I didn't really know what to do, so I just recklessly went up to the seventh floor and knocked on the 'Monthly Royal Class' clubroom door.
-Bang, bang!
If they weren't in, I planned on going to every class to look for them, but the door opened up. The clubroom was definitely smaller than Grace's, but it was still pretty large because this was Royal Class, after all.
There were three people sitting at a table that looked like a conference table. The one who opened the door was a man that looked like a senior.
"You're… Reinhardt?"
"Ah, yes."
I was planning to at least shout something like, "What the hell do you bastards think you're doing?!"
However, the people who seemed to be that club's members had gloomy expressions on their faces, and there was, of course, one more person that definitely wasn't part of this club.
"…Reinhardt."
Charlotte, with her chin resting on her right hand, sat at the table—looking at me as if I was pathetic.
"Sigh… You really came in person, huh?"
Charlotte shook her head in disbelief as if she was actually disappointed.
* * *
All the seniors sitting opposite Charlotte kept their mouths tightly shut. They were surrounded by a rather solemn atmosphere. What? Why was she here?
"Why are you here?"
"…I was sure you'd come over here to fight, so I came here in advance to stop you before you end up destroying everything."
"Ah."
Charlotte expected how I would act. But I tried to hold back first, you know? I only became so angry because Harriet kept on egging me on, you know?
…Anyway, I ended up going there, so Charlotte read me correctly, I guess.
She went there in advance, expecting that I would cause a scene. Still, it was pretty creepy that she ended up reading me so accurately.
Although the other guys were our seniors, they were all frozen solid—probably because the Imperial Princess ended up coming to their club room. Charlotte smiled subtly as she looked at the monthly newspaper that got published that day lying on the table.
"Of course, I also came here because I noticed that the article differed greatly from what I said in the interview."
I felt all the seniors flinch at those words. In front of Charlotte, who was a lot higher in status than them, they were like mice before a cat. By the way, that club only had three members? The Royal Class had so few students, so that might not be too surprising, actually.
Charlotte smiled and looked into their eyes one by one.
"Seniors, I definitely said something to the effect of Reinhardt being a good person in the interview. So how did the content end up like this?"
Charlotte was scary when she was angry, but her smiling like that was scary in its own way. It was creepy in a different sense than Bertus's.
One of them opened their mouths in response to Charlotte's interrogation-styled question.
"Ththat's… When I compiled the answers of all the interviews of the first years, it seemed like there were a lot of them scared of Reinhardt and… We wanted to focus on the unspoken."
"Ah, so because of that gap you felt, you wrote a speculative article telling others that Reinhardt might bully his classmates and those other things?"
"It wasn't just mere speculation; we judged most of those things to be kind of true…"
They seemed to switch between polite and informal speech a lot, and the one who spoke just then felt extremely polite but still talked informally.
"You're saying that you chose uncertain facts that you gleaned from unspoken words over the certain content of the interviews? You just picked out some uncertain circumstantial information and built the article around—"
"Ththat's not it!"
The president cut off Charlotte's words while she was still talking, but she kept on smiling.
"Anyway, you completely ignored when I said in my interview that Reinhardt is a sincere and good person, didn't you?"
The problem isn't that you insulted Reinhardt but that you ignored the statement of the Imperial Princess, you know?
That was what she meant.
Scary.
She was sometimes scarier than Bertus!
Reaper Scans
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"That… That's… That's…"
"Of course, it is true that Reinhardt is only close to the female students. In fact, because he caused one problem after the other at the beginning of the semester, his image as a problem child became ingrained in everyone's mind."
Why are you doing this all of a sudden?! If you want to insult me, at least look at me! This feels like you're talking to someone else, so it hurts even more!
"But since then, he hasn't caused a single problem, and I don't think Reinhardt is actually a lecherous person. He only maintains healthy friendships with the people he's close with."
Is this the carrot after the stick?
Anyway, Charlotte expected that I would come over and flip the place upside down myself. She was worried about me, after all, so she took action first to meet me there.
I was grateful, although I felt a little complicated, as it still seemed like Charlotte saw me as a crazy bastard.
"I think it is very bad practice to harm individual students by releasing such uncertain information."
They did publish some insults about me, and, no matter if they were a student club or not, they still published a monthly newspaper. It seemed unacceptable to Charlotte for them to report based on implications rather than facts under the guise of journalism.
The seniors listened to her, looking even more nervous than when confronted with a teacher's scolding.
"I don't know why you wrote such an article about Reinhardt; however, there's no law that forbids you from doing as such… Unless you've done similar things before."
Charlotte looked towards the president and blinked.
"Did you keep your old publications? I want to take a look at them."
"Uh, ah… Yes…"
Looking at the situation, it became clear that the Prince and Princess seemed to abide by Temple's rules and yet not at all.
In Temple, there was a hierarchy between seniors and juniors, but the Princess, whose status was excessively high, ordered that fourth-year around with no hesitation at all, although it was only a nominal request.
The president handed Charlotte the previous editions of "Monthly Royal Class", which they kept in the club room. Charlotte asked me to sit next to her, requesting that we look through them together.
So there I was, sifting through those previous publications together with Charlotte. It seemed like she wanted to see if they slandered anyone else by spreading malicious rumors without any proper basis like they did with me.
If Charlotte determined that the club crossed the line multiple times, would she get rid of it somehow?
-Flip… Flip…
"Hmm… This is a monthly paper that's only available inside the Royal Class, right?"
"Oh, yes. That's right…"
"Do a lot of people read it?"
Charlotte didn't stop asking questions while reading through the articles.
"Well… To be honest, hardly anyone ever reads it… But there are still some people who read it when a new issue is published—"
"Well, actually, even if they look through it, they tend to prefer reading the weekly Temple Times, not ours."
While the president murmured, another senior interrupted him.
Those guys were accurately evaluating the value of their publications. The president glared at the other senior, who had suddenly intervened as if he was talking nonsense. They still seemed to have some pride in what they did.
"So… This is a newspaper one wouldn't read unless one was curious about Royal Class' internal news. It's also a monthly newspaper, and even the people that are interested in it prefer to read the weekly newspaper published by a larger club called Temple Times instead of this internal publication, is that right?
"T-they certainly have a lot more members than us… So we can't even compete with their level of writing and amount of information."
It was a monthly newspaper, but barely anyone read it. In fact, if people wanted to get some information, they'd rather read the weekly newspaper made by a much larger number of people than the monthly newspaper made by only three—that much was obvious.
It couldn't even be called a third-rate tabloid. No one read it in the first place, so why the hell did they publish something about me in there? They wanted to get people reading. The first-years knew they were going to cover me, so all of them read their newspaper, and those seniors that were curious about me or disliked me were likely to read it as well.
Charlotte sighed.
"I'm rather glad about that. All your content is weird speculative reports, dripping in conspiracy theories and circumstantial evidence… If people actually ended up believing this stuff, it would cause a lot of trouble…"
Charlotte continued to talk while reading the articles, then she suddenly stopped her breath.
She was reading last month's, May's, publication.
Visit readel.me for extra chapters.
The attack on the Imperial Capital, why did it happen?
The attack on the Imperial Capital, presumed to be the work of demons, caused great chaos in the Capital as well as the whole Empire. This incident is presumed to be the work of remnants of the Demon Realm, and although it had been announced that they are currently being pursued, there have been no clues or news of them catching the perpetrators up until now, about a month after the incident. However, we didn't even consider very fundamental questions that we should have. This time, apart from the identity and purpose of the perpetrators, we would like to consider some questions the authorities did not present.
The incident took place at night, taking advantage of the dark hours when all citizens of the Imperial Capital were deep asleep. We have a brief overview of events. They seemed to have clashed with the Knights Templar in front of their headquarters and escaped by seizing the Warp Gate located there. But, just why were the main forces of the Knights Templar outside that night? The Knights Templar did not give their statement about this. They didn't mention anything else other than claiming that they had been attacked. So it's only natural to wonder just why the most elite unit of the Knights Templar wander around outside of their headquarters late at night. This question needs an answer.
Therefore, after pondering deeply about this matter, one might come to the conclusion that there has to be a different reason behind the demons' attack on the Knights Templar.
Charlotte fell silent after looking at the article.
Why did the most elite members of the Knights Templar wander around outside, fully dressed in armor at night? Weren't they actually on some kind of secret mission for which they had to go around like that at night?
Why were there no casualties when such a large-scale attack took place, and why did they just run off through a warp gate? If it was an attack, wouldn't they have chosen a different place? What would they gain by attacking those elite troops?
The article pointed out various suspicious things and said that there was something else going on behind the scenes we didn't know about.
They were convinced that there was more to this, although they didn't base this on facts but mere suspicions, and their tone was so confident that it was pretty much an insult towards the Empire.
With a firm look in her eyes, Charlotte looked at each of the club members.
"…These people will end up creating a lot of trouble. Really."
'Did you guys go fucking crazy, or do you actually want to die?', That was what she tried to signal to them.
Of course, Charlotte was furious.
"No, it's a relief that no one has read nor cared for this newspaper so far. Do you think you can say whatever you want just because you're Temple students? This is both an insult towards the Knights Templar and the Imperial Family! Thank the Gods that no one has ever cared enough for your nonsensical speculative articles!"
Charlotte was very furious and shouted wildly at her seniors.
But I couldn't help but know the real reason behind her anger. The article drew quite a few conclusions that came very close to the Imperial Family's as well as Knights Templar's hidden side. I mean, all of it was very suspicious to begin with.
However, Charlotte got so angry because she knew that if other people carefully read this article without a filter, their lives would be in danger.
It was as if they were asking to be dragged to the streets to get killed.
Everyone was trembling at the Princess' extreme anger; I was no different.
I was hella scared!
Charlotte didn't stop shouting as she looked over the other publications beside that one.
"These are all just rumors and misinformed speculations! 'Are there believers of the Demon Gods' Church in Temple?', 'Are there any Revolutionary Forces in Temple?', 'Are there members of the Magic Society inside of Temple?', seriously… Do you just write whatever comes to mind?! This isn't even worth writing about. 'Are there ghosts in Temple?' Why are you writing articles like that?!"
There was also a problem occurring on my side.
[Quest appeared – Revolutionary Forces]
[Description: There are rumors that there are Revolutionary Forces hiding inside Temple.]
[Goal: Uncover the truth behind the rumors.]
[Reward: 300 achievement points]
[Quest appeared – Magic Society]
[Description: There are rumors that members of the Magic Society have infiltrated the Temple.]
[Goal : Uncover the truth behind the rumors.]
[Reward: 300 achievement points]
[Quest appeared – The Phantom of Temple]
[Description: There are rumors that ghosts are haunting Temple.]
[Goal : Uncover the truth behind these rumors.]
[Reward: 300 achievement points]
Three quests emerged instantly. What? Was that place like a quest vending machine?
"And what is this? Great. I don't know if you thought this was a big concession not by saying that they are in the Empire, but by stating that there are demon spies in Temple? Really…? Temple has its own barrier that repels demons. How do you think demons could get in here like that?"
[Quest appeared – Temple's Demons]
[Description: There are rumors that demon spies have infiltrated Temple… Oh, that's you!]
[Goal: lol… sorry…! LOL…!!]
[Reward : -]
['Quest – Temple's Demons' has been deleted.]
That crazy fucker again.
Charlotte shook her head and turned her eyes towards those three as if she couldn't leave them alone.
…What Demon spies?
Was everything those idiots wrote unexpectedly correct? Charlotte burst into laughter as she rummaged through other editions, wondering if they could get even more absurd.
"Just what is this—"
"Ch-charlotte. Stop, let's take a break."
Otherwise, I was going to be swamped in quests!