obviously—Chris was a prodigy, and years of dungeon combat against monsters didn't translate cleanly to fighting another swordsman. Her kendo was rusty besides. But she'd pushed him. Made him adapt. Made him improvise.

And when they'd finished, both panting, Chris's expression held something she recognised from the game's affection meter—but rendered in actual human emotion, it hit differently.

Wonder.

"Where did you learn to fight like that?" he'd asked.

"Here and there." Marie had racked the practice sword and wiped her forehead with her sleeve—an utterly unladylike gesture that she'd forgotten to suppress. "Mostly by getting hit until I figured out how not to."

Chris had laughed. A real one, not the polite court-trained version. It transformed his face entirely.

Greg Fou Seberg had been the most straightforward.

The guild office at the academy. Greg, the most experienced adventurer amongst the prince's retinue, spent his free hours doing solo dives in the capital dungeon. In the game, the protagonist ran into him whilst lost, and he gallantly offered directions.

Marie hadn't bothered pretending to be lost. She'd walked straight to the guild board, scanned the posted contracts with the practised eye of someone who'd been clearing dungeons since childhood, and clicked her tongue at the payout rates.

"Thirty dias for drops, that's basically equivalent to a second-floor clear? That's robbery."

Greg, seated at a nearby table with his lance propped against the wall, had looked up from his own paperwork.

"You know dungeon rates?"

"I know when someone's being cheated." Marie had turned to face him, hands on her hips. "The mana stone yield alone on a second-floor clear is worth five times that."

The conversation that followed had lasted two hours. Greg, it turned out, was desperate to talk to someone—anyone—who understood the practical realities of adventuring rather than treating it as a glamorous hobby. Marie obliged. She talked about equipment maintenance, party composition, monster behaviour patterns, and supply chain logistics for extended expeditions. Things she'd learnt in dungeons with blood on her hands and dust in her teeth.

Literal dust, in one memorable case. She'd tripped face-first into dungeon floor on an early dive—mouth bloodied, teeth caked with grit, and the healing magic had only fixed the cuts. She'd had to drain her entire water canister to get the taste out.

Greg had found the story hilarious. Marie had twisted his fingers until he stopped laughing. He'd found that hilarious too, which rather defeated the purpose.

By the end, Greg was leaning forward with his elbows on the table, his eyes bright—a man who'd finally found someone who spoke his language.

"You should come on our next expedition," he'd said. "The prince's been talking about—"

He'd caught himself. Glanced around. Remembered propriety.

Marie had just smiled. Small. Knowing.

Jilk Fia Marmoria had been the most delicate operation.

The game's scripted encounter was a collision on a garden path—the protagonist rounds a corner, bumps into the prince's foster brother, papers scatter, mutual apologies ensue. Standard fare. But Jilk was the sharpest of the retinue, the one whose green eyes missed nothing, and Marie knew that a simple bump-and-scatter wouldn't be enough to hold his interest.

So she'd engineered the collision perfectly—angled just right to send her own documents flying rather than his, stumbling with precisely calibrated gracelessness—and then, as Jilk knelt to help gather her scattered pages, she'd let him see what was written on them.

Financial projections. Crop yield analyses for the Lafan viscounty's depleted farmland. Investment proposals she'd been drafting in her spare time, trying to pull her family's territory back from the edge of ruin.

These were legitimately researched, as she wanted her family to at least partially support her.

Jilk's hands had paused mid-reach. His gaze swept across the numbers with the velocity of someone who processed information the way other people breathed.

"These projections assume a sixteen per cent improvement in soil quality," he'd murmured, almost to himself. "That's... ambitious."

"It's realistic if you factor in the fertilisation cycle I outlined on page three."

His eyes had lifted to meet hers. Those downturned green eyes that gave him his perpetually melancholy air. But behind them, something had sparked—the recognition of a kindred mind.

"You wrote these yourself?"

"Who else would?"

A pause. Then a smile—slow, genuine, and tinged with something that looked suspiciously like respect.

"May I?" He'd gestured to the remaining pages.

Marie had let him read. They'd ended up on a nearby bench, heads bent over her projections, Jilk's quiet corrections and suggestions weaving through her framework with an elegance that made the numbers sing.

When he'd finally returned her papers, their fingers had brushed. He'd noticed. She'd noticed him noticing. Neither had mentioned it.

And then there was Julius.

Marie's cheeks warmed despite herself as the memory surfaced, unbidden and irrepressible.

The date. Their first proper outing together, arranged after weeks of careful groundwork—the accidental meetings, the lingering conversations, the slow accumulation of trust. Julius had suggested a restaurant in the capital's merchant quarter, somewhere discreet, away from the academy's panopticon of gossip.

Marie had dressed simply—or rather, she'd dressed in the best her modest wardrobe could offer, which amounted to the same thing. Julius hadn't seemed to mind. He'd pulled out her chair, ordered wine she couldn't pronounce, and gazed at her across the candlelight with eyes that held none of the princely distance he wore like armour at the academy.

The steak had arrived.

And Marie—who had been Taiga Fujimura, who had grown up in the Fujimura household where she vaguely remembered Raiga once challenging a rival yakuza boss to an eating contest and winning—had taken one look at the cut of meat on her plate and felt something primal override every scrap of noble conditioning she'd spent eleven years building.

To be fair, steak like this didn't exist in the Lafan viscounty's budget. This was the first time in this life she'd encountered a properly aged, properly seared cut of beef, and the Taiga in her had simply snapped.

She'd caught herself three bites in. Frozen. Meat juices running down her chin. Fork and knife untouched on either side of her plate. Julius staring at her with an expression she couldn't begin to read.

Horror. Fascination. Something else entirely.

"I—" Marie had started, the blood draining from her face as the mask crumbled in real time. "I'm so sorry, I—I don't—I never learnt—"

Julius had opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"That," he said, very slowly, "was the most honest thing I've seen anyone do at this academy."

Something about his tone had cracked through her mortification—warm, genuinely amused, almost delighted. And then he'd reached across the table, picked up his own steak with both hands, and taken a bite.

The look on the waiter's face alone had been worth the entire evening.

Later—after the meal, after the wine, after she'd grown comfortable enough to stop monitoring every gesture—she'd been teasing him about something and the Taiga in her had surged forward before the Marie mask could catch up. She'd grabbed the prince by the nape of his neck, hauled him into a headlock, and ground her fist into the crown of his head.

The realisation of what she was doing hit her mid-noogie.

She released him so fast she nearly stumbled.

The silence afterwards had been absolute.

He'd rubbed at his head. Looked at her. And his eyes had held an expression she recognised from the game's highest affection tier—but rendered in living colour, it was ten times more devastating.

Julius slapped both his cheeks, as if to snap himself out of a daze.

"No one," he'd said quietly, "has ever done that before."

"You deserved it," Marie had whispered, her voice shaking, unsure if she was still acting.

"Definitely."

She'd expected anger. Offence. The cold withdrawal of royal favour. Instead, Julius had laughed—raw and startled, like something had broken loose inside him that he hadn't known was stuck—and Marie's heart had done something complicated that she was still, weeks later, unwilling to examine too closely.

Though, unfortunately, the red mark on his head was the reason a rumour circulated that she'd slapped the prince.

The difference between the game and reality was this: in the game, Marie had been selecting optimal responses from a predetermined list, guiding an avatar through scripted encounters towards numerical affection thresholds. Here, she was a person. A messy, contradictory, occasionally violent person who ate steak with her hands and sparred before dawn and argued about dungeon payout rates and put princes in headlocks when they said stupid things.

And somehow—somehow—that was working better than any optimised route she'd ever run.

In public, the mask held. Marie Fou Lafan was gentle, soft-spoken, the kind of girl who clasped her hands and lowered her eyes and made men feel ten feet tall. But behind closed doors, in the private moments the game had never shown—the walks back from the library, the cool-down after sparring, the quiet arguments about crop yields—she was herself.

Taiga.

Loud when she was angry. Blunt when she was honest. Quick to laugh, quicker to tease, quickest of all to react when someone pushed her buttons. She'd grabbed Greg's lance out of his hands once during an argument about grip technique and demonstrated the correct hold with enough force to crack the practice dummy's torso. She'd stolen Brad's textbook mid-sentence and read aloud from it in a mocking falsetto until he'd chased her halfway across the dormitory wing. She'd challenged Chris to a rematch every morning since their first spar, giving him a harder fight each bout—falling down and getting back up every time with a grin that made him forget to be stoic.

And they liked it.

All of them. Every single one. They liked the girl who didn't perform softness for their benefit, who pushed back when they pushed, who treated them like human beings rather than capture targets in a dating simulation.

Marie felt something swell in her chest—warm, buoyant, almost painful in its intensity. She was grateful. Genuinely, devastatingly grateful for this second chance, this impossible gift of a world where she could be Taiga again without carrying Taiga's weight.

Because Taiga's weight had been unbearable.

Twenty years in that flat. Twenty years of replaying the same game, cycling through the same routes, watching the same pixels smile the same smiles whilst the real world grew distant and cold and small. And now close to forty years since—

A pang lanced through her chest, sharp enough to steal her breath.

'Stop it.'

She was enjoying her life. Right now, in this moment, she was happy. She had friends—well, soon-to-be lovers, if she was being honest about where things were heading—who saw her, the real her, and wanted more of it. She had a purpose. She had a future that stretched beyond the next playthrough.

She remembered Julius's kiss.

It had happened three days ago, at the end of their second outing. He'd walked her to the dormitory entrance, and the lamplight had caught his hair, and he'd leaned in—slow, careful, clearly thinking about this for a long time and not entirely sure of the mechanics—and his lips had found hers in the warm evening air.

Marie had felt fireworks. Actual, genuine fireworks that bloomed behind her closed eyelids in colours that the game's CG artwork could never have captured. His lips were warm and slightly chapped and tasted faintly of the wine they'd shared at dinner, and his hand had found the small of her back, gentle enough to buckle her knees in a way that was entirely unscripted.

When they'd parted, Julius's composure had been shot. His cheeks were the same colour as the sunset behind him, and his eyes held that look again—real and unguarded and devastating in a way no game engine could render.

"I—" he'd started.

"Don't ruin it by talking," Marie had whispered, and kissed him again.

She'd floated back to her room that night. Actually floated. Her feet had touched the ground at some point, presumably, but she had no memory of it. She'd collapsed onto her bed, pressed her face into her pillow, and squealed—a sound that would have horrified every prim and proper lady in the kingdom and delighted every girl who'd ever been kissed by a boy she actually liked.

'Taiga Fujimura, you absolute disaster of a woman,'  she'd thought, grinning so hard her cheeks ached.

She had not got a hold of herself. Not then, and certainly not now, sitting on this bench in the courtyard with her hands folded like a saint's whilst her insides did cartwheels.

Movement rippled through the courtyard.

Marie's reverie broke as she tracked the disturbance—a procession of polished boots and sighing girls converging on the central walkway. Prince Julius materialised from between the colonnaded arches like a figure stepping out of a painting, his blue hair catching the afternoon light. Jilk walked at his elbow, forest-green hair a muted counterpoint to the prince's brilliance, his downturned eyes sweeping the crowd with that quietly assessing gaze that missed nothing.

Girls pressed forward like flowers turning towards the sun. Marie watched them from her bench—the fluttering fans, the breathless exclamations, the calculated positioning—and felt a flicker of amusement so sharp she had to bite the inside of her cheek.

'Here we go.'

"Your Highness! Will you be holding a tea party in May?"

"I'd like to join—no, I must join!"

"Your Highness, it would be the honour of my family's lineage to attend!"

One first-year lunged for Julius's sleeve, her face the colour of the peonies on her bodice. Julius's smile flickered—basking despite himself—before he caught it and schooled his features into regal distance. Beside him, Jilk redirected the crowd's enthusiasm smoothly—he'd been managing the prince's admirers since childhood, and it showed.

Marie remained on her bench. Waiting. The script was clear in her mind—she didn't enter yet. Not until—

The courtyard's ambient chatter died as though someone had drawn a blade.

Angelica Rapha Redgrave emerged from the eastern colonnade with an entourage at her back. Marie studied her with fresh eyes—the gleaming blonde hair pulled into its immaculate bun, the alabaster skin, the red eyes that cut through the crowd like heated steel. The girl moved as though the courtyard belonged to her—and by blood, half of it probably did. The students parted before her, instinctive as water around a stone.

'The villainess,'  Marie thought, though the word felt wrong even in her own head. In the game, Angelica had been an obstacle—a jealous fiancée whose escalating antagonism drove the dramatic tension of the first act. But watching her now, in the living flesh, Marie saw something the game's sprites had never conveyed.

Angelica was afraid.

It was buried deep—leagues beneath the imperious posture and the cutting gaze—but it was there. In the way her fingers curled inward, just slightly. In the set of her jaw, too rigid for genuine confidence.

Marie filed the observation away. It changed nothing about her plans, but it was... worth noting.

"Your Highness, I would like to speak to you regarding your tea party in May. Would you permit me to join?" Angelica's voice carried across the courtyard, phrased as a request with steel beneath the courtesy.

Julius breathed a measured sigh. "Angelica, drop the intimidation act. This is the academy."

"I am aware." Angelica's tone never wavered. "But this fuss and bother you trail has begun to grate on my nerves."

And that was her cue.

Marie rose from the bench, smoothed her skirt once, and walked towards the group. Most people, possessing any measure of self-preservation, would have read the charged atmosphere between the prince and his betrothed and stayed well clear. Stepping into that particular vacuum was an act of either extraordinary bravery or spectacular foolishness.

'Probably both,'  she admitted to herself.

But commitment was everything. She kept her stride even, her expression soft, her posture open—the picture of a girl who simply happened to be passing by at the right moment.

"Your Highness..."

"Hmm? Oh. Marie, perfect timing." Julius's entire demeanour transformed. The rigid prince who'd just dismissed his betrothed dissolved into something warmer, more open, more real. He smiled at her, and the gesture was deliberate in its warmth. "I was looking for you. Would you join me?"

Angelica's brows twitched first—a minute betrayal of her composure—then furrowed as one of her followers leaned in and whispered urgently in her ear. Whatever was being communicated clearly wasn't pleasant news. Marie watched the subtle play of emotions cross the duke's daughter's face—annoyance, calculation, then a careful restoration of her mask.

"Boys at the school will be holding tea parties in May," Julius explained, his tone shifting to casual authority. "I don't want to do anything too elaborate or formal, so I planned to just invite acquaintances—people I actually want to spend time with. I was hoping you would join me."

Marie could feel the dozens of eyes boring into her back. She suppressed the urge to turn and meet them.

"Prince Julius! There are regulations about such things. I don't mean to say that you must have an elaborate party with all the pomp and ceremony, but it ought to be at a scale appropriate to your status—otherwise you'd be spitting on the expectations burdened upon those beneath you."

"Enough, Angelica!" Julius snapped, his patience fracturing along familiar lines. "This is the academy. I'm just another student here, nothing more. You may be my betrothed, but that doesn't give you the right to interfere with my personal life or dictate my friendships."

"But—"

Angelica tightened her jaw. Her fists clenched, knuckles blanching white against her gloves. Marie watched the struggle play out across the duke's daughter's face—pride warring with pragmatism, fury with forced composure.

"My apologies, Your Highness." The sarcasm was barely sheathed, each syllable edged and deliberate. "I overstepped my bounds. It won't happen again."

The bow that followed was deep—deliberately, excessively deep. Far lower than protocol demanded for a duke's daughter addressing even the heir apparent. The message was unmistakable: mockery dressed in the finest deference money could buy.

Julius and his retinue frowned at the gesture, recognising the insult but trapped by its veneer of propriety. Angelica rose, chin high, spine straight as a sword, and turned on her heel. Her steps were measured and dignified as she departed, her entourage falling into formation behind her like a military escort.

Marie watched her go. A strange feeling stirred behind her breastbone—not sympathy, exactly, but something adjacent to it.

'In the game, she was just an obstacle. A boss fight with dialogue trees.'

Here, she was a girl whose fiancé had just humiliated her in front of half the academy.

Marie pushed the feeling aside. She had a scene to finish.

Jilk's gaze found her across the courtyard. His expression shifted—recognition flickering behind those mournful green eyes—and he touched Julius's arm.

"I'm so sorry about that, Marie," Julius said. "I hope that unpleasant scene didn't upset you too much."

"N-no, I'm fine, truly." She let her hands tremble, just enough to be visible. "But are you really sure it's all right for me to attend your party? Given the circumstances?"

"The prince isn't particularly fond of formalities or rigid social structures," Jilk interjected, smooth as silk over glass. "He wants to hold a more casual affair, something genuine. We would all love for you to join us." He shrugged with practised nonchalance, then chuckled warmly. "Plus, this is honestly the first time I've ever seen the prince be so insistent on inviting a lady to anything. It's quite refreshing, actually."

Marie lowered her eyes in what she hoped read as modest gratitude. Beneath the mask, her pulse hammered with triumph.

'Flag captured. Villainess awareness triggered. Public invitation accepted in front of witnesses.'

Julius and Jilk began to withdraw, their entourage falling into step behind them. Unlike Angelica's followers, who'd departed with unified purpose, the expressions amongst the prince's hangers-on were mixed—conflicted glances thrown back at Marie, uncertainty written across features that hadn't yet decided whether she was a rising star or a falling one.

Marie stood in the courtyard as they departed, maintaining her composure with iron discipline. Hands clasped. Eyes downcast. Steps small and even.

She watched the prince's vivid blue hair disappear beyond the colonnade. The murmuring crowd began to disperse, the spectacle concluded, the gossip already spreading like fire through dry brush.

For one unguarded heartbeat, Marie's face contorted into a grin—wide and lecherous and fizzing with barely contained glee, a woman who'd just cleared a critical event flag with maximum affection points and was already calculating the next three moves on the board.

Then, in a blink, it was gone.

Marie Fou Lafan walked away from the courtyard with both hands clasped before her, her steps small and even, her expression serene as still water.

'Reverse harem route, here I come. And later a Julius sandwich!'

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Back to the present…

The academy's eastern corridors were quieter than Leon expected for a festival morning. Most students had gravitated towards the western grounds—where hell resided, at least according to him—drawn by the food stalls and exhibition tents that clustered in a riotous sprawl of colour and noise. Here, the marble floors reflected pale morning light through arched windows, and the only sounds were the tap of Leon's boots and the softer patter of Meltryllis beside him.

"You should have seen it, Leon." Melt's bright eyes sparkled as she walked, her hands clasped behind her back and her hips swaying with each step in that peculiar, balletic way she had. "The queue stretched past the eastern colonnade. Twice around the corner. Some of them brought parasols as it reached the outside—though to be fair, some of them stood in the line just because there was a line, and some thought it was the queue for the prince's butler café."

Leon rubbed the bridge of his nose. "That many?"

"Mmhm. And not just the girls." Melt held up three fingers. "There were three men who came with their faces covered—they requested private booths."

Leon supposed he shouldn't have been surprised. In a society where lower-noble women treated prospective husbands as walking purses in exchange for an heir, it was inevitable that some men would seek comfort from the only people who didn't treat them like commodities.

"Well, the attendants were wearing rather tight short shorts," Melt added. She tilted her head—a gesture she'd picked up from watching Olivia—as if that explained everything.

Leon exhaled through his teeth.

Melt's expression shifted to something more considered, her brow creasing in the way it did when she was organising information. "I spoke with several of the attendants after their shifts. The cat-eared gentleman—Tomas, I think—said it was the most enjoyable work he'd performed since arriving in Holfort. The fox-man, I think they were called renards, Rielle, asked whether Livia intended to make this a permanent establishment."

"Permanent."

"Mm. Several of them expressed the same sentiment. They said they'd be happy to work full-time at the host club, and a few mentioned they have friends back home who might be interested in similar positions." Melt paused, tapping her chin. "One of them—the tall elven man with the silver earrings—said he'd already sent a letter to his brothers and uncles in the Dominion, recommending the job."

Leon's stride slowed.

The attendants. Right.

He'd nearly forgotten the scope of what he and Margot had done in the weeks following the Folkvangr skirmish. When the prince and his retinue lost the wager, the financial shockwave had rippled outward through half the academy's upper crust. Noble houses that had bet heavily on the Crown Prince scrambled to recoup their losses, and many turned to the quickest liquid asset available—their attendants.

Demi-human attendants occupied a peculiar position in Holfort's social hierarchy. Not slaves—the long-lived races would never have tolerated that—but contracted companions. A noble paid an upfront sum to secure the contract, then provided a monthly allowance for the duration of service. Some attendants negotiated a cut of their master's dungeon earnings on top of that. The arrangement was transactional by design: the noble got companionship and physical intimacy from someone who wouldn't age alongside them or complicate succession with half-blooded heirs; the attendant got decades of reliable income to send home to family, with the option to retire comfortably after a few centuries of service.

It worked because both sides understood the terms. Until Folkvangr broke the board.

Desperate nobles, bleeding money from lost bets, had begun entertaining offers from foreign buyers—merchants from the Principality, agents from the eastern empires, and more than a few shadowy intermediaries whose employers Leon preferred not to imagine. The problem wasn't moral. It was strategic.

Many of those attendants had participated in the cosmic dungeon raid. And many of those participants had successfully contracted guardian spirits.

If even a fraction of those newly bonded attendants were purchased by a foreign power, Holfort would haemorrhage military capability overnight. Guardian spirits couldn't be separated from their contractors by force—but buying the attendant's contract was functionally the same as acquiring the spirit.

It was smart thinking by Margot to negotiate the first buy rights after the dungeon raid.

Leon and Margot had moved fast. Using a combination of Leon's Folkvangr winnings and Margot's guild connections, they'd purchased dozens of attendant contracts before the foreign buyers could close their deals. It had been expensive, exhausting, and bureaucratically nightmarish.

And now those attendants were, effectively, Leon's responsibility.

The trouble was that most of them had never wanted to be adventurers. They'd crawled through dungeons and fought crystalline horrors because their masters required it, not because they harboured any particular enthusiasm for having their faces melted by cosmic pixies. Given the choice, most of them would have happily provided physical companionship and lazed about until their master needed them for something arbitrary like pouring tea and organising wardrobes.

Which was, apparently, precisely what Olivia had offered them.

"They also brought up a proposal," Melt continued, her tone bright and businesslike. "Several of the attendants offered to place their guardian spirits under your command—or under the adventurers' guild, if you preferred—on a standing basis. In exchange, they'd like guaranteed employment at the host club for the duration of their contracts."

"And the spirits? Long-term?"

"Once the ritual of inheritance becomes viable, they'll transfer them. First contracts take a full century to mature enough for the ritual, though. Subsequent ones only half that." Melt's eyes crinkled. "Livia and Mégane already drafted the agreements."

Leon stopped walking.

"They what?"

"Drew up the contracts. Together." Melt paused, letting the impossibility of that statement settle. "Livia said Mégane's penmanship was 'adequate,' and Mégane said Livia's legal reasoning was 'not entirely incompetent.' I believe that's the kindest exchange they've ever had."

Leon resumed walking, slower now, processing the implications. Olivia and Mégane had cooperated. Voluntarily. Without supervision, bloodshed, or the threat of Sella's intervention. That alone was alarming enough to warrant investigation.

But the substance of the agreements troubled him more. The contracts bound the attendants to a minimum service period—until the ritual of inheritance became viable—during which they'd work at the host club. It was clever. It gave the attendants stability and income, kept their guardian spirits within Holfort's sphere of influence, and created a pipeline for eventually transferring those spirits to contracted adventurers or military personnel.

It was also, Leon noted with mounting dread, the foundation of a business empire.

'She's already planning to build one on my territory.'

The thought arrived with the weight of prophecy. Of course she had. Olivia never did anything small. And now that the Queen had expressed interest in investing—

"Plus," Melt said, her voice taking on that chirpy lilt that always preceded something catastrophic, "it helps that the attendants also get a cut of the income from the loans."

Leon's right boot caught the edge of an uneven flagstone. His body pitched forward, arms windmilling, and he caught himself against the corridor wall with one hand, the marble cold against his palm.

"What loans?"

Melt blinked at him. She hadn't yet learnt that some questions were rhetorical—or that some simply needed the phrase, "you probably wouldn't want to know."

"The credit lines. Livia extended interest-bearing loans to many of the customers who availed of the host club's services."

The corridor seemed to narrow. The morning light through the windows took on a faintly sinister quality.

"She extended credit. To the students. Who are already in debt. From the bet they lost."

"Mm-hm." Melt nodded encouragingly, as though Leon were a slow student finally grasping a difficult theorem. "Many of them haven't recovered their finances yet, so Livia kindly offered a line of credit. She said—and I'm quoting here—'It would be unconscionable to deny them comfort in their time of financial distress.'"

Leon pressed his forehead against the wall.

"She also said," Melt continued, clearly enjoying the recitation, "that as long as they pay the interest at the end of each month, she doesn't mind how long the principal takes to clear. Though if they miss a payment, the interest rate increases." A pause. "But it can be renegotiated back to the original rate after a year of consistent payments."

Leon's jaw worked silently.

The structure was elegant. Predatory, yes—predatory in the way a trapdoor spider's burrow was elegant. Olivia had created a system where indebted nobles, desperate for social validation and physical comfort, could continue spending money they didn't have on services provided by attendants whose contracts Leon owned, generating income that was then partially distributed to those same attendants as an incentive to maintain quality, all underwritten by loans whose interest payments created a self-sustaining revenue stream that would compound for years.

Decades, if the attendant contracts were anything to go by.

And the Queen wanted to invest.

Leon lifted his forehead from the wall. He stared at the opposite side of the corridor for a long moment, weighing his options. He could confront Olivia. He could demand she restructure the loans. He could invoke his authority as her liege and shut the entire operation down.

Or he could do what he always did when Olivia's schemes crossed the line from ambitious into monstrous.

He ignored it.

'Hopefully, nothing truly awful comes of it.'

A classroom door stood open to his left, a hand-painted sign advertising festival wares. Inside, a girl with pigtails was spinning sugar into clouds of pink and blue over a small enchanted burner. Leon fished a silver coin from his pocket, purchased the largest cone she had, and turned to present it to Meltryllis.

Melt's face lit up. Her fingers closed around the paper cone, and she brought it to her lips, pulling away a wisp of sugar with the careful focus she gave to everything—delicate, precise, faintly reverent.

"Thank you, Leon."

"You're welcome." He fell into step beside her again, steering them back towards the student council chambers. "Melt."

"Mm?"

"How are you finding everything? Since the contract."

The question was genuine, and Melt's answering smile told him she recognised it as such. She took another bite of cotton candy—a larger one this time, less delicate—and tilted her head back to gaze at the vaulted ceiling as they walked.

"Wonderful. Honestly, truly wonderful." Her voice carried a dreamlike quality, soft and distant. "I love that our islands have both freshwater and saltwater lakes. And everyone is just so nice."

Leon smiled at that.

"Art and Ria have been inviting me to spar every other morning. Durga, Sella, and Leysritt are always pleasant to work with. Pollux is fun, and Illya—"

Leon snorted.

"Well, she's fun too."

"And the cooking!" Melt spun to face him, walking backwards now, cotton candy held aloft like a sceptre. "Leysritt taught me to make onigiri. Durga showed me a spice blend that I didn't ask where she'd learnt it, but it made everything taste like fire and flowers. And Art—" She hesitated, something flickering behind her eyes. "Art makes this stew. It's simple—just vegetables, stock, and herbs. But she makes a lot, and it tastes really good. Though she and Ria do eat a lot."

Leon watched her, saying nothing.

"Oh, and I'd like to learn an instrument," she added, brightening again. "Piano, maybe. Or violin. Something with resonance."

"We'll find you a teacher."

"Really?"

"Really."

Melt beamed.

Then the beam shifted. It didn't diminish—it deepened, growing warm and complicated in a way that made Leon's chest tighten. She slowed her backward pace until they were nearly touching, and looked up at him.

"Leon."

"Mm."

"I've been speaking with the others. And some of the attendants." Her crystalline eyes held his, unblinking. "About... physical things."

Leon's expression didn't change. The corridor felt abruptly warmer.

"They told me how pleasurable it can be. The closeness. The touching." Melt's voice didn't waver. She said the words with the same careful precision she applied to everything—tasting each syllable before releasing it. "I think everyone would like that. With you."

The cotton candy drooped slightly in her grip. She continued looking up at him with an expression that was neither demanding nor pleading—just open. Honest. Expectant.

Leon exhaled slowly.

His hand rose and settled atop her head. His fingers threaded through her hair—cool and fine and faintly shimmering, like spun water—and ruffled it gently.

He could have said something deflective. A joke, a redirect, the kind of sardonic non-answer he used to keep the world at arm's length. But Melt had been honest with him, and she deserved honesty back.

The truth was that he wanted to. The longing was there—had been there—tangled up with memories of hands and voices from a life that wasn't this one. But Olivia had fought for him first. Had chosen him when he was nothing, had stayed when staying cost her everything, and was still—even now, even with the scheming and the chaos and the host club—building something with him that he didn't fully understand but couldn't bear to dishonour.

If someone crossed that line before her, it would mean something. Something he couldn't take back.

And behind Olivia, there was Angelica—steady and fierce and learning to trust again. And Mégane, prickly and proud and trying so hard, it made his chest ache. They were all making efforts, each in their own way, and he owed it to every one of them to do this properly.

"I'm working on that." His voice was quiet, stripped of its usual sardonic edge. "I'm sorry. And I'm asking you—and hopefully the others—for a bit more patience."

Melt's eyes closed. She leaned into his hand, just fractionally, and the smile that crossed her face was small and private and unguarded.

"I can be patient," she said. "I'm very good at waiting."

She opened her eyes and took his arm, pressing herself against his side as they rounded the final corner towards the student council chambers. The cotton candy had somehow migrated to her other hand without losing a single strand.

-=&<o>&=-

The student council room occupied a generous suite on the academy's second floor—a wood-panelled space with tall windows overlooking the festival grounds, furnished with heavy desks and bookshelves and the accumulated detritus of generations of student governance. It functioned as a miniature parliament, a student-run apparatus that managed everything from club funding to dormitory disputes, operating in parallel with the academy's faculty administration. The more cynical students called it a sandbox for future politicians. They weren't wrong.

Leon pushed open the door and found Angelica.

She was slumped face-down across one of the central desks, her arms folded beneath her head, her blonde hair spilling across the polished surface in a dishevelled curtain. A half-empty teacup sat at her elbow, long since gone cold. Her breathing was deep and rhythmic.

Britomart stood at attention beside the desk, her crystalline wings folded tight against her back as she turned towards Leon and Melt with an expression that managed to convey both dutiful composure and maternal exasperation.

"She insisted on completing the final reports before resting," Britomart said. Her voice had the cadence of someone who had lost this argument more than once. "We finished everything an hour ago. The task logs are cleared, the vendor permits are filed, and the security rotation for the western grounds has been confirmed through midnight."

Leon glanced at the stack of neatly organised documents beside Angelica's elbow. Even hungover and half-conscious, she'd managed to produce impeccable paperwork. The handwriting on the topmost sheet was crisp and even, not a single blot or correction visible.

Of course she did.

"So there's nothing to hand over to the next representative?"

"Nothing of substance. The remaining duties are procedural—a walk-through of the campus grounds to verify that everything's running smoothly, and a brief meeting with the faculty liaison to confirm tomorrow's schedule." Britomart's wings rustled. "Lady Angelica insisted she would complete the walk-through herself, but..." She trailed off, gesturing at the unconscious woman. The battle, clearly, was lost.

Leon nodded.

"Take her to her quarters. Let her sleep it off."

He stepped closer to the desk and placed his hand on Angelica's shoulder, pressing gently. She didn't stir. He pressed harder, rocking her slightly, and her breathing hitched.

"Angie."

A groan. Muffled by her arms.

"Angie, wake up."

One blue eye cracked open, bleary and unfocused. It blinked twice, found Leon's face, and narrowed—probably from the light.

"...Leon?"

"Britomart's going to take you back to your room. You need proper rest."

"I'm fine." The words came out thick, each vowel dragging. Angelica lifted her head an inch from the desk, revealing a cheek marked with the impression of her sleeve's stitching. "What about our evening stroll?"

"We can reschedule it. And if you'd like, we can watch the fireworks from your dorm room this evening. Better view from up there anyway."

A flicker of protest crossed Angelica's face—the instinctive resistance of someone who had spent her entire life believing that stepping away from a duty was the same as failing it. Her mouth opened.

Britomart stepped forward.

"My lady." The guardian spirit's tone was gentle but absolute—a wall wrapped in velvet. "Rest now. You'll be no good to anyone if you collapse during the evening programme."

The protest died. Angelica's shoulders sagged, and she hauled herself upright with the grace of someone dragging herself out of a swamp.

"Fine." She gathered herself, straightening her uniform with automatic precision even as her eyes remained glassy and unfocused. "The fireworks, then. You promised."

"I promised."

Angelica nodded once, swayed slightly, and allowed Britomart to guide her towards the door. The guardian spirit wrapped one arm around her contractor's waist, bearing her weight effortlessly.

"Oh, Angie."

They paused at the threshold. Angelica turned back, her gaze finding Leon through the haze of her hangover with surprising clarity.

"Thank you. For yesterday, too."

Then Britomart swept her through the doorway and the door clicked shut behind them.

The room felt larger without Angelica's presence anchoring it. Melt drifted towards the windows, peering down at the festival grounds with open curiosity. Leon surveyed the space—the cleared desks, the filed reports, the cold teacup. Everything in order. Everything handled.

A door at the far end of the room opened, one that led to an auxiliary chamber used for storage and private meetings. Erica emerged carrying a lacquered tray, steam curling from a porcelain pot and three cups arranged with precise symmetry.

She wore her usual academy uniform, though she'd traded the standard blazer for a simpler vest that left her arms free—a concession, Leon suspected, to her preference for mobility over formality. Her silver-white hair was pulled back in a low tail, and her blue eyes found Leon's with a flicker of warmth before settling into their characteristic stillness.

"Good morning again, Lord Bartfort."

"Morning, Your Highness. And it's just Leon."

A barely perceptible twitch at the corner of her mouth. "Good morning, Leon. And call me Erica—I... think we're close enough for that."

Neither of them looked at the other's neck. The effort required to maintain that particular discipline was, Leon suspected, roughly equal on both sides.

She set the tray on the desk Angelica had vacated. "I prepared a pot when I heard voices. Three cups—I assumed Lady Meltryllis would be joining you."

"Just call me Melt," the guardian spirit interjected with a bright smile.

"You assumed correctly." Leon accepted the cup she offered, the porcelain warm against his fingertips. The scent was clean and floral—jasmine, maybe, with something underneath it. "Thank you for this. And for helping me stay hydrated last night."

The flush that rose across Erica's cheeks was immediate and vivid, sweeping from her collar to her hairline. She set down the teapot with a faint clatter.

"That was—it was nothing. Anyone would have done the same." She busied herself arranging the cups, her movements slightly too quick. "And I ought to apologise for my mother. Her behaviour was..." She searched for the word, found it, discarded it, searched again. "Excessive."

Leon waved the apology away with his free hand. "The Queen is the Queen. No apologies necessary."

Erica looked as though she had several opinions about that statement but held her tongue. She poured tea for Melt, who accepted it with a smile and took a seat by the window.

Silence settled over the room—not uncomfortable, but weighted. Neither of them quite ready to name the thing they were circling.

Melt took a sip of tea. Set the cup down. Looked at Erica with her head tilted at that particular angle Leon had learned to recognise as the prelude to something unfiltered.

"Erica."

The princess glanced up.

"Is there anything Art and Ria could do to help you feel more comfortable around them?"

The question landed in the room like a stone in still water. Leon flinched—a minute tensing of his shoulders that he suppressed almost instantly, but not quite fast enough. Erica's reaction was more pronounced: her fingers tightened around her teacup, and something flickered behind her eyes—not fear, not quite, but a rawness that she shuttered almost immediately.

Leon had planned to raise the subject. He'd been turning it over for days, searching for the right moment—a private conversation, perhaps, during one of their administrative sessions, when Erica's guard was down and the setting was safe. He'd prepared approaches. Considered angles. Drafted and discarded a dozen opening lines.

Melt had bypassed all of it. She genuinely didn't understand why people made simple things complicated, and she'd simply asked.

Erica's gaze dropped to her tea. Her reflection stared back at her from the amber surface, wavering.

"They... resemble someone." Her voice was careful, each word placed deliberately. "Someone I've dreamed of. The resemblance is..." She paused. Drew a breath. "Striking."

Leon set down his own cup.

"Dreamed of?"

"Since I was young."

Leon's expression remained neutral. Inside, his mind was racing.

'Arturia Pendragon.'

'She's dreaming of Arturia.'

'Why?'

"I didn't mean to cause tension," Erica continued, her composure reassembling itself with visible effort. "It's my issue, not theirs. I'll speak with Ria and Art privately to clear the air. I should have done so already—I've been putting it off, and that was unfair to them."

"No need to apologise," Leon said, keeping his voice even. "I was actually going to bring this up myself, in a more..." He glanced at Melt, who was eating cotton candy with an expression of perfect innocence. "Private setting. But I'm glad it's out in the open."

Erica met his eyes. Something in her posture eased—not fully, but enough.

"They're good people," Leon added. "Both of them. A bit battle-hungry—Ria more than Art, if I'm honest, though Art gets a certain look in her eye when you mention swords that I've learned not to encourage."

A laugh escaped Erica—small and startled, as if it had slipped past her guard. She pressed her fingers to her lips, surprised at herself.

"I'll look forward to it, then."

'Dreaming of Arturia.'

The thought circled back, insistent—

The door burst open.

Clarice Fia Atlee strode into the student council room—chestnut hair immaculate, uniform pressed to knife-edge perfection, her expression set in the kind of severity that upper nobles wore as easily as their crests.

Her eyes swept the room. Leon, standing by the desk with his teacup. Erica, seated with her own. Melt, by the window with her cotton candy. The conspicuous absence of a fourth person.

"Where is Lady Angelica?"

"Feeling under the weather," Leon said. "I sent her to rest. I'll be handling the handover."

Clarice's brows drew together. "Under the weather? She seemed perfectly fine at—" She stopped. Recalculated.

"She drank?"

"There were extended revelries last night."

Clarice's lips pressed into a line that suggested she had several things to say about that and was exercising considerable restraint in not saying them.

"I see. And the reports?"

"Completed. Filed. Everything's in order—Britomart confirmed there's nothing substantial to pass over. Just the walkabout and the faculty liaison meeting."

Clarice moved further into the room, her gaze tracking across the desk's surface as if she could verify Leon's claims through sheer force of inspection. She found the stack of documents, flipped through the top three pages with practised efficiency, and set them down with a nod that conceded competence without quite admitting satisfaction.

"Fine. I'll take it from here."

Leon nodded. Then didn't move.

Clarice noticed. Her eyes narrowed slightly.

"Was there something else?"

Leon set his teacup down on the desk with a soft clink. He straightened, and when he spoke, the sardonic edge that usually coloured his voice was absent. What remained was quieter, more deliberate—the tone he used when the subject was political rather than personal.

"Actually, yes. I'd like to discuss something with you, Lady Atlee." A beat. "Concerning your house."

The room's temperature didn't change. The light through the windows didn't dim. But something shifted in the air—a tautening, like a string drawn tight across a bow.

Clarice's posture adjusted. Subtle, professional. Her weight settled evenly across both feet, her hands clasped at her waist. She'd been an earl's daughter longer than she'd been a student representative, and the shift was instant.

"Concerning House Atlee," she repeated, her voice neutral and measuring.

"If you have the time."

Her gaze flicked to Erica—a brief, assessing glance that weighed the princess's presence against the sensitivity of whatever Leon was about to say. Erica returned the look with placid stillness. She'd spent her life in rooms where powerful people said dangerous things, and this one was no different—it was, after all, her right.

Clarice's attention returned to Leon.

"Speak."

-=&<o>&=-

End

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