⁂
So I came to Sheryl’s room, and…
Grimoires were scattered across the floor again, with nowhere left to put a foot. Still an absolute disaster, I thought, and had to laugh. She’d been given a good room, an enormously spacious one… and being able to wreck it on this scale is a talent of its own kind.
“Ha. This is really something.”
“…I have no capacity for daily life. As Ephthal said before, it is not a thing to boast about.”
“No, you can boast about it.”
“…Eh?”
“Because all it means is that you study hard, doesn’t it? I didn’t notice before, but looking at it again just now, that’s what I think. The room is a mess, but it isn’t dirty. Same with you never going out. You grudged the hours you spent sleeping and the hours you’d spend outside, and you put them into studying magic. Which is why it’s only books on the floor. Am I wrong?”
“…I am surprised. How did you know?”
“Because the Ice God Emperor’s room was apparently the same. Blood really does tell.”
Not that I wasn’t much the same myself, in my past life. Once I get started on a piece of research I’ll have dozens of books laid open across the floor.
“By the way, Sheryl? I’d like you to tell me about your brother. About Brad.”
“…I have not met him in a long while. The semifinals the other day were the first time in years.”
“No, you haven’t met him. I know that. What I’m asking about is the communication by invisible familiar.”
Sheryl’s eyes went wide at the question.
“…………I am genuinely surprised.”
“Will you tell me? What is your brother trying to do? I’m putting Maria and Anastasia into the final, so I need to know what I can, to keep them as safe as possible.”
Half true and half a convenient line, that.
Because whatever treatment I give Sheryl’s magic power depletion, if the Fire God Emperor is involved there’s no telling what has been planted. Without knowing the situation, moving carelessly risks standing on a mine. In his lifetime the Fire God Emperor was a mage a full class or two above me. You don’t get to bulldoze somebody who outranks you.
“…Before that, I want to ask, Ephthal. I have kept the communication with Brother from you until now. That was because I did not want to cause you trouble. He looks, more and more, as though he is walking further off the road.”
“That isn’t something a child needs to worry about.”
Sheryl puffed out a cheek at that—expressionless, of course, which struck me funny enough that I laughed a little.
“…If you know, it may become troublesome for you. Only an abandoned puppy. I think it is better… to think of me that way.”
“I’ve started boarding this boat… no. I’m already aboard it. I can handle it better if you tell me.”
“…Mm.”
She gave a small nod.
“…I do not know Brother’s aim. But I can explain the situation.”
“Please.”
“—It will be a somewhat long story.”
It was a long story. A very long one.
From the time they were taken in by their adoptive parents, for as far back as she could remember, Sheryl and her twin sister were put through magic training that was compulsory in all but name. Purely as tools to raise the family’s standing, with no regard whatsoever for their ages, the training ran on and on, dangerous and severe. They were given no affection as parents give it, none of the other siblings would have anything to do with them, and the two of them lived isolated inside the house.
And the treatment Brad got was every bit as wretched. Having no magic aptitude at all, he was made an outcast within his own family. Handled no better than a servant—worse than one, in fact, and sometimes used as an outlet for a parent’s stress for no reason at all: chastisement under the name of discipline. Violence, plainly, and a daily occurrence.
But Brad was a kind boy, and he was always looking out for his isolated sisters. Inside that vast ducal house the three of them were cut off from everyone else, and being alone in the same way, the three of them held together.
Then, when Sheryl was six, her twin sister’s health failed. They looked into it, and the symptoms of magic power depletion came to light. There are rare cases of people born showing something similar, so the spirit connection was never found out. But for anyone who works magic it remains a fatal defect all the same. Her place at the magic academy had already been settled, and it was withdrawn. And then came the incident.
The twin sister, having lost her value, was to be sold—with the circumstances concealed—to a childless lower noble house of the mage line. As a descendant of the first Ice God Emperor she carried a considerable price. From the lower house’s side, the plan was to bring in a relative of their own as an adopted husband and make it a marriage. That way they gain the prestige of a blood tie to the Ice God Emperor and the family line is preserved. Sheryl’s sister, in short, was a convenient figurehead.
Though the ducal house that took Sheryl in had taken them on precisely the same reasoning. Reselling defective goods. The children were thrown about from end to end by what suited the adults, and there’s no question it’s a thoroughly sickening story.
And then, one day—before she could be sold on as an adopted daughter—Sheryl’s sister died.
Afterward, Brad and Sheryl entered the magic academy at the same time, and the same symptoms came for Sheryl as well. The academy staff had of course learned of the depletion by then, so reselling her with the circumstances concealed no longer worked either. And so the family cut her off. What Sheryl was after that, I already know. And Brad, whose academy marks were about as close to the bottom as you can get, was cut off in the same way, as useless.
So Brad knocked on the door that leads to the back roads, to cover his own tuition and to get Sheryl her magic crystals.
That’s roughly the whole of it.
“…I have barely seen Brother in two years. We exchange letters, but he says almost nothing about himself. I was startled when he suddenly used a Level 7.”
“I see. And before you stopped seeing him—was there anything different about him?”
“…Year by year the magic crystal I need grew larger, and he seemed to be running into walls, financially.”
A small difference in a crystal’s size means several times the price, and at the wrong end of the scale it means another digit entirely. Even taking dangerous work on the side, a student would blow past what he could manage very quickly.
“By the way, Sheryl? I’d like you to tell me what the familiar communications actually said.”
“…Brother says… that we should live together. That everything is going to work out soon. That I need not worry about the magic power depletion anymore.”
Going to work out soon.
The basis for that would be the Soul Eater circle planted in the magic academy.
“Thank you. That gives me most of it.”
And it did. That conversation made me certain.
Brad is most likely intending to use the souls he gathers to refine magic crystals, or something close to it. A magic academy is the single most suitable place there is for that sort of work—souls carrying high-purity magic power, belonging to students whose magic resistance is still immature, all assembled in one location.
But taking that route makes him a serious criminal. However strong a single person is, setting yourself against a nation, or against the whole world, doesn’t work. So ‘live together’ is, in other words, an invitation to a life on the run.
“So what do you want to do?”
“…Honestly, I am torn… I loved Brother.”
“Loved? Why the past tense?”
“…Brother killed my twin sister.”
“…Eh?”
“…I do not know the reason. But that day, I saw it. There was a noise in the night, and my sister’s room was locked. When I looked through the keyhole… I saw Brother drawing my sister’s magic power out of her.”
“Any idea why?”
“…Brother became strange. After he met that mysterious red-haired boy, Brother became strange.”
A red-haired boy. He means the Fire God Emperor. In this case there’s nobody else it could be.
“Would you tell me about the boy in detail?”
“…He came to the house only once. He visited the ducal house one day, and I remember my adoptive father being strange.”
“Strange how?”
“…He behaved normally, and yet it was not normal. That arrogant man treated a boy who looked far younger than him, for some reason, as though he were handling a jewel. And when I asked about the boy afterward, he said, ‘What are you talking about?’ As though it had never happened at all.”
Memory manipulation, maybe. Or something in the brainwashing family. An effect that extreme would be Level 9 or above, so the Fire God Emperor it is.
“And what did the two of you talk about with him?”
“…I barely spoke. He took Brother away to another room. I do not know what was said there, but Brother came out looking as though something were weighing on him. And a week later my sister died.”
It looks faster to hear about the Fire God Emperor from Brad directly. Nothing more is going to come out of Sheryl.
“…Ephthal smelled the same as Brother, somehow. The scent of the magic power was close. Colorless… a very, very rare scent. But warm. He changed after that day. The same scent as Brother before he changed. I cannot… put it well.”
“No, I follow, more or less.”
Magic power is strongly affected by a person’s mental state. The color is most likely magic aptitude, and the warmth, I think, is that mental state. Something was done to him at that meeting with the Fire God Emperor, something that left him unable to stay calm.
“…So loving Brother is in the past tense. Since that day, I have been very frightened of him. No—I stopped understanding him.”
“And about living together. What will you do?”
“…I cannot bring myself to live with him now. But… someday I want to talk with him properly. About why he did that to my sister. He does not know that I know, and until now I have been too frightened to ask.”
“…”
“…”
“By the way, Sheryl. These grimoires all over the room—why are you still studying magic? With the fate of magic power depletion on you, spells that burn magic power are poison. Even with a magic crystal in hand.”
“…Because something might change. That is what I think.”
“Something might change?”
“…My adoptive father discarding me, and Brother walking the road of the underworld—all of it began in my own powerlessness. There is no mistaking that. With power I would not have been discarded. With power there would have been no trouble over money. All of it, my powerlessness. That is what is wrong.”
She isn’t wrong, I thought.
If Sheryl had power of the kind I have, none of this would have happened. I can put out as much magic power as it takes, and I’d never have been thrown away as useless at magic. And if money were short, I could earn as much of it as I liked at an adventurers’ guild or somewhere like it.
“…I want power. In this fate, where misfortune blows through like a storm, I do not want to be only a small boat, drifting. I want to pull the oars with my own hands and row myself out of the storm. That is what I think.”
“…”
I had no idea what to say to her. After a silence, Sheryl gave a small nod.
“…I said before that I was torn about going to Brother. But I have decided now. I will not go to him yet. So until I can talk with Brother properly… please let me stay here, Ephthal.”
“Staying or going is yours to decide. If you want it, this mansion will take you in any time—even coming back after leaving.”
“…Thank you. Since Brother killed my sister, I have had no place to be. But this is a place to be that I may finally have found. Truly… truly, thank you.”
And there Sheryl broke down and wept.
She’d never told anyone any of this, presumably. Carrying it alone, agonizing over it, frightened by it. And with nothing to be done about any of it, this girl had shut herself in a room and shaken, by herself. Anxiety about her own future, and mistrust of the brother she loved most. Thinking and thinking about all of it, around and around inside her head.
Raised in an extraordinary family, in extraordinary circumstances, but at the root of it she is only a child. The girl in front of me right now is nothing more or less than an ordinary nine-year-old.
“It was lonely, wasn’t it. But it’s all right now.”
I held her tight, and Sheryl looked up at me and made a faintly relieved face.