Appendix — The Lord and Maids’ Special Training

Zenjirou Capua, formerly Yamai Zenjirou, was both prince consort of Queen Aura I of Capua and the lord of the inner palace.

From the day he had married her, he had spent each night in the inner palace. He had been working in the royal palace more as of late, so it was now fairly common for him to be out and about during the day, but he had never slept outside of the inner palace. This marked the first time he would have a prolonged absence from his home.

Zenjirou had gone to Valentia as Aura’s proxy. His trip would last for at least a month, and whispers of what it would mean spread among the young maids. Perhaps they would get some time off.

It was hardly a strange direction for their thoughts to take. Live-in maids were destined to get no time off as long as their master was in residence. Therefore, now that he was gone for a time, chances to relax would be relatively common.

Of course, this would depend on the prince consort’s whims, but Zenjirou—their master in name—was the softest touch one could find, and Aura—more practically their mistress—wasn’t the kind to work people unnecessarily. It was inevitable that a sense of hope for vacation time would spread through the young maids.

Head Maid Amanda, however, had other thoughts. Thoughts like, This is my chance to tighten up on discipline in a way I could not with Sir Zenjirou present.

The next day, all of the inner palace maids were gathered in a room of their workplace. The space was more than big enough, but it was plain and a room that the master and mistress had never entered. It was “backstage,” if you would.

The maids wore their scarlet uniforms and lined up in the large room. Amanda looked at her subordinates and began to speak in her usual tone.

“As I am sure you are all aware, our lord, Sir Zenjirou, has departed for Valentia.”

The young maids listened carefully as she began. Even now, the more perceptive amongst them could tell they weren’t going to like what they were about to hear.

To either side of Amanda were the maids in charge of each aspect of service in the inner palace. One of them, the head of cooking—Vanessa—was stifling a twisted smile. If she were to verbalize that smile, it would be something along the lines of “my sympathies” or “my condolences.”

The chances of this being a declaration of time off were slipping away. While a small portion of the maids was preparing themselves, Amanda continued easily.

“I believe this to be an exceptional opportunity. Our master, Sir Zenjirou, is an exceedingly amiable person. What he wants from the inner palace is a peaceful environment and somewhere to relax. Therefore, I have refrained from finding too much fault with your work.”

A silent incredulity floated around the young maids at those words. However, Amanda’s claims were not incorrect. The girls themselves had apparently forgotten, but when Zenjirou had first arrived, they had been all taut with nerves, taking the greatest care not to make even small mistakes as they set about their work. However much they hid their nervousness, more sensitive people would still pick up on it. Regardless of how perfect their work was, Zenjirou couldn’t be comfortable surrounded by people as nervous as they had been. Naturally, he had never explicitly said that their anxiety made him uncomfortable, though.

Amanda was a maid of such ability that Aura had personally appointed her to the inner palace. A true maid would intuit her master’s desires even if they weren’t spoken and act to fulfill them before any order passed his lips. Amanda had quickly surmised that Zenjirou didn’t want utterly faultless work, but rather a place suited for relaxation. Therefore, she had eased off the younger maids without their noticing. Thus, they had been able to work at ease without being nervous. Amanda, as the head maid, should have been one of the people they were most afraid of.

The fact that they were clearly unhappy about what she was saying, in front of her, no less, was proof of that slackening discipline. She had seen their reactions coming and gave an exaggerated sigh before continuing.

“Fortunately, Sir Zenjirou is satisfied with your work. However, your awareness and skills have been gradually lowering below what is expected of you as a maid of the inner palace. This is something I cannot ignore.”

The reactions to this statement were varied. Some of the girls had a clue as to where this was going and stifled their expressions. Some of them pouted as if to disagree. The majority didn’t know where this was going and simply looked at her questioningly. That confusion was perhaps to be expected. Amanda hadn’t eased up on them enough to be called “easygoing,” and the work the maids were doing was certainly sufficient.

But they were maids of the inner palace. They shouldn’t be aiming for “sufficient,” they should be aiming higher. Amanda believed she had a duty to turn these girls into the best maids possible. She clapped her hands and spoke in a carrying voice.

“Therefore, from this day until Sir Zenjirou returns, you will receive special training. If you’re all in agreement, ladies?”

It was worded as a question, but the young maids of course had no right to refuse.

“Yes, ma’am!”

Naturally, no one present failed to understand that. Special training directly from Amanda. The maids all felt fear to some extent from that possibility.

The three problem maids, as they were known, Faye, Dolores, and Letti, were on the far end of that spectrum. The three had been reassigned to cleaning and walked the corridors of the inner palace with the heavy gait of cattle off to the slaughterhouse.

“Argh, why are we on cleaning duty now, of all times?” Faye complained, shaking her head and sending her short, frizzy hair flying.

“The timing is the worst, yeah,” Dolores answered heavily, despite her usual tendency to dispute anything Faye said. She was particularly tall among the maids but her slumped posture made her seem about a fist shorter than usual.

Ines would usually have been their section leader for cleaning, but she was with Zenjirou in Valentia. Thus, Amanda was carrying out her responsibilities. The others weren’t exactly soft either, but it would be far better than being trained directly by Amanda.

“Aha ha, there’s nothing we can do about it. If we try hard, she’ll approve.” Letti tried to soothe them, optimistic at heart. However, it had no effect on her two roommates.

“That’s not going to happen, Letti. I mean, it’s Head Maid Amanda.”

“You’re right...she’ll approve of the effort, but the results are another thing,” Dolores commented.

Her thoughts were harsh. Amanda would most certainly approve of the effort they put in, but she wouldn’t allow effort without commensurate results to pass. She would say something like “You worked hard every day; I am impressed. Ensure that you put your minds to what you can accomplish with that effort.”

They would be praised for the effort itself, but it would have no impact on her judgment. What was more, her judgment was exceptionally strict.

Still, even if their heads were hung and their steps heavy, they would eventually arrive at their destination.

“Ah, we’re here,” Faye said.

“Well, nothing for it, okay? Are you both ready?” Letti asked.

“Yeah, let’s give it our best,” Dolores added.

The three of them stood in front of the living room, and once they’d gotten themselves under control, they knocked on the door.

“Right, let us begin,” Amanda said as soon as they had entered. “First, we shall clean the room as usual. Afterwards, we shall take advantage of the opportunity to clean the carpet as well.”

The three girls’ faces drew tight at the smooth instructions immediately following their entrance. Cleaning the carpet was a particularly difficult job, even for the accomplished maids. It meant using a heavily wrung cloth to scrub the entire, absolutely massive carpet, getting out all the dust and hairs that had twined around the piles.

The room was hardly tiny—it was thirty to fifty square meters. Of course, the carpet didn’t cover the entirety of the room, but it did cover about half of it. Still, considering the effort the cleaning would require, it was intimidatingly massive.

Such a cleaning would ordinarily have been done every day, but unfortunately, Zenjirou spent the majority of his time in this room, so they had very few openings for cleaning. Therefore, the daily routine had been reduced to merely dusting wherever there was visible dirt.

Now that Zenjirou wasn’t here, Amanda’s eagerness was to be expected.

“Now then, begin.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Of course, the young maids were in no position to refute the eager head maid’s order.

About two hours later, Amanda clapped her hands.

“Right, that should be sufficient,” she said.

At this point, Faye, Dolores, and Letti all felt like they were about to pitch forward into the carpet themselves.

“My arms are dead...” Faye lamented.

“Ugh, my knees...” added Letti.

Dolores could only gasp for air.

They had their hair covered with long scarves to stop any strands from falling onto the floor, and cleaning the carpet after so long had utterly exhausted them.

Amanda’s cold judgment rained down upon them. “Do you not remember? You accomplished this far more easily when you were first assigned to the inner palace. You have degraded to the point where even this is enough to exhaust you.”

The maids had, of course, been there longer than Zenjirou and had originally cleaned to this extent on a daily basis. Her statement reminded them that they had been utterly focused on completing their tasks to perfection before and hadn’t complained or whined even once. There was no rebuttal they could offer with that comparison in mind.

Whatever else they may have been, the group had an idea of the minimum expected of them as maids of the inner palace and had strangely regretful expressions for once. Their expressions told Amanda that her words had gotten through to the girls, and her expression softened ever so slightly.

“Before long, you will be leaving the inner palace and returning home. Marriage will be awaiting you then, and you will carry both your families’ names and your titles of former inner palace maid. You cannot forget that.”

“Our apologies, ma’am; you’re quite right,” Dolores said, bowing humbly. A beat later, Faye and Letti followed suit. The refinement of their bows showed that they were indeed maids of the inner palace.

Everything Amanda had said was the truth. Unlike herself or the division heads, the young maids had much shorter terms of service. This was not due to any concerns on their employer’s side but rather out of consideration for the young women themselves.

The work required them to live where they worked and led to a separation from society. Particularly in Capua, where the master of the inner palace was a man and it was expected, almost hoped, that they would get involved. For that reason, the requirements for becoming a maid were to be young and charming, but also to have no lover or fiancé. The majority of the time they could otherwise “sell themselves” was spent in the inner palace. If the entirety of that was consumed by their work, the remnants of their life could quite easily be tragic.

Whatever else, they had been recommended as maids for the inner palace, so they were aware of what their families would expect. They couldn’t afford to disappoint the head maid. They had a duty to polish their skills to such a level as to live up to the reputation of an inner palace maid. The three clenched their fists with rare looks of seriousness on their faces.

“Now, we are to clean the bedroom next. Sir Zenjirou has graciously allowed the use of the air conditioner while we work, but do not allow that to make you purposefully take longer. Understood?”

“Understood,” came the answer after a pause, the temptation of the AC almost being too much for them and delaying their response.

◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆

Once the three had finished their day of stress under the careful supervision of the head maid, they were relaxing in their room that night, fatigued.

“Ah, that’s the spot. Oh, not quite... Ahh, at least you’re good at massages,” Dolores sighed.

“Guh, this, ugh, just isn’t fair, you giant!” Faye complained from where she was straddling Dolores’s underwear-clad form and massaging her back and shoulders.

The three had, at some point, agreed that they would give each other massages after work, but Faye always complained about it. True, it did seem like it would be more difficult for Faye to massage Dolores, given the size difference. But once the three of them had finished their massages by the dim light of the oil lamp, they each sat on their own beds and enjoyed some chatter before going to sleep.

“Anyway, she’s way too imposing. I felt like I was going to die, and she was only watching me!” Faye complained, kicking her legs in the air as she sat on her bed.

“You’re right,” Dolores agreed. Her bed was the same height, but her feet actually reached the ground. “She watches you terrifyingly closely. If Madam Ines is ‘watching over’ us, then Madam Amanda is definitely ‘keeping watch on’ us.”

It was an almost cruel expression of how different their heights were, but fortunately, neither of them were particularly insecure about it, so it didn’t lead to any excessive arguments.

“For real, she could have been a little less harsh.”

“There’s nothing we can do about it, Faye,” Letti chided her pouting roommate with a soft smile. “We really have gotten worse.”

Letti had an honest disposition, so she had taken Amanda’s words and really considered them. Perhaps they had indeed been slacking off lately. While her appearance and personality were a bit soft and it might not be an obvious change, Letti truthfully intended to turn over a new leaf.

Faye, however, had another opinion. “I get that. But isn’t our master Sir Zenjirou? Honestly, doesn’t it seem like he enjoys us slacking like we do?”

It was an irrefutable fact that Zenjirou had warmed to the three problem maids before any of the others. The thing that had caught his attention was that they were the first to lose their air of nervousness around him. With that in mind, there was a certain thread of logic to what she was saying.

“It’s still a problem of degree. Besides, Sir Zenjirou is definitely in the minority as far as masters go. If you really want to aim to become his concubine then that’s fine, but if not, you need to be ready to be a maid that society will accept. She didn’t put it exactly like that, but it’s all bridal training as well,” Dolores argued, knowing how things went and being more judgmental.

“Huh, marriage... I haven’t thought much about it yet,” Faye mused, flopping back onto the bed while still kicking her legs in the air.

While Faye could move around the capital’s downtown area without seeming out of place, she was still a full-fledged noble girl. When she returned to her home—before too long, now—she knew she would select a husband from her parents’ choices, and she was prepared for that. However, she had adapted to life in the inner palace and had started to feel her new lifestyle would continue forever.

“Well, I understand where you’re coming from,” Dolores agreed with a shrug of her slim shoulders. “Even though we’re the ones getting married, it’s usually our fathers who choose the husband, so it ends up feeling like it’s got nothing to do with us.”

The inner palace was a form of seclusion, and even though they knew it was only temporary, it still made them feel unconnected to their prior lives.

“If only we could stay here forever...” Letti mused. The words that slipped past her lips were without a doubt her honest opinion. She would marry for the sake of her family. While she had no intention of going against that, it was still human nature for her to want her current enjoyment to last indefinitely.

“That’s not going to happen, Letti. If you absolutely have to, though, you’ll need to get Sir Zenjirou to fall for you,” Faye teased.

“Yup, that’s not going to happen,” Dolores agreed, joining in on the joke.

While the way it was put might have made it sound like they were disparaging her charms, not even Letti was angry at the statement.

“Well, of course not. Actually, I don’t think he has eyes for any of us maids,” she agreed. The opinion wasn’t one unique to her either; it was one held by all the maids of the inner palace. That was how much the prince consort avoided looking at them sexually.

Recently, his gaze had been trailing after their legs bared by the miniskirts of the uniform or else drawn to their cleavage when they were working nearby, but he’d always immediately averted his eyes. It wasn’t as if he didn’t see them as women, but considering he hadn’t made a move on any of them even after an entire year under the same roof, their prospects were definitely slim.

“You’re not wrong,” agreed Faye.

“If he’d been interested in anyone, he’d have made a move while Her Majesty was pregnant,” Dolores added.

The conversation had slipped into discussing their master’s relationships. Whatever else they were, the girls were of that age where they had a weakness for romance stories, whether they were involved or not.

“Huh? But didn’t Her Majesty sleep in the same room even then? It might have been in another bed, but still. There couldn’t have been any room for another woman like that,” Faye asked.

“Didn’t you hear, you idiot? That was Sir Zenjirou’s suggestion. As soon as they knew Her Majesty was pregnant, she had intended to sleep in another room. Sir Zenjirou said he wanted to sleep in the same room, even if they couldn’t sleep in the same bed, and had another one brought in.”

“Whoa, he must really love her.”

Zenjirou and Aura were both masters they were rather happy to have, so any pleasant tales of them would inevitably raise the mood.

Even noble girls—who lived with the knowledge that marriage would unavoidably be political—longed for real romance. However, their knowledge meant that they had a somewhat harsher outlook on it than the average girl. That was all the more true when it concerned where they worked.

“Anyway, the most important thing is that Sir Zenjirou and Her Majesty have a good relationship. Apparently, working in the household gets much more difficult when the couple is quarreling. If an angry couple cut themselves off from each other, that’d be easiest, but if one of them frantically keeps at it while the other stays cold, it’s the worst. The pursuer grows unhappy at the constant lack of response, and the one being pursued gets annoyed at the constant pressing. Then all that resentment gets taken out on the support staff like us,” Dolores told them.

“Ergh...” Faye grimaced.

“I’m so glad they have a good relationship!” Letti exclaimed in relief.

“Same here. Oh, but there’ll be a concubine eventually, right? Do you think things won’t be as peaceful then?” Faye asked in sudden realization. She was both a noble’s daughter and a maid of the inner palace, so she was aware of the position that Zenjirou had been placed in.

It was impossible for the only adult male capable of using the royal lineal magic (particularly since he was in his twenties) would be able to stay with only the queen forever.

However, the rebuttal came from the most realistic of the three, Dolores. “Hmmm, I’m not too sure about that. I think you’re right that he’ll eventually need to take a concubine, but that won’t necessarily worsen the atmosphere here.”

“Why’s that, Dolores?” Letti asked curiously.

“Well, a concubine is just a concubine. Her Majesty is still going to be his legal wife, right? Do you honestly think there’s a concubine that can compete with her?” Dolores asked, explaining her opinion.

Aura was practically the embodiment of an Amazon. It would indeed be rather difficult for an average woman to compete with her. Besides, the difference in standing between legal wife and concubine was a rather large handicap. On top of that, Aura was wickedly intelligent and strong-willed and had thoroughly captured Zenjirou’s heart. All of that meant that Dolores’s opinion that no concubine would have the leeway to cause any trouble was quite sensible.

“I see,” Faye answered. “It definitely would take a lot of courage to go against Her Majesty.”

Despite that, Letti wasn’t entirely convinced. “Huh? But wouldn’t she take her annoyance over that out on us?”

It was a plausible concern, but Dolores disagreed with that too. “That’s where Sir Zenjirou comes in. Have you forgotten? Why was he happiest with the three of us before any of the others?”

“Huh?”

“Oh, right, that makes sense.”

Faye and Letti were both intelligent enough to understand her implication. The reason he had preferred them originally was due to his dislike of being around people that were strained mentally. Thus, he had accepted the three problem maids first, as they couldn’t keep up the tension as much as the others. In that respect, Zenjirou would never allow a concubine to worsen the inner palace by taking out her displeasure on the maids.

“That makes sense. Then what kind of person would he choose?” Letti asked innocently.

The other two exchanged looks. That was certainly something they wondered about. It would need to be a woman who wouldn’t find fault with the maids even though Zenjirou’s affections were directed towards the queen. What kind of saint would that be?

“I suppose even Sir Zenjirou would be partial to a woman who was that wonderful.”

“Don’t you think we’ve gotten a bit off-topic?”

The young maids’ romance chat continued without end.

◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆

The next day, Faye, Letti, and Dolores all did the same work as the day before and cleaned the living room. They used a duster to knock down any dust, a damp cloth to wipe the table, and a long broom to sweep the floor.

The three of them were busy, but Dolores was a little more focused that day and noticed that Amanda’s gaze was sometimes flicking unnaturally off to the side.

I wonder what’s going on? she thought as she dusted, having been given the role due to her height.

The fact that the head maid was looking away from them despite giving them special training gave Dolores a bad feeling, and that feeling was almost immediately made a reality.

“You are a minute behind schedule compared to yesterday. Get yourselves together,” Amanda said, her gaze on the digital clock in a corner of the room.

“Ah, my apologies,” Dolores answered immediately. The fact that she managed to react so quickly despite her gasp of surprise was impressive in itself.

Faye and Letti both let out sounds of confusion and paused to look.

“What is it? Neither of you are working.”

“Ah, right!”

“Sorry!”

The two of them hurriedly resumed, but their minds were ruled by surprise.

She was looking at the clock? Dolores couldn’t believe her eyes. It didn’t change the truth, though. Until recently, the only maids who could read the time shown in intervals of 24 hours, 60 minutes, and 60 seconds were the three of them, what with their obsession with video games. However, Amanda had apparently acquired the knowledge as well. This was a grave situation for them.

This is bad; she’s going to be working us to the minute now!

Unfortunately, Dolores’s concerns proved to be true.

◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆

“Argh, this is the worst! She can read the clock now!” Faye squealed like a stuck pig as she lay on the table at lunch.

They were in a corner of the kitchen as they took their break. Lunchtime included a siesta during the hottest part of the year, so a lot of the maids simply took their food and went to their rooms to eat. The break wasn’t as long during this time of the year, though, so everyone was eating together.

“We screwed up,” Faye added, her voice despondent despite still sitting up, unlike her companion. “We underestimated Madam Amanda...”

As Dolores had worried, their cleaning had been monitored to the minute. They hadn’t noticed the day before due to being utterly focused on their work, but Amanda had been literally timing their pace. If they slowed down even slightly compared to the day before, she would interject with something like, “You’ve slowed down... You finished this a minute quicker yesterday.” Or if they focused too much on their speed and worked haphazardly, she would order them to redo it to get what they’d missed.

The training was harsh enough to discourage them in the middle of their work, although this was to be expected when receiving training directly from Amanda herself.

“Here, good work today. Amanda must be pretty tough, right? Eat this too and keep your energy up for this afternoon,” Vanessa told them. The stout, middle-aged woman spoke in her usual jovial tone as she placed their meals on the table.

“Madam Vanessa!”

“Thank you.”

“Whoa! We can eat this?!”

Sitting before them was a browned flatbread, spiced vegetable soup, and drake meat fried in fine sesame oil. It all looked fresh from the oven, and steam rose from them along with the rich scents of the food. Ordinarily, the maids ate whatever could be made quickly in between Zenjirou and Aura’s meals, but this was most definitely more than that. Considering the ingredients and time that had gone into them, they were meals that would normally be found on the royal dining table.

Vanessa put her hands on her round hips and laughed at the three forgetting their earlier exhaustion and cheering.

“Ha ha ha, of course! Her Majesty won’t be returning until tonight. We can’t let ourselves slip during this period of special training either. Therefore, the meals today were us practicing the royal palace’s cuisine. Her Majesty and Amanda both gave permission, so dig in.”

The only way to improve one’s cooking skills was to actually cook. However, they couldn’t serve their masters with practice food. Therefore, the maids took the roles of taste testers from time to time.

“In that case, I will!”

“Thank you!”

“Wooow, it looks so good.”

With joy on their faces, the three of them reached for the food.

Capua was one of the biggest producers of spices and sugar, so their cuisine was rich as a rule. Dolores used a big wooden spoon to scoop up a helping from the bowl. The soup was reddened by the large amounts of spices, and the contrast of the green leaves floating inside made her even hungrier. She put the whole spoonful of soup and leaf vegetables into her mouth, and her eyes widened in surprise.

“Huh? Is this the normal seasoning?”

It was a somewhat cryptic impression of the dish.

“What are you talking about?” Faye asked.

“Dolores, we can’t get your point from that,” Letti added.

“Try it. You’ll see what I mean,” she replied.

Despite their confusion, they did as she said and took a mouthful of the soup before crying out in surprise.

“Huh, you’re right!”

“Yeah, this isn’t how Sir Zenjirou normally has it spiced! It’s the traditional version,” Letti explained, making it easier to understand with the greater knowledge of cooking she possessed.

The cuisine in the inner palace was, naturally, made to Zenjirou and Aura’s tastes. Aura’s tastes weren’t too out of the ordinary for Capua—the problem was Zenjirou. With his modern Japanese upbringing, he wasn’t fundamentally picky, but when it came to food from a completely different world, it was another matter entirely. He didn’t mind sometimes eating the herbs used in the soups or the purposefully matured meat, but there were meals he wouldn’t eat every day.

Thus, the seasoning in the inner palace had gradually diverged from that of the royal palace. However, the meal in front of them now was one of the ordinary meals from the royal palace.

Vanessa answered the surprised trio loudly. “It’s obvious, really. These are for practice. While you certainly need to be able to cook to Sir Zenjirou’s preferences, that’s the culmination of this practice. We’re supposed to be training, after all, so strengthening the basics is the best.”

In other words, now that they didn’t need to cater to Zenjirou’s somewhat abnormal seasoning preferences, she could have them prepare more standard meals. It certainly made sense to start practicing from the ground up. Learning to cook strictly to Zenjirou’s otherworldly preferences wouldn’t be helpful as a more general maid in the future. Once they left the inner palace and married, if their cooking was customized to Zenjirou’s tastes, the family they married into would most certainly be disappointed. While not the case for higher-class nobles, cooking skill was still one of the requirements of a good wife for lower nobles.

It was naturally Dolores who caught the implication of her words. “Wait, this is part of the training? So who made it?”

Vanessa smiled broadly at the question. “You guessed right; it wasn’t me. It was the girls on cooking duty for today. I simply supervised. What do you think?” she asked.

Faye was the first to answer, having stuffed herself with the fried meat. “Huh, really? I couldn’t tell. It was so good!”

Despite her energetic answer, it was well known that Faye didn’t have the most developed of tastes.

“Oh, I see. What about you two?” she continued, her gaze moving on to Dolores and Letti.

Now knowing that it was made for training purposes, Dolores picked up the flatbread and carefully tore off a piece before eating it. “Well, I think it isn’t quite as good as something you would make.”

Dolores wasn’t the best at cooking, but she had a palate that could rival anyone else’s, so she was a good person to ask.

“Oh? How, exactly?” Vanessa asked, her face growing more amused.

“Well, the best place to start would probably be the soup? The vegetables are cut into squares, but the sizes are all quite different. If you’d made it, they would be much closer in size.”

By the time Dolores finished speaking, Letti had completed her own taste-testing and added her thoughts. “That’s right. The bread is a little too firm as well, I think. Maybe they kneaded it too much? Parts of the meat are burned a bit, so the oil was probably too hot?”

Letti excelled, at least in cooking, compared to the other maids, so her observations were more technical than Dolores’s. Her spacy expression didn’t change, but cooking was the one thing she spoke clearly about.

Their impressions seemed to fit Vanessa’s expectations as she turned and called across the room, “There you go. Your customers aren’t happy with it. I’ll be drilling you on it this afternoon, so look forward to that.”

This was what finally made the trio notice their coworkers standing behind Vanessa. Their expressions were noticeably dull and somewhat familiar... They were the same expressions the problem trio had had on their own faces just a little earlier. Indeed, the same looks they had worn throughout Amanda’s training.

“Ah, Kisha?”

“Oh, Conchita, was the soup yours?”

“Hey, Sabrina!”

The group called out to their colleagues from where they sat. All three were tall—although not to the same degree as Dolores—and all of them had full chests—although not to the same extent as Letti.

The young maids of the inner palace had originally been chosen to suit Zenjirou’s tastes—that is, a woman with a similar height and figure to Aura—so this was a fairly common description. If anything, Faye and Dolores were the exceptions due to their short stature and slender figure, respectively. Those tall, good-looking girls all had grim faces at the moment. Sabrina was even on the verge of tears. They focused on Dolores and Letti with misty eyes and spoke in strangled voices.

“Dolores...I’ll remember this,” Kisha told her.

“Letti, this is the first time I’ve ever hated that you never lie about cooking...” Conchita despaired.

“Argh, if only the two of you had the same tastes as Faye.”

“Ha ha ha,” Vanessa laughed at them, clapping them on the backs. “The results are in. Prepare yourselves. Don’t worry, though; I’m confident in my instruction. I’ll have you trained up so you won’t embarrass yourselves no matter where you cook.”

“Huh, it sort of feels like we’re not the only ones struggling,” Faye remarked blankly.

“Well, it’s special training,” Dolores told her with a rueful smile. “It’ll be the same for all of us.”

They had known they were going to continue receiving Amanda’s special training that afternoon, so it had seemed a little unfair that their colleagues would have it easier. If they were descending to hell, they should at least have company.

With slight darkness entering her smile, Dolores looked pointedly at the soup in her bowl and ripped into it like a critical mother-in-law.

“Oh, now that I look even closer, I think there might be too many herbs in this. Perhaps the bitterness is due to overheating it?”

“Ah, you’re right. The flatbread isn’t just too hard; it’s overcooked in some places. Maybe it was in the oven too long?” Letti added, in agreement, totally innocently.

Of course, whether the critique was purposefully or unintentionally harsh made no real difference to the targets.

“Dolores...mark my words, I’ll remember this.”

“Letti, I know you aren’t being mean for the sake of it, but there are things you just can’t get away with.”

“You’ll regret this!”

As the girls’ faces morphed into looks of grinning rage, Vanessa’s full stomach started to shake with her laughter.

“Gah ha ha ha! I see, I see. Well then, I’ll have to step up my training. First, we’ll practice keeping the pot moving. After that, we’ll use the discards from the vegetables to practice cutting them more finely. We’ve got plenty of firewood too, so we’ll finish off with using the oven.”

The looks on her maids’ faces said that if they had been allowed to, they would have fled immediately. Of course, Vanessa wouldn’t be going easy on them. While she was the most relaxed of the division heads, she was by no means an easy superior to deal with in her domain.

“Come on, disappointment doesn’t get your work done,” she said briskly. “Back to work, back to work.”

“Yes, ma’am...”

Dolores watched her coworkers shuffle off after a whack from Vanessa on their hips with an unconcerned smile on her face. Suddenly, Vanessa turned back to them and spoke.

“That was rather bold of you three. It will come back to you as well, you know.”

The problem trio all let out confused noises. Vanessa’s smile grew.

“Of course. After all, it’s special training. Did you think it would be over once you finished your stint in your current division? Sir Zenjirou will be in Valentia for at least a month, and we want you all to get some training in every area, so we’re speeding up the rotations. If I remember correctly, the three of you will be working with me in just a few days from now.”

Faye and Dolores exchanged looks while Letti happily clapped her hands together in front of her full chest.

“Really, Madam Vanessa?! I’ll do my best!”

Dolores’s expression was particularly dire. Remembering her earlier words, she tried to keep a smile on her face even as a cold sweat sprung up on her forehead.

“M-Madam Vanessa? Well, my opinion earlier? I, ah, might have gone too far. Um, ah, the food was plenty good. So, if you could ease up on Conchita and the others—”

However, the girl in question—Conchita—cut her off. “That isn’t necessary, Madam Vanessa.”

“Indeed, we’ve already prepared ourselves.”

“We’ll do our absolute best.”

The three maids on kitchen duty had dark smiles on their faces as they gave exemplary responses.

“Dolores?” Conchita drew her attention.

“We’ll be tasting your food in three days.”

“So make sure to look forward to that...’kay?!”

Their words were forceful.

“Really?” Letti asked. “Yeah, I will. I’ll work hard.” She was still innocently motivated, but she was the only one.

“Hey, Dolores?!” Faye demanded. “Did you just drag me into this mess?!”

“N-No way. It was just a joke, right. Right? Conchita? Kisha, Sabrina, say something!” Dolores insisted, desperately trying to keep up her excuses as Faye blamed her for their upcoming predicament.