The Banquet (2)

“…Dame Noelle.”

Stella, seated at the same table, spoke up, looking as though her head were pounding.

“That gentleman. I was quite certain I had heard he held no connections in noble society.”
“That’s what I knew, too.”

Noelle’s face said she could hardly believe it herself.

“They told me you were the husband of that ever-solemn hero, so I assumed you would be cut from the same cloth, and here you are, a young man who has turned out well. Come to my manor sometime. I will see you treated properly.”
“I will be waiting on that, Viscount. Ah, and let us have the Lieutenant General come along later as well—”

Before her eyes, Aiden was carrying on conversations with several people at once, a sociable smile on his face. He chatted with nobles as slippery as old snakes without the slightest strain, leading the mood of the circle rather than following it, with the air of a man thoroughly used to occasions like this.

As though this were closer to his ‘real trade’.

The laughter around him never once broke off. Even those who had first eyed him with suspicion, an unknown figure keeping an important foreign personage as his adjutant, were lowering their guard the longer they talked with Aiden, and warming to him more and more.

Of course, she had known he was a con man, a trade that must have made him good with people from the start. But, honestly speaking.

…That was a lie, wasn’t it?

Noelle scratched her cheek at the thought.

She had lost count by now of how many times that man had shown her something remarkable where ‘fighting’ was concerned. Feats like those could only come from terrifying levels of training, begun in childhood, in combat and in the operation of supernatural power.

People like that almost always found an occasion like this one, an occasion for ‘dealing with people’, hard going. They could never have had the experience for it.

Just like Noelle herself.

These gatherings had always been difficult for her, so she could not help envying his talent.

Aiden really is an impressive person…

She mulled the thought over and wriggled her toes for no reason.

…It was a good thing I left it with the Central Intelligence Bureau.

The trouble was that, by this point, what the man had actually been before was left in the fog more thoroughly than ever.

She thought of the ‘personal dossier’ on Aiden she had entrusted to the Bureau a while back, and sighed inwardly. It truly was a mercy she had at least that much; without it, she could not even have guessed who he was.

“So, how is married life with the Lionhearted?”
“I think of her as a spouse far too good for me. I live off her credit every day of my life.”

…Though she did have some thoughts about the way he fired off lines like that one after another, as if gritting his teeth to keep his earlier promise to make sure she could hold her head high.

She emptied her glass of champagne in one go, sigh and all. Watching him say things that shameless in real time, she needed to dull her wits a little.

“Would you care for another glass?”
“Ah, yes, if you would—”

And then, the moment she answered and turned her head toward the voice.

Something like ice ran through her veins.

“Are you enjoying the banquet, Dame Noelle.”

“…”

“It is the first time I have seen you in person since the battle with the Magic Kingdom, is it not. You have not changed in the slightest.”

“…”

Giving no answer at all to someone keeping up a friendly conversation like this was a blunder the usual Noelle would never have made.

But.

Not when the person facing her was this one.

A courteous voice. A respectful manner. Every last movement steeped in grace and formality.

He gave off such an aura of nobility that he was hard even to approach. And yet.

To Noelle, he was the one person in all the world she least wanted to meet.

What he said next was proof enough.

“You found yourself a decent ‘stand-in’, did you not. Even as a fake, he is presentable enough to pass as a groom.”

As though it were nothing at all. The words went into her like a dagger.

“Was my proposal so very unpleasant to you? That stings a little.”

He said it so playfully, and she could barely manage to speak his ‘title’ in reply. Somehow, there was even fear mixed into her voice.

“…Your Highness.”

The Prince.

Her ‘husband candidate’ broke into a smile.

That’s it, that’s it, that’s it…

Aiden looked at the system window refreshing itself over and over beside him and smiled inwardly. He was only standing there making conversation with the people around him, and still the number of people taking a liking to him kept climbing, like fish swimming one after another into a trap he had already set.

That was how much a first impression mattered. Having hammered in the perception that he was ‘an important person’, he had people warming to him on their own while he did nothing but keep the conversation ticking over.

Dressing myself up beforehand was the right call…!

It had to be the effect of the ‘Imperial Bloodline’ skill, and of having brought Katya along as his adjutant. Aiden himself was nothing special, just a man who had lived an ordinary life. The knack for fitting his talk to each topic as it came, for reading people’s moods and handing them the right words, was his own, granted. But the ‘stage’ that let him put any of it to use had been laid by the skill and by his choice of companion.

Still, if anything nagged at him, it was that the ‘reward’ had taken a subtly different form from the ones he had received until now.

…A Point Shop, then.

He had no idea what sort of function this one was, but it would be no bad thing, at the very least.

His grounds for that?

I feel like I’ve talked with a fair few people by now…

He had spoken with dozens at the very least, and still the shop refused to open. For all he knew, that was because it had something tremendous stocked away inside.

Still, it’s about time I ran into them, isn’t it?

The people he had set as his targets were nowhere in sight yet, though one of the two ought to be turning up about now.

Fortunately, he would not have to dwell on the thought any longer, because a familiar face was approaching from the side.

“Ah, Sir Aiden.”
“Chieftain?”

The Dragon Hunter, Dunadan U’jal.

He had heard the chieftain was still staying in the Empire for the exchange, and apparently the banquet was on the list too. What caught Aiden’s eye, though, was the petite woman trotting along in step at Dunadan’s side.

“And this is…?”

He asked, though he had a rough guess at who she was: she was one of the ‘reasons’ he had come to this banquet.

“My eldest daughter. Rania A’shan.”

At that, the woman tipped her head up and looked at Aiden.

The woman called Rania struck him as something genuinely new.

A beauty. A beauty, yes, but.

Thick pink hair, an eyepatch over one eye, the Tribal Confederation’s traditional dress thrown on loose, a tattoo climbing from the collarbone to the neck, a look that found every affair of the world a nuisance, and a cigarette held cynically between her lips.

And on top of all that.

“Hey.”

A greeting flung over with nothing but a crook of her finger, in plain casual speech.

“…”

Hardly the picture of a priest in a god’s service. Not by any stretch. Aiden, however, was not one to mind that sort of thing.

“The priests of Urgan attach an honorific to no one but the deity Urgan. Doing otherwise is the discourtesy, in fact, so I will ask for your understanding.”
“Yes, of course. It is no trouble.”

What Dunadan offered, almost as an excuse, was a setting that already existed in the game. To begin with, given the standing Urgan’s Shamaness held within the Tribal Confederation, her using plain speech with Aiden was not strange in the slightest.

Every deity kept one proxy to act on its will, and within the Confederation the Shamaness filled that role. Holding a ‘call line’ plugged straight into the god she served, she belonged very near the top of the superhumans who handled supernatural power, in fighting strength and symbolic weight alike.

Even the Confederation’s Grand Chieftain surely could not treat her carelessly. She might well be worth more than Dunadan, the chieftain standing beside her.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Rania.”

He offered the greeting, but no answer at all came back from her.

And.

Rania looked at Aiden, steadily, without a word.

On and on.

And on.

Until Dunadan, who had introduced her, grew flustered.

And at length.

…Right.

Aiden

had known that if it was this person, she would take an interest in him like this the moment she laid eyes on him.

Given the kind of person Rania was, it was only the natural outcome.

…I’m walking around with the protagonist’s karma on my back, of all things.

From the standpoint of Urgan’s Shamaness, the ‘Oath of the Savior’ he had taken on not long ago was an interdiction she could not help finding interesting.

“You, there. You’re kind of interesting.”

As she said it, the pupil of her uncovered eye ‘split’. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of colors settled into it in an instant, spiraling and churning like a kaleidoscope, every one of them fixed squarely on him as though looking at Aiden’s ‘insides’.

“Mind if I’m honest?”
“Sorry?”
“I’ll just be honest, then.”

“…”

Aiden held his tongue at her free-and-easy manner while Rania lit her cigarette and went on. Honestly, he had meant to take whatever she told him in stride; he already had a reaction ready for it anyway.

“Something pretty awful’s latched onto you.”

…Hearing that out of nowhere was a bit unexpected, though.

Rania tapped a finger beside her eye, which still carried that intricate light.

“…I mean the source of the supernatural power you handle. I can’t see it even with the Divine Eye. There are only two cases where the source of a power stays invisible even to an eye borrowed from a deity.”
“…Sorry?”
“The first is a human who has a means of communicating directly with a deity, like me. They hold a similar power inside them, naturally, so it can’t be detected. It cancels out. That case would be the better one, if anything.”

Aiden blinked at her blankly, and Rania drew deep on the tobacco before going on.

“You don’t serve a god, do you.”

“…”

“You’re no priest, are you.”
“That is… so, yes.”
“Then it’s the second one.”

Rania broke into a grin and patted Aiden on the shoulder. It almost looked like encouragement.

“Hang in there.”
“Erm, what is this, all of a sudden…?”
“It isn’t widely known. But they do exist. Beings that can be more dangerous than the ‘gods’ up in heaven who hand supernatural power down.”

Out of nowhere.

The words dropped.

“You’ve been marked out by one of them as ‘mine’. And the power you handle now comes out of there.”
“…Sorry?”
“And because of the karma you took on yourself, you can’t run from it anymore. Poor thing.”

Rania ran a hand lightly down Aiden’s cheek, as though he were pitiable, as though offering her sympathy.

“…”

What on earth was this woman talking about? The question rose in him unbidden, and yet there was one thing he could feel.

…This doesn’t sound like it’s just about handling supernatural power.

Something more fundamental than that. She seemed to be speaking of the source of Aiden’s ‘peculiarity’, the way he copied other people’s skills at will and handled several supernatural powers at once with no limit and no restriction. As though she were saying it arose under the influence of something other than a god.

“So. Hang in there.”

Rania grinned and said it again.

“You’re going to have a rough time of it from here on.”

“…”

“If you’re still breathing, let’s meet again sometime. I’ll help you out with something then.”

While Aiden stood listening in a daze, Rania waved a hand and went striding off the other way, as though that was all she had to say.

“…The girl is a little peculiar, I grant you.”

Dunadan had watched quietly from beside him, and now offered that with a wry smile.

“Those who commune with a deity show uncommon behavior in most cases. The very way they see the world is bound to become different from ours.”
“…It does rather seem that way.”

Aiden’s blank mutter drew a short laugh and a ready nod from Dunadan.

Well, I got the skill, so that’ll do for now.

He had been told something weighty, certainly. At any rate, he had won her favor and could now copy one skill.

If she’s a priest of Urgan…

She held a skill he would have to use before long. Had things gone badly, he would have had to pour painstaking effort into raising her favor, so getting it settled this easily counted as a gain.

“Tell me, where have you left your companion, wandering about alone like this?”
“I sent my adjutant outside for a while.”
“…Why?”

…Because if he left her alone, she looked likely to cause an incident.

With so many people speaking to him there had been no shortage of odd characters among them, and Katya, given her temperament, was the sort to send somebody’s jaw spinning with divinity the moment something rubbed her the wrong way. Better to keep her apart for a little while than risk a disaster on that scale.

“I had my reasons.”
“…Well. You will have your circumstances. And Dame Noelle?”

He turned his head to glance over, and found her with someone.

“Ah, it seems she is with the Prince. There is no particular need for you to feel guilty over having left her be.”
“That came out a little strange.”
“The Prince is a treasure of the Empire, is he not. A short conversation would do the Lionhearted no harm, I should think.”
“That is true enough.”

Aiden let out a wry laugh and conceded the point. Going by the Prince as he was in the game, the man did deserve respect.

The phrase ‘paragon of virtue’ given human form, one might say. Even in the middle of Act 1 of the main scenario, ‘Fissure in the Imperial Capital’, he burned up his own life for the common people without a second thought.

All that aside, of course.

His being over there was an opportunity. In any case, the Prince was the ‘main target’ Aiden had come to the banquet for, and this was a prime chance to tear a skill out of him, no question about it.

“Still, I should go and get in the way. She is my wife, after all.”
“Mm. Go and do it well.”

Trading that nonsense with Dunadan, Aiden rose quietly from his seat.

And then.

A strange feeling began to rise in him from the moment Noelle’s expression came properly into view.

Huh?

Something was off about the way Noelle was holding herself. Her hand was clenched so hard the blood could not get through, her face had gone dead white, and her shoulders were rigid with tension and trembling faintly.

What it meant was obvious.

This woman, right now.

The Prince, who by every account ought to be a ‘good man’.

She was afraid of him.

While Aiden was taking that in, the Prince, who had not yet noticed him, said something that drove straight into his ear.

“—Or is that too hard a thing to ask of ‘the Butcher’?”

The strangeness only swelled from there. The way he spoke was as kind as ever, his manner as courteous. And yet.

Aiden could read it clearly all the same: a glistening, sticky emotion, dark and muddy as a bog.

This man was plainly showing Noelle ‘malice’.

“—”

Aiden stood stiff for a moment at the realization, and the Prince, sensing someone there, turned to look at him.

Then, as if his whole ‘character’ had been swapped out, a smile settled onto his face in an instant. From that expression, the malice he had been showing Noelle a moment ago had vanished as though washed away.

This was the Prince as Aiden knew him. A good man, flawless in character.

“Ah, Dame Noelle’s groom.”

The Prince’s voice was warm.

“I am glad you came. There was something I wanted to talk with you about.”

…There was no mistaking it.

Something was turning strange.

Oddly enough, the Prince had asked for a one-on-one talk with Aiden. Outside the banquet hall, a terrace had been set aside so that two people could talk alone, and he proposed they speak there.

The terrace, out beyond the noisy hall, felt sealed off from everything. And even there sat a man who looked as though he alone inhabited another world.

Across from him, eyes quietly closed, the Prince gave off an overwhelming presence without moving at all.

So this is what it feels like.

This was probably much how others saw Aiden when the Imperial Bloodline skill was switched on.

“…”

That aside, of course, there had already been plenty of cases where the knowledge Aiden had from the original played out differently in reality. The biggest was that there was no protagonist; nothing else came close. But if he had to name the next biggest, he would name the man sitting in front of him without hesitation.

…Was he always this sort of person?

He looked at the man sitting wordlessly across from him. The air he knew was still there intact: goodness, an unblemished purity, warmth, gentleness.

But.

Whether he wanted it or not, he sensed that all of it had curdled in some strange way. Filling the gaps was a chilling degree of ‘rationality’. He was no longer the paragon of virtue of the original; he came across as something closer to an iron-blooded monarch who would do anything at all for the sake of the people.

“Aiden Kellermain. That is correct, yes?”

While he was chewing that over, a soft voice came from the Prince.

“…Yes.”

Aiden answered after letting a little pause fall.

Perhaps he was reading too much into it, but of everyone Aiden had met so far, this man alone had not attached the honorific ‘Sir’ to his name, as though he already knew Aiden was no Knight.

“It really is curious, I must say.”

He went on.

“Ordinary people find it hard even to meet the eyes of a member of the imperial house properly. Apart from His Majesty the Emperor, who keeps that bloodline of his forcibly suppressed, those who are not swayed by it are exceedingly rare.”

“…”

“‘Ordinary’ people such as yourself, especially, are rarer still. You are as interesting a man as the rumors had it, are you not.”

…So what he had felt a moment ago had been no overreading after all. This man looked like someone who knew a thing or two about Aiden.

“—May I ask what it is that you want?”

He had gone along with being drawn out of the banquet hall to the terrace for a one-on-one talk, but the way the conversation was flowing did not sit well with him. His chest felt tight.

“What I want… yes. There is something.”
“I am listening, Your Highness.”

At the prompt, the Prince spoke without so much as a blink.

“Break off your engagement with the Lionhearted.”

Words like those, as though they cost him nothing.

“In return, whatever it is you want, Aiden, I will grant every bit of it.”

flowed out of a smiling face.