The Crown Prince Who Raises Alt Characters

#Chapter 371 Ghost Sirius (11) - Or It might sound utterly absurd, and if you said it to some passerby you might get a reaction of surprise, but Lucidra is a Greater Demon. It's just that she's always being pushed around and suffering at the Crown Prince's hands — in terms of sheer havoc-wreaking power capable of turning the continent upside down, she wasn't one to easily fall behind, either. And so, that wicked and terrifying Greater Demon, Lucidra, declared: "Let's wreck them." Her long black hair drifted upward on the mana billowing off her, and her red eyes were charged with killing intent enough to make anyone watching go weak in the knees (the Crown Prince excepted). "These bastards crossed the line. We have to wreck them right now, don't we?!" "Hmm. Specifically?" "Drag every last one of them into a dream. And make them have nightmares. They think they've woken from the nightmare, and it's another nightmare. They wake from that one, and it's another nightmare. Repeat that over and over until their minds are ground to dust, then make them mistake reality for a dream so they go and cause some incident — and then take them down with the full force of the law!!" "That's suspiciously specific. Have you done this before, by any chance?" "…A little?" "Ha ha ha, relax. I'm no zealot for justice, and it's got nothing to do with me — I'm not about to go condemning someone else's past history one detail at a time." Of course, if she did it in a situation that concerned him, he'd wring her neck for it. At least, that was how the words sounded to Lucidra. While the Greater Demon whistled innocently, eyes sliding away, the Crown Prince spoke, the tension easing lightly from his shoulders. "No." "Ah, why not?!" "Because this is the imperial capital. You seem to keep forgetting, now that most of my tutors have cleared out of the palace lately, but if your existence were ever discovered, it would cause an uproar in more ways than one. Honestly, even this business of raising havoc through dreams is already toeing a razor's edge." The Empire was the mightiest of the great powers, and back when the Crown Prince had been deep in his lessons, the capital had been a veritable den of monsters among them. That was because talents who, under ordinary circumstances, either played head of their own faction or holed up in some corner — the kind who would only gather if the Emperor issued a general summons — had come flooding into the capital en masse, all just to teach the one Crown Prince. These days, though, the Emperor — having resolved to give the Crown Prince more free time (while conveniently offloading his own work in the process) — had declared to everyone except Baldur, the swordsmanship instructor the Crown Prince himself had chosen, "You've taught him well enough up to now, so let's leave it there," and as a result, the density of 6th Rank in the capital had dropped sharply. So much so that the number of people capable of sensing a Greater Demon's presence had greatly diminished, letting Lucidra move about far more freely than before. But even so, the capital was still the capital, and the Empire was still the Empire. As for raising havoc within dreams — since Lucidra was originally a succubus who had transcended her own species to become a transcendent, and it was hard to tell what purpose, if any, her influence on reality served, it was being let slide well enough. But pulling something like what she'd just described? "A single superhuman-class 6th Rank mage, and a single prestigious mage house he leads. If the whole lot of them went berserk all at once, do you really think no one would catch the suspicious scent of it? The Empire's body is bloated and its hide is thick, so it's slow to react — but that doesn't mean it has no head." "Then what about you handling it yourself? You could send them off politically, the way you did with the demon Kron." "That case was resolved simply because I reviewed 'my own property' once again — and that was only possible because the other side had touched two things first: the imperial family and the law of succession. What the Boriel Count Family is doing right now is, at the very least, a different situation from that." "Tch." Lucidra clicked her tongue. Honestly speaking, the Crown Prince was eccentric enough to be called a crazy one, but at the same time, he had a side to him that clung, almost maddeningly so, to his own personal "line." One instance of that was his refusal to let his True Body step in and resolve whatever problems his Clone ran into. (E/N: Well, he did it 3 times already, and that's only those I remember. Arguably 4 times.) It wasn't a matter as simple as just not wanting to work while he was off enjoying himself. To begin with, this man went right on working perfectly well while insisting it was all leisure. No, it was a matter of value. If the True Body stepped in to solve every single problem the Clone encountered, what would be the point of having a separate Clone at all? What value would there be in the effort and blood the Clone, and those alongside the Clone, poured into things, if the True Body could just step in — poof — and solve it all, and that would be the end of it anyway? In a way, it was much the same logic behind how the Crown Prince's Clone kept dying, one after another, to save people it had taken a liking to. Because the value of a real person's life outweighed that of a Clone's. There were exceptions, but even those were, for the most part, cases where the Clone's problem happened to overlap with something that fell within "the category of work the True Body was meant to handle anyway." Or else, as with the beggar Gritz, the gimmick was simply built into the Clone's own nature from the start. "So then, you're just going to stand by and watch, even if these Boriel people, or whatever they're called, go ahead and cage that actress, Stella?" "If they don't cause an incident large enough to demand the Crown Prince of the Empire's direct intervention, then yes, I suppose I would." Ordinarily, those words would amount to something close to a refusal. But by this point, Lucidra was no mere veteran of the Crown Prince — she was practically a master of him. She might, perhaps, know the Crown Prince even better than his own family did. And so, she was able to see through even what the Crown Prince left unsaid. "Say there's a fork splitting left and right. The right path is the one you have to take, and the left path is the one you want to take." "Then I suppose I'd have to take the right one." "But what if you had one more body to spare?" At the Greater Demon's question, the Crown Prince smiled. "Why, of course I'd go try the left one." *** Though she had already shared the same stage with him upward of dozens of times, Stella had never once had a proper conversation with Sirius. As the characters who appeared on stage, they recited lines to each other, exchanged glances, embraced, even touched skin to skin — but that was, to the very end, only the connection between "the heroine within the story" and "the hero within the story." As the individual Stella Rosenberg, she had never once exchanged a real conversation with the individual Sirius. She didn't know who he was, why he performed and vanished night after night, or even whether he was truly human to begin with. In truth, it couldn't have been helped. Sirius existed on stage only as a performer, and the moment the curtain fell, he would vanish without even sparing time for a proper goodbye. What could she do, when even speaking to him never turned into an actual conversation? And today, Stella didn't even have a way to hold that "conversation as characters." Because she hadn't brought a script with her. Sure enough, Sirius seemed to show no particular interest in Stella as she sat in the audience seats, staring blankly up at the stage. As if to say that, unless Stella joined in, he would simply carry on the play alone, he merely went on quietly performing without a counterpart role. 『You ask how, in a mortal body, I dare speak the will of a god? Let me ask you the reverse. What value could there possibly be in a divine will that mortals cannot even begin to discuss?』 '…What tremendous acting.' It was admiration she had already voiced countless times before, and yet Stella couldn't help but marvel at it all over again. Because Sirius's acting was, quite simply, dizzying to that degree. Stella had performed dozens of scenes opposite Sirius. Her counterpart had been an adventurer, a servant, a thief, a scholar, a beggar, a suspect, a priest, and even a criminal. And in every single one of those roles, Stella had come face to face with "an entirely different person." Becoming one with the role. Countless actors aimed for it, and some even achieved it — but in truth, however desirable that state might be for an actor, it wasn't nearly so desirable for a human being. A role was a personality. A role was a life. To become one with a role meant accepting someone else's personality and life as "one's own." Naturally, this took an immense toll on the mind, and there were even cases where an actor grew so absorbed in a single role that they never fully recovered from the aftereffects. And yet, what of Sirius? Each time he performed, he became one with a brand-new role. And in his very next performance, he became one with yet another new role. And he pulled that off without contradiction, without wavering, flawlessly, roughly once a week. Even Stella, for all the strength of her sense of self and the firmness of her ego, had no confidence that she could keep switching personalities that rapidly while still holding on to the individual called "Stella Rosenberg." Granted, part of that was simply because her own acting style leaned less toward immersion and more toward analysis — toward calculating how she would appear to others. 'In the end, was it simply a difference in caliber?' She had believed she could catch up. And indeed, her skill had actually improved compared to before. But. She simply couldn't bring herself to believe that a weak self like this — one who wavered and harbored hesitation over mere outside pressure like this — could ever climb to such a supreme height. While Stella sat lost in thought, the story on stage was drawing to its close. Sirius would vanish now, surely. And perhaps, she herself would never again appear on this stage. It was just then, as Stella quietly closed her eyes. 『─I am Sirius. Angel, and demon, and no one at all.』 At the voice that rang out once more from a curtain that had surely already fallen, Stella's eyes went wide. Amid the darkness of night and the light of the moon, the man in the Domino Mask spoke toward Stella. Or perhaps, performed. 『─Or perhaps, the Phantom who has taken root in your heart, Stella. (Or Stella, the Phantom of your mind)』(E/N: The part in parenthesis is written in english in the raw. So I guess Phantom was more fitting than Ghost.)