Chapter 99
The officer in charge of assembling the Hero party at the Hero Support Agency blinked as he looked back and forth between the documents he had received and the people standing before him.
Hero, saint.
And warrior, mage, and archer.
It was an extremely textbook combination.
A warrior on the front line, with a mage and archer in the back who could concentrate firepower and respond flexibly to all sorts of variables.
And, of course, the key members: the Hero and the saint.
It was very textbook, but.
“L-Lady Chloe?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You’re doing this yourself...?”
Chloe nodded with tears half forming, silently affirming it.
Actually, this much was fine.
As the old maxim of noblesse oblige suggested, there were occasionally children of noble families who stepped forward themselves to shoulder the duties of the ruling class, even if they were acting on youthful impulse.
But then.
[Estea Golden Lintberius]
[Role: Warrior]
[Age: Dunno!]
[Race: The noble and great Gold Dragon!]
How on earth was he supposed to interpret these documents?
Even though they had demanded a prompt submission, he couldn’t just let such prank documents bypass the procedures of a public agency──
“Prank documents?”
As if she had read the officer’s mind.
Suddenly—arrrang—a cute little horn sprouted from her forehead.
And then—krrrang—a plump little tail emerged from her backside.
And to put the finishing touch on it.
Fwoosh!
A feat absolutely impossible for a Draconian half-breed.
Estea held a vivid blue flame in her mouth, blew it into the air with a whoosh─, and bared her fangs with a krrrang.
“Now, Estea-chan. You mustn’t bully people like that.”
A red-haired woman fearlessly picked up the dragon girl and hugged her tightly.
The officer was startled into trembling at the outrageous behavior, but.
“Mmph? No! I wasn’t bullying him!”
The dragon girl naturally nestled against the woman’s chest, making a soft nyang-nyang sound as she gently swished her tail.
The officer quietly let out a sigh of relief, then.
“I’ll formally review and process this immediately!”
He tried to hurry out at once.
But.
“Officer?”
The dragon girl’s voice, cheerful yet carrying an eerie chill, sent a cold shiver down his back as he turned away.
“Y-Yes!”
He turned around stiffly, creaking as his frozen body moved, but.
The dragon girl added nothing more.
She merely bared her fangs.
With a mischievous smile, she placed a finger to her lips.
“Shhh──”
The officer’s head bobbed up and down violently.
.
.
.
The officer, his face gone pale, ran like mad.
How could he keep his mouth shut in such a serious situation? Naturally, the entire upper administration—and indeed the entire nation—had to be placed on emergency alert.
At first, he had thought it was some kind of joke, but he had seen it with his own eyes.
The officer had also heard stories of the Mad Dragon Estea in fairy tales when he was young.
“Huff, huff, Count!”
“What is it?”
The patriotic officer tried to report this unprecedented situation as clearly and concisely as possible.
“──, ── has appeared!”
“What do you mean, something has appeared?”
“──!”
As the count’s brow furrowed, the officer belatedly grasped the situation with perfect clarity.
If she was strolling so boldly through the heart of the city, there were surely many other witnesses besides him.
The perfect answer to the question of why no rumors had spread.
It was lodged in his vocal cords.
In truth, it was only natural.
There were already high-ranking nobles aware of the dragon’s existence, including Duke Vertus and Duke Schnaisen.
Even so.
How could the Empire have failed to establish a Dragon Emergency Measures Committee, allowing Estea to toddle all over the Empire as though it were her own home?
The officer shed bitter tears and endured the count’s scolding for about an hour.
Even as he did so, he desperately forced himself to think of the bright side.
He didn’t know whether it was some whim or a form of entertainment.
But he could only hold on to the thought that, if she had gone so far as to put her name on the Empire’s Hero party, she probably held no explicit hostility toward the Empire.
He looked down at the documents he had been holding again.
[Estea]
[Role: Warrior]
[Age: ■■]
[Race: ■■■]
Before he knew it.
The words he remembered being written there had.
Either vanished or twisted into something bizarre.
* * *
This has freed me from every legal restriction that was binding me.
Now all I have to do is enjoy some fun health-training sessions with Seraphine every now and then for up to three years, then pick out some promising kid, designate them as a reserve Hero, and hand over the holy sword.
As for exercise, it would be good to get some in while I had the chance.
And even if an emergency broke out and I really had to play the Hero?
Dragon snap-finger, Demon Realm normalized.
At this point, it was practically a web novel protagonist concept.
Of course, the persuasion process hadn’t been particularly smooth.
“Mmm. Dragons are forbidden by the Dragon Pact from becoming deeply involved in human affairs......”
I sighed as I looked at Estea, who was shamelessly trying to take back her ‘request’ without changing her expression.
Then I gestured with my chin toward the musicians who had received twice the originally promised amount as a participation prize.
“Completely turning those people’s lives upside down doesn’t count as becoming deeply involved in human affairs?”
Faced with my eminently reasonable argument.
“What! I’m going to live however I want!”
The dragon whose conscience was questionable proudly puffed out her flat chest.
It would have been nice if the matter had ended with that much, but.
“Me too! I have a condition! You have to entertain me!”
Entertainment was such a subjective measure that one wrong step could easily turn this into a transaction where I was the only one losing out because of unfair trade practices, but.
I believed.
Did I believe in Nureongi’s conscience?
As if.
.
.
.
“O-oh, wooooow……!”
“Relax your grip. This is an incredibly delicate object, so if you handle it wrong, it’ll break. It’s an ancient relic, so it can’t be repaired.”
“O-Okay!”
What Nureongi, hungry for dopamine, held was.
A legendary item, probably one of a kind in this world, that had made an enormous contribution to my escape from reality for a while after I was transported here.
The Nin■do Switch 2.
Of course, I had no intention of simply handing it over to Nureongi and leaving her to it.
I was still too chicken to test whether broken electronic devices really repaired themselves at midnight.
It didn’t seem to lose any of its lifespan, of course, but still, you never knew.
“Here, Estea. I’ll explain it to you.”
I stationed Historié as a safety attendant to facilitate a smooth experience and distribute the risk.
Honestly.
I’d already enjoyed it as much as I could, so I wouldn’t be terribly disappointed even if it broke.
And if such a disastrous situation did occur?
‘You broke this precious thing that can never be found in this world again……! Repay me with your body!’
“Heehee.”
“It seems Kim Yul is having another strange thought. Come on, Estea.”
“Yeah!”
Sordid thoughts, you say.
I was only imagining becoming the strongest dragon rider and a great warrior soaring through the skies like Lawrence and Te■ler.
Honestly, wasn’t that the sort of thing a Hero was supposed to do?
* * *
The results Kim Yul obtained from his expedition to the dragon lair were quite substantial.
Naturally, the greatest result was acquiring the ability to summon a dragon, but there were various other things as well.
“This is...... a respected tyrant......!”
Through the opportunity to interview the people who had voluntarily imprisoned themselves in Estea’s dragon lair, he had been able to properly examine the life of a tyrant.
Of course, Estea had bought respect with money.
Napoleon had drawn respect out of people through charisma.
But in any case, it had been an experience that allowed him to understand the psychology of those who offered their respect, advancing his novelistic psychological descriptions by another step.
Of course, he couldn’t give Napoleon that sort of aspect right away.
In the first place, inspiration was the sort of thing that took root in small moments of everyday life.
Along with that flash of insight.
Kim Yul began writing, using Nureongi’s giggling squeaks as ASMR.
Napoleon had earned recognition for his military talent through the Siege of Toulon, but.
The previous installment had left him in the frustrating stretch where the Thermidorian Reaction had brought down the Jacobins who backed him, leaving him on the verge of losing his support.
Therefore.
There was a need to suppress public sentiment by administering a swift dose of catharsis.
But as Earth writers so often did, they tended to structure a hero’s entire life as a narrative that repeatedly alternated between frustration and catharsis.
Napoleon was no exception.
Facing the agitation of the counterrevolutionary royalists.
The 13th of Vendémiaire was waiting for him.
## ====== ##
“Bonaparte, I’m entrusting Paris’s fate to you.”
The voice of Paul Barras, commander of the National Convention’s army, was trembling.
Twenty-five thousand royalist rebels were besieging the Tuileries Palace, while the government forces defending it numbered only five thousand.
Numerical disadvantage was not the important part.
The rebels were overflowing with fighting spirit.
The government forces were trembling with fear.
Considering that nothing was more important on a battlefield than morale, it was an utterly desperate situation, but.
Napoleon slowly nodded.
“Give me full authority over the command. Make sure no one contradicts my orders.”
“……I authorize it. If it means we can stop that enormous wave, what wouldn’t I do? My neck is practically already in the guillotine.”
At Barras’s joke, Napoleon’s lips twisted coldly.
He unfolded a map.
The alleys of Paris spread out like a web.
Numerical superiority had meaning in open terrain, but it was difficult for it to matter in a city like this.
They might be brimming with morale, but they were nothing more than a militia. With the right shock, it should be more than possible to shatter them.
A map of Paris was taking shape in his mind like a chessboard.
The projection of overwhelming firepower.
A single act of cruelty.
Before long, he left the temporary command post.
Then he went to Menou, the previous commander of the suppression operation, grabbed him by the collar, and demanded that he explain everything he knew.
Menou resisted at first, but when he saw the gleaming insignia of a field commander on Napoleon’s shoulder, he soon resigned himself and explained why he had originally intended to abandon the suppression operation.
“Murat!”
“Yes, General!”
Joachim Murat’s deep voice rang out.
“Go to Sablons immediately and retrieve the forty cannons there. Make sure you bring them back before the rebels do.”
“I’ll be back faster than the wind.”
Murat led the cavalry out into the streets of Paris, where gunfire rang out intermittently.
Napoleon looked at his watch.
What if the royalist mobs seized the cannons first?
The Revolution would be over.
And so would his own road to advancement.
But.
“I won’t let that happen.”
…….
…….
Dawn.
The rattling of wheels began to echo noisily through the military camp.
Napoleon raised his head and watched Murat arrive with his cavalry, covered in mud and dragging the cannons behind them.
The cavalry force was smaller than when it had departed, but.
The cannons they had dragged back at the risk of their lives would save the lives not only of the cavalrymen, but of every soldier under his command.
Napoleon got off his horse and embraced Murat before he had a chance to say anything.
“G-General, what are you doing? You’ll get dirt on your clothes……!”
Unable to push him away, Murat stood there stiffly in confusion as Napoleon whispered quietly in his ear.
“You’ve worked hard, Murat.”
At those heartfelt words, Murat felt an indescribable emotion surge up from deep within his chest.
He had risked his life.
And Napoleon had recognized that act of risking his life.
While Murat shuddered, Napoleon released him and calmly dusted the dirt from his clothes.
And then.
“Deploy the cannons at the key roads around the Church of Saint-Roch. Aim the muzzles at head height and load them with grapeshot.”
Suppressing his emotions as much as possible, he issued the order in a cool voice.
In an instant, voices expressing bewilderment, voices of shock, words of approval, disapproval, and neutrality—all of them swirled around him.
“General, they’re citizens of Paris.”
The adjutant offered a trembling protest.
He wasn’t wrong.
“To retreat is decline, and to lose courage is death.”
As silence descended, Napoleon added one more sentence.
“For the Revolution.”
In the eyes of the National Convention’s soldiers, who bore the banner of the Revolution, a determined resolve began to replace despair and confusion.
Later generations would treat them as cruel men who aimed cannons at citizens and fired.
But that was a matter for later generations.
Along with survival.
Liberty, equality, fraternity.
With those words engraved in their hearts, the soldiers prepared the grapeshot and cannons without complaint and prepared to face the royalist attack that would soon come surging in.
And then.
4 p.m.
“Overthrow the National Convention!”
“Protect the Bourbons!”
From far away, cries began to ring out.
## ====== ##
“Phew.”
After finishing, Kim Yul stretched.
Normally, he would have worked through revisions with Historié, but unfortunately, she had been assigned as Nureongi’s exclusive agent, making it awkward to ask for such help.
If Nureongi got her hands on the manuscript and distracted him, wouldn’t all he hear before long be, ‘Write more! Write more!’?
So Kim Yul printed the manuscript without having anyone look it over first and trudged toward Novelpia’s headquarters.
Depending on how it was interpreted.
Killing the Emperor’s supporters for the sake of the Revolution.
Killing the citizens surging in for the sake of power.
Something that could be interpreted either way.
Holding a bomb made of printed words.