Sheryl’s Perspective
—That day.
The day my sister was killed.
I ended up seeing it, through the keyhole of the door.
Brother astride her on the bed, drawing my sister’s magic power out of her.
We were fed nothing but complete-nutrition rations, flavorless, with the look and taste of packed mud, and Brother always slipped us sweets in secret. Brother read us picture books when nobody was watching. When Brother appeared, my sister’s eyes and mine would light up, and the sepia scene we lived in, steeped in magic, seemed to take on color at once.
—Why did Brother do that to my sister?
That day, that hour, that instant. From the moment the red-haired boy took Brother away into another room, the gears of all of us began to slip.
—That Brother killed my sister.
—That Brother put his hand to the underworld’s work to earn money.
—That Brother obtained a power beyond anything human.
—And that Brother is trying to kill a great many people in order to save me.
All of it. All of it is wrong.
I no longer understand what any of it means.
And so, when a summons came from Brother, I knocked at the back guild’s door. Three times first, then twice more…
Strange. No answer came from the other side. When I gripped the handle, it was unlocked.
And the instant I pushed the door open, the scene that opened in front of me took my words away. A choking smell of iron. No—of blood.
Lit by pale moonlight from the window, Brother stood spattered with another man’s blood, and at his feet the guild’s portly man lay sprawled.
“…Brother? Why?”
“Because I need money. If I have to take it from someone anyway, better it be money that was never clean.”
An immediate answer, and an extremely simple one.
“…You do not have to do that anymore. I will not need money for a while. The magic crystal was bought the other day.”
“I need funds to run. I have no intention of picking a fight with a nation.”
“…Run?”
“I am about to take several hundred lives. I will need money… to stay hidden.”
“…Why do you need to collect souls?”
“High-concentration magic crystals, and a great many of them. The quickest way to get them is to make use of the magic academy’s students. Am I wrong?”
What is strange about that? Brother asked it exactly like that.
I bit my lip, and then—
“…I do not want Brother’s hands dirtied any further.”
“You understand it yourself, surely. The magic crystal you need to maintain your body grows larger and larger. And once it does, the thing itself becomes impossible to obtain however much money you stack. It would mean breaking into a national facility, and that is not realistic.”
“…If it is decided that I will die, then I think I can only accept it as fate.”
“Once. Only this once. Get through this one time and take a great quantity of large crystals, and you will be released from your cursed fate, Sheryl.”
“…Built on the foundation of several hundred lives? If I have to live on the premise of someone’s death… then I… then I don’t want anything like that!”
Brother swung his right hand high, and brought it down across my cheek.
—Crack!
I was thrown to the right and slammed into the wall face first. Less a slap than the sensation of being struck with a blunt weapon.
“Who do you think I’m doing all this for, Sheryl!”
Blood came pouring out of my nose, and Brother caught his breath. “Ah…”
“…Sheryl, I’m sorry. I’m sorry… there are times when I can’t control the power or my own feelings.”
“…Brother. Why did you kill my sister?”
Brother’s eyes went wide.
“You knew?”
“…Mm.”
Brother shifted his gaze to the moon in the window, and his eyes went distant. Then he spoke, with a melancholy look.
“That day, a god appeared before me.”
“…A god?”
“The red-haired god. He told me Claire’s magic power depletion had already left her little time. And that Sheryl would go the same way before long. And then he was good enough to call me, with no magic aptitude at all, blessed by god.”
“…What does that mean?”
“He opened the Root of Roots and gave me power. And he was kind enough to teach me a way to save at least you, Sheryl.”
“…The way to save me was… to kill my sister?”
Brother nodded, and smiled gently.
“For you to go on living, a sacrifice is necessary. You understand, don’t you? You’ll understand for me, won’t you?”
“…I do not understand. I do not want to understand a thing like that.”
“Someday you will. Without fail… you will.”
And there Brother brought the thumb and middle finger of his right hand together.
“But since you do not understand yet, perhaps you should sleep a little. The environment will be somewhat cramped, but once it is all over I will come for you, so be at ease… Sheryl.”
“Sleep magic…?”
“Yes, that’s right. I am to meet the god in a month, and I will let you meet him too.”
My body was… cold.
My eyelids were… heavy.
No strength would come into my limbs.
And my consciousness, taken by a floating sensation like weightlessness, was swallowed at once into a deep, deep dark.
—When I came to, I was in a cell.
This was most likely where the back guild kept and managed slaves and kidnapping victims. I had been thrown onto the flagstones, and I tried at once to get up.
Could I even break those iron bars? I began to think about it, but that was beside the point.
I could not so much as sit up.
“…He got me.”
A high-order binding spell of the ice line had been placed on me, apparently, and in this state I could not move my hands or feet at all.
There I realized that all of it was already far too late.
—The die is already cast.
Whether I could persuade him or not was beside the point. Brother had settled his heart a long time ago. And I… I understood that there was nothing I could do. Brother would not stop. And there would be nobody who could stop him.
Then, out of pure frustration, the tears came.
—That I carry the fate of magic power depletion.
—That I made Brother walk a road of suffering.
—That my sister died… no. That Brother, it seems, killed my sister for my sake.
—And above all, my own powerlessness, unable to do anything in this situation.
Unable to move even my hands and feet, I found the powerlessness of this body the bitterest thing of all.
By rights, if only my magic power were sufficient, I too would be a high-order mage.
—Or perhaps there was a possibility, however small a fragment of one, that I could have stopped Brother by force.
—No. With sufficient power I could have stopped him. If I cannot stop him, that is only because I am powerless.
—Power… I want power.
—This fate that a spiteful god handed me.
—I am only a small boat that can do nothing but wait for the storm to pass… only swept along.
—To go anywhere I please, by my own hands and my own feet.
—To drive my will through the rough water and hold it there. That is the power I want.
In the middle of tears that would not stop, for some reason the profile of a black-haired boy flickered across my mind.
—Ephthal.
—The person who smells the same as Brother did before he changed.
—And the person who makes me feel safe.
At that moment, I heard the clatter of metal falling to the ground.
When I moved only my face, the iron bars, cut through, were falling to the floor one after another with a ring of metal.
Ephthal, a single-edged blade in his hand, asked me a question.
“Magic power depletion… want me to cure it for you, Sheryl?”
“…Ephthal? Why…?”
“I was outside the back guild’s door listening. I’ve got the shape of it.”
Why is Ephthal here, truly? I tried to think, but my head was in a panic and would not work properly.
“So? What’ll you do? If you agree to it, I can cure it right here, right now.”
“…Cure magic power depletion? There is no way that can be done. How many texts do you think we went through?”
“By this era’s common sense, sure. That’ll be true enough.”
“…This era’s common sense?”
Ephthal gave a great nod, and declared it.
“I’ll give you the conclusion first. A familiar contract.”
“…A familiar contract?”
“You’re human and you’re also spirit. You keep half a demon inside that body of yours. And that half is doing harm to the human half.”
“…It is true that I am half spirit. A contract of the familiar kind is… not impossible.”
“If you’ve got that far, this is quick. We link your soul to mine, and I supply the magic power you need as your employer. No problem with that, is there?”
I have heard that the first Ice God Emperor kept his child alive by that method. Naturally, that was the first place we looked in the literature.
“…That method has been examined as well. But we concluded it was impossible.”
“How so?”
“…Making a familiar of a spirit is a tale from more than four hundred years ago. Now that the Magia Burst has caused the transformation of the soul, there is no human being who can do it.”
Because of that transformation, the mages of this era and the mages of the past differ completely in the ceiling of magic power their bodies can generate. Before you even reach the question of Level 9 and Level 10 being lost, we mages have become fundamentally frail things.
“…And even in that age, doing such a thing would need power of the first-generation Four Emperor class. Nothing less.”
“Sheryl? What would you say if I told you I… am one of the first Four Emperors?”
“…Ephthal. Jokes are not good at a time like this.”
“Your ancestor and I go back a long way. And how do you think I followed you and listened in on that conversation? Any guesses?”
Ephthal snapped his fingers, and his body turned transparent and was gone from sight in a moment.
“This is… Level 8: Invisible?”
My eyes went wide, and I blinked at nothing, at a complete loss.
“That’s right. And that magic item of the Ice God Emperor’s you used… who do you think broke that barrier?”
“Su… surely not…? Truly…?”
“Reincarnation, that’s the thing. You’ve got the gist of it.”
Ephthal dropped the invisibility and seemed to begin refining a new formula.
—Fast.
Flowing magic-power handling. No—beautiful enough to be called artistic.
Whether even Headmaster Merlin, called the fastest of the demons, could manage a feat on this level…
And though the formula he was assembling was evidently a considerably complex one, he paid its difficulty no regard whatsoever, simply weaving it up at a speed that was not ordinary.
“…Incredible.”
A sigh of pure admiration came out of me.
To begin with, the invisibility spell just now, a Level 8 cast with no cast time, is not a thing that happens. This is not remotely something a human being can do. If it could be done, it would be nothing short of a devil’s own work.
“The contract formula is built. Take my hand and the contract completes. I’ll save you without fail—so trust me, Sheryl.”
I no longer understood what Ephthal was saying.
—He assembled a contract formula in a matter of seconds?
A formula that takes a seasoned mage an entire day… in an instant?
“…Ephthal. Right now I do not understand half of what you are saying. But… this much I do understand.”
“What do you understand?”
“…Ephthal is a good person.”
Yes.
I understood that Ephthal held power that was not ordinary. But whether he is truly the Thunder God Emperor I do not know, and it is far too outlandish a story besides.
But none of that matters. Ephthal gave a place to be to me, who had shut myself away alone all that time.
—With Ephthal, I can feel safe.
So I reached out my hand to Ephthal. Yes: it is not the Thunder God Emperor but the boy in front of me, an ordinary black-haired boy, Ephthal, whom I want to trust.
I took Ephthal’s hand and closed my palm around it, tightly and with strength.
“Good. That makes you my familiar, and under my protection.”
“…Mm.”
I gave a small nod, and Ephthal struck his chest as if to say leave the rest to me.
“From here on, I’m tagging in. The burden you’re carrying—hand all of it to me.”