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Bonus Story 2:
Are You in Need of a Princess to Dedicate Your Blade to?
“WHAT THE?”
That day, the same letter arrived to all the families of knights in the Holy Kingdom and all the girls who were graduating from the Academy of the Magical Arts’ knighthood program that year.
At first glance, the contents of the letter seemed to be some kind of scam—it was a highly suspicious recruitment advertisement to become escort knights for the princess.
What princess, though?
The nobles who made up the most powerful families were consolidated into regional communities, so it wouldn’t be all that unusual to call the daughters of the nobles who owned the lands “princesses.” It would have been one thing if the family of a count or someone of equal or higher station had put out this advertisement, but there was no such family name specified. In fact, the name of the sender made this advertisement even more suspicious.
Е́n ù m̀а́
“The Kingdom’s Public Relations?”
The daughters of the knight families all cried out, demanding an answer.
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Knights were considered minor nobility. Basically, a long time ago, the most skillful of nobles’ soldiers who had distinguished themselves in battle had received a hereditary title, but none of the other perks. So there were over five thousand families of noble knights just here in the Holy Kingdom alone and several times that number of actual knights.
The most power the rank of knight and similar peerage—which included a great number of civil servants as well—could yield was authority as the steward of a village. They were no more than somewhat well-off commoners, so almost none of them understood what exactly the Kingdom’s Public Relations actually was.
While the houses of knights produced knights for nobles in great numbers, not all of the girls of those families necessarily wanted to become knights themselves. After all, lady knights primarily served as bodyguards and escorts for women and children of status rather than going off to fight battles. Lady knights were expected to learn decorum and sharpen their minds rather than their blades, and thus there were hardly any who aimed to take up the occupation in earnest. Plus, respectable parents knew that they were better off searching for suitable marriage matches for their pretty daughters rather than sending them into the den of muscly, sweaty brutes.
That year, there were only a hundred and thirty girls total graduating from studies in knighthood across the entire nation.
Ẃ é b nо̊ v̂.ё l̂ Е̄ ñ ú.m̀а̄
The majority of them already knew which noble daughter or lady wife they would be serving based on their own lineages. The most logical of them were able to figure out what the Kingdom’s Public Relations meant. From there, they were able to understand what was meant by “princess” and decided not to respond to the recruitment.
Thus, the women who did respond to the advertisement were capable in their skill with the sword, albeit not the most gifted in more scholarly pursuits nor the type to put much thought into things. Basically, they were all fifteen-year-old “meathead” girls.
“Huh? You decided to apply too, Brigitte?”
“So you wound up applying too, Sarah?”
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After graduating, the girls were all assembled at the academy’s campus in the capital once again. Those who had graduated from campuses located in the other lands of high-ranking nobles were happy about this, but those who had gone to the capital’s campus because they’d been born near the city, like Brigitte and Sarah, were tired of seeing it.
The Academy of the Magical Arts took up nearly an entire district of the royal capital, so it was excessively vast. There was one building that wasn’t used anymore due to a sudden change in a class’s curriculum, and it was to one of the classrooms in that building that they had been summoned.
Е̊ nû m̃ ӑ . і d̈
A dozen or so girls had already assembled. For better or for worse, because they were all muscleheads, not a single one of them seemed uneasy about what was about to happen.
“By the way, Sarah, do you know who we’re going to be serving?” Brigitte asked her friend as she combed her fingers through her short black hair. She was dressed in the uniform of a knight and did not look at all like a minor noble’s daughter.
Sarah was wearing a dress suitable for a girl from a good family, yet she was sitting on top of a desk in a very unladylike fashion. Her shoulder-length brown hair shook back and forth with her head as she answered, “Not a clue. We know for sure they can’t be royalty. The royal family doesn’t have any princesses right now.”
“Yeah, so I was thinking it’s gotta be the daughter of some high-ranking noble house or something.” Brigitte shrugged, looking the very image of an actress who played male parts in a certain all-women theatrical troupe.
Just as Sarah had said, the royal family didn’t have a princess right now. To be more precise, there were daughters of a duke who had royal blood, but the behavior of one of them had been so atrocious that her engagement to one of the princes had been called off. Now there were rumors that they might even be going so far as removing them both entirely from the lineage of the royal family. Sarah and Brigitte had no idea how much of this was true, since it was only what the older ladies were gossiping about these days, but the rumor had traveled far enough that they had heard it even though they were just minor nobility.
Nevertheless, noble daughters growing up to be selfish was pretty commonplace. Even if their reputation should plummet in high society because they were careless, they usually managed to rein in their bad behavior by the time they reached a certain age. This was because selfish girls with insufficient motivation would only end up being knocked around by the waves of society and sinking to their doom. The fact was that girls who weren’t capable of committing some kind of crime that got them labeled as “villainesses,” like in the plays they had watched in the streets, were also incapable of living such harsh lives.
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“As if it could be someone like that.”
They laughed together at the thought. “Ha ha ha.”
What?!
At long last, someone arrived to give them an explanation. It wasn’t the person who had recruited them, though, but some civil official acting as their representative. And after hearing what they had to say, all of the girls who had applied for this job were internally screaming.
It hadn’t been unveiled to the public yet, but the person they would be guarding was of royal blood.
Normally, this would be something to rejoice over. However, just as Brigitte and Sarah had been discussing before, the only girls of royal blood at present were the two daughters of the duke.
É n̊ ú m а
They hadn’t believed that such villainess-like daughters actually existed. It was a different story altogether if they were going to have to serve the very girls that everyone had been gossiping about. They had been able to laugh about it before because they were just rumors and had nothing to do with them at all, but now, every single one of them was so tormented by the weight of such a heavy burden that it left them speechless.
As a result, several of the girls asked to withdraw their applications, leaving only about ten remaining out of the original twenty.
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The girls who had declined were not fleeing because they had chickened out. Every single one of them would have run away if they could; the girls who remained simply had no choice but to go through with it, as they all had such lacking grades that they had been unable to join a proper order.
They all had their reasons. If they stayed with their families, some would be forced to marry some middle-aged knight, some had been told not to bother coming home if they couldn’t find employment, and so on. And because they all focused on training their muscles and not their brains, they would never be able to work as court ladies or maids or the like. They might have rather left their families and worked as common waitresses if they could, but tavern keepers would rather employ safe commoner girls than minor nobles.
In other words, they had nowhere to escape to. Naturally, Brigitte and Sarah were in the same boat, both keenly aware that they were more physical types than not. Rather than end up as some old man’s mistress, they hoped to have an opportunity to possibly catch the eye of a bureaucrat who served a high-ranking noble instead. And so, as the two girls signed their contracts, they pressed on the quill with enough pressure that they nearly ripped the papers.
Starting the next day, Brigitte, Sarah, and the other girls were now all officially training to become escort knights. However, they didn’t make it even a few days before they were all regretting their choices.
Ẅ ёb̌ṅ o v̂еl̃_ Ѐnuṁ а́
They were using a part of the academy for their training and they all slept together like a training camp. However, they still had not yet seen the princess they were supposed to be guarding, let alone the face of their actual employer.
Why couldn’t they meet their employer? Why would nobody tell them who their employer even was?
They were complaining about it to their dorm mothers when all of a sudden, the dorm mothers all gathered around and told them with much amusement that they definitely wouldn’t be guarding the sisters everyone had been talking about.
According to the dorm mothers, those girls had exiled a commoner for speaking too loudly in the academy cafeteria.
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According to them, they had stripped a noble lady with a strong sense of justice completely nude, drawn indecent doodles all over her, and then tied her up to a pillar.
According to them, they had forced an impertinent noble daughter to attack some boys in town and she was forced to resign from the academy.
Е̌n̂ umа́
According to them, they brought the family of a professor who had reprimanded them to ruin and made an example of him to the other teachers.
According to them, they had gotten a minor noble girl who refused to get out of their way abducted and sold abroad.
And on and on.
The knights in training didn’t know how true any of this was, but when they asked where these ladies were getting their information from, their information network made the girls tremble with fear. Brigitte and Sarah went pale as they realized that all of the stories they had assumed were jokes before might actually be true.
The thing that bewildered them most of all, though, was what their training actually included.
All of the girls, including Brigitte and Sarah, had only gotten good grades in practical skills and preferred to let their swords do the talking. Their training as knights wasn’t grueling, but it was certainly demanding. In fact, the first things they were brought to do was get their hair done and get whole-body makeovers.
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They were thrown into steam baths, thoroughly scrubbed free of grime, subjected to a hair-removal regimen, bathed in perfume oil, and polished until they all looked slim and had pretty faces. They were forced to do this every few days and, in the meantime, they were taught proper etiquette by a proper old lady who wielded a proper whip, starting with correcting how they walked. She made the teachers at the academy seem like angels in comparison. She drilled into them the minimum amount of education they would need for serving as “the princess’s escort,” which was all their trainers would tell them about the situation.
Of course, if they’d all known how to do these things from the start, there wouldn’t have been any dropouts. As a result, nearly everyone tried to run away, but they were caught within a few hours and dragged back in chains.
It was awful. It was terrible. Proper noble daughters would be overjoyed at this kind of treatment, but these girls would have been happier sentenced to hard labor in prison.
They tried to appeal to the tyrant teachers, but those ladies didn’t even bat an eyelash as they flashed the letters of consent that they had obtained from each of their families stating, “You may do with my daughter as you wish.” They also informed the girls that they had already paid their families the ten large gold coins agreed upon in their contracts.
Ten large gold coins? A new adult who was working as an artisan’s apprentice made one regular gold coin a month and this was a hundred times that. That was practically the same amount their fathers made as an annual salary as members of the knight peerage. Sarah’s mother also added in her letter the heartwarming encouragement to do whatever it took to protect the princess, even at the cost of Sarah’s own life.
Their days continued on like that for half a year until the tyrant teachers declared the girls had all just barely passed the minimum requirements for being out in public. They then departed to finally start their work as the “princess’s” escorts.
Е̌nuṁ ă .í d̊
It was around that time, though, that a number of mid-ranking and minor noble houses had their titles revoked. To their surprise, even the house of the duke with the noble sisters they all had assumed they would be serving lost all of its power and nobility entirely, with only their family names left to them.
What about the knights in training and their jobs, then? Had they lucked out, since they wouldn’t have to serve those delinquent sisters after all? Seeing the girls all wearing looks of mixed apprehension and relief, the ladies in charge took pity on them and finally told them the name of their employer.
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“The Grand Duke of Versenia?! Who the hell is that?!”
“I ain’t never heard of him!”
“Manners, girls!” one of the tyrant teachers immediately chastised them.
Brigitte and Sarah had been kneeling on the floor for half a day now and didn’t really care, but the equipment and formal knights’ clothes they had been given were of the highest quality. All of it clearly cost more than the payment their families had received for their contracts.
W e b n̂.õ v̌e l Èn̊ um̈а̃
Some time later, they were all escorting an extravagant coach while riding upon white horses. They wound up heading to the house of the former duke with the awful daughters. They all had half-dead looks in their eyes as they feared the worst—that they would have to serve these girls anyway. But instead, they wound up meeting a real princess who looked like she had just stepped out of a picture book.
She had golden hair and eyes. She looked like a beautiful angel crafted in the image of the gods; so perfect were her looks that she didn’t seem human.
Every one of them froze with wild fervor at the sight of the princess. That was when they remembered the contents of the original recruitment advertisement they had received:
“Are you in need of a princess to dedicate your blade to?!”
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And indeed, this was the one and only princess to whom they would ever dedicate their blades.
The princess of royal blood, born to the Grand Duke of Versenia.
Е̌ñũ m̃а . i d
A true Saint who had once saved many children by offering up herself in their stead.
Sixth in line for the throne of the Holy Kingdom of Talitelud.
Princess Yulucia von Versenia.
Nearly everyone in the castle had been assembled in the courtyard where they got to see the young princess as she was held in the arms of the king. It was likely unavoidable that all of them immediately adored her. It felt as if she had charmed them to their very souls.
“Princeeeeeeeeeeeess!”
“Long live Princess Yuluciiia!”
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“Ahhhhhhhhh! Our princess!”
“Princess Yulucia is so cute!”
Naturally, Brigitte and Sarah also wholeheartedly gave three cheers and screamed with delight for her.
This pretty and beautiful girl was their one and only princess.
“Come on, girls, let’s put our all into our ‘training’ today!”
“Yeah!” three girls replied.
Ѐ n̊ ūm̄а̀
Today, just like every day, they were in the Grand Duke of Versenia’s courtyard, shouting encouragingly in a very unladylike manner. They were neglecting their knightly training to instead practice how to best present themselves as the cool guardian knights of the princess.
“All for the sake of our princess!”
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