episode_0094

“There is something I need to discuss with the church, so let’s invite the Pope.”

“I will obey your command, Your Majesty.”

The Emperor’s residence, the most heavily guarded place in the palace.

There were only the emperor and his courtiers there.

And Count Julius, who had been instructed by the Emperor to invite the Pope, was already refining the wording of the invitation in his head.

‘I haven’t seen you since New Year’s, so I’ll have to use that as an excuse to invite you.’

As he was no different from the Emperor’s representative, he had to be careful with every word he wrote in his letters.

However, if it was too rigid, the emperor’s image could seem stuffy, so Julius’ main role was to write in a way that was appropriately soft but still conveyed the meaning clearly.

“I never thought I’d pick on the empire’s problems so openly.”

As Julius’s mind raced over the contents of the letter, he heard the Emperor muttering to himself.

He was holding a book in his hand and smiling helplessly.

“Your Majesty, I hope you are not overthinking it.”

Julius tried to comfort the emperor’s soliloquy, but his expression still looked slightly bitter.

“I just finished reading the picture book he drew.”

After reading all of The Alchemist and the Iron-Blooded Man, the Emperor also began reading the fairy tales that Rupert had illustrated.

At first, I thought it was just a story for children to read, but at some point, his fairy tales began to contain strong criticism of the reality of the empire.

From to and now .

From a child’s perspective, it was a sad or happy story, but from the emperor’s perspective, it felt like a petition to himself.

“Was it a useless war?”

Rupert’s new children’s book, Hansel and Gretel, begins with the story of Hansel and Gretel, siblings abandoned in the forest by impoverished parents after the war.

The harm of war was clearly written in fairy tales.

Emperor Leonius Bel could not help but recall the war with Sylvania he had waged a few years earlier.

That war was not waged for any particular reason or for the benefit of the imperial people.

-The power of the nobles has grown too strong recently.

It was a war waged to reduce the power of the nobles, which had grown due to the continuation of peace, and to lower their control over their territories.

At the time, he thought he had made the right decision as the emperor, but now he honestly felt that he did not know.

Leonius Bell, who regrets that there might have been a better direction.

‘I regret it… .’

It was something that would have been unimaginable in the past, but now the emperor was changing little by little.

That is why, rather than feeling bad while watching , I first thought of a solution for children abandoned by their parents and urgently invited the Pope.

Since it is a religious order that originally worked for orphans and the poor, it would be more effective if the royal family helped.

“It seems that Somerset’s blood still runs on the line.”

“Is there any secret in Somerset, Your Majesty?”

Count Julius was puzzled. As far as he knew, the Somerset family was just an old southern family, with no particular special features.

They were not a famous knight family, nor were they involved in politics; they were just one of the common local lords.

“Do you know what Somerset means?”

“Isn’t that what you mean by somersault?”

Somerset, an ancient word meaning somersault.

“Their ancestor, John Beaufort. His other name was Somerset.”

Even after the emperor’s answer, Julius still looked like he didn’t understand.

It was a natural thing.

The story about Somerset was passed down only among those who succeeded the emperor in the imperial family.

The ‘Acrobatic Troupe’ is an organization that has been hiding in the shadows and carrying out all sorts of dirty work behind the scenes for the first emperor during the founding of the empire.

The Emperor now believed that he was the only one who knew the story that John Beaufort, the first and last master of the circus troupe, was the beginning of the Earls of Somerset.

John Beaufort, after the founding of the empire, disbanded his own organization and was worried that he would become a stumbling block to the first emperor, so he went down to the provinces and lived there, erasing all of his past.

It was a story from the past that no one remembers anymore.

However, the emperor thought that blood could not be hidden.

Think of Rupert Somerset, who sticks out like a sledgehammer.

***

“It’ll be better if you do it, owon.”

Is he about 120cm tall?

A little boy with short blond hair spoke to the man blocking the front door of the mansion with his fists clenched.

“No, Miss.”

Since the little boy’s threats had been experienced dozens of times already, Knight Oun answered as before.

‘The combined attack of Rash and Miss is not easy, but I just have to guard the door.’

The fight between Ada, who wants to be free, and Own, who must stop it, has already become a major attraction for the people of the mansion.

At first, Ada was on a losing streak, but at some point, Ada became much more agile and started to run away from Oun with her puppy Rash.

And now, Oun, who had been feeling guilty for not being able to catch even one little boy who was only eight years old, has awakened.

-Thank you, ten thousand times a day.

He was clearly a talented young man who had been accepted into the Imperial Academy, but he was so intoxicated with his limited talent that his development was slow.

So, he graduated from the academy with almost the lowest grades, was unable to get hired in the capital, and ended up in Somerset in the south.

However, even after coming all the way to Somerset, Own, who still couldn’t come to his senses, thinking that there were only shabby knights here, changed after losing Ada.

He went back to basics and started practicing Mana Yeon Gong Beop at dawn, swinging his vertical slash ten thousand times a day.

On the first day, I could only finish ten thousand rounds at dawn, and I couldn’t move due to fatigue and the harsh training that even a knight’s body could not handle.

However, he gritted his teeth and practiced it repeatedly every day for about a month, and in the process, Oun attained enlightenment.

‘I was so caught up in all the glamour that I didn’t even think about the things I could do.’

A vertical downward slash, which can be considered the basic swordsmanship.

He realized that he had been mistaken in thinking that he could already do something perfectly because it was simple.

That moment when you realize how much unnecessary movement and force was going into your vertical downward slash.

Own went from being a sword user to an expert.

‘You’re slow, even running away.’

After that, he clearly explained to Ada and Rash what an expert’s article was.

Sometimes it’s just about speed

Sometimes you dig a trap

Sometimes with strategy and tactics

Own, who was closely marking Ada and preventing her from escaping, was truly an iron wall.

But Ada, who stood before such a situation confidently today, was also different from before.

“Ada, defeat the witch today!”

Ada’s body bounced into the air as if she was on a trampoline, then spun around and tried to hit Own’s head with her heel.

It’s a very difficult martial art that’s hard to believe is the movement of a child.

But the opponent was now an expert who had shed his rookie image.

Bam!

Oun, who had assumed a posture of covering his head with his forearms, looked like a huge mountain.

The showdown between Ada, who is free like a bird flying in the sky, and Oun, who resembles a sturdy steel shield, has begun.

“Snacks!”

Rupert and Earl Bradley watched it while eating sweets.

***

“Sir Jorge, come and sit here.”

Jorge, the secret bodyguard of the only princess of the empire, Iolin, has been feeling his heart stop beating every time he hears her words lately.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Although I wanted to open the window and jump out right away, I couldn’t disobey the princess, so I had no choice but to obediently head to the chair next to her.

“Do you find my work boring?”

“No! That’s just a slander from people who don’t even know the basics of comics!!!”

It was already an open secret that Iolin was serializing in the manga magazine Manapia.

However, because the work had to be done only within Iolin’s palace due to the earnest request of her chief chamberlain, Ayton, she often called Jorge over and asked him to critique her cartoons.

Of course, Jorge wasn’t burdened from the beginning.

Her work, , was a very, very entertaining cartoon, so it was Jorge who gave his honest review.

but,

‘Hmm… the extreme parts are boring?’

‘Isn’t this piece too stretched out?’

‘Show me the automata fighting each other quickly!’

It had been about two months since the series began, and the starting point was when voices of dissatisfaction with Iolin’s work began to emerge.

‘Rupert!!! That author!’

Jorge was internally cursing Rupert.

Since it was impossible for Iolin to hear evaluations of his own work directly, he usually found out through stories told by Jorge.

Jorge recently met with Rupert to talk about his work, and was harshly scolded by Iolin, who told him about his own cartoons.

‘If you can’t give me your opinion objectively, I won’t be able to realize what’s wrong.’

Since he had ordered Jorge to relay all the bad reviews to her, he couldn’t help but feel terrified whenever Iolin called him.

Even though he wanted it, it was a huge burden for Jorge to convey the bad reviews of the princess’s work.

“Okay, then let’s hear the opinions of the people of the empire about this week’s serialized part.”

“… Which would you like to hear first, good or bad reviews?”

But Jorge, who thought that if he continued to tell only good stories and Iolin found out the truth again, he would really not be able to handle the consequences, asked her with a slightly resigned look.

“Let me hear the bad reviews first.”

As Iolin’s order was given, Jorge remembered an ordinary story he had overheard on the street about a father and son.

So he decided to tell him and opened his mouth.

“Son, you said the puppet show was fun… Did you fool Dad?”

And Iolin’s expression hardened.