The Feelings of the Three Friends
My name is Anon Sheffield. I’m the daughter of a noble with a Knight’s title, but our family is quite different.
First, we don’t live the noble lifestyle. We take care of ourselves, even cooking our own meals. It’s strange because from what I understand, our family could have easily become Viscounts, but my family absolutely refuses any promotion to that rank, saying, “It’s strange for a Knight to be a Viscount.”
Soldiers and Knights in Ostland are weak. My Father muttered this while drinking. He often says he wishes our country’s Knights had the strength of Arland, but I don’t really understand what that means.
I don’t know much about that country. Information doesn’t flow out, and even if it does, it doesn’t seem to be very significant.
The first thing I received from my Father was a steel short sword. It might seem odd to give something like that to a noble’s daughter, but I quite liked it. I haven’t used it in actual combat, but everyone praised my strength. In fact, in the dojo, I’m stronger than my Father.
I don’t have real combat experience, so I don’t know about a real battle, but I’ve become quite proficient with a wooden sword during training.
I have a childhood friend. We’ve known each other since birth, apparently brought together to create a faction in the future. But surprisingly, we get along well. Keena is serious, and she knows a lot of things I don’t. She gets angry when I’m wrong.
Sharon is shy but surprisingly determined, and she has a quiet and noble lady-like demeanor… everyone’s a noble lady here, though.
I’m not at all like a noble, so I couldn’t make any friends when I entered the academy. Just by cutting my hair, not only their parents but also other noble girls kept their distance. However, long hair is inconvenient.
My Father always tells me to make more friends. It seems that nobles value connections with other nobles. But Father was wrong in how he raised me. If he wanted me to live a lady-like life, he should have raised me to be more refined. I quickly gave up when Father handed me a sword for the first time.
But there was a girl who caught my interest. She was always alone, reading books or talking to her maid. Her name was Alice Fleur.
I wondered if she was like me. She seemed to have no intention of building a network. She was a peculiar girl, and I couldn’t tell if she was interested in other people. I decided to approach her because there’s no way she was just a daughter of a Count. Her manners and gestures were so refined that even I could tell. I’m a noble lady too, and while I’ve never attended parties, I’ve been to tea gatherings. She had manners similar to or even better than the high-ranking noble ladies who attend those events. Sometimes, her maid cried while talking to her, but I had no idea why at that time.
What I find out was, that she was quite an unusual girl. When I first approached her, she didn’t notice, and when she did, she became flustered all of a sudden. It seemed she wasn’t good at socializing. However, once we became close, she was just like anyone else, but it felt like she wasn’t used to talking to people of her own age.
I found it interesting. After all, she had such impeccable etiquette, but she claimed to have no friends of her age. So, I asked her how she learned all of that, and then…
“Because they wanted me to…”
It seems like it wasn’t her own choice. Moreover, this girl was already a Sorceress. I’ve heard that there have been two-nicknamed sorcerers who joined the school recently. Was it her?
Keena and Sharon apparently knew about it. Those two have friends other than me, so they’re fine. I’m all alone just because I cut my hair.
The books she read were full of characters I couldn’t even read, or they were history books, definitely something difficult, but she read them as if they were normal. I tried reading them once, but the characters were different from what I knew, so I fell asleep within 10 minutes. It was too difficult.
Keena and the others seemed resistant to get to know Alice at first, but they surprisingly got along with her. Apparently, she has quite a few similarities with me… mostly in the troublemaker department. How rude!
Alice is different. She’s apparently perfect in class, but she occasionally plays pranks. Misunderstanding that she’s supposed to destroy the targets in a magic target practice, breaking targets that normally shouldn’t break, duels with other noble sons and winning, sending her familiar flying into the sky… Saying this again, I can’t help but think she’s a different kind of creature from us.
She doesn’t seem to know why she’s not doing well herself. She said she learned etiquette but was completely lacking in common sense. The maid’s expression when she heard that was quite amusing. It was like, “I completely forgot!” written all over her face. It must be because she’s really smart that she forgot to teach her the basics, leading to her unusual growth. Keena told me that if I was given a staff instead of a sword, I might have grown more like Alice. Leave me alone.
Well, in conclusion, Alice didn’t seek connections with nobility.
“I want to become stronger. Strong enough to protect important things and people.”
She’s a bit of a musclehead, isn’t she~? We all said she’s amazing as she is now, but it doesn’t seem like she’s just being modest; she genuinely believes it. So, I decided to ask her casually.
“So, how strong do you want to become?”
“I want to be able to easily defeat a dragon if one were to come.”
Well, that’s impossible. But with Alice, it feels like she might achieve it sooner or later. It’s strange how she always seems so confident.
We became quite close after that, but we won’t be able to meet during the summer break. That’s because Alice is going back to her family home in Arland… We had plans to meet, but it seems she was taken back against her will, according to what I heard. It goes beyond the scope of a maid.
Alice is really kind to her maid, Alicia, who is always with her. Some people treat their maids like objects, but Alice absolutely refuses to do so. According to Keena, “Alicia is more like a bodyguard than a maid. During a duel, she said that Alice might become an amazing magician, so the country has dispatched her.” She’s set for the future.
While we are having a conversation, Alicia just stands there smiling in the background, but when we’re apart, they talk normally. If anything, it’s more like Alicia is an older sister than anything else. They don’t look alike at all, so it’s more like an older sister in the sense of their relationship… that person is a bit scary, though.