Chapter 200: Chapter 200 - Life Doesn’t Like Us Having Time Off
"You should be RESTING, Aurea."
Yaci and Lovelace are both staring at the princess, who is at the desk in her office, dealing with paperwork.
"I should, yeah. Will you make the deputy who we just arrested solve all this for me, then? Will you entrust him with the restructuring of the city guard and the dismantling of the remainders of the slavery rings?"
Aurea doesn’t even raise her eyes from the documents on her desk as she answers them. She had planned to take it easy while adapting to the new position, but life had its own plans, as it often has.
Seeing her determination and the truth of her words, the other two have no option but to fold.
"Then I’ll help you with what I can. Don’t take it all to yourself."
"I agree with Lovelace. I’m not that good with paperwork, but I can help with a lot of stuff."
Aurea finally takes her eyes off the documents and looks at her girlfriends. The bags under her eyes tell how little she has slept since arriving in Altenfeld.
"Yaci, would you like to be the captain of the city guard? It would be very helpful to me, as it would take a lot out of my hands, and I trust you fully. A beastkin occupying such a high position would also be a strong message."
Yaci jumps at the offer, with glistening eyes.
"Yes!! That would be awesome!"
"Good. Shalia, would you please help her adapt to her new role?"
Aurea talked to the elf woman who was just entering through the door. Shalia smiles gently as she puts more documents on Aurea’s desk.
"Of course! It is a bit different than commanding army troops during a war, but I think that she has what it takes to be a good guard captain."
Shalia and Yaci started chatting animatedly and walked out of the room, prompting Aurea to release a deep sigh.
"That’s a heavy burden lifted off my shoulders. I can rest knowing that the two of them will restructure the city guard to be a role model for the whole country."
"Indeed, Yaci is becoming a very capable leader and has a pretty good eye for people. And what about me? In what may I help you, my dear Aurea?"
"You are the court wizard, and you’re here supposedly on vacation. Thus, I can’t appoint you to any official position. But you’re good with parsing data. Would you help me make sense of all this?"
Aurea gestures to two piles of the documents scattered on her desk.
"These are the financial reports of the last fifteen years, from the whole province. They seem deliberately confusing and convoluted, so I’m having a hard time following it all."
She then shows Lovelace her notebook, in which she has been penning some spreadsheets.
"I’m trying to translate all that information into a more readable format. Can you help me with that?"
"Of course!"
Lovelace takes some documents and sits at a desk near Aurea and starts working on the data.
:::
PoV: Nakata
Under guidance of the Pontifex and a group of paladins, Yumegami Nakata has been training her new abilities and studying the reality of this new world she found herself in.
Of course, she had access only to the version of events told by the Church.
She used to be a conservative, back on Earth. She thought that the new world order was bad, that people were disrespecting tradition too much, and that foreign people should remain in their own countries and never try to live in hers.
And yet, she was a modern person nonetheless. There were some lines she would never cross. And also some liberties that she expected to have as a free person, despite being a woman.
All the slavery and the misogyny she was facing were making her feel nauseated.
She was used to seeing people slander other races and often went along with it. But the first time she saw a collared cat girl being brutally punished for a small mistake, her blood boiled.
And yet, she stayed silent. ’When in Rome, act like the Romans’ is a universal truth. Even though she has a theoretically high position because of her status as a hero sent by the goddess, she wasn’t sure yet of how substantial or decorative her position actually was.
And she wasn’t very fond of the idea of dying.
So she blinded herself to the stuff that she saw around her and focused obsessively on training and mastering the game-like system and her blessings.
Some people say that money equals power or that social status equals power. But Nakata knew, deep down, that only power equals power. And that truth was even stronger in a world where a person could become a walking calamity thanks to magic and to the System.
:::
Around two weeks after her arrival at the city of Viscatya, capital of the kingdom of Castro, a lone horseback rider arrived at the temple, causing a commotion in her wake.
Nakata was in the middle of her evening exercise routine on the training grounds outside when she heard the ruckus coming from inside the temple. She got curious and went to see what was happening, as it was highly unusual.
After all, the temple was silent most of the time, with the eventual masses and singing of sacred hymns to break the silence. She was yet to see anyone shouting or running within the holy premises until this moment.
She hurried inside, still wearing her training clothes, soaked with sweat, and with the wooden sword in her hand.
She arrived in time to see the Pontifex almost running into the main hall and a beautiful woman in military attire down on one knee with her head lowered.
"Princess Urraca. What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in Wesgoth, leading the crusader army against the heretics?"
"The crusade is no more. We were utterly defeated. I came as fast as I could so I could deliver the news personally. The remainder of the survivors are to arrive in the next week or so."