“Greetings, everyone. I sincerely thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to come to this emergency inquiry. We are here today to discuss a certain Ikki Kurogane, a legal adult who has gravely misconducted himself by fostering an illicit sexual relationship with a state guest. Thus, many in this Japanese Branch office have called into question his accountability and sense of ethics.

“Student knights are given various rights at age fifteen that normal children do not have. Thus, it is only natural that we would expect them to have a sense of responsibility befitting those rights. In the spirit of that belief, this Ethics Committee meeting was arranged to provide an opportunity for us to thoroughly investigate whether there are concerns regarding Ikki Kurogane’s status as a knight. I know you are all very busy men, so I thank you for your understanding and cooperation.”

The International Mage-Knight Federation’s Japanese office building. On its tenth underground floor, a committee existed to oversee the ethics of student knights and Mage-Knights, providing guidance and petitioning for bans when the need arose. They could be said to be a kind of military police.

In one room on that floor, the leader of the committee, Akaza, bowed his head to the gathering of near-middle-aged men around him. He also grinned broadly at Ikki, who stood square in front of them.

“Now, everyone,” Akaza continued, “please be seated so that we may begin the inquiry.”

The inquiry was announced, and everyone took their seats. Only Ikki, who was not provided a chair, was left standing. It was a plain, yet spiteful act, demanding that he stand throughout the hours-long interrogation, but at the very least, Ikki wasn’t so feeble as to admit defeat from such a minor discomfort.

The air here is so stagnant.

Ikki surveyed the room, which had almost no light sources to speak of. Around him were long desks arranged in a U-shape, where Akaza and the other men sat. Three in front and one on either side—a total of five people, all wearing red suits to show that they were members of the Ethics Committee.

“There’s no need to act so uptight. I’ll say it once: all of us here are on your side.” Akaza teased Ikki, noticing that he was sizing up the strength of the committee members. “This inquiry is not the place to point fingers. As unprecedented as your misconduct may be, we want to hear your excuse for having a relationship with a state guest. This is a place of enlightenment, open to you due solely to the combined generosity of your father and us. There’s not a single one among us who isn’t on your side. Right, everyone?”

“That’s right. None of us want you banned from the Federation without at least giving you the chance to offer an explanation. You’ve tried your hardest to make it to where you are now, mere steps away from making it to the Seven Stars Battle Festival. It would be a shame for all that effort to go to waste.”

“…Thanks.”

The way they could brazenly lie to his face about so many things was almost amazing.

“Now that you understand that we have your best interests at heart, let’s start by confirming the basics. Ikki, is it true that you are in a relationship with Stella Vermillion, the second imperial princess of the Vermillion Empire?”

“Yes, that is true.”

“Mhmhm, good on you for being honest. When did your relationship begin?”

“It was around the time the Seven Stars Battle Festival selection battles began. Specifically, the night of my first battle.”

There wasn’t much point in hiding the truth from them, so Ikki answered honestly. Even so, the committee members all looked at him scornfully.

“Oh? It didn’t take you two very long after you met to start dating.”

“Hmph, kids these days. They’re all about being fast and reckless.”

“Yes. Back in my day, we would take things slow and wait for our relationship to develop organically.”

“These kids are like rabbits, I tell you. I think they call them ‘shotgun weddings’?”

“Truly reprehensible.”

They talked as if Ikki and Stella were having premarital sex, but they had done nothing of the sort. In fact, most couples their age would say they were too platonic. They took their relationship very seriously because they were well aware of the delicacy surrounding her status as a princess, making those accusations all the more enraging.

“Excuse me, but I haven’t done a single thing like you all and the newspapers—”

“Ikki, Ikki. I understand you have things you want to say, but you must leave them until you’re given permission to testify. Otherwise, you might give us a bad impression. Mhmhm!”

“…My apologies.” Ikki bowed reluctantly, his testimony blocked by Akaza.

“Hmph. If you want to talk so badly, I’ve got a question for you. Did you never think that it was poor judgment to have an illicit relationship with a princess?” the man to Ikki’s left, with a goatee and an unpleasant look in his eye, asked curtly. “That’s a very dangerous act that could quickly develop into an international incident. I know you’re at an age when you’re always thinking with the wrong head, but do you really lack even the sense to choose a more suitable plaything?”

“My relationship with Stella isn’t ‘play’. We honestly love each other.”

“Hmph. Brat.”

“Mhmhm! I once thought my first love was the one too. Oh, youth is a wonderful thing.”

“If you’ll permit me to say it, Stella and I are legal adults. We have the right to marry. Don’t you think it’s completely normal to take our relationship seriously?”

“A trivial objection. You’re awfully defiant, aren’t you?”

“Come on, now. You’d better rethink that attitude.”

“Bad first impression. Mhmhm!”

Akaza wrote something on a piece of paper. As he looked at the men around him who were clearly not willing to listen to his thoughts, Ikki sighed inwardly. They were interrogating him based on an adult’s accountability, but simultaneously refusing to acknowledge his rights as an adult; they only treated him as an adult when it was convenient for them.

I figured this would be a farce. The committee’s behavior made it abundantly clear that not one of them had any intention of truthfully investigating Ikki’s qualifications as a knight. They had already come to the conclusion that he was unfit, and were in the process of searching for information to reinforce that claim, much like during the Inquisitions. Then again, I’ve known as much ever since I saw those newspapers.

From the get-go, everything had clearly been odd. First, the princess of an empire starting a relationship during her time studying abroad. That would be scandalous in and of itself, and there would be a controversy over it, but the progression from there to questioning Ikki’s qualifications as a knight was unnatural.

As Ikki had asserted before, he and Stella weren’t children. They were adults, so they had the right to marry. There was a legal basis for their love, in a way. With Ikki’s and Stella’s feelings for each other made clear, even if the emperor of Vermillion—Stella’s father—took issue with it, his natural first course of action would be to speak with her.

No such thing had happened, however. Instead, people entirely unrelated to their relationship were calling it wrong and screaming “misconduct”, plastering it all over every single newspaper in order to call Ikki’s capacity as a knight into question. It was nothing if not abnormal.

Why would something so abnormal be happening? The reason was simple: a certain someone must have been mixing their own arbitrary opinions into the uproar.

Roundabout as always, I see.

They weren’t being roundabout just for kicks, though. All Mage-Knights, student knights included, had their names in the International Mage-Knight Federation’s register. Besides acting as a deterrent against war, the existence of such a supranational organization simplified crossing borders for Mage-Knights, allowing them to help each other in times of duress. In the event a war were to somehow break out, thanks to the power of the Federation, gathering knights to battle as representatives of their nations would be orderly and procedural.

There were many other reasons as well, but they had little bearing on Ikki’s situation. What was relevant to his case was that knights with their name in the Federation’s register couldn’t have their knight certifications suspended or revoked by a single nation’s government or branch office. Not even Itsuki Kurogane, head of the Japanese Branch, or Akaza, chairman of the Ethics Committee, held that privilege. As such, they were forced to use roundabout methods, like how they had tried to sic The Hunter on Ikki the year before.

They had hoped to pressure Ikki in private to force him to admit that he had done wrong. If they weren’t able to do that, they would just say he had a bad attitude or bad posture, or that he looked at them wrong, or that they didn’t like the way he talked, and so on. Nothing was beneath them.

Once they had enough information at their disposal to make Ikki look bad, they would use it as grounds to apply for his name to be struck from the register. That was Akaza’s aim, and Ikki knew it, so instead of just repeating his own assertions, the safest thing for him to do was to weather the storm and avoid letting them read into his statements.

“Whether you all have a good or bad impression of me doesn’t really matter. I truly love Stella, and Stella truly loves me. I can guarantee you that much. I don’t believe we’ve done anything wrong, and I can’t stand idly by while someone else calls us wrong.”

Ikki knew his best course of action, yet he didn’t stop opposing the committee. He was well aware of just how much Stella loved him back; whenever they hugged or kissed, he would see her gorgeous smile, so he wouldn’t let anyone call their love “misconduct” or “wrong”. If someone was going to say it was a mistake, he was going to fight back. That was the entire reason he had come to the interrogation.

I told Stella one thing: I’ll proudly tell anyone and everyone that I love her.

He would not retreat, and he would not sit silently. If the men before him had never had any intention of entertaining his claims, then all the better; Ikki didn’t need their approval. He would make his claim regardless, because his feelings for Stella were the one thing he would never lie about.

◆◇◆◇◆

In the three days that had passed since Ikki had been taken away and detained by the Ethics Committee, Stella had been like a volcano primed to erupt. She scowled constantly, and sparks flew from her hair like fireworks.

Many students seemed interested in the scandal and wanted to probe her for information, but even approaching her was so intimidating that they all gave her a wide berth. Even in the packed cafeteria at lunch, nobody sat near Stella.

“You look pretty menacing for someone who just recovered from a cold, Stella.”

The tall, lean girl who spoke to Stella so nonchalantly was Nagi Alisuin, someone in no position to worry about such trivialities.

A voice from afar—likely one of her fans—warned, “Lady Nagi, it’s too dangerous!”, and though Stella wouldn’t take out her anger on a friend no matter how mad she was, her attitude and speech were clearly more aggressive.

“No duh. You think I can smile when they’re all writing lies about me?” Stella spat. “They”, of course, being the newspapers. Their lies involved lambasting Ikki and painting Stella as a weak-minded woman who was fooled by a monster. She boiled with indignation just from remembering it. “I heard it was bad, but Japan’s mass media really has reached a new low.”

“Nyehehe, that one definitely hit home.”

Another girl, wearing an apologetic look beneath her glasses, said as she sat next to Stella.

“Kagami?”

“Mind if I sit with you?”

“Go on. There’s plenty of space, not that I mind.”

“Nyehehe. Thanks.” Kagami Kusakabe moved her lunch tray over to Stella’s table and continued speaking, looking apologetic. “I don’t blame you for being mad, Stella. I mean, yeah, it’s obvious that you dating someone while studying here would turn into a scandal, but the reporters are slimeballs for completely ignoring your judgement in favor of calling your relationship ‘misconduct’. That’s gonna cause an actual international incident, but hey, that’s probably why they’re reporting it like that in the first place.”

“Oh? What’s that mean?”

“Well, I’ve got a bit of clout in the world of reporters, so I had my contacts dig up some dirt. As it turns out, the Ethics Committee has been pressuring people like nobody’s business. They publicized the Princess Vermillion Scandal as misconduct, trying to make it out to be something horrible. And just between us, the committee has even been threatening to take away some outlets’ publication rights to entertainment events like the King of Knights.”

“Since the Federation controls the KoK, they’re free to make threats like that, then? I see.”

Newspapers losing their publication rights to the greatest entertainment event in the world would deal an immense blow to their sales, one great enough that said papers would be hard pressed to not fail immediately. They essentially had knives at their throats; their only option was to give in to the coercion.

The facts according to Kagami were proof enough that the Ethics Committee and Itsuki Kurogane were really coming after Ikki’s certification as a knight. Knowing how serious they were, Stella couldn’t help but be taken aback.

“I can’t believe it… Ikki’s just a high school student! Why is his own father, the head of the Federation’s Japanese Branch, going so far to corner him?!” What was the point in doing so? Wouldn’t the widespread denunciation of Ikki also hurt the Kurogane family name by extension? What possible reason could he have had? “This is his son we’re talking about. Why—”

“That’s just the kind of father he is.” The reply came from the opposite side of the table, directly in front of Stella. Her voice was quiet yet pretty, not unlike a bell. “That’s what he does. There’s not much else to say.”

“Shizuku…”

“Honestly, I don’t know what he’s thinking or why he detests my brother so much. His warped mind is beyond my comprehension. That just makes it all the more normal for him to do such horrible things, though.”

Shizuku moved her own tray to the table as well, stating the cold, hard truth as she set her Japanese-style meal down opposite Stella.

“Hey, Shizuku?” Stella found the coming words hard to say, but knew she had to. It had only taken her so long to say because they hadn’t seen each other since Shizuku’s battle with Raikiri. “I’m sorry we didn’t tell you about us.”

She knew just how much Shizuku loved her brother, so she braced herself for the coming storm. Shizuku’s reaction, however, was surprisingly dismissive.

“I don’t care. Besides, I already knew.”

“Huh?”

“It was obvious from a glance that your relationship had changed on the night of his first battle. Right, Alice?”

“Haha, well, it was rather easy to tell.”

“Yep!” Kagami added. “I actually noticed too.”

“Ugh…” Stella groaned, strangely ashamed. Was their flirting that brazen? They thought they had evaded detection by keeping anything lovey-dovey confined to their room and the forest.

“Your status means that being in a relationship would definitely lead to an uproar the moment it was announced. I get that you two wanted to avoid that during the busy time that is the Seven Stars and its preparations, and I think you did the best you could, so I don’t blame you at all. What matters now is what we do going forward,” Shizuku said, turning to look at Kagami next to her. “Kusakabe, based on the way this conversation is going, I assume you know my family circumstances to some extent?”

“Nyehehe! Information is a journalist’s lifeline. Yeah, I do happen to know a little.”

“Then I’ll come right out and ask: Do you think my brother could actually be exiled as a result of this case?”

“Not as things are now,” Kagami responded, not hesitating in the slightest.

“Oh, really?”

“Well, Alice, neither of them actually did anything bad, right? I touched on this before, but there’s a limit to how long a handful of journalists can ignore Stella’s side and call it misconduct. For most people, this story is just, ‘Wow, the princess of Vermillion is dating? What’s he like? Ooh, saucy!’ and that’s it; nothing more. The Ethics Committee is trying to fan the flames by calling it misconduct, but it just isn’t catching on. Without that, their claims have no legitimacy; at this point in time, it’s just a large-scale false accusation. In fact, they probably know this, and that’s why they’re trying to control public perception by using the inquiry to dig up dirt in any way they can. Ikki isn’t stupid enough to take the bait that easily, though, so I find it hard to believe the Japanese Branch will be able to ban him. The Federation as a whole sees bans as the last of their last resorts, after all.”

“What makes it ‘the last of their last resorts’?” Stella asked.

“Whether it’s a student knight or a licensed Mage-Knight, the Federation doesn’t want to ban someone unless they’ve done something truly terrible. To put it in perspective for you, do you remember Kuraudo Kurashiki from Donrou Academy?”

“Yes.”

“Even for someone as notorious as him, the most he’s gotten is a stern warning.”

“That’s… a very light punishment.”

“Is there a reason why?”

Kagami nodded in response to Shizuku’s question.

“It’s because most banned knights turn to crime.”

Once they obtained their licenses, all knights dreamed of making livelihoods as Blazers. The vast majority of those to whom that opportunity was lost would use their Blazer abilities illegally, becoming criminals. Countless statistics supported that claim.

“Of course,” Kagami continued, “these people were already bad enough to be banned, so it’s not that surprising, but it’s safer to keep your mad dog on a leash, isn’t it? So the Federation wants to keep all knights under their supervision, and as a result, just about every country that’s a part of it has legislation to keep their Blazers on the path of knighthood. That said, human rights groups in Japan have kept things from progressing that far here.

“Basically, banning Blazers lets all of the mad dogs loose and creates criminals, which is why the Federation is generally reluctant to resort it, and banning student knights is an especially rare case. The Ethics Committee is trying really hard to make it happen this time, though, so I’m a little worried about what’s happening to Ikki right now.”

If the committee wanted to find fault with Ikki’s attitude or tone of voice in response to their questioning, they wouldn’t be able to take it much further than that. However, if Ikki said that he was thoughtless, that would become the accepted truth, giving them a strong backing in their petition to ban him. It would follow that the committee would use any means necessary to accomplish that.

“…”

Everyone present fell silent at Kagami’s mysterious words. The committee’s inquiry was being carried out underground, far from the light of day and right in Itsuki Kurogane’s lap. In addition, the Ethics Committee itself was staffed entirely by the Kurogane bloodline, as if it were their sanctuary. Everyone around Ikki was allied with the Kurogane family; he would never receive fair treatment there. They weren’t likely to resort to torture the way a real inquisition would, but there were plenty of other ways to press him.

Ikki… The more she thought about it, the more awful things Stella imagined, to the point that she hadn’t slept properly for the past three days. Every time she closed her eyes, she was forced to picture what was happening to her beloved deep underground. This is all because of me.

If she were just another ordinary girl, Ikki’s enemies wouldn’t have been able to use her to their advantage. She was a burden on Ikki. She was holding him back during the most important time of his life, when he was meant to secure his place at the Seven Stars. That helpless regret revealed itself bit by bit; it hurt her so, so much.

“Maybe I should break up with Ikki.” The words leaked weakly from her lips. “Because… it’s all my fault, right? If I were a normal girl, this wouldn’t—”

“Stella!”

Alice’s scream pierced Stella’s eardrums. Her voice sent a shudder down Stella’s back, causing her to look up from her bowed position. When she did, she noticed the tip of a sharp icicle shooting toward her face.

She reflexively covered herself in Empress’ Dress, crossing her arms in front of herself to guard against the spear of ice, but the attack was too fast and too strong. The impact lifted her off the ground and threw her against the cafeteria wall, causing her to crash through it and land outside.

“Ahhh!”

“Wh-What’s going on?!”

The cafeteria erupted into a panic.

In the midst of the uproar, Stella felt her arm, grimacing at the pain that shot through it. One of her bones must have cracked when she was thrown against the wall by the blunt icicle, only its sharp tip having melted amidst the flames that burned hot enough to disintegrate even bullets. There was only one person there who could wield water magic like that.

“Wh-What are you doing, Shizuku?!”

Covering her wounded arm, Stella howled at Shizuku, who stood tall atop a table with Yoishigure in hand.