Chapter 2

1. The Princess’s Return

“It’s cold! Save the princess!”

My sentimental mood lasted only a moment before an incredible chill swept over my body.

Seeing me trembling as I hugged my shoulders, the Hero hurriedly took off his cloak and handed it to me.

Perhaps my shoes had crumbled because of the Demon King’s power, because all I was wearing was a white dress—the Goddess’s Cloud.

Although it had an excellent holy-power recovery function, this sleeveless treasure dress had absolutely no ability to keep me warm. Once I wrapped myself in the cloak, I finally felt a little better.

After dealing with the immediate problem, I examined my body.

There weren’t any major changes, but my hair had become incredibly long. It had originally been a short bob that swayed just above my shoulders, but now it was long enough to drag along the floor.

“Please excuse me for a moment, Princess.”

Seeing my bare feet, the Hero suddenly scooped me up into his arms.

My field of vision instantly rose.

At the same time, my hair, which had been spread across the floor, floated up into the air.

“Magic?”

The Hero nodded with a faint smile and continued forward without hesitation.

When we emerged from the Demon King’s Castle, I could see an army filling the entire plain.

Two enormous ships were floating in the sky amid the fierce wind.

“The airship on the left is the Viviana, and the one on the right is the Fluria.”

Surely I wasn’t imagining that I knew exactly where those names came from?

I had seen a drawing of an airship before. Princess Vivian, who had been exceptionally talented at crafting artifacts, had drawn one in her research notebook.

At the time, she had told me:

It was impossible to build with the technology of our era. She estimated that it would take hundreds of years before a ship like the one in her drawing could fly through the sky.

I took a deep breath before asking the Hero,

“Richt. Which Hero are you?”

“I am the seventh. After you entered the Demon King’s Castle, it took five hundred years to eliminate the Demon King of Despair.”

Five hundred years.

My mind went blank at the staggering number I had never even imagined.

I must be the only Princess of Total Victory who ended up becoming 520 years old after spending 500 years beating the Demon King.

I had never imagined anything like this would happen in my life, so I was completely speechless.

I’d always been told that I had an unusually strong mentality. But suddenly being told that 500 years had passed left me completely clueless about what I was supposed to do.

While I was lost in thought, the Hero joined the unit that had been waiting for him outside the Demon King’s Castle.

“Wow, she looks exactly like the portrait!”

“She really is the Princess of Total Victory.”

“Everyone, greet her first.”

A sturdy knight who appeared to be the oldest among them bowed with a disciplined motion.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Princess of Total Victory. I am Grayson Navier, the Shield of the Demon King Subjugation Army.”

“I am Miles Soil, the first disciple of the Tower Master.”

“I’m Teyra, a spirit mage and the party’s healer.”

The standard composition of a Demon King subjugation party centered around the Hero, with a tank who took responsibility for defense at the front, a mage who dealt with the Demon King’s monster army, and a healer responsible for recovery.

The primary role of the Princesses of Total Victory, who possessed enormous amounts of holy power, was as healers.

In other words, once the Hero was found, previous princesses usually played an active role from the rear.

I was the unusual case.

Judging from the bloodstains covering their clothes and armor, I could imagine just how fierce the battle had been.

“I am Fleur, the Princess of Total Victory. You’ve all worked so hard.”

My throat tightened for a moment, but after swallowing down my emotions, I finally said what I had wanted to say for so long.

“Let’s go home now. Home. I’m sick and tired of this damn battlefield.”

The knights, covered in blood and dust, raised their weapons and shouted.

“We won!”

“Waaaaaaaah!”

The victorious cheers I had wanted to hear for so long echoed in every direction.

The longest Demon King subjugation campaign in history had finally ended.

Still being carried in the Hero’s arms, I boarded the Fluria, the airship named after me.

There were four airships mobilized for this campaign in total.

Five thousand soldiers on each ship, meaning a total of twenty thousand members of the subjugation army had been sent to attack the Demon King’s Castle.

“What month is it now?”

“It is March, early spring.”

Even in early spring, the area around the Demon King’s Castle at the northernmost point of the continent was as cold as the middle of winter in the central regions.

Yet somehow, the inside of the airship was warm enough that I didn’t even need a cloak.

At a glance, the floor of the airship was spotless, without even a speck of dust.

It looked like I could walk around barefoot, but for some reason, the Hero showed no sign of putting me down.

Only after we reached a room with a sofa did I finally get to put my feet on the floor.

When Teyra saw what I was wearing beneath the cloak, she hurriedly brought me shoes and clothes, allowing me to escape my barefoot predicament at last.

“I’m sorry that we only have military uniforms and military boots. We’ll arrive at the capital tomorrow afternoon, so please bear with them for a little while.”

“The capital?”

“Both the Fluria and the Viviana are airships belonging to the Groxdel Empire.”

The name of a country I had never heard of in my entire life suddenly came up.

If five hundred years had passed, then surely new countries had appeared across the continent during that time.

But then everyone in the room suddenly began glancing nervously at me and signaling to the Hero.

The Hero, Richt, furrowed his brow and let out a long sigh before speaking again.

“Four hundred and seventy years ago, the Eterna Kingdom, your homeland, disappeared, Princess. The Groxdel Empire was established in its place. Three neighboring royal families formed an alliance and founded the empire.”

“Groxdel is now a great power occupying one-third of the entire continent. All of us are from Groxdel.”

My country was gone.

They said that my homeland no longer existed.

This is a serious problem, isn’t it?

That means I’m stateless!

Normally, once the Princess of Total Victory completed the task of defeating the Demon King, her homeland would provide her with various rewards.

In the Eterna Kingdom, the royal family would provide a pension for the rest of her life so that she would never have to worry about making a living.

I had endured everything believing I could rely on that.

And now they were telling me my country had fallen.

Goddess, how is this fair?!

Perhaps feeling sorry for the Princess of Total Victory who had lost her country, the Hero’s party brought me some food from somewhere, telling me to at least eat something.

I happened to be hungry anyway, so I quickly picked up a spoon.

There were some dishes I’d never seen before, but I had spent years on the battlefield, so I wasn’t picky.

I simply put everything into my mouth and chewed.

Once my stomach was reasonably full, I bombarded them with a mountain of questions.

What had happened on the continent after I entered the Demon King’s Castle alone?

I had thought ten years at most would be enough, so why had it taken five hundred years to defeat the Demon King?

“A great deal of the records were lost, so we don’t know exactly what happened back then either. However, they say the Demon King was overwhelmingly stronger than any Demon King who had appeared before him, which resulted in humanity suffering repeated defeats for a very long time.”

Even after his power had been cut in half by the seal, the Demon King had been terrifyingly strong.

Some of the weaker monsters had fled into the mountains, reducing the size of the Demon King’s army, but even defending against them had been difficult.

The most devastating blow was when the Demon King directly attacked the royal palace of the Eterna Kingdom, which had been the core of the subjugation army.

Most of the royal family died fighting, with only Princess Vivian, the heir, barely surviving.

She went on to train disciples and left behind countless research materials.

“The person who played the most important role in founding the empire was the Hero Dietrich. Under his mediation, the prince and princess who were heirs to the two countries married and became the first imperial couple.”

Dietrich, who became a founding contributor to the new nation, was given the surname Selburn along with the title of Marquis.

He never married and went on several more subjugation campaigns before dying in his fifties.

After that, reincarnated Heroes repeatedly attempted to defeat the Demon King, but continued to fail.

It was only with the arrival of the seventh Hero, Richt, that they finally managed to cut off the Demon King’s head.

“This subjugation campaign was exactly the hundredth.”

“The previous campaign was five years ago, when you were nineteen, Hero.”

That meant Richt was twenty-four years old now.

Excluding the five hundred years I had spent sealed away, the Hero was older than me.

Taking tens of thousands of soldiers all the way to the Demon King’s Castle would require an enormous amount of money.

The fact that there had been relatively few attempts compared to the length of the sealing period was probably because it took time to gather enough military funds.

“The Selburn Marquis family was succeeded by Alviera, who was Hero Dietrich’s younger sister. It is now one of the continent’s long-standing noble houses, with a history spanning several hundred years.”

“Alviera… The one time I met her, she was about six years old.”

She had loved drawing.

But because supplies were scarce during the war, she couldn’t get paper or paints, so she drew pictures on the dirt with a stick.

That little girl I had seen grew up to become the greatest genius painter on the continent.

They told me that people in later generations knew what my face looked like because the portrait of me painted by Alviera still remained.

“The full-body portrait is almost identical to your current appearance, Princess. Ah, except for the length of your hair. The portrait shows you with short hair.”

“We weren’t even together for an entire day. I can’t believe it. How did she paint it?”

“There is a reproduction at the museum in the capital. The original is kept by the Selburn Marquis family, but of course, they will show it to you.”

“Um, Hero. What is a museum?”

At my question, everyone’s eyes except those of Hero Richt and Mage Miles grew as wide as saucers.

“Tsk. Everyone must have slept through history class. There were no museums during the era when the princess lived. The first museum on the continent was established three hundred years ago. Princess, a museum is a place where valuable objects such as portraits, old pottery, and jewels are put on display so that everyone can see them.”

Thanks to Miles’s brief explanation, I immediately understood.

There were really all sorts of things in the world five hundred years later.

Apparently, anyone could even enter a museum regardless of their social status by paying a small admission fee.

“Oh, there’s also something called a library besides museums! An entire enormous building filled with books.”

“Can anyone go there and read the books, too?”

“Yes. The admission fee is about the same as the price of two sandwiches.”

“Books are expensive, though. They let you in for that little money?”

“Paper has become cheaper. Printing technology has also advanced.”

Museums.

Libraries.

We had only spoken for a short while, yet there were already so many things I knew nothing about.

But at least the world five hundred years in the future seemed to be a little more pleasant to live in than the past I had known.