TUS

Five days later.

Knock knock. The sound rang through my room in the mansion, at dusk.

“Merlin? Come in.”

“Excuse me. The investigation into Sheryl’s brother, the student Brad, and everything around him is finished.”

“Is your body all right now?”

“It was recovery magic of the Thunder God Emperor’s own make, so… yes.”

“Good. That thing is customized to my body specifically, so it tends to come out weak on anyone else…”

I looked through the documents she handed me and sighed.

“So it’s the dark arts after all.”

“Yes. We squeezed the back guild crowd and followed the money moving around narcotics and virulent substances, and it checked out immediately.”

The ingredients told me they were using much the same method as that religious outfit I broke up in my past life. The effects run:

· explosive improvement in magic skill

· as a side effect, increased violence

· as a grave side effect, a shortened lifespan

The shortened lifespan is the really ugly part. Put plainly, this is a thing that burns your life out over a few years to manufacture a superhuman for one fleeting instant. It has something of an evil-god contract ritual about it, too, so the premise is that the subject consents to the enhancement. Which is the part I can’t get to sit right. Wanting power the easy way is a human constant, but would a young student really accept having a few years left to live?

“Well, set that aside. But Merlin? Granted it gives an explosive improvement in magic skill, do you think a thing like that lets you handle a Level 10?”

“Impossible.”

Flat and immediate, and I nodded, because I agreed with her.

“Level 9 and above have been lost to this era in the first place. It isn’t a question of enhancement one way or the other.”

“Right. Otherwise there’d be no way your own ceiling would be Level 8.”

Hmm. I read further into the documents, and my eyes went wide at what was there.

“Brad’s magic aptitude is… none?”

“Yes. The student records show that Sheryl’s brother has no magic aptitude. And Sheryl’s brother is the biological son of Sheryl’s adoptive father.”

“Would you give me the details?”

“Well. Sheryl Oldis. She was disowned, but she is the adopted daughter of a ducal house in a certain country, and House Oldis is a great noble line of mages. So when the duke realized that Brad, his eldest son, had no magic aptitude, he fell into despair. He fathered several more children after that, and not one of them had anything worth calling an aptitude either. Brad was the only case extreme enough to be a complete absence, mind.”

“I see. And that’s why they adopted Sheryl?”

“Yes. People at court began whispering that the fault might lie in the duke’s own seed, and in time the duke came to dread fathering children at all. Which brings us to the adoption.”

“I see…”

“With the spirit side kept buried, Sheryl—whose magic aptitude could only be called a miracle—and her twin elder sister were bought for a great deal of money. It saves the house’s face, and if either of them is eventually married to one of the duke’s children, they become family in name as well as fact.”

“Hm? Hold—hold on. Wait a moment, Merlin. Her twin elder sister?”

“There is a record of her sitting the entrance examination at the same time as Sheryl. Her results were higher still than Sheryl’s. There is no word for that score but ‘prodigy.’ But… she never enrolled.”

“Meaning what?”

“…She died before enrollment. Cause of death, magic power depletion. The direct cause… being magic power siphoning.”

“Siphoning? You’re telling me she was murdered?”

“Yes. Siphoning is the method used when, say, an adventurer party is out on an expedition and one mage transfers magic power to a healer who has run dry. Somebody stole into the twin sister’s bedroom and did it there. Nothing was taken, apparently… so there is a great deal about it that doesn’t sit right.”

“So that girl still hasn’t opened up to me completely, has she. I haven’t heard a word of any of this.”

I shrugged.

“Yes, well. The Ice God Emperor was a secretive man too, in his way.”

“Two of a kind… blood tells.”

“In any case, it’s Brad,” Merlin went on. “A man with no magic aptitude whatsoever, reaching Level 10… however I look at it, it seems wrong.”

“No,” I said. “It’s the opposite.”

“The opposite?”

“It’s because he has no magic aptitude that Sheryl’s brother, Brad, could reach Level 10. Probably… I think I’m starting to see it. A little… but I am.”

I turned the keywords Sasha gave me over in my head.

· an ancient artifact

· the Root of Roots, said to be the cure for magic aptitude

· reincarnation, and the goddess

· magic aptitude

And then the Fire God Emperor.

He was researching ancient civilization and magic aptitude as well, and that’s probably not a coincidence. Beyond that: the transformation of the soul that lowered the ceiling on magic across this entire world—the Magia Burst—was caused by the Fire God Emperor, and so was Isaac’s death.

Then set the goddess of reincarnation, who governs souls, beside the transformation of the soul that the Magia Burst produced. There’s no possible way those are unrelated. Which is exactly why I’ve been watching and moving carefully on Sheryl’s magic power depletion rather than simply solving it. Ever since Sasha turned up, I haven’t been able to shake the sense that the Fire God Emperor’s shadow keeps flickering across this festival.

“Say, Merlin? One in a hundred thousand. Any idea what that’s the probability of?”

“No… I’m sorry, I haven’t the faintest.”

“Of a human being born with no magic aptitude. And I can’t bring myself to think that’s a coincidence.”

I came up with no magic aptitude a second time too. And Sasha told me, right in the middle of that conversation, that it was inevitable. The connection’s plain enough.

“That may well be so.”

“Well. The details of all that will have to wait until the Thunder God Emperor Festival is over and I can pin my master down.”

Merlin gave a small nod.

“By the way, have you noticed, Ephthal-sama?”

“Which one do you mean?”

Merlin laughed a little, as though exasperated.

“You really do see everything, don’t you, Ephthal-sama.”

“Well, the first is Sheryl.”

“That she’s in secret contact with the brother she claims to have lost touch with,” Merlin finished.

“Yeah. There’s no chance of me missing a familiar being used as a carrier pigeon.”

“Then… how far are you on the disturbance inside the magic academy?”

“There’s a large-scale magic circle planted inside the academy as well, on a timed trigger. And it’s a forbidden circle of the Undead line.”

“Soul Eater. A formula that devours the magic power of everyone in range until they dry out. You say you’ve noticed it… so is it all right to leave it alone?”

“No, leave it for now. All of it… I know it’s there and I’m leaving it alone deliberately.”

“…And your reasoning?”

“There’s far too much I don’t know, and I want to see how the other side moves. I can crush the circle whenever I like, and the trigger time is right after the festival’s final match, so there’s room.”

I got to my feet.

“And where might you be going?”

“Sheryl. I’ve gathered every document that can be gathered on her, and if it still doesn’t tell me, it’s faster to ask the girl herself, right?”

⁂

In front of us, a one-sided beating was unfolding.

“G-G-Give, give u—urgk!”

The Student Council President was already a bloody mess and face down on the ground, and a soccer-ball kick detonated against his jaw.

What had happened was this. Right at the opening, four students of the third-year class had put through a Level 6 ritual spell. It dropped the student council out of the fight in a single blow, and everyone assumed the match was over there. It wasn’t. Going down without managing a thing would disgrace the council’s name, so the president didn’t raise the white flag.

That was the mistake.

The ones already on the ground were beaten and kicked, one-sidedly… no, they were being beaten to knock them senseless. Now the work was growing still more savage against people who had been knocked out and driven past the point of being able to surrender at all. The president had come around for a moment just now, apparently, and been struck again before he could get the words out—knocked straight back under.

“That one was aimed at the jaw, Ephthal. Obviously.”

“Yeah. They knocked him out on purpose. Or rather, they made sure he couldn’t surrender.”

A heavy thud, a wet crunch, another impact, and blood scattered.

“Haha, hahaha…”

“Hahaha!”

“What even is the student council? They’re so weak. And these people were the ones acting important?”

“Hahahaha!”

Whud!

A kick went into Irene-san’s stomach where she lay face down. No mercy for being a woman, then. This was awful.

“Master… those people… are they enjoying it?”

“No. That isn’t it. They’re not enjoying it.”

Long ago I dealt with people who’d fallen into a state much like this one. I still remember how badly it sat with me afterward. That was an adventurers’ guild commission, I think: breaking up some devil-worshipping religious outfit. They used every dark art they could lay hands on, dosed their believers with hard drugs, went into their brains with magic. An ugly battlefield in every sense.

“They’ve lost track of themselves. They were carrying an inferiority complex about the student council to begin with, and it’s blowing up out of all proportion. Probably.”

Then Sheryl called out at the top of her voice to the brown-haired boy on the platform.

“…Brother Brad. Please… please stop! Why…? What meaning is there in this?”

“Brother?”

So the brown-haired one up there—Brad—was a relation of Sheryl’s.

Why they’d put dark-arts enhancement into themselves I didn’t know, but Sheryl’s brother was a man who’d knocked on the underworld’s door to get hold of magic crystals. Not the sort to be choosy about his means when there was a result in front of him.

Either way, at this rate somebody was going to die. And that was when Merlin, finished changing at last, finally came back to us.

“Ephthal-sama? Is it about time?”

“Yes. Stop it right now. We’re getting close to somebody dying.”

Merlin went up on flight magic and became a figure on the platform.

“You have gone too far, you vicious brats—Level 7: Tartaros.”

Chains without number came into being around her and took the students one after another. Two of them leapt clear and got out from under it, though, and the chains chased that pair like snakes with minds of their own, from every angle and every direction, relentlessly. Those two were evidently on a different level from the other students, because it never quite closed on them.

“We can manage Level 6 with a ritual, Headmaster. If you spread your magic power that thin… a sloppy net’s going to be difficult, isn’t it?”

“Why, you—!”

Merlin caught one of the chains in her hand and poured magic power into it, and the chain went at the man at a furious speed and wound him up.

“Guh!”

She’d caught one of them. The other was the problem. Merlin must have noticed it too: from the very start, the quality of the magic power Brad wore was plainly different from everyone else’s.

So every remaining chain went toward Sheryl’s brother, and—

“Level 7: Ice Prison.”

—every one of them was turned aside by an ice ward.

“…Level 7? Brother Brad is…?”

Sheryl had lost her words and frozen where she stood. From her reaction, this was unquestionably the first time she’d seen it. And then—

—Silence.

Not just Sheryl. The whole venue froze at the same moment, wrapped in it.

Which is no more than you’d expect. Level 7 was high magic even in my own era, after all.

After a short interval, voices began leaking out of the spectator seats here and there.

“That’s an illusion… right?”

“…Probably.”

“Well… yeah… right?”

“I mean, surely…”

True or not, interpreting it that way is better for everyone’s mental health.

Still. I tilted my head, and Merlin evidently thought the same thing, because she was wearing a puzzled look too. He had, to all appearances, fired a spell with no magic power and no formula. Certain schools use concealment arts to slow an opponent’s response. Was it something of that order? If so, he was without question a very difficult opponent to fight. Though a counter exists, and it’s what Merlin was doing right then: concentrate magic power in the eyes and see the concealed power and formula.

Textbook handling, and correct as far as it went. But I felt an unease I couldn’t name, and a bad feeling with it.

On the platform, Brad put a question to Merlin.

“Headmaster? We were only having a match, in accordance with the rules. Restraining us out of nowhere is rather strange, is it not?”

“You went too far, you fools. And besides… you have used enhancement by the lost dark arts, have you not? Though you alone, it seems, are of a different stripe from the rest.”

“As learned as they say. But the dark arts are not legally forbidden. Nobody has prohibited them, have they?”

“They are unprohibited only because they were lost. And do you understand that you are trading away your lifespan? That you are a superhuman for one instant and no longer?”

“I understand all of that as an exercise of free will, do I not?”

“Regardless. You went too far.”

“I am telling you that this exceeds your authority. You have no power to halt a match. Or am I wrong?”

Brad smiled thinly, and Merlin snorted.

“I see. So you are reckless enough with your life to defy me.”

“Reckless with my life? Which of us, I wonder?”

Several veins stood out along Merlin’s temple.

“Very well. If it is what you wish, you shall have special instruction. Though my discipline burns like the fires of hell.”

The chains moved, and the bound students were thrown outside the platform, still trussed. Clearing the stage, in other words.

“Level 7: Dead Blind.”

The platform was swallowed in a dome of black darkness.

“Master! We can’t see inside!”

“…Because it’s going to get spectacular in there.”

The platform, wrapped in dark. I could make out what was happening by the method Merlin uses, seeing the flow of magic power through all creation, but Anastasia and Maria wouldn’t manage that. The thing doubles as a magic barrier against the outside as well as a blindfold.

Meaning Merlin intended to fight without holding back. Which meant that what was about to happen up on that platform would be something this era was never supposed to see.

Up there, Merlin spoke to Brad with a fearless smile.

“Still, that Level 10 of yours is going to waste.”

“Ho,” Brad said, and drew a small breath.

“Well informed, are you not?”

“Sasha-sama sent word ahead. I do not know what method you used, but this is a matter within Sasha-sama’s domain. In which case nonsense of this order occurring is only natural.”

“And… going to waste, how do you mean?”

Merlin let out a small laugh.

“Did you burn magic power off needlessly against the student council? Your total looks insufficient to me. As you are now, you have not a Level 10 or even a Level 7 left—one shot of a Level 6, at the outside. Am I wrong?”

“Ho. To catch that much, you really are the headmaster.”

And there I said “Ah!” out loud, because I’d finally put my finger on the unease from earlier.

No, Merlin. That isn’t it. Brad hasn’t used a single spell in that entire fight.

The bad feeling turned to certainty and I started running for the platform.

“So? What will you do? Do you intend to fight me with your magic power run dry?”

“Yes, that is right. The magic power that looks empty to you is entirely sufficient for me.”

And Brad turned his palm toward Merlin and, without assembling a formula, without setting any magic power in motion at all, simply—declared it.

“Level 9: Blizzard Tyrant.”

This was nonsense.

Merlin and I thought it in the same instant, and in the same instant our faces went the same shade of shock.

Because this was an event outside all reason. It wasn’t supposed to be able to happen. To put it in terms of Japanese history, it was as absurd as this world’s mage corps riding wyverns into the Second World War and trading fire with the machine guns of fighter planes.

This was not a concealed formula. There really was no movement of magic power. No formula had been assembled at any point. A spell had simply appeared, all at once, ignoring reason and theory alike, at the moment of the declaration. And a colossal ice dragon turned tyrant opened its maw and swallowed Merlin whole.

—A direct hit.

Her defense was late, and Merlin took a Level 9 completely undefended.

There’s a reason a caster of Merlin’s standing took an attack with no resistance at all, like an amateur. We mages read an opponent’s next action from the movement of their magic power and the state of their formula, and both offense and defense are built out of that exchange of prediction. But Brad had no movement of magic power in the first place. On top of that came the assumption that it was being concealed. She had her focus pinned on seeing power and formula, and so, precisely because she is an expert, her reaction was catastrophically slow.

This settled something else, too: the ice attack on our carriage a while back was probably Brad.

And at that time, Merlin had made exactly the same mistake in reasoning that I had. Which is why she took the hit square. Back then, I concluded that the caster who’d kept us from noticing the spellwork was Sasha. Because the very premise of a person able to do that is a fantasy, so surely only something equally nonsensical could manage it. That was what I told myself.

But what Brad is using isn’t magic in the first place.

This is… a Skill.

You can’t possibly respond when you think you’re playing by the rules of chess and your opponent attacks with shogi.

“Kah… hah…!”

Blood scattering, flesh torn open.

Thanks to the defensive spell she’d thrown together on instinct while the dragon took her, Merlin seemed to have escaped instant death. Her own formula broke the ice dragon down into water at once, but a pool of blood was spreading across the floor where she lay.

The wound was deep. Her organs were damaged, in all likelihood.

“You… what… did you… do?”

Merlin’s head had to be nothing but question marks.

Honestly, I was shocked myself. This isn’t supposed to be possible.

But I know it. The one way there is to explain the phenomenon in front of me. Because it can only be accounted for by that power outside all reason.

What I don’t know is why Brad has that skill, or how he reached that space. Which is to ask: why is Brad wielding a reincarnation skill granted by the goddess?

The phenomenon Brad had just produced was Skill: Devil Resource, beyond any doubt.

It was just before I was reborn as Ephthal in this life. I was curious, so I asked the goddess a great many things about skills, and I remember hearing about this ridiculous one—ignores magic theory, produces a spell out of nowhere at zero cost—and saying oh, come on in sheer exasperation.

And there Brad turned toward me and smiled thinly.

“Haha. Surprised, are you not? It was one of my trump cards against the Thunder God Emperor, and now it has been seen. The result is the same either way, though. We have one more card over here—a Level 10.”

“That one’s ice as well, is it?”

“Yes, exactly so. And though it is likewise a Level 10, it outranks your Thunder God Emperor Ephthal. I can wield the Ice God Emperor Isaac.”

I didn’t engage any further. I put my palm to the wound on the fallen Merlin.

“Level 10: Perfect Heal.”

Her organs were damaged, as expected. Anything involving lost body parts has to be treated at once, or even my recovery magic can’t put it back the way it was.

“Perfect Heal is a nuisance, certainly. But the Ice God Emperor Isaac freezes everything in an instant and takes the target’s consciousness. Whatever else Perfect Heal is, it means nothing if you cannot cast. Or am I wrong?”

I kept working on Merlin and glared at Brad without answering.

“I think it would be entertaining to begin the finals here. What do you say?”

“If you want a fight, I’d have thought the finals were the place for it. Wouldn’t you?”

“I have no objection to right here.”

I took that provoking look, and—

“Ho. Picking a fight with me. That’s a pretty interesting thing for a brat to say. You’re the first one to run his mouth at me like that knowing exactly who I am.”

“So you have come out at last. An honor to meet you, Thunder God Emperor.”

“Then let’s settle it here, to the death, since that’s what you wanted.”

“Yes. That would be its own amusement.”

And at that moment, Sheryl came running up onto the platform.

“…Brother. Please… please stop. Truly… please stop.”

An appeal with tears standing in her eyes.

Brad’s expression shifted into something a little shaken, and the fight went out of him on the instant.

“All of it is for your sake, Sheryl.”

“…I do not understand what Brother is thinking… or why it has come to this. I no longer understand… any of it. But I understand this much.”

Sheryl gave a small, unsteady shake of her head.

“…Brother is rushing headlong… in a bad direction. If it is for my sake, then please stop doing these things. I was truly against Brother walking the underworld’s road as well. It is enough… you need do nothing more for my sake.”

And the pressure coming off Brad thinned out all at once.

“My appetite for this has gone. Very well. The finals are in a week regardless. Let us say that enjoying you will keep until the festival’s last day.”

And Brad smiled, sweetly.

⁂

“…That size has always been twenty gold coins.”

“Got an order in from the necromancer trade. For a ritual spell, apparently. Market’s up.”

A cramped room. They sat facing each other across a table, and Sheryl puffed out a cheek at the portly man, who was refusing to engage.

What a back guild actually does, in business terms, is broker. In this case, take an order and hand over the goods. Since the trade is illegal on principle, the standard practice is that nothing is ever physically here except on a handover day. The guild itself is a small office and nothing more, with no adventurers loitering the way they do at an adventurers’ guild, or in this case no assassins, no hired muscle, no thugs. Assemble what’s wanted when it’s wanted, match supply to demand, settle on the spot. All of it aimed at avoiding a raid from above, presumably. There won’t be so much as a ledger here to serve as evidence, either. Keep the damage minimal if anything goes wrong. That’s the thinking.

“…I need a magic crystal. Without one I cannot go on living.”

“Sorry, missy. We have to put the one paying more first.”

“…But my order came first.”

“This isn’t the legitimate world. In a hard business that runs on nothing but profit, it happens all the time. Give it up.”

Sheryl went pale. If her magic supply is cut off it’s a life-and-death matter in the most literal sense, so that stands to reason.

That was when a knock came at the entrance. Three, a pause, then two. The portly man got up and went to the door, returned one knock, and got one back. He turned the lock, and the man who came in was wearing a black robe. The portly man looked him over and gave a small nod.

“Magic crystal, yeah? Got exactly what you ordered.”

Sheryl appealed to the portly man almost pleading.

“…Please wait. I will find the money. Give me time and I will pay, without fail.”

The black-robed man dropped his eyes to Sheryl and me and tilted his head.

“Hm? What are these brats?”

“Ah, I had orders from two of them this time. The little miss here bid twenty gold coins, the gentleman forty.”

“That’s how it is, then. Sudden order, so the cancellation notice didn’t reach you in time? It happens, missy. Give it up.”

Sheryl glared at him.

“…I do not accept that. This man will only use it for something wretched. That much is certain.”

Something seemed to catch at the black-robed man. He studied Sheryl’s hood closely, and drew a sharp breath.

“Cat-ear hood… ah. I remember. You’re Brad’s little sister, aren’t you? He used to come and go at our place. The Marx family.”

Sheryl gave a small nod, and the man went on.

“Right, right… well, no wonder you need a magic crystal.”

“…If you know the circumstances, then let me have it. And all the more so if you are Brother’s associate.”

At that, the black-robed man put on a coarse smile.

“Bad luck. Your big brother’s already out of our outfit.”

“…What does that mean?”

“He had a magic academy identity card, see. Came in very handy. And he needed money, so he’d walk over any dangerous bridge you put in front of him. Gutsy kid, I’ll give him that.”

“…I asked what it means. I too can rarely reach Brother. I know very little of how he is now.”

“His head went somewhere strange lately. No idea what he’s up to these days, but there’s no decent talk about him, put it that way.”

“…In any case, let me have it. I can pay twenty gold coins.”

“Hey. You said just now that I’d only use it for something wretched, didn’t you? Well, you’re right, I probably will, seeing as the man I’m passing it to is a necromancer.”

“…Then let me have it.”

And there the black-robed man shut her down flat.

“No. Because this magic crystal sells for a hundred gold coins. Which makes sixty gold coins for moving it from one hand to the other. Can you do addition and subtraction? That’s all it is. And on that subject, you little brat—where do you get off talking down to me?”

“…?”

“You’re keeping yourself alive on dirty money the same as me, aren’t you? Aren’t you the little sister of the sewer rat who earned his keep helping us out?”

“…Say what you like about me. But do not speak ill of Brother.”

“Let me put it plainly. Living the way you do makes you a filthy rag too, a piece of garbage. You live off dirty money and you want to tell me you alone came out clean? That’s the type that gets under my skin worse than anything. Brats, honestly.”

“…”

“So learn your place. You piss-smelling little kid.”

The black-robed man took a pouch out of his coat.

“There. Forty gold coins.”

The portly man made an expression it would be hard to name and asked him a question.

“A hundred gold coins… you’re moving it on at more than double? That’s a bit rough, isn’t it?”

“It’s a bulk order. Cuts it fine on my end too—if I don’t get the numbers together exactly, I’m in breach of contract and out an enormous sum. And you couldn’t do what we do anyway, could you, when buying a single one puts you at your limit?”

“Well, no arguing that. Can’t be helped, I suppose. Forty gold coins is double the going rate as it is. Still, that necromancer’s something else. Ignoring the market completely… wants the numbers whatever it costs, I suppose.”

“Right. Here’s to a long association.”

The black-robed man took the seat across the table from us, and the portly man sat beside him and opened the pouch. He started counting, and built four towers of ten gold coins on the tabletop.

“Forty gold coins, confirmed.”

The black-robed man gave a big nod and turned that coarse smile on Sheryl again.

“If it galls you, stack up a taller tower of gold than that. Not that your big brother earns anything like it.”

“Ngh…”

Out of the corner of my eye, Sheryl was on the verge of tears. I took a large pouch out of my bag.

“Then I’ll stack the coins on her behalf. Five towers of gold ought to do it.”

I opened the pouch and spilled the coins across the table. I was sincerely glad I’d brought two hundred along to be safe, though it had made for an awkwardly large bag.

“Wh—!”

“Hm? Some problem? I was told a moment ago that selling to whoever pays more is the back guild’s way of doing business.”

The black-robed man went white and raised his voice.

“Hey, wait! This has to go to a seriously dangerous outfit! If I don’t make the buy properly, the boss will beat me half to death!”

Not my problem. There isn’t another sentence available in a situation like this.

“So? What’ll it be?”

I put it to the portly man.

“Well, but… the gentleman here is a regular…”

That put the color back in the black-robed man’s face.

“That’s right! I’m a regular! Not like you people, once a year!”

What an exhausting pair. I shrugged.

“A hundred gold coins, then. So? What’ll it be? You wouldn’t much enjoy having it moved on at more than double either, I imagine.”

There’s as much money as anyone could want in the mansion’s storehouse. Half of my previous life’s assets, which I left to my disciples—to Merlin and the rest—to spend on advancing magic, has never been touched at all. Bluntly, money isn’t a problem for me.

And the portly man thought about it, and thought about it, and thought about it, and smiled.

“Sold!”

At which I smiled back and answered.

“Bought!”

And the black-robed man stood there and went “G-G-G—guhhhhhh!”, a howl of pure anguish.

On the way home, Sheryl, who hadn’t said a word from taking the magic crystal until we were outside, asked me a question.

“…Why does Ephthal go that far for me? A hundred gold coins is… a very great deal of money.”

“My house is the Alcott ducal house. Your family’s ancestor did a great deal for mine, so… we have a family precept about it.”

The part about her ancestor was true. The family precept was a lie. No such thing exists.

“…A family precept?”

“The Four Emperors are kin who walked the line of death together. They shall aid one another, and that bond is eternal, and it shall hold down through their descendants. That precept.”

We did swear something along those lines before storming the Demon King’s castle, mind. We fought like cats the whole time, but we were close.

“…The Four Emperors. Thunder God Emperor Ephthal. I have heard he hated crooked things and was a man of duty and feeling.”

Oh—looks like you gave your kids a good education, Isaac. I nodded along, pleased.

“…Though he is said to have been violent when angered, and impossible to handle on account of an outrageous temperament.”

That part you could have left out, Isaac. I nearly fell over. Not that it isn’t true. Once the switch goes, it goes.

“…Ephthal? Then the sandwich, at the start? Was that also because you knew I was of the Ice God Emperor’s line?”

“That was plain meddling on my part. I didn’t know anything about your background then.”

Sheryl spread both arms at that and threw herself at me for all she was worth.

“Huuug… Ephthal really is a good person.”

By the way, I said.

“Would you tell me about your brother? From what was said back there, he attends the magic academy, doesn’t he?”

After a conversation like that one, of course I was curious, and there was no leaving it unasked.

“…Money was needed to keep me alive. The means was as you heard. I have barely seen Brother in two years. He said that as he is now, dirtied, he would only dirty me, and told me one-sidedly that he did not want to meet. We exchange the occasional letter, and only business. Nothing more.”

Hmm. A strong sense of justice, or else caring too much. Bound too tightly by his own morals, presumably, and thinking about a man like that earning money in the underworld leaves an odd taste.

“…Come to think of it, I was startled to see Brother at this festival.”

“He attends the magic academy, though, doesn’t he? So there’s nothing strange about him being there.”

Sheryl gave a small, quick shake of her head.

“…For some reason he has been chosen as a class representative. Brother works terribly hard, but he has no talent for magic, and his marks at the academy were about as close to the bottom as you can get. So I am startled.”

“Doesn’t that just mean he put in a tremendous amount of work?”

“…He was already working close to his limit. Climbing from there to class representative is not possible.”

Sheryl looked up at the sky with distant eyes.

“…I am very worried. I think he is probably trying to do something for my sake. Money will be needed to keep supporting me from here on as well, and winning the festival is as good as a guaranteed future.”

“Worried why?”

“…There are various ways to strengthen a human being. I am worried he has ruined his body with reckless doping. He is a person who will stop at nothing when he has a purpose.”

Doping. Sure, there’s more than one way to do it, and in most cases the drawbacks are so severe that ordinary people don’t touch them. Specifically: your lifespan shortens, or the strain lands on your brain or your organs. Nothing good comes of any of it.

“…Watching Brother grow dirtied and damaged for my sake. That is very sad, and I am worried.”

I let out a long sigh.

“What a worthless breed.”

“…Worthless? My brother and I?”

“No. Him, behind us.”

I looked back, and the black-robed man from earlier was coming toward us, flashing a knife.

“Hey, boy. Hand over the magic crystal and be quiet about it.”

“On what grounds?”

“I told you, didn’t I? If I don’t bring that back, things go badly for me.”

Another deep sigh.

“It’s your own fault for walking around a slum like this as a couple of kids in the first place. Whatever happens, you’ve got no room to complain.”

“Whatever happens, there’s certainly no room to complain. For you.”

I caught Sheryl up in my arms, triggered my physical enhancement, drove my legs down, and jumped.

“…Eh?”

One backhand as I passed him.

“Aguh!?”

A ridiculous noise, and the feel of a cheekbone breaking traveled up my arm. The man flew some ten meters, rolled along the ground, and eventually stopped. Then I set Sheryl gently down on her feet, and that was that.

“Right. Let’s go home.”

Sheryl blinked at me and spoke in obvious surprise.

“…Ephthal… you were that strong?”

Ah, of course. Sheryl had never seen me fight. I laughed a little and answered.

“Well. I’m the Thunder God Emperor’s descendant, after all.”

“…Ephthal?”

“What is it, Sheryl?”

“…There is something Maria said. I think I understand it now, more or less. That she had found a place to be. Somewhere warm and noisy… somewhere enjoyable, where you can feel safe. I think mine is here.”

And the moment she finished, Sheryl spread both arms and dove into my chest.

“…Huuug.”

I gave a wry smile and patted her head.

Now then. Today was the second day of the semifinals.

Since it would tell us about our opponents in the finals, we were watching from the competitors’ waiting room by way of scouting the enemy, and—

“Well, well? If it isn’t Maria-san. And what is the flattest chest in the first year doing in a place like this, I wonder?”

“Well, well, Irene-san? I showed you my strength exactly as you told me to, and you still speak that way? This is what comes of being a Holstein with all the nutrition going to her chest—actually, you’re irritating, so stop picking fights.”

Sparks were visibly crackling between the two of them. This had all started when Irene-san and company came over to pick at us on our way to the match.

“Fufu. Still, Maria-san?”

“What? Have you got another complaint?”

And there Irene-san turned her usual sharpness around completely and put on a gentle smile.

“When I recall the days of being pestered, day after day, with duel me, duel me… I do have a great many thoughts about it, but—”

Ah—so you used to get it from Maria too, Irene-san. Feeling a sudden rush of fellow feeling, I couldn’t help laughing.

“I would be willing to acknowledge you now. Your ability.”

“Wh—What’s brought this on all of a sudden? It’s creepy.”

“I did tell you, did I not? The student council acknowledges anyone with ability.”

And there the Student Council President put out his right hand to me.

“Ephthal-kun, wasn’t it? Your Level 5 was splendid. And Anonymous Hope-san’s illusion, too.”

A handshake, apparently. Refusing when a hand’s been offered would be strange, so I took it.

“Which means the finals are ours and yours. I promise you we shall meet it fairly and with everything we have. Isn’t that right, Vice President?”

“Yes, that’s so, President. Ah, and Maria-san? The truth is we are short-handed on the secretarial side. You kept challenging me to a duel because you wanted to join the student council… didn’t you?”

“W-Well… that was the case at the time.”

“Once the festival is over, come and visit the student council room. You would be welcome. All of you, of course.”

“What is with you, this is so sudden, it’s creepy… no. No, that’s wrong. That isn’t it, is it.”

And Maria, who had worn a sour face right up to that moment, shrugged like someone letting something go.

“Thank you for acknowledging me. I really am glad about that part. But I’m… not joining the student council.”

Irene-san’s eyes went wide in surprise.

“And why is that? After being so persistent…”

“Because I’ve got one… I suppose.”

“Got one?”

Maria turned her eyes to me, and her cheeks colored slightly.

“Sorry, but I’ve already got—a place to be.”

Irene-san let out a slightly disappointed breath. Then she and the president looked at each other and gave rueful smiles.

“It appears we have been turned down… President.”

“Haha. Well, free will is a thing to be respected.”

And the president put on a smile and started off toward the platform.

“Then let’s meet again in the finals. First years.”

“Maria-san, I will grant that your side is higher on average in magic technique. However—in real combat, I wonder?”

And with that, the student council members climbed up onto the platform.

Chapter 3 – The Thunder God Emperor Festival Main Tournament and the Cat-Eared Girl’s Brother

So. We were at the venue for the Thunder God Emperor Ephthal Festival main tournament.

For the moment, Sheryl’s magic power depletion had her in a bad way. Long ago, back in the deep past, a water-spirit girl took flesh on a whim, and the Ice God Emperor Isaac was born with a magic aptitude that made him, in all likelihood, more beloved of the water spirits in the air than anyone else alive. Once those two met, ending up close was less a choice than a foregone conclusion.

And a child that is half human and half spirit runs into trouble as a matter of course. Isaac and I had been friendly enough, one way and another, that the two of us once tore through the literature together in a fairly desperate way. The conclusion we reached was that the odds of dying of magic power depletion before reaching ten years old were extremely high.

The reason comes down to this: spirits devour magic power simply to keep living. Which stands to reason, really, since a spirit is a creature of pure mind, its very existence a mass of magic power. So a spirit sustains itself by constantly converting the breath of the air into magic power and drawing it in. A human obviously can’t do that. Put plainly, a spirit-human half burns fuel faster than a human body can produce it, and as the human child grows, the amount it needs rises, until eventually the child hits its ceiling and dies.

By our arithmetic back then, a grandchild or a great-grandchild could just barely be made to work. The direct child, no matter how we ran the numbers, could not. Well, descendants exist, so evidently Isaac found a way for his own child.

—Presumably the same way I’m about to use on Sheryl.

Which is only logical, since the pair of us concluded together that it was the one method that would carry a child through.

The thing I feared most at the time is exactly what’s happening to Sheryl now: an atavism. A god-adjacent entity is, to put it bluntly, something nobody understands, so anything at all could happen, and cross-species pairings throw up scattered cases of precisely this. And if it surfaced generations down the line, Isaac wouldn’t be there and nothing could be done about it. Which is why, back then, I talked myself hoarse trying to stop him.

As for Sheryl herself. Fated to die she may be, but she isn’t going to die tomorrow, or the day after, or a week from now. A month from now, though, I couldn’t guarantee. So I’ve prepared an emergency medicine, in case a depletion attack takes her and she suddenly can’t move.

That leaves us, for the moment, in something like a secure position. But there is one point I can’t make sit right.

“…Mm? What is it, Ephthal?”

“It’s nothing, Sheryl.”

Which was a lie. For a start, I don’t understand why Sheryl cast a spell in her dorm room at all, Level 1 or not. Either she hasn’t noticed her own magic power depletion, or there’s something else that makes her confident her life isn’t in danger. Today’s match is the first place to find out which.

Sasha put the name of the Fire God Emperor Cliff into this festival, too, so the whole thing smells wrong. Even setting out to treat Sheryl, it would be a mistake to assume everything runs to my expectations, and confirming the situation as far as I can see it is unquestionably the better play.

“Anyway. Could you maybe stop walking along holding the hem of my clothes…?”

“…It settles me, doing this.”

Just how attached has this girl gotten? Not that I mind, particularly. What I feel toward Sheryl now is essentially what I’d feel toward a friend’s daughter. She’s near enough family, and when family gets attached and comes to lean on you, finding it plainly adorable is not a thing you can help.

So I patted her head, and sure enough her cat ears twitched and she said “Ehehe” in high good humor.

“…Being patted by Ephthal really is reassuring.”

“Reassuring?”

“…Because you smell the same as Brother… huuug.”

And I got hugged, naturally.

That aside, today was the Thunder God Emperor Festival semifinals: a single decisive team match. The match itself ought to be a walkover, but before I put Sheryl through any serious treatment for her magic power depletion, I wanted to confirm that it really is that, in live combat, where the truth can’t be dressed up. A clumsy treatment is the kind of thing that costs a life, so this needed care rather than rough work.

⁂

And so the Thunder God Emperor Festival semifinals began.

Our opponents, incidentally, were a third-year class. The student council gathers the best of the entire student body, so they field a mixed corps drawn from across the classes. And unlike the preliminaries, this round was to be fought in the colosseum on academy grounds. If I say it’s like the Colosseum in Rome on modern Earth, only tidied up, that might carry some of the sense of it. An enormous venue, and when all’s said and done this is a famous demon academy, so being able to borrow a national facility for an event strikes me as no small thing. In the middle of the flat ground inside the spectator seating stands the platform, which makes the whole thing a colosseum in the most literal way.

Which brings us to about ten seconds after the signal for the match to start, with the five of us facing off against their five, and—

“H-H-He’s floatiiing! What is that mask!? That’s Level 5: Flight, isn’t it!?”

She was, in fact, floating. This swallowtail-butterfly-masked woman in student-uniform cosplay was up in the air. Merlin isn’t allowed to take part in the fighting, so she’d withdrawn from the platform the moment we started, but she was standing out so hard it was exhausting to even attempt a comeback.

Why does this girl casually use a Level 5? I had a pretext when I did it, at least: the mysterious boy with Headmaster Merlin’s special favor. A masked woman throwing Level 5s is nothing but an invitation to be asked questions. Meanwhile our five opponents had gone pale and were shouting over one another.

“I said these guys were off! The black-haired one used a Level 5 in the preliminaries too!”

“The headmaster uses formal speech on that human, Ephthal or whatever his name is! There’s definitely something going on with them! They’ve got a kid on the roster! This is absolutely not normal!”

Then Merlin, wearing an insufferably smug face, made her announcement.

“Be at ease, gentlemen! This of mine is no Level 5. It is a Level 4 Illusion! And for the record, I shall not lift a finger!”

That again. I went limp on the spot. But the five of them visibly recovered their color as they took it in.

“Hey, she says it’s an illusion.”

“Level 4, huh. Which means the Level 5 the black-haired one used could be an illusion too.”

“Level 4 might well be their ceiling, right? Then we can take this. That’s not zero odds, is it?”

“We’re carrying the class name, after all. Forfeit and there’s no telling what the rest of them will say to us afterward.”

“Right, and Anonymous Hope says they won’t lift a finger, and one of them’s a child, so counting properly… we’re really up against three.”

The five of them looked us over and swallowed hard.

“…Five on three. We can do this.”

What an unbelievably transparent bunch. Convinced now of their numerical advantage, the fear on their faces gave way to confidence. And as far as I could see, the gallery had swallowed Merlin’s illusion line as well. When I nervously checked the faculty referee, he was satisfied too, for some reason: an Illusion, then…

At which point I finally noticed that this was, in fact, absurd.

—Level 8: Long Range Mind Jack.

A species of mental contamination. A confusion spell, in plain terms. To see high magic put to work on something this petty would make the art itself weep.

In any case, the opposition had found their enthusiasm.

“Right. Bullying the kid looks bad, so we go for the next weakest thing out there. That soft, fluffy one. Everything on her!”

They’d settled on Anastasia as their target, apparently.

“They’ll be throwing Level 4s, so watch yourselves!”

“Which is why the four of us hold this—Level 4 magic barrier!”

“And I’m the best close-quarters fighter in the academy, so I go in and put the pink-haired girl out of the match in one strike!”

Not a bad plan, as plans go. Anastasia was in fact standing somewhat out ahead of the rest of us, in the giant’s path. For Maria and me to help her, we’d have to fire long-range attack magic, and so the four of them combined their formulas and completed a Level 4-grade barrier to shield the big man. If it all went their way, Anastasia would be dropped instantly and only Maria and I would be left. At which point, whatever the gap in ability as mages, sheer weight of numbers might carry it. That was the shape of the thinking.

And as the shaven-headed giant came at us with a practice sword raised high overhead—

“Wait, please! There’s no need for that! If it’s a one-on-one at close quarters—a bout between warriors—I’ll take you on!”

Anastasia called it out at the top of her voice.

“What? One on one!?”

The giant stopped dead. From where he stood, a one-on-one at close quarters was exactly what he wanted, so this must have felt like a gift falling out of a clear sky.

“I accept a one-on-one. So I thought we should begin with the greeting. I am a swordsman of sorts myself. This is a duel between warriors—have you never heard the saying that it begins with courtesy and ends with courtesy?”

The giant thought about it for a moment, then gave a small nod.

“I am Anthony, third year. Anthony Ames.”

“And I am Anastasia, first year. Anastasia—”

Some five meters apart, the two of them bowed to each other, and the instant the man’s head was all the way down, Anastasia twisted hard at the waist and—

—threw a knife.

Not a real one, mind. A practice blade. It carried a lightning enchantment even so, so taking it was never going to be free. The knife went into his shoulder, and the giant took the shock and dropped to one knee with a strangled noise.

“That’s dirty!”

Quite right. I was pulling a wry face myself.

“Well, there’s somebody here far dirtier than me.”

And at that moment, countless rose stems erupted across the platform.

“M-My legs, my legs, my leeeegs!”

“Wh-Wh-What in the world is thiiis!?”

What had wrapped itself around all five pairs of legs was Rose Bind—a magic tool elves are fond of. In the main tournament, incidentally, bringing in a self-made magic tool is permitted provided the stated purpose is to support one’s spellcasting. That was a special allowance to rescue students majoring in alchemy, and since no alchemist ever actually entered, it has sat unused ever since. Anastasia is the one who spotted it.

I remember clearly the moment she was reading the rulebook and let out an “Ah!” Her usual soft, fluffy expression vanished for an instant and something wicked came over her face. Though I would prefer to believe I imagined the wicked part.

That aside, the strength of that magic tool of Maria’s scales with the skill of the one using it. Bound by a girl whose power had come on at a frightening rate over the training camp, none of them was going to get free in a hurry.

“—Right, now that you can’t move, it’s time for a beating!”

Arrows with their attack power raised by enchantment came down on the five of them like sleeting rain. And then: pandemonium.

“Gyaaaaaaaah!”

“I-I knew it, we’re finished!”

“What is with that elf!? What kind of binding is this!? And those are practice arrows, aren’t they!? What enchantment work gets you that kind of power out of a practice arrow!”

“I told you! I told you these guys were off!”

And with the five of them in a full panic, Anastasia and Maria caught each other’s eye and nodded.

“Here we go, Anastasia!”

“Yes! Maria-san!”

The two of them ran together and each put out a right hand. These two really are good at a fight. This had evidently been the plan from the beginning.

“Ready—”

And as their palms met, the pair of them fixed the five with a hard look and—

“Level 5: Explosion!”

KABOOM. A very literal, very large explosion. Immobilize, beat them into collapse, then finish with heavy firepower from a cooperative ritual spell. All in all, I’d call that a satisfactory piece of work.

“At least the kid…! If I don’t take down even one of them, the whole class will look at me sideways!”

Best close-quarters fighter in the academy was apparently not an idle boast. He’d been furthest from the blast and taken the least damage, and he had forced his way out of the Rose Bind as well—and he came at Sheryl, beside me, with his sword raised.

I didn’t move. If she looked like getting hurt I’d step in at the last possible moment. And the instant Sheryl came inside his reach—

“Level 3: Huge Tornado.”

“Wha—Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!?”

The tornado threw the giant some ten meters into the air, and then he came down.

“Gubh!”

An odd noise, and he was out cold and twitching. He’d had his physical abilities enhanced, by the look of it, so at this level he’d likely get away with minor injuries and there was nothing much to worry about.

The problem was Sheryl. Given a magic power depletion that should have posed a direct threat to her life, the obvious question arose: how was she casting a Level 3 at all?

The next day, Saturday.

The magic academy was closed, and in the early afternoon Sheryl and I were walking through the city.

“…I have asked you a number of times not to follow me.”

Sheryl looked troubled. I shrugged.

“I’m curious, is all.”

“…Why are you curious?”

“Because I’m already aboard this boat.”

She thought about that for a while, then went quiet and started walking again.

“…Then do as you like.”

We left the main street in the center of the city and went into the back lanes, working deeper and deeper through the alleys, and the scenery around us grew steadily more run-down. More than run-down, in fact. Creepy. Garbage lay scattered along the narrow streets, homeless people slept in heaps here and there, and the smell of ammonia caught at my nose now and then. Bad for the mood, bad for the sanitation. There were people drinking from the middle of the day, and around here a young person in clean clothes is a pusher and nothing else.

—We had, in short, walked into a slum.

“Sheryl. Where are we heading?”

“…My once-a-year errand to the back guild. I need a magic crystal. There is no route by which I can obtain one legitimately.”

More or less what I’d imagined. If a girl who by all theory should be dying of the condition is casting spells like anyone else, then she needs an external fuel tank.

Magic crystals, incidentally, get used for defending strongpoints in monster-heavy regions, for building shelters in safe zones, holding a ritual spell in permanent operation, that sort of thing. A magic crystal is a substance refined from the magic stones that can occasionally be taken from high-order monsters. The output itself isn’t especially strong as a rule. How to put it… imagine a dry-cell battery with an absurdly long endurance and you’ve got roughly the right idea. Output scales with the size of the magic stone, so one large enough to sustain a ritual spell can carry a price that would bankrupt a country. They’re used in magic tools too, and they’re expensive on principle, so even a small one costs a great deal. On top of that, trade in them is strictly controlled by the union of nations, and as Sheryl said, there’s no room to get one through legitimate channels.

“I know roughly what your magic power depletion is, spirits and all, from the research records left in the Alcott ducal house. But dealing with the back guild… is that really something you should be telling me?”

“…It is not something I hide, and this transaction is not illegal. On the buying side, at least. And… I trust that Ephthal is a good person.”

The selling side is certainly breaking the law at the acquisition stage. Realistically the only routes are theft or embezzled goods moved on quietly.

While I was thinking that, Sheryl let out a sigh.

“…What a wretched place, all the same.”

She took a tight grip on my sleeve, and that was when I noticed she was shaking.

“Are you frightened?”

“…Mm. There are a great many thugs. So I am frightened now. It was not like this before.”

“What do you mean, now?”

“…Last year and the year before, I was not frightened, because I could use higher magic. Every year the magic I can handle grows weaker, and now Level 3 is my limit. A magic crystal is not all-powerful either.”

“A magic crystal, though. Aren’t they expensive?”

“…Brother sends me money every year, so it is all right. This year was quite dangerous, so I resorted to a last measure.”

Ah. So that’s why she was selling underwear at the flea market.

“Brother—your older brother? If he needs magic crystals too, then between the two of you that must come to an outrageous sum…?”

“…Mm. He is not blood, so it is fine.”

“Not blood?”

“…I was bought with money by a ducal house of magic lineage. To lend the house prestige.”

“I’d like to hear that part in rather more detail.”

Sheryl gave a small nod.

“…My earliest memory begins in a room of a slave market, as collateral against my true parents’ debt, with a duke carving a slave crest into me. Since the first Ice God Emperor died, nothing has gone well for the line.”

What she explained then comes to roughly this.

To begin with, Isaac kept his child’s life going without difficulty by ‘that method,’ right up until the Fire God Emperor killed him. But with Isaac gone, that method doesn’t hold. And so what came afterward turned ugly. Isaac’s child, from the father’s death onward, was kept alive on magic crystals, exactly as Sheryl is now. But they couldn’t obtain crystals of high enough output, so it was all they could do to sustain life… and as a mage, at least, the child was finished from that point.

The family’s standing inside the court of Isaac’s country grew precarious, and the decline began. It started with selling off land and houses; as the generations went on, more and more that was fatal went to market, until in the end the title and the domain itself were sold.

—That is what it means to take spirit blood into a line.

You gain a superhuman magic aptitude, but the fuel consumption is so terrible that in time even the life burns out. That is both why Sheryl was a genius and why her growth stopped. And it took Isaac’s line several generations for the spirit blood to thin far enough that its members could live as ordinary mages. Over all that time the house was left out of favor at court, the situation passed the point of recovery, and here we are.

“…The story ends here. We have arrived.”

A run-down building in one corner of the slum, apparently our destination. The sort of cramped, mixed-use building you’d find back in Japan, with two staircases from the entrance, one up and one down. We took the up.

Second floor of a three-story building, at the end of the corridor, Sheryl knocked three times, paused, and knocked twice more. A single knock came back from the other side, and she returned one.

Precautions, presumably, on account of the illegal trade going on. And while I was thinking exactly that, I heard the lock come off, and the door swung open with a creak.

The next day.

I’d asked Maria along, and we’d come out to the great forest. My stomach had been in an abnormal state ever since eating Anastasia’s cooking, but dwelling on that is how you lose. I’ve researched a great many things since I first took up the pursuit of magic, and I never once knew that antidote magic works on a stomachache from ordinary home cooking. Honestly surprising. Worth writing up as a paper sometime.

Joking aside. Maria was filling her basket with magic herbs, quick and practiced, in air thick with the smell of green.

“Hey, Ephthal? Why’d you suddenly decide we were out gathering magic herbs?”

Hmm. Telling Maria should be safe enough. Merlin had worked it out the moment she looked at the flow of Sheryl’s magic power, once she’d heard about the Ice God Emperor, so it’s the sort of thing anyone with the eyes for it can see.

“The thing is… Sheryl has a rather troublesome illness.”

“A troublesome illness?”

“Congenital. She burns an enormous amount of magic power simply to stay alive, and left alone, she’ll die. Does ‘spirit’ mean anything to you?”

“The breath of great nature, lurking in the air… no, gods. Elves are spirit-worshippers, so of course I know.”

“They’re much the same order of thing as the Azure Dragon or the Black Tortoise, the Four Sacred Beasts. Have you heard that spirits, being creatures of pure mind, will rarely take on flesh and imitate a human shape?”

Maria nodded, and I went on.

“And a spirit girl who took flesh in the material world on a whim fell in love. With Sheryl’s ancestor, the Ice God Emperor.”

Maria laughed, exasperated. “Hahaha.”

“Getting together with a god. The first Four Emperors really were an anything-goes crowd, starting with you.”

“Anyway, she has spirit blood in her ancestry, and she’s in a state where magic power depletion could kill her at any moment.”

Maria’s eyes went wide and round.

“You took that girl into the mansion knowing that?”

“That’s about the size of it, yes.”

“Haha. You really are strange. Same story with Anastasia, and the same with me. It practically looks like you go out and get yourself caught up in trouble.”

“Well… I’ve never managed to shake the habit of picking up strays.”

Merlin herself started out as an infant I picked up at the Demon King’s castle.

Maria laughed again, exasperated, thought about something for a while, and sighed.

“It’s lovely, though. Marrying a spirit… I could get starry-eyed over that.”

“Hm? Is this you saying you’d like to marry a spirit too?”

Maria puffed out a cheek, then shook her head like someone giving it up.

“When I was a kid, sure, I used to dream about fairy-tale things like that.”

“But…” And she fixed her eyes on my face and held them there. “Right now I have someone I actually like. Not some vague daydream. A real, live person.”

“…”

“…”

We looked at each other for a good few dozen seconds. Then Maria tipped her head back and looked at the sky through the gaps in the trees.

“Still, it really is lovely. Across species, across station. Two people who could never have happened, and they happened.”

“It might be, at that.”

“…Well. I’m in love across station myself, so when I hear a story like that I think it’s wonderful. And I think I’m jealous.”

“…”

“…”

Maria kept her eyes fixed on my face, as though she were waiting for me to say something. Then she shook her head again, giving it up—

“…Magic herbs, so you’re making some kind of medicine to top up magic power?”

Which was exactly my purpose, as it happens. I don’t know whether I’ll ever use it, but if Sheryl collapses I want to be able to give first aid at any hour, and that was why we were out here today.

“So why bring me along? You can do anything by yourself, can’t you?”

“You were raised in the forest. Just as I expected, you’re picking out the herb colonies beautifully. Reading the subtle shifts in the plant ecology, that sort of thing. I can’t work that way. You’re a real help.”

Nobody outdoes an elf at this sort of gathering. I learned that over and over back in my adventurers’ guild days, so bringing Maria along for exactly that reason is the honest truth.

“Well, well. What an honor, to be of use to the Thunder God Emperor-sama.”

The theatrical delivery, gesture and all, got a small laugh out of me.

“Huh. So Maria says honest things sometimes after all.”

“I can be honest sometimes… Actually, I’d say a good deal of the thorn has come out of me since I met you, hasn’t it?”

She puffed her cheek out, as though the suggestion offended her. Then something seemed to occur to her, and she closed her fist tight, like someone steeling herself.

“Hey, Ephthal? You’ve kissed Anastasia before, haven’t you.”

What is this girl starting on now, out of nowhere. I froze where I stood.

“Hey. Ephthal?”

Maria walked up to me, opened both arms, and pulled me into a hug.

“Wait—Maria?”

She’s small, so her face came up around my chest. She held me tight, slid both hands around behind my neck, and stretched up on her toes, and as her face came closer, against my lips—something warm.

“That’s thanks for saving me. It doesn’t mean anything more than that.”

Maria dropped back onto her heels and her face drew away.

“…Elves have a custom like that, don’t they. If I remember rightly.”

Elves are a people who take obligation seriously, and they have some strange customs. When someone of the opposite sex saves your life, for instance, a kiss like that is one way of showing gratitude. Bridget sprang exactly this on me once, long ago, and it left me weak in the knees. To be fair, I didn’t know it was a custom at the time, so it landed as a complete ambush, which is a good part of why it worked.

“So, um, Ephthal? The other day… I said I’d grant you a favor as thanks for saving me, right? That promise is a separate account from what just happened. The favor’s still very much alive. So, if you’re going to spend the favor?”

Maria looked up at me through her lashes with a challenging smile.

“…I wouldn’t mind kissing you one more time.”

“…”

“…”

“A kiss isn’t something you get by asking for a favor.”

“If you ask, then once more… no. As many times as you want.”

“Maria. Are you… serious about this?”

“I don’t say things like this as a joke.”

“That sort of thing is… what lovers do. Thanks for a rescue, favors owed, I don’t need any of it. Honestly, all of that sits on my shoulders more than I can stand.”

“Picking up strays might be an ordinary day for you, but it isn’t for the person who got saved. It’s a special thing… and it’s not a matter you get to smooth over and forget.”

“Like I said, I don’t need it. And least of all asking, as a favor, for something lovers do…”

“I wouldn’t say this to someone I disliked, either.”

That got a small jolt out of me. I genuinely can’t read this girl’s intentions. No. Running for that exit would be cruel to her, wouldn’t it.

So Maria said the decisive thing, exactly as I’d expected her to. Without letting the challenge slip out of her face, spirited to the last.

“You’re kind to everybody as though it were nothing at all, and anything crooked, you knock flat by force. That’s why—I fell for you.”

Troublesome, this. I’d been making a point of not noticing until now, but the truth is that her… that the repeated attacks she’s thrown at me, almost all of them dead straight, have been landing. Only slightly. But they have been doing damage.

“When I said I’d grant you any favor, that’s what I meant by it. You can spend it on something else, obviously. But if the order is a million kisses, that’s completely fine by me.”

“…”

“‘Become my lover’ works. Or ‘marry me.’ An order like that would be fine too.”

“…You really are direct.”

“Haha. Well, I do live exactly as my feelings take me, as I please, you see.”

And troublesomely enough, I don’t dislike girls like this. Honestly, she plays dirty, I thought, and sighed. Maria gave a big nod, wearing the clear, bright face of someone who has finished everything she came to do.

“Take your time thinking it over. As for what you want the favor to be, you can tell me any time up to graduation.”

“…And if I end up asking you for something worthless?”

“I’ll be really mad. And then I’ll go and cry about it on my own.”

No hesitation at all. Saying that with a beaming smile leaves me really stuck, you know?

This had turned into a real problem. I don’t have the slightest intention of messing with how she feels, but there’s no escaping it now. Or rather, she has no intention of letting me escape, which is why she’s been coming at me this hard, all this time. Even this conversation comes down to wanting it settled in black and white, whether it ends well or badly. The whole run of it is about as Maria as Maria gets.

“Hey. Ephthal? Back then, you said it, didn’t you. That in a few more years I’d grow into your type of woman.”

I did say that. I said exactly that, all right, but…

Maria finally let go of me and gave a mischievous smile.

“The one who lit the fire was… you. So none of this is my fault.”

In the end I had no choice but to admit this was a seed I’d planted myself. In mental age, though, the gap between us is literally wider than granddaughter to grandfather. I let out a deep, deep sigh.

⁂

In the mansion’s dining room, Anastasia raised a voice of protest.

“Merlin-sama! Why does Sheryl-chan get a room in the mansion? Uu… when I live in the shed in the garden…”

“Sheryl-sama is of the Ice God Emperor’s direct line, is she not. That she should be treated differently from a useless mongrel like you is only natural—from birth!”

“That’s… how can you even say that…”

“Silence, useless mongrel! It is a hundred years too early for a dog to assert itself! A dog—belongs in a kennel!”

“Uu… that’s awful, Merlin-sama.”

It was certainly awful, and I had nothing to say in its defense. Merlin was attached to Isaac, though, so her going soft on Sheryl isn’t entirely beyond me.

Maria clapped her hands together.

“Anastasia? Before you get going about dogs, don’t you have something to be doing?”

Anastasia stood, and Maria stood after her.

“So then, Master! We’re off to cook♪”

Ah. I’d completely forgotten, but of course, tonight was the dinner to welcome Sheryl.

We waited an hour. The situation, to explain it: the moment it was settled that Sheryl would be taken into the mansion, the pair of them had gotten strangely fired up about it. “In that case, we’ll do our very best and cook!”

“Right, sorry to keep you.”

Maria came back from the kitchen with a large platter. What she’d made was fried chicken, or rather a traditional elven dish along the lines of karaage.

“Anastasia said she’d start frying after me, so I expect she’ll bring hers through later.”

“Hoh. Student Maria. This karaage… I shall grant its appearance and its aroma a passing grade.”

Merlin is fussy about food, so a mound of karaage drawing praise out of her was a rare event in itself. Then she speared a piece on her fork and took a bite. Her eyes flew wide, and she gathered the platter into her arms and set about it at a ferocious clip.

“Delicious! Delicious! What is this!”

Chomp chomp chomp!

Watching Merlin plow on with that single-minded ferocity, I drew back a little. For Merlin to actually take to something is no small matter, mind you.

Then Anastasia came pattering into the room.

“Maaaster! My karaage’s done tooo♪”

Her platter went down on the table, and the assembled company looked at it and lost the power of speech. It was purple.

It also had a smell, a pungent one. Chemical, to put it concretely. The dangerous sort of chemical. On top of which, the surface of the stuff was visibly, steadily beginning to melt into sludge.

Acid…? That gel-like liquid that looked like sauce, was it acidic? Come to think of it, the smell sat awfully close to an Acid Slime’s. Though how you contrive to build food that smells like a monster out of the ingredients in that kitchen, I could not tell you.

“I’m not eating this!”

The look and the smell were both far past dangerous.

“Master… you won’t eat it? I’m… sad.”

Anastasia’s eyes filled and she made a sorrowful face: fragile enough to break at a touch, wistful, lovely, and one blink from spilling over. Merlin saw it and clenched her fist tight.

“Ephthal-sama? Anastasia would like you to eat it, it seems?”

“No—like I said, I am absolutely not eating it!”

“Hmm… if you say so to that degree, Ephthal-sama, then I have no choice but to step forward myself. The useless mongrel did make it with all her might, in her useless way… hm.”

Maria sighed.

“Hmm… no, I’ll eat it. Not wasting food is a principle of mine. And Anastasia worked hard on it.”

“Wait, student Maria. Here, I, as the elder—”

“Merlin-sama, please don’t force yourself. I’ll eat it.”

“But that will not do, will it? When Anastasia made it with such effort. We cannot let that feeling go to waste.”

“No, no, I’ll do it. Anastasia did work hard on it.”

“You are a difficult one. I said I would eat it.”

Anastasia on the verge of tears, and the two of them looking out for her like that—somewhere in the middle of it I started to feel that refusing the food made me the one doing something wrong.

So I steeled myself and said it.

“Then I’ll eat—”

“Go ahead.” “Go ahead.” “Go ahead.”

Perfectly in sync. All three of them, Anastasia included, had thrust the platter of purple karaage out in front of me at the same instant. Dammit. They got me!

Unbelievable. I never expected to take the Da○ou Club bit in another world. And how are these three that perfectly in sync, exactly? Besides which. Technically speaking, all of them are my disciples, aren’t they? I’d had an inkling for a while now, but with Merlin at the head of it, the way I get treated when things go loose, when everybody’s cutting up, is a bit off, isn’t it?

Still, once it had come to this, eating the karaage was not something I was going to get out of. So I made my peace with it, speared a piece on my fork, and put it in my mouth, gingerly.

“Gobfa!”

It was like taking an explosion spell to the mouth. Wait. An explosion spell!?

“A-A-Anastasia? What did you put in this purple, pungent karaage?”

“Eh? Gunpowder… maybe?”

You actually used an explosive as a seasoning!?

“And… mandragora, maybe?”

That’s a narcotic!?

“And… fly agaric, for a secret note?”

That’s a certain-death note!

“A-Anyway. I said I’d eat it, so I’ll make the effort.”

And as I reached for a second piece—

“No, Master! Not a second one! That exceeds the lethal dose! From the second piece on you can’t handle it without an antidote potion!”

“You’re not even trying to hide that it’s poison!?”

“I mixed antidote potion into the drinks, so please enjoy it as you drink♪”

“You’re smiling sweetly at me and all I can see is a demon’s smile!?”

While Anastasia and I went back and forth, a fork came in from the side, and Sheryl, having taken a bite, gave a small nod.

“…Mm. Surprisingly good.”

With that, she dragged the platter over to her own place.

“Really?”

“…Mm. The look and the smell are certainly bad. And the moment it enters the mouth there is certainly an explosive shock. But chew it through, and there is a mellow, well-aged aroma. And a deep, savory richness.”

Hmm. I’d spat mine straight out, so I certainly hadn’t chewed it through and tasted anything. At a guess, it might be something on the order of natto back in Japan: genuinely good once you get past the front door.

So I speared the purple chicken again, put it in my mouth, and… no. This was awful. Far too awful. But it’s supposed to be good if you chew it. I steeled myself and bit down. And—

“Gobfa!”

Garbage. What chewing it through released was the smell of well-aged garbage.

“…Mm. For what reason are you spitting, Ephthal?”

“G-G-Garba…”

“That’s awful… are you trying to say garbage, Master?”

No good! Anastasia was welling up again!

“…Mm. In any case, what is good is good. This mellow, well-aged aroma…”

That’s the smell of garbage. Well. Sheryl gives off a strange-girl aura, so a palate with no discrimination in it wouldn’t be out of character.

“…It really is good, Anastasia. Thank you for working so hard on the cooking for my welcome party.”

“You’re very welcome!”

With tears pooling at the corners of her eyes, Anastasia started bouncing on the spot.

“…Anastasia? For what reason are you this delighted?”

“Um, uh… er… I… it’s the first time in my life anyone’s praised my cooking!”

Obviously!

And while I sat there with my face twitching—

“So Master won’t eat it after all? When the person I most want to eat it is Master… and you spat it all out.”

“Ah, no… yeah. Sorry, but I think I’ll pass on any more.”

“Uu…”

For the umpteenth time today, Anastasia’s eyes went teary, and Merlin, seeing that face, pulled a sour expression.

“If you say you dislike it, Ephthal-sama, then here too I have no choice but to eat it myself.”

“No, I’ll eat it. They taught us in the elven village that food must never go to waste.”

Merlin and Maria squaring up to the purple karaage with the faces of people who had made their peace with dying. Anastasia once again on the verge of tears. Watching the three of them, I started to feel, all over again, that refusing the food made me the one doing something wrong.

“All right, so after all I’ll just…”

“Go ahead.” “Go ahead.” “Go ahead.” “Go ahead.”

Sheryl included, every one of them reached for the platter of purple karaage and thrust it out in front of me.

A second round, no less. The Dachou Cl○b bit, run back word for word. And while I sat there with dread all over my face—

“…Fu… fufufu. Kufu… fufu.”

“Sheryl?”

“…Mm. It has been a long time since a meal was this noisy. And I think it has been about two years since I laughed out loud.”

Laughed, she said. Only with her mouth, and expressionless as ever.

“Two years?”

“…For two years I have eaten alone and had no proper conversation with anyone. Today is… fresh. A strange feeling.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a lot going on. If you want to, stay in this mansion as long as you like.”

“…Mm.”

Sheryl gave a small nod on that one. Then Maria stood, and set her palm on Sheryl’s head with a pat.

“Look, I’m sure there’s all sorts going on, but I think you can relax now. I was stubborn and alone at first too, and one way or another I ended up with a place to be.”

“…A place to be?”

“Ah, you’ll get it… eventually.”

Maria ruffled her hair roughly, and Sheryl made a troubled face.

⁂

Thirty minutes later.

“Um… why is it the two of you cleaning Sheryl’s room, exactly?”

Which was precisely what was happening: Maria and Anastasia were in the thick of tidying a room in a genuinely dire state. Not dirty, exactly. Cluttered to the last inch is more like it. Grimoires lay scattered over every surface, and my first impression was of my own study back when I still lived alone. Come to think of it, Bridget used to get on me about exactly that once we married, and once I started taking disciples Merlin took to tidying up of her own accord, which was a mercy.

The mistress of the room, meanwhile, was doing precisely nothing and savoring an apple pie.

“…Not to boast. Zero capacity for daily life.”

“That is genuinely not a boast, no. By the way… why exactly are you sitting on my lap?”

Sheryl had asked Anastasia and Maria to tidy the room, and asked me to sit down in the middle of it. That was her condition for becoming a class representative. The moment I settled cross-legged, she perched herself neatly between my knees.

“…Because Ephthal smells good.”

For the whole thirty minutes since, she’d been sniffing away at my chest and my neck. I’d have liked her to stop. Is this some habit particular to beastfolk?

“You said something like that before, too.”

“…Mm. You really do smell the same as Brother.”

She snuffled along my neck, her nose working steadily upward, and by the time it reached my ear it had started to tickle.

“…Haha. That tickles, so stop.”

I pried her off with a wry smile, and Sheryl puffed out a cheek—

“…………Rawr.”

I was being menaced. Or was she simply angry?

“Are you angry?”

“…Mm. I don’t like being pushed away. So I’m in a bad mood. Bad enough that I might say I won’t be a class representative.”

Both cheeks went up to match.

What a handful, I thought, and opened both arms.

“Sorry, sorry. I won’t push you off again. It just tickled, that’s all.”

Sheryl’s face lit up like a flower opening. Still expressionless, mind.

“Huuug…”

Then she dove into my chest. Maria, still working on the room, turned an exasperated look our way.

“You’re weirdly practiced at handling little girls, huh.”

“Am I? Well, I think she’s honest and a good kid. And for whatever reason she seems to have taken to me.”

“…Mm… good kid? Sheryl is a good kid?”

“A strange one, though.”

At which Sheryl said “Ehehe” and clung on harder. Expressionless the entire way through, naturally.

And so the room got itself more or less tidy, and Anastasia made tea all round by way of marking the moment. The business about Sheryl having no capacity for daily life turned out to be entirely true, incidentally: no tea set, no crockery, so it ended with a trip down to Maria’s room in the dorm to fetch some.

“Ah, Ephthal, it’s about lunchtime, so… here. Eat.”

Maria came out with it suddenly, in the middle of tea.

“…A sandwich?”

“You like beef, right? I put a stupid amount of roast beef in the filling.”

It was a good-looking sandwich, generous with the beef, lettuce tucked in. Let’s see, then. I took a bite. It was good: a steak-sauce base, with a light note of lemon pulling at the appetite.

“How did you know I like beef, though?”

“You can tell that much from watching what somebody eats.”

Then Maria lowered her lashes and muttered.

“…I’m always watching you, so… I’d know whether I wanted to or not. I just do…”

There she goes again, saying things I have no idea how to respond to. Anastasia had frozen solid out of sheer bewilderment.

Sheryl sent Maria a look of naked want.

“…I am hungry too.”

“Yours is here. And there’s one for Anastasia as well, don’t worry.”

Maria pulled paper-wrapped sandwiches out of a parcel.

“They’re from the place Ephthal always eats at, so they should taste good.”

“…Mm.”

Delightedly—expressionless, but delightedly—Sheryl started working through hers.

“Why is mine the only handmade one, Maria?”

“Because Sheryl’s and Anastasia’s are obligation, and Ephthal’s is the real thing.”

Delivered with a completely straight face. Does this girl have no intention of hiding it? No, that’s bad. That’s a bad trend. Anastasia, watching Maria carry on like this, had gone into total freeze, like a PC that had stopped responding.

“Ah, Ephthal. That favor I owe you for saving my life. That wasn’t a joke, I meant it. Give some proper thought to what you want.”

“Meaning?”

“Anything at all, really. For example…”

“For example?”

“Asking me on a date. There’s all sorts.”

Straight face again. Lately she’s really been—

—coming at me hard.

This is… ah, this is trouble. That particular development is exactly what I don’t want to be thinking about right now.

“Ah, that reminds me. Merlin gave me a lunchbox.”

“From Merlin-sama?”

“Yeah. Let’s all share it. Merlin’s a good cook, believe it or not.”

My previous-life self drilled the fundamentals into her, so her seasoning inevitably runs to my taste. There’s a men’s-cooking quality to it. Or rather, a boldness. But it’s genuinely good.

“…Mm. It’s good.”

“That’s a surprise. It really is good… knowing Merlin-sama, I assumed she’d have made something bizarre.”

Merlin’s lunchbox was going over well. That was when I noticed Anastasia looked about to cry.

“Um, uh… I’m sowwy!”

First time she’d tripped over her tongue in a while. What’s the matter?

“U-Um… I-I didn’t think of it! I’m sorry for not bringing anything I’d made!”

“Ah, so that’s it. It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

“B-B-But… this pi—I mean, Maria-san went and made sandwiches! And I’m a slave, and I still didn’t think of it—a slow, thoughtless dolt!”

I could have sworn I just heard ‘pi—’ there. Surely not. Surely she wasn’t starting on ‘pig.’ Anastasia isn’t that sort of girl. She simply tripped over the word. Yes. That version is better for my mental health, so that’s the version I’m going with.

“Really, don’t worry about it, Anastasia.”

Still. I looked around the room. A room without so much as a table, the four of us sitting in a ring on the floor: considered properly, this was quite the chaotic scene. Set against camping out in my adventuring days, though, it was a considerable step up.

“Um… Master?”

“Hm? What is it, Anastasia?”

“This is a complete change of subject, and it’s rich coming from the person who made the tea, but… I can’t drink it hot.”

“Ah, is that so.”

At that, Sheryl turned her left palm toward Anastasia’s teacup.

“Level 1: Create Ice.”

Moisture condensed out of the air, and ice went tumbling into the cup with a clink, clink.

“Awawa, it’s going to spill!”

Anastasia grabbed the cup in both hands, flustered. Both hands weren’t going to help with that, but the tea stayed where it was, so, fine.

“Huh. Handy little utility spell. Making ice that small… actually, I’ve never heard of that one.”

I lifted Sheryl off my lap, stood, set her carefully down on the floor, and turned back around—

“Hey. You. That spell… where did you learn it?”

It wasn’t the schoolboy who asked. It was the Thunder God Emperor.

The first time I ever saw that spell was the night before the decisive battle at the Demon King’s castle, in a tent, out on campaign.

—It’s the Ice God Emperor’s own spell.

Or more precisely: I was the one with modern knowledge, I handed the Ice God Emperor the notion of chilling a drink with ice, and he built the utility spell off the back of it.

“…What is it, Ephthal? Your face is frightening.”

“I’ll ask again. Where did you learn it?”

“…Will you keep it secret? I am not forbidden. But speaking of it… would not be good, I think.”

I nodded. Anastasia and Maria nodded after me, and Sheryl let out a small sigh.

“…My name is Sheryl. Sheryl Oldis. Adopted daughter of a ducal house in a certain country. No… I was. And—”

Sheryl thought for a moment, then gave a small nod.

“The name I had before I was taken in was Sheryl Alford. Which means—the Ice God Emperor… I carry the founder of that line as an ancestor.”

A blood relative of the Ice God Emperor Isaac, then. The one the Fire God Emperor is said to have killed. Now that she’d said it, there was a faint trace of him lingering around her eyes.

It explained the whole thing, though. Why she’d dropped from genius to ordinary, and why she’d been a genius in the first place. Because it seems that damned fool Isaac really did cross the barrier between the races and father a child. I told him and told him to leave it alone, that it would end in nothing but mess. The cat ears had me down for beastfolk at first. She isn’t. It’s spirit blood in Sheryl, not beast, and it runs outrageously thick. Something close to an atavism, which makes her magic power running dry a matter of time.

And after all the times I told him no, I’m the one cleaning up after him? Come on, Isaac.

“Haa…”

Nine years old. Leave her be and she could well be dead within the year. Nothing but trouble, this. Still. She’s an old friend’s descendant, and I can’t very well walk past that.

“Hey. Sheryl.”

“…What? Ephthal?”

“Your dorm-fee waiver runs out soon too, right? And your adoptive father’s cut you loose, by the look of it. If you’ve got nowhere to go, why not come to the mansion where Anastasia and I live?”

Merlin’s going to grumble at me about dragging home strays again. Can’t be helped. I need her where I can watch her, besides. Honestly, give me a break, Isaac. I laughed at myself over that one.

No. My fault too. Normally the coolest head in any room, and then past forty he lost it over a spirit, and while my mouth was telling him to stop, somewhere underneath it I was cheering him on.

“…Ephthal. Your air changed all of a sudden. But… you really do smell like Brother.”

“So? What’ll you do?”

“…Mm.”

And Sheryl gave a small nod, and that was her answer.

Chapter 2 – The Cat-Eared Girl, the Spirit, and the Emperor of Ice

—The magic academy cafeteria.

With our place in the main tournament secured, we were holding a celebration dinner in the academy cafeteria. This is a custom of ours going back to my previous life: whenever a disciple gets recognized for something, a tournament or a paper or whatever it happens to be, the whole household turns out to eat and drink. Being hard on them is necessary if you want them to grow, but there’s a saying that a child raised on praise grows well, and praise, or rewards if you like, matters every bit as much. So on nights like this I pay, and we make a racket.

“Still, that was priceless, Ephthal-sama. The faces on those damned student council brats—”

I brought a fist down on Merlin’s head. Hard.

“Do that again and I really will get angry.”

“…My apologies.”

“Merlin. You’ve been alive more than four hundred years. It’s about time you stopped behaving like a child.”

“And by the by. This fried shrimp is quite the fine article.”

At that distinctive turn of phrase, Maria nodded hard.

“You think so too, Sasha-sama? I love them!”

“Aye. And another thing, this cafeteria keeps a decent wine. Is the stock for the faculty?”

My master—Sasha—tipped his wineglass to wash the fried shrimp in his mouth straight down. It was Anastasia who fielded that one.

“Yes. They won’t sell alcohol to students.”

And there, all four of us, Merlin and Anastasia and Maria and me, went wide-eyed in the same instant—

“Why are you here!?”

“Hm? There was a good smell on the air.”

“Master!? You spend your time shut up in your quarters in the World Tree, asleep, don’t you?”

Sasha tilted his head at the question.

“Aye, well. There was a chance of seeing a Level 10. There’s a festival on… is there not?”

I turned the real meaning of that over and shrugged. Good grief.

“Do you honestly think I’d use a Level 10 here? It would be nothing but trouble, wouldn’t it?”

Sasha laughed at that, loud and hearty, and took another mouthful of wine.

“Nay, not you. A Level 10 other than you.”

“A Level 10 other than… me? In this era the only ones who can handle one are me, and you, Master, and the Fire God Emperor Cliff. Because of the Magia Burst, even Merlin can’t manage it.”

Sasha gave a small nod.

“That is how it stands. Officially.”

“Officially…?”

“Take this, for instance.”

He pointed at Anastasia and Maria.

“Ephthal. You used Vessel Transcription on these two, did you not?”

“…Nothing gets past you, does it.”

“Look at the flow of their magic power and it’s plain enough. In theory these two fledglings carry souls the same as the lot from before the change, from four hundred years and more ago. Train them and reaching Level 10 stands to reason.”

At that the pair of them went “Eh!?” and stood there dumbstruck.

“We can…”

“…use a Level 10?”

“Beyond training that beggars imagination, aye.”

“I told you back then, didn’t I, Maria?”

“Told me what? Ephthal?”

“That I’d take you to the highest title a young mage can hold. The realm of the Hihiirokane.”

Maria swallowed audibly.

Exactly as Sasha said, it’s an outrageous road. In the end it comes down to their own effort, but if the two of them want it, I intend to teach them how to walk it—a hard road, wall after wall, with a guaranteed run of setbacks along the way.

Anyway. Setting that aside—

“What do you mean, a Level 10 other than me, Master?”

“I mean there are ways. Even in this world, changed as it is.”

“But if you came to watch the Thunder God Emperor Ephthal Festival… that means they’re among the students?”

There was no way. Not a chance. Even back in that era four hundred years ago, or anywhere in recorded history for that matter, I’d never seen or heard of a Level 10 in their teens.

“Say, Ephthal. Shall I tell you a piece of the secret of magic aptitude I’ve kept from you all this while? You’ve been hunting for a way to cure aptitude, have you not? We get nowhere on the other Level 10 unless I explain that part first.”

“You knew about my aptitude too. Nothing really does get past you.”

“I am your master, for what it’s worth. So, then. Having no aptitude means being colorless, in short. Fire is red, wind green, earth brown, water blue, and so on down the line.”

“…I’m not following.”

“Faster to give you the conclusion. The only cure lies in the chain of phenomena that connects to the Root of Roots.”

“The Root of… Roots?”

“You carry a singularity at the level of your soul. There are those in this world who happen to be colorless, rarely. In your case it is inevitable.”

“My having no aptitude is… inevitable?”

Sasha stood then, and murmured into my ear.

“So it was the second time as well, was it not? That fate of yours is inevitable.”

Cold sweat prickled its way down my spine.

“Master. How much do you know about me?”

“Well, I am your master. I knew from the start. And after you died… no, the Fire God Emperor knew too, did he not? Before he ever made the aptitude test reagent.”

“…What is the Root of Roots?”

“The Roots. The road that leads to the goddess. The ancient artifact the Fire God Emperor was after… well. Telling you for free is a bit much.”

“The goddess. And the Fire God Emperor!? Hey—what the hell are you actually saying!?”

“Are you not better versed in the goddess than I am? I’ve never met the thing, unfortunately. Me—I’m wild-caught. Not reincarnated stock, like you.”

Hey, hey. So Sasha knows the goddess of reincarnation exists after all, does he.

Sasha grinned.

“You’ll run into that Level 10 at the festival whether you like it or not. Better I tell you once you’ve seen what it is.”

He waved a hand behind him—“Be seeing you. Come to my quarters once the festival’s done”—and started to walk off, and—

“Hey, Master! We’re not done—”

I clicked my tongue.

—Level 9: Ex Teleport.

“The bastard ran. Still… a monster through and through, that one.”

Vanished without letting me catch so much as the first stir of his magic power. Honestly. You can’t get a thing past that old man. I shrugged.

Saturday, our day off.

“So! We’re heading for the dorms to drag in our last member!”

At Maria’s clarion call, we set off for the student dormitory. Anastasia and I are day students, so the dorm is a bit of a blank to me. What I knew came to this: the six-story building in the corner of the school grounds, no shared rooms, every one of them private. Word had it the interior was fairly luxurious, and one step inside told me the word was good. Say what you will, this school is a prestigious one with a great many demon nobles from far-off places, so that much is a given.

“So whose room are we heading for?”

“Remember I said our classmates are useless as fighting strength? There’s exactly one exception. Difficult personality, but she’s in the dorm.”

I don’t think she’d want to hear ‘difficult personality’ from you, of all people. I nearly said it out loud, then thought about the aftermath and let it go.

“Um… Maria-san? What sort of person is she?”

“Special recommended admission, affiliated with the human religious organization. The Holy Church. A genius girl who got into the magic academy at six years old.”

Anastasia and I went wide-eyed together.

“Six years old? That’s incredible!”

And it really is. My era had skip-a-grade systems of a sort, but admission to a magic academy at that age is something I’ve never heard of anywhere.

Anastasia tilted her head.

“But why would someone from the Holy Church be at a demon school?”

“She’s got circumstances, apparently. Her family sent her away, and she got passed along from there. That’s how she wound up with the Holy Church. Part of her magic training, basically. From the day she was born she was knocking on the doors of one tradition after another, studying under all sorts of schools right up until she turned six.”

“She’s six, though. All those traditions, at that age? There isn’t even time to learn the fundamentals…”

“No, she’s got them down at a serious level. Bluntly? That girl is the one person who has surpassed the genius beauty that is me, and I don’t even need a ‘maybe’ for it.”

For Maria to go that far. This might genuinely be quite the talent.

“But then why wasn’t she picked for the class selection in the first place?”

Maria let out a deep sigh where she stood.

“…She’s a shut-in of monstrous proportions.”

“A shut-in?”

“Yeah. She’s already repeated three years, for one thing. Disowned by her family, expelled from the Holy Church, and it seems to have hit her hard. She’s repeated so many times the academy’s about to throw her out too. She’s what you’d call standing on the edge of a cliff.”

“Hold on, Maria, I don’t follow. The girl was a genius, wasn’t she? Three years repeated…?”

“Er… a child prodigy at four, a bright kid at five, and by six just an ordinary person. Compared to the normal crowd she was still miles ahead, sure, but the plan was to skip her a grade inside two months, and instead she got a normal promotion. That’s where she broke.”

“So she fell from grace at a spectacular rate. Is that about it?”

“That’s about it. Anyway, from what I hear there’s no question she’s far and away the best of the first years. As of right now she’s obviously a usable piece. And besides?”

“Besides?”

“Like I said, she’s repeated three times, so her scholarship waiver on tuition and dorm fees should run out with this Thunder God Emperor Festival. She’s been backed into a corner far enough that without a result here she has nothing left, and that’s a fact. Depending on how we pitch it, I think she’ll cooperate.”

“I see. All right, let’s go.”

A few minutes’ walk through the dorm and we arrived in front of the room.

Knock knock. I rapped on the door, and something snagged at the back of my mind. Entered at six, three years since, and a shut-in, which means she never goes out. And that girl had said, if I remembered rightly, that she doesn’t live with her parents. Come to that, her selling goods openly inside the magic academy grounds when she had no business being there had been a question in itself.

From beyond the door came the soft pat, pat of someone padding toward us. Then it opened, and a cat-eared girl with sleepy eyes stood there, expressionless.

“…And here I was enjoying my shut-in life all by myself. What do you want?”

Needless to say, the girl in question was the light-blue-haired girl. Sheryl.

And I sighed.

—Right, then. Target destruction.

The situation, briefly: our turn came dead last, closing out the whole preliminary round. Third years first, then second years, the student council slotted in partway through as a sort of exhibition, and us first years bringing up the rear. Closing the show didn’t mean anything was expected of us, mind you. If anything the gallery had gone cold on us, radiating a general sense of you’re all hopeless anyway, so hurry it up. Provisional fourth place stood at one hundred twenty-four targets, which made beating that our minimum.

“Hey, Ephthal, get a look at the student council.”

I looked. Over in their tent the council had settled in for a leisurely tea break, and their accommodations were plainly not the ones the rest of us had been given. A red carpet laid down under the canvas. Tables, in the middle of a field. To crown it all they had a valet, some butler sort of person attached to the council, and as far as I could tell he was the one brewing the coffee.

Anyway.

“All right. Maria, want to lead off?”

“Okay. I’ll knock them flat, and properly.”

Maria thrust her right palm high toward the sky, closed her eyes, and began building the formula as she worked the magic power up.

Still. Thinking about where Maria had come from, there was a great deal in this. Born to the guardians of the elves, her branch family slaughtered to the last, persecuted by everyone around her. She’d set herself to proving them all wrong so completely that she’d gone abroad to a demon magic academy to do it, and the whole way she’d held herself up alone, straining, bluffing, fighting a war with no army behind her.

I nodded to myself.

Go on. Knock the wind out of the ones who laughed at you, exactly the way you said you would.

Because that was what this was. The spell she was about to fire was a signal flare, the opening shot of the counterattack. Fate had knocked Maria around her entire life, and here she was setting out on the road to success under her own power, on nothing but the work she’d put in. Step one.

And just as Irene-san, the Vice President, brought the cup to her lips—Maria’s magic opened fire.

“Now watch! Level 4, the top tier of the fire attribute—Fire Dance!”

The formula came out clean, the flow of power superb. A hundred arrows, near enough, and her control had sharpened by an order since I’d last watched her work. Elves take up the bow to begin with, so the image probably sits easily in her head. This is her showpiece at the moment, and with it, near enough every arrow lands. A miss was essentially off the table.

The standing record was the student council’s two hundred eight, and that was across four casters. Maria was about to reach almost half of it on her own.

The hundred arrows climbed high into the empty air, turned over, took their angles, and ran for the distant targets. Guided in, to be precise, each one drawn down as though the target were swallowing it.

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOOOM! The fire arrows struck almost as one and detonated, and something like a hundred targets burst apart into fragments. A perfect finish.

“Splendid.”

Honestly, that was the sort of flawless, unwavering control you’d see at a Self-Defense Force artillery exercise. You could call it beautiful and nobody would argue the point. And when I looked over at the council, sitting there mid–tea break, every last one of them—

—sprayed their coffee out in perfect unison.

“Hack! Hack… hack!”

“Wh-Wh-What was that!? What in the world was that!?”

“Impossible! A first year, casting Level 4… and the top tier of it, no less…”

“Ri… dic… ulous.”

“Ah… am I dreaming…?”

Maria puffed out her chest, radiating smugness, folded her arms, and nodded, and nodded again. Then she came at me with her right palm up, so I put mine up and met it. A crisp, satisfying smack, and a bright, cheerful flower of a grin opened on her face.

“See? I really am a genius.”

Her grin was wide and genuinely adorable, no argument there. Although I had rather thought I’d hammered the whole don’t-get-carried-away lesson home earlier. Some of that must have soured my face, because Maria tilted her head with a puzzled little “Huh?”

Then again, she’s spent her whole life being trodden on, and withholding confidence from her has problems of its own. This kid has worked without stopping to make the people around her admit she exists. Fine. Strutting on this scale, I’d allow.

“Okay, next up, Anastasia—”

She fired before I got the sentence out.

“The wind attribute, Level 4… the top tier! Thunder Storm!”

A roar went up, and violet lightning tore around us like a storm. Her spell burns everything in reach to cinders with lightning, with herself at the center, which meant every target inside a ten-meter radius was swallowed in the discharge and charred black. Call it seventy destroyed, by eye. Either way, the entire close range was cleared out in one stroke.

And ‘with herself at the center’ meant, naturally, that we were inside it too. Nobody got hurt, since I’d scrambled a defensive circle over Maria the instant it started.

“Anastasia. Maria’s mind is worn through right now, straight off a piece of delicate casting. Think about the people around you a little more.”

“Ah. I thought Master would protect Maria-san.”

Ah. So that was priced into the casting. She drifts around soft and fluffy most of the time and then turns sharply calculating at moments like this, and I rate that side of her rather highly, as it happens. That particular application was a touch much, though.

Anyway. That put our total somewhere around one hundred seventy. Provisional fourth stood at one hundred twenty-four, so the goal was already cleared, and all that remained was for me to lob something around Level 3 and call it a day.

That was when the voices reached us from the council’s tent.

“C-C-Calm down! We are the student council! What are we doing, losing our heads over that much!”

“Yes—we are the superior, chosen breed who lead the entire student body!”

“Quite so! Their advancement may be settled, but we shall show them the difference in power in the main tournament!”

“Right. We’ll show them that target destruction and real combat are different animals! And it’s only those two who are anything special. The black-haired one is Merlin-sama’s favoritism, nothing more. The rest have to be small fry!”

“Yes. Let us calm down first. Handle this calmly and we cannot lose. We may drop narrow individual matches to those two, but the rest are small fry… yes, the rest must be small fry… they must be… Our superiority in overall strength is an immovable fact, after all.”

Right. Change of plan. No more fudging it with a Level 3. Being called Merlin’s pet forever is genuinely uncalled for, and left alone it starts to touch her reputation as well as mine.

“About time I showed you why exactly Merlin treats me as a special case.”

Within the bounds of common sense, mind. Nothing that throws the world into disorder.

The council picked their coffee cups back up to steady their nerves. And just as Irene-san brought hers to her lips a second time—my magic opened fire. Literally, in this case.

“Level 5: Red Genocide.”

A heat ray in the shape of a small dragon leapt from my palm, and one of the targets went up in a hiss of steam. Left to itself the beam would carry on into the gallery, which wouldn’t do, so I took hold of it. Open hand closed into a fist, thumb cocked upward, and the dragon climbed to match. Up it went, spiraling and spiraling, racing for the heavens.

“Right. There.”

I flicked the thumb over and aimed it at the ground. Obedient as ever, the dragon turned and came down headlong, maw wide, and bit into the earth.

The heat ray struck the field, and—

—BOOM!

Pebbles and dust swirled up in the wash of it. The upshot being a very large explosion and a scorched crater on the ten-meter scale, sitting in the middle of the ground.

As a way of saying abnormal enough that Merlin makes an exception for him, that ought to do nicely. And thinking exactly that, I looked over at the council, who had been steadying their nerves with coffee this entire time, and—

—of course. They sprayed their coffee out in perfect unison.

“Pffffff—!”

“Hack! Hack… hack!”

“L-L-L-Level 5!? That’s the kind of thing you see maybe once in several years, even at the inter-academy tournament. Genuine MVP territory!”

“Wh-Wh-What is happening!? What is going on with those first years!?”

“I can’t believe it… what I’m looking at… I can’t believe it. E-E-Everyone… let’s have some coffee. To calm down…”

They really do love their coffee. I was still thinking it when Merlin took a step toward them and thrust her right palm up over her head.

“What are you—Merlin? You’re not supposed to be doing anything today.”

That was certainly the arrangement we’d made beforehand. So why, Merlin, are you refining magic power? And this shape feels like—Just as the bad feeling arrived, Merlin spoke the name of exactly the spell I’d been afraid of.

“Level 6: Degraded Thunder God Emperor Lesser Ephthal!”

A flash of lightning. Whiteout and thunderclap, arriving a beat behind. Anastasia’s lightning couldn’t be mentioned in the same breath—

—CRASH-SMASH-KRAKAAAAAOOOOOM!

And last of all came a colossal explosion. Which came down to this: the lightning fell, and every single target laid out for the trial was blown clean off the field.

In the same instant, the council sprayed coffee from their mouths again, as one.

“Pffffff—!”

“Hack! Hack… hack! There isn’t enough coffee in the world to calm this down!”

“L-L-L-Level 6!? Solo!? Not even a ritual working by professional court mages!? S-S-Solo!?”

“What in the world!”

“Ah, I’ve finally understood. It’s a dream… this is a dream. Haha, well, in that case… right, let’s try pinching my cheek… wha—Ehhhhhh!? It’s real!? Level 6!?”

Mouths and clothes soaked through with coffee, the council fell out of their chairs from sheer shock, and there they stayed, mouths opening and closing, bodies arched backward, exactly like fish washed up on a beach.

No—hang on. This had genuinely turned into a disaster. Merlin. I pushed right up against the real line to use that Level 5, and the one person who wasn’t supposed to do anything at all has gone and cast a Level 6. Why?

Whether or not she noticed how stunned I was, Merlin turned a hard glare on the council.

“You there, Student Council President! There is something I must say to you!”

“T-T-T… to me? Something you want to say?”

Merlin fell silent. Then she drew in a great, great breath.

“This mask is not in bad taste! It is decidedly not in bad taste—you witless knave!”

Ehhhhhh!?

That!? That’s the part, Merlin!? That’s what made you snap and do all of this!?

I brought a fist down on her head without a moment’s pause.

“Merlin?”

“What is it, Ephthal-sama?”

“I’m actually going to get angry. Don’t tell me you did that in a temper. You do realize this is going to cause problems, don’t you?”

Merlin shook her head, quick little movements.

“…I merely taught those damned brats their place. I’ve thought that part through, Ephthal-sama. Be at ease.”

The snap of Merlin’s fingers, and a formula built itself immediately after. Level 8: Repair Matter, and Level 4: Illusion.

First came glittering motes of illusory light. Then a drift of them, a swarm like fireflies floating up into the sky. Follow the motes with your eyes, look up, and there was a rainbow standing across it. A distraction, in other words, built out of Illusion. The staging pulled every eye on the field, gallery included, and held them. And while everyone had their faces turned up, Repair Matter was quietly putting the targets back, one after another. What she actually intended to do with all this, though, I had no idea.

Then, at the exact instant the restored targets matched what her Level 6 had destroyed and not one more, Merlin drew a deep breath and called out to the whole field at the top of her voice.

“That Level 6 just now… was no true Level 6! As you can all see, it was a Level 4 Illusion!”

Merlin had altered her vocal cords, incidentally, with an application of disguise magic, so her voice wasn’t going to give her away. That part was covered. At her announcement, voices went up all over the gallery.

“W-Well, yeah. Obviously. A Level 6 is impossible.”

“R-Right. A Level 5 on its own is earth-shaking… a Level 6 would be pushing it, wouldn’t it.”

“Still, that first-year class really is high level… no, too high. Has anything like this happened since the age of the first Four Emperors?”

“For that matter, that class has been strange from the day Headmaster Merlin took it as homeroom teacher. There’s something going on in there. Has to be.”

“And that black-haired first year wasn’t favoritism after all. All sorts of ugly rumors were going around, but the truth of it is probably that he’s Headmaster Merlin’s prize pupil.”

Good, good. Our reputation was settling right up against the line and still inside what common sense allows. There had genuinely been rumors flying about Merlin having a thing for little boys, so it looked like we’d get that misunderstanding cleared up into the bargain.

In the council’s tent, silent against the buzzing of the gallery, the president simply stared at nothing and muttered to himself.

“And yet… I cannot believe that was a mere Level 4 Illusion. The finish on it… and to put a hallucination in front of this many people at once… Anonymous Hope… what on earth are they…?”

If you’re asking what she is… she’s the headmaster.

So one way or another we were through the preliminaries. And just as we started back toward the competitors’ tent, our classmates came rushing over in a body.

“That was incredible, Ephthal-kun! I always thought there was something out of the ordinary about you!”

“Maria and Anastasia too! Absolutely unreal!”

“You were recruiting representatives, right!? Can I join as a class rep too!?”

“No, let me compete! Let me ride the winner’s coattails! Take the championship, pick up a medal, and it does wonders for you! Monsters like you guys are a lock to place at the inter-academy tournament!”

“Just being on the roster would be huge! Put me in!”

What a beautifully transparent bunch. Maria had evidently arrived at the same conclusion, the evidence being that she was watching this magnificent about-face with her mouth hanging open far enough to unhinge her jaw. A bit too convenient, though. We were of one mind there as well, because her face slid straight into a mean little grin.

“The class-rep slots are—closed♪”

Maria waved a hand behind her and started back toward the tent, then stopped for a single moment and, without turning around, tossed one more line over her shoulder.

“Well. If that last person I’ve got in mind turns me down… I might deign to use one of you.”

And so we walked back to our seats with that thoroughly convenient chorus of “Let me ride the coattaaails!” chasing us the whole way.

So in the end the four of us, Merlin included, were entered in the preliminaries. And the method for ranking the top four teams that advanced was, bluntly, target destruction.

Magic academies love smashing targets. I have no idea why. It was the same back in my previous life, and I never did work out the reason. I asked Merlin about it once, she being the headmaster, and got shut down in a single line: “It is the done thing, by ancient tradition. Every other magic academy is the same. Target destruction, one and all.” Hmm. And what exactly is ‘the done thing’ supposed to mean? The mystery only deepens.

Anyway. The venue was a big, big field, as it had to be with the entire school turning out, and it wasn’t only the school in the end. People from the surrounding area had come to watch as well, until the whole affair had turned into something of a local festival. A roaring success by any measure, and the gallery was loving it. Picture a sports day on a modern Japanese high school field, or an elementary school field day scaled up to something absurd, and you have the general idea.

The event ran in the middle of the ground. Targets stood scattered outward from the center in a radial pattern, and each competitor got exactly one shot at them: a single all-out area spell. Win or lose came down to the team’s combined total.

Which brought us back to our four, Merlin among them. Though as for Merlin, I was fresh out of words on the subject. The swallowtail-butterfly mask was the same one I’d seen in the classroom the other day, but the outfit was a student uniform. The same student uniform Anastasia wears. The cosplay energy coming off her was, frankly, off the scale. As for whether anyone would recognize her, she had the mask, and she’d layered the perception-blocking magic assassins favor on top of it, so presumably we were fine.

So there we sat, under the sun-shade tent in the competitors’ waiting area, watching the class representatives work—

“Level 2: Fire Lance!”

“Level 2: Ice Edge!”

“Level 3: Ice Blizzard!”

“Level 2: Lightning!”

Hmm. I’d been watching them knock targets down for a while now, and this looked like the average standard for a second-year class representative.

Just then a murmur ran through the gallery behind the tent.

“That’s a high level, all right. Throwing around top-tier Level 2 like it’s nothing.”

“You’ve got Level 3s flying out there too. That’s the Thunder God Emperor Festival for you.”

I turned to Anastasia beside me.

“What do you make of it, Anastasia?”

“…Am I allowed to say it straight?”

“Go ahead.”

“Um… well… I think… it’s low level.”

“Maria?”

“Same. ‘Low level’ is the only phrase I’ve got.”

At the training camp the other day the pair of them had gotten Level 4 fully under control, so in practical terms, what was happening out there could only look like children at play to them.

Even so. I pitched my voice deliberately heavy.

“That’s how it looks to you now, sure. But from where I stand, the two of you are plainly half-baked. There’s always someone further up, so whatever else you do, don’t get complacent.”

The two of them nodded, and a great cheer went up from the gallery. A group had started out from the competitors’ area toward the center of the field, walking abreast in a single line. One of them I recognized, in fact: the student council member who’d run the representative-selection assembly before the camp.

Riding that roar from the gallery, the student council started in on the targets, fully primed—

“Level 3: Ice Blizzard!”

“Level 3: Elder Lightning!”

“Level 4: Salamander!”

“Level 4: Wind Shelter!”

Top-tier Level 3 as their floor, and up to mid-tier Level 4 at the ceiling. That was about the size of it.

What came from the gallery behind the tent this time wasn’t a murmur. It was a swell of noise, and under it, sounds of open admiration.

“Hey, hey, Level 4 is teacher grade!?”

“The student council, all right… I can’t believe they’re our age.”

“Well, that settles the championship for this year too!”

“Hey, their target count’s… over two hundred!? What are you supposed to do but laugh at that.”

To cheers and applause, the student council came back to the waiting area with what was, as things stood, a runaway score on the board. Or rather, they came back to Maria.

“Well, well? If it isn’t Maria-san. And what is the flattest chest in the first year doing in a place like this, I wonder?”

Irene-san, the well-endowed one. Who, it seemed, had history with Maria.

Next up came a giant of a man, pushing two meters, cracking his knuckles and glaring at me.

“Hey. You. Don’t get cocky just because Headmaster Merlin’s taken a shine to you.”

I had some idea what he was referring to, granted. Still, there was no need to bare quite that much hostility.

Then the man in glasses nodded along, hard.

“Just so. A human of the inferior species, and… a savage elf!”

Several veins stood out on Maria’s temple at once. Knowing the background, I understood the feeling perfectly. That hair trigger of hers is a bad habit all the same.

I was about to step in when Irene-san stopped the man with a raised hand.

“Michael? Headmaster Merlin has said this before. Discriminatory remarks in public are forbidden. In front of people, at the very least, restrain yourself. It puts your breeding in question, you know?”

“But, Vice President Irene—!”

“What? You don’t mean to argue with me, surely? Honestly… when exactly did you become so very important…?”

This one might run on the same instant-boil setting as Maria. Beautiful, certainly, but her angry face was genuinely frightening.

“M-M-My apologies, Vice President.”

Irene-san let out a short breath through her nose, the very picture of so long as you understand.

Maria turned a sharp glare on her.

“Vice President Irene. How about training your pet dog properly?”

Irene-san laughed at that. “Fufu.”

“Training? Well, quite. However—thanks to certain people trading on the headmaster’s reflected glory, our General Secretary has been confined to his room. Naturally, there isn’t one person here who thinks kindly of you.”

Ah, right. That had happened. The General Secretary, if I remembered rightly, was this man in the glasses, and Merlin had brought the full weight of her office down on him on a charge of throwing discriminatory remarks at Maria and me.

“Besides, it is a fact that you are not thought well of among the forest elves.”

“…”

“You know that. You have made your peace with being talked about behind your back, and you still mean to walk out onto a public stage like the Thunder God Emperor Festival, do you not? Then acknowledge reality first. Show them power and silence the peanut gallery. Fail at that, and you will be a loser for as long as you live. And I will never grant a loser standing on the same stage as myself. That is simply my nature. Though personally, I would recommend a loser behave like the beaten cur she is: one yelp, then a quiet, modest little life.”

Ah. This was bad. Maria had begun to tremble where she stood, eyes gone half-lidded, the whites of them starting to show. This was well past five seconds from snapping. Her anger had gone straight up through the roof, and by the look of her she couldn’t hold the overflow back anymore even if she wanted to.

“And you there, the black-haired one? It is likewise a fact that, unlike us demons, you belong to the species called human. The ones they call inferior. If you intend to get by at this academy, choose how you mean to live, and choose early.”

“How I mean to live?”

“Whether you live in the shade with your head down and draw no attention, or silence the peanut gallery with overwhelming power. We, the student council, welcome anyone with real ability. Human, or a pariah among the elves, it makes no difference to us.”

Irene-san threw out that ample chest of hers and smiled, sharp and challenging.

“If you can, of course. Should you ever wish to know the celestial realm of magecraft—a stage entirely apart from the one you live on—then force it all down by strength and crawl your way up to the student council’s ground.”

Hmm. Confidence is a fine thing, I suppose, and what she was actually saying wasn’t unreasonable. Unpleasant logic, but not unreasonable. A doctrine of the chosen, resting on pure meritocracy, in short. Though the first Four Emperors had no shortage of self-assured people in it, and I don’t think a single one of us ever talked quite that big. Myself included.

Maria shrugged, thoroughly fed up.

“So you came over to be snide because your General Secretary got grounded? That tells me the size of you, Student Council President.”

At the end of Maria’s glare stood a man with long blond hair, androgynous enough that if you were told he was a beautiful woman in men’s clothes, you’d find yourself nodding along.

“…”

He gave Maria’s words no reaction at all. He simply swept a single glance across all of us, ‘as though we were scenery.’

“Hey—! Why aren’t you saying anything?”

That, finally, got a response: a small, amused laugh.

“We are… no. The Vice President and I are a chosen people, able to handle Level 4 while still students. Which makes you, let us say, pebbles at the roadside. Come now, think about it. Do you take an interest in pebbles? Do you go so far as to speak to them?”

“…Meaning what?”

“Meaning I hold no feeling toward you whatsoever. You asked just now why I was silent, didn’t you? If you want a proper conversation with me, kindly come back once you can manage top-tier Level 3 at the very least. Even the student council’s own members, the Vice President aside, keep their words with me to the bare minimum.”

The Student Council President, it seemed, had quite a lovely personality.

He waved a hand behind him without turning and started off toward the competitors’ seats.

“I opened my mouth today as a special service, but time is finite, and I keep no mouth for conversing with breeds of no value. Ah, and one more thing. The masked one there is in dreadfully bad taste. A ridiculous outfit and a ridiculous name. I had a look at the entry list, and ‘Anonymous Hope’? That is on the level of doubting your sanity.”

The president walked off, and the rest of the council followed after him. Some wore contempt, some a confident smile. That was how the remaining four of them left.

The short version being that we were thoroughly looked down on and thoroughly mocked.

This was absolutely going to turn into trouble, I thought, and looked over at Maria, and I was right. Shaking from head to foot, veins standing out all over her face, eyes rolling back, gnawing at the thumbnail of her right hand. Ah. This one was definitely past saving.

“Hmph… I always did think they were insufferable, but honestly, those people really do have—lovely personalities.”

Everything she said was entirely correct. Then Maria prefaced her next question with a “surely not, but,” and asked it.

“You’re not going to say something useless at this stage, are you? Like ‘don’t use your real strength.’”

I was on Maria’s side, as it happened. Putting Merlin on the targets would be cheating of the highest order, so competing was off the table for her, which left the three of us. Doing with three what every other team was doing with four is a serious handicap. If the two of them fell short it would land on me in the end, but I could hardly cut loose with a Level 10 Thunder God Emperor Ephthal, and even if I did step in there’s a ceiling on what I can show. Those two, meanwhile, stay comfortably inside what the world thinks possible even at full power. So honestly? I wanted them to go all out.

“No. I’m not stopping you.”

“Good. Then let’s give them a shock, shall we. With Anastasia’s Level 4 and my own.”