Chapter 364

A Luxurious Lineup of VALSOK Goods [Part 2]

Only half the number of knights Joshua requested rushed to the scene. Joshua thought the other half turned back after seeing the flying artillery shells.

Bombardment on somewhere that wasn’t even a borderland. It was a state of emergency. The remaining knights must have also been worried about the Royal Capital’s state. They must be itching to confirm the situation at the port and return to the Royal Capital.

Despite that, they kept repeating, “Huh?” to Joshua’s explanation even when the detained Joanna was right before them.

“There’s no way, right?”

The knights stubbornly weren’t convinced. No, there was even a hint of anger in their expressions.

That got Joshua wondering, ‘Are they perhaps thinking there’s no way for the Kingdom’s Holy Maiden to do such a thing?’

No matter what the articulate Joshua said, the knights’s response was terrible or, rather, dull.

“I witnessed with my own eyes that Joanna-sama over here gave out the orders to fire the artillery.”

The fact that Joanna, who was supposed to be in the Royal Capital, was here was suspicious in itself. Even though this fact alone was enough evidence, the knights looked baffled, like they couldn’t even comprehend it.

“No, not that. This woman… can’t be Joanna-sama, right? Are you trying to fool us knights with such a foolish prank?”

However, what urged the knights to speak up seemed to lie on another issue.

“What do you mean?”

Joshua furrowed his eyebrows.

“Have you never seen Joanna-sama? This woman indeed has black eyes, and her hair color is also similar to black. However, Joanna-sama is more… um, how should I put it… youthful… Uh-huh, that’s it. She’s supposed to be younger and cuter… right?”

The knights mumbled hesitantly in a low voice so only Joshua could hear him. As a nobleman and a knight, commenting on a lady’s appearance was not praiseworthy behavior, so he couldn’t say what he just said out loud.

“Huh? I have never met her up close, but I’m also a student of the academy, so I at least have seen her before… Could she perhaps look different to everyone?”

Joshua was busy dealing with complaints about cotton after returning from Imperial Japan, so he had been taking many days off of school. But he wouldn’t make a low-level mistake like forgetting to check the person in the center of the rumors. If anything, he would be the first to notice if Joanna’s appearance changed.

“Huh? The Joanna-sama we know is a girl in her teens. She looks very young, and her face is especially… lovely… hm? Huh? What does her face look like again?”

The knight suddenly got confused when he tried to visualize Joanna’s appearance. Even though he found her appearance so likable, no image came to mind when trying to remember her face now. He couldn’t remember her face, but he could declare with confidence that the woman bound with thread before him was not Joanna.

She was a far cry from the Holy Maiden, who caused the knights to fight with each other to decide who got to steal glances from her. Who would have thought they had gone as far as to waste their precious lunch break to go see this woman?

How should the knight put this… her face wasn’t supposed to be so plain like this.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

What’s the same was only the color of her hair and eyes that reminded people of the royal bloodline.

“Young and especially lovely?”

Joshua muttered as he put his hand on his chin and pondered for a while.

Only Emma was lovely in Joshua’s eyes, so he was slightly unconfident about his perception in that aspect. But if all the knights unanimously said her face was different, then it’s probably different.

Joshua knew from his experience that how old someone looked was influenced by one’s environment.

Girls in the borderland who were stuck with a harsh lifestyle, girls born into poor families, girls who lived in the highlands at the mountain’s summit… Looking around the Kingdom, you would see many people whose appearance reflected as much weariness as the hardships they had endured.

Joanna did look like she had “slightly” passed the age for attending the academy, but Joshua just thought that would naturally be the case since she had lived as a commoner before, not a noble.

The women the knights interacted with were limited to noble ladies or the beauties from brothels, and they all invested a lot in their beauty. And comparing Joanna, who used to live in a borderland, to them would just be tragic.

Even when Joshua saw Joanna being flattered here and there at the academy, he just brushed it off, thinking, “Nobles and their weird hobbies… Nothing new.” …but now it appeared that was where he should’ve inserted a retort.