14. The Heir Of The House

“Come to think of it — who carried me all the way to my room?”

“Leo? His leg shouldn’t be healed yet.”

Eve shook her head.

“Then Elli, who can knock out a bear?”

Instead of answering, Eve fixed her gaze on the door with a strange expression.

“…Don’t tell me Valerian was the one who brought me here?”

At my half-joking question, Eve gave a short reply.

“What?”

The reply came without a subject.

— Click. Click.

Footsteps were approaching down the corridor, and they were no ordinary footsteps. It was as if someone were crossing a sheet of thin ice, every step laced with a sharp, frigid crack. By now the room had filled with the same blue butterflies I’d seen outside the window, drifting through the air.

The door finally opened, and a woman with long white hair hanging loose stood in the doorway.

…Yuki-onna?¹

For an instant, a Japanese yokai flashed through my mind. Tall, long-haired, her skin so pale it was hard to believe any blood ran beneath it. Hadn’t the yuki-onna of legend been lovely enough to lure a man to his death? The woman in the doorway was unreal in exactly that way, beautiful as a statue carved from sharpened ice, with a cold, dangerous edge to her that looked as if it might cut down anything that came near, down to a careless glance.

Of course, she wasn’t actually a yuki-onna. But she wasn’t a stranger to me, either.

Eve explained, sounding faintly put out.

But the name I remembered was different.

Frost Empress — Seraphina.

The boss fight against Seraphina had been a special one. She could only be encountered through a quest that had nothing to do with House Arne at all, and she never appeared in any of the storylines tied to the head of the house or to her brothers. The only place to face her was deep in the late game of the Empire’s main scenario, in Endless Nightmare: White Night, a quest that had driven countless players to despair. The leader of the band of the Empire’s most elite knights, who had fallen as one and turned to demons, was Seraphina.

According to the lore, a very long time ago, Seraphina had chosen on her own to leave the house and set out for the Empire. With nothing but her own sword and none of the house’s name behind her, she had climbed all the way to Imperial Knight Commander, only to undergo demonification on the spot and meet a tragic end. That was the official history, as far as I knew it.

“…You’re awake.”

“Yes — when the eldest sister who’s finally come home after all this time carries me to my room with her own hands, how could I not sleep soundly?”

Seraphina’s brow twitched.

She must have expected me to be startled by the return of the eldest daughter who’d been gone from the house so long. But I’d known she was back for a while now.

“You’ve already greeted me, haven’t you.”

“Greeted?”

To the woman still feigning ignorance, I brought up what had happened in the garden a few days ago.

“Back when I was running about doing this Running Crew thing of mine, weren’t you the one who put those servants in their place — the ones who didn’t know their station and were yapping at me?”

Those servants had gone down hard, tripping and sprawling in the most undignified ways, a few of them catching laundry baskets to the face. It had happened far too often to write off as simple clumsiness. What gave it away was the frost: just before each of them hit the ground, I’d caught the faintest sheen of it forming underfoot.

She wasn’t even trying to hide it — those blue butterflies of hers were a calling card from the start.

There was still one question I hadn’t been able to answer. Why had Seraphina come back, and why was she helping me? As I said, once she left the house she was never meant to set foot here again. Her fixed fate was to rise to Imperial Knight Commander, then fall to demonification and deal the players their despair.

“You must have business with me, I take it?”

“…I do.”

Short. Painfully short.

In person, Seraphina was every bit as relentlessly taciturn as her character had been in the game. Even in an ordinary boss fight, all she ever did was swing her sword, doggedly and in silence, never a battle cry, never a line beyond the occasional grunt.

Unable to bear the awkward silence, I asked,

“Would you care for something to drink?”

Seraphina answered with a single nod. I swallowed a sigh and got to my feet. Watching her, it struck me that if I hadn’t pulled out a chair and invited her to sit, she’d have stood there like a post the whole night.

I waved her toward the chair and, with hands not quite used to the task, set about brewing black tea. The only sound in the silent room was the faint clink of the teacup.

This is suffocating. Truly.

If Eve hadn’t been here, I might honestly have choked to death on the atmosphere.

In any case, I held out a steaming cup, wisps of vapor curling off it, to Seraphina. She took it but didn’t raise it to her lips. She only held it, brow faintly furrowed, glaring at the steam rising off the surface.

“Is something not to your liking?”

In place of an answer, Seraphina lightly touched her index finger to the teacup.

— Pssssh.

A small, frigid sound rang out. From her fingertip, white frost raced across the surface of the cup. The steam vanished in an instant, and a thin film of ice drifted across the red tea. Only then did her brow finally smooth.

…So her aesthetic is committed, I see.

I stared blankly at the sight. The Frost Empress, it seemed, was an iced-drinks-or-die type, right down to the bone.

Through the whole of our elegant little tea time, neither of us said a word. At last the cup was empty, set back on its saucer with a faint clink. That hellish stretch, where I honestly couldn’t tell whether the tea was going down my throat or up my nose, was finally over. Now, at last, it was time to get to the point.

“So, then — what is it you wished to say to me?”

Seraphina slowly lifted her head and looked at me. Not a flicker of emotion showed in those blue eyes. Her lips parted.

“Arden.”

“Yes.”

“Take part in the succession contest.”

“…Excuse me?”

I doubted my own ears.

“I will be your guardian.”

Breaking the silence fell to me this time, too.

“Succession contest?”

I asked, feigning bewilderment. Though in fairness, I really was bewildered.

“Isn’t the heir to the house Brother Valerian?”

It was an obvious question. Every matter in the manor, large or small, passed through Valerian’s approval, and servants and knights alike already treated him as the next head of the house. And now, out of nowhere, a succession contest?

Don’t tell me.

Seraphina answered my question at once.

“The head of the house has not yet officially designated anyone — not anyone — as his successor.”

There was a reason a “don’t tell me” always managed to grab me by the throat. Valerian was not the official heir.

Momentarily at a loss for words, I asked Seraphina,

“To my understanding, Brother Valerian is already acting as the house’s proxy.”

“A proxy is merely a proxy. It has nothing to do with succession.”

Her answer came at machine speed: feed in a value, and the output drops out the very next instant.

No matter how I turned it over, I could find no reason to withhold the formal heir’s seat from Valerian. This was something even I hadn’t known.

Carefully, I said to Seraphina,

“Are you saying Brother Valerian has some disqualifying flaw?”

“The head of House Arne is not merely a ruler. To become the true master, one must pass three trials the house lays down.”

This time too, Seraphina answered as though she’d been waiting for the question. She held up three fingers.

“Strength of arms, wisdom, and one remaining trial… Pass all three, and one ascends to the position of official heir — a position no one can deny.”

“No one can deny it?”

At my question, Seraphina shook her head.

“Yes. Even if it doesn’t please the head of the house.”

“…What?”

“Code of House Arne, Article 11. The moment one becomes the official heir, that position is absolute — and even the head of the house cannot strip away the qualification or kill the heir on the grounds of personal displeasure.”

It was a formidable clause, but it didn’t end there.

“A head of the house who fails to protect his heir is deemed to have lost his own qualification, and not only is the position of house head stripped from him, but he is permanently expelled from House Arne. This is the law our house has upheld for several hundred years.”

Nothing like this had existed in the in-game history of House Arne. The headship had always run on something close to a nomination system, where whichever child the sitting head favored most was the one who inherited.

Perhaps reading the question on my face, Seraphina added bitterly,

“However, this law has long since become nothing more than words written on a page.”

Well, that tracked. In all my time in the game, I’d never once heard of a house where anyone became heir by passing a series of trials.

“It’s already been over a hundred years since the last time someone passed all three trials and became the official heir.”

Seraphina was the elder sister, a full two years Valerian’s senior. In a sense, she was the true eldest of the house, which was perhaps why the information she carried was on an entirely different level.

“For the last century, the heads of House Arne have not been those who passed the trials. They have merely been the ones the previous head chose to nominate… even the current head of the house is no exception.”

Even Kairon — the current head of the house — never passed those trials?

Then again, maybe that was exactly the kind of privilege only an exam that brutal could grant. If I reached that seat, certainly, no one would be able to lay a finger on me. No, I’d be the one holding the power to run the entire house however I pleased. It was a hard offer to turn down, which was exactly what made it fail to add up.

“In that case, this is even stranger.”

I looked Seraphina squarely in the eye.

“Why me, of all people?”

“…”

“Or rather — for what reason are you trying to block Brother Valerian from becoming the heir?”

“Because it’s dangerous if Valerian becomes the heir.”

“Dangerous?”

“Valerian changed a long time ago.”

So Seraphina had felt it too: that decisive moment when Valerian changed, the inflection point I’d been trying to pin down. She hadn’t put it in concrete terms, but she’d clearly stopped trusting him a long time ago.

But even so, that was hardly reason enough for me to be the one stepping forward.

“Sister — you are the Empire’s youngest Knight Commander. Whether by sheer strength of arms or by mere standing, you outstrip anyone else in this house. Even Brother Valerian has to bow his head a notch in your presence.”

I gestured at my own sickly body, lying in the bed.

“So why, of all people, are you putting me — a man living one day at a time — forward? If your goal is to set this house right, isn’t it far quicker and more certain for you to take the trials yourself, Sister?”

There’s a reason for the old caution about gobbling down whatever someone hands you. The prettiest-looking morsel, swallowed without a second thought, is the very one that lodges in your throat. Obvious enough.

“I cannot.”

Seraphina’s expression twisted, a bitter cast to it. She ran her fingertips along the scabbard at her hip. Etched clearly into it was the Empire’s emblem: two crossed swords and a golden laurel wreath.

“You cannot? Don’t tell me you mean to say your own strength falls short.”

“It is not a question of ability. It is a question of qualification.”

“Qualification?”

“The day I left for the Empire, there was an oath I made with the head of the house. In exchange for being granted the freedom to leave the house… I swore that, even if I ever returned, I would never again covet the position of heir to House Arne.”

I stared at her dumbly. A bluebird that had spread its own wings and fled the cage could never return to it again, perhaps. Now I had the full shape of the situation.

I raised one corner of my mouth slightly and asked,

“Very well. In that case — how, specifically, does this heir’s trial proceed?”

Seraphina looked taken aback for a moment, then said,

“Are you truly sure you’re all right with this?”

She must have been bracing herself for me to refuse. It was a natural enough worry, given that she was asking a sickly younger brother to shoulder the fate of an entire house.

I shrugged.

“With the Empire’s Knight Commander serving as my guardian, what is there to fear?”

At my joke, for the first time, a faint smile spread across the corner of Seraphina’s mouth.

— Sssssshk.

Before I could even react, thick, transparent ice crystals began climbing out of the floor, the walls, the ceiling. In a heartbeat the room had become a vast dome of ice, sealed off completely from the outside. Even the thin moonlight that had been seeping through the window was shut out, and the only thing lighting the space now was the faint blue glow radiating from the ice walls themselves.

Co… cold.

Just then, one of the blue butterflies drifting through the air settled gently on my shoulder. And just like that, the chill gnawing at my bones vanished, and a soft, gentle warmth wrapped itself around me.

“Whuh — huh?!”

Seraphina drew the sword from her hip and hurled it at me hard.

“Your training begins now.”