"Your Highness! Your Highness! Hurry and open the door! Come play a thrilling card duel with me! The kind with only 1,000 Life Points!"
Outside the dormitory room, Rena—wearing a black-and-white maid dress with her lively hair tied in a high ponytail—was knocking loudly on Lilith's tightly shut door, her voice brimming with eager excitement.
"No! Where is the thrill in that?! You're literally just speeding up how fast someone wins or loses!"
Lilith's voice drifted out from inside the room, carrying clear annoyance and embarrassment.
Rena blinked and tilted her head in thought.
"Since Your Highness finds ordinary card duels boring, then... how about we play the legendary Shadow Duel? If I lose, I'll keep being your maid as usual. But if you lose, then you'll have to become my maid! How about that? Thrilling enough, right?"
The room fell silent for two seconds before Lilith erupted into an even more exasperated shout:
"You really are just a pure idiot, aren't you?! Stop standing at my door saying such stupid things! I'm getting some rest!"
"Ehhh—why..."
Rena wilted like a frostbitten eggplant.
Slumping her shoulders, she walked back sluggishly to her two older sisters, who had been quietly waiting nearby in the hallway.
"As expected, it didn't work..."
Rena showed a disappointed expression to her sisters and muttered in a small voice:
"My perfect plot still couldn't fool the clever Highness. She's still refusing to come out of her room."
Layla: "..."
Renee: "..."
What plot are you talking about?
Trying to overthrow your master through a single card duel?
Renee, who had chin-length short hair, sighed helplessly. She was more concerned about practical matters, her gaze drifting toward the shut door with worry:
"Ever since Her Highness came back from outside this morning, she has locked herself in her room without eating or drinking, nor letting anyone in. It's almost been a full day. I wonder how her body is holding up..."
Layla pushed up the glasses on the bridge of her nose, her eyes behind the lenses filled with deep thought as she slowly spoke:
"We can't entirely blame Her Highness for this. I didn't expect someone else besides us to notice her true feelings, let alone that it would be Greg Sass of all people. It's truly unexpected, so it's no wonder Her Highness only wants to hide away right now."
As Lilith's personal maids who had served her since childhood, the three sisters had naturally seen that former fiancé who was once engaged to First Princess Vivian—Greg Sass.
She still remembered years ago, at an official banquet in the royal palace, when they first saw that blond boy brought along by Duke Sass. Even though they were used to seeing brilliant young nobles, they couldn't help but marvel inwardly at his dazzling good looks.
Back then, Greg Sass had still possessed a touch of youthful innocence, but his manners were elegant, his speech polite, and his eyes clear. Standing beside Princess Vivian, who was already beginning to shine, they had looked like a match made in a fairy tale. Anyone who saw them would praise them as a match made in heaven.
Even Princess Lilith, who had still been quite young at the time, hadn't shown her usual aversion to strangers when she first met her prospective brother-in-law. Instead, she had blinked her large, round red eyes and peeked at him secretly for a long time.
Back then, almost everyone believed that it would be a beautiful marriage and one of the symbols of the kingdom's future stability.
However, good times did not last long.
At some point, the rumors about Greg Sass began to take a sharp turn for the worse.
It was as if his personality had drastically changed overnight. He became arrogant, stupid, and rude, relying on his family background to run wild everywhere, repeatedly doing things that disgraced the royal family and embarrassed Princess Vivian.
Those beautiful first impressions were shattered rapidly. In the end, the royal family took the initiative to dissolve the once-enviable engagement.
Ever since then, the three sisters, along with Princess Lilith, had hardly seen Greg Sass himself in formal settings.
News about him consisted only of negative rumors coming through various channels—magic trash, shame of the academy, playboy villain...
They had thought that the blond boy who had once caught their eye had long succumbed to ruin, becoming a name that would never intersect with their world again.
Yet recently, the rumors about Greg Sass within the academy seemed to have taken a subtle turn.
First came the dubious heroic tale of him defeating a Demon King Cult executive to rescue kidnapped freshmen.
Then came the absurd news that he had joined the Student Council as a Disciplinary Committee member.
And then, just this morning, the public confession incident that had rapidly fermented across the academy.
What surprised them even more was that Greg Sass had not only seen through the feelings deep within Princess Lilith's heart, but even... publicly admitted that he himself had always harbored admiration for Princess Vivian as well.
All these turns and revelations were far too sudden and far too dramatic, completely exceeding their past understanding.
Therefore, they currently had no idea how to comfort Princess Lilith either.
Rena, who was several beats behind, only now seemed to catch up a bit to her sisters' topic. Tilting her head, an innocent expression of confusion appeared on her face:
"What are you guys talking about? Are you referring to... the fact that Princess Lilith secretly harbors admiration for Princess Vivian? Didn't we know that already?"
"I do NOT harbor admiration for Sister!!!"
The moment Rena finished speaking, an intensely embarrassed and furious rebuttal from Lilith burst out from inside the room.
Startled by this sudden shout, Rena's round face was filled with even greater confusion. "Huh?! So... she doesn't? But Your Highness clearly always..."
"Shut up, idiot Rena!" Lilith's voice grew even more exasperated.
Layla and Renee simultaneously raised their hands to cover Rena's mouth to stop her from further provoking Her Highness. At the same time, deep helpless expressions washed over both of their faces.
Sigh... Caring for someone with a tsundere trait really is... extraordinarily troublesome.
Both sighed in their hearts in unison.
Meanwhile, inside the room.
Lilith was currently wrapping herself up tightly inside her soft velvet bedding, revealing only a few strands of fiery red hair.
The space underneath the bedding was dim and warm, shutting out the light and sounds from the outside world, seemingly isolating her temporarily from those gazes and gossip that made her die of shame.
Yet it could not block out the clear, affectionate voice of the blond youth echoing repeatedly in her mind, nor the words that had struck right at her secrets, leaving her nowhere to hide.
"I don't... I don't harbor admiration for Sister like that guy said!"
She stubbornly denied it over and over again in her heart.
"I just... I just think Sister is amazing, outstanding, and great at everything, the pride of the kingdom and the representative of the academy... So, so I'm just..."
"I'm just respecting her! Yes, respect! The respect a younger sister and subject of the kingdom should naturally have toward the First Princess and the academy representative!"
"It definitely hasn't reached that weird level of admiration! That guy was completely talking nonsense! Yes, that's it!"
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