TUS

Chapter 2 – The Thunder God Subjugates the Foreign Tribe

The carriage rattled and swayed.

We were traveling through the mountains now, and, of course, it was to deal with the foreign tribe. By Svetlana’s account, a fort somewhere near here, where the border patrol was garrisoned, was due to be raided by the tribe before long. Good odds, she’d said, that the Scarlet of Hades would turn up there.

“The foreign tribe, though…”

The memory’s still fresh: during the coup that broke out a while back, my father this time around, the former Duke Alcott, was the one who’d drawn the foreign tribe up from the south into the royal capital. And, to wander off the point a little, there’s a proper reason the tribe makes its living by raiding and other rough trades.

The thing is, the land within their sphere is mostly barren. Strictly speaking, it belongs to no nation at all. Or, more precisely, “land every nation has abandoned” is closer to the sense of it. The foreign tribe’s origins, they say, lie in criminals and bounty-marked men who could no longer stay in any country, gathering on stateless ground, banding together, and setting up in the bandit trade. It predates Sasha’s birth, so that’s a history of more than twelve hundred years, a thorough nuisance, all told.

And now we’re barreling straight through that tribe’s territory toward the fort, which is our present situation. Ordinarily this would be a reckless, life-forfeiting move. But there’s a sound reason we’re doing it.

That aside, I was sitting in the rear bed of the carriage, facing Merlin.

“You said Svetlana keeps studying magic. Just how good is she, exactly?”

“Well… better than me, I’d say.”

“She’s mastered higher-order magic than you have?”

Dragonkin don’t strike me as spellcasters, so it’s a hard thing to swallow on the spot. Merlin, looking flustered, corrected herself.

“In pure technical skill I’m the better. She and I have put in different amounts of practice, after all. But she is of the Dragon Emperor’s bloodline.”

“…Hm?”

“For a dragonkin to have trained up to high-order sorcery at all is a thing to shake heaven and earth. It seems the god of fortune took an interest in a dragon’s little diversion, and something about it caught his fancy…”

“Meaning?”

“When a dragonkin goes all out, they take dragon form, but she stays in human shape. On the back of the dragons’ bottomless magic power, she pours out a relentless barrage of Level 8 spells. She throws away defensive magic altogether and covers herself with her own draconic battle-aura instead. That said, her raw power as a dragon is apparently the weakest in her clan…”

“Merlin? That’s… all but unbeatable, isn’t it?”

“Yes. An impregnable fixed gun-battery. Nothing but a ceaseless offensive barrage of Level 8 magic.”

An unpleasant sweat prickled cold down my back. I turned it over for a while, but no first-sight answer to her came to mind. In fact, thinking it through only made it look worse. We have to spend part of our resources, and our formula-building speed, on defense, while she goes all in on attack and stands up a near-absolute defense on a separate track besides. “An impregnable fixed gun-battery” is exactly the phrase for it, and I couldn’t readily see a way through.

“She’s likely the peak of the dragonkin’s fighting strength. There are even those who call her the Dragon Sorcerer Emperor now… or rather, Sasha-sama does.”

“…Sasha granted her the title of Emperor?”

I swallowed hard. It meant, after all, that Sasha himself had recognized her as an equal of us Four Emperors. It’s rather different from being a disciple, but Svetlana’s growth makes me plainly glad, and I’d love a bout with her someday. My chest was pounding with the thrill of a new powerhouse to hear about, and I gave a wry smile, still, always and forever, the child who dreams of being the strongest.

And there the voices of the other three, up on the driver’s box working the horses, came drifting back. Three’s a chorus, as they say, and a bright peal of girls’ talk was carrying from the front of the carriage.

“…The only men I know are Brother and Ephthal, so if you ask me about my taste in men I honestly can’t say. If I must, then setting family aside, the one I hold in most regard is Ephthal, so pressed for my type, I could only answer that I like the pushy, take-charge, reckless sort, like Ephthal. Not that I understand romance.”

“You, the pushy sort… that man will never, ever make you happy, that taste of yours.”

“You’re the one saying that, Maria-san?!”

“Hey, Anastasia! They’ll hear you in the back!”

No, I hear you perfectly well. And what are those two thinking, talking romance with a child like Sheryl…

“Still, that one really is a piece of work, personality-wise.”

“Well, I do think Master is rather a lot to handle.”

“No mercy to his enemies, swaggering around like there’s no tomorrow… I truly can’t picture him as fifty or sixty in a past life.”

“Fifty’s generous, I think even ‘over twenty’ would be a stretch, Master. The showing-off is world-class, too.”

“How can I put it, when I heard ‘the Thunder God Emperor-sama,’ I’d imagined someone more… seasoned, more mellowed.”

“Mm. Well, he still seems to be chasing ‘strongest on the earth’ and all that, so a youthful mental age isn’t such a bad thing, I think.”

“But that solve-everything-by-force streak is, honestly, a bit much in practice.”

“And yet that’s the Master you’re fond of, Maria-san, isn’t it?”

“Th-that’s true, sure. But when you think ahead, building a household and all that, you can’t help feeling a little uneasy, can you? He’s fine because he’s invincible. But if he makes nothing but enemies, then what happens to me, or to the kids…”

“Ahh… I do think that too, a little.”

“You think it too? What do you mean?”

“Well, you see, I mean to be with Master forever, so bearing his children is naturally within the realm of what I’ve considered.”

“So you’ve given up hiding how you feel about Ephthal, then…”

“N-n-no! It’s h-hypothetical, hypothetical! I mean, if Master were to want me for his bedmate, as his slave, that’s all. Personally, I’d never dare hold romantic feelings for Master, it would be far too presumptuous…”

“…You’re really not going to admit it, are you.”

“Whatever could you mean?”

“And you say ‘bedmate’ so lightly, do you actually understand what that involves?”

“Well, I’ve been through all sorts, in the old days.”

“’All sorts’ meaning?”

“Back when I walked the shadow trades, I got a full course of training, and there was even a stint apprenticing at a brothel.”

“Eh?! You’re serious?!”

“Though it was only ever tagging along with my sister. Practice was on things like a phallus… and what I was actually taught was just the handwork, and of course I never took a single customer. So, that’s the way of it, I’ve had lessons from professionals, so I’m quite confident.”

“You really… are a woman full of surprises.”

“Fufu. I get told that a lot.”

“In any case, when Ephthal gets too reckless… it does put me in a bit of a spot too.”

“But that’s the very part of him you like, isn’t it?”

“Well, I mean… yeah, it is.”

Listening to all that, I let out a sigh. It’s just… how do I put it.

—Am I honestly bad enough to earn a roasting like that?

I’ll grant I’ve a faint idea of what they mean. Counting my past life I’m at grandpa age, and counting the life before that I’m the age of some great elder. So, no, I can’t deny there’s an excess of raising hell for a man my years… ah, there goes a sigh.

It seems even the Thunder God Emperor can be got down a little. As for Merlin, she was biting her lip with tremendous force, fighting to hold in a laugh.

“Even the great Thunder God Emperor… is quite undone in the hands of a few young girls.”

“Well, it’s precisely because I know they’ve got a point. But once my temper hits its boiling point, I’ve never been able to help myself, from the old days.”

“But I like that about you, Ephthal-sama, now as much as then.”

“Meaning?”

“When you’re angry, you’re angry all the way. Whatever you can’t abide, you blast flat by force. In your case the motive is a sense of justice, so I like it. And as for why ordinary people don’t do the same…”

“Why others don’t, you mean?”

“Because they haven’t the power. To put it Sasha-sama’s way, the power to drive your will through, to make others accept it, to compel them. But you, Ephthal-sama, worked harder than anyone and won that power, the privilege of a strength without equal. And so—”

Merlin threw out her chest, proud, and said it.

“I think my master should wield the strength he’s honed to the utmost exactly as he always has, by his own convictions and his own sense of right. For that is the very Ephthal-sama I look up to and hold dear.”

“…It’s a strange thing, but when you say it, Merlin, I actually start to believe it.”

And there Merlin, seeming to notice something, made to stand, shifted her gaze to the front of the carriage, shook her head, and sat back down. Why she’d started to rise, I could guess. Why she’d sat back down, I couldn’t. So, no help for it, I made to stand in her place, and a voice reached me.

“Three of them have already gone out to meet the attack, so there’s no need for concern.”

“That much I know. But Anastasia and the others are students, you realize. I’ll grant they’re passably capable, but real combat, on their own, is still too soon for those girls.”

“Ephthal-sama? Are you not being a touch overprotective?”

“Overprotective? When we’re surrounded by the foreign tribe, a pack of bloodthirsty bandits?”

“Yes, I would call it overprotective. Though in your case, Ephthal-sama, your baselines are all skewed in various ways, so perhaps that’s only to be expected…”

And there the voices of the tribesmen came in from outside.

“Prime women!”

“Aye, all kids, but they’ll fetch a good price!”

“Boss! These ones are armed, looks like they mean to fight!”

“Price drops, but if they resist, hack off an arm or two, no matter! Just don’t kill them!”

Bellowed filth enough to make your head spin came flying in from every side. And there was no chance Maria would sit still against scum like that.

“Excuse me, you lot? Who’s selling who, now?”

“Ho, a mouthy little elf brat, this one.”

“So, who’s selling who? I’d suggest keeping the jokes to your face.”

“Ha, well. You’ll all get sampled before you’re shipped out, you know that already. But you, you I’ll pass around good and proper.”

“Ah, so it’s not just your face that’s ugly, it’s your head too. And your character’s foul on top, truly, garbage past all saving. You disgust me.”

“Right, you lot. This brat’s off the sale list. Hack off her limbs and haul her back to the hideout cave.”

“What’ll we do with her, boss?”

“Keep her as a plaything. Heh, be a fine sight, watching how long a brat like her holds onto her sanity, limbs lopped off and toyed with till there’s nothing left.”

“The last woman didn’t last three days, mind.”

“Right, care to wager? She looks tough at the core, I say a week. Take the last woman as the mark: over or under, three days. I’ve got ten silver on four days or more!”

“I’ll take the same as before, twenty silver she breaks inside three days!”

A crew rotten in head and character both, it seemed. At this rate Maria and the others would— and, unable to bear it, I stood and came bounding down out of the carriage.

And the instant I stepped out—

“Gyaaah!”

“Gwuh!”

Anastasia’s thrown knives were burying themselves, one after another, in the tribesmen’s heads. These weren’t practice blades. They were the real thing. And, needless to say, the men sprawled with knives sprouting from their skulls like grotesque sculptures had no breath left in them.

“Gyagh!”

“Nnaaah!”

Maria’s arrows followed with the same screams, sinking likewise into the men. Anastasia and Maria alike. Every strike to the head—a headshot, one kill per motion.

And Sheryl, next, spoke up, soft and quiet.

“…Level 5: Evil Cutter.”

The whirlwind blades she loosed turned ten of the tribesmen to gobbets of meat in the blink of an eye.

“L-Level 5?!”

“H-h-hiiii!”

“Monsters!”

At that, Anastasia and Maria let fly Level 4 spells at the tribesmen, fear plain on their faces now. Both had gone with fire-attribute magic, by the look of it, and the tribesmen went flying amid the blast.

“Wh-what are these brats, what are they?!”

And so the remaining tribesmen bolted like startled hares, and I was left standing there, dumbstruck, on the spot.

“Ephthal-sama?”

“What is it, Merlin?”

“Your words earlier… the three being ‘passably capable students’, that is passably capable by the standards of four hundred years ago.”

“…”

“My academy, for all its faults, is where the truly capable of the present world gather. Which means that, by the measure of this era, those three are already more than strong enough. In adventurers’-guild terms, B to A rank, I should think.”

At that, I sighed. Well, weighing everything I’ve seen so far, I take the point, and it’s likely true. But those three, adventurer rank B to A… This era really has grown too weak, in every sense. Still, I suppose it’s about time I adapted to the common sense of the age.

“Well, there it is, Ephthal. Maybe it’s time you stopped treating us like small fry?”

Hearing that, I raised my palm high overhead—

“Level 7: Sagittarius.”

The ten arrows of light I loosed flew off to a point some two hundred meters up and shot down a gargoyle, and the beast-tamer riding it. A tribe beast-tamer, no doubt, but Maria hadn’t noticed the one aiming at us from on high with arrows.

“That’s why I keep telling you, it’s dangerous.”

“…Guh.”

No comeback left. I know the phrase. But she was the first child I’d met to actually say “guh” out loud, and I couldn’t help laughing.

At any rate, Anastasia and the others are short on real combat experience. There are absolutely things that training alone can’t teach, so part of the point here is to have them build some against the foreign tribe. I can’t keep them under a protective wing forever, but at the least I have to let them earn the experience.

“All right. Shall we make for the fort, then.”

⁂

A few days later, we were taking lunch on the terrace of a mountain teahouse.

“Looks like we’ll finally get a proper meal, Ephthal.”

“I was thoroughly sick of dried meat and hard bread myself, Master.”

“…I don’t mind either way.”

Well, Sheryl’s got no palate to speak of. And so it was a real, honest meal for the first time in ages. Getting this far, mind you, had meant wading through wave after wave of the foreign tribe. Anastasia and the others, having taken to heart the value of that concept called watching your surroundings, had turned the whole lot back on their own, and done it thoroughly. It was just about ideal for building real combat experience, though for my part the weakness of this era’s foreign tribe, or rather its bandits, left me genuinely deflated. At this rate the ordinary, non-magical strength of the national armies must be badly withered too, I thought, and a sigh came out.

Then again, even professional soldiers outside the mage trades use body-strengthening, that power of magic. So, thinking it over, with magic itself in decline this is perhaps only to be expected. The swordsmen I know of in this era are… Fraser nii-san, Cecilia nee-san, or maybe Principal Moria at the officers’ academy. Those people happen to belong to a wildly strong bracket, and because I’d been rating Anastasia’s and Maria’s close-quarters fighting against them, my sense of that had gone crooked as well, it seemed.

That aside, our food arrived at the table.

“Yaaay! Meat that isn’t dried!”

Eyes sparkling, Anastasia stabbed her fork into the ginger pork and took a bite.

“It’s delicious!”

Curious myself, I tried a mouthful too. Fat rich with savor spread over my tongue, and the sweet-salty seasoning suited it perfectly. It’s called ginger pork for a reason. There’s something of Japan’s buta no shōgayaki in it. The onion and broccoli fried alongside it were good too, coated in the pork fat and nicely browned. I was eating it with bread, but, well, if only there were rice, I couldn’t help thinking, which is likely the curse of a man who is, at the root, Japanese.

“You’re not eating, Maria?”

“No… meat’s a bit much for me. I can eat it, but when it’s plonked down as the whole main course… just looking at it turns my stomach.”

That’ll be the vegetarian-by-default sensibility particular to elves. “Excuse me, could we get a separate order, a salad with plenty of boiled beans?” When I put it to the mistress at the back of the shop, Maria’s face brightened.

“But the salad’s welcome, and of course I’ll eat it, still, Ephthal, I think I’ll try my best with the meat too. Because you like meat over salad, right?”

“Well, I do.”

“I want to like the same things you do, to be able to. I want to try, in that direction. That’s what I found myself thinking, just now.”

Said to me with a perfectly straight face. As I sat there struggling for a response, a loud voice reached me from the table behind.

“A Minotaur, tamed by a foreign-tribe beast-tamer, brought down? Don’t talk nonsense. It’s an S-rank threat, that thing. And there’s been no word of a tribe-subjugation party being raised lately.”

“No, I saw it with these eyes. The Minotaur, and the tribe’s corpses.”

“So you came through Hell Road, where the tribe swarms thick?”

“Aye, on a great noble’s whim. A once-in-a-lifetime delivery, they hired adventurers for escort, and wait as we might, not a single raid came. An anticlimax, all told.”

“That’s the strange part. Half a year back the tribe got active, and near here a fort was taken once, retaken now, but at that level. Even with the border patrol reinforced it’s a dire situation, they say… did you really come through Hell Road?”

“Whatever else, I saw it. The Minotaur’s corpse.”

“A Minotaur’s the sort of thing they send a knight order to put down. You mistook something for it.”

“No, listen, that was a Minotaur, sure as anything.”

“But I’ve heard nothing of the kingdom’s subjugation squads or the guild moving…”

“Then what? You saying I’m a liar?”

“Don’t get sore. I’m only calling the impossible impossible. So then, you’ll tell me there were several A-rank adventurers out in a place like this? Hell Road’s narrow, ill-suited to any large-scale haulage. For a lone merchant to hire that as escort would be wildly over the top.”

“That’s what doesn’t add up… who in the world put down a Minotaur…”

Ah, that would be us. Even I was surprised the tribe had a Minotaur in tow, I’ll admit. Anastasia and the others couldn’t handle it alone, so Merlin stepped in, and from there it was over in an instant.

“What this gentleman says is the truth.”

At the voice, there was something familiar in it. I sent an offhand glance toward the table behind.

“And you are?”

“Upper C-rank. Edwards of the Mad Flame, they’d call me.”

Oh—you again!

Come to think of it, the last time I’d met this man was at a teahouse too. Back then, if I recall, he’d had Anastasia in tow as a slave. But he’d been calling himself A-rank then, so why an odd, middling rank like upper C-rank now? Well, for the moment I’ll keep my face turned away so he doesn’t notice me. Edwards and I have a history, and it’s a nuisance.

“Hm? Edwards of the Mad Flame, wasn’t that an A-rank? What’s this about?”

The man who’d been insisting “a Minotaur’s corpse is impossible” put the question to Edwards, having landed on the same doubt as me.

“…I made a mess of things a while ago. Spent a few months locked up, and when I was released I handed the A-rank title back to the guild.”

Ah, so he did turn himself in. Though it was rather an attempted-murder sort of affair; I wouldn’t have thought a few months would see him out of a cell…

“Made a mess? What did you do?”

“As for the charge, it shames me even now… might I be spared that? Ordinarily it would have been a sentence of several years, but with my family’s pull, somehow… A great deal of money to the victim, and words in the right ears among the judiciary. I caused trouble, it seems.”

“Ho, reach into the judiciary, eh? So you’re some great noble’s son?”

“A house of some standing, let’s leave it at that. Being a third son, I’m let do as I please. To my family, a noble’s son turned adventurer is a prodigal they’ve given up on.”

“If you’re a lordling, then, should I be minding my manners?”

“No, no need. Respect your elders, so a certain boy once taught me.”

“A certain boy? Well, never mind. And why did you surrender the A-rank title?”

“A lack of ability. That’s the whole of it. Merely being able to wield the top of the Level 4 spells, I never had more than B-rank strength to begin with. I put on airs over that, a noble’s prestige and bribes. The truth is, the A-rank title was as good as bought with money and connections.”

“Hm, I can’t follow the story.”

“That a station beyond your worth only ruins you, that’s what I realized. So I’m in the middle of making a fresh start, with a new heart.”

Reformed, I suppose you’d call it. If so, that’s a happy thing for my part. That Edwards, back then, really was a piece of work.

“Whatever the case, I’ll vouch for it. That was a Minotaur’s corpse, sure enough. And from the traces of the fight, the work of several people, at that.”

“Several people, eh… now that’s something.”

Then the man thought a while and muttered, sounding truly mystified.

“But really, who on earth would do something so preposterous?”

And there, off in the distance, a band decked out in armor came into view, riding toward us. About ten of them, all mounted. They halted near the teahouse and dismounted with a great clatter, then made straight for the table behind us, every one of them.

“You look like adventurers, but I’ll ask you to come along to the border fort.”

At the words, Edwards addressed the armored man.

“To the fort? We four C-rank adventurers are in the middle of an escort commission from the guild.”

“The tribe’s grown active. A fort took a night raid only the other day, and the higher-ups are on edge.”

“I don’t follow…?”

“There’s no telling where a tribe spy might be, and the garrison captain’s gone nervy over it. Everyone bearing arms is to be brought in for questioning, is the order.”

“We have an escort commission, you understand? What of our employer? Fort or no fort nearby, this is the very edge of the tribe’s territory.”

“Pay me, and by my personal authority… I’ll not refuse to lodge your employer at the fort until the questioning’s done. Though, the most I can manage is a spare corner of the stables.”

The armored man laughed a coarse laugh, and Edwards’s employer, the merchant, let out something close to a shriek.

“That’s high-handed robbery, sir!”

“Regardless, this comes from above. It’s a state of emergency, on account of the tribe. So long as you’re in this kingdom, you’ll do as we say.”

And so, one way and another, the merchant seemed to settle things with the teahouse’s owner. He’d be staying in a spare second-floor room, it appeared, and Edwards and the rest set off for the fort. Eight of the armored band led Edwards’s group away, and the two that stayed turned to us as well.

“You heard how it stands. No exceptions for the armed. You’ll come to the fort too.”

Well, of course we would. I shrugged, and Merlin murmured a question at my ear.

“What shall we do, Ephthal-sama?”

“Let’s go along quietly here. Svetlana had word that the tribe holding the Scarlet of Hades means to raid the fort, if anything, this suits us. Merlin and I can hold the fort’s losses to a minimum.”

“But if it comes to questioning us on suspicion of being spies… that end of it may prove troublesome?”

“Well, my family’s rooted in this kingdom. Let’s meet it head-on and aboveboard. I can name the ducal house if need be, and a word or two should sort it out.”

At that Merlin nodded, and the armored man gave a smirk.

“Settled, then. You’ll come with us.”

⁂

The fort’s interrogation room.

Take the interrogation room from a crime drama and redo it in isekai flagstone, that should get the general sense across. And there the garrison captain, who looked to be in his late thirties, conducted the questioning himself.

“This crest is indeed the Thunder God Emperor’s. To think you truly are a son of the Alcott ducal house… my apologies.”

With those words, a short blade wrapped in clean cloth was placed back in my hands. It was the talisman blade Cecilia nee-san had given me as a parting gift. To think it would prove useful in a place like this. In any case, meeting it head-on had won them over after all.

“When my men reported someone claiming the ducal name, I doubted it, but I’m glad I came in person to be sure. Many of my common-born men wouldn’t know the Alcott crest.”

Across the long desk sat Captain Orgren; on our side, the five of us. My own suspicion had been cleared, it seemed, but as for the other four, I wondered.

“And what becomes of my companions?”

At that the captain shook his head hard, side to side, all perish the thought.

“I could hardly take up more of the ducal son’s companions’ time to no purpose. There’ll be no questioning them, of course.”

Truly, thank you, Cecilia nee-san. I hadn’t imagined the ducal prestige would tell this sharply. Then again, the house is reckoned one of the top three names in the kingdom, so perhaps it’s only natural.

“But truly, my apologies! My subordinate’s blunder, yet the responsibility is mine. I beg you, I beg you, of your great magnanimity, your pardon!”

Captain Orgren was bowing his head, near tears, looking about to start slamming his forehead into the desk.

Hmm, but this is rather laying it on thick, and, well… I felt for the man.

“You needn’t put yourself out this much over someone like me.”

“No, I shall put myself out!”

“That I’m the former duke’s son is true, and that I’m the current duke’s brother is true. But, well… I’m not a pure-blooded noble.”

“Hm? Not a pure-blooded noble, you say?”

“Yes. I’m the current duke’s half-brother, by a different mother.”

“Hmm… a different mother? If it’s no imposition, the details… I’d be glad to hear them.”

“I’m the child of a commoner mother and the former duke. A comfortable enough position, all told.”

And with those words, Captain Orgren’s lowered head snapped up in an instant, and he fixed me with a glare.

“Ah, you’re a commoner’s child. A bastard.”

Abruptly he clapped his hands and called back to the soldiers standing behind him.

“You there. There’s no need to treat this child with any care.”

Then, as if catching himself, he cleared his throat once, ahem.

“That may have come out badly worded. Show him some courtesy, only, the bare minimum will do.”

He shrugged, and Captain Orgren let out a sigh.

“Still, the young these days simply don’t understand the noble order. In any case, your questioning continues.”

“But you just said—”

“Strictly speaking, unlike me, you are not a noble. You’re a quasi-noble, treated a shade better than a commoner. And that only for a single generation. But, boy, don’t you think that an affront?”

“An affront, you say?”

“I am, as you see me, the head of the barony of Orgren. Seeing a true-blooded noble like myself bow his head, why did you not at once bid me stop? If that’s not an affront, what is?”

No, you were the one bowing at tremendous speed, entirely of your own accord… I gave a wry smile.

“In any case, I cannot treat you as a noble. Just as you’re treated within the Alcott ducal house itself.”

And there Captain Orgren leaned back into his chair and crossed his legs in one unhurried motion. Talk about being thoroughly looked down on. But that aside, it’s true the previous Duke Alcott had treated me exactly so. And, as the word purist attests, the great majority of nobles are inclined to despise the very existence of a bastard. This man, beyond any doubt, is no exception—

“As for how I’m treated, you’d do better to ask the current head, Fraser nii-san, or Cecilia nee-san, who serves at court. I should be recognized as family, properly.”

At my words the captain began to laugh, as though this were the finest joke.

“Ha, hahaha! What nonsense is this! There’s no chance a child born of a commoner is acknowledged as one of the house! A half-sibling. A bastard can’t so much as get an audience; that’s common knowledge. No lies, now. No lies!”

Wearing a coarse grin, the captain shifted his gaze to Merlin and Anastasia.

“And these women… demons, are they? You do know a permit’s required to walk our nation?”

On the temple of Merlin, who’d kept silent through the whole exchange, several veins had risen. Ah, this is bad, I thought. But Merlin and Anastasia meekly laid their permits down on the desk.

“Ho. Your name’s Merlin, is it.”

“…It is.”

“A grand name, though.”

“A grand name how?”

“There’s a hero of the demon race who bears such a name. The founder of our kingdom’s Alcott ducal house, the Thunder God Emperor’s own direct disciple. Ah, that reminds me: I’ve long wanted to ask one of the Alcott blood. What do you make of him, your ancestor, the Thunder God Emperor?”

Well, it’s my own self we’re talking about, so it’s an awkward one to answer.

“The previous Alcott duke was a rather odious sort. A mere descendant of the Inferior Emperor, yet he’d stroll the court throwing his weight about.”

“The Inferior Emperor… you say?”

“Just so. The Thunder God Emperor is the weakest of the Four Emperors, isn’t he? A makeweight on a wholly different plane from the other three, and treated as their equal for some reason all the same. A troublesome business.”

Ah, this is no good. Merlin was trembling, the vessels standing out all over her face, half her eyes gone to white. That she’d stayed silent until now. She’d just barely been holding on while it was the present-day Alcott house under discussion. But the instant the talk reached my previous self, her anger needle seemed to have swung clean off the dial. And there, in that hair-trigger moment before the blast, Maria whispered at my ear.

“Ephthal? You all right letting him say what he likes? This is honestly getting a bit—”

Looking over, it wasn’t only Merlin; Anastasia and Sheryl too had their brows knit. Everyone was a breath from boiling over. And, granted, being trashed this thoroughly is unpleasant even for me. As it stands it’s just insults, plain and simple. But announcing “I am the Thunder God Emperor” here would be a strange thing to do, and taking it to force would only make a mess, and amount to bullying the weak besides.

“Everyone, anger and violence are no good.”

I let out a small sigh.

“In any case, you’ll be lodging at this fort a while. Just to confirm, you’re of quasi-noble standing, correct?”

“Yes, under the system that’s how it stands.”

“A commoner adventurer would be swept up under emergency conscription, but in your case it takes the form of a request from the national army. As a quasi-noble who upholds the state… you won’t be telling me you refuse, surely?”

“I don’t follow you?”

“There’s a reason we’re gathering the armed. The truth is, the tribe are a good deal tougher than they look. We were handled roughly the other day, and requests for reinforcements to the capital go nowhere. Cases just like ours keep cropping up, and there’s no strength to spare for this place.”

“Don’t tell me, that’s why, under the pretext of questioning spies…?”

At my question, Captain Orgren grinned and gave a great nod.

“Aye, we’re mustering combatants to defend the realm. In a state of emergency, local conscription, civilians included, is permitted at the commander’s discretion.”

“But that’s a different tale, isn’t it? The story was questioning, verify a man’s identity and he’s released at once?”

“To pledge your life on the road to the fort, to speak the plain truth like a fool, and to obey it like a fool, is a fool’s work, wouldn’t you say? I simply chose the easy road.”

Well, at least where I’m concerned, if I’d been asked in good faith I’d not have been unwilling. This kingdom’s king of four hundred years ago treated me well, to begin with, it’s the very reason House Alcott put down roots here.

“And if the adventurers you’ve hauled in refuse?”

“Desertion before the enemy means prison, as a rule. A commoner has no right of refusal, none.”

The captain leaned on the word commoner.

“Ah, but as a commoner’s child, you do have the right to refuse. For whatever reason, in this kingdom a bastard of a great noble of ducal rank or above gets quasi-noble treatment. Fortunate in your parents, weren’t you, Ephthal-kun.”

Then, with a small chuckle, he went on.

“Still, quasi-noble though you may be, if you mean to put on the airs of a noble after a fashion… I’d like you to fulfill a noble’s duty first, and defend the realm.”

No, I’m not putting on any noble airs.

“…”

“Why silent? Don’t tell me you refuse? I’ll not ask you to lodge here a month or two. The raid we anticipate is the new moon the day after tomorrow, stay only that long and your duty to the state is discharged.”

“…No help for it, I suppose. Understood.”

“Mm, obedient, and rightly so. Were I in your place, I’d have nodded far, far sooner, mind. This is why the half-made things with commoner blood in them… I’ll expect you to show us a noble’s pride on the battlefield.”

Captain Orgren rose and started for the door. And there, hand on the knob, he muttered as if it had just come to him.

“It was the crack adventurers who put down the Minotaur troubling the region, those are the ones I’d thought would come up in the net, not women and children. Damn it. No sense hauling in dead weight.”

Made to sound like a private aside, but that last was said to carry, plainly on purpose. Purists really are a vile breed… no, that’s not it. In this case it’s simply that the man’s own character is rotten. And so, with the creak of the opening door, Captain Orgren took his leave.

Chapter 1 – The Jade-Haired Dragon Princess

The academy training ground, and the hour was dusk.

“We are absolutely coming with you!”

The one who declared it, positively brimming with fight, was Anastasia.

She and I stood facing off, while Merlin and Maria watched from a distance to see how it would go.

Well, to explain how it came to this.

There’s no question the Fire God Emperor has a hand in the business this time. Which means the situation could turn dangerous even for me, and bringing Anastasia and Maria along, Merlin aside, was a bad idea. Bluntly, they’d be a liability, and I couldn’t guarantee their safety. So, reluctantly, I’d ordered them to wait at the mansion, and that had drawn no small amount of discontent.

“I-I-I’m always with Master! I want to stay by your side!”

Their being so attached to me is a happy thing, but that’s a separate question from this one.

Sheryl, for her part, can handle higher-order magic than the other two, so I judged she could keep herself reasonably safe and let her come. There’s also the fact that she’s tied to the Ice God Emperor to begin with. It seems Brad opened the Root of Roots the other day by devouring the soul of Sheryl’s sister, and there’s a real chance Sheryl’s very existence is bound up with the Fire God Emperor. If so, then even at some risk, better to keep her at hand.

“Haaah? Sheryl gets a pass and I’m the dead weight? You’ve got some nerve!”

And there Maria came biting back, her voltage cranked to its very peak.

Having caught a backlash of that force, I set the two of them a challenge.

“So here’s the deal: manage to surprise me, even for a single instant, in a mock battle, and the win is yours, Anastasia.”

“I-I-I’d like nothing better!”

Both of them, temperament-wise, are the charge-straight-down-the-middle type. Well, Anastasia’s a touch questionable on that score. Either way, when it comes to making a point land, there’s no beating the plainest, clearest method.

“All right, Merlin, if you’d do the honors.”

At my word, Merlin gave a firm nod.

“Then—the mock battle begins!”

The instant Merlin spoke, Anastasia sprang far back to open the distance. At the same time, by way of a parting gift, she flung a short blade, a mock knife, of course. Given her fighting style up to now, an ambush with a thrown weapon right off the whistle was well within my expectations. I knocked the knife down with my sword.

At that, Anastasia snapped her fingers and set off an explosion spell underground. The ground shook with the blast, and she leapt back once more. And there it dawned on me: her very first jump hadn’t been to open distance from me at all—

“Ah, I see.”

The ground gave way beneath me. Footing gone, I dropped into a pitfall Anastasia had prepared in advance. The hole was maybe ten meters in radius and two deep. And looking down… oh, come on, the bottom was bristling with bamboo spears. Their points looked to be smeared with poison, too. Ha, she’s come to kill me outright, I thought, and had to smile.

“It’s a numbing agent! Even you, Master, can’t shrug off poison from an ambush… huh?”

“Merlin can float. You think I can’t? Honestly, I’m impressed you went to all this trouble, but this much won’t close the gap between us.”

I halted my vertical drop by force of magic and rose slowly back up, then set down at the edge of the pit. I was partway through “So no, I can’t take you along—” when Anastasia pulled something round from her coat. Seven spheres in all came flying at me and the ground around me—and burst with a sharp pop.

“Smoke bombs?!”

Knowing Anastasia, I’d figured the pitfall might not be the only trap, so this too was more or less anticipated. The area vanished into smoke in an instant, but I made a point of staying calm and called out to her.

“Rob me of my sight, and I can still read what’s around me with detection magic—like this!”

The detection spell I’d cast caught Anastasia closing on me from behind at speed. A mock sword came down at me from high overhead. I slipped it aside and drove a counter-thrust into her chest.

“Guh…!”

A clean hit, and the thud of a body crumpling. And there something felt off. I cast a wind spell at once to clear the smoke. Why did it feel off? Because the sensation of the chest through my sword had been… oddly full. More to the point, I’d felt something far too ample for Anastasia. And when the smoke lifted, there—

“Irene-san…?”

The one lying there was Irene-san, the Student Council vice president. Ah, that explained the far-too-ample feel. But why on earth was Irene-san here?! While I stood there flustered, Irene-san smirked.

“A Level 4 disguise spell. It only lasts a few minutes, but Anastasia-san assured me that would be plenty, and asked me for the favor.”

Come to think of it, Anastasia had gone off to the washroom right before the match. I’d known she was setting something up; so this was it. Which meant—

—I hadn’t been fighting Anastasia at all, from the very start.

And when I noticed she hadn’t cast a single spell since the opening, I let out an “ah” of understanding. Of course, her read was that I’d pick her out by the habits of her spell-craft. That was the plan. But then where was the real Anastasia?

And there the earth at the bottom of the pit went churning.

“A hole under the hole… a false bottom!”

The one who came bursting up was, naturally, Anastasia. She emerged with her right palm already leveled at me and fired instantly.

“Level 4: Shining Arrow!”

The fastest bolt in the Level 4 bracket. Small in power, but the formula comes together quickly, and the arrow itself is quick as well. Honestly, this had caught me completely flat-footed. I hadn’t built a single formula. I twisted my body to dodge, but I wasn’t going to make it. In a scramble I threw my palm out toward the arrow—

“Level 6: Black Guardian!”

I got it up just in time. My defensive spell snuffed Anastasia’s out on the instant.

“E-even… doing all this… I couldn’t land a single hit… Master really is in a class of his own.”

Anastasia had gone teary-eyed, though… well, she was rather missing the point. I glanced at Merlin, who wore the look of a woman biting down on something bitter, as if to say she had no choice but to acknowledge it. And I felt the same.

Honestly, I was lost for words. The thing was, in this case I’d had no choice but to use a defensive spell. No, made to use it is the truer way to put it. Had it been Merlin rather than Anastasia running that gambit, I might well have lost, and that’s no exaggeration. What let me weather it was the overwhelming gap in raw ability, and the fact that Anastasia had closed that gap with the tactic of the ambush was simply true. At the very least, this was the first time in a one-on-one fight that I’d used a defensive spell against an opponent this far beneath me in skill.

“No, I’m impressed, Anastasia.”

At my words her face lit up.

“Then, does that mean—?”

“You’ve walked the back roads all your life. Running away is your true trade, isn’t it? The moment you sense danger, you bolt, flat out. That’s the condition.”

“Yes! Yes! Thank you, Master!”

I let out a light breath, then walked over to where Maria was standing.

“Maria. This is hard to say, but… you don’t have Anastasia’s quick wits, so I can’t take you with me.”

“What? The wind’s up. I can’t hear you.”

It did seem the wind had suddenly picked up. So I stepped closer to Maria and said it again, louder.

“Maria. This is hard to say, but—”

“Like I said, the wind, I can’t hear you. Come closer and say it right in my ear.”

As told, I put my mouth to Maria’s ear and opened it once more.

“Maria. This is hard to say, but you don’t have Anastasia’s quick wits, and you’re short on power, so—”

An ambush.

Maria pressed her lips to mine.

“…Eh?”

“I just had to surprise you, right? By the way, the wind was Vice President Irene’s spell.”

Maria traded a glance with Irene-san, and the two of them grinned like a pair of pranksters.

Damn it…

Still, that she’d surprised me was a fact I couldn’t very well deny.

“So I’m coming. To make sure no strange bugs get on you… I have to come along.”

“Strange bugs?”

“…Well, you’ve got a habit, haven’t you? A habit of… picking up odd things.”

On that point, I had no comeback.

At any rate, a man’s word, once given. Honestly the two of them are both baggage, but I’ll take it as training for myself and let it go.

⁂

The inter-academy tournament was a month off, and until then I’d been granted leave from the academy. As for Merlin, it seemed she had a preposterous backlog of paid holiday saved up, so this went down as her finally using some of it. There’d been a fair bit of wrangling, apparently, but once she digs her heels in there’s no moving her, and she strong-armed it through.

Then, four days’ travel by carriage toward the ducal domain, and we arrived at our first destination: the Dragon’s Treasure Vault.

We entered a cavern in the mountains, far from any village, and walked the dark, chill rock for maybe fifteen minutes. Then the path switched abruptly to laid flagstone, and when we opened the gate at its dead end—there was another world spread out before us. A lobby that called to mind the social floor of a royal court, long-pile carpet underfoot, gold and silver treasure, busts and paintings everywhere.

The keeper came out from a back room the moment we entered. Merlin, already an acquaintance, spoke with her a while, and the keeper began to laugh, low and amused.

“Fufu. Open the vault and let you leaf through the books Sasha-sama entrusted to my keeping? My, my, and what foolishness might you be talking, Merlin-chan?”

She looked like a human woman in her late twenties. No, that’s not right. A flawless, otherworldly beauty, as though she’d stepped out of a painting in a gallery. There was even a kind of bewitching quality to her; she gave off the sense of something not quite of this world. Her chest, too, was enormous. Beyond human, really. I am, after all, a man, so it would be a lie to say this bosom, all but bursting its bounds, didn’t catch my eye.

—Off every scale there is.

Merlin is quite well endowed herself, and the first time I saw her it gave me no small jolt, but this was on another plane entirely.

—Rocket boobs.

The words surfaced in my head. A bosom sturdy enough to carry a man’s dreams clear past the stratosphere… what in the world am I thinking. And with an outfit that bared her front so freely, the thoughts came all the more readily. But that aside.

“Of course I never imagined you would comply meekly, Svetlana.”

So the two of them stood glaring at each other. Hm. They’d been on good terms once, if memory served, yet here we were.

This Svetlana, incidentally, is someone with whom I have a not-shallow history. When she was small she was quite attached to me, and since she looked for all the world like a little doll, I doted on her in turn. Ordinarily she keeps a human form; all that’s left of her Dragon Emperor blood, her Emerald Dragon nature, is the deep jade of her hair. That much hasn’t changed from the old days.

“In any case, I refuse. You see, Big Sis dislikes lending her aid to the weak. To put it more precisely, I don’t mind lending humans my strength. It’s more that I decline to count the weak as human at all.”

“Hoh. And what do you mean by the weak, Svetlana?”

“Because there’s simply no end to it. A giant’s turned up on that mountain; a herd of river-horses has come to that stream, please save us, Dragon Princess-sama. You must have had your share of the same, Merlin-chan?”

“I’ll not deny it. That the powerless lean on the powerful, and swarm to them, is only to be expected. But you too are one who carries on Ephthal-sama’s will. As I recall, you used to set off gladly to hunt down the villains and the monsters that preyed on the weak…”

“Since the Magia Burst four hundred years ago, humankind, your demon race included, has changed. So at a certain point Big Sis’s thinking changed too. I’ve no particular wish to harm humans now, but neither the obligation nor the free time to go out of my way to help them.”

“To put it plainly,” Svetlana said, and clapped her palms together.

“There’s no end to it, truly. Handle a river-horse yourselves, or Big Sis is in real trouble. Help a few times and it becomes the expected thing, and then if so much as one casualty turns up in a matter I’ve had a hand in, there’s always some fool who complains, isn’t there?”

“I can’t say I don’t take your meaning. When goodwill on our side comes to be taken for granted, that sort of thing does tend to follow.”

“So Big Sis lost all interest in human beings. Getting mixed up with the weak is nothing but a nuisance.”

Calling herself Big Sis, though, one does wonder about that. Well, from the look of her, I suppose it fits well enough. And there Maria pushed into the conversation.

“Th-there may well be something to that about humankind, but isn’t the way you put it a little cruel? For weak people—people who can’t use magic or body-strengthening the way we can—even a low-ranked monster is a genuine threat!”

“Fufu. Fufufu!”

As if this were the finest entertainment, Svetlana clapped her hands over and over and laughed.

“Just now… did this little elf child say ‘we’? That’s too much, ha, ha, hahaha! Don’t tell me you fancy yourself as something other than one of the weak?”

“…At the very least I can manage a river-horse or two.”

“No, no, this is a surprise even to Big Sis. You genuinely believe you stand on the same side as I do. A little slip of a girl, convinced she’s a cut above the rest… fufu, this is why there’s no saving fools.”

At the remark Maria puffed out her cheeks.

“…I’ll have you know I won my way through the academy’s representative selection, and I’m bound for the national tournament.”

“Fu, ha, hahaha! Ahh… kh, hehehe… of all the things to say… a tale about the little ones at a magic academy? My, my, now there’s a story on a scale to leave Big Sis reeling.”

“Wh-what’s so funny?! The national tournament is the glory of every young mage—”

“Turn it around, then: can you tell one mite apart from another by size? Come to Big Sis with talk on that microscopic scale: this one’s a hair bigger, that one a hair smaller, and all she can do is laugh.”

“H-hang on… mites… what is it with you?!”

“The plain fact is that, students aside, if you ask Big Sis to weigh the difference between mages of the present age—four hundred years back would be another matter—all she can do is shrug in bafflement. Let’s see… you’d have to be at least the level of that Merlin-chan there to be worth discussing at all. That’s the lowest line below which Big Sis simply lumps you all in together as the weak.”

And there Svetlana’s eyes shone with an eerie light.

“Since words won’t reach you, I’ll have your body understand instead. This is the Jade Eye, one of the innate powers of the Emerald Dragon.”

The instant she spoke, Anastasia, Maria, and Sheryl dropped to their knees where they stood. Their faces drained of color in a heartbeat, and they began to tremble, fine and quick.

“There, you see? Big Sis merely let out the Dragon Emperor’s aura she’d been keeping in check, and not one of you can so much as stir, can you?”

“What this does,” Svetlana went on, “is slip past the cortex the fruit of wisdom built up, and speak to the deep places of the brain, to the instinct of humankind itself.”

“Speak… to…?”

“Just so. It makes you grasp—by instinct, not by reason—absolute power, and the sheer difference in rank. How frail a thing you truly are: this eye teaches its object that lesson well. Exactly as it’s teaching the three of you now. Ordinarily you’d not manage a word, so allow me a correction: you aren’t mites. You’re more like flies.”

“Flies… you… damn it…”

“That’s right. Not mites but flies. I’ll grant you that much special treatment. Fufu. There, I’ve made Big Sis herself acknowledge the gap between you and the truly weak. Are you satisfied now, little elf?”

To Svetlana’s low laughter Maria answered through gritted teeth, dredging the words up in defiance.

“You… absolute…”

“Tell me, little elf. Why are the dragonkin strong… have you ever stopped to think on it?”

“How would… I… know…”

“Because we are born shouldering the fate to reign through absolute power—that is the Dragon Emperor’s bloodline. An uncrossable wall, the law the gods laid down: the barrier of species.”

Her words left me thunderstruck. I stood rooted where I was, able to do nothing but gape. No—my jaw hung open and would not come back up.

—What a monumental… swelling of the head.

Four hundred years ago, when she was a knee-high little thing, she’d been so honest and so dear. But it seemed her attitude had swelled right along with her chest.

Then Svetlana let the low laughter die and made her face grave.

“And yet, on rare occasion, there’s a human who breaks that wall by sheer effort, which is exactly why humans are interesting. And so Big Sis, half-resigned about the humans of today, goes on keeping her interest in mages.”

“…What do you… mean?”

“That you grovel and are scorned beneath me now is simply because you haven’t reached the stage. Big Sis respects the Undead Emperor, for one. And there have been others, over the years: humans I held in genuine reverence.”

At that Maria, greasy with cold sweat, wore a smile of triumph all the same.

“Then this… is a joke, isn’t it. All that lofty talk… but there’s one right here… who’s reached this ‘stage’ of yours… isn’t there?”

Maria sent her gaze my way, and when Svetlana followed it and looked at me too, our eyes met. And Svetlana’s went wide, wide as they could go.

“…Well now, this is a surprise. You, it seems, are one of us. But an unfamiliar face. Perhaps not one who has lived since four hundred years past, but a child born after the Magia Burst? Fufu, Big Sis is glad, truly. It seems the humans of today aren’t quite past saving after all.”

“Well, glad to have pleased you, then.”

Delighted, Svetlana came trotting over to me and looped both arms around my neck.

“Your name, will you tell Big Sis your name?”

“H-hey, what are you doing?!”

She drew my face in against her chest, and—

—Smush.

My face was buried, whole, in that vast valley of a cleavage.

“Come now, Big Sis is honestly just so happy right now! Your name, your name, won’t you tell me?!”

“S-stop, please! Uh, my name is… Ephthal! Ephthal Alcott!”

Squeezed head-on between two overwhelming masses, I half-shouted it in something like desperation, and Svetlana froze on the spot.

“Um… Merlin-chan? This child is with you, yes?”

“Or rather, it is I who am with him.”

“What are you talking about. Well, your disciple, or something of the sort, I suppose… or are you making sport of me? Ah, yes, of course. The two of you are making sport of me.”

“Because,” Svetlana went on, “there is no earthly way Merlin-chan would let a companion of hers give the name Ephthal, the same name as my husband, the Thunder God Emperor I loved four hundred years ago.”

At the words, everyone but Merlin went wide-eyed, and then—

—turned on me a look that said what exactly did you get up to in the past.

And, if I wasn’t imagining it, there was a faint thread of killing intent woven through every one of those looks.

I let out an enormous sigh.

⁂

“Um, so, ehm… when I get big, please make me Ephthal-sama’s bride!”

That was Svetlana at five, back when she was still missing teeth. Having saved her life under certain circumstances, I’d become the little girl’s first object of love.

“Ah, once you’re grown and a fine woman, sure.”

And I, at the time, had answered that as a joke. Yes, I’d certainly said something of the kind—but it seemed the child had taken me at my word.

“And so, for that very reason, it’s a settled and self-evident fact that Big Sis, grown now into a fine woman, is Ephthal-sama’s wife.”

“How many times must I tell you Ephthal-sama has a wife, Bridget-sama?! This is exactly why I loathe having to meet you!”

“Oh? The dragonkin practice plural marriage. Big Sis doesn’t trouble herself over the fine print. And frankly, I’m rather worn out with you too, forever declaring nonsense like you are not his wife! So I’ve no particular urge to see you either. It’s quite all right.”

“The one talking nonsense is you! Ephthal-sama is already dead and gone!”

Ah, that’s the line she’s taking. Well, letting Svetlana in on the fact that I’m me would only make things a headache, so it’s a sound call. Yes, I firmly and unreservedly endorse that route.

“A-anyway! Hold on a moment, Svetlana!”

“Oh? Hold on? Whatever for?”

“There’s a complicated situation on our end. A brief strategy timeout.”

“…Hmm? Fine, then. Keep it short.”

So Merlin came over and, to keep the conversation from being overheard, raised a sound-blocking barrier.

“When Svetlana presses for details, our base line will be that Ephthal-sama is my disciple, forgive me for it. And as for who you are now, we’ll go with this: that a family line descended from the Thunder God Emperor’s lover of four hundred years ago has in fact survived. That’s the version with the most weight behind it.”

“That’s fine, Merlin.”

And there Maria puffed out her cheeks, out of sorts.

“Hey, Ephthal, what exactly is going on? I get that that woman’s spouting nonsense about some childhood promise, but.”

“Yes. Why do Master and the Dragon Princess know each other in the first place? And you saved her life? What in the world happened?”

“No, nothing outrageous, nothing so grand. Just… normally, you know… it’s a four-hundred-years-ago story… and, well, normally…”

“Normally?”

“Yeah. Normally, a Dragon Emperor I was acquainted with asked me to look after little Svetlana, and I ended up having to put down the demon dragon-god Echidna, who was after her.”

“There is no ‘normally’ about that!” “What kind of normal is that?!”

The two objections came back at me without a beat’s delay. Sheryl, though, took no part in it, and only gave a small nod.

“…For the first Thunder God Emperor, that is simply ordinary. An anecdote of exactly the scale that suits Ephthal, an ordinary one, I would say.”

Sheryl looked oddly proud about it, but never mind that.

“Look, four hundred years ago it was an ordinary sort of story. I teamed up with the Ice God Emperor to drive the thing off. I could hardly have taken Echidna on by myself.”

“Four hundred years ago was… on another level entirely, wasn’t it.”

Maria, face gone pale, swallowed hard.

“Maria, student?”

“What is it, Merlin-sama?”

“Even four hundred years ago, this was not ordinary. It is only that this person and his friends are strange in a great many ways. Which is precisely why, four centuries on, he still, now and again, drifts somewhere off the map of the ordinary world.”

“But, Ephthal? You really are a piece of work yourself.”

“A piece of work how?”

“I knew you had a habit of picking up odd things and getting attached, but a dragon princess, on top of everything…”

Maria and Anastasia traded a look and nodded at each other, wearing expressions I couldn’t quite name. And there Sheryl murmured, under her breath.

“…If we’re talking about that, Maria and Anastasia are strange too. In personality, mainly.”

Then Svetlana called over to us, sounding irritated.

“Not finished yet, Merlin-chan? Big Sis isn’t so terribly free, you know.”

Merlin gave a small nod, snapped her fingers, and released the sound-blocking barrier.

“In any case, Svetlana. We have reasons of our own for needing to see Sasha-sama’s books.”

“And I told you I refuse, did I not?”

“That you dislike me personally I know full well, and I’m no fonder of you. But the line you drew was that you would not lend your strength to the weak, yes? Whatever you make of me, this black-haired boy, at the least, has shown you his power.”

“That’s…”

“So which is it, will you lend us your aid or won’t you? By the very nature of the vault, the management of Sasha-sama’s books has been left to you, and the authority to grant access with it.”

And then, with a look of triumph, Merlin went on, prefacing it with, “Surely you don’t mean to tell me—”

“—that there was a lie in those fine words about not minding to lend the un-weak your strength? Ha. A proud princess of the dragonkin, caught in a lie. Now there’s a thing to make one blush for her. This is what they call giving the whole game away.”

“Kh…”

Arms folded, Merlin turned a look of open contempt on Svetlana. They really are on wretched terms. As I recall, Svetlana first came to us when Merlin was six. Svetlana herself would have been five at the time. In the few years they lived under one roof there were certainly quarrels, but at bottom they’d been like a pair of close sisters, and yet…

Still, Merlin, provocation this childish, is it truly going to work? A plan to rub her pride the wrong way and bait her, most likely, but. And as I fretted over it, Svetlana bit her lip in mortification, a why, you, and half in desperation cried out:

“Fine! I’ll grant you your viewing!”

Good, easy as ever! I’ll admit that with four full centuries gone by I’d been rather anxious, but at the root of her the character hadn’t changed a whit from childhood, and she’s as easy to handle as she ever was. Squabbles over snacks, squabbles over stuffed animals, whenever those two fell to fighting, this was always how Merlin ran rings around Svetlana.

“But there’s a condition, Merlin-chan.”

“A condition?”

“You know the territory of the foreign tribe begins some twenty kilometers south of here? It seems the foreign tribe has gotten hold of the Scarlet of Hades, from where, I couldn’t say.”

“The Scarlet of Hades…?”

Merlin and I looked at each other. The Scarlet of Hades is the very artifact noted at the head of Sasha’s research papers, the one recorded as a possible substitute for the Key of Solomon.

“But that thing was a super-class restricted contraband even four hundred years ago. Its method of refining was lost over a thousand years past, and there should be no more than a handful left in all the world. How on earth would the foreign tribe come by such a thing?”

“That, Big Sis doesn’t know. But it’s solid word from Big Sis’s own network as a collector of treasures. You may take it as ninety percent reliable and better.”

Well, in the end it all comes back to the same knot, doesn’t it. The Fire God Emperor shows every sign of collecting souls, and a legendary artifact of the necromancer’s art on top of that. One can’t help but catch the suspicious smell of it.

“What will you do, Ephthal-sama?”

“What is there to do… we’ve no choice but to take the deal.”

It’s settled beyond doubt that the thing is an artifact bearing on magic aptitude. On top of which it’s a super-hazard, capable in theory of creating and sustaining undead by the thousand. There’s no leaving it in the hands of a foreign tribe, obviously. And recovering it stands a good chance of proving useful to the aptitude cure down the line. So here too, taking the deal is the only real option.

“Crush the foreign tribe and win the orb. Simple enough for you, wouldn’t it be, Merlin?”

“And why not simply go and fetch it yourself?”

“Ha. Big Sis—born as the finished work of Eden, bearing both the fruit of life and the fruit of wisdom, both power and knowledge together—Big Sis, no… I, am to raise a hand against a rabble of human foreign tribes?”

Then, with a peal of high laughter and a coldness in her eyes, Svetlana pronounced:

“—That would not be elegant.”

“You truly are the same woman you always were. The upshot is simply that you can’t stomach doing as I say without a fuss.”

Struck somewhere tender, Svetlana choked on her words with a strangled “kh…”

“I’ve had no taste for you since the old days. Forever getting your head patted by that person merely for being the direct disciple…”

“I return the words unaltered. Forever trailing after Ephthal-sama and me through every hour of our training, and getting in the way…”

The two of them glared, the air taut enough that a fight might break out on the spot. And staying here much longer risked their catching on to any number of things. Of the thirty-six stratagems, retreat is the finest, as the saying goes. I clapped Merlin on the shoulder.

“Well then, shall we be off, Merlin-sama? To deal with this foreign tribe!”

And just as I was making to hustle us out of there—

“Wait a moment, you?”

“Y-yes? What is it?”

“You’re Merlin-chan’s disciple, are you not?”

“W-well… more or less.”

My eyes darted, I’m sure, but good, Svetlana didn’t seem to have noticed a thing.

“Then might Big Sis call you Junior, from here on?”

“J-Junior? What are you suddenly—?”

“Yes. Big Sis can’t abide this old woman called Merlin, but a capable mage she does love.”

“If I’m an old woman, then so are you, Svetlana!”

“Oh? The firmness of our skin rather differs.”

At that Merlin studied Svetlana closely, then looked down at the back of her own hand—

“Damn it all!”

—and, with the cry, slammed a fist into the wall. Now, Svetlana’s skin was certainly the dewier of the two, but surely that’s a matter of toner and skincare rather than anything else. Merlin does mind her appearance, but she’s a warrior at the core and mannish with it. Against a Svetlana who lacquers on the manicure, there’s no imagining she’d win on sheer diligence of upkeep. And there Maria put her oar in.

“No, from where I’m standing, Svetlana-sama, you’re also—”

Maria had evidently found her opening—here, this is where I can win!—and wore a bold little smile. Svetlana studied Maria just as closely, then looked down at the back of her own hand—

“Damn it all!”

—and, with the same cry, slammed a fist into the wall.

That got a small laugh out of me. One way or another, they really are just as they were: like sisters. Merlin the elder, Svetlana the younger, forever chasing Merlin’s back and copying whatever she did.

“So why Junior, Svetlana-sama?”

“Well, you see, Big Sis is in fact a mage of the Ephthal school herself, a small one. To that old woman over there—to Merlin—I’m a sister-disciple under the first Thunder God Emperor, Ephthal-sama.”

“A mage…?”

“Yes. I’ve gone on honing the craft for all four hundred years.”

And at that, my chest went warm and tight. Born strong from the start, she’d never had any need to use magic. And yet she’d always tagged along to my training with Merlin… and before I’d quite noticed, I’d been teaching magic to this child as naturally as to Merlin herself. When the time came to send her back to the Dragon Emperor, she’d wept, and carried home a great armful of grimoires, saying they were the bond between us.

—She’d gone on studying magic all this time.

The thought caught me off guard, and, unbidden, the backs of my eyes went hot.

“Humans are, I do think, weak and dull things for the most part, but here and there among them is someone remarkable, someone who crosses the barrier of species by sheer effort. And that’s why the birth of a fine new mage makes Big Sis so honestly glad.”

Svetlana wore the far-off look of someone remembering something. She smiled, and gave a small nod.

“Everyone who studies magic in earnest is a fellow traveler on the same road. So I’ll take the liberty of calling you Junior. The effort you made—driving yourself, in a mere human body, to the level of not so much as flinching at Big Sis’s aura—is worthy of nothing but admiration and respect.”

“…”

“By the way, Junior, haven’t the two of us met somewhere before? Big Sis did just now… throw her arms around you, didn’t she?”

A single line of cold sweat ran down my back. Better, without doubt, to beat a retreat from here at once. And, just as before, Svetlana looped both arms around my neck and pulled me in, pressing my face to her chest.

“There, you see! The urge to do this came out all on its own! This is a greeting Big Sis—no, that the dragonkin—give only to those they’ve truly opened their hearts to.”

No, did the dragonkin ever have any such custom? Then again, Svetlana’s about the only female dragon I’ve ever known.

And so, for my part, there was only one way to answer.

“No, this is the first time I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you.”

In this life, at least, I added, and smiled wryly to myself.

Prologue

—Sasha.

My master, and the one the world also calls the Undead Emperor.

He wields a Level 11 summoning formula, and even four hundred years ago they said he could ride out alone and meet a great nation head-on. The very pinnacle of martial power.

—What is power?

The necessary condition for protecting the people who matter to you.

The sufficient condition for defending your own pride as a fighter.

—And why does anyone reach for it?

The answer changes from person to person, but in Sasha’s case it’s simple to the point of transparency.

—Power enough that no one can ever bind you. The one absolute requirement for carrying your own will through to the end.

She… no, he sought power to live exactly as he pleased, and as a matter of plain fact, he has lived exactly as he pleased ever since.

The cross-dressing habit aside, that he’s a difficult piece of work is something he and everyone around him would grant without argument, and without his power this world would have been a hard place for him to live in.

So he reached for it.

Selfish, certainly, but there’s nothing base in him for all that: he keeps to a strict live-and-let-live and never fusses over anyone who doesn’t concern him.

Let some eyesore of a reprobate turn up in his vicinity, though, and he’ll clear them away too.

The number of villains he’s purged for no better reason than that they irritated him runs well past anything you could tally on fingers and toes.

A mage who stands utterly alone. One of a kind. The strongest there is, no qualifiers.

—A great and beautiful jet-black eagle, beholden to nothing, soaring a sky no one else can reach.

The young me, dead set on becoming the strongest, was drawn to that Sasha with everything I had.

Why I chase the summit myself, if you pressed me on it, I’d be hard put to answer.

But if you pressed anyway, there’d be only one answer I could give.

—Because I had the misfortune to be born a boy.

Other world or Earth, there isn’t a boy alive who doesn’t dream of it.

—The first dream of all. Instinct, right down at the animal level.

The kind of dream most people wake from without ever noticing, somewhere along the way, as they keep running up against reality.

Sasha never gave it up. He made ceaseless training both his wings and his weapon, climbed to a peak no one else could touch, and has reigned over the open sky ever since.

—Level 11: Otogi Fantasia.

Overwhelming violence, on a scale you can only laugh at.

And in the middle of that howling unfairness, there was always that fearless, dazzling grin.

It’s nothing so complicated, really.

When it comes down to it, the last time I crossed swords with Sasha, Merlin and I together still couldn’t force him to go all out.

Point that out and he’d only give a wry smile: between students of the same school, he’d say, Otogi Fantasia is a forbidden move.

At any rate, that man is the highest peak of martial skill I know of.

And the great wall I have to get over.

My goal is to stand at the top. The wall in the way is Sasha.

Which is why I have to do something about the handicap of having no magic aptitude… that was the entire point of my second reincarnation. But—

—that same Sasha has gone missing. And by the look of things, at the hands of violence to match his own, or worse.

I was still lost in all that when Merlin broke in, her expression puzzled.

“What’s the matter, Ephthal-sama?”

“…That Sasha gave it everything he had and still, in all likelihood, lost. Honestly, it’s shaken me more than a little.”

“I can well imagine. That someone who was the very embodiment of the preposterous…”

“By the way.” Merlin turned to the maid who’d served Sasha. “Do you have any idea who might have done this? Or, failing that, anything about Sasha-sama that’s been out of the ordinary lately?”

At the question the maid put a hand to her chin. She thought for a moment, then gave a small nod.

“Now that you mention it, Sasha-sama had been researching magic aptitude theory. Ordinarily he sleeps away most of the day to lengthen his lifespan, so he was grumbling that it was ruining his complexion.”

“Sorry to cut in from the side, but could you wait one moment?”

“Yes? What is it?”

“What did you just say?”

“That it was ruining his complexion…”

“No, before that.”

“Magic aptitude theory?”

“That’s the one. Why would Sasha-sama take up the theory of magic aptitude, now of all times?”

Magic aptitude theory was something the Fire God Emperor had established four hundred years ago. That the theory itself held no errors was plain enough. Even in those days the consensus was that digging deeper would turn up nothing more, so it had long been shelved as a finished thing.

“I wondered about it myself and asked him. All he said was, ‘If I don’t put this theory to bed, it seems my freedom is going to end up bound.’ A joke, naturally. Deflected in his usual way, in other words. In any case, he seemed to be looking into things like a cure for aptitude, which is supposed to be impossible.”

“A cure?”

“Yes. He’d turned to researching magic aptitude a few times before, whenever it crossed his mind, but this time he threw himself at it like a man possessed… and in the end he settled the theory of a cure as well. ‘Now I can finally sleep in peace,’ he said, laughing.”

My eyes went wide, and before I knew it I’d closed the distance on the maid.

“Wh-what is it? You’re… you’re very close.”

“Please, take me there… to the room where Sasha-sama was researching magic aptitude.”

My heart was pounding, hard. No, I couldn’t get the pounding under control. My breathing went ragged, and too much oxygen left my head swimming.

Fighting to keep some show of composure, I let her lead me deeper into the World Tree, Sasha’s home.

⁂

It was a room hollowed out of the tree itself. Every room in the World Tree is like that, and the color and the grain lend them all a soft, faint warmth. The study itself, though—bookshelves lined the walls, packed tight with volumes, and in the center of the room sat a simple alchemy rig: flasks, a small alchemy cauldron, that sort of thing. None of Sasha’s usual girlish décor, just the things the work required and nothing else. This was where he drew the line, I suppose, between himself as a mage and himself as Sasha, the private person.

I’d had the maid wait outside, incidentally, and laid a sound-blocking spell over the room. There was a real chance that knowing about this would put a person in danger, so I was taking what precautions I could.

“Still, is there really any such thing as a cure?”

“If Sasha-sama said he had established one, then I should think there is.”

“Well, that’s true enough. But magic aptitude is decided by whether the four great spirits favor you or not, isn’t it? And at the level of the soul, at that.”

And there something snagged in my thoughts.

—At the level of the soul, was it.

Spirits are creatures out of fantasy. And my own soul came, originally, from the other side—from modern-day Earth. Which might mean that every reincarnator, all of them… ah, I see. So that was why Sasha had called my having no aptitude a foregone conclusion.

“Ephthal-sama? What is it, exactly, this business of being favored by the spirits?”

True enough, I thought.

A spirit is all but synonymous with a god. And a god is the energy dissolved into the land itself, a thing that is everywhere and nowhere at once. They’re beyond comprehension to begin with… but why should such things exist in this world at all?

By the common sense of modern Earth’s evolutionary and biological theory, anything that lives, lives in order to reproduce. Beings like Sheryl, the issue of a spirit taking flesh and bearing a child, do factually exist. But that only happens when a spirit puts on human shape for a lark; it means reproduction in the sense of borrowing the human species’ machinery to make more humans. I’ve never once heard of spirits or gods increasing in number, and they most likely have no means of reproducing on their own either. That falls clean outside the very definition of life.

“In any case, shall we try the shelves and the desk?”

Feels rather like ransacking the place, which I don’t love. Still, needs must. Thinking as much, I pulled open the lower drawer of Sasha’s desk.

“Of course it wouldn’t be that easy…”

Well, no. This is, beyond any doubt, an important matter with the Fire God Emperor’s hand in it. Even if the papers really were here, he’d have made sure a stranger tossing the room couldn’t turn them up at a glance. To a mage, unpublished research is more precious than life itself, so you hide it, and even if you did leave it somewhere obvious, you’d have it encrypted, or something of the kind.

“The classic hiding places for research are the hidden room, the hidden bookshelf…”

“Yes. Or, if the work is entirely finished, there’s the chance it’s simply kept somewhere else altogether.”

“Not going to be a straight road, is it.”

Then, glancing over the books ranged on the desk rack, I found one with a spine that read—

The Cure for Magic Aptitude and the Lesser Key of Solomon: A Study of the Goddess and Reincarnators.

The thing itself. In the most head-on title imaginable. I nearly toppled over on the spot.

“Why would he just leave it lying out?!”

Merlin gave a small, wry laugh at that.

“Very like Sasha-sama, I’d say. Bold, or however one wants to put it.”

“Well, I’ll grant you it’s like him, all right.”

Thoroughly deflated, I slid the book off the rack and took it in hand.

“Ephthal-sama? What is this ‘reincarnator’ in the title, by the way?”

Now that’s a hard one to answer. I thought about it a moment.

“Someone like me, born again into a new life, I’d imagine.”

Half a lie, half the truth. Sasha knows about reincarnation from Earth, but telling Merlin that would only muddle her. With the contents still unread, there was no sense saying it here and now.

“…Right. First order of business is to see what’s inside.”

Whatever else, everything I’m after is surely written somewhere in this book. Sweat pricked down my back, and an excitement I couldn’t name filled me up. My previous self died in despair for lack of magic aptitude, and I have not forgotten, even now, how bitter that was.

I opened the cover, and there was a table of contents. The foreword, it seemed, began just beneath it.

The out-of-place artifact chiefly treated in this volume is the Key of Solomon; for the relationship between reincarnation and the goddess, refer to the previous volume.

The Key of Solomon serves as the key that opens the Root of Roots, and it is posited that, to a greater or lesser degree, the Scarlet of Hades may stand in for it when opening a dimensional singularity.

The Key of Solomon? Some sort of key that opens the Root of Roots, the way through to the goddess?

Whatever else, the cure for magic aptitude had to be revealed at last. I turned to the next page—

“Ha, hahaha! Hahahaha!”

The laugh burst out of me before I could stop it.

“What is it, Ephthal-sama?”

“No, Sasha really is a piece of work.”

I handed the closed book over, and when Merlin opened it to the page, she too let out a weak little “hahaha…”

“So that’s how he plays it.”

“Yeah. The middle’s been carved clean out.”

We hadn’t exactly expected a mage to leave his research where anyone could flip through it, so on that score there was no real disappointment. But, even so, this is in rather poor taste, don’t you think, Master?

“Well. Looks like it’s finally come to running Sasha down and making him talk. By the way, Merlin?”

“What is it, Ephthal-sama?”

“I still think the surest way for me to grow stronger is to cure my magic aptitude. I’ve no idea what the Fire God Emperor is thinking, but to stand against him I need this problem cleared as fast as humanly possible.”

“Yes. Clear the matter of your magic aptitude, and the Thunder God Emperor is the strongest thing on the earth.”

“Well, I don’t know about that… but there’s no harm in being stronger.”

Then I called a “Sorry, excuse me?” out to the maid, who’d been waiting outside the room.

“Yes? What is it?”

“About these papers, do you know where Sasha-sama keeps the originals?”

She thought a moment, then gave a small nod.

“For research of that sort… I can’t say whether it’s exactly what you’re after, but it should be kept in the Dragon’s Treasure Vault.”

At the words, Merlin and I looked at each other.

“You’re all right telling me so easily?”

“Merlin-sama is Sasha-sama’s grand-disciple. And even should the two of you go there, what becomes of the papers is for the keeper of the vault to decide, in any case.”

A fair judgment, that. Sasha entrusting his papers there means, in effect, that he’s left them to the keeper’s discretion.

The keeper of the Dragon’s Treasure Vault: a contract with the dragonkin. What it comes to is a promise to have your most precious thing guarded as a dragon’s treasure, ownership whole or in part ceded to the dragon in exchange. In concrete terms, in most cases the original owner keeps the right to borrow the item back freely for short stretches, and in return it’s kept as one piece of the dragon’s hoard, under the safest guardianship in the world. That’s the shape of the contract.

“By the way, the keeper of the Dragon’s Treasure Vault would be that acquaintance of Sasha-sama’s, the Dragon Princess, I believe. Which means it’s in that region, isn’t it?”

“Yes. In the mountains of the Alcott ducal domain.”

Well now, I thought, and let out a sigh.

That every last thread runs back to the domain where I was born and raised this time around, the land Fraser nii-san now governs as duke, has a distinctly suspicious smell to it.

But, I thought. Until now, anything touching the Fire God Emperor had promised nothing but upheaval. This, though, is good news. And the reason is—

—if this body of mine had been blessed by the spirits rather than born without aptitude, what would the truth of it have been?

Would I have been the strongest thing alive, as Merlin says? Would all my old effort, handicap aside, have carried me to the summit of martial skill?

Every answer is in Sasha’s research… in the Dragon’s Treasure Vault.

And thinking about that, I found myself standing there, unable to keep down a thrill of pure excitement.

Epilogue – The Fire God Emperor and the Undead Emperor

So we’d taken the Thunder God Emperor Ephthal Festival, and the inter-academy tournament was next on the horizon.

But before any of that, there was business to settle. Sasha had promised to tell me about the Root of Roots, and I meant to collect on that promise. It was a story the Fire God Emperor was tangled up in, and the name alone sounded like it cut straight to the heart of my magic aptitude problem. Above all, for someone who intended to climb over that wall and stand at the very top, this was something I had to know, whatever it took. And if Sasha had caught wind of anything about the Fire God Emperor’s movements, I needed to hear that too.

What was the Fire God Emperor really after? Did he mean to make an enemy of me? Far too much was still in the dark, and drifting along blind through a situation like this was the one thing I couldn’t afford.

Which is how Merlin and I found ourselves walking the great elven forest, headed for Sasha’s home: the World Tree.

It’s a tree that looks like it could reach the heavens. And honestly, depending on the weather, its upper reaches sit inside genuine clouds, so ‘reaches the heavens’ might just be the literal truth. It’s said to stand two thousand meters tall, and simply walking a circle around its trunk takes the better part of an hour. The thing is off every scale nature keeps. A dragon vein runs directly beneath it, thickening the earth spirits’ energy, and some scholar long ago concluded that’s what drove it to grow so far beyond anything natural. That was the theory, anyway.

Then Sasha came along, declared, “Ho—now that is a tree of properly grand scale. I do like flashy things,” and hollowed out the trunk to live in. Never mind that the tree is a research subject of global importance, a World Heritage Site in modern-Earth terms, with ownership, or at least custody, formally sitting with the mages’ academic society. But… well, it’s Sasha-sama. What can anyone do? On that reasoning and sheer audacity alone, the World Tree has been Sasha’s private residence for the past five hundred years.

I’d been inside plenty of times, naturally, and every visit reconfirmed it: that otokonoko grandpa has remarkably good taste in interior decorating. He spends most of his days asleep, since that’s how he maintains his semi-immortal body, and the bed he does his sleeping in is a spectacle all by itself: a canopied, princess-style four-poster in a bedroom done up in pink from wall to wall, girlish sensibilities dialed all the way up. The absurdly oversized room is crammed corner to corner with adorable stuffed animals, too… and if he didn’t happen to look like a cute little girl, the whole picture would be, well—a lot. No, scratch that. The inside is a grandpa. It’s a lot either way…

Honestly, I’ve half come to believe that Sasha’s very existence is the greatest fantasy this fantasy world has to offer. But let’s set that aside.

“What do you mean to do now, Ephthal-sama?”

“Enter the inter-academy tournament, as planned. Make a good showing there, get an audience with the Sword God Emperor at the awards ceremony… and ask him to take me on. None of that has changed.”

“No—I meant… more immediately.”

“Well, the tournament’s more than a month out. So first I’m heading for the Alcott ducal domain, my family home this time around. All of this is as good as an invitation with the Fire God Emperor’s seal on it, after all.”

“I believe accepting that invitation is a mistake. If you would only reconsider…”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“…It’s dangerous. That is my honest opinion.”

I’d taken the don’t go for half a joke. Apparently not.

“Do they matter to you…? The people of the Alcott domain?”

Merlin asked it with her eyes fixed somewhere far away, up along the World Tree. I couldn’t quite read her intent, which was rare for us. Normally we understand each other without a word passing between us. But asked whether they mattered, there was only one answer I could give.

“They’re family.”

Merlin shrugged at that.

“It’s a bad habit of mine. Long ago, whenever you and Bridget-sama were laughing together, I would be seized by an anxiety I couldn’t put a name to.”

“Anxiety?”

“…That I would be cast off. A child’s fear, but I carried it. As you know, I had no family, no one in the world to lean on… except you.”

Her profile, in that moment, looked terribly lonely. The usual boldness had drained away and left something fragile in its place. And the girl she’d once been showed through so clearly that, before I knew it, I was laughing the way I used to and patting her head the way I used to.

“It’s all right. You matter to me too, you know.”

“…Yes. Though honestly, I’m hopeless, aren’t I. A woman my age… and in front of you I turn right back into a child.”

“No—that’s fine by me. The gallant hero of the demons, and only in front of me does she turn back into a kid. If you ask me, that’s a good thing… having a place that special all to yourself.”

“Ephthal-sama?”

“What is it, Merlin?”

“Have I… managed to become… something special to you, too?”

She asked it so anxiously that I made sure the nod I gave her was a firm one.

“Merlin. You’ve been special to me from the very start.”

“…How do you mean?”

“When I picked you up at the Demon King’s castle, I didn’t have children of my own yet.”

“…Yes.”

“I still remember raising you, Bridget and I fumbling through it together. You were such a clingy little thing… every night, if I wasn’t the one holding you, you’d cry and cry and nothing on earth would settle you. And I changed your diapers more times than I can count, you know.”

At the word diapers, pink rose in Merlin’s cheeks.

“D-d-don’t bring up things from that long ago!”

I drew her into a gentle hug.

“So yes, you’re special to me. You were practically my first daughter, after all.”

“…”

“No different from a son or daughter of my own blood. That’s how I’ve always thought of you.”

That was when I noticed her shoulders trembling, ever so faintly, in my arms.

—Some things really never change. She always was a crybaby. But that Merlin, exactly as she is, is unbearably dear to me. However many years pass, she’s still a clingy little thing, still trails two steps behind me, still loves me with everything she has. You could search the whole world over and never find a disciple half so precious.

So I held her until the crying stopped, my arms around a back that had grown so big somewhere along the way, when I wasn’t looking.

⁂

We ate the boxed lunches Merlin had made, then set off again toward the World Tree.

“The Fire God Emperor, though. If there is any way to avoid making an enemy of him… I would much prefer we take it.”

“Even with Divine Enhancement this time around—and you running the calculations for me… yeah. And he seems to be getting stronger too…”

If I was being honest, I’d been taking the Fire God Emperor a little lightly until now. In a straight contest of magic I’d lose to him, no question. But Divine Enhancement and swordsmanship were serious advantages, and I’d had neither in my previous life. I couldn’t have claimed I’d beat him, but I’d told myself I could weather it if he ever turned on me, or at the very least make him understand that coming after me wouldn’t be free. And we’d been friends once, long ago. Some part of me had kept insisting we could still talk things out.

But by all appearances, the Fire God Emperor had been gathering new powers of every kind. He’d been trying to harvest souls in bulk, and word had it he was the one who’d killed Isaac. Whoever he was now, he was no longer the man I remembered, and I doubted my words would reach him.

So, first things first… I needed a way to fix my magic aptitude. Manage that, and even the me of this life would leave my previous life’s magecraft far behind. That much was guaranteed. And the thread tying it all together was, in all likelihood, the Root of Roots. Sasha had said it was inevitable that I’d be born without magic aptitude this time around as well; add Brad’s Level 10 and the goddess of reincarnation, and too many threads kept running through the same knot.

Then Merlin’s nose twitched. She sniffed at the air, once, twice.

“Ephthal-sama…?”

“Yeah. That smell is bad news.”

Merlin nodded and laid full-resistance wards over the both of us. I left the defense to her, lit a detection spell instead, and took charge of watching the forest around us. Master and disciple, perfectly in step: neither of us said a word, and each was already doing exactly what the moment needed.

“No hostility or killing intent anywhere in range. For now.”

“Hunters, then? Or bandits… armed robbers of some sort?”

“In Sasha’s front yard? Nobody tries that without a death wish.”

“Could they simply not know they are near Sasha-sama’s dwelling?”

“The odds aren’t zero… but everyone for miles around knows exactly what lives in the World Tree.”

“That is… fair enough.”

“Merlin, I’ve got a bad feeling about this one. Let’s go carefully.”

We split the work between us and layered on everything we had: optical camouflage, presence erasure, sound dampening, recognition blockers. Far past the point of overkill. Warded like that, the two of us could probably have slipped unnoticed into the imperial bedchamber of a great nation. We still took no chances: keeping to the shade of the trees, moving slowly, never letting a single footfall sound.

We kept up that careful pace until Sasha’s home was maybe two kilometers off, by my eye—

“Yeah. Something’s definitely wrong.”

It was no longer just blood. The stench of flesh charred by flame magic had folded into it: a scent my nose knew far, far too well. The scent of a battlefield.

We pressed on, quickly now but no less carefully, until the trees finally opened and the foot of the World Tree came into view. And the sight struck us both speechless.

“Phantom demon… corpses?”

Just as Merlin said: more than ten phantom demon corpses lay scattered around the base of the World Tree.

“Is this somebody’s idea of a joke? Impossible. This is impossible.”

“Yes… no hunter or robber in the world leaves this behind.”

The scene before us told its own story: the very terrain had been torn open. A battle of staggering scale had been fought here. Nothing else could explain it. And the phantom demon corpses settled the rest, because they could mean only one thing. Sasha had used it—

—Level 11: Otogi Fantasia.

“Merlin? As far as you know, in this day and age, can you think of anyone who could do this to Sasha?”

“Counting you… two people. That is all.”

I switched Divine Enhancement on. For Sasha to cast a Level 11, and leave phantom demon corpses on the field doing it, meant this had been no friendly bout. Two people had tried, in dead earnest, to kill each other. Which put excellent odds on Merlin and me standing in the middle of a live battlefield at that very moment.

Every nerve on edge, we made straight for the entrance to Sasha’s home. What in the world had happened here?

We opened the door set into the bark, and Merlin and I looked at each other.

“The inside’s… untouched. No sign anyone even ransacked the place.”

“Yes, and the traces of that battle were all well away from the World Tree itself.”

We nodded at the same time.

“It is almost as if… two acquaintances stepped outside and settled it properly, mage to mage. A formal duel.”

“Right. Say one of them said take it outside before you wreck my house… and the other actually listened. That’s the shape of it.”

As for who’d fought Sasha, the same face was surfacing in both our heads. I’d have bet anything on it.

We’d started for Sasha’s room when I spotted a familiar face in the entrance hall: a maid with glasses, a half-vampire like Merlin if I remembered right, early thirties by human reckoning. Sasha’s personal maid, I was fairly certain. The instant she caught sight of us—of Merlin’s face, really—relief flooded her features, and she came running.

“Merlin-sama…! Oh, thank goodness… after everything that has happened, I have been here all alone, and I was so frightened…”

Tears stood in her eyes. The relief on her face was real, and it ran bone-deep. The two of them went back a long way, I recalled. Friends, through Sasha.

“The state of the grounds is no small matter. What in the world happened here? And where are the other servants?”

“Everyone but Sasha-sama is… they are all dead, by someone’s hand. And I believe… it was very nearly one-sided.”

“Everyone who serves near Sasha-sama is an accomplished mage! And you’re telling me they never stood a chance?!”

“I have already buried the bodies… shall I unearth them for you to confirm? What I found permits no other reading. It was a massacre.”

Merlin considered it a moment, then shook her head.

“No need to go that far. If you say it is so, then it is so.”

But she spat the words out bitterly, like she couldn’t make herself believe them. Sasha kept himself staffed with vampire-line butlers and maids, Merlin’s own kind, people she knew. For her, this could only have come as a bolt from the blue.

“And the bodies. What condition were they in?”

“Every one of them died with their magic power—no. With their very soul drawn out of them. To pull the soul from a living, trained mage… it cannot be done unless the gap in skill is that of an adult to a child.”

Merlin and I traded a look. Souls, drawn out. We were thinking the same name. I’d have staked anything on that too.

“And Sasha-sama?”

“Sasha-sama has—vanished, it seems.”

“Vanished? What do you mean, vanished? No. More to the point, how is it that you alone are unhurt?”

“I had gone out shopping… provisions for Sasha-sama’s journey to the Alcott ducal domain. That is the only reason I escaped this calamity.”

Neither of us said a word. The maid went on.

“I came home to… this. After I had confirmed the bodies, I searched everywhere, and Sasha-sama was nowhere to be found. So the truth is… I have no idea at all what happened here.”

“Mind if I ask you something?”

“Merlin-sama? And this gentleman is?”

“The circumstances are… difficult to explain. But I vouch for him. He is a personage you may trust.”

The maid gave a small nod.

“What would you like to ask?”

“Just now—you said my mast… no. Where did you say Sasha-sama was planning to travel?”

“The Alcott ducal domain. The family lands of the Thunder God Emperor, his former disciple. It is so rare for him to leave this area at all that I did wonder about it… Does it seem connected to what happened here?”

She was asking me? The only answer anyone could have given her was yes, obviously. The Fire God Emperor and Sasha had both named my hometown in this life, and both of them were headed straight for it.

The faces of my mother, of Cecilia nee-san, of Fraser nii-san rose up in my mind, and I let out a long, long sigh.

Between Merlin’s ‘unprecedented, overwhelming defeat’ and Anastasia’s ‘victory by fiendishness,’ our team was apparently having itself quite a tournament.

I hadn’t watched Maria’s match myself, but alchemy-grade numbing agents and incendiaries for spell support fall squarely within the rules, so I had no complaints there. As for Anastasia… on a real battlefield, what she did is simply common sense, so it wasn’t anything I planned to scold her for afterward. It certainly wasn’t praiseworthy either, mind you, but stabbing your enemy in the back is the time-tested wisdom of the weak. Though, yes… it was awful.

So, on to the last match. The captains’ bout, mine against Brad, had ended in a draw by mutual forfeit; per our arrangement beforehand, it was officially a match that had never happened. That made this final bout the deciding match in everything but name. We stood at two wins and one loss, so even a defeat here would only drag the whole thing to a draw.

Still, what would happen if we did end up tied at two-and-two…? The question crossed my mind for all of a second before reality made it moot. Because—

“…Level 5: Scarlet Flame.”

“Level 5: Magic Guard.”

—up on the platform, Sheryl was in the middle of a firefight with the giant.

It was a pure mage’s duel: no practice swords, no practice bows anywhere in sight. At some point, by what seemed like wordless mutual agreement, the two of them had settled into an old-school slugging match: hold your ground at range and trade spells until someone drops. Which, for the record, happened to be my favorite format back in my previous life.

“…Level 5: Evil Cutter.”

“Level 5: Magic Guard.”

Sheryl’s wind blade shattered against his ward. That said, the man’s Level 5 was cram-school work, slapped on in a hurry and never learned from the ground up. It showed in everything from his casting speed to the finish of the spell itself. Sheryl’s spellwork, by contrast, was orthodox to the core: classical, textbook-perfect form, the kind of performance an instructor dreams about. Honestly, it was beautiful to watch.

“…Level 5: Scarlet Flame.”

Then, as Sheryl fired her third round, the man seemed to realize his ward wouldn’t form in time, because—

“Level 3: Wind Guard.”

He batted the flames aside with a burst of wind magic, twisted clear of the spell in the split second it bought him, then abandoned the exchange entirely and charged straight at Sheryl. In other words, he meant to replay Anastasia’s match from earlier with the roles reversed. And fair enough: Sheryl was nine years old. Force her into close quarters, and on paper she’d look like an easy win.

Except… I grinned.

“With those legs of yours, you’ll never close the distance once Sheryl gets serious.”

He’d made it all of a few strides when Sheryl’s palm rose, smooth as silk.

“…Level 5: Evil Cutter.”

She’d pulled the spell deliberately, holding it primed at the brink, ready to fire the instant she chose. The man sensed as much, and his feet stopped dead. All he could do was stand there, staring at her in open disbelief.

“What… is that? What kind of casting speed was…”

“…The first shot and the second were to take your measure. The third, I built at full power and full speed. That is all it was.”

“We were… casting Level 5s… I know we were. That’s no… Level 1 cantrip…! Speed like that… isn’t… possible…”

“…You are wrong.”

“Wrong? What am I wrong about?”

“…Only that you cannot truly use Level 5 at all. Understand a spell properly, and this much is normal.”

Then Sheryl glanced my way and gave a small nod.

“…No. There is a person who can cast faster… hit harder… do far more incredible things than this. That is what it means to be backed by real technique.”

“Urgh…”

The man had no comeback left. Not so much as a squeak. He simply stood there, swallowing his own words.

“…What will you do? Shall we continue?”

Sheryl asked it with her palm still leveled at him, and that was that: his head dropped, and he sank to one knee right where he stood.

“…I give up. There’s no way I’m beating you.”

And with that, right then and there, our championship was decided. Truth be told, I’d been worried. The way things had shaken out, Sheryl and the other two had needed to win every single match without me. Well… now I could finally let out the sigh of relief I’d been holding. Beside me, Merlin gave a soft chuckle.

“Still, what a remarkable girl Sheryl is. In my time at this academy… I have watched a great many students, and never once a prodigy of this order. Is this the talent of one who carries spirit blood, I wonder?”

I shook my head.

“That’s not it, Merlin.”

“Meaning?”

“Talent isn’t a word you get to close the book with. Have you ever seen Sheryl’s room? She spent every hour she had buried in grimoires, grinding away at her studies. To prove her family wrong, to stop Brad. All that time… all of it, alone.”

“…”

“Her magic power was depleted. She knew none of that effort would ever be repaid, and she still never stopped opening those grimoires. That’s something worth respecting.”

I nodded, and said the rest plainly.

“What’s happening out on that platform is nothing more than the world finally giving her fair credit for the road she’s walked.”

Hard work doesn’t lie. That’s the truth of it. Everything else in this world may well betray you, but a body you’ve forged and the magic you’ve honed never will.

Merlin bit her lip at that and looked down, a little abashed.

“Yes… yes, that’s exactly so. You climbed to the Four Emperors on relentless effort yourself, after all.”

“Well, I mean, the talent didn’t hurt either.”

Seriously, though, she was something else. Perfect command of Level 5 at nine years old, delivered with a rapid-fire cadence that could have come straight out of the Ephthal school, no less.

“So this is the real Sheryl, without the magic power depletion dragging her down. Hey, Merlin? Give her ten years and even you won’t be able to handle her, don’t you think?”

“Mm. Give her two years and she’ll be up to my ankles… ten, and she’ll be at my chest, I should say. As one of a slow-growing race like us vampires… I will admit it honestly: I’m envious.”

Sheryl came down from the platform with the match won. And that was when a corpulent man in gaudy noble finery came running our way.

“Merlin? Who’s that?”

“Sheryl’s adoptive father.”

Merlin sounded thoroughly sick of him already.

“…Huh? Meaning what?”

“He heard the daughter he disowned had made the academy’s final match, did a complete about-face, and rushed over to see for himself. A few days ago there was a demand that a special seat be prepared… the staff tell me the strong-arming was appalling.”

“…Hang on, this area’s closed to outsiders. How did he just stroll in?”

“The staff at the gate must have folded the moment they heard ‘duke.’ I will be disciplining whoever was responsible.”

And so Sheryl’s adoptive father, a duke of some country or other, arrived in front of us.

“Ha! Hahaha! A genius! I knew it! My daughter is a genius after all! Level 5 at nine years old! Unheard of!”

“…”

Snorting with excitement, the duke grabbed Sheryl’s arm, hard.

“Come, Sheryl! We’re going home! Three whole years wasted on this foolishness! We must resume your training regimen at once! Home first, then the arrangements for you to study the Eastern arts—”

“…You disowned me. Brother, too. You told me I was worthless.”

“And now you’ve shown your worth, haven’t you! Come, come, never mind the past. True, you were worthless then, but that was a passing phase! Look at you now! Competent after all!”

The man brayed with laughter and started walking, all but dragging her behind him.

“Now show me more! Greater brilliance, greater results! You’re going to make the whole world ring with our house’s name, the name of a great family of mages!”

Yeah. That was about enough of that. I rose, crossed toward the duke, and was just reaching for his shoulder when—

—thwack. A dry, ringing crack split the air.

It took me one look to see what had happened, and then I was laughing out loud.

“Ha! Nice one, Sheryl!”

The sound had been Sheryl’s uppercut connecting, clean and true, with the duke’s jaw. Jaw rocked, brain thoroughly rattled, the man folded at the knees and crumpled to the ground in a heap.

“Aghk…! Sh-Sh… Sheryl? What did you just…? You hit me? I was hit? Me? My own… daughter hit me?”

“…I am not going back to your house. No… I do not want to go back.”

Then she raised her hand and pointed at the far sky, toward Merlin’s mansion… no, toward ours.

“…I already have a home. A place to go back to.”

“Sh-Sh-Sheryl… what? What are you saying? Do you have any idea how much I paid to buy you as an infant? How much it cost… to keep you?”

“…‘Keep’ me?” Sheryl fixed the duke with the sort of look reserved for something foul on the roadside—

“…Be quiet. You pig.”

At that, a laugh slipped out, and not just from me. Maria and Anastasia lost theirs too. And right then Merlin came trotting back toward us. At some point she’d slipped away, and at some other point she’d apparently found the time to finish changing as well.

“Duke… allow me to introduce myself. Merlin, headmaster of this academy.”

“Wh-wh-what is the meaning of this! What sort of education are you giving my daughter?! As a ducal house, we shall be lodging a protest over how this academy is run!”

Merlin met his bluster with a theatrical little tilt of the head—my, whatever could you mean?

“Oh? How strange. Some time ago, this academy wrote to the ducal house to confirm what should be done with student Sheryl once her tuition exemption expired. The reply, as I recall: we will pay no tuition; our house has severed its ties with Sheryl and bears no relation to her whatsoever. Was that not your answer?”

“Ah… perhaps some such letter existed.”

His whole attitude said so what? Merlin’s voice cooled by a degree, and the next words came down flat and final.

“To be precise, a scholarship student’s tuition exemption runs three years. What was to become of her afterward? We asked you exactly that, in a formal letter of inquiry, and your reply is on record. The ties were severed; the academy could do with student Sheryl precisely as it pleased. Those were your terms. Which is why I would humbly suggest that student Sheryl’s own wishes be respected here. No?”

“Are you an imbecile?! Can you not see that circumstances have changed?! I will not give up my daughter! I will never give her up!”

At that, a vein finally popped out on Merlin’s temple. Honestly, the real mystery from where I stood was how she’d stayed polite this long.

“Very well. Courtesy is wasted on your kind. This academy was told, once, to do with her person as it pleased, so I shall do precisely that.”

“You dare take that tone with—!”

“Student Sheryl is presently in this academy’s care. Which makes you a man attempting to carry off, by force, a child under the headmaster’s own protection… no. Let us call it what it is. Kidnapping.”

“K-k-kidnapping?! What crime is there in taking my own daughter home?!”

“You severed the ties. In writing. It sits in the record: your formal answer to this academy’s official letter of inquiry.”

“I have stood here listening quietly long enough! A mere headmaster, drunk on her own convenient little logic—!”

Convenient logic, he said. Also, quietly? He hadn’t shut up once. Honestly, the way this man talked was something else. ‘Awful’ didn’t even begin to cover it. Maria and Anastasia clearly agreed, the two of them just standing there with their jaws hanging open.

“And that tone! Toward a duke! Do you truly understand who it is you are addressing?!”

“I am a demon. I owe no courtesy to any human duke. And in any case, this is not your country, is it?”

“…It would appear you do not know what it means to earn a duke’s displeasure.”

“You witless man. If you mean to keep forcing this absurdity, then go home to your country and fetch whatever you please: your knights, your mage corps, all of it. Bring the ducal house’s entire strength against me. I will meet it with my own. Alone.”

The duke gaped at her. “Huh?”

“You… are you truly the headmaster? Meet an army, alone? That is… you are not joking, are you?”

“Oh, I am in deadly earnest. And you… it seems you are the one who knows nothing of this academy.”

“Knows nothing…?”

Merlin nodded, slow and deliberate.

“Have you never heard the name Thunder God of Flashing Chains? In the great war a hundred years ago, I crushed a mage corps or two from some little country or other… alone. Ah, now that I think of it, one of those divisions served a country with a name remarkably like the one you belong to.”

The color drained out of the man’s face as I watched. Huh. So Merlin was world-famous. I’d known they call her a hero of the demons, but apparently she’d also gone on a genuine rampage in some war way back when.

“…The Thunder God of Flashing Chains…? The one who single-handedly annihilated the mage corps our house was proudest of… heir to the arts of the first Thunder God Emperor… the witch—Merlin?”

“The very same. This Merlin, eldest and foremost of the Ephthal school, and my policy has always been that a fight offered is a fight accepted. Better yet—let us settle it here and now: not duke against academy, simply one person against another. You are a mage of sorts yourself, are you not? Say you will stand across from me alone, and I may yet credit your nerve.”

“Urk… nnngh…”

You know, that might have been the first time in my life I’d heard a person actually say nnngh out loud. Anyway, his breed folds fast in front of real authority. Men like him spend their whole lives as far from battlefields and bloodshed as they can get, and the quiet hint of direct violence clearly hadn’t hurt either.

“Well? What will it be?”

Under Merlin’s glare, the duke spun on his heel.

“Tch… c-consider yourselves lucky! T-today… today I’ll let it slide!”

Incredible. He’d actually said the stock villain line on his way out.

And so, with the crowd’s cold stares on his back, he made to slink away, at which point Merlin drew a crystal ball from inside her coat.

“Ah. One thing I forgot to mention.”

“What now?!”

“Every word spoken here has been recorded by a magic tool. You are aware, I trust, that this academy governs itself. Politics does not reach inside these walls. What you did today was naked political interference in academy affairs, and I shall lodge a formal protest through the mages’ academic society in due course.”

“Do whatever you please!”

“I shall. Of course, the moment I do, that reputation your house craves as a great family of mages dies on the spot. I would rather not hear complaints afterward, so I am telling you now. Here.”

The duke went a fresh shade of pale and let out a strangled groan. He opened his mouth to fire something back, then seemed to realize he had nothing left to fire, and shut it without a word.

And at the very end, Sheryl turned to the duke and delivered the finishing blow, spitting the words out:

“…At times like this, there is a correct thing to say. Namely… get lost, and don’t ever come back.”

The duke fled. And that, more or less, was that.

The moment he was out of sight, Sheryl turned to me and beamed, her whole face lit up with it, and I smiled right back at her. Then it hit me, and my breath caught.

“Sheryl? Just now… did you…?”

“…Mm. What is it, Ephthal?”

“That’s the first time… you’ve smiled. Isn’t it?”

She’d laughed out loud at our dinner party once before, true, but even then her expression hadn’t moved a millimeter. This time, though—just now, unmistakably—she had smiled.

“…Mm.”

Sheryl pressed a hand to her cheek to check, and apparently found the smile still sitting there. Because one heartbeat later her whole face went scarlet, quick as a flipped switch. Even she hadn’t seen it coming, it seemed… or rather, what really got her was being seen.

“…A grinning face is not for showing to people.”

Hm? Wait, so the blank face was never natural? She’d been keeping it up on purpose this whole time?

She stayed sulky about it for a while, clearly stewing over having been caught. But in the end she gave a great, decisive nod, like someone settling accounts with herself.

“…You have seen it once. After that, it is all the same.”

And then she spread both arms wide and came running and leapt at me, wearing a smile like a sunflower in full bloom, strong and bright.

“…Huuug.”

I laughed out loud at that. There’s just a trace of Isaac left in her face, the faintest touch, and one look at it sent a whole lifetime of memories flooding back at once.

—A long time ago, Isaac and I had a blazing row about it. A child, with a spirit? Are you insane? There’s no telling what could happen. Drop it. That was me talking, back then. But now… now I think the answer Isaac reached—to have that child—was no mistake at all.

—Because Sheryl is right here: this lovely, and this alive. And faced with that smile, even the Thunder God Emperor Kaminari-sama himself has no choice left but to run up the white flag.

“Hey, Sheryl?”

“…What? Ephthal?”

“Thank you for being born.”

And I held her tight, as tight as I could. As if my arms could apologize to her: to Sheryl, the child whose very existence I’d argued against, a lifetime ago.

⁂

“…I feel like something possessing me has fallen away. Thank you for saving my sister. For saving Sheryl.”

My lightning has always fixed most things. Blast it off and the problem generally sorts itself out, so I used it constantly, and my disciples took to calling me the real Thunder God Emperor Kaminari-sama behind my back. Anyway.

Brad had stopped at serious injury, so Perfect Heal got him back to the point of speech. Different training from Merlin’s, maybe, but this guy is softer than I expected.

His body ought to be more or less mended, and yet he still can’t sit up…

“Save your thanks for Isaac. Now, I want the details of when you met the goddess.”

“The goddess? Ah, that was—”

Brad’s head was wrapped in something black.

“Oh, come on… you’d go that far, Fire God Emperor?”

Black magic power came crawling out of Brad’s nose and ears like snakes, welling up out of his brain by the look of it, and vanished at once.

“…He got us.”

“Got us? Ah—what were we talking about?”

“The goddess.”

“The goddess? What about her?”

The Fire God Emperor’s got a hell of a personality on him. A second layer of insurance never occurred to me.

—Level 10: Curse of Pharaoh.

Brad has just had the relevant memories erased, for security. It was my first time seeing it. Even four hundred years ago, a timed trigger like this was attested only in the literature.

“Then do you still have any memory of the red-haired boy?”

Brad thought about it for a while and got as far as starting to say “I have no memory of it,” and then—

“Alcott… I am going now to the Alcott ducal domain. For some reason those words came into my head.”

So that’s how it joins up. I sighed.

Apparently sitting back and watching isn’t going to be allowed me after all.

—This is an invitation from the Fire God Emperor, beyond any doubt.

He anticipated exactly this situation from the start and left me a message. Which means he’s hinting at harm to Cecilia and Fraser. And to this life’s mother.

“Well. This is getting troublesome…”

A cure for magic aptitude first. And Sasha knows a lot more than that, near enough certainly. Nothing starts until I get his mouth open, whatever it takes.

I shrugged. Good grief.

And so—

On the way back I went and crushed the load-bearing points of the Soul Eater circle. As for the dark-arts formula enhancing our classmates, that was probably… no, that was certainly the Fire God Emperor as well.

The reason being that dark-arts enhancement requires the subject’s consent. It isn’t conceivable that four classmates, all four of them, were cornered enough to want an enhancement they’d wager their lifespans on. In which case you’re manipulating consciousness at the level of a person’s own memories, and nothing but Level 10-class brainwashing accounts for it. The Fire God Emperor seems to use brainwashing and memory manipulation constantly, and in any case the number of people in this era who could manage that trick is small, so it’s him.

As for why he did it, it was probably about drawing a crowd. The finals are held at the magic academy, and once a dark horse survives to the final, spectators from inside and outside the school increase. Gather people, then take every soul in one sweep. That would be the shape of it.

Brad, incidentally, seems to have forgotten even that he can use magic of Level 9 and above. I’ve got all sorts of thoughts about it, but… he’ll most likely walk a quiet, honest life from here.

And so, one way and another, I arrived at the venue for the final match, and—

“Ha. You’re in tatters, Maria.”

I called it out with a wry smile from the waiting tent set up just below the platform.

“I won, though.”

Hm? There were blast marks on the platform, and signs that oil had been spread around. And a glance at Maria’s luggage turned up the scent of a fast-acting sleeping drug. Her practice bow smelled of a numbing agent too. She really had worked in every trick going, I thought, and couldn’t help laughing.

“Well. Good work, at any rate.”

At which Anonymous Hope—Merlin, in the swallowtail-butterfly mask and the student-uniform cosplay—gave a great nod.

“I lost by forfeit, incidentally.”

“No, Ephthal, Merlin-sama was incredible. She blocked the whole of her opponent’s onslaught with finger-snap defensive magic, and the moment he despaired and went half in tears and tried to give up, she panicked, clapped a hand over his mouth, and forfeited herself. I have never in my life seen anyone lose like that.”

Oh, Merlin.

That is standing out in the worst possible way… is it going to be all right? Then again, we stand out quite enough already, so maybe that much doesn’t matter anymore… oh, dear.

“Merlin? I’m sure you know this, but see to those kids on the other side. Their lifespans will have been shortened… as far as you possibly can, all right?”

“Already investigated. Some years shortened, most likely, but no effect on the broad picture. Put a stop to the eating and drinking excesses young people go in for, hold them to a properly healthy life, and their average lifespan will actually go up.”

“Good. That’s a relief.”

“And their violence has already been treated, incidentally. Last time the procedure used on the subjects was unknown, but the investigation gave me a reasonable idea…”

“You used state-recovery magic?”

“I undid the mental contamination alone, before the match. So there shouldn’t be any of that going-too-far this time.”

“Then all I have to do is watch my disciples grow.”

How these two fight against an opponent above them is something I want to see. Matches they’re bound to win aren’t experience worth having. And at that moment a cheer went up through the venue.

Anastasia and the bespectacled student were standing on the platform. It looked like I’d get to watch in full from this match onward.

At the referee’s signal, Anastasia called out to him, nervously.

“U-U-Um, ah, er… please listen to what I have to shay! I have a request! I… am a girl!”

“Yes, you are certainly a girl.”

“If my face gets damaged… I won’t be able to marry, and that would be a problem…”

“Hmm.” The man put a hand to his chin.

“I understand what you are saying, but this is a place of battle. There is no method by which nobody gets hurt. What is it you want?”

Anastasia gave a small nod.

“I want to make a rule.”

“A rule?”

The man tilted his head and let out a startled sound.

“That’s right. I want a no-face rule.”

“No… face?”

“What nonsense—” the man began, and Anastasia looked up at him through her lashes, eyes brimming.

“Please. Not the face. Anything but the face.”

She fell silent. Then she trembled like a newborn fawn and, in the most pitiable voice she could manage, said it.

“…My dream is to become a lovely bride.”

The man looked at her, colored slightly, and cleared his throat.

“H-Hypothetically. Even if such a rule could be made for physical attacks, it would be impossible for magic, would it not?”

Area attacks are more or less the default for magic, so the man’s point is entirely reasonable.

“Area bombardment can’t be helped with magic, so… just the practice swords is fine.”

“Ah. Very well.”

The man gave a small nod, and cleared his throat once more.

“Your name?”

“Anastasia.”

“Yes. Anastasia… a l-lovely name. Then sometime soon, when the moment is right, I, as a third year, shall give you a magic lesson. Private instruction.”

Anastasia’s face lit up like a flower opening.

“Really?”

Seeing her look so pleased, the man closed his fist tight. “Right!”

“In that case I’ll fight seriously, so let’s both give it everything.”

“Yes. I think nothing ill of you, but that’s one thing and this is another.”

And so the match began.

First the man, a magic swordsman, loosed a Level 4 wind spell, a horizontal sweep of wind blades. The no-face rule shouldn’t have applied to magic, but he seemed to be showing Anastasia consideration and aimed at her feet. And Anastasia—

“Level 2: Air Step.”

—used a foothold of air to jump the blade as it came crawling along the ground.

“Yes! She dodged it!”

Anastasia ran flat out across the platform. Wind blades came at her without number, and she took them sometimes with defensive magic and sometimes by building footholds and going acrobatic, closing the distance in fine style with a beautiful piece of movement.

With the opponent able to use Level 5, a magical exchange at range goes badly for her. So her strategy was to get inside his guard and force it through with the sword.

“She’s good!”

Just as Maria said. She closed that distance nicely.

“No, this is bad.”

The man’s swordsmanship had reached a considerable level too. He was skilled. Countless sword flashes crossed in the air, and a genuinely high-level exchange of swordplay unfolded.

“Eh? Doesn’t Anastasia look like she’s pushing him? Looks like she could force it through as is.”

“With real blades, Anastasia would have taken that student’s life three times over… though.”

The man was running a strong passive Level 5 physical defense spell. A practice sword is a wooden sword in the end. Anastasia was landing clean hits over and over, and he was taking very little damage from them. And Anastasia is specialized for speed. Even with physical enhancement, her raw strength is low, so a wooden sword as a blunt instrument suits her badly. The man’s sword, meanwhile, was being swung with enormous muscle behind it. She had dodged every one so far, but take a single hit and she’s finished.

“Limiting attacks to below the neck may have been a bad move on Anastasia’s part. Against the head, the damage might have gone through.”

“True… thinking of it as a blunt instrument, not being able to aim at the head really hurts.”

“The torso wouldn’t be no damage at all. But it’s a long way from putting him out of the fight.”

There the man put on a triumphant expression.

“Now, surrender, Anastasia-san! I do not have the poor taste to injure a lovely young woman!”

Supremely confident in his defense, apparently, he opened both arms and threw out his chest toward her. As if to say hit me. Which is presumably exactly what he was saying. Take everything she had, then win a surrender out of a collapse in her will to fight—that would be the plan. His advantage at range is obvious, and at close quarters she has no move left either. Which is, in its way, gentlemanly.

“I won’t surrender!”

Anastasia set herself into a thrust with the practice sword, aimed at his chest.

“Then, since your strength cannot injure me—What!?”

Anastasia turned out of the thrust and swung the practice sword up overhead.

And toward the completely undefended face of her opponent—wait. An overhead strike down onto his head?

Maria and I and the opponent all stood there dumbfounded, and—SMACK!—she brought it down on his head with everything she had.

“There’s no such thing as a serious duel with the face off the table!”

Th-Th-That’s… dirty!

—This is dirty!

Maria and I gaped, mouths opening and shutting, over and over.

And Anastasia, facing an opponent whose expression had gone to agony, dropped the sword into a low stance, and then… swept it upward.

Her target was between his legs. A single clean strike, landed as though it had taken dead aim at the greatest weak point a man has.

Ugh. That hurts. That definitely hurts.

Watching it sent gooseflesh crawling up my own back.

“Kah… hah…!”

In accordance with the laws of nature, the opponent went down.

“Medic! Call a medic!”

“That girl—no mercy at all! At this rate Alfred’s future could be in serious trouble! Hurry! Hurry!”

The opposing team was in outright pandemonium.

Anastasia herself, meanwhile, was bouncing on the spot, delighted.

“I did iiit! I won! I’m so happy! I did it! I did it! I really did iiit!”

A full-face smile. A bottomless grin. Innocent, childlike, delighted capering.

And Maria and I, standing dumbfounded in front of a girl bouncing up and down and expressing joy with everything she had.

At this point it goes past being good at a fight. This isn’t skill in a scrap. This is—

—nothing on this earth but a fiend.

And still bouncing, still wearing that bottomless smile, Anastasia shouted across to me at the top of her voice.

“Maaaster! I don’t feel good about you and Maria-san getting along, you knooow!”

Eh? Why say a thing like that at this particular moment?

Was it my imagination, or were her eyes not smiling at all…?

Maria took that in and nodded, white-faced.

“Hey, Ephthal? Something I’ve thought for a while, and this has turned it into near certainty. Anastasia… the usual soft and fluffy thing is an act, and what she is in a fight is her actual nature. That’s what I think.”

“…You mean she’s black-hearted?”

“…Near certainty, I said. Not confirmed.”

Honestly, I’d been half feeling it myself. There are a great many calculated little moments, and the way her head suddenly starts working the instant a fight begins is odd. She was a girl who walked the back roads and stole artifacts by deceiving people, when it comes to that. Thinking about it that way, the bottomless smile has started to frighten me.

But no. I want to believe in Anastasia. Cursed as a useless mongrel by Merlin, trips over her own tongue the moment she panics… that soft and fluffy girl is the one I want to believe in.

Right. Let’s pray Maria is worrying over nothing.

And with that, I decided not to think too hard about the Black-Hearted Anastasia Theory, and gave a small nod.

So. Only the final bout is left.

Here’s where the results stand so far.

· Vanguard: Merlin (an unprecedented, overwhelming defeat, in Maria’s words)

· Second: Maria (won by getting inventive about it, apparently)

· Middle: Anastasia (victory by fiendishness)

Chapter 4 – The Thunder God Emperor Festival Finals: The Thunder God Emperor vs. the Ice God Emperor

Ephthal’s Perspective

The next day, up in the mountains well away from the magic academy.

Back at the academy the individual matches were under way, four against four. Four against three, if you count Merlin out. Strictly speaking you’re disqualified if you can’t field five, but both sides were down exactly one, so nobody was going to make trouble about it.

“Now then… shall we begin, Thunder God Emperor? I confess I never expected to be summoned directly.”

“And I never expected you’d actually turn up for a duel.”

“The god has told me about your character, you see.”

So Brad had me made already. Which meant the Fire God Emperor Cliff knew about my second reincarnation.

If that thing meant to kill me, or even just to make an enemy of me, he wouldn’t have come at it this indirectly. Both sides are taking each other’s measure for now, and I’m fairly sure that reading is right. Move rashly with his shadow in view and he’d write me off as a man who doesn’t think. Judge an enemy dangerous and he moves slowly and carefully. Judge him otherwise and he burns him down on the spot. That’s his character.

What I want right now is time.

—Find a cure for magic aptitude and even the current me stands a real chance against the Fire God Emperor.

That’s one reason I didn’t simply make Sheryl my familiar the moment this started. The bigger reason was to avoid the worst case: rushing a diagnosis, reaching for the wrong solution, and killing her with it. Either way, with the Fire God Emperor involved, judging carefully is only common sense.

“By the way. Why did you specify somewhere this deep in the mountains?”

“Think about it and you’ll work it out. You and me going at it seriously turns into something enormous.”

Brad laughed and nodded. “Indeed…”

“Speaking of why, I’ve got a question of my own. Why did you kill Sheryl’s twin sister? Why Claire?”

“To reach the Root of Roots, one needs a key.”

“…A key?”

“Claire, who carried a spirit’s power. I ate her soul, and by it I opened the gate to the road. Claire offered herself willingly, you know. She had already understood how little time she had… and if it was for Sheryl’s sake, she said.”

“And then you met the goddess in the room of reincarnation.”

“That is how it went, yes.”

I stayed quiet for a while, glaring at him, and then asked it.

“…Skill: Cap Free, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And Devil Resource.”

Exactly as I’d figured. The word ‘goddess’ comes up and a man suddenly acquires power, and there’s only one answer.

—The goddess in the room of reincarnation can grant skills.

The ability to wield magic up to Level 10 in one of the four attributes: Cap Free. And the supply of the magic-power resource needed to withstand a Level 10—no, the removal of consumption itself: Devil Resource. Cheat skills, as the phrase goes.

And the goddess of reincarnation governs souls, so there’s no way she isn’t connected to the Magia Burst, which drove the transformation of the soul. Given that the first me and the second me both came up with no magic aptitude, the key is in her hands beyond any doubt. The Root of Roots is the road that leads to the goddess and grants skills. Magic aptitude looks tangled up in it too, so there are probably other faces to the thing, but the broad shape of it can’t be far wrong.

“One more thing I want to ask.”

“And what is that?”

“Why did you dirty your hands with underworld work?”

“Because I needed money?”

“Let me rephrase. I’m asking why you needed it.”

If Brad met the goddess three years ago and got absolute power out of it, he had any number of routes open that weren’t that one. It doesn’t square with his academy marks being near the bottom, either.

“…I opened the gate three years ago. But the road itself opened only last month.”

“Meaning?”

“The god did not appear before me again for three years afterward. I was on the point of doubting the whole thing when he finally granted me a new revelation, quite recently.”

I shrugged, and pressed him further.

“Brad. Haven’t you worked out yet that you’re being played?”

“Played? Me? What makes you think so?”

“You’re walking a road through hell to save Sheryl. Right?”

“Yes. Exactly so.”

“Then start here: the Fire God Emperor could have saved both twins on the spot.”

“…I am afraid I do not follow.”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve already secured Sheryl’s life. With a familiar contract.”

“…Eh?”

“Don’t you know how the first Ice God Emperor kept his child alive? Why did the Fire God Emperor point you at a method that roundabout? Has it never once occurred to you to ask what that means?”

“Ah,” Brad said, and drew a sharp breath, as though something had landed.

“That is… that is certainly… no, but… it is strange. Why did I forget the very first thing I ever looked up…”

Memory manipulation. Has it been done to him?

He himself probably hasn’t taken any dark-arts enhancement, though there are signs his violence has risen. Which points back the same way: all of it in the Fire God Emperor’s palm.

“B-B-But! At that time the god certainly gave me a revelation that this was the only way!”

“Brad. Has the possibility never crossed your mind that the Fire God Emperor is a devil calling himself a god?”

Sweat ran off him and his face went white, and I kept going.

“Why didn’t the Fire God Emperor open this Root of Roots of yours immediately?”

The Fire God Emperor is most likely doing the same thing elsewhere—hunting down people with no magic aptitude and building himself pieces. There are others of that kind in this world, so there’s no reason in thinking Brad is special. And there’s a reason he didn’t hand Brad power straight away. Maybe to keep a man with power from running wild, or maybe opening the road isn’t something you can do without limit in the first place. It comes to the same thing: he uses you when you become useful, and until then the road stays shut.

“And here’s the biggest reason of all. Why is there no formula for crystallizing souls built into that magic circle you were taught would save Sheryl?”

“Wh—? That… is that true?”

“It’s an ancient circle, so you wouldn’t know yourself. There’s a formula in there for gathering the souls somewhere, though. No question about that.”

“Gathering them somewhere…? I was told they crystallize on the spot…?”

Brad’s eyes went wide, and he stood there shaking, refusing to believe it.

“Wake up already. However you look at it, you’re just being used by the Fire God Emperor.”

“Impossible… impossible…”

“Sheryl has already been saved. What are you making your little sister cry for now… you damned fool!”

I threw it at him half in despair, and Brad’s knees went out from under him.

“Then… then what did I take my sister for? What did I eat her soul for?”

“Ask the Fire God Emperor. Only he knows what he actually intends.”

Whatever it is, it’s nothing good. Not with the means, the method, and the outcome all being that vile—collecting souls.

“Then what was any of it for… all this time… even eating Claire’s soul…”

“Brad. The road you walked may have been wrong, but there was nothing wrong with the will behind it. You put your body on the line for your sister, didn’t you? And taking her life was Sheryl’s sister’s own choice, wasn’t it?”

I struck my chest.

“Then go and see Sheryl with your head up! Tell her your big brother worked himself to the bone for her—head up, damn it!”

Brad broke down where he knelt and wept.

“That… may… be so… perhaps…”

“Don’t cry, you’re a grown man. Idiot.”

I took a handkerchief out of my coat and started toward him, and—

“But I, I, I aaaaaaaah!”

Brad rose to his feet, veins standing out all over his face as though something had lit him up. Then blood burst out through them and his face went red with it.

“Hey. What’s wrong with you…?”

“You are… a liar. Liar, liar liar liar LIAR LIAAAAAAAR!”

A face out of a demon mask, drooling, streaming from the nose, tears running too.

This was… not good.

“Liars… anything obstructing Sheryl’s survival is to be eliminated… eliminated eliminated eliminated eliminated eliminated—!”

He was completely gone. Off his head.

But what is that… this… this unpleasant feel to the magic power? No—I know this. This is… this is…

—the Demon King?

That’s it. It’s very like the thing all four of the Four Emperors put everything into putting down. Which would mean the Demon King came through the Root of Roots too?

I sharpened my guard and took a backstep to open the distance.

And Brad smiled thinly.

“Well. A genuinely troublesome human, that one. He kept his sanity all the way through, mental contamination and all.”

What the hell is this thing on about? Then I understood, and asked.

“Who the hell are you? No. Since when have you been in there?”

“Three years ago. The day this body ate the spirit, the Fire God Emperor-sama planted me in Brad.”

“…Some kind of brainwashing?”

“Well perceived. Level 11 brainwashing magic. Think of me as something like the Fire God Emperor-sama’s divided spirit.”

Vicious piece of work…

More reliable than brainwashing, certainly. It amounts to installing a controller inside a man’s head.

“The seed alone was planted as a minimum insurance for granting him the power of a Level 10. It would hardly do for a piece to stop functioning. Direct operation through the divided spirit consumes part of the Fire God Emperor-sama’s own brain, however, and the fuel cost is poor, so the seed does not germinate until the last possible moment.”

“Extra Level magic I’ve never heard of… huh. Honestly… how far has that red-haired bastard gone?”

Over these four hundred years the Fire God Emperor has apparently climbed into Sasha’s territory. Another dimension entirely.

“Hahaha,” I laughed, before I could stop myself.

“What amuses you, Thunder God Emperor? Awe at my lord’s divine art, and a smile of resignation?”

“No. The opposite. The higher the mountain, the better the climb. Since I got to this era the only mages worth the name I’ve seen are Sasha and Merlin. There’s somebody out there who gives me goosebumps… and I’m glad of it.”

“Even more of a born fighter than I was told, are you not.”

“It’s my nature, unfortunately. Now then. About that spell of yours—from what I can see it only takes the seat of consciousness, and the body, the magical performance, and the magical knowledge are all Brad’s own. That right?”

“Just as you analyzed. Building a personality from nothing when creating a divided spirit, and furnishing it with experience and knowledge, would tax even my lord, and the fuel cost would be appalling. Though certain information necessary to the task was given directly to this personality rather than to Brad.”

“I see… right.”

“Then… I kill you, and this ends here.”

Brad turned both palms toward me. No formula built, no magic power set in motion—only to declare a Level 10 into existence.

“Kill me, is it. Try it, if you think you can.”

“The Level 10 Ultimate Magic: Ice God Emperor Isaac, against your Level 10: Thunder God Emperor Ephthal. You are aware of the difference in performance, I assume?”

“Sure. Between Isaac and me, in a straight contest of magecraft, he had the edge.”

“And the same holds for the gap between your strongest techniques. The weakest of the Four Emperors—surely you of all people know it.”

“Skip the speeches. Come on.”

And Brad spoke a single phrase: the name of the man called the Emperor of Ice four hundred years ago, the man who dropped the Demon King’s army into the depths of terror. The name of the strongest freezing magic there is. And that name was—

“Level 10: Ice God Emperor Isaac!”

A colossal icicle came at me.

But leave that for the moment, because the worst part of this spell is overhead!

Just as expected, I could feel a mass of magic power dropping toward us at ferocious speed from above.

The stratosphere, ten kilometers up. Temperature there: minus seventy degrees Celsius. Carry that frozen mass of air down to ground level in one motion with wind magic, and on the way freeze the minus-seventy air further still with ice-type control. Take it, in short, to the limit of freezing. Absolute zero.

What finally hits the ground is an absolute-zero downburst on a massive scale, and everything around it freezes in the gale and becomes ice sculpture. A tasteless piece of work.

I don’t currently know a wide-area annihilation spell above it.

—A direct attack by icicle, and a reaper descending from the sky. Two stages.

That is what Level 10: Ice God Emperor Isaac actually is.

The first icicle carries about a Level 9’s force and is hard enough to deal with on its own. But get your attention fixed on it and the absolute zero comes down on your blind side and seals you in ice. A first-sight killer in the purest sense.

Tap every stone before crossing your own bridge, and tap cracks into the bridges your enemy has to cross. Isaac’s character all over.

“Haha! Hahahaa! A Level 9 icicle on the ground, and overhead the real prize—absolute freezing! This! This is the sublime Level 10! Nothing whatever like the thing built by someone like you, with no magic aptitude—the inferior of the Four Emperors!”

“Right. The icicle first.”

I started weaving a formula.

“I have no idea what you intend, but do struggle! Even knowing the decoy from the true attack, an absolute-zero downburst is not a thing anyone can resist!”

Even without the icicle pulling your attention, the downburst alone usually finishes it. Wide-area, no route out, absolute freezing in the literal sense. And there are layers of formula built in to thin out any defensive magic, so blocking is difficult too.

So my opening move was—

“Level 7: Extra Magic Guard!”

The icicle drove into my Level 7 and scattered into the air.

“What—!? A Level 9 icicle… with a Level 7?”

I turned my eyes back to the sky.

“Bad luck, boy. I know it very well… the real Level 10. The real… Ultimate Magic: Ice God Emperor Isaac.”

I put my palm up toward the sky.

“The first time I saw this… I was jealous. Envious. And more than that, plainly, I thought it was magnificent.”

At this moment the air mass was around two thousand meters up, at about minus one hundred ninety degrees.

And then.

I reached into the freezing air—no, the mass of magic power—as it dropped.

Against Isaac’s wind-formula control generating the downdraft, my own wind-formula control generating an updraft. Intervention—no. Cancellation. Then over the ice-type control cooling the air, my fire-type control, overwritten, canceled. That drops the air back to its natural minus seventy, so let’s add another eighty or so on top of that.

Right. Done.

And now the air mass was at five hundred meters. So what does that get you—

“Well… bit cold, admittedly.”

The trees around us stirred in the wind, and small leaf-sounds went up here and there.

A slightly chilly breeze falling out of the heavens. That’s the long and short of it.

“I-Impossible…? Intervention… in the formula?”

“You don’t understand what a magic formula even means. You’ve barely scratched the surface. You don’t know the inside, so you can’t resist an intervention, and you’re helpless. A papier-mâché Level 10 like that was never going to work on me.”

“Impossible… that is… impossible…”

“The road of magecraft isn’t walked in a day. Somebody handed you a monster of a greatsword bigger than you are and you ran around delighted with it, like a kid. That’s all you are.”

Though it’s also true that I’m the formula-obsessed academic type, and his luck was bad.

I turned my palm toward him.

“Hey, boy. Can you use a Level 9 Perfect Ice Guard?”

“…I-I can. I can use it.”

“I’ll give you a handicap. No intervention this time. Show me you can resist.”

Shock is the time-honored cure for brainwashing. Electric shock all the more so… and come to think of it, that happened once before.

I laughed a little.

Once, in a situation much like this one, I teamed up with Isaac and we broke a religious organization. And there was an exchange like this at the time.

“Shock is the time-honored cure for brainwashing. Electric shock all the more so.”

“Ephthal!? That’s far too reckless, even for you!? Do you understand you’re talking nonsense!? There is no possible way something that crude works!”

And then it did work, which is the awkward part. I had a hunch with reasoning behind it, mind.

Afterward Isaac, who couldn’t accept it, went and researched the thing and produced a flawless paper concluding that lightning genuinely is effective against brainwashing. A logic fanatic to the bone, that man.

Right. And while I was thinking, the formula was finished.

Lightning gathered in my palm, and Brad sagged and folded where he stood.

“This high-purity magic power… like a work of art… the force it produces is beyond comparison with mine. This… this is—”

“Yeah. I’ll show you the real thing. I’m aiming to burn out the brainwashing formula only, so I plan to stop just short of killing you, but slip and you’re gone.”

“A-A… ah…!”

Brad raised his Perfect Ice Guard, and the power of the Thunder God manifested on the ground.

“—Level 10: Thunder God Emperor Ephthal!”

Sheryl’s Perspective

—That day.

The day my sister was killed.

I ended up seeing it, through the keyhole of the door.

Brother astride her on the bed, drawing my sister’s magic power out of her.

We were fed nothing but complete-nutrition rations, flavorless, with the look and taste of packed mud, and Brother always slipped us sweets in secret. Brother read us picture books when nobody was watching. When Brother appeared, my sister’s eyes and mine would light up, and the sepia scene we lived in, steeped in magic, seemed to take on color at once.

—Why did Brother do that to my sister?

That day, that hour, that instant. From the moment the red-haired boy took Brother away into another room, the gears of all of us began to slip.

—That Brother killed my sister.

—That Brother put his hand to the underworld’s work to earn money.

—That Brother obtained a power beyond anything human.

—And that Brother is trying to kill a great many people in order to save me.

All of it. All of it is wrong.

I no longer understand what any of it means.

And so, when a summons came from Brother, I knocked at the back guild’s door. Three times first, then twice more…

Strange. No answer came from the other side. When I gripped the handle, it was unlocked.

And the instant I pushed the door open, the scene that opened in front of me took my words away. A choking smell of iron. No—of blood.

Lit by pale moonlight from the window, Brother stood spattered with another man’s blood, and at his feet the guild’s portly man lay sprawled.

“…Brother? Why?”

“Because I need money. If I have to take it from someone anyway, better it be money that was never clean.”

An immediate answer, and an extremely simple one.

“…You do not have to do that anymore. I will not need money for a while. The magic crystal was bought the other day.”

“I need funds to run. I have no intention of picking a fight with a nation.”

“…Run?”

“I am about to take several hundred lives. I will need money… to stay hidden.”

“…Why do you need to collect souls?”

“High-concentration magic crystals, and a great many of them. The quickest way to get them is to make use of the magic academy’s students. Am I wrong?”

What is strange about that? Brother asked it exactly like that.

I bit my lip, and then—

“…I do not want Brother’s hands dirtied any further.”

“You understand it yourself, surely. The magic crystal you need to maintain your body grows larger and larger. And once it does, the thing itself becomes impossible to obtain however much money you stack. It would mean breaking into a national facility, and that is not realistic.”

“…If it is decided that I will die, then I think I can only accept it as fate.”

“Once. Only this once. Get through this one time and take a great quantity of large crystals, and you will be released from your cursed fate, Sheryl.”

“…Built on the foundation of several hundred lives? If I have to live on the premise of someone’s death… then I… then I don’t want anything like that!”

Brother swung his right hand high, and brought it down across my cheek.

—Crack!

I was thrown to the right and slammed into the wall face first. Less a slap than the sensation of being struck with a blunt weapon.

“Who do you think I’m doing all this for, Sheryl!”

Blood came pouring out of my nose, and Brother caught his breath. “Ah…”

“…Sheryl, I’m sorry. I’m sorry… there are times when I can’t control the power or my own feelings.”

“…Brother. Why did you kill my sister?”

Brother’s eyes went wide.

“You knew?”

“…Mm.”

Brother shifted his gaze to the moon in the window, and his eyes went distant. Then he spoke, with a melancholy look.

“That day, a god appeared before me.”

“…A god?”

“The red-haired god. He told me Claire’s magic power depletion had already left her little time. And that Sheryl would go the same way before long. And then he was good enough to call me, with no magic aptitude at all, blessed by god.”

“…What does that mean?”

“He opened the Root of Roots and gave me power. And he was kind enough to teach me a way to save at least you, Sheryl.”

“…The way to save me was… to kill my sister?”

Brother nodded, and smiled gently.

“For you to go on living, a sacrifice is necessary. You understand, don’t you? You’ll understand for me, won’t you?”

“…I do not understand. I do not want to understand a thing like that.”

“Someday you will. Without fail… you will.”

And there Brother brought the thumb and middle finger of his right hand together.

“But since you do not understand yet, perhaps you should sleep a little. The environment will be somewhat cramped, but once it is all over I will come for you, so be at ease… Sheryl.”

“Sleep magic…?”

“Yes, that’s right. I am to meet the god in a month, and I will let you meet him too.”

My body was… cold.

My eyelids were… heavy.

No strength would come into my limbs.

And my consciousness, taken by a floating sensation like weightlessness, was swallowed at once into a deep, deep dark.

—When I came to, I was in a cell.

This was most likely where the back guild kept and managed slaves and kidnapping victims. I had been thrown onto the flagstones, and I tried at once to get up.

Could I even break those iron bars? I began to think about it, but that was beside the point.

I could not so much as sit up.

“…He got me.”

A high-order binding spell of the ice line had been placed on me, apparently, and in this state I could not move my hands or feet at all.

There I realized that all of it was already far too late.

—The die is already cast.

Whether I could persuade him or not was beside the point. Brother had settled his heart a long time ago. And I… I understood that there was nothing I could do. Brother would not stop. And there would be nobody who could stop him.

Then, out of pure frustration, the tears came.

—That I carry the fate of magic power depletion.

—That I made Brother walk a road of suffering.

—That my sister died… no. That Brother, it seems, killed my sister for my sake.

—And above all, my own powerlessness, unable to do anything in this situation.

Unable to move even my hands and feet, I found the powerlessness of this body the bitterest thing of all.

By rights, if only my magic power were sufficient, I too would be a high-order mage.

—Or perhaps there was a possibility, however small a fragment of one, that I could have stopped Brother by force.

—No. With sufficient power I could have stopped him. If I cannot stop him, that is only because I am powerless.

—Power… I want power.

—This fate that a spiteful god handed me.

—I am only a small boat that can do nothing but wait for the storm to pass… only swept along.

—To go anywhere I please, by my own hands and my own feet.

—To drive my will through the rough water and hold it there. That is the power I want.

In the middle of tears that would not stop, for some reason the profile of a black-haired boy flickered across my mind.

—Ephthal.

—The person who smells the same as Brother did before he changed.

—And the person who makes me feel safe.

At that moment, I heard the clatter of metal falling to the ground.

When I moved only my face, the iron bars, cut through, were falling to the floor one after another with a ring of metal.

Ephthal, a single-edged blade in his hand, asked me a question.

“Magic power depletion… want me to cure it for you, Sheryl?”

“…Ephthal? Why…?”

“I was outside the back guild’s door listening. I’ve got the shape of it.”

Why is Ephthal here, truly? I tried to think, but my head was in a panic and would not work properly.

“So? What’ll you do? If you agree to it, I can cure it right here, right now.”

“…Cure magic power depletion? There is no way that can be done. How many texts do you think we went through?”

“By this era’s common sense, sure. That’ll be true enough.”

“…This era’s common sense?”

Ephthal gave a great nod, and declared it.

“I’ll give you the conclusion first. A familiar contract.”

“…A familiar contract?”

“You’re human and you’re also spirit. You keep half a demon inside that body of yours. And that half is doing harm to the human half.”

“…It is true that I am half spirit. A contract of the familiar kind is… not impossible.”

“If you’ve got that far, this is quick. We link your soul to mine, and I supply the magic power you need as your employer. No problem with that, is there?”

I have heard that the first Ice God Emperor kept his child alive by that method. Naturally, that was the first place we looked in the literature.

“…That method has been examined as well. But we concluded it was impossible.”

“How so?”

“…Making a familiar of a spirit is a tale from more than four hundred years ago. Now that the Magia Burst has caused the transformation of the soul, there is no human being who can do it.”

Because of that transformation, the mages of this era and the mages of the past differ completely in the ceiling of magic power their bodies can generate. Before you even reach the question of Level 9 and Level 10 being lost, we mages have become fundamentally frail things.

“…And even in that age, doing such a thing would need power of the first-generation Four Emperor class. Nothing less.”

“Sheryl? What would you say if I told you I… am one of the first Four Emperors?”

“…Ephthal. Jokes are not good at a time like this.”

“Your ancestor and I go back a long way. And how do you think I followed you and listened in on that conversation? Any guesses?”

Ephthal snapped his fingers, and his body turned transparent and was gone from sight in a moment.

“This is… Level 8: Invisible?”

My eyes went wide, and I blinked at nothing, at a complete loss.

“That’s right. And that magic item of the Ice God Emperor’s you used… who do you think broke that barrier?”

“Su… surely not…? Truly…?”

“Reincarnation, that’s the thing. You’ve got the gist of it.”

Ephthal dropped the invisibility and seemed to begin refining a new formula.

—Fast.

Flowing magic-power handling. No—beautiful enough to be called artistic.

Whether even Headmaster Merlin, called the fastest of the demons, could manage a feat on this level…

And though the formula he was assembling was evidently a considerably complex one, he paid its difficulty no regard whatsoever, simply weaving it up at a speed that was not ordinary.

“…Incredible.”

A sigh of pure admiration came out of me.

To begin with, the invisibility spell just now, a Level 8 cast with no cast time, is not a thing that happens. This is not remotely something a human being can do. If it could be done, it would be nothing short of a devil’s own work.

“The contract formula is built. Take my hand and the contract completes. I’ll save you without fail—so trust me, Sheryl.”

I no longer understood what Ephthal was saying.

—He assembled a contract formula in a matter of seconds?

A formula that takes a seasoned mage an entire day… in an instant?

“…Ephthal. Right now I do not understand half of what you are saying. But… this much I do understand.”

“What do you understand?”

“…Ephthal is a good person.”

Yes.

I understood that Ephthal held power that was not ordinary. But whether he is truly the Thunder God Emperor I do not know, and it is far too outlandish a story besides.

But none of that matters. Ephthal gave a place to be to me, who had shut myself away alone all that time.

—With Ephthal, I can feel safe.

So I reached out my hand to Ephthal. Yes: it is not the Thunder God Emperor but the boy in front of me, an ordinary black-haired boy, Ephthal, whom I want to trust.

I took Ephthal’s hand and closed my palm around it, tightly and with strength.

“Good. That makes you my familiar, and under my protection.”

“…Mm.”

I gave a small nod, and Ephthal struck his chest as if to say leave the rest to me.

“From here on, I’m tagging in. The burden you’re carrying—hand all of it to me.”

⁂

Time passed, and it became the eve of the finals.

Which meant a council of war. A dinner, really, doubling as the customary rallying party.

“So what do we actually do, Ephthal? You can obviously flatten whoever it is without breaking a sweat, but…”

“That’s the thing. Against people who can use Level 5, the two of us just can’t manage!”

“Merlin-sama’s a guaranteed forfeit, right? And Sheryl can’t go all out either, for a whole pile of reasons.”

“Um, er… so in the end it has to be Master and me and Maria-san winning all three?”

Fair concerns, both of them. Going by the catalog specs alone, you’d think exactly that.

“There’s nothing to work out. It’s simple.”

“Hm? Simple? How do you mean?”

“Go at it with everything you’ve got. I haven’t been putting either of you through soft training, and you both had outstanding combat sense to begin with.”

“Right, but they can use Level 5. The gap in raw power—”

“Up in the higher world that’s ordinary, so from here on you’d do well to get in the habit of watching how magic power is handled and how a formula is built. Maria, when that lot used a Level 5, I think it just knocked the wind out of you.”

“Hm? Seriously, what do you mean?”

“Their power is borrowed. It’s not much different from a swordsman with something to prove swinging a greatsword that’s taller than he is. I gave the two of you Level 4 formulas as well, didn’t I, and I’ve had you drilling them over and over until you can actually use them.”

Their side is trading lifespan for the use of that power. Which means they can’t cast in practice, so what they’ve become is inevitable in its way.

“…Master? Which means…?”

“Keep your heads, think, respond, and you’ve got a chance. Specifically: their accuracy and the time it takes them to get a formula off are both abnormally slow. That’s as far as advice from me goes.”

Maria nodded, hard.

“Right! In that case, Anastasia! It’s on you!”

“Eh? On me? What is?”

“Think up every dirty trick and cheap gimmick you can! That’s your specialty!”

“Ehh! What kind of person do you take me for!?”

“Er… a soft and fluffy fiend girl?”

What in the world is a soft and fluffy fiend girl. I had to laugh.

“Well, understood. In that case… I’ll think! Of a way to win!”

Both of them are easy to fire up, basically. Getting them looking forward is a good thing, and there’s a decent chance of an actual win. Under normal circumstances it would be very hard, but catch the other side off guard and it should be manageable, and the sense for that is something both of them have.

That was when Sheryl stood up without a word and started for the dining room door—the way out.

“Sheryl? Where are you going?”

“…Ephthal… a messenger came from Brother today. He insists that we live together.”

Sheryl opened the door, took a single step through it, and turned back to go on.

“…And I have understood what Brother intends to do. So I have to go.”

She slipped a hand in through the collar of her robe and drew out a necklace.

“…Because I am the only one who can stop him. In the semifinals, my words did stop him. If I face Brother sincerely, he should not do anything foolish.”

The jewel on the necklace burst with a sharp crack, and out of it poured an enormous torrent of magic power, carrying cold.

“…If I cannot stop him, the whole academy will suffer terribly. So I cannot let you go outside. Until the final match is over… please wait here quietly.”

White haze.

Cold crawled along the walls of the room, and as we watched, the walls were sheathed in thick, magic-laden ice.

“…Perfect Ice Guard. The last of the magic items the first Ice God Emperor left behind to protect his descendants. To protect us.”

And last of all, the doorway itself was sealed behind thick ice.

“…I am sorry. And goodbye, Ephthal.”

Maria, thoroughly dumbfounded, raised her voice.

“Hold on, hold on!? What is going on here!? We just got shut inside ice with an absurd amount of magic power in it, in a single instant!?”

“A Level 9 barrier… huh. Using a defensive barrier to shut people in. Sheryl thought that one up.”

And I cracked my knuckles.

“Yes, Ephthal-sama. This is Isaac-sama’s technique, no question.”

I stood, stretched lightly, and rolled my neck until it cracked.

“And what do you intend to do?”

“I planted a Trace spell on her right before she used the magic item. I’ll let her run.”

“Let her run?”

“There’s still background here I can’t read. This is a matter with the Fire God Emperor’s hand in it, so sloppy work isn’t an option.”

“Meaning?”

“If I can manage it, I intend to save Brad too.”

“…Not only Sheryl…?”

“Isaac’s a special man to me too. So I can’t have Sheryl crying.”

“How do you mean?”

“My wife. Bridget. Every year on her birthday he’d send a bouquet of rare flowers he’d picked himself, with a poem attached. Insufferably smooth bastard, but Bridget was pleased, so what was I supposed to do, stop him?”

“…I’m not following the story.”

“Bridget never knew. But he loved the same woman I did.”

That was part of why, when he lost his head over a spirit past forty, somewhere underneath I was cheering him on. I knew what it had cost him to take his hands off Bridget without ever saying a word.

Merlin’s eyes went wide.

“You really are… But what of the barrier? I could not undo that quickly, at least.”

“Who exactly do you think you’re talking to, Merlin?”

I snapped my fingers, cracks ran through the ice, and at once it began coming apart, loudly.

“My apologies, Ephthal-sama. Still, you really do have a habit of picking up troublesome things, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Same as I picked you up at the Demon King’s castle.”

Merlin laughed, as though exasperated.

⁂

So I came to Sheryl’s room, and…

Grimoires were scattered across the floor again, with nowhere left to put a foot. Still an absolute disaster, I thought, and had to laugh. She’d been given a good room, an enormously spacious one… and being able to wreck it on this scale is a talent of its own kind.

“Ha. This is really something.”

“…I have no capacity for daily life. As Ephthal said before, it is not a thing to boast about.”

“No, you can boast about it.”

“…Eh?”

“Because all it means is that you study hard, doesn’t it? I didn’t notice before, but looking at it again just now, that’s what I think. The room is a mess, but it isn’t dirty. Same with you never going out. You grudged the hours you spent sleeping and the hours you’d spend outside, and you put them into studying magic. Which is why it’s only books on the floor. Am I wrong?”

“…I am surprised. How did you know?”

“Because the Ice God Emperor’s room was apparently the same. Blood really does tell.”

Not that I wasn’t much the same myself, in my past life. Once I get started on a piece of research I’ll have dozens of books laid open across the floor.

“By the way, Sheryl? I’d like you to tell me about your brother. About Brad.”

“…I have not met him in a long while. The semifinals the other day were the first time in years.”

“No, you haven’t met him. I know that. What I’m asking about is the communication by invisible familiar.”

Sheryl’s eyes went wide at the question.

“…………I am genuinely surprised.”

“Will you tell me? What is your brother trying to do? I’m putting Maria and Anastasia into the final, so I need to know what I can, to keep them as safe as possible.”

Half true and half a convenient line, that.

Because whatever treatment I give Sheryl’s magic power depletion, if the Fire God Emperor is involved there’s no telling what has been planted. Without knowing the situation, moving carelessly risks standing on a mine. In his lifetime the Fire God Emperor was a mage a full class or two above me. You don’t get to bulldoze somebody who outranks you.

“…Before that, I want to ask, Ephthal. I have kept the communication with Brother from you until now. That was because I did not want to cause you trouble. He looks, more and more, as though he is walking further off the road.”

“That isn’t something a child needs to worry about.”

Sheryl puffed out a cheek at that—expressionless, of course, which struck me funny enough that I laughed a little.

“…If you know, it may become troublesome for you. Only an abandoned puppy. I think it is better… to think of me that way.”

“I’ve started boarding this boat… no. I’m already aboard it. I can handle it better if you tell me.”

“…Mm.”

She gave a small nod.

“…I do not know Brother’s aim. But I can explain the situation.”

“Please.”

“—It will be a somewhat long story.”

It was a long story. A very long one.

From the time they were taken in by their adoptive parents, for as far back as she could remember, Sheryl and her twin sister were put through magic training that was compulsory in all but name. Purely as tools to raise the family’s standing, with no regard whatsoever for their ages, the training ran on and on, dangerous and severe. They were given no affection as parents give it, none of the other siblings would have anything to do with them, and the two of them lived isolated inside the house.

And the treatment Brad got was every bit as wretched. Having no magic aptitude at all, he was made an outcast within his own family. Handled no better than a servant—worse than one, in fact, and sometimes used as an outlet for a parent’s stress for no reason at all: chastisement under the name of discipline. Violence, plainly, and a daily occurrence.

But Brad was a kind boy, and he was always looking out for his isolated sisters. Inside that vast ducal house the three of them were cut off from everyone else, and being alone in the same way, the three of them held together.

Then, when Sheryl was six, her twin sister’s health failed. They looked into it, and the symptoms of magic power depletion came to light. There are rare cases of people born showing something similar, so the spirit connection was never found out. But for anyone who works magic it remains a fatal defect all the same. Her place at the magic academy had already been settled, and it was withdrawn. And then came the incident.

The twin sister, having lost her value, was to be sold—with the circumstances concealed—to a childless lower noble house of the mage line. As a descendant of the first Ice God Emperor she carried a considerable price. From the lower house’s side, the plan was to bring in a relative of their own as an adopted husband and make it a marriage. That way they gain the prestige of a blood tie to the Ice God Emperor and the family line is preserved. Sheryl’s sister, in short, was a convenient figurehead.

Though the ducal house that took Sheryl in had taken them on precisely the same reasoning. Reselling defective goods. The children were thrown about from end to end by what suited the adults, and there’s no question it’s a thoroughly sickening story.

And then, one day—before she could be sold on as an adopted daughter—Sheryl’s sister died.

Afterward, Brad and Sheryl entered the magic academy at the same time, and the same symptoms came for Sheryl as well. The academy staff had of course learned of the depletion by then, so reselling her with the circumstances concealed no longer worked either. And so the family cut her off. What Sheryl was after that, I already know. And Brad, whose academy marks were about as close to the bottom as you can get, was cut off in the same way, as useless.

So Brad knocked on the door that leads to the back roads, to cover his own tuition and to get Sheryl her magic crystals.

That’s roughly the whole of it.

“…I have barely seen Brother in two years. We exchange letters, but he says almost nothing about himself. I was startled when he suddenly used a Level 7.”

“I see. And before you stopped seeing him—was there anything different about him?”

“…Year by year the magic crystal I need grew larger, and he seemed to be running into walls, financially.”

A small difference in a crystal’s size means several times the price, and at the wrong end of the scale it means another digit entirely. Even taking dangerous work on the side, a student would blow past what he could manage very quickly.

“By the way, Sheryl? I’d like you to tell me what the familiar communications actually said.”

“…Brother says… that we should live together. That everything is going to work out soon. That I need not worry about the magic power depletion anymore.”

Going to work out soon.

The basis for that would be the Soul Eater circle planted in the magic academy.

“Thank you. That gives me most of it.”

And it did. That conversation made me certain.

Brad is most likely intending to use the souls he gathers to refine magic crystals, or something close to it. A magic academy is the single most suitable place there is for that sort of work—souls carrying high-purity magic power, belonging to students whose magic resistance is still immature, all assembled in one location.

But taking that route makes him a serious criminal. However strong a single person is, setting yourself against a nation, or against the whole world, doesn’t work. So ‘live together’ is, in other words, an invitation to a life on the run.

“So what do you want to do?”

“…Honestly, I am torn… I loved Brother.”

“Loved? Why the past tense?”

“…Brother killed my twin sister.”

“…Eh?”

“…I do not know the reason. But that day, I saw it. There was a noise in the night, and my sister’s room was locked. When I looked through the keyhole… I saw Brother drawing my sister’s magic power out of her.”

“Any idea why?”

“…Brother became strange. After he met that mysterious red-haired boy, Brother became strange.”

A red-haired boy. He means the Fire God Emperor. In this case there’s nobody else it could be.

“Would you tell me about the boy in detail?”

“…He came to the house only once. He visited the ducal house one day, and I remember my adoptive father being strange.”

“Strange how?”

“…He behaved normally, and yet it was not normal. That arrogant man treated a boy who looked far younger than him, for some reason, as though he were handling a jewel. And when I asked about the boy afterward, he said, ‘What are you talking about?’ As though it had never happened at all.”

Memory manipulation, maybe. Or something in the brainwashing family. An effect that extreme would be Level 9 or above, so the Fire God Emperor it is.

“And what did the two of you talk about with him?”

“…I barely spoke. He took Brother away to another room. I do not know what was said there, but Brother came out looking as though something were weighing on him. And a week later my sister died.”

It looks faster to hear about the Fire God Emperor from Brad directly. Nothing more is going to come out of Sheryl.

“…Ephthal smelled the same as Brother, somehow. The scent of the magic power was close. Colorless… a very, very rare scent. But warm. He changed after that day. The same scent as Brother before he changed. I cannot… put it well.”

“No, I follow, more or less.”

Magic power is strongly affected by a person’s mental state. The color is most likely magic aptitude, and the warmth, I think, is that mental state. Something was done to him at that meeting with the Fire God Emperor, something that left him unable to stay calm.

“…So loving Brother is in the past tense. Since that day, I have been very frightened of him. No—I stopped understanding him.”

“And about living together. What will you do?”

“…I cannot bring myself to live with him now. But… someday I want to talk with him properly. About why he did that to my sister. He does not know that I know, and until now I have been too frightened to ask.”

“…”

“…”

“By the way, Sheryl. These grimoires all over the room—why are you still studying magic? With the fate of magic power depletion on you, spells that burn magic power are poison. Even with a magic crystal in hand.”

“…Because something might change. That is what I think.”

“Something might change?”

“…My adoptive father discarding me, and Brother walking the road of the underworld—all of it began in my own powerlessness. There is no mistaking that. With power I would not have been discarded. With power there would have been no trouble over money. All of it, my powerlessness. That is what is wrong.”

She isn’t wrong, I thought.

If Sheryl had power of the kind I have, none of this would have happened. I can put out as much magic power as it takes, and I’d never have been thrown away as useless at magic. And if money were short, I could earn as much of it as I liked at an adventurers’ guild or somewhere like it.

“…I want power. In this fate, where misfortune blows through like a storm, I do not want to be only a small boat, drifting. I want to pull the oars with my own hands and row myself out of the storm. That is what I think.”

“…”

I had no idea what to say to her. After a silence, Sheryl gave a small nod.

“…I said before that I was torn about going to Brother. But I have decided now. I will not go to him yet. So until I can talk with Brother properly… please let me stay here, Ephthal.”

“Staying or going is yours to decide. If you want it, this mansion will take you in any time—even coming back after leaving.”

“…Thank you. Since Brother killed my sister, I have had no place to be. But this is a place to be that I may finally have found. Truly… truly, thank you.”

And there Sheryl broke down and wept.

She’d never told anyone any of this, presumably. Carrying it alone, agonizing over it, frightened by it. And with nothing to be done about any of it, this girl had shut herself in a room and shaken, by herself. Anxiety about her own future, and mistrust of the brother she loved most. Thinking and thinking about all of it, around and around inside her head.

Raised in an extraordinary family, in extraordinary circumstances, but at the root of it she is only a child. The girl in front of me right now is nothing more or less than an ordinary nine-year-old.

“It was lonely, wasn’t it. But it’s all right now.”

I held her tight, and Sheryl looked up at me and made a faintly relieved face.