"P-P-P-Please wait, Young Ladyyyyyyyyyy!"
"Haa, haa! Stop, please! I'm telling you, this is really, really, really finnnnnnnnnne!"
"Told to stop? Who the hell actually stops when they're told to!? If someone's chasing you, you run—that's just common sense!"
This was right after the Royal Academy entrance examination—the commoner division exam, to be specific.
A single girl was sprinting through the streets of the royal capital, with several out-of-breath knights in hot pursuit behind her.
"The k-knight commander… Lord Cattleya has ordered that we bring you to him! Please, just stop where you are, Young Ladyyyyyyyy!"
"Then try and stop me! Are you even real knights!?"
The one weaving through the knights' pursuit and dashing through the city was the girl who had crossed paths with Rest during the entrance exam—Yuri Cattleya.
After finishing the interview portion of the exam, Yuri had stepped out of the testing venue.
Thinking it might be a nice opportunity to invite the boy she'd just gotten friendly with out to dinner, she was caught completely off guard when knights were lying in wait for her.
Yuri dodged their pursuit with her extraordinary physical abilities and was now running wild through the city.
"I have already been cast out of House Cattleya! My father, out of what little pity he had left, allowed me to keep using the Cattleya name, but I am no longer a young lady of the marquis's house! Therefore, know that I have no obligation to answer the summons of the Marquis of Cattleya!"
A month ago, Yuri had gotten into a fight with her father, the Marquis of Cattleya, and stormed out of the estate.
At the time, he had thrown the words at her: "If you're leaving, then consider yourself disowned! You are never permitted to set foot in this house again!"
She hadn't had the Cattleya name—the same name as her late mother—taken away from her, but she no longer considered herself a member of the marquis's house in any meaningful sense.
"No, you see, that was just a figure of speech! The knight commander regrets that it was spoken in the heat of the moment—just words spoken in anger, matched with anger in return…"
"I am free now! I am bound by nothing and no one!"
"Please, just listen to what I have to saaaaaaaaaaaaay!"
Yuri paid absolutely no heed to the shouting knights' words, leaping from rooftop to rooftop and bounding away with the nimble grace of a cat.
"Lady Yuriiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!"
The knight's screams fell on deaf ears — Yuri's expression was radiant with joy.
Yuri was the youngest of five siblings.
All four of her older siblings were brothers. She was the only daughter of House Cattleya.
Her striking resemblance to the late Marchioness Cattleya had ensured that Yuri was smothered in love by her father and brothers since birth.
She was rarely allowed to leave the mansion in their domain, and on the rare occasions she was permitted an outing, at least five of her father's subordinates served as her escort.
She had watched her brothers training in the garden and begged her father to teach her swordsmanship... only to be handed a stick stuffed with cotton and made to play at training like a children's make-believe game.
As a result, she had no choice but to hide in her room and work out in secret, which inadvertently honed her athletic ability to a razor's edge.
Yuri had endured this treatment all the way until she was nearly fifteen, but that year, something finally happened that she could no longer tolerate.
She had been certain she would be enrolling in the Royal Academy, only for her father to vehemently oppose the idea.
"If you so much as set foot in that academy, all sorts of unsavory characters will swarm around you, and you'll be drowning in a crowd of suitors! If you want to study, I'll hire you a tutor. You are not leaving this mansion in my domain!"
For the first time in her life, those words filled Yuri with white-hot fury toward her father — and toward her four brothers, who sided with him.
If she enrolled in the academy, she could escape this birdcage of a mansion... and set off into a whole new world.
She could make friends, gain all sorts of experiences... and learn just how vast the world truly was.
And yet, she was being denied the chance to attend the academy she had dreamed of for so long.
She still respected her father... but even so, this was unforgivable.
In the end, Yuri had a massive argument with her father and stormed out of the mansion.
She obtained a letter of recommendation from her mother's family to sit the exam as a commoner candidate, then applied to the Magic Department — the one field where her father, the knight commander, held little influence.
"I'm free now! This is the world!"
Standing atop the clock tower in the royal capital, Yuri threw her arms wide open to the evening sky.
When she had risen at dawn, she was so captivated by the sight of the royal capital — a place she had never seen before — that she had accidentally fallen right off... but she would not make the same foolish mistake twice.
Yuri gazed down at the royal capital, wrapped in the orange glow of twilight, and beamed with a broad smile.
"Alright, I'm making a hundred friends! I'm going to all sorts of places and seeing all sorts of things!"
The world stretched out endlessly before her.
For so long, she had been shut away inside the estate in her family's domain, and her world had grown small. Now she would expand it.
"And I'm going to find... a wonderful husband!"
Yuri shouted toward the setting sun at the top of her lungs.
*'Find a fine, respectable man you can look up to, and fall in love.'* *'Have children with him, and build a happy family.'* Those were the dying words Yuri's mother had left behind.
One of the reasons Yuri had set her sights on enrolling at the Royal Academy was to follow her mother's wishes and search for an ideal partner.
"My very first day out in the royal capital, and I've already made friends and found one wonderful man! I'm on a roll — let's keep it up!"
With the knights searching frantically below, Yuri made her declaration to the sunset.