LETTER 1

Miss March—

I must apologize for the rudeness with which I begin this letter, but if you happen to know another girl of my stature and tender age who has been assigned to rein in a living god from wiping entire continents at a whim—or maybe even officiated to convince other countries to at least not kill this very god out of fear for his boundless power, yay!—then I beg of you, please introduce us. I can really use the help right now.

The reason I have not written to you in the past two years is because I have had to handle so many things you would not have believed it. The issues plaguing my family’s dukedom finally came to a tipping point. The demons broke through our fortifications. My parents … they are safe as of the moment I write this, but they’ve gone through their fair share of trials, some of them very literal in nature. My brother and sisters are with them, and I can only pray them well.

I also came across our Hero of legends. In fact, it’s partly why I decided to write you this—apart from your request that I keep you in the loop regarding our activities whenever possible—because it just so happens that everything that I will tell you, including my current romantic status, revolves around this very Hero.

You may have heard that the Alliance recently performed a Summoning, based entirely on the Secret Art unlocked by the High Priestess. I would say it was closer to a Miracle, but I do not want to rush my conclusions regarding that topic—we will get there very soon. As you can see from the defeat of the Demon King, the rumor was entirely true. The Hero had indeed been Summoned. The Hero had indeed vanquished the Demon King.

And the Hero was not one of us.

He was a man not native to this land—or, even, from any land in this world at all. He had roamed the continents, sailed the seas, befriended men and women of various species and stations in life, but at the root of it all, he was a stranger. A man summoned from a world other than our own.

He said he was from a world called ‘Earth’.

Earth was an intriguing world no matter how many times I heard him talk of it. He said that his world was round, that it was a globe, and he was fairly convinced that ours was, too. Even today! What an odd man. His world contained many wonders unimaginable to us—gargantuan chunks of metal, the size of dragons, roaming the sky as if they were birds; cartwheels, owned by simple families, who move under the command of a ‘driver’ but without the pull of a horse; bicycles that propel themselves forward with the twist of a handle; handheld devices that allow them to access the world, talk with people, and read libraries without moving; he even said that his world no longer have nobles to keep things running. No nobles! Imagine that.

His ramblings about Earth were so otherworldly, so insane that there would have been no way for any of us to really believe his words, if not for his obvious and clear difference in look and outlook—something about him was just so unmistakably alien, his deep black eyes and deep black hair, his short stature among the peers of his age, his lanky posture despite his fighting prowess, his distaste for slavery … his oddities, his mannerisms; he was such a stranger to this world that it was simply impossible not to acknowledge that he was, indeed, from another world.

Well, his oddities, his mannerisms, and common sense. Putting aside his powers, too. Those should be enough to convince anyone that he truly was from another world, but I knew it to be true for a fact due to a late report by the Holy Empire that they attempted to perform an Otherworld Summoning: a ritual lost to time that only the Goddess Herself had managed to salvage just very recently. Even the High Priestess was said to have had to endure a Revelation that lasted for weeks due to how complicated the Secret Art was.

This is the only way, the Goddess Revealed to her.

And the Goddess was right. With the Alliance helping the Holy Empire, they got the Summoning to work, and we soon had, in our midst, Sir Tanaka. Thanks to Sir Tanaka’s help, we finally got to live in a world free of the Demon King’s terror.

That was a world entirely unimaginable for the past thousand years.

The question I prefaced this letter with, regarding reining in a living god? That very god is none other than Sir Tanaka. And it is unfortunate because I believe that not even you, Miss March, would have such an acquaintance that I ask for—a girl of my age and stature who must do what I do. Well, what I was assigned to do.

So why was I assigned this job, you ask?

The answer is simple: Sir Tanaka is my lover.

Or, to be more precise, I am his lover. One of many. Sir Tanaka is a very popular man, with him being the Hero and all, so it was truly no surprise that he seemed to conquer women wherever he set his foot in. The mansion that our King gifted him very early in his campaign against the Demon King soon became a place where many women lived, more than even the King’s concubine quarters; women of various backgrounds, of various kinds … all united by two things: first, they have all faced tragedies, and Sir Tanaka had rescued them. Second, they were all in love with Sir Tanaka.

… we were all in love with Sir Tanaka. Or Suzuki, as he asked us to call him.

Our ages are barely apart. Sir Tanaka is no older than seventeen, barely two years older than I am (the last time I wrote to you was when I was thirteen—can you believe that?). Sir Tanaka has only been here for approximately one year, maybe one year and a half. A stranger in a very unwelcome world, a human from peace who came into a land torn by a thousand years of war.

But he came at the right time. The Alliance of Kingdoms might have made it look like everything in the war stagnated, but the hushed whispers from our advisors in the castle, the secret letters my father received in the darkest depths of the night, the ever-thinning reserves of gold we had stashed away in rooms nobody knew of … even I noticed something was growing very wrong by the last time I sent you a letter.

Sir Tanaka arrived during a time of fatigue, not stagnancy. Right before one final blow would’ve ruined everything we’ve built that kept us alive, Sir Tanaka came to us, mingled with us, walked among us, and brought peace. And not only to human lands, either—Sir Tanaka helped broker peace with the demonkind, too. How queer!

The war has only just ended, however, so I am not surprised to find that sentiments have yet to change at all. But that isn’t the case here in our Heroic Mansion. To nobody’s real secret, we even have a demoness among us: the charming Miss Scarlet, who keeps her True Name hidden from all of us except Sir Tanaka for security concerns. Miss Scarlet isn’t without her share of oddities, and there are of course moments where our common sense does not work with hers, but I came to learn that she was otherwise not a malicious person. In terms of common sense, I can even say that elven sorcerers like the Sage of the Ages had more in common with Miss Scarlet than with us mankind, even though the Elven Societies were signed members of the Alliance.

Oh—that Sage, Lady Dreyhilda, also lives in our Mansion, by the way.

I will probably go on a rather long tangent if I spend the rest of my letter just describing our life at the Mansion, so allow me to place a sizable pin on this particular piece of paper for now. The reason I write again, aside from catching up with our present circumstances, is somewhat akin to the rhetorical question I posed at the start of this letter. I wish for assistance, or at the very least, I wish to find myself inspired as I write these letters. If I do, I will send all the solutions I discovered for my problems as I go. Otherwise, I do hope for your assistance, just as you have helped me stand on my own two feet when my mother began worrying whether I could walk like the other children of my age.

The Kingdom has not been kind. The entire Alliance has not been kind, to tell the truth. I first realized my misfortune too late, when I found myself kneeling and ducking under the ceremonial swordpoint of Rex Lenamontis, to be inaugurated the role that would prevent me from having a relaxing time for what could well be the rest of my life.

Even the High Priestess of the Holy Empire was there to attend, and she never left the Holy Empire. Not even to support Sir Tanaka in his journey to defeat the Demon King. It’s that big of a deal.

“With the power invested in Me, above My Throne and under My Crown as the King of Lenamontis—” a single sword tap to my left shoulder, a move across my throat, and a tap on my right, “—I hereby appoint you Manus Dextra Regis Lenamontis. You are to serve as My Right Hand, in the best interests of the Kingdom of Lenamontis.”

I was on my knees and I couldn’t look around (as etiquette dictated, I had to keep my head bowed down), but even I knew the gravity of that decision. Only once before had a Manus Dextra ever been appointed in Lenamontis history, and that was three hundred years ago—back when there was a very large scandal with a marchion House that was supposed to function under my very own Duchy of Constantius. Rex Lenamontis of the time suspected internal foul play in the very defense of the Frontier Border, and needed someone who answered directly to Him.

This time, however, the defense was not against traitors that would let in external threats. The King wanted a Right Hand to rein in a threat from the inside—a threat so great that not even the combined powers of all the races could stop it. A threat so powerful, so mightily so, that an entity of pure malice born from the Enmity of the very Goddess Herself could not kill him—

A threat so close abreast that I could embrace him every night.

The King realized how powerful Sir Tanaka is, and He wanted Sir Tanaka on a tight leash.

Sir Tanaka uses Holy Magics. Sir Tanaka was summoned by none other than the Goddess Herself, even if our Alliance initiated the ritual … which was also performed under Her advice through the Revelation given to the High Priestess. His powers were granted by the Goddess, Her Fairest, a power that Lady Dreyhilda recently proved to be very distinct from Magic or Spirit Arts.

A power beyond them both, a power that bends the very fabric of existence itself. A miracle.

To summarize, Sir Tanaka is nothing short of a living god.

With the Demon King dead and Sir Tanaka alive, Sir Tanaka sticks around for no real purpose at all but to live the rest of his daily life in peace. In other words, the only person in existence strong enough to kill the Demon King that has terrorized this world for a thousand years on end was finally on the loose, with no real goals left to his name … and he is still very young and yet to fully form his own ideas regarding his life.

He could not be banished. It would look bad for the powers that be, as Sir Tanaka has virtually saved the entire world—banishing the Hero who saved the world could result in widespread, worldwide revolt. Not to mention that his powers are, otherwise, very desirable. Countries would fight to have possession of him, and we’d plunge right back into a war. War is expensive. They would not want that.

He could not be slandered. Sir Tanaka travels the common man’s path, which means everyone has seen firsthand his nature and kindness. Everyone in the Mansion also happens to be a person of powerful standing, acknowledged for their roles in the fall of the Demon King. Should any wind blow against our direction so soon, it wouldn’t be difficult for us or our benefactors to turn the talks around … again, potentially leading to a widespread, worldwide revolt. As we established, nobody would want that.

He could not be assassinated. And not for lack of trying, I must add, but it just so happens that Miss Hojo—Sir Tanaka’s lover from the Far Eastern isolated archipelago of Yamatai—had trained a very formidable team of clandestine fighters, people that she and Sir Tanaka call the ninja, who handle these threats almost on a daily basis for a good amount of time before they finally stopped. Above all else, they made the mistake of trying to assassinate the man who could kill the Demon King, which was a foolish endeavor to begin with.

He could not even be blackmailed. Apart from the ninjas that Sir Tanaka and Miss Hojo entrusted with guarding our Mansion, each one of us is a decently capable fighter on our own. Again, we had our fair share of fighting along our journey with Sir Tanaka, even if not all of us walked the entire path. At most, maybe our head housekeeper Amelie and former housekeeping slave Little Miss Karin could be exempt from the fighting, but they never leave the sight of the others in the Mansion, so it makes not a meaningful difference.

In the end, there was nothing that the powers that be could do to our heroic Sir Tanaka. And they do not like that. I can imagine why—he here is an unstoppable, uncontrollable force, let alive only because he’s a fire that could not be extinguished. Should he so choose, he could decimate entire countries at a whim. Surely, nobody of a high enough station would find that a particularly enticing idea.

Most especially since it’s not exactly a secret that Sir Tanaka boasted how his world functioned just fine without nobles or royals.

So, given how Lenamontis hosts the Hero, everyone from outside had been pressuring Rex Lenamontis to do something about it. They needed Him to get Sir Tanaka under control, because there are many who wish him away with none of the power to bring that about. Sir Tanaka was untouchable. That was not good for them.

So, what could Our King do when Sir Tanaka was absolutely beyond control?

He could try the closest thing—He controls me.

Firstly, He already had me under His fold. Ducal Houses answer to Crown Princes and Kings, and Maximillius Rex is the King of Lenamontis. As long as I want to keep my parents safe and my siblings fed without a taint on their names, I must answer to His orders. By officiating me as Manus Dextra, His very words become such orders.

Secondly, being appointed the Manus Dextra is technically a promotion. In other words, it’s an honorable action. Sir Tanaka is, for a lack of better words, naïve—the lack of nobility in his world may be part of it, but he does not naturally understand that an increase in responsibilities also means bowing heads to stronger people. Being appointed the Manus Dextra would be something Sir Tanaka celebrates, as much as I dread it … which frankly tears me apart, because I know he means well for me.

Thirdly, despite answering to Rex Lenamontis, I am technically fighting for myself, and Maximillius Rex isn’t such a fool that He would have missed this. No, truth to be told, I think He must have actually intended it that way. He knew I would hate anyone coming for Sir Tanaka and anyone of the Mansion, and He was counting on it, especially because He knew that the storm I had to face were other kings, from other nations, none of whom would even consider my interests like He did.

He wanted me to fight tooth and nail to protect the life I have with Sir Tanaka and the others, even against the looming threats of kings beyond our own.

He needed someone Sir Tanaka listens to, one who would not plot anything behind His back.

He needed someone that He could use to convince the other Kings that He has a viable connection point between them all and Sir Tanaka.

He needed Sir Tanaka under control. He did not need to threaten anyone—He just needed to make sure everyone was in the right place under the right rules. Sir Tanaka appreciates rules that ‘make sense’, as he put it, and nothing about my promotion to Manus Dextra violated that. The King finally understood what He could do within Sir Tanaka’s worldview, how He could navigate it to His purpose without offending him, and He realized the most optimal solution: a lynchpin to quell the fiery panic burning among the elites.

Me.

So, Miss March—if you happen to know another girl of my stature and tender age who has been assigned to rein in a living god from wiping entire continents at a whim—or maybe even officiated to convince other countries to at least not kill this very god out of fear for his boundless power—then I beg of you, please introduce us. I can really use the help right now.

I just want everyone at the Mansion to live their lives happily. The war had ended. I truly believe we all deserve at least that much.

Faithfully yours,
Charlotte Valeria de Constantia,
Ducal House Constantius, Kingdom of Lenamontis.

*