How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom: Volume 1

“Huh? Souma’s obviously my family name. Kazuya’s my given name.”

“But you said you were Souma Kazuya, didn’t you?”

“…Ah.”

Shoot. In this country, they follow the European style, where given name comes first. I should have given my name as Kazuya Souma. Oh, I see! That’s why everyone’s been calling me King Souma. Now that I think of it, it’s weird to have “king” attached to a family name. In a hereditary system, you’d have a large number of kings with the same name if you did it that way.

“I–Is it too late to correct it?” I asked.

“Probably? Everyone thinks you’re Souma, and I think all your external correspondence has been under the name Souma Kazuya.”

“Augh! To think I was making such an awful mistake…” I moaned.

“Well, maybe it’s not so bad?” Aisha asked. “Why not use one name in public and the other in private? So, on private occasions like today, I’ll call you ‘Sir Kazuya.’”

With Aisha finding ways to cover for my mistake, I just got more depressed about it. “Now I have Aisha, of all people, having to cover for me…”

“Just what do you think of me as, Sir Kazuya?!”

“What are you, you ask…? A disappointing dark elf?”

“That’s just mean!” she exclaimed.

“Honestly, cut the stupid banter, you two, and let’s get going,” Liscia urged while I was still dealing with the teary-eyed Aisha.

Yeah… It’s fine to say let’s get going, but we haven’t chosen a particular destination, I thought. “Is there somewhere you girls want to go?”

“No,” Liscia said.

“Wherever you go, I will follow, Sir Kazuya,” Aisha added.

“Yeah. At least pretend to think about it, you two.”

If they pushed the decision off on me, I wouldn’t know what to do. Now that I thought about it, this was my first time walking around the castle town. The last time I had come here, we had just galloped straight through on horseback, after all.

Hmm… In that case, maybe that’s all the more reason why I should take a good look around. Even if we just meander around, it’ll still be new to me.

“Well, let’s just take it easy,” I said.

Parnam Central Park.

A large park in the center of the royal capital, Parnam.

Though it was called a park, there wasn’t a playground or anything like that. There were just trees, shrubs and flowers that had been planted there, but the grounds were three times the size of Tokyo Dome. In the center of the park was an impressively large fountain with a Jewel Voice Broadcast receiver. When there was a broadcast happening, it could project a massive image that was large enough to be seen from 100 meters away. There was amphitheater-style seating around the fountain, and during the last Jewel Voice Broadcast, a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands had apparently gathered there.

You know, it might be interesting to hold a live concert there, I thought. As soon as Juna’s broadcast program using the Jewel Voice Broadcast gets up and going, I’d really like to plan something like that. Someday, this fountain plaza might become a stage singers from across Elfrieden aspire to stand on, like the Budokan or Hibiya Outdoor Theater.

…Well, that’s enough of my idle fantasizing. Anyway, we had come to Central Park.

“This is a lovely place full of natural beauty,” Aisha said.

“Even though it’s in the middle of the city, the air is so clear,” Liscia commented. “Mmm.”

Aisha looked around full of curiosity while Liscia stretched widely.

“Huh? But I don’t remember the air being this clear before…” she murmured.

“Well, yeah, I worked hard to arrange that,” I said.

“You arranged it? Did you do something to this park?”

Liscia seemed puzzled, so I puffed out my chest and explained. “Not just to the park. I prepared infrastructure all over the underground of Parnam, and I could go further and say I made preparations in regards to the laws, as well. If you compare things to a few months ago, I think you’ll find environmental hygiene has improved considerably.”

To be blunt, before my preparations, the environmental hygiene in this country had been on the same level as Middle Ages Europe. Which is to say: it’d been disgusting.