How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom: Volume 1

by Dojyomaru

  “...Okay. Fine, I’ll take a day off,” I said.

  “Your understanding is appreciated.”

  As Hakuya bowed reverently, I gave him a cold look.

  “Now then, where’s Liscia at?” I wondered.

  I wanted to let her know we had a day off, but she wasn’t in her room. Usually, that meant she was somewhere in the palace’s training facility. When I had ascended the throne, Liscia’s position as royalty had gone up in the air. Now all that she was left with was her military rank, so acting as my advisor (which, mind you, was pretty hard work) was the only job she had now. She’d been complaining lately about how she had nothing to do other than join the royal guards for training, hadn’t she?

  First I visited the shooting range, then the indoor training grounds. Finally, when I visited the inner garden, I found Liscia in the middle of crossing blades with Aisha.

  “Hahhhhhhhhh!”

  With a loud cry, Aisha swung a sword that was as tall as she was.

  In contrast, Liscia silently read her opponent’s attacks, striking with her rapier.

  It was hard for an amateur to tell which of them had the advantage. Was it Aisha, who was unleashing an attack that would be crippling if it landed? Or was it Liscia, who dodged that attack, unleashing three sequential thrusts with her rapier?

  Was it Aisha, who knocked those thrusts aside using nothing more than the gauntlet she wore? Or was it Liscia, who used the opening that left her with to step on Aisha’s great sword, preventing Aisha from lifting it up?

  ...Is this really a practice match? Their swordplay was so intense, I couldn’t be sure how serious they were.

  “Sonic Wind!”

  “Ice Sword Mountain!”

  Now they’ve started using magic and skills!

  Aisha’s Sonic Wind was apparently a skill that released a “cutting wind” from her great sword. When Liscia dodged, it cut the tree that had been behind her in half with a diagonal slash.

  Meanwhile, Liscia’s Ice Sword Mountain seemed to be a skill that instantly froze the ground like a skating rink and shot icy spikes out of it, but Aisha cut down all of the spikes that looked like they might hit her using her great sword.

  ...What’s with this battle to the death?

  I had already seen magic in this world. Recently, in order to practice my ability to manipulate dolls, I had been using a mannequin to go out and hunt monsters, so I had often seen the adventurers it encountered use magic (though it was usually when my mannequin got mistaken for a monster and attacked).

  However, with the magic that ordinary adventurers used, the most they could do was things like shoot flames, shoot ice, or heal minor wounds. I’d never thought magic used by someone experienced would be this incredible.

  Aisha was strong, but Liscia seemed pretty capable herself. As the two fought, their eyes were filled with life, sparkling even, as if they had discovered a worthy rival.

  So these are warriors, huh... Wait, if I let them keep going, they’re going to wreck the castle!

  “Both of you... cut that out!”

  ““Yes, sir! Wait, wha?!”” The two of them returned to their senses, landed on the ground, then both slipped on the ice and fell on their rumps in unison.

  “A-A date?!” Liscia exclaimed.

  “Yeah.”

  When I explained to her that I had a day off, and that Hakuya had recommended I spend it going on a date with her, Liscia looked dumbstruck.

  “Wait... Is that something we should be doing because someone else told us to?”

  “I feel the same way, but... in Hakuya’s mind, royal dates are probably a part of our duties.”

  “What an inhumane way of thinking,” she muttered.

  “‘Before I am a human being, I am the prime minister.’ That’s probably something he’d say.”

  “Ha ha ha!” she giggled. “He would.”

  “So, before we’re human beings, he wants us to be king and queen, basically.”

  “...Sorry. That one I can’t laugh at.”

  The two of us sighed in unison.

  Hakuya was sharp, reliable, and he took his work seriously, but he could take loyalty to his post too far sometimes. Well, that wasn’t to say he didn’t have a soft side. Recently, he had started tutoring Tomoe at her request.

  “Well, I’m happy for the day off, and I figure heading out somewhere is okay, right?” I asked.

  “I suppose so,” she agreed.

  “Oh, oh! In that case, please, come to my forest!” Aisha raised her hand, trying to get our attention, but I shook my head.

  “I still have a pile of official work to get through. It has to be somewhere we can make a day trip to.”

  “Ohh... Even by horse, it takes three days each way to get to the God-Protected Forest...”

  Yeah, that’s out of the question.

  “You’ll have to give up on it this time. But I did teach you how to do periodic thinning, didn’t I?”

  “Yes. However, there are some among the dark elves who are blindly stubborn... ‘What is this nonsense? How can you suggest that we dark elves, protectors of the forest, cut down trees?’ they say.”

  Ah. Yeah, you get types like that in every world.

  I respected their desire to protect nature, but when that desire goes too far, it reaches a level of arrogance, and it can actually be a problem. Nature isn’t so weak that that it needs humans to look down on and “protect” it. If anything...

  “That’s why I want you to come, sire,” she explained. “To give them a good shouting at.”

  “...I get it. The moment I’m free, I’ll go.”

  It feels like the number of things that I need to do is only going up, but... saying that won’t help matters, will it? I thought.

  “Please do. If it will help, please, use my body, my life, in any way you see fit,” Aisha said, bowing her head.

  “Well, then I’ve got a favor to ask right now...”

  “Yes, sire! You want me to see to your needs?” she asked immediately.

  “Why is that the first thing that comes to mind?!”

  “Well, I did just finish pledging my body to you.”

  “Souma...” Liscia said dangerously.

  “Of course I’m not going to ask for that! Liscia, stop giving me that look!”

  When Aisha got worked up, it seemed she had a way of letting herself run wild.

  “I just wanted to ask you to be my bodyguard while we go into the castle town,” I explained.

  “Y-You want me to join you two on your date?” she asked.

  “Well, if it were just me and Liscia, we’d be in trouble if anything happened,” I said. “We may be calling it a date, but really we’re just walking around town together, so you don’t need to let that bother you.”

  “...It bothers me, though.” For some reason, Liscia was pursing her lips.

  Maybe she’d wanted to go on a date alone together? ...Nah, couldn’t be. I mean, even though we were betrothed, that was just a formality.

  “Well, that’s how it is,” I said. “I’ll be counting on you two when the day comes.”

  “Yes, sire! Understood!” Aisha said enthusiastically.

  “...Fine, I get it.” In contrast to Aisha’s enthusiasm, Liscia seemed dissatisfied somehow.

  And so, our day off came.

  Liscia, Aisha, and I were walking along a shopping street in the castle town of Parnam. Hakuya had said, “Please go out and show the people how close you are,” but apparently that had been a joke, because when the day came, he asked us to be discreet. Well, for the king going down into the castle town, Aisha alone probably wasn’t enough security, after all.

  So, I wore a uniform from the Royal Officers’ Academy in Parnam and passed myself off as a student. ...Which I actually was, given that I had been in university back home.

  By the way, Aisha and I were just wearing school uniforms, but we’d realized people would recognize Liscia, so she had her hair in braids and was wearing va
nity glasses, giving her an honors student look as a disguise. With this, if anyone looked, all they would see was three students out on the town for their day off.

  “Heya, buddy, you’ve got some real beauties there with you! If you’re a real man, how ’bout buyin’ them some of my wares as a present and showin’ off how generous you are?” a middle-aged guy at a stall with accessories on display called out to me in a Kansai accent. Apparently, the merchant slang from this world got translated as a fake Kansai accent to my ears.

  While turning the man down with a tactful smile, I talked to Liscia. “Liscia, you sure do look good in glasses.”

  “I-I do? ...Thanks.”

  “Sire! What do you think of me in a school uniform?” Aisha quickly raised her hand. Lately, she’d been downright aggressive about doing that.

  “...Uh, yeah, it doesn’t really suit you,” I said.

  “Why not?!”

  Yeah... the Officers’ Academy’s uniform was something like a blazer, and that didn’t go with her brown skin and silver hair at all. I don’t know how to say it, but it felt like I was looking at someone cosplaying as a character from a school anime. Like how there aren’t pink haired girls in real life, and even when girls dye their hair that way it just looks completely unnatural? There was a clash between the realistic and the fantasy here, you could say...

  “Personally, I don’t think it looks that bad on her, you know?” Liscia said.

  “Princess!” Aisha exclaimed.

  “Yeah. Well, I’m sure it’s probably just because I was judging her by the standards of my own world,” I said.

  Really, this is a diverse world with many races. I should try to get used to it as quickly as I can.

  Rattle, rattle, rattle...

  “And, anyway, Souma, it’s not Aisha that’s bothering me, it’s that thing you’re dragging behind you,” Liscia said.

  “Hm? This rolling bag, you mean?”

  “That’s a bag? It has wheels on it!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “There are caster wheels underneath, which makes it easy to carry heavy things.”

  “My word, what a convenient thing to have.” Aisha’s eyes were wide. Not surprising, since these weren’t common in this country yet.

  I had special-ordered this one from a craftsman in the castle town. The person who’d made it for me had said he wanted to sell them himself, and I’d allowed it so long as he didn’t try to keep a monopoly on the concept. If there turned out to be demand for them, they might not be so unusual a few years from now.

  “But sire, if you want your luggage carried, you need only ask...” Aisha protested.

  “We’re supposed to be disguised as school friends. It’d be out of place for the guy to be making a girl carry his stuff,” I said. Besides, a bunch of my self-defense equipment was in there. I couldn’t let go of it. “Also, Aisha, stop calling me sire. Technically, we’re supposed to be incognito here.”

  “Yes, sire! But what am I to call you, then...?”

  “Just address me normally, no formal title. If you’d like, you can even use my given name, ‘Kazuya.’”

  ““Huh?”” both girls exclaimed.

  Huh? Why is Liscia confused, too?

  “But... Souma, isn’t your given name ‘Souma’?” Liscia asked.

  “Huh? Souma’s obviously my family name. Kazuya’s my given name.”

  “But you said you were Souma Kazuya, didn’t you?”

  “...Ah.”

  Shoot. In this country, they follow the European style, where given name comes first. I should have given my name as Kazuya Souma. Oh, I see! That’s why everyone’s been calling me King Souma. Now that I think of it, it’s weird to have “king” attached to a family name. In a hereditary system, you’d have a large number of kings with the same name if you did it that way.

  “I-Is it too late to correct it?” I asked.

  “Probably? Everyone thinks you’re Souma, and I think all your external correspondence has been under the name Souma Kazuya.”

  “Augh! To think I was making such an awful mistake...” I moaned.

  “Well, maybe it’s not so bad?” Aisha asked. “Why not use one name in public and the other in private? So, on private occasions like today, I’ll call you ‘Sir Kazuya.’”

  With Aisha finding ways to cover for my mistake, I just got more depressed about it. “Now I have Aisha, of all people, having to cover for me...”

  “Just what do you think of me as, Sir Kazuya?!”

  “What are you, you ask...? A disappointing dark elf?”

  “That’s just mean!” she exclaimed.

  “Honestly, cut the stupid banter, you two, and let’s get going,” Liscia urged while I was still dealing with the teary-eyed Aisha.

  Yeah... It’s fine to say let’s get going, but we haven’t chosen a particular destination, I thought. “Is there somewhere you girls want to go?”

  “No,” Liscia said.

  “Wherever you go, I will follow, Sir Kazuya,” Aisha added.

  “Yeah. At least pretend to think about it, you two.”

  If they pushed the decision off on me, I wouldn’t know what to do. Now that I thought about it, this was my first time walking around the castle town. The last time I had come here, we had just galloped straight through on horseback, after all.

  Hmm... In that case, maybe that’s all the more reason why I should take a good look around. Even if we just meander around, it’ll still be new to me.

  “Well, let’s just take it easy,” I said.

  Parnam Central Park.

  A large park in the center of the royal capital, Parnam.

  Though it was called a park, there wasn’t a playground or anything like that. There were just trees, shrubs and flowers that had been planted there, but the grounds were three times the size of Tokyo Dome. In the center of the park was an impressively large fountain with a Jewel Voice Broadcast receiver. When there was a broadcast happening, it could project a massive image that was large enough to be seen from 100 meters away. There was amphitheater-style seating around the fountain, and during the last Jewel Voice Broadcast, a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands had apparently gathered there.

  You know, it might be interesting to hold a live concert there, I thought. As soon as Juna’s broadcast program using the Jewel Voice Broadcast gets up and going, I’d really like to plan something like that. Someday, this fountain plaza might become a stage singers from across Elfrieden aspire to stand on, like the Budokan or Hibiya Outdoor Theater.

  ...Well, that’s enough of my idle fantasizing. Anyway, we had come to Central Park.

  “This is a lovely place full of natural beauty,” Aisha said.

  “Even though it’s in the middle of the city, the air is so clear,” Liscia commented. “Mmm.”

  Aisha looked around full of curiosity while Liscia stretched widely.

  “Huh? But I don’t remember the air being this clear before...” she murmured.

  “Well, yeah, I worked hard to arrange that,” I said.

  “You arranged it? Did you do something to this park?”

  Liscia seemed puzzled, so I puffed out my chest and explained. “Not just to the park. I prepared infrastructure all over the underground of Parnam, and I could go further and say I made preparations in regards to the laws, as well. If you compare things to a few months ago, I think you’ll find environmental hygiene has improved considerably.”

  To be blunt, before my preparations, the environmental hygiene in this country had been on the same level as Middle Ages Europe. Which is to say: it’d been disgusting.

  Horse dung had been left lying out in the streets as if that were perfectly normal, and people had just poured their domestic sewage into ditches along the roadside. I’d heard it had smelled absolutely foul in summertime.

  Because the concept of hygiene hadn’t existed, these problems had just been left alone. But when horse dung dries out, it turns into dust which is lifted into the air. When that gets i
nto people’s lungs, it causes a variety of respiratory diseases.

  That was why the first thing I had done was set up an aqueduct and sewer system.

  “An aqueduct and sewer system,” Liscia gasped. “When did you have the time to make those?!”

  “Actually, there wasn’t that much effort involved,” I shrugged. “There were underground passages running all over Parnam to begin with, you see. All I had to do was run water from the river through them.”

  “Wait, those were escape tunnels for the royal family!” she cried in outrage.

  As Liscia had said, in the event that the capital came under attack, and the fall of the royal family became unavoidable, those tunnels had been meant for the royal family to escape through. Even if the enemy discovered them, they had been built like a maze in order to hinder pursuit, and they covered the entirety of Parnam. What was more, they had been built in three layers. All of that had been very convenient for repurposing them as an aqueduct and sewer system.

  First, water from the river that ran near Parnam had been drawn into the first layer, which served as an underground aqueduct. That water was now being used in wells and public bath houses that once relied on underground water. The third layer was used as a sewer, ultimately emptying out into sedimentation ponds outside the capital where the sewage would be filtered before being returned to the river once more. The system had been designed so that the water that made the full trip around the city in the first layer would ultimately drain into the third layer. We had filled in the second layer and set things up in a way that bad smells from the third layer wouldn’t rise up into the first.

  “If you’ve turned them into an aqueduct and sewer system, what do you plan to do if there’s an emergency?!” Liscia demanded.

  “If we get to the point where the royal family needs to flee the capital, the country’s already finished, isn’t it?” I asked. “If it were up to me, I’d probably surrender at the point when the enemy was closing in on the capital.”

  “That easily?” she exclaimed.