Chapter 2: A Story of Using Shrimp as Bait to Catch Sea Bream, but Instead Catching a Shark (part 5)

While I was staring in blank amazement at the suddenness of all this, Roroa got

angry. "Aw, you're no fun, Mr. Souma."

"Mr. Souma?!" I cried. I've never been called Mr. Souma before... Wait, that's not it!

Huh? What?

Gaius and Julius had both been scary people who'd given off a serious bloodlust,

so why was this girl so friendly? Wasn't the princely family of Amidonia supposed to

hate the royal family of Elfrieden?

While I was still out of sorts, Roroa started punching me in the shoulder. "Still, I

can't say I approve of ya spoilin' the surprise. I was all rolled up in here for a little

under an hour, y'know? ...Yeah, it was hotter than I thought it'd be."

Well, yeah, if you were wrapped up in wool, it would be...

"So, how'd you figure it out?" she demanded. "I was pretty confident you

wouldn't, y'know?"

"Well, there was a woman in the world I came from who did something similar,

you see."

"Urkh, my trick overlapped with someone else's, huh?" she cried. "What a

blunder."

"Though, that person was apparently naked when she did it," I said. ( *Opinions

vary about this.)

"What's with that woman?" Roroa cried. "Was she some kinda pervert?"

I shrugged. "It's been said that she was so great that if her nose had been shorter,

the whole face of the world would have been changed..." ( *Opinions vary here, too.)

I looked at Roroa who was hugging her rather meager chest as if to hide it. She let

out a sigh.

Roroa, by the way, was clothed. If she had been naked, we wouldn't have been

able to have an easygoing chat like this. My two fiancées were right behind me,

watching, after all.

"Erm... Do you mind if I call you Roroa?" I asked. "You're the princess of

Amidonia?"

"Darn tootin'," she said. "These clean-cut features, this charm and wit, oh, yes, the

breathtaking beauty of Amidonia, Roroa, that's me."

"Oh, geez, I don't even know where to start poking holes in that..."

"'Poking holes,' huh?" she demanded. "Which of my holes are you plannin' on

pokin'? ...Blush."

"You don't say 'blush'! Also, get your head out of the gutter!"

"No way! You and me, we've just met, haven't we? Let's start out as husband and

wife, okay?" she said.

"You've already gotten to the end goal there!" I shouted. "We're supposed to start

as friends!"

"You two... Why are you getting along so well when you're just meeting for the

first time?" Liscia demanded.

While I was diligently playing the straight man in Roroa's comedy routine, Liscia

gave me a cold look.

Whoa! Now that she mentioned it, she was right!

Roroa cackled. "You're good at this, Mr. Souma. You make a good straight man."

"Why are you so easygoing?" I asked. "Are you really an Amidonian princess?"

"Sure am. If ya'd like, I can do a formal greetin' and everythin'." With that said,

Roroa dropped the silly grin and did a respectful curtsy. "I am Roroa Amidonia,

daughter of Gaius VIII, of the former Principality of Amidonia."

When she acted that way, she mysteriously started to look like a princess.

"...And what exactly is Princess Roroa doing here?" I asked.

"Ohh. I've got me a good reason for that."

"You're already back to speaking casually?!"

"It ain't nothin' to get so fussed over. I mean, after all..."

With her best smile on her face, she dropped the biggest bombshell of the day.

"After all, I came here so we can get hitched."

"Hold on!" Liscia shouted.

While my brain was still frozen, processing Roroa's sudden declaration that she

was going to be my bride, a flustered Liscia ran over to Roroa.

"You're a princess of Amidonia, aren't you?! What are you talking about?!"

"I'm just doin' what you did, Sis," Roroa said.

"Sis?!"

Roroa was calm in the face of Liscia. "Sis, you're a princess of Elfrieden, ain't ya?

When ya first agreed to marry Mr. Souma, it was all to give him a just cause for rulin'

the kingdom, wasn't it?"

"How did you know that?!" Liscia burst out.

It was only natural for Liscia to be surprised. Roroa had an accurate grasp of

what our situation was.

"Never underestimate a merchant's information network," said Roroa. "Well,

anyway, it's the same for me. If I'm marryin' into the kingdom, and bringin' my

country with me, Mr. Souma'll gain the Principality of Amidonia, and a just cause for

rulin' it. By mergin' with the kingdom, the reparations the principality needed to

pay'll be wiped out, and by bein' integrated into the kingdom, we can receive food

support from there, too. Don't you think it's a marriage that benefits the both of us?"

Roroa was emphasizing how it was beneficial to both parties in her reasoning,

but Liscia only seemed more reluctant. "That's... I mean, yes, our betrothal was an

arrangement for the country's benefit at first. But, now, I sincerely want to support

Souma. I even feel affection for him. Aisha, Juna, and myself, we all chose to be by

Souma's side of our own free will!" She practically shouted a confession of her love

at the end.

I was startled. There was this girl who felt so strongly about me. Hearing her talk

so passionately, I could feel my cheeks burning.

Roroa's cheeks turned a little red at Liscia's declaration, too, but she immediately

snickered. "Ahh, there ain't no problem there, then. I'm pretty fond of Mr. Souma

myself."

When she said that so plainly, it was Liscia's turn to be dumbfounded. "You 're

fond of him...? But this is the first time you've ever met, isn't it?"

"I've seen his face before," Roroa said. "When I was in hidin', he was on the music

program. That sure was a revolutionary new way of usin' it. I can think of more

applications, too. Dependin' how it's used, you could make a real mint off of it."

Roroa snapped her fingers gleefully. "I know! The royal and princely families have

got a system of royal warrants of appointment, yeah? It's a system where high

quality gifts we receive are given our official approval. It's a guarantee of the

product's quality, but it's also an advertisement that there's somethin' good enough

about it to make it worth guaranteein'. So, how about ya make even just a small

amount of time on the Jewel Voice Broadcast where, for a price, you'll show

advertisements for people's products? If there's a big business lookin' to advertise

themselves and their product, don't ya think they'd pay good money for that?"

"I see," I said. "Run commercials, huh. I had overlooked that..."

Because the Jewel Voice Broadcast was currently being used as a public

broadcaster, I hadn't considered the idea of running commercials at all. I had never

thought it would occur to anyone in a world without television to want to sponsor

commercials on it, anyway. But, like Roroa was saying, there were merchants who

advertised themselves as purveyors to the royal family. If we set up a place for them

to advertise, the funding might start to pour in. If that let us cover the costs of

producing programs, it would mean that much more room in the national budget.

While I was thinking that, Roroa put her hand on her hip and smiled. "I think you

can bring the kingdom and the principality together and lead us into a more

prosperous era, y'know. Besides, if I'm with ya, I figure I'll probably be able to see

more fun things like that, and I've always thought, if I've gotta marry someone, it'd

better be someone interestin'."

"...I understand your thinking, but... Are you okay with this, Roroa?" I looked

Roroa straight in the eye as I asked her that. "I'm... the man who killed your father,

Gaius VIII, you know."

The moment I said that, a wave of tension ran through the people from the

kingdom's side.

Roroa's father Gaius VIII had fallen in battle with the kingdom, and I was the one

who had led that force. In other words, to this girl, I was her father's killer.

Roroa shrugged, seemingly unconcerned. "If you're gonna say that, well, I went

and drove my own brother out of the country. Used my connections with the

merchants to set up simultaneous revolts and everythin'."

"Wha?! That was you?!" I burst out.

The only riots that the kingdom had stirred up were the ones around Van. We

hadn't been involved at all in the revolts by vassals or the popular uprisings that had

broken out elsewhere, but who would have thought that she was behind it all...

What a girl.

While I was still trying to process that, Roroa waved her hand. "Ya don't need to

feel bad for what happened with my old man. Or would ya rather I give you a

vengeful 'How dare you kill my father!'? Then do you want to force me to submit to

you, and make me say, 'I can't believe I had to bear the child of my father's killer...'?"

"I don't have that kind of sadistic fetish!" I shouted.

"Souma," Liscia muttered, looking disturbed. "That's a little much..."

"Why are you acting a little creeped out, Liscia?! That's just something Roroa

came up with on her own, all right?!"

Ahh, I didn't know what to say. Maybe because I'd been raising my voice a lot

more than I was used to; I was starting to feel dizzy. This fake Kansai-accent girl

totally had me dancing to her tune.

I sighed. "Listen, Roroa..."

"What?"

"You really don't hold it against me? Not in the least?"

"...Well, when ya say it like that, it's not like I feel absolutely nothin' about it."

Roroa crossed her arms in front of her chest and closed her eyes. "Even with the way

he was, he was still my old man. But he was tryin' to kill you too, wasn't he? On the

battlefield, it's kill or be killed. There ain't much ya can do about that. It sounds like

you returned his remains good and proper, so ya won't hear any complaints out of

me."

I was silent.

"Well... it just means the two of us got on poorly enough as father and daughter

that I'm able to leave it at that." Roroa looked a little lonely. "My old man and my

brother were so obsessed with takin' revenge on the kingdom, they couldn't see

anythin' else. Amidonia's a poor country. We've got valuable mineral resources... but

that's it. Our food self-sufficiency rate is low. It ain't the Royal House of Elfrieden or

the people of the kingdom that're makin' our people suffer right now. It's hunger and

poverty. What we really needed were jobs and food. That's what Colbert, the

bureaucrats, and I were all thinkin' when we desperately worked to scrape together

money. But, my old man and his lot, they would immediately put it all into the

military."

As Roroa talked about that, her eyes went ice cold. The playfulness from before

was gone, and her voice was filled with disappointment in her family and a sense of

resignation.

"If they'd used it right, the starvin' people, the girls forced to sell themselves, the

children sold off so there'd be less mouths to feed, we could've cut down on all of

that," she said. "Stirring up hatred against the kingdom and using that to keep down

dissent, that ain't healthy. It's sure to fall apart eventually. But, still... my old man

didn't listen to me when I tried to set him straight. I wonder when it was, really...

that I stopped seeing them as family..."

"Roroa..." I said softly.

Roroa shook her head and collected herself, then smiled. "For me, my only family

members are Grandpa Herman, Mr. Colbert, who's like a big brother to me, and all

the nice men and women who live in the principality's markets. It ain't a family

that's only related to me by blood that I want to protect. It's a family that I care

about."

A family she cared about who wasn't connected to her by blood, huh...

During the post-war talks, Julius had given up on Roroa because she might have

become a political enemy of his. And now, Roroa had also turned her back on Julius.