Abduction (2)

They say life’s changes always come without warning, and violently. Even so, a change this big landing overnight was surely a bit much.

He had been asked to “pretend” to be her husband, as though refusing were simply not his right, and then, with a breezy “let’s start living together, as of today,” he had been hauled off that very same day. A mild threat came along with it: if he didn’t cooperate, the evidence of his crimes she had collected would go straight to the police.

Dame Noelle’s faint smile stood like an iron wall, and every scrap of resistance, every attempt at escape, broke against it without a trace. Being allowed to leave his family a single note saying he had somewhere to be was probably the last courtesy he would get…

“You may use this room from today on.”

The woman Knight assigned as Aiden’s guide went on in a businesslike tone, her silver armor clanking as she stepped inside. Dame Stella, he had been told. One of Dame Noelle’s closest aides, wasn’t she? Apart from Dame Noelle herself, she was the only person who knew about the sham marriage Aiden had been forced into.

“An orderly will be assigned to you. Pass along anything you need through the orderly, and it will be prepared promptly.”
“…Yes.”
“You will be presented at the Imperial Palace before long. Kindly prepare yourself well.”

The sentences reaching his dazed head kept knotting into a jumble, but he still managed to snag one thing worth asking about.

“…The Imperial Palace?”
“Dame Noelle is a national hero who symbolizes the Imperial military. His Majesty the Emperor follows every development in her marriage with the keenest attention, so an audience is unavoidable.”
“Do I really have to—”

One look at Dame Stella’s expression and Aiden closed his mouth. Come to think of it, if they’d been willing to let him off that easily, they wouldn’t have dragged him all the way here without asking his opinion once.

So he put a slightly different question into words instead.

“Is it really all right, handing something that big to me?”

Folded inside it was another question: was this insane sham-marriage con really something to entrust to a nobody like him?

“Dame Noelle decided it. It cannot possibly be anything but all right.”

“…”

“Dame Noelle has never once made a wrong decision.”

The trust in those words bordered on the blind, and Aiden shut his mouth again. If anything, she looked as though she were reproaching him for doubting Dame Noelle’s judgment in the first place.

The impression that followed came naturally enough.

Is this woman insane?

He could sense a lunatic in the making: the kind who, if Dame Noelle said the sun rose in the west, would spend the next morning shouting at the eastern sun for failing to come up in the west.

“Well then. Do rest comfortably.”

With that, Dame Stella pulled the door shut behind her, and after a moment Aiden let out a quiet sigh.

All of it had come at him out of nowhere, but first things first: he needed to sort out where he stood. He sat down in a chair and glared at the empty air, and the pane that always rose in answer to his thoughts opened in front of his eyes at once.

Absurd. Never mind the grandiose name, Weaver of Fate or whatever it was supposed to be.

A bond with Dame Noelle, Stage 1?

Bond, his foot. What bond could there possibly be between the woman who had kidnapped him to play her husband and the hostage she’d dragged along? Even if he’d wanted to come down with Stockholm syndrome, there hadn’t been enough contact for it to take root. They had exchanged a few words, and that was the whole of it.

Still, beneath that bizarre word lay one part he could read as good news.

Skill copy, meaning…

It had to mean he could mimic one of Dame Noelle’s abilities exactly. Given the standing she held in this world, just having something like that up his sleeve would help him considerably.

Because.

Aiden glared at the panes through narrowed eyes. The words “sham marriage” alone turned his stomach, but the bigger problem was the line tacked on underneath.

What was the main story, after all? Valiant battles against the hordes of evil that threatened the world. A crucible where every warlord’s schemes and conspiracies churned across a continent brimming with the threat of war. Great stories about great people.

Which meant, in short.

Get tangled up in that and you die.

The trouble was that, like it or not, he was tangled up in it already.

What was he supposed to do? More precisely, what would let him throw the whole thing over and run, even now?

He was still agonizing over that when the crash of a door being flung open rang in his ears. Dame Stella had said an orderly would be assigned to him, so that was probably the one. Aiden promptly straightened up and arranged his expression. As long as they were keeping him here, he had to play the part of Dame Noelle’s spouse.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m—”

— BANG!

Before he could finish the greeting, the man who had kicked the door in spoke, his voice cold.

“I am Gale Osron, Dame Noelle’s old friend and heir to the Marquess House of Osron. Draw your sword.”

“…”

What was this guy talking about?

However he looked at it, that was no orderly’s line, and the man who’d walked in didn’t look like an orderly either. With a sword at his hip and full armor strapped on, he was plainly someone who had come for a fight. Killing intent rolled off him in waves, and he made no effort whatsoever to hide it.

Aiden barely kept his cheek from twitching as he went on.

“Sorry, I don’t quite follow what you—”
“I hear you are Dame Noelle’s betrothed. I would like to see what you can do.”
“…Why?”

No, seriously. Why? Were these the only kind of people who gathered around Dame Noelle?

“I have never once heard Dame Noelle speak of you. All I heard was that an engagement had suddenly been decided today.”

With that, Gale Osron drew his longsword with a slow rasp of steel.

“I cannot rest easy until I have tested the man my friend intends to marry. Cross swords with a man and you learn his true nature. Come at me.”

“…”

One fact, at least, Aiden could now grasp for certain. There really were a great many lunatics around Dame Noelle.

The Knight had genuinely drawn his sword and was striding toward him, and Aiden’s eyes darted urgently to the system window. If he just sat here, he really might get run through. He had to come up with something, anything!

He picked the topmost one without even looking. Anything would do, as long as it got him out of this right now!

A line that snagged at his attention flickered past, but he plainly had no time to spare for it.

“The first strike comes from me.”

“…”

Where this man had sold off his chivalry was anyone’s guess. Shouldn’t he at least let the other side move first?

“Stand up straight and show me what you can do!”

A blade came driving down at him, and Aiden screwed his eyes shut.

“How does he look?”

At the question dropped in that gentle voice, Stella barely held back a sigh. She could hardly commit such a discourtesy in front of Dame Noelle, whom she revered.

“He is thoroughly frightened.”
“To what degree?”
“It is written all over him that he has been dragged into something he cannot handle. Like a puppy left out in the rain, I suppose.”

At that run of blunt answers, Dame Noelle, in her light training clothes, burst out laughing despite herself. She must have found it quite funny, because she even laid down the wooden sword she had been swinging.

“That’s only natural, Stella. If anything, I’d have been more rattled if he’d adjusted to all this right away.”

“…”

Noelle Astria Simmers, also called by the epithet the Lionhearted, held a position within the military that was nothing short of absolute. Stella herself stood at the forefront of that reverence, yet seeing Noelle take such an attitude, she couldn’t help harboring a question or two.

“May I ask one thing.”
“Go ahead.”
“Why that man, of all people?”

Dame Noelle, who had been wiping away sweat, slowly turned her red eyes toward Stella. They held no emotion and no intent, and yet the moment Stella met that transparent gaze, she had to work to steady a breath that threatened to catch in her throat. Even just sharing a room with her, Stella could feel that Noelle’s presence belonged to another order entirely.

As if.

As if this entire world had been designed to revolve around that woman.

So the slight catch in her voice as she went on was surely beyond her control.

“…There were plenty of other candidates for the match. Whoever you picked would have been better than that—”
“Don’t be silly.”

Noelle cut Stella off mid-sentence, her voice firm.

“The way things stand, it gets noisy whoever I marry. You’re not unaware of that, are you, Stella?”

That much was certainly true. The Coalition War, which had plunged the whole continent into decades of fighting, had ended only a year ago.

In a situation like that.

If a national hero whose prestige ranked just below the Emperor’s bound herself to any one faction, there was a very real chance it would set off a chain of events that shattered a peace barely holding together.

“Then would it not be simpler to turn every one of them away?”
“Everyone else, fine. But the Prince coming at me himself is a bit much even for me.”

On that point, Stella had no choice but to hold her tongue. However deeply Dame Noelle had carved her name into the Empire’s history as a Knight, in the end she was a soldier of the Imperial military. A direct member of the imperial family stepping forward to push through a marriage proposal made Stella dizzy just to imagine, especially given the rumors about this particular Prince.

“Right. I don’t want that kind of marriage either. So, enter the substitute.”

Stella’s color had drained, and Noelle went on with a snicker.

“A third party with no political background whatsoever, popped up out of nowhere. If we say we married because our hearts matched, not even His Highness the Prince can keep picking holes in it forever, can he?”

“…Even searching within that category, there would have been more than enough substitutes for that man Aiden.”

Stella’s voice was still stiff as she said it, and Noelle tilted her head.

“Stella, didn’t you ever pull the man’s file?”
“I recall there being nothing special about it at all.”

A back-alley con man. A bottom-rung criminal who had never once been tied to a job of any real size. How unremarkable must a petty crook be to have no arrest record at all? The authorities clearly hadn’t thought him worth the trouble.

“Right. And that’s the important part.”

As that thought came to Stella, Dame Noelle’s voice fell soft and low.

“How did he manage to dodge every single one of those ‘special points’?”
“Pardon?”

Stella asked back blankly, and Noelle went on with a gentle smile.

“That man is uncannily ordinary. Given his profession.”

He made his living at a trade as conspicuous as swindling people, and yet, never mind being arrested, he had never even been investigated. He was, quite literally, a thoroughly petty criminal.

Yes. Thoroughly.

Thoroughly enough that, seen from a certain angle, it felt contrived.

“…I am not sure I understand what you mean.”
“Mm. There’s a reason. I’ll get a chance to explain it soon enough.”

With that, Dame Noelle took up the wooden sword again.

“Still, he’s definitely a little interesting.”

“…”

Calling the man named Aiden to mind, Stella thought even that a dubiously generous assessment. But the doubt slid straight back down her throat unspoken, because she could feel ki circulating through Dame Noelle’s body as she gripped the wooden sword.

Ki: the grace that Karva, the Empire’s chief deity and goddess of strife, had bestowed upon her subjects. The superhuman power of the Empire’s Knights rests on honing the energy within the body through cultivation methods and releasing it outward, and the color of that ki marks the measure of one’s mastery.

The famous example was the Knight of Dawn, who first developed combat forms and fighting methods built on ki. He was the first Knight, a monster said to have split mountains and cleaved the sky with a single sword, a great figure hailed as the Sword Saint. Legend held that he had compressed the ki rising within his body into just two colors, silver and blue.

And, here and now.

Here stood a genius who made even that legend a relic of an older age.

“—”

As Noelle let out a deep breath, ki rose along her body like mist.

Pure white.

Stella swallowed dryly without realizing it. The ki Noelle wielded was pure white, without a single blemish. Purer than anyone’s, simpler than anyone’s, more distinct than anyone’s.

Across the Empire’s long history, among talents as numberless as the grains of sand on a shore, Dame Noelle was the only Knight ever to compress her ki into a single color.

“Dame Noelle. Dame Noelle!”

The instant a soldier’s voice cut into so marvelous a sight, Stella’s face twisted fiercely. To interrupt a scene this majestic! If the business was a trifling one, she would not forgive it.

“The eldest son of the Marquess House of Osron has just gone into the betrothed’s quarters!”

Urgent enough, as it turned out, that there was nothing to forgive.

Stella and Noelle both stiffened at the same moment. Gale Osron. Dame Noelle’s old friend. Not a bad man. Not a bad man, but.

“What is that muscle-brained idiot about to pull this time…!”
“Stella. That’s too harsh.”

Dame Noelle checked her with a wry smile, but she didn’t look to be denying the substance of it either. The speed with which she threw on her coat said it all: trouble was certain, and she had decided she had better step in herself.

Given Gale’s character, he had probably shoved a sword at Aiden out of nowhere, announcing he meant to test his mettle, and that was a rather more serious problem than it sounded. He was no elite on the level of a formally invested Knight, but as the eldest son of a marquess house he had still received professional combat training for years. Drop him among ordinary soldiers and he would be a lion loose among sheep.

If I don’t get over there fast, something’s really going to go wrong.

And by her estimate, Aiden’s abilities fell below even those of ordinary soldiers. It would not be the least bit strange if something truly did blow up.

Noelle drew a deep breath and put strength into her legs, meaning to leap toward where Aiden was and cover the distance in a single bound. She would probably have to break a window or two getting in, but what could you do? Every second counted.

That was what she had been thinking.

— CRASH!

“Aaaaaagh—!”

Right up until she saw someone tumbling, screaming, out of the very window she had meant to smash her way through. His full suit of armor was crumpled as though a giant’s fist had struck it.

“…”

That.

Wasn’t that Gale? The full armor alone said it was the man she knew.

Then she caught sight of someone leaning hurriedly out of the window the man had smashed through on his way down.

“Hey, hey! Are you okay?!”

The voice spilling out past the broken window belonged to Aiden Kellermain, perfectly unhurt.

“…?”

And wrapped around his body was pure-white ki, completely identical to the ki Noelle herself had been wielding moments before.

“…Huh?”

There was no mistaking it. The sight could draw a dumbfounded sound even out of Dame Noelle.