If one of those illustrations I had seen so often in the game that I was sick of them came alive in reality, it would probably look exactly like this.
Even the face of the girl I had seen in Dreamland.
Her face had been dirty and she had been disguised, but I had still thought she was pretty, like any proper romance-fantasy heroine.
But her original appearance was this different.
And...
Didn’t she seem to have grown up more than before?
The Dolnesia I had seen in Dreamland had looked like a child of around fifteen.
But the Dolnesia before me had shed every trace of that former youth, standing as adulthood itself, proudly displaying a mature beauty.
What happened?
Had she somehow undergone a complete transformation in the meantime?
No, more importantly...
Why was Dolnesia here right now?
It had definitely been less than ten minutes since we parted in Dreamland...
"Ian?"
Had those thoughts, which I thought were brief, actually taken a long time?
Dolnesia called my name with an expression asking if something was wrong.
Was I flustered because our reunion had come too soon?
Or was it because she did not recognize me?
I had thought that fleeting train of thought lasted only an instant, but apparently reality had been different.
Her voice was directed at me, and her eyes were looking at me, yet there was no emotion in them at all.
Rather than looking at someone she had reunited with, it was more like she was looking at someone she saw every day.
It was as if she knew only Ian de Logres, not the Don Quixote I had been.
There was much I wanted to ask her.
When we parted in Dreamland, I had not had any particular thoughts. But now that we had suddenly met again like this, questions I had not even possessed were bubbling up.
I had thought she would have plenty to ask me. I had not expected the opposite to happen.
"I’ve kept you standing outside too long. Come in."
For now, I decided to let her inside and think afterward.
#
A silent room where not a sound could be heard.
The only noises within were the clink of a teacup striking its saucer and the sound of tea passing through someone’s lips.
Dolnesia, who had come in out of nowhere claiming she had business with me, merely drank her tea.
And I was silently organizing my thoughts because of the person before me.
In the end, the only things filling the quiet, empty room were the sounds made by the teacup and tea.
Why was Dolnesia in front of me?
It definitely had not even been ten minutes since I returned from Dreamland.
Why was the girl who had been fifteen in Dreamland now sitting brazenly before me as an adult?
At this point, shouldn’t she be out in the forest, wondering whether she should leave?
[Insight Eye activates.]
【Dolnesia de Logres】
◈ Level: 31
◈ The target has awakened ‘Spirit Affinity.’
Her level, which had been 10, had now reached 31. And perhaps she had even completed the adoption process, because her surname was Logres instead of Kihano.
I wondered whether Dolnesia had been a member of the family from the very moment I possessed Ian’s body, but no matter how many times I replayed Ian’s memories, the only fact was that Dolnesia had not been in the Logres family before my possession.
If I were to simply accept that the Dolnesia here was a different person from the one in Dreamland, as the setting suggested, the cursed item and Carnwennan in my inventory still bothered me.
And I could not just brush it aside so easily, because there was no explaining how she had awakened her exclusive stat, Spirit Affinity.
After all, that was something she could obtain only by avoiding her bad ending.
In the game, I could somehow beat the hell out of the bandits through sheer player skill.
But in reality, there was no way Dolnesia, frail as she was and unable to use spirits, could clear it.
And even if she had somehow beaten them down, could she have found the hidden dungeon concealed there?
So the theory that she was a separate person was rejected as well.
Then the woman before me had to be the same Dolnesia from Dreamland...
To think that notification window which had crossed my mind in passing had been real.
Right before the screen went dark, a level-up chime had sounded, and a message appeared saying that the past from five years ago had been altered.
Then the Dreamland ticket was not a teleportation device, but a device for traveling through time.
By using the Dreamland ticket to change Dolnesia’s bad ending that would have occurred five years ago, the Dolnesia five years later had become a member of the Logres family.
That would explain why the Grand Duke’s household was so quiet, too.
Since it was not teleportation, the heir to the Grand Duke’s household had not vanished for two days. He had never vanished in the first place.
I glanced at Dolnesia.
Ever since entering, she had not said a word, merely sipping tea.
Hadn’t she said she had business with me when she came in?
Yet she would not bring it up and only kept sipping tea, which left me feeling awkward.
It was almost as though she was quietly giving me time to gather my thoughts.
Still, since I had invited her in, it felt strange to just leave her drinking tea in silence, so I spoke first.
"So, what is it you need?"
"Must we have business to meet each other?"
Were we that kind of relationship...?
Maybe we were.
It was not just some nonexistent memory. There was a genuine possibility that we really were that close.
I simply could not remember it.
Wasn’t it practically a rule in romance-fantasy childcare or family stories that, once adopted, the protagonist first wins over her new family and turns them into her loyal followers?
In the game, after Dolnesia was adopted, the first characters whose affection she could raise were the family head and Cassian.
If events had unfolded as they did in the game, it would not have been strange for Dolnesia to be Logres’s mascot by now.
Even considering that this was not a game that forced you to raise affection, increasing it was remarkably easy. By the time she entered the academy, she would at least have reached the middle rank, ‘Affection.’
Unless you deliberately went around acting like a complete bastard.
Dolnesia surely had not gone insane and acted like a delinquent, so it might not be an exaggeration to say that Logres was now in the palm of her hand, guided by the laws of romance fantasy.
Did I need to switch my meal ticket from Cassian to Dolnesia now?
The problem was that Ian did not appear in the game.
Ian was not merely a non-romanceable character. He could not even serve as a background extra you could speak to. He was basically just setting material—a single line of setting material, at that. Air.
Still, now that reality had received an update, surely he and Dolnesia had at least met face-to-face.
It was not as if this guy had shut himself in his room like a recluse the entire time.
Yet Dolnesia did not appear anywhere in Ian’s fucking memories.
I did not know whether the Ian before my possession had ever spoken with Dolnesia, or even whether he had met her.
No, the past had been revised, hadn’t it?
Then his memories should have been updated to match the altered past.
Why were there no memories that did not exist before?
No, what, had he been avoiding Dolnesia or something?
Ian had not been a delinquent, either, so surely he had at least spoken to her normally.
"You’re the one who said you came because you had business with me."
"Well, yes."
With a clink, Dolnesia set down her teacup.
"It concerns the academy."
"The academy..."
There was only one academy Dolnesia could mean.
Lumea Academy.
An academy within the Astoria Empire, and the largest and finest educational institution on the continent.
The central setting of Dawnstar Academia’s story.
The starting point passed through by countless heroes and geniuses who had brought glory to the Astoria Empire.
Though the Empire had a class system, its academy accepted anyone with ability, including commoners, and did not officially discriminate based on status within its walls.
So on the surface, it was an excellent educational institution that paved a road to success for commoners and a road to connections for nobles.
On the surface.
In truth, it was no more than a political arena where noble factions split apart and formed their own little cliques.
Commoners were like shrimp crushed beneath the clashes of those whale-like noble factions.
And while it was true that commoners could rise through the ranks because admissions were based on merit, that was practically impossible.
There was the social isolation caused by those cliques, for one thing.
But think about it. Who was more likely to succeed: a noble who had received support since childhood, or a commoner who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and studied on their own?
There was a reason secret arts were handed down through noble families, and a reason nobles ruled over commoners.
Commoners and nobles began from entirely different starting lines.
Still, the talent pool there was top-tier, so if you shut up and focused only on studying, it was true that you could become fucking strong.
But this was romance fantasy, not an academy story.
Of course everyone spent all their time fooling around in romances.
And somehow, they still got good grades.
How was a poor bastard like me supposed to live without feeling cheated?
"But why the academy?"
The academy and I had no connection at all, did we?
If there was an academy matter to discuss, it would be better to speak with Cassian rather than me.
Because originally, the one from Logres who went to the academy was not Dolnesia, but Cassian.
In the official Logres Grand Duke’s household storyline, Dolnesia enrolled. But in worldlines where another heroine, rather than Dolnesia, was the protagonist, Cassian entered the academy instead.
Though unlike Dolnesia, who entered as a student, he entered as a teacher.
In any case, the reason Cassian joined the academy as a teacher was because important figures from foreign countries happened to enroll at the academy that year.
That’s right. The male leads who were romance targets.
With important figures from foreign nations flocking to the academy, the attention of the age naturally converged on it.
And those foreign countries, needing to protect their highborn people, sent personnel here and there under various pretexts.
The Empire had to keep them in check, so it too dispatched several people to the academy, one of whom was from the Logres Grand Duke’s household.
It was not a bad choice from the Empire’s perspective. The Logres Grand Duke’s household was one of the Empire’s Five Dukes who had helped found the nation, yet it had stepped back from politics.
Furthermore, Logres’s reputation for integrity—silently obeying the imperial family’s command and holding back the northern barbarians and magical beasts—extended even to foreign nations.
In other words, their favorability was absurdly high.
And if someone messed with an academy that had Logres affiliated with it?
They would be fucked.
They would get internationally dogpiled.
That was why Cassian had been set to take a teaching post, but then Dolnesia, who had not been part of the plan, was suddenly adopted into Logres.
Then there was no longer any need to send Cassian to the academy.
For a Grand Duke’s household desperate for every soldier it could get, sending Cassian away to teach at the academy was a considerable loss. So instead of Cassian, they enrolled Dolnesia in the academy.
Whether the person was strong or not did not matter to the Empire.
What mattered was that a member of Logres was affiliated with the academy.
And from Logres’s perspective, they prevented the loss of military strength that would result from Cassian becoming an academy teacher, while safely protecting Dolnesia by having her remain under the academy’s protection under the pretext of enrollment.
In short, it was a win-win.
Therefore, although he had quit halfway through, Cassian had been preparing for the teacher certification examination.
I was saying she should ask Cassian, who had prepared for the teacher certification examination, rather than me, who did not even know how academy enrollment worked.
But Dolnesia tilted her head as if asking what the hell I was talking about.
Had I said something strange?
"Why the academy... do you mean?"
"What do you mean, why? I’m not enrolling in the academy."
"Excuse me?"
Dolnesia’s expression changed by the second.
Then...
"What do you mean by that? The ones from Logres enrolling in the academy are me and you, Ian."
.........?
Excuse me?
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