How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom: Volume 1

…Well, wishing for things I couldn’t have wasn’t going to get me anywhere. And it was, as a matter of fact, a useful power to me.

Today, as usual, I was fighting the mountain of paperwork with my [Living Poltergeists]. While I was doing so, someone entered the room with a thunderous noise that sounded like they’d tried to kick down a perfectly good door. When I peeked through a gap in the paper mountain, I saw it was a young woman in a military uniform.

With her regular features, skin so pale as to be translucent, and silky platinum blonde hair, she was so gorgeous that at any other time I would have been captivated by her beauty. However, having pulled three consecutive all-nighters, I saw not a beautiful girl but just a new source of labor.

After calling her over and practically forcing her to sit next to me, I pushed two stacks of paper in her direction. “Please compare these two sets of documents and look for places where the values, or the number of items, don’t agree and mark them.”

“Huh? What? What kind of work is this?”

“What, you ask? Digging for buried treasure. That’s what.” I explained to the perplexed girl in uniform. “For ‘unaccounted-for expenditures,’ to be precise. One pile is requests for budgetary appropriations, the other is income and expenditures reports. Even if the amount requested and the amount spent match, if the number of items differs, that can be indicative of either wasteful investment undertaken to fully use up their budget, or embezzlement disguised as investment. We’ll check those, and if any laws have been broken, we’ll make each of the responsible parties pay to make up the loss. If we uncover personal embezzlement, we will mandate repayment, and in the event they cannot pay, we will arrest the offender and seize their assets.”

“U-Understood.”

Perhaps she had been intimidated by the threatening air of a man who had gone without sleep, because the girl nodded along as I talked.

Good.

Perhaps around two hours passed with her working quietly next to me.

At last, the girl in military uniform spoke to me, her hands never ceasing their work of checking documents as she did. “…Hey.”

“What? If you’re tired, you can take a break whenever.”

“No, that’s not it… I haven’t introduced myself yet. I am Liscia Elfrieden. The daughter of the former king, Albert Elfrieden.”

I stopped moving my pen. “…You’re the princess, huh?”

“I don’t look like one?”

“You were in uniform, so I didn’t notice. But… Yeah, maybe you do look princess-y.”

At this point, she finally made me take note of how attractive she was.

“I’m… Souma Kazuya. Technically, I’m the new king.”

Liscia turned to face me. She was pretty close, and we looked into one another’s eyes. Unlike me, who was just taken aback, her golden eyes seemed like they were trying to evaluate me. After we looked into one another’s eyes for some time, Liscia slowly opened her mouth.

“I’m not a princess anymore. Because you usurped the throne, my current position is a little unclear.”

“Usurped…? Your father pushed the throne and all his duties off on me, I’ll have you know. Honestly, why do I have to go through all this pain and hassle?”

“…Seriously, what happened? I know you’re the summoned hero, but how did that suddenly turn into you taking the throne?”

“You tell me. I just did what I felt I needed to in order to protect myself…”

I explained what had happened around the time of the summoning ceremony to Liscia.

When I had been summoned to this world, I’d been on the verge of being handed over to the Empire. The king hadn’t seemed enthusiastic about the idea, but, seeing as he had no other plan, if the Empire had put pressure on him to do it, he probably wouldn’t have had any other choice. There had been no telling what might happen to me if I was turned over to the Empire, so I had asked the king to choose the “do not hand over the hero” option.

My proposal to the king and prime minister was that they pay the war subsidies to buy time, and with that time, push forward with policies that would build a strong and prosperous country. If they were saying “hand over the hero in place of war subsidies,” all we had to do was pay the subsidies. If we did that, they would lose any justification for interfering in our affairs. It was not an actual threat, no matter what it seemed like. To keep up appearances, the Empire would not insist on it any further. That was my reasoning. We would use the time bought this way to pursue country-strengthening policies which would let us stand on equal terms with the Empire.

The two of them had had objections, of course. They had said this country had no means to pay the war subsidies. But, after inspecting the materials they brought me, I was able to show that if we sold off some state-owned facilities, enacted caps on government spending, and the king turned over some of his “personal assets,” it would be possible to pay.