*** PoV: Alan ***

“That bastard. Did she really have to assign me to your team, Alan bro?” our escort greeted me. It was Sebastian, Kath’s uncle, meaning our team was picked to be on the attacking side.

“What’s exactly your problem with being assigned to us? What did we do to deserve this treatment? You didn’t even bother to properly greet us. Are you trying to insult us?” Knowing him, his problem was that my team had no girls. I could see why he would have preferred some eye candy, but come on, he was a married man with his own children.

“Eh, hi Alan bro, why aren’t there any girls in your team?” he inquired with a noticeably disappointed face. See, I was right.

“You are trying to insult us, aren’t you? How many girls would be willingly joining a team led by you?” He had the same kind of bad reputation as I did, so definitely not many.

“Two, most probably. Maya would be one of them, and she would make sure everyone other than Sara sis would not dare join me.”

“Great, so you can best me thanks to your wife and niece. I’m impressed.”

“Not like your brides wouldn’t join you if they had the chance.” Or so he claimed. One of my brides was already a candidate for his team, turning him into one of my rivals.

“That sounds like you have multiple brides, Alan.” Was that the sound of my popularity falling even deeper? Sometimes I wished my coursemates would be a bit denser and did not pick up on all these remarks.

“Don’t look at me like that. I swear I had no say in this.” Usually, it was me picking girls up behind Kath's back, but in this specific instance, Sara just went and announced she wanted to become my wife.

“Who is the lucky maiden?”

“It’s Sara sis,” Sebastian announced. Thanks for taking away my chance to announce it myself. Not like it should have been made public yet.

“Princess Sara? When will they hold the funeral?” one of my teammates asked.

“Rest in peace. He was fated to achieve great things, but the skies took him way too soon,” another of them added.

“I never knew jealousy could turn into pity this fast. Reminds me of how swift your deaths will be.” Vengeance will be mine or whatever.

“Not as swift as yours if you make Sara sis punch you. She landed one single hit on Hanna sis, and it took us hours to dig her out from under the rubble.” Perverted old dude says what?

“Oh, so that hole in the training ground walls was the result of Hanna crashing into it?” I knew who the perpetrator was without him telling me, but the identity of the victim being the undead lady was unexpected.

“Are they talking about the Hanna I think they are talking about? Surely not,” yet another classmate wondered.

“Yes, we are. Why?” There went Sebastian blabbing again. I wonder how he was yet to slip anything confidential.

“There is just one little thing I can’t understand. How is she still alive?” These guys seriously had to be sharp at the worst time. I wanted Sebastion to stop before he actually said too much.

“She is n–” See? This is what I was talking about. I had to clap my hands on Sebastian’s mouth before he could cause any more damage.

“She’s pretty tough. At least we won’t have to look out for her when defeating her guards.” I definitely wasn’t sweating like a horse while throwing my little lie out. Was that even a lie though? It was a fact that the undead lady was tough. Even more so mentally, staying sane for multiple millennia. Even some of us elves couldn’t pull that off, and she was just a human originally.

Sebastian peeled my hand off his mouth and said “It’s time we left for that siege thing. I don’t want to get chewed out by Hanna sis for being late.”

*** PoV: Keith ***

“Where did you leave your white steed? That damsel in distress will be sooo disappointed that her prince came for her on foot like this,” smirked Dad. I was sure her problem would be completely unrelated to my lack of a steed. Thanks to him poking fun at me since the incident at the church, I would have preferred my brainless uncle as our escort over dad. He was doing this from the moment he heard about my relationship with Hanna.

Suzan’s case was at least smoothed over by Lady Eva and the head maid, so I had near zero backlash from that other than Hanna rubbing it under my nose and the fact that I was to become a father. Hanna was one thing, as I didn’t really expect anything else from her, but were the other two really content with any action as long as it resulted in more descendants of our royal family?

“Could you please cut it out? I’m not really in the mood for this right before having to deal with whatever way of defense Hanna prepared against us. Alan might be a lazy piece of shit normally, but he knows how to put up a fight.”

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“Isn’t calling him a lazy piece of shit a bit too much? Aren’t you friends?”

“Doesn’t change the fact that he tends to only do the bare minimum, even though he would be capable of way more.” Yeah, he did the bare minimum. And my sister. But that’s a different topic.

“He still beats you in academics without even trying,” Dad laughed while poking my side with his elbow.

“He beats me in whining too.” When he was with me, he whined about missing Kathleen, but when he was with her, I could still hear him whining about being overworked by her over the castle’s thick walls.

“Just make sure he doesn’t take your harem away while he’s busy whining.”

“““We aren’t his harem!””” shouted the girls in my team.

“Let’s just pretend I was talking about them and change the topic,” he said with an amused face.

“Much appreciated.” That was a close one. Dad almost let something he shouldn’t have slip.

“Who is the last team’s leader?” he asked. Hanna seemingly only gave him info about my team, or possibly only the location where my team was assembling.

“It’s Claude.” I couldn’t help but grimace at the pure disgust I could see on Dad’s face. His opinion of Claude was that bad, even though he did spend way less time around him than we did.

“The Noir boy? He doesn’t look strong, but you should look out for whatever tricks he might use. Ilishwa and Shadow are a sneaky bunch.”

“Lina is with him, he won’t be able to pull anything dangerous. Even a guy like him has someone holding him on a short leash.”

“You are saying this like that girl wasn’t one of them,” Dad retorted. “She actually feels more dangerous than the boy.”

“Isn’t it time we left?” I didn’t want to have that conversation about Lina again. No matter what Dad said, she was nowhere near as bad as the others, including Claude.

“Sure it is. On your feet, ladies and gentlemen, the other teams won’t wait for you!”

*** PoV: Lina ***

“Why did I have to join your team, Claude?” I would have preferred being teamed up with Prince Keith over my asshole of a nephew.

“Beats me. Why does it bother you this much though?” I couldn’t believe him, with that confused face of his. Did he seriously have no self-awareness?

“Because you always mess up in the worst way possible, and I’m the one who has to clean up after you!” I couldn’t help but shout at him.

“I never asked you to do that. It’s not like I can’t stand up for myself if I get caught,” he shrugged.

“Oh, so you are willing to sit through a lecture by your father, did I get that right?”

He tilted his head. “Sure?”

“Well, I’m not. And I would definitely get dragged into that lecture by my sister.”

“That sounds like Mom alright.” He looked at me, then took a step back with a surprised look.

“And I sound like the best escort you might have asked for,” whispered Lady Hanna to my ears.

“This will be a pain to clean up,” I sighed without even turning around. If we were attackers we could have taken advantage of the other team, but we ended up with the shorter stick.

“That one I can agree with. Make sure you don’t land in Kei–” I felt a sudden chill on my back, and Claude went pale as he quickly corrected himself. “... Alan’s bed when he beats us.”

“Nice save,” replied Lady Hanna, finally stepping out from behind me.

“I’m not willing to hide your corpse,” I whispered to Claude as Lady Hanna walked towards the others in our team, “so try to not get yourself killed.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not stupid enough to mess with her. I am capable of learning from my past mistakes, and thanks to you I had some close calls with death.”

“I never got close to killing you.” I had to avert my gaze. Accidents do happen, and I wasn’t an exception to that rule.

“That’s a bit of an understatement, isn’t it? Mind reminding me who had to pretend he managed to break his legs by falling off a tree and get laughed at for being an absolute failure of a cat just so that you would not get chewed out by my mother?”

“I…” I couldn’t reply to that. He actually fell off the balcony at home when I tripped and pushed him.

“Are you done with your lover’s quarrel? If we don’t leave soon, we won’t have a fortress to protect,” Lady Hanna barked at us from next to the others.

“He’s an idiot, why would I be his lover?”

“She’s my aunt. No clue why her greatest problem isn’t that we are related.” I could practically see myself turn red. He turned his back to me, and started walking towards everyone else. “Can’t argue with the idiot part though,” he muttered under his breath.

“Why are you admitting it?” I cried out.

“Unlike you, I have some self-awareness,” he looked back at me. Him being the one to tell me that hurt quite a bit.

“You guys sound just like sis– Princess Kathleen and Alan,” sighed Lady Hanna.

“See, Claude? I’m like a princess,” I stroke a pose, pointing at my nephew.

“Sure, sure. I have mixed feelings about being compared to Alan though. Not like I’m not at least somewhat jealous of him.”

“Shall we leave? Our fortress won’t build itself.”

“You won’t work us to the bone, right?” I couldn’t help but ask our teacher.

Lady Hanna just smiled back at us instead of a reply.

“We won’t be defeated before the siege even begins, RIGHT???”

***

It was an absolute nightmare. A nightmare for us, who had to do most of the work, and a nightmare for anyone who was unfortunate enough to trigger the dark magic spells we were tasked to set up all around the perimeter.

I thought we would be given a different kind of manual labor, but building the fortress took no more than 10 minutes thanks to Lady Hanna’s earth magic. After the fortress walls finished rising from the ground, she just hopped into a makeshift throne and started throwing her unreasonable commands at us. I actually wished the attackers had taken her away then and there.

Claude led the Ilishwa out of the fortress to set up illusion-based traps. Mirages, disorienting fields, perception-blocking barriers, they made them all. At the same time, I was filling the fortress walls with skeleton archers. I’ve never used necromancy before, but Lady Hanna proved to be a great teacher when it came to dark magic. I just wished we didn’t have to walk back to her makeshift throne every time we needed pointers.