by Dojyomaru
I was sitting at the glass table, with Sir Albert across from me.
Having finished making us tea, Lady Elisha stood in waiting behind Sir Albert. It seemed she intended to stick to the role of server.
...When I thought about it, I hadn’t spoken much with Lady Elisha, had I? She was my mother-in-law to be, but she was a woman of few words, always just standing at Sir Albert’s side with a warm smile. From what Liscia had told me, she had always been a quiet person who never said much.
While I was thinking that, Sir Albert opened his mouth to speak.
“I am glad that you have come here today,” Sir Albert greeted me and then smiled gently. “I would also like to congratulate you on your victory in the war with the Principality of Amidonia and subsequent annexation of the principality. It has only been half a year since I passed you the crown, and yet your deeds are great. I believe, with your accomplishments, you needn’t be embarrassed if people call you ‘Souma the Great.’”
“No... It was only possible with Liscia and everyone else’s help.” I took a sip of tea and looked Sir Albert straight in the face. “Finally, we’re able to meet.”
“I am sorry for making you wait so long,” the former king said and bowed his head to me.
I had sought to meet with Sir Albert a number of times before today: when I hadn’t known anything, when I’d wanted to have him convince the three dukes to cooperate, and when I’d requested his help in convincing Castor not to rebel against the sudden change of power. Then, once I’d understood everything, I had asked for an audience a number of times to seek an explanation.
However, each time I’d asked, he’d said:
In the earlier instances, “This country is yours now. It is not my place to do anything.”
In the later instances, “I will reveal everything to you soon. Please, wait until then.”
And that was all I could get out of him.
Once he’d started saying, “I will tell you soon,” all I could do was wait for him to do so. Because, if I pressed him, there would be no way to be sure he was telling me the truth.
At last, today, I was here because he’d said he would tell me everything.
“You’re going to tell me everything, right?” I asked.
“If that is what you wish,” Albert said.
“I think it’s time you finally cleared some things up for me. Like what you were thinking.”
He’d said he would tell me everything. I figured I might as well go down the list.
“I have three things I want to ask you. The first is about when you ceded the throne to me. At that point, when I had just been summoned to this world, we were meeting for the first time. Yet, just from hearing my plan to enrich the country and strengthen the military, you turned over the throne to me. With a betrothal to Liscia as a nice bonus. That did give me the freedom to move, but... it was also unnatural. Why were you able to give your crown to some kid from another world whom you had only just met so easily?”
Sir Albert listened to me in silence. It seemed he meant to answer only once he had heard everything I had to say. In that case, I might as well ask him everything I had to ask at once.
“The second concerns Georg’s devotion. Our former General of the Army, Georg Carmine, took all of the blame on himself while committing suicide and taking all of those who might become my enemies with him. Looking at the result, and even considering the letters Liscia sent to try to convince him, I have to think that Georg had prepared this plan in advance. That’s bizarre, too. I only met Georg once at the very end. He put his life on the line for this plan, so he shouldn’t have been able to do it without trust in and loyalty to me.”
Albert was silent.
“Georg and I weren’t even passingly acquainted. There was no way he could feel loyalty toward someone he’d never even met. Well, who was his loyalty toward, then? I can only think... it would be you, the former king.”
I had tried to verify that when I’d met Georg. But: “When the proper time comes, I am sure that person will tell you themselves” was all that the man would say. Today must have been that proper time he was talking about.
“Lastly, why did you refuse to meet me up until today? If you were waiting for everything to be settled, you could have done that after the victory of Amidonia or the annexation. Why did I have to wait until today for an opportunity to meet you? I want to hear that, too.”
“...Is that everything?” Albert asked.
“More or less,” I said. “Let me ask about the finer details as I listen to your explanation.”
“I understand.” Nodding, Sir Albert began to speak at a relaxed pace. “First, I want to say, there is one thing that connects all three of those points you raise.”
“One thing?”
“Before I explain that, I want to answer your three questions. It was because we were coming to a decision. On whether we should answer you or not. We thought it might be best to continue telling you nothing...”
I was silent.
“However, my heart is not so strong that I can keep the sins I’ve committed locked away inside it,” he added.
The sins he’d committed? What was he talking about?
“Sir Souma... Have you ever wished you could live your life over once more?” Albert suddenly asked me.
I answered him, somewhat suspicious. “...All the time.”
A lot had happened since I’d been handed the throne. I had carried out disaster relief, and experienced war. I couldn’t help but think... hadn’t there been another way? A better way? Couldn’t I have saved more lives? Even when it came to those I fought as enemies and cut down, I sometimes thought that, maybe, we could have come to an understanding. Even though I knew it wasn’t reasonable to think that.
“But why do you ask?” I went on.
“What I am about to tell you is the story of a certain world, a certain country, and a certain foolish king,” Albert said.
With that introduction, Sir Albert began to smoothly relate this tale.
◇ ◇ ◇
In a certain country, there was a king.
The king was not wise, but nor was he a fool. He did not govern well, but he did not govern poorly, either. That was the mediocre sort of king he was.
In a time when the world was stable and the country was already set up for success, he would have been called a good king without faults. However, in his time, the Demon Lord’s Domain appeared, and the threat of monsters threw the world into chaos.
The fires of war might not have spread to his country yet, but there was a food crisis and the economy was slowly inching toward collapse. The mediocre king could do nothing effective to deal with these issues.
Then, one day, there was a request from the great land in the west to carry out the hero summoning told of in this king’s kingdom. It was worded as a request, but he had virtually no option to refuse it. So the mediocre king carried out the hero summoning as requested.
That ritual succeeded when no one thought it would, bringing a young man from another world to the kingdom. The king struggled with the question of whether to turn the young man over to the great country in the west. This was because, if he lost this boy, he would be letting go of his key to negotiations with the great nation in the west.
The young man who was summoned told the struggling king this:
“If you mean to fight the demons, you should enrich the country and strengthen the military.”
...This story sounded familiar.
However, the developments from here on differed from the story I knew.
Hearing what the young man had to say, the king sensed the man had gifts he himself did not, and decided to appoint him to the post of prime minister. The young man responded to his expectations and worked desperately, carrying out various reforms. Thanks to that, the kingdom began to show signs of recovering from its food crisis and financial difficulties.
However, there were those who found the young man a nuisance.
<
br /> It was the nobles of that country. Those without very good reputations themselves.
They had been angry when a youth they had never heard of before was chosen as the prime minister, but they were even more incensed when he began his reforms. The young man had rooted out corruption to find the funding he needed, carrying out reforms that cut into the wealth of the upper class.
They visited the king many times, trying to persuade him he was harming the country and should be removed from power.
However, the young man had an ally. The general of that country’s army.
The sober and honest General of the Army was able to accurately judge the young man’s talents and became his backer. However, the nobles of ill-repute were not amused by this development, only intensifying their slander against him.
Hearing their libelous words day in and day out, the king gradually became stricken with uncertainty.
It was true that the young man was gifted, but he had far too many enemies. The country might be split if things were left as they were.
With that in mind, the king made a decision that, in retrospect, he never should have.
The young man was removed from his post as prime minister.
Having been dismissed, the young man went to stay with the General of the Army at his castle. The king felt sorry for the young man, but this was to prevent the splitting of the country. Ultimately, it would be saving the young man’s life. That was how the king convinced himself.
However, that was not the end of it all.
The nobles of ill-repute were more persistent than the king had thought. No, if anything, considering their secret ties, it was best to read it as them not being able to leave the young man be. That year, the neighboring state which had a long-running enmity with the kingdom began deploying its forces along the border.
The General of the Army dispatched the troops under his command in the Army to intercept them, confronting those forces.
That was when it happened.
As if they had been waiting for this moment, the nobles’ forces rose up, attacking the city where the General of the Army’s castle was. When you consider the timing of it all, the nobles had probably been collaborating with the neighboring country.
Because the General of the Army’s land had once been the territory of the neighboring country, it had been easy for them to concoct the scheme. Then, the neighboring country moved to snuff out the young man who had the potential to become a serious threat to them.
The city containing the General of the Army’s castle was well-fortified, but the Army had been mostly dispatched to the border, leaving less than 500 troops in the garrison. The opposing force led by the nobles numbered 10,000.
The General of the Army remained in the city, and he managed a diligent defense, but... greatly outnumbered, the General of the Army was eventually struck down.
The city burned, and the young man disappeared like ashes among those flames. It was only a few days after the nobles had raised their troops, and the king was unable to do anything.
The Army, having lost their commander, was unable to maintain the battle line against the forces of the neighboring country and fled in defeat. The forces of the neighboring country joined up with the nobles, and together they used their momentum to advance on the royal capital.
The king hurriedly tried to bring together an armed force to meet them in battle, but... he couldn’t. In the end, he had left the young man and the General of the Army to die.
The soldiers of the Army rebelled against him and returned to their own lands, the units of the Air Force were few in number, and the Navy was far from the capital and preoccupied with defending their own domain.
His last resort was to recruit volunteer soldiers from among the common folk, but even that had failed.
The young man’s reforms had angered the nobility, but they had saved the people. To the people, the young man had been a savior who had come to them in their time of need, and they felt no kinship with the king who had stripped him of his post. Ultimately, like the young man before him, the king found himself encircled by an enemy that hopelessly outnumbered him. In time, he would be killed just like the young man. If there was one difference between them, it was that he lacked the General of the Army who had been willing to lay down his life.
At this point... what he faced could only be called karmic retribution.
He had brought it upon himself by believing the slanderous lies of those who would become his enemies, and stepping on those who truly cared for the country.
◇ ◇ ◇
As I listened to Sir Albert’s story, I was at a loss for words.
He spoke of another present. When I had been summoned to this world, not knowing what the Empire truly wanted, I had talked about enriching the country and strengthening the army because I hadn’t wanted to be turned over to them before I’d known better. I’d thought I would be made to implement my ideas as one bureaucrat among many, and that I would be able to find the money to pay the war subsidies the Empire was requesting. However, because Sir Albert had given me the throne, I had ended up manning the helm of this country.
What would have happened if he hadn’t given me the throne back then?
If I had been operating not as the king, but as the prime minister... the future might have turned out exactly the way Sir Albert had described. The world Sir Albert spoke of gave me considerable room for thought, and it was so realistic that I couldn’t imagine it was a fabrication. I thought it was a fairly accurate simulation.
But in that case, there were things I didn’t understand. It was rude to say it like this, but Sir Albert didn’t seem like the kind of person who had that degree of foresight to me. I couldn’t see him simulating things so accurately.
“You speak as if you’ve seen it yourself,” I said.
“Because I did see it myself,” Albert said. “No... Rather, I was shown it.”
“You were shown it?” I asked.
“Indeed. By my wife’s ability.”
His wife’s ability? I looked at Elisha despite myself, and she returned the look with a broad smile.
“Did you know that my wife is a user of dark-type magic, just like you are?” Albert asked.
“I had heard that, yes. Though even Liscia didn’t seem to know the details.”
“This is something known only to a select few, so I ask you not to speak of it to anyone else,” said Albert. “My wife’s ability is to transfer memories into the past.”
Sir Albert moved on to continue his story.
◇ ◇ ◇
The king who was about to have everything taken from him by the nobles was gripped with a deep sense of regret.
Why had he dismissed the young man?
Why had he not valued him more?
If he had not been shaken by the nobles slanderous lies, if he had instead taken the hands of the young man and the General of the Army, if he had continued with reforming the country, at the very least, he would not be in the difficulty in which he now found himself.
Were he truly rotten, this is where he might have raged, “This is all the summoned young man’s fault” or “If not for him, it would never have been like this,” ignoring his own responsibility. However, this king might have been foolish and weak, but he was generally soft on others, so the idea never occurred to him.
What he did think was that he had needed to value the young man more.
If, at the very beginning, rather than prime minister, he had just made the young man king to begin with...
If he had, surely he would have reigned over this country far better than the king himself could.
If that had happened... then his daughter...
The king sunk into despair.
Having lost hope in that king, the queen said: “You have failed. Our fate is already sealed. However, if we use my ability, we can tell our past selves about this failure.”
The queen had a mysterious ability. It allowed her
to transfer a person’s experiences to their past self.
The past self who received them would experience them as if for themselves, and it would feel as if time had been wound back for them. It was using this power that the queen had survived the bloody war of succession. (Or to be more precise, she had repeatedly sent back her memories moments before her death, then avoided the danger.)
After explaining this, the queen had apologized to the king. It turned out that she had used this power to choose her husband, too.
It seemed no matter how fierce of a warrior she had taken as her husband, no matter how wise a sage, the kingdom was destined to be destroyed. Invasions by foreign enemies, attacks by monsters, plots by the nobility, uprisings by the people— while the reasons differed, the result was always that the royal capital was engulfed in flames.
This king who people thought was mediocre had been the only one who, while he hadn’t uplifted the country, had managed to extend its life. It seems this king was the only one whose child the queen had given birth to.
“Even if I use this power, we cannot change our present,” Elisha had explained to him. “However, we can lead our past selves to a future different from this one. Dear... if our lives are to end here anyway, would you like to try creating a future like that?”
When the queen told him this, the king came to a resolution. That he would send word of this failure into the past. Then he would have his past self leave the throne to the young man.
It may only have been to satisfy himself. But it felt like it might offer him some atonement for the things that had been lost due to his failure, so the king entrusted everything to his past self.
The king and queen transferred their memories to their past selves.
Those memories had come back to him as he’d listened to the young man speak about enriching the country and strengthening the army.
◇ ◇ ◇
“To put it simply, I am the king who inherited those memories,” Albert finished.
While I listened to Sir Albert’s story, I was in a state of confusion. Was this a time slip...? No, a time leap?
