The Reincarnated Princess Deliberates

“Are you sure that’s the move you want to make, Princess?”

The sound of a voice calling out to me snapped my concentration back to reality.

“Hmm? Oh.”

I eyed the chessboard placed atop the table, and then the piece in my hand. A silly-sounding murmur left my lips. I’d been too preoccupied with my own thoughts to notice that I was about to absentmindedly march my queen off to her grave.

I slowly withdrew the hand that’d been a moment away from placing the queen onto the board. Quiet laughter reached my ears. Embarrassed, I peeked across the table at the handsome and smiling boy seated opposite me.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s fine. You haven’t put it down yet, so you’re in the clear.”

Teo—a boy with fiery-red hair—narrowed his garnet-like eyes as he spoke.

The apology wasn’t just for pulling my piece back, but also for not focusing on the game. Teo was aware of that though, and was telling me indirectly not to worry about either issue.

“That was one of the few chances I’ve ever had to beat you,” Teo said good-naturedly, “but I’d rather win on my own merits if I can.” He clasped his hands behind his head and winked playfully, then let out a cheery laugh. The elegantly crafted cast-metal chair creaked loudly as Teo leaned his weight into the backrest.

Roughly a year had passed since the foiling of the sorcerer abduction plot. Now fourteen, Teo looked burlier than he had before; he was presently in the prime of his growth period.

“I won’t let you win just yet,” I declared. I placed my queen down and shot back a smile in response to his joke.

“Ah!” After my move, the confidence drained from Teo’s face. He crossed his arms and sunk into thought. After much deliberation, he moved a piece, only for me to attack it again.

“Check,” I announced, and Teo pored his attention over the board.

He resigned from the game after a brief pause and then groaned in frustration. “Aaah, I look like an idiot now,” Teo whined. I wrung out a smile.

“You’ve only just learned how to play chess,” I remarked. “I’d be the idiot if I lost to you.”

Less than a month had passed since Teo had decided to pick up chess. Since then, we would occasionally play against each other in the break room adjoining the greenhouse.

He’d been learning about battle tactics in his classroom lessons, but apparently he couldn’t get the contents of the textbooks to stick in his mind, so he hit upon the idea of trying games.

Honestly, I wasn’t too sure whether familiarity with board games would be of any use in a real battle. I framed that doubt as a question and posed it to Teo while he was tidying up and putting the chess pieces away.

“Dunno,” he said, tilting his head. “After all, I’m new to all these tactics, to chess and everything, so I don’t have a clue!” Teo declared this clearly, making a thumbs-up gesture.

Yep, makes sense... Can’t argue with that.

Teo saw the warm look I was giving him. He laughed loudly and added, “But the game is quite profound, and I do think I can learn something from it. To tell you the truth, I never saw the point of drumming tactical knowledge into a foot soldier. But it really is possible for a single man to change the course of a battle, isn’t it? It’s similar to this little guy.” Teo rolled a pawn across the palm of his hand as he spoke. “If this piece reaches the back rank, he can become anyone except the king.”

“Indeed.” I nodded. Pawns could even become knights and bishops. They usually just became queens though. The potential to vastly alter the course of battle could come down to a single person’s actions.

“That’s right,” I continued. “In fact, if you and Lutz had been captured by Skelluts, we’d be in a completely different situation right now.” In my mind, I appended: just like in Hidden World.

Teo’s eyes grew wide. Then he gave a single nod and joined my musings on the topic with great interest.

“Suppose we failed to discover the abduction plot beforehand. How do you think things would’ve turned out?”

Visions of Hidden World appeared in my mind. War had bred more war, culminating in a long-lasting era of widespread tumult across the continent. I pondered over Teo’s question for a while before answering.

“First off, the war would’ve stretched on.”

The threat of war was never far away when the loose cannon known as Skelluts was on the scene. But the neighboring countries would’ve lost faith in Nevel if we’d proactively declared war without a legitimate justification. Hidden World’s Nevel must’ve suspected Skelluts after Lutz’s abduction, but without proof, there was nothing they could’ve done. After Nevel had perennially found itself on the defensive, war had broken out between the Kingdom of Vint and the Kingdom of Skelluts.

“We couldn’t have picked a fight with another country on circumstantial evidence alone...and Skelluts would’ve launched a war against one of its neighbors while we floundered.”

“I see,” Teo murmured after listening to my explanation in silence. “Well, they would’ve wanted to take us, their new weapons, out for a test fight.”

Teo grasped the pawn that he’d been fiddling with and placed it on the board. A lone white foot soldier in the middle of the black side’s formation. That was exactly the position where Lutz had found himself in Hidden World.

I stared at a black pawn that I’d picked up and recalled the worrying train of thought that I’d been considering a few minutes ago—there were now distinct differences between the world of the otome game Welcome to the Hidden World and our present situation.

I also considered the dangerous figure we’d have to deal with sometime soon—the demon lord.

Without speaking, I glanced down at the board and placed the black pawn amongst the white formation. This soldier hiding among our country’s army wasn’t a foreign spy. He was a new, different menace.

I knew from Hidden World that his name was Michael von Diebolt, and he was born the second son of a viscount in the Kingdom of Nevel. In the game, where the shrine maiden had been summoned, Michael was a suitor character. A priest, in fact. Unfortunately, he also became the leader of our enemies, the demon lord.

However, Michael was not, at present, the demon lord. Right now, he was just a pious priest, one who’d cast away the luxurious lifestyle of his birth into a noble family, choosing instead to live a life in the service of a god.

“In the hypothetical event that war had broken out between Skelluts and Vint, Nevel wouldn’t have been able to stand around and do nothing to help our ally. The trouble would’ve spread inside our borders.”

According to Hidden World, when Michael was thirteen, the first signs of unrest appeared inside of Nevel. In the war between Skelluts and Vint, Nevel of course backed our ally Vint, but the fighting left swathes of unrest in its wake. Years went by, but the conflict still raged on. Eventually, five of the countries on the western half of the continent were pulled into this horrible mess.

“The longer the war dragged on, the more dire the situation would’ve grown,” I continued. “We’d have to face the prospect of other countries taking advantage of our weakened state to launch an attack.”

In Hidden World, the Kingdom of Lapter, a country neighboring us to the northeast, invaded Nevel, taking advantage of our reduced military power brought on by the long-lasting war. And thus, yet another war began.

“Yikes... Sounds like a disaster,” Teo muttered, knitting his brows deeply in a clear display of his displeasure.

“A disaster, indeed,” I nodded gravely. “If we’d been attacked from the east, the fighting would’ve spread to our agricultural land. That would’ve put pressure on our food supply and invited the risk of famine.”

To compound an already dreadful situation, a plague began to spread throughout Hidden World’s Nevel from the south.

The awful spectacles taking place inside of Nevel grieved the priest Michael’s heart. The sights preyed upon his mind, and he resolved to leave his home, the Great Temple, and travel throughout the country in the hope that he could somehow offer aid. Michael wandered around the stricken land, nursing the wounded and the sick, saving children, and offering prayers for the dead.

He wound up in a border village, near the front lines. There, he found a half-ruined temple on the outskirts of the village. While rummaging through the building to find a spot where he could pass the night away from the elements, he happened upon a hidden door.

Through the door was a small room with a mysterious altar. Enshrined there was a stone the size of his fist.

Although he found the sight disturbing, he decided to rest in a corner of this room, telling himself that it’d only be for one night. That same night, however, the fighting reached the old temple, and it collapsed.

Michael lost his life, crushed beneath the rubble.

At the same time, the stone on the altar—the stone sealing away the demon lord—ruptured. Cast free from the seal that had bound him, the demon lord possessed Michael’s lifeless body, which had been lying nearby, and thus returned to the world.

In other words, by the beginning of Hidden World, Michael was already dead. Only the demon lord who’d possessed Michael’s corpse remained.

“I get it...” Teo said seriously, heaving a long sigh. “So basically, one wrong move and we’d have been screwed beyond belief.”

As he’d said, this was purely a hypothetical scenario, assuming that the abduction plot had proved successful. Though these were true events of Hidden World, in this version of Nevel we’d successfully avoided that outcome. Unfortunately, I couldn’t guarantee that we were one hundred percent off the hook.

A coup d’état had taken place in Skelluts, and we’d managed to prevent the war between Skelluts and Vint from starting. That was all well and good, but the menace of the Kingdom of Lapter still lingered in the northeast. There could also still be an outbreak of plague, even without a war. I couldn’t be certain that Michael would stay put in his home temple either.

There were just too many uncertain factors.

What was more, I couldn’t at all predict what was coming, given the huge differences between the backstory of Hidden World and the present-day Kingdom of Nevel. My knowledge of the game, which was a kind of foresight, was no longer of much use.

If I wanted information, I’d have to do my own research. The mountain of tasks ahead of me seemed dizzying, and a melancholic sigh escaped my mouth.

“I think I’ll take my studies a little more seriously,” Teo said, starting to clear the chess pieces away again. His face was meek.

I looked at him, my eyes wide, and stopped tidying. After blinking a few times, I tilted my head. “I think you’re already taking them seriously enough.”

Teo might’ve looked quite sloppy at first sight, but I knew very well how earnest and thoughtful he truly was. He’d listen with joy when I explained about medicinal herbs, and I’d heard that he’d copy everything down as notes so that he wouldn’t forget.

But Teo lightly shook his head. A smirk was etched across his handsome features.

“I’m biased. I only get enthusiastic about some topics. I’ll put my whole heart into learning about medicine, but I never want to study tactics. Preparing for battle isn’t really all that appealing to me, y’know?” He then mumbled self-deprecatingly, “That might be rich coming from a sorcerer who can only use offensive magic though.”

I more or less understood what he was getting at. Tactics are methods for winning wars. He felt resistance to the idea because it was almost as though he were being told to learn more effective techniques for killing the enemy. For killing people. This task would affect Teo all the more because of his diligent studies of medicine.

“But I realized,” Teo said, “sometimes tactics are necessary to prevent conflict before it starts.”

He grabbed the black pawn that I’d left on the board, then stood up and leaned over the table to present the pawn to me, where I was sitting on the other side.

I saw myself reflected in his narrowed eyes. They possessed the mysterious property of appearing both red and black, depending on how the light struck them.

“If that knowledge can be used to save lives and not just end them, then I wanna learn more.”

“Teo...”

I found myself entranced by the mature look of his smile. I returned to my senses a second later, and hurriedly reached out with my hand to take the pawn.

However, the moment before I could, someone else’s hand suddenly landed a chop in between mine and Teo’s.

“Whoa?!”

“Hwaaa?”

The chop had been destined to hit Teo’s hand, but Teo had dodged the attack with his superb reflexes. The black pawn went flying, bounced off of the table, and landed on the floor.

I froze in place. Teo covered his right hand with his left, shielding the one he’d swiftly pulled back from the chop. We both followed the path of the pawn with our eyes as it rolled across the floor. When the pawn collided with a pair of boots, we slowly lifted our eyes up to the figure standing there.

It was Lutz, the ice sorcerer, who was enveloping the two of us with a chilly glare.

I thought he was out helping Miss Irene on an errand. Just when did he get back? And why does he look so mad...?

Lutz’s brows were deeply knitted. His mouth was curled up in a frown like an upside-down letter V, and he was emitting an atmosphere of rage so potent that the very air around him seemed about to freeze. His whole body gave testament to his anger.

What in the world have we done wrong? Was it the conversation about tactics? Or the ominous talk we’d had about the potential future? Or has something else entirely rubbed him the wrong way?

All I could do was watch on, trembling in fear. Lutz slowly placed a hand on his hip, as if to mock my inability to move. He stood there in that imposing stance, working the muscles in his jaw, and while looking down at us, abruptly opened his mouth.

“You’re too close!!!” Lutz roared.

“Huh?”

“Err?”

A few seconds were needed before Lutz’s grandiose proclamation could worm its way into my brain. Or rather, I needed more than just three words to understand his objection properly.

“Too close? Do you mean how far apart we are?” Teo asked. He sounded confused and scratched at his cheek with a finger. “The princess and I are sitting on opposite ends of the table.”

“The way I see it,” Lutz declared, “you made a move on the princess just now.”

“I did not! I was just handing her a chess piece!!!” Teo waved his hands in front of his body and frantically defended himself. His face was blushing enough to be apparent, even on his brown skin.

Lutz didn’t back down, however. He rejected Teo’s explanation with a snort.

“Suuure... All alone with the princess in this tiny room? I think you lost control of yourself.”

“That’s a flat-out lie!” Teo spat out in desperation, pointing a finger at Klaus, who was standing by the entrance of the break room. “Besides, we weren’t alone either! This knight’s been giving me the evil eye the whole time with that horrifying look on his face!!!”

I’d neglected to acknowledge his existence, but the truth was that Klaus had been there from the beginning. I couldn’t see his face because he was stationed behind me, but I expected that he’d probably been scowling at Teo.

“Uhh, sorry about that, Teo...” I apologized, feeling embarrassed beyond belief.

“It’s fine.” Teo shook his head. His face showed his exhaustion. “Really, it’s fine. It’s just... I’ve felt him staring for so long. Like it’s...piercing me.”

“Be glad that nothing physical has pierced you,” Klaus muttered contemptuously.

Teo’s face contorted in a grimace. “Could you please not grumble something so terrifying?”

“If his sword isn’t to your liking, then how about I freeze you with magic?”

“That’s not what I was saying!” Teo exclaimed. “I wasn’t griping about the specific method of my murder!!!”

“The sword it is then,” Klaus chimed in.

“Like hell it is! Why is my death rapidly turning into an established fact?!”

This has all gotten a little...chaotic.

I played the spectator, letting out an empty-hearted chuckle. But I wasn’t brave enough to plunge myself into the middle of this exchange of violent threats and fervent comebacks.

Sorry, Teo. Really.