I’m groaning as I hold my pen.
I can shift my entire body across the desk in my dorm room. I can look up, and I can look down. But my pen won’t move.
Because there is nothing to write.
“How am I supposed to report on Sei? I only vaguely know what he’s doing, and he’s already reported it all to the prime minister anyway. What’s the point of this whole monitoring thing when I don’t even fully know what he’s up to?”
The thing I’m racking my brain over is my regular status report about the guy who got summoned alongside the Holy Maiden from another world. King’s orders. You see, the Romany Kingdom suffers from miasma once every century, and only the Holy Maiden can purify it. This time, the Holy Maiden came from another world or something, so they revived an ancient magic spell to summon her here, only to drag along this other random guy who had nothing to do with it. That’s Sei.
Sei is an adult man who isn’t very energetic. The higher-ups wanted to pretend the whole gaffe never happened by paying him a basic stipend to lounge about. But then, for some reason, he asked for a job. Even now, I still can’t wrap my head around it. So they shrugged and threw him into the Funnel Department, which used to be the Accounting Department’s nickname.
Nobody told him to do a thing, but he threw himself into work anyway and did all kinds of things to earn himself a good reputation, like fixing the kingdom’s finances, proposing a way to stop the miasma without the Holy Maiden’s purification, exposing corruption in the church, and making a school to train future employees. He gave me stuff to do as well, and my house’s title even got promoted from viscount to count. I’ve got him to thank for that.
I was keeping an eye on Sei in case he had any hostility toward the royal family, but the opposite turned out to be true. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I called him the savior of Romany.
Not that Sei was putting in all that effort for the kingdom’s sake—I bet he’d get pretty mad at me if I called him a savior. He was just trying to do his job efficiently. Well, to be precise, he had his own goal and was ticking off the steps to achieve it one by one. Sometimes he ended up spinning three or four plates at the same time. But anyway, that’s not the problem here.
The problem is that the country no longer has a reason to make me spy on Sei, who is now my boss, but I still got a letter telling me to hurry up with the report.
You see, the king wants me to write him a letter. He calls it a report, but he basically just wants to hear from me. Because I’m his illegitimate son.
My mother was a low-ranked woman who worked in the palace, and when I was born, I was adopted into the Blanc family. Oh, I should mention that this isn’t a huge scandal or anything. All the higher-up nobles know about it.
Me, I’ve thought of myself as Norbert Blanc for as long as I can remember. After I had my christening at six, the people I thought of as my parents told me about my background. Even then, I was like, “Uh, okay?” Nothing actually changed after that anyway. Every now and again I get called to formal ceremonies so I can learn my role as a retainer, and that’s about it, so I kind of forget about my royal blood most of the time.
Things changed a little after I started keeping an eye on Sei, though. Before, the king and the prince (my half brother, basically) just watched me from afar at ceremonies and whatnot. Now I have more chances to see them and talk to them in person. That’s all well and good, but the distance never really bothered me, and I get the impression that they’re weirdly conscious of me. A part of me is like, “Um, why now, after all this time?” but if I say that, my adoptive dad will do an awkward chuckle and I’ll feel like a kid going through his rebellious phase.
Anyway, that’s why I’m writing this pointless report. Well, I would be if I didn’t have crazy writer’s block.
Sei’s been juggling so many projects over these past ten months—I bet he can’t take on more work. That’s what my dumb brain assumed, at least.
Activity Report No. 34
Sei was appointed to guide the Egorovan guests on their upcoming visit. This sounds excessive for a person who already deals with a mountain of work. Apparently, he will be handling everything except for the technical magic explanations, which a member of the Sorcery Department will help him with.
I hope that you do not overburden him. Although his health has improved significantly, his constitution has never been the strongest, and the air of this world does not agree with him.
In the meantime, I have taken on his Accounting Department work.
After I wrote that down, I wondered if I sounded kind of accusatory, but oh well. I sent it off. I mean, we’re talking about assigning a super important state matter to a guy who does three times the work of a normal person—and is frail to boot!
I mean, sure, Sei is brilliant and all. I can always rest easy when he’s on the job. But can you really extend that to the whole kingdom of Romany? What are we even going to do if he goes away?
Wait. It just hit me.
“Oh, right… Sei’s gonna leave someday…”
For sure he wants to go home. He was dragged here against his will, and he came up with a whole bunch of initiatives to establish a way back to his world. No duh. Who wouldn’t want to go home in his shoes? Not to mention that this world’s air doesn’t even suit him. I can’t imagine why he’d want to stick around.