Chapter 138 Busy Days
Edited by: Kanaa-senpai
For Ayumu, every morning began with shock. Literally.
”Lord! Wake the hell up alreadyyyy!”
”Wake up, wake upppppp!”
Impact slammed into his stomach, and a strangled “Gofuh?!” burst from his throat. The culprits, of course, were none other than Sasami and Cocoa, the pint-sized maids who had launched themselves onto his bed with suicidal glee.
”…Every morning, Sasami. Every damn morning. How many times do I have to tell you not to wake me up like this?”
He glared at the foul-mouthed little maid, who had been pulling stunts like this since the day they met. No amount of scolding ever stuck. Worse, Cocoa had picked up the habit from her senior, turning the wake-up routine into a two-pronged assault. It was getting harder and harder for Ayumu to fight back.
”Quit whining and get up already, Lorddd!”
With that, Sasami yanked away his blanket. Maybe a hardcore lolicon would consider being woken up by adorable little maids delivering gut-punch wake-up calls the pinnacle of bliss. But for Ayumu, dragged out of sleep in the grey hours before dawn, it was hell.
(Blast you, Sasami, you damn brat…)
Something was very wrong here. He was supposed to be a grand lord. A respected master of his domain. This—being stomped on by children—was beneath him. Sasami ought to show him at least a shred of affection, or reverence, or something.
”Starting the day with this abuse… ugh.”
Shoved out of his own room by his pint-sized tormentors, Ayumu brushed his teeth with a boar-bristle brush and washed his face with warm water piped in from the boiler. Exhaling a long sigh of relief, he patted himself dry with a hand towel. “Haaah. Much better. Nice and refreshed.”
His mood lightened, he headed to the dining hall for breakfast. Rilina, Nanari, and Luruna greeted him with a crisp, “Good morning, Lord.” He replied in kind, “Good morning, Rilina, Nanari, Luruna,” and continued inside.
Waiting by the serving cart was the cook, Vanya. “Good morrrning, Lordddd~” she chimed, her voice as mellow and languid as ever.
Vanya’s scarlet eyes and deep-blue hair were striking. Born of both Yugan and Caesar blood, she had once been an Imperial Court chef—until prejudice and cruel regulations cast her out. Thanks to Emperor Rai’s recommendation, Ayumu had been able to hire her, and she had since become indispensable.
And she was… impossible to ignore.
The other maids were already generously endowed, but Vanya’s figure eclipsed them entirely. Her full breasts swelled so large they spilled out of aprons and dresses alike, defying even gravity’s pull. Every time Ayumu saw her, his teenage brain went up in flames, though he made sure to tell no one.
At least her food was a distraction. The flavor was miraculous in a world where bland, overcooked meals were the norm. Every cut of meat perfectly seared, every sprinkle of salt balanced. After suffering through Luruna’s well-meaning but questionable cooking, Ayumu had no regrets about hiring Vanya.
Breakfast itself was kept light—sandwiches, easy to keep down before his training with Yoluminette. He washed it down with kvass, a lightly carbonated, low-alcohol drink brewed from rye and honey, tasting closer to juice than beer.
Sasami and Cocoa, of course, preferred Mors—sweet juice brewed from berries and malt syrup with sugar imported from the Beastfolk Kingdom. Since sugar was expensive, it was usually reserved for knights and soldiers who risked their lives. But Sasami regularly stole drinks from Ayumu’s kvass casks, only to get scolded by the senior maids. These squabbles had become part of daily life.
At first, Ayumu had been softhearted enough to allow the girls three cups a day. But Sasami never honored the limit, and the cost began to stack up. Now he was forced to rethink. Yet whenever Sasami cried about it, his heart wavered.
Which was why he had ordered sugar beets to be gathered from across Yugan, hoping to produce sugar locally. If they could make their own, maybe the problem would be solved.
The tangent ran far—sugar beet cultivation back in his world, Napoleon’s continental blockade, the shift from Caribbean cane to European beets… All of it replayed in his mind as he schemed. Not to undermine the Beastfolk Kingdom’s core trade industry, of course—just a little secret production for Keldan’s own consumption. Surely they wouldn’t complain… right?
(Heh heh heh… this could make me even richer—)
”Your mind’s wandering again.”
”Fugyaah!”
A sharp thwack cut off his thoughts. Yoluminette’s wooden sword slammed against him without mercy. She never missed when his focus drifted.
”Gyaaaaaa!!!” Ayumu howled, clutching the spot and rolling on the ground.
Sasami and Cocoa, who had been heckling from the sidelines with cries of “Go on, crush that stupid blonde knight, Lordddd!” and “Now, now, finish her offfffー!” immediately turned on him the moment he fell.
”Tch! Pathetic weakling of a lord! He lost again!”
”Lord’s down!”
Not a trace of sympathy. Just disappointment. A ten-year-old and a six-year-old, savage as any battlefield.
(Wh—what the hell?! I’m your lord! Your top! You should be cheering for me, not kicking me while I’m down!!)
His protests stayed trapped inside, leaving him to nurse both his bruised body and his wounded pride.
”Phew. You’ve finally got the basics of swordsmanship down. Next time we’ll move on to applied techniques. That’s all for today,” Yoluminette declared.
As she spoke, Sasami and Cocoa rushed off to put away the wooden swords. The sword drills had ended, and the day’s training shifted into hand-to-hand combat.
Ayumu, fortunately, was no stranger to close combat. Long before this world, in a different life, he had been forced to learn. His father—an abusive man who once belonged to a US Coast Guard special unit—had taught him brutal self-defense when he was still a child. It was a cruel upbringing, but it left him skills that now, in this otherworld, he could repurpose. And so, these sessions with Yoluminette became less about his own growth, and more about experimenting, refining, and teaching untrained conscripts and future Keldan soldiers the kind of body-to-body combat they would one day need.
For context: this world had its own traditions, rough cousins of wrestling. But unlike the safety and spectacle of the wrestling Ayumu once knew, the techniques here aimed straight for survival and death. Strikes at the eyes and sensory organs, joint locks designed to snap bones, and blows to the torso meant to rupture organs, induce bleeding, or suffocate. As Ayumu studied and sparred, he realized these arts weren’t for competition. They were designed with pure killing intent.
Building on that lethal foundation with Yoluminette…
”Gyaaaahhh!! Stop! Stop! Yolumi!”
…they wove human reflexes into the drills, teaching instincts to take over when conscious thought collapsed under pressure. The system they crafted was not a sport, not even martial arts—it was assassination training disguised as self-defense.
”Chyo, chyo, chyo!!! I give! I give, I give!!”
Ayumu and Yoluminette stripped it down to a curriculum. Sticks, knives, axes, swords, shields, spears, even bows—they integrated counters and close-range tactics for them all. Age, sex, physique, stamina, even prior experience didn’t matter. The style was pared down, ruthlessly efficient, designed so anyone could acquire deadly skills in as short a conscription period as possible. A universal killer’s toolkit.
”Stoppp! It’s gonna break! It’s gonna break!!!”
They built scenarios of panic into the drills. People under ambush froze, panicked, lost the ability to think. So the training recreated fear on purpose. Smoke machines fogged vision, strobes and thunderous noise disoriented ears, until soldiers could fight through sensory overload. Their task was to kill—or be killed.
”L-Lord?!”
Yet Ayumu insisted they include one more principle. Even as they designed the curriculum with Yoluminette, he added techniques not just for killing, but for avoiding fights entirely. Methods of using words and body language to de-escalate, to prevent armed peasants or desperate civilians from being forced into combat at all. For him, combat training was not just about killing—it was also about preventing unnecessary bloodshed.
By noon, their training was done. Ayumu staggered through lunch with Yoluminette, then braced himself for the true battlefield: paperwork.
In the lord’s office, Ninim was already waiting. She had stacked documents and reports requiring Ayumu’s signature into neat bundles, annotated and sorted. Ayumu sat, picked up the first sheaf, and began flipping through at speed.
”Page one-ninety-eight, page two-forty-one, page two-forty-three—spelling errors.”
”This document’s wrong format. Send it back.”
At first, Ninim had exploded at him. “Stop skimming! Are you even reading, my lord?!” His hands moved too fast, eyes darting, papers dropping into sorted piles like leaves in a storm. But later, after verifying his corrections, she realized his reading was terrifyingly accurate. Her anger faded into wary resignation.
By mid-afternoon, Ayumu had cleared the desk and turned to his other role: Chief Researcher of the Magic Engineering Division.
In the suburbs research lab, he found the usual mix of brilliance and chaos. Researchers, engineers, builders, even artists—geniuses in their fields—busied themselves testing theories and methods based on his knowledge. But manpower was never enough. Even with aides like Sarasa, who lacked genius but made up for it in effort, the division needed every hand, temperamental or not.
And then there was Sheris Cloriana.
The moment she spotted him, she fired her greeting like a dagger. “Well well, if it isn’t our tardy little lord. Honestly, it’s been so long I nearly forgot who you were~desuwa!”
Emerald-green eyes gleamed against a cascade of golden hair so radiant it looked spun from sunlight. Seventeen, maybe eighteen, proud, sharp. Once a court alchemist of a noble family—before her clan’s ruin. Now here, smoldering with defiance.
”Chiwaa~su! Thanks as always for your hard work today!” Ayumu replied brightly, voice deliberately cheerful.
”‘Chiwaa~su, thanks as always for your hard work today,’ my foot! Don’t you dare take me lightly!”
The greeting only fanned her temper. Sheris raged on about her heritage, her wasted talent, the insult of being shackled to some shady lordling when her true duty was reviving her family name.
Ayumu’s smile froze. His eyes glazed over. Trouble. But before the flames grew too high, another voice intervened.
Roto, a middle-aged alchemist with the same fallen-court pedigree, stepped in. His story was known—how he had once headed the disastrous manaline acceleration project, how he had begged the lords to halt it, how they ignored him and forced the experiment forward, until catastrophe struck. The upper echelons covered their tracks, left innocents dead and homeless, and Roto alone shouldered the blame. He had resigned, abandoning wealth, status, and name. On record, his departure was “personal reasons.” In truth, it was scapegoating.
Ayumu respected the man. And so, muttering, “Anyway, none of that matters now…” he slipped away from Sheris’s tirade, her voice still screeching behind him: “Wait! I wasn’t finished with you yet!”
(…Even if it wasn’t my imagination, I’ll pretend it was.)
He worked with the lab until sundown, guiding, correcting, advising. At day’s end, he returned to the old manor, showered, and joined Hiyori Sashima for dinner.
They ate together, Hiyori reporting quietly on the servants’ moods, the day’s happenings. At Ayumu’s request, she kept close watch for discontent, especially among the younger ones.
Sasami, predictably, dominated the reports.
She had dirtied rooms under the guise of “cleaning” and blamed Cocoa. Soiled freshly washed laundry, and blamed Cocoa. Snuck food from the kitchen, blamed Cocoa. Shattered furnishings mid-race through the halls, blamed Cocoa.
…Sasami never did anything right. Poor Cocoa. Truly cursed with the worst senpai imaginable.
Ayumu shook his head, pitying the girl, as he finished dinner.
The rest of the night was routine. A few last documents dispatched in the lord’s chamber. A diary entry penned. Then, as always, Rilina and the others brought a chilled serving of Mors—a dessert cooled by the Keldan night air. He accepted gratefully.
”Fuuuh… Tired. But I worked well today.”
He set down his pen, brushed his teeth with bristles of salt and boar’s hair, and at last let sleep take him.
Notes:
• Hiyori Sashima – A quiet, caring girl from the library committee, empathetic toward Sanai.
• Sashima – Family name of Hiyori. A quiet, caring girl from the library committee, empathetic toward Sanai. She followed as a Barrier Technique Adept.
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Edited by Kanaa-senpai.
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