14 — 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, the one 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 answer was missing its subject.

— Click. Click.

Footsteps were approaching from the corridor.
They weren’t ordinary footsteps.
It was as though someone were walking across a sheet of thin ice, every step laced with a sharp, frigid cracking sound.

By that point the room had filled with the same blue butterflies I’d seen outside the window, dancing through the air.
The door finally opened, and a woman with long white hair fluttering loose stood in the doorway.

…Yuki-onna?¹

For an instant, a Japanese yokai flashed through my head.
Tall, long-haired, skin so pale you couldn’t believe there was any blood under it.
Hadn’t the yuki-onna of legend been beautiful enough to bewitch a man to his death?

The woman in front of me was unrealistically beautiful in exactly that way.
Like a statue carved out of sharpened ice.
A frigid, dangerous beauty that looked as though it could cut anything that came near it, even a stray glance.

Of course, she wasn’t actually a yuki-onna.
But she also wasn’t a face I didn’t recognize.

Eve, looking put out, explained her.

But the name I remembered was different.

Frost Empress, Seraphina.

The boss fight against Seraphina had been special.
You could only encounter her in a quest that had nothing to do with House Arne at all.
She didn’t show up in any of the storylines tied to the head of the house or to her brothers.

The place you could meet Seraphina was in the late game of the Empire’s main scenario.
Endless Nightmare: White Night, a quest that had driven countless players to despair.
The leader of a band of the Empire’s most elite knights, who had collectively fallen and become demons, was Seraphina.

According to the lore, Seraphina had, a very long time ago, chosen on her own to leave the house and head for the Empire.
Without the house’s name behind her, she had climbed the ladder to the post of Imperial Knight Commander on the strength of her own sword alone, and ultimately undergone demonification right there, meeting a tragic end.
That was the official history as I knew it.

“…You’re awake.”
“Yes. When the elder sister who’s finally returned to the house after so long personally carried me here, of course I had to sleep well, didn’t I.”

Seraphina’s brow twitched.
She must have been expecting me to be startled by the return of the eldest daughter who had been away from the house for so long.
But I had already known she’d returned.

“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.”

The servants who’d ended up taking laundry baskets to the face as they tripped and went sprawling in the most undignified ways.
It had happened far too often to chalk up to mere stumbling.
The decisive evidence: just before each of them went down, I’d spotted the faintest sheen of frost forming on the ground.

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

A question I still hadn’t been able to answer.
Why had Seraphina come back?
And why was she helping me?

As I said earlier, after leaving the house, Seraphina was never supposed to return to this place a second time.
Becoming the Empire’s Knight Commander, then undergoing demonification and delivering despair to the players: that was the fate fixed for her.

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

Short. Painfully short.
Seraphina was every bit as relentlessly taciturn in person as her character had been in the game.
Even in a standard boss fight, all she did was thoroughly swing her sword. No battle cries, no dialogue 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 of her head.

I swallowed a sigh and stood up.
Watching her, it occurred to me that if I hadn’t pulled a chair out and invited her to sit, she would have stood there like a stone post all night.

I gestured her toward the chair and, with hands not quite used to the work, brewed black tea.
The only sound that filled the silent room was the clinking of the teacup.

This is suffocating. Truly.

If Eve hadn’t been here, I might honestly have suffocated to death on this atmosphere.
In any case, I held out a steaming teacup, wisps of vapor curling off it, to Seraphina.

She took the cup but didn’t bring it to her lips.
She simply held it, brow slightly furrowed, glaring at the rising steam.

“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, a white frost spread rapidly across the surface of the cup.
The steam that had been curling upward vanished in an instant, and a thin sheet of ice began drifting on the surface of the red tea.
Only then did her brow finally smooth out.

…So her aesthetic is committed, I see.

I stared blankly at the spectacle.
It looked like the Frost Empress was an iced-drinks-or-die type, all the way down to the bone.

For the entirety of our elegant tea time, neither of us said a word.
At last the cup was empty, and with a faint clink it was set back on its saucer.

The hellish stretch of time, during which I couldn’t tell whether tea was going down my throat or up my nose, was barely over.
Now, finally, it was time to hear the main subject.

“So, then. What is it you wished to say to me?”

Seraphina slowly raised her head and looked at me.
Not a single emotion could be read 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, this time as well, fell to me.

“Succession contest?”

I asked with feigned bewilderment. Though, to be fair, I was genuinely bewildered.

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

It was an obvious question.
Every major and minor matter in the manor passed through Valerian’s approval, and the servants and knights alike were treating him as the next head of the house.
And now, all of a sudden, a succession contest?

Don’t tell me.

Seraphina immediately gave me the answer to my question.

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

“Don’t tell me” had a way of grabbing you 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.”

The speed of her answer was like a machine. Input a value, get the output the very next instant.

No matter how I turned it over in my mind, there was no reason not to give Valerian the formal heir’s position.
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 if she had been waiting for it.
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.”

There was no such content in the in-game history of House Arne.
The position of head of House Arne had always been a near-nomination system. Whichever child the current head most favored 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 did track.
I’d never once heard of a house in the game where someone had become 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 an older sister two whole years senior to Valerian.
In a sense, you could say she was the true eldest of the house.
Perhaps that was why the quality of the information she carried was on a different level entirely.

“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 maybe that’s the kind of privilege only an exam that difficult could bestow.
Certainly, if I made it to that position, no one would be able to touch me.
No. I would be the one with the power to handle the entire house however I pleased.

It was a hard proposal to turn down, which is exactly what made it not 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.
The decisive moment when Valerian transformed, the inflection point I had been trying to find.
She didn’t say so in concrete terms, but she had already stopped trusting Valerian.

But even so, that wasn’t reason enough for me to be the one to step 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 forward? A man living one day at a time. 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 saying that you shouldn’t carelessly accept whatever someone hands you.
The most beautiful-looking rice cake, popped thoughtlessly into your mouth, will choke you. That much is obvious.

“I cannot.”

Seraphina’s expression twisted with a bitter tinge.
She ran her fingertips along the scabbard hanging at her hip.
The scabbard bore, etched clearly into it, the Empire’s symbol: 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 flown the cage, perhaps, could never return to that cage again.

I had the situation in hand now.
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 preparing herself for me to refuse.
It would have been a natural worry. She was, after all, 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, transparent, thick ice crystals began rising and growing out of the floor, the walls, and the ceiling.
In a heartbeat the surrounding space had transformed into a vast dome of ice, perfectly cut off from the outside.
Even the faint moonlight that had been seeping in through the window was blocked.
The only thing illuminating the space now was the faint blue light radiating from the ice walls themselves.

Co… cold.

Just then, one of the blue butterflies that had been flitting through the air alighted gently on my shoulder.
And then, as if by some lie, the chill that had been gnawing at my bones disappeared, and a soft, gentle warmth wrapped around my body.

“Whuh — huh?!”

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

“Your training begins now.”