My Beloved Princess ~The Boy Called Incompetent Rises with Only a Sword and the Princess's Devotion~ - Chapter 114.1: Side Story: Bottom of the Well

Chapter 114.1: Side Story: Bottom of the Well

A tiny patch of sky.

About the size of a ring made with a thumb and forefinger.

Even if she stretched out her hand, it didn’t look like she could reach it.

The faint sunlight filtering down from the grey sky dimly lit the darkness around her.

When she tried to raise herself, a sharp pain ran through her left side. Pressing a hand there, she felt something warm and slick. Her worn pale blue dragon robe was stained red.

Turning her head, she saw splintered wood and stone bricks piled up all around her. Apparently, she had collapsed right in the middle of them.

With her hazy mind, Koharu tried to think.

Why am I in a place like this?

Tilting her head slightly, Koharu searched her memory.

During the battle to capture the royal capital, the slave vanguard unit that included Koharu had broken through the capital’s gate with an old siege weapon known as a battering ram.

There had been no enemy resistance, and they had taken no casualties.

That all-too-smooth battle had filled Koharu with a sense of foreboding.

But she had been given no time to think, nor allowed to stop.

Together with her comrades, she had surged into the royal capital’s plaza and advanced with a long spear in both hands.

It had all happened in a furious rush.

Nothing stood in their way. As though venting all the frustration they had built up until now, the mercenary men rampaged through the city even as they tore it apart.

Koharu’s assignment had been to secure the west gate, so she had tried to leave the plaza and head west.

However, the square had been packed shoulder to shoulder, and she couldn’t move the way she wanted. On top of that, Koharu was astonishingly short even compared to other girls, so once the crowd swallowed her up, she couldn’t secure a proper view.

That was probably why she never noticed the gaping hole in the ground. The slave soldier in front of her nimbly stepped over something, and the instant she wondered what it was, someone shoved her from behind and her vision went black.

Her memory ended there.

When she woke up, she was in this dim place.

She had probably injured her left side in the fall.

Her body, lying at an angle on its back, seemed to be resting on something like a plank. There was a puddle by her feet, and everything below her knees was submerged.

A bucket floated near her feet, and beneath the water lay a broken pulley and its post.

Koharu concluded that she must have fallen into a well.

Still, there were far too many wooden fragments and stone bricks for it to be just a well. Had it been in the middle of being filled in? Koharu tilted her head.

It didn’t seem as though her body would move. Her left side throbbed painfully.

Giving up on escape, Koharu remained on her back and gazed up at the narrow patch of sky.

She could see snow fluttering down in scattered flakes.

Koharu closed her eyes. She was sleepy.

She didn’t know how long she had slept. By the time she realised it, grey snow had piled up around her.

No, that wasn’t it. What had accumulated so thickly it looked ready to bury her body was ash.

It was as though she had buried herself in an enormous heap of fallen leaves. It was a little warm.

What had become of the battle to capture the royal capital?

Had the city burned down, with the ash drifting here and settling?

Even so, it felt like there was a little too much of it.

If the war ended, would her comrades notice that Koharu was missing?

But realistically, perhaps that would be difficult. One person quietly losing their life on the battlefield was far too ordinary. No one would search through the missing one by one.

Even so, perhaps…

“I wonder if Kokuren-sama would notice.”

White breath spilled from her lips, making the cold air tremble.

Just whispering that name made her heart grow warm.

But that person had suffered a terrible injury to his leg.

“He can’t come save me, can he? But Kirin-sama might.”

She pictured the faces of the two people who had told her she was their comrade.

The memory alone was enough to bring tears of joy to her eyes.

But thinking she couldn’t afford to rely on that kindness, Koharu tried once more to stand. Yet her body had grown as heavy as lead and would not move.

She looked up at the sky.

It was still, as ever, grey.

But the ash like snow was no longer falling.

Maybe she had a fever, because her head felt hazy.

Koharu closed her eyes once more.

◇◇◇◇◇

Morning came, then night.

Koharu spent many days inside the narrow well.

At the bottom of a well dug deep into the earth, and in the middle of winter, no less.

The cold cut into her flesh. Koharu curled up, making sure her feet stayed out of the water, and slept on the piled-up ash as though it were a bed.

At times, she wondered if she would simply die here in silence.

But the tough body of a dragonkin, even in such wretched conditions, gradually began to show signs of recovery. She couldn’t get any food, and her stomach growled the entire time, but after about three days she had recovered enough to at least crawl.

She gulped down the well water.

And by preserving her life that way, she waited for herself to recover further.

One week passed.

Koharu had recovered enough to stand.

She climbed the wall of the well and attempted to escape. Her physical strength had fallen greatly, but with a dragonkin’s physical abilities, escaping wasn’t all that difficult.

Hooking one foot over the edge of the well, she pulled herself up to the surface.

Morning sunlight touched her for the first time in a week.

But a different world spread out before her.

At the centre of the royal capital, where the royal castle had stood, the ground had been levelled bare, leaving behind a complete blank zone. From there, rubble gradually began to pile up in concentric circles, and the farther out it spread, in other words, the closer it came to the sturdy city walls, the more densely it was buried under debris.

To Koharu, it looked as though something had exploded.

There wasn’t a single human figure anywhere. Neither allied troops nor enemy troops.

Only the cold wind passed through the gaps in the ruins, whipping the settled ash back up into the air.

“Kokuren-sama? Kirin-sama?”

Koharu began walking aimlessly through the ruined royal capital.

There was no sign of people. There wasn’t even a moving shadow.

Had the world perished, leaving only Koharu behind? The deserted ruins made her feel that way.

Searching for human warmth, for even some trace of it, Koharu wandered.

She climbed the city wall and looked down over the royal capital from high ground, but the result was the same.

The Nobles’ Alliance camp set up in the distance was still there, but not even a single plume of smoke rose from a campfire, making it clear that it was deserted. Had they already withdrawn? Or else…

“Could it be, Kokuren-sama…?”

At that ominous thought, Koharu shook her head.

Then she started walking again.

Along the way, whenever Koharu found charred corpses burned black, she made graves for them. She didn’t know whether they were her own people or people of the enemy nation, but that didn’t change the fact that they were dead. She made a grave for every body and buried them all without discrimination.

One by one, graves without markers increased.

Before long, their number passed ten, and then passed a hundred.

She procured food from the abandoned forward base of the Nobles’ Alliance.

Had they been annihilated, or had they retreated? Koharu worried about Kokuren and Kirin’s safety, but she diligently prioritised making graves. If they happened to be among the dead here, then they had to be properly mourned.

Then one day.

As she was clearing away a pile of rubble and digging up a corpse, she heard a faint sound.

She listened closely.

It seemed to be coming from beneath her feet.

At first she thought someone had been buried alive, but that wasn’t it.

As she removed the heap of rubble to trace the source of the sound, a floor hatch leading to a cellar appeared. The hatch was securely locked, but Koharu smashed it open by force.

Then she stepped underground.

A dark staircase stretched down below. Using the light of a lamp to guide her, she descended and emerged in a wide room.

Koharu’s eyes widened at the scene spread before her.

There were numerous box-shaped cages. Cages no bigger than wooden crates were stacked so tightly there was scarcely room between them, and inside the iron bars lay beastkin children collapsed in exhaustion.

Every one of them was younger than Koharu, mere boys and girls not yet grown.

A weak metallic clanging, like someone tapping cage bars, rang out. This was the sound that had reached all the way outside. The one making it was a large-built boy crammed into a cage that looked painfully cramped. Even in a daze, he kept striking the iron bars with the shackles fastened to his hands.

When Koharu approached, he looked relieved and said,

“Please save my friends.“

Those were his last words. The boy used up the last of his strength and breathed his last.

Burning away the final scraps of his life, he had kept calling for help for the sake of his companions.

Tears welled in her eyes.

Most of the beastkin had already died of weakness, and only six managed to survive. All of them were around ten years old, and among them was even a girl of six.

After giving them the food she had on hand and letting them catch their breath, she tried asking what had happened. They said they had been brought to the royal capital to be auctioned off while they were being sold as slaves.

Though she herself was also a slave, the difference in treatment pained Koharu’s heart.

It was true that Koharu had no freedom, but she had never been subjected to the sort of confinement where shackles were clamped onto her hands and feet and she was locked inside a cage. She had at least possessed the freedom to interact with kind people like Kokuren and Kirin.

That night, everyone huddled together and fell asleep.

When one of them began sobbing, perhaps because they missed their mother, it spread to the rest, and before long they were all crying their eyes out. It was no wonder. They were still too young to live on their own. The anxiety of being left behind in a foreign land was easy enough to imagine.

Koharu made up her mind.

She too was utterly alone in the world, with nowhere to go.

If that was the case, then she would take care of these children herself.

After that, she and the beastkin children divided the work and kept making graves.

For days and days. Whether strong winds sent dust swirling, whether rain fell, whether snow piled up, they kept at it diligently without rest.

And when at last the royal capital had been filled with graves without markers,

Koharu set out on a journey with the beastkin children.

She would not return to her homeland. Protecting them and raising them was Koharu’s mission now. Their races were different, but they were already a proper family, her comrades. She couldn’t take them back to her dangerous homeland.

“I’m sorry, Kokuren-sama. If you’re alive, then let’s meet again somewhere someday.”

With that wistful murmur, Koharu disappeared into the wasteland where dust storms raged.