Wow, what a cool maze, and whoever thought of this was a real idiot in my opinion, because it completely blocked the view of the exotic and rare flowers that you could only find on this continent, and those were actually worth looking at.
I made my way through to the cottage, which was a fairly simple one, and I found my food already prepared there just as I had ordered.
"As expected of Jane!!" I exclaimed to nobody in particular.
The food was a bunch of luxurious dishes that didn't really fill my belly, but at least they were delicious, and I had always wanted to try doing rich people things like this, because in my previous life I never really got a chance, so this was a momentary bliss before my execution~
Caviar, foie gras, truffles... I happily munched through everything Jane had prepared and decided that yes, this was apparently what rich people ate, and I was not complaining.
"Who are you?" A voice startled me from behind, but I didn't turn around to whoever said it.
"I repeat, who are you?" The figure said, and I could hear the sound of a sword being drawn.
I naturally continued chewing my food and ignored him.
"Why aren't you answering?" he roared in a chilling tone, the kind of tone that probably made most people freeze up on the spot.
I gulped the last of my food, wiped my mouth with the cloth on the table, and turned around, and what appeared in front of me was a handsome jerk pointing his sword dangerously close to my cheek.
"Sorry, I thought it was rude to speak while eating," I said, "but do you know what's even more rude? Pointing a sword at a lady who is peacefully eating her meal."
It was Peter Edencrown, the male lead of this novel and an undeniable douchebag.
'What a shit show.'
Well, he was your typical novel prince, an underdog of his own family who had, for some reason, clawed his way to the position of heir through sheer force and now seemed to believe that everything within his sight belonged to him by default, and he was exactly like that in the novel too, so I wasn't surprised, and honestly facing him now didn't feel scary at all, and if anything I was just annoyed.
Aside from his face, what exactly did Josephine see in this man?
He held the sword steady and pressed it closer to my cheek with an expression of complete superiority. "This is the last time I'll ask. Who are you?"
"I am Josephine von Konrow, first daughter of the Konrow Family and outcast of the duchy," I said, standing up to him and letting my cheek graze his blade deliberately. "And you are?"
He flinched slightly but kept the sword where it was. "What are you doing here, you wench! This is the meeting place between me and—"
"And you are?" I repeated.
"How dare you talk back—"
"And you are?" I said again, in a flat tone.
Ugh, my appetite was now completely ruined because of this fucker.
"Since you're not helping, I'll just call you Mr. Nobody from now on, okay?"
Something shifted in his expression, and he pressed the sword to my neck. "You're the one who's been tormenting Adele, aren't you? How dare you show up here."
"Hah...!" What a pretentious bastard.
"So what?"
"What did you say?" His anger was already worse than before, and I could see it in the way his jaw tightened.
"So what if I tormented her?" I said, and this time I willfully let the blade press harder against my neck. "Will you kill me just to avenge her? Will you solve it with violence again, Bloody Prince?"
He took a step back, because I was pressing myself into his sword and he clearly hadn't expected that, and for just a moment his certainty wavered, and that was when I reached for the mitts on the table and slapped one across his face.
"You, me, duel. Now."
"What?" The look on his face was genuinely priceless.
"Do you not get it, Mr. Nobody? A duel. Now."
"Hah! You think you can win against me?" He withdrew his sword and returned it to his scabbard, and the superiority was back in his expression just like that.
"What, are you scared that a lady will defeat you?"
"You...!!!" Provoking him was probably not a smart idea, but it was fun, and I was already annoyed enough that smart wasn't really the priority.
We arrived at the training grounds belonging to my family, which turned out to be a large and well-maintained space, and I looked around it for a moment and thought that at least the Konrows spent their money on something useful.
I didn't bother changing my clothes since I was already in a polo shirt and pants, and I took a wooden sword from the rack, tied my hair back, and swung it a few times to get a feel for the weight and the reach of it.
'Okay, let's see what this body can actually do.'
That was genuinely what I was thinking, and it wasn't bravado, it was just curiosity, because I had spent my previous life doing kendo seriously enough to reach 5-dan, and I had the theory in my head and the muscle memory of a sport, but kendo was a sport, and what I was about to do was not a sport, and I had no idea yet what the gap between those two things actually looked like in practice.
"I didn't know a wench like you could even hold a sword," Peter said from across the training ground, and his voice had that particular quality of someone who was already so certain of the outcome that they were narrating it rather than participating in it.
"I didn't know Mr. Nobody was talking. Oh, I'm sorry~" I replied.
"You bitch...!"
I tossed the wooden sword to him underhand without looking and grabbed another from the rack. "Rules are simple. Whoever defeats the other wins."
He caught it without looking, which told me something, and then he just stood there and looked at me with the sword hanging loosely at his side like he hadn't quite decided whether this was worth his time yet.
"You want a duel," he said, and it wasn't a question, it was the verbal equivalent of looking at something on the ground and deciding whether to step on it.
"I just said that."
"A duel," he repeated, and now there was something in his voice that was almost amused, except not the good kind, the kind that came right before someone said something genuinely unpleasant. "You struck me with a mitten. You, Josephine von Konrow, the disgraced daughter of a duchy that no longer claims you, struck the crown prince of this kingdom with a kitchen mitten, and now you want a duel."
"You're summarizing correctly so far."
"And you think," he said, and he finally moved, and he walked toward me slowly the way someone walked when they wanted you to feel every step of the distance closing, "that I would lower myself to cross swords with you. That I would dignify what you just did with anything other than having you dragged out of here by your hair."
I looked at him.
"Are you scared, Mr. Nobody?"
The temperature in the training ground dropped by about three degrees, or at least it felt like it did.
"I'm going to give you one opportunity," he said quietly, and quiet from Peter Edencrown was apparently considerably more dangerous than loud, "to apologize, withdraw, and remove yourself from this property before I decide that banishment wasn't sufficient punishment for everything you've done."
"Mm," I said. "No."
"...What?"
"I said no," I said again, and I rolled my shoulder and took my stance, which probably looked completely wrong to him because it wasn't any formal style this world would recognize, and that was fine. "If you won't duel me then go home, Mr. Nobody, and take your hurt feelings with you. I'll finish my meal."
Something happened in his face that I didn't have a precise word for, except that it was the expression a person made when they had decided that they were done being reasonable, and he took his stance, and it was nothing like the casual way he'd been holding the sword before, and I felt the shift in the air around him like a change in pressure, and somewhere in the back of my head a small and very calm voice noted that this was probably what the novel had actually meant when it called him the Bloody Prince, and that I had perhaps miscalculated the gap between reading about something and standing in front of it.
"Fine," he said, and his voice was completely flat. "If you want this so badly."
"If I win, you stay away from me and my plans entirely."
"And if I win," he replied, "you stay away from Adele forever."
"Wow, how did you know my plan, Mr. Nobody?"
He didn't answer that, and he didn't wait either, and he came at me, and the first thing I learned about Peter Edencrown in actual combat was that he was fast in a way that the novel had completely failed to convey, and the second thing I learned was that fast was not even the right word for it, because fast implied you could track it and adjust, and what he actually was was precise, and there was a difference, and I understood that difference about half a second after his first strike connected with my block and the impact traveled all the way up my arms and into my shoulders and I had to step back just to stay upright.
'Oh.'
I had read "Bloody Prince" and filed it away as a dramatic title the novel gave him to make him seem impressive, the way light novels always gave their male leads something that sounded cooler than it probably was in practice, and I had read about how he had clawed his way to the position of heir through sheer force when everyone in the imperial family had written him off, and I had thought of it as a plot device, a way to make his rise feel earned on the page, and I had not thought carefully enough about what it actually meant to be the person who did that, and I was thinking about it very carefully now.
In the novel, the power ceiling that got referenced whenever things got serious was Ashkart, the great hero, and Peter wasn't Ashkart, but he also wasn't nothing, and the gap between what I had expected and what was currently trying to take my head off was considerable.
He pressed forward and I gave ground, parrying what I could and eating the impacts I couldn't fully deflect, and my 5-dan kendo was doing something, it was giving me the angles and the footwork to not immediately collapse, but kendo was a sport with rules and referees and protective equipment and what I was doing right now was not kendo, and the parts of my training that had assumed a certain level of safety were not helping me at all.
He caught me across the ribs on my right side and the impact was sharp enough that my vision went white at the edges for a moment, and I stumbled sideways and caught myself on the weapon rack, and I heard him stop behind me, and I understood that he was giving me the opportunity to concede.
I stood there for a moment and breathed, and the rib made itself very known, and my arms were already shaking from the accumulated impacts, and I thought about the novel, and I thought about Josephine training alone in the rain, eating magic stones, enduring pain just to get her family to look at her, and I thought about how the novel had treated her as a failed character, someone whose efforts didn't matter because she lacked talent, and I thought that the novel was wrong about that, and I straightened up and turned around.
He was watching me with an expression that wasn't quite contempt anymore and wasn't quite anything I could easily name.
I moved differently this time, and it wasn't a decision exactly, it was more that something in this body had been watching what he was doing and had been working on it quietly while I was busy being overwhelmed, and the kendo in my head and the something-else in Josephine's muscles started to find each other, and Nephie's eye, which had been running in the background this whole time cataloguing things I hadn't consciously asked it to catalogue, started feeding me information I could actually use, and I noticed that his left shoulder came up slightly before a committed strike, and that his weight transferred to his back foot when he was about to change direction, and that there was a half-beat delay when he transitioned out of a combination, and none of that would have been enough on its own, but it was enough to start working with instead of just reacting to.
We exchanged, and this time I didn't give as much ground, and I could feel him recalibrate, and I could feel the moment he decided I had somehow gotten more dangerous in the last thirty seconds, and I could feel the moment after that when he decided to stop holding back.
The mana came into his sword like a pressure change, and I felt it before I saw it, a heaviness that hadn't been there before, and the wooden sword in his hands felt different when it moved now, and I knew that if that connected with me cleanly in the state I was already in, it was over, and I had one exchange left before he landed it, and I needed to do something with that exchange that he wasn't going to expect from someone who had been fighting defensively for the last several minutes.
'One shot.'
And something from the deepest part of this body came up to meet the moment, and it wasn't everything Josephine had, it was a fraction of it, just enough, and I brought my wooden sword up and committed everything behind it, and the collision was loud enough that I heard it echo off the walls, and his blade cracked and then splintered outward, and the force of it traveled back through my arms and into my shoulders and chest and the bruised rib screamed at me, and for a moment everything was very bright and then very quiet.
When it cleared, Peter was on one knee, and my sword was at his neck, and my arm was shaking in a way I was genuinely hoping he couldn't see clearly from that angle.
"…How?" he said.
I stood where I was and did not move, because I was fairly certain that if I moved too quickly my legs were going to do something embarrassing, and I kept my arm steady through what I would later describe to myself as pure stubbornness.
"You lose," I said.
He looked up at me, and the expression on his face was not the one I had expected, and it wasn't simple embarrassment, it was the expression of someone who had encountered something they didn't have a category for yet and was going to be thinking about it for a while, and he stayed on his knee for a long moment before he bowed his head.
"How could I lose to a mere lady?" he said, though his voice had lost most of what it came in with.
"Arrogance, Mr. Nobody," I said, and I turned my back on him and walked, and I threw the broken sword aside as I went, and I kept my pace steady and my back straight until I was completely out of his line of sight.
Then I stopped, leaned against the wall of the training ground, let out a very long and very careful breath, and took stock.
My arms were shaking and my right side was going to be a spectacular bruise by morning and the hollow feeling behind my sternum from that last fraction of whatever I had used was still sitting there like a warning, and my 5-dan kendo had bought me maybe the first minute of that fight before Josephine's body had to carry the rest of it, and I was very aware that without her strength I would not have survived the second exchange, let alone won the fourth.
I had underestimated him, and he had underestimated me, and the difference was that my mistake had cost me some ribs and his mistake had cost him the duel, and I was going to count that as a win and not examine it too closely.
I pushed off the wall and kept walking.
I wonder if Jane can reheat my meal?