Between Merlin’s ‘unprecedented, overwhelming defeat’ and Anastasia’s ‘victory by fiendishness,’ our team was apparently having itself quite a tournament.
I hadn’t watched Maria’s match myself, but alchemy-grade numbing agents and incendiaries for spell support fall squarely within the rules, so I had no complaints there. As for Anastasia… on a real battlefield, what she did is simply common sense, so it wasn’t anything I planned to scold her for afterward. It certainly wasn’t praiseworthy either, mind you, but stabbing your enemy in the back is the time-tested wisdom of the weak. Though, yes… it was awful.
So, on to the last match. The captains’ bout, mine against Brad, had ended in a draw by mutual forfeit; per our arrangement beforehand, it was officially a match that had never happened. That made this final bout the deciding match in everything but name. We stood at two wins and one loss, so even a defeat here would only drag the whole thing to a draw.
Still, what would happen if we did end up tied at two-and-two…? The question crossed my mind for all of a second before reality made it moot. Because—
“…Level 5: Scarlet Flame.”
“Level 5: Magic Guard.”
—up on the platform, Sheryl was in the middle of a firefight with the giant.
It was a pure mage’s duel: no practice swords, no practice bows anywhere in sight. At some point, by what seemed like wordless mutual agreement, the two of them had settled into an old-school slugging match: hold your ground at range and trade spells until someone drops. Which, for the record, happened to be my favorite format back in my previous life.
“…Level 5: Evil Cutter.”
“Level 5: Magic Guard.”
Sheryl’s wind blade shattered against his ward. That said, the man’s Level 5 was cram-school work, slapped on in a hurry and never learned from the ground up. It showed in everything from his casting speed to the finish of the spell itself. Sheryl’s spellwork, by contrast, was orthodox to the core: classical, textbook-perfect form, the kind of performance an instructor dreams about. Honestly, it was beautiful to watch.
“…Level 5: Scarlet Flame.”
Then, as Sheryl fired her third round, the man seemed to realize his ward wouldn’t form in time, because—
“Level 3: Wind Guard.”
He batted the flames aside with a burst of wind magic, twisted clear of the spell in the split second it bought him, then abandoned the exchange entirely and charged straight at Sheryl. In other words, he meant to replay Anastasia’s match from earlier with the roles reversed. And fair enough: Sheryl was nine years old. Force her into close quarters, and on paper she’d look like an easy win.
Except… I grinned.
“With those legs of yours, you’ll never close the distance once Sheryl gets serious.”
He’d made it all of a few strides when Sheryl’s palm rose, smooth as silk.
“…Level 5: Evil Cutter.”
She’d pulled the spell deliberately, holding it primed at the brink, ready to fire the instant she chose. The man sensed as much, and his feet stopped dead. All he could do was stand there, staring at her in open disbelief.
“What… is that? What kind of casting speed was…”
“…The first shot and the second were to take your measure. The third, I built at full power and full speed. That is all it was.”
“We were… casting Level 5… I know we were. That’s no… Level 1 cantrip…! Speed like that… isn’t… possible…”
“…You are wrong.”
“Wrong? What am I wrong about?”
“…Only that you cannot truly use Level 5 at all. Understand a spell properly, and this much is normal.”
Then Sheryl glanced my way and gave a small nod.
“…No. There is a person who can cast faster… hit harder… do far more incredible things than this. That is what it means to be backed by real technique.”
“Urgh…”
The man had no comeback left. Not so much as a squeak. He simply stood there, swallowing his own words.
“…What will you do? Shall we continue?”
Sheryl asked it with her palm still leveled at him, and that was that: his head dropped, and he sank to one knee right where he stood.
“…I give up. There’s no way I’m beating you.”
And with that, right then and there, our championship was decided. Truth be told, I’d been worried. The way things had shaken out, Sheryl and the other two had needed to win every single match without me. Well… now I could finally let out the sigh of relief I’d been holding. Beside me, Merlin gave a soft chuckle.
“Still, what a remarkable girl Sheryl is. In my time at this academy… I have watched a great many students, and never once a prodigy of this order. Is this the talent of one who carries spirit blood, I wonder?”
I shook my head.
“That’s not it, Merlin.”
“Meaning?”
“Talent isn’t a word you get to close the book with. Have you ever seen Sheryl’s room? She spent every hour she had buried in grimoires, grinding away at her studies. To prove her family wrong, to stop Brad. All that time… all of it, alone.”
“…”
“Her magic power was depleted. She knew none of that effort would ever be repaid, and she still never stopped opening those grimoires. That’s something worth respecting.”
I nodded, and said the rest plainly.
“What’s happening out on that platform is nothing more than the world finally giving her fair credit for the road she’s walked.”
Hard work doesn’t lie. That’s the truth of it. Everything else in this world may well betray you, but a body you’ve forged and the magic you’ve honed never will.
Merlin bit her lip at that and looked down, a little abashed.
“Yes… yes, that’s exactly so. You climbed to the Four Emperors on relentless effort yourself, after all.”
“Well, I mean, the talent didn’t hurt either.”
Seriously, though, she was something else. Perfect command of Level 5 at nine years old, delivered with a rapid-fire cadence that could have come straight out of the Ephthal school, no less.
“So this is the real Sheryl, without the magic power depletion dragging her down. Hey, Merlin? Give her ten years and even you won’t be able to handle her, don’t you think?”
“Mm. Give her two years and she’ll be up to my ankles… ten, and she’ll be at my chest, I should say. As one of a slow-growing race like us vampires… I will admit it honestly: I’m envious.”
Sheryl came down from the platform with the match won. And that was when a corpulent man in gaudy noble finery came running our way.
“Merlin? Who’s that?”
“Sheryl’s adoptive father.”
Merlin sounded thoroughly sick of him already.
“…Huh? Meaning what?”
“He heard the daughter he disowned had made the academy’s final match, did a complete about-face, and rushed over to see for himself. A few days ago there was a demand that a special seat be prepared… the staff tell me the strong-arming was appalling.”
“…Hang on, this area’s closed to outsiders. How did he just stroll in?”
“The staff at the gate must have folded the moment they heard ‘duke.’ I will be disciplining whoever was responsible.”
And so Sheryl’s adoptive father, a duke of some country or other, arrived in front of us.
“Ha! Hahaha! A genius! I knew it! My daughter is a genius after all! Level 5 at nine years old! Unheard of!”
“…”
Snorting with excitement, the duke grabbed Sheryl’s arm, hard.
“Come, Sheryl! We’re going home! Three whole years wasted on this foolishness! We must resume your training regimen at once! Home first, then the arrangements for you to study the Eastern arts—”
“…You disowned me. Brother, too. You told me I was worthless.”
“And now you’ve shown your worth, haven’t you! Come, come, never mind the past. True, you were worthless then, but that was a passing phase! Look at you now! Competent after all!”
The man brayed with laughter and started walking, all but dragging her behind him.
“Now show me more! Greater brilliance, greater results! You’re going to make the whole world ring with our house’s name, the name of a great family of mages!”
Yeah. That was about enough of that. I rose, crossed toward the duke, and was just reaching for his shoulder when—
—thwack. A dry, ringing crack split the air.
It took me one look to see what had happened, and then I was laughing out loud.
“Ha! Nice one, Sheryl!”
The sound had been Sheryl’s uppercut connecting, clean and true, with the duke’s jaw. Jaw rocked, brain thoroughly rattled, the man folded at the knees and crumpled to the ground in a heap.
“Aghk…! Sh-Sh… Sheryl? What did you just…? You hit me? I was hit? Me? My own… daughter hit me?”
“…I am not going back to your house. No… I do not want to go back.”
Then she raised her hand and pointed at the far sky, toward Merlin’s mansion… no, toward ours.
“…I already have a home. A place to go back to.”
“Sh-Sh-Sheryl… what? What are you saying? Do you have any idea how much I paid to buy you as an infant? How much it cost… to keep you?”
“…‘Keep’ me?” Sheryl fixed the duke with the sort of look reserved for something foul on the roadside—
“…Be quiet. You pig.”
At that, a laugh slipped out, and not just from me. Maria and Anastasia lost theirs too. And right then Merlin came trotting back toward us. At some point she’d slipped away, and at some other point she’d apparently found the time to finish changing as well.
“Duke… allow me to introduce myself. Merlin, headmaster of this academy.”
“Wh-wh-what is the meaning of this! What sort of education are you giving my daughter?! As a ducal house, we shall be lodging a protest over how this academy is run!”
Merlin met his bluster with a theatrical little tilt of the head—my, whatever could you mean?
“Oh? How strange. Some time ago, this academy wrote to the ducal house to confirm what should be done with student Sheryl once her tuition exemption expired. The reply, as I recall: we will pay no tuition; our house has severed its ties with Sheryl and bears no relation to her whatsoever. Was that not your answer?”
“Ah… perhaps some such letter existed.”
His whole attitude said so what? Merlin’s voice cooled by a degree, and the next words came down flat and final.
“To be precise, a scholarship student’s tuition exemption runs three years. What was to become of her afterward? We asked you exactly that, in a formal letter of inquiry, and your reply is on record. The ties were severed; the academy could do with student Sheryl precisely as it pleased. Those were your terms. Which is why I would humbly suggest that student Sheryl’s own wishes be respected here. No?”
“Are you an imbecile?! Can you not see that circumstances have changed?! I will not give up my daughter! I will never give her up!”
At that, a vein finally popped out on Merlin’s temple. Honestly, the real mystery from where I stood was how she’d stayed polite this long.
“Very well. Courtesy is wasted on your kind. This academy was told, once, to do with her person as it pleased, so I shall do precisely that.”
“You dare take that tone with—!”
“Student Sheryl is presently in this academy’s care. Which makes you a man attempting to carry off, by force, a child under the headmaster’s own protection… no. Let us call it what it is. Kidnapping.”
“K-k-kidnapping?! What crime is there in taking my own daughter home?!”
“You severed the ties. In writing. It sits in the record: your formal answer to this academy’s official letter of inquiry.”
“I have stood here listening quietly long enough! A mere headmaster, drunk on her own convenient little logic—!”
Convenient logic, he said. Also, quietly? He hadn’t shut up once. Honestly, the way this man talked was something else. ‘Awful’ didn’t even begin to cover it. Maria and Anastasia clearly agreed, the two of them just standing there with their jaws hanging open.
“And that tone! Toward a duke! Do you truly understand who it is you are addressing?!”
“I am a demon. I owe no courtesy to any human duke. And in any case, this is not your country, is it?”
“…It would appear you do not know what it means to earn a duke’s displeasure.”
“You witless man. If you mean to keep forcing this absurdity, then go home to your country and fetch whatever you please: your knights, your mage corps, all of it. Bring the ducal house’s entire strength against me. I will meet it with my own. Alone.”
The duke gaped at her. “Huh?”
“You… are you truly the headmaster? Meet an army, alone? That is… you are not joking, are you?”
“Oh, I am in deadly earnest. And you… it seems you are the one who knows nothing of this academy.”
“Knows nothing…?”
Merlin nodded, slow and deliberate.
“Have you never heard the name Thunder God of Flashing Chains? In the great war a hundred years ago, I crushed a mage corps or two from some little country or other… alone. Ah, now that I think of it, one of those divisions served a country with a name remarkably like the one you belong to.”
The color drained out of the man’s face as I watched. Huh. So Merlin was world-famous. I’d known they call her a hero of the demons, but apparently she’d also gone on a genuine rampage in some war way back when.
“…The Thunder God of Flashing Chains…? The one who single-handedly annihilated the mage corps our house was proudest of… heir to the arts of the first Thunder God Emperor… the witch—Merlin?”
“The very same. This Merlin, eldest and foremost of the Ephthal school, and my policy has always been that a fight offered is a fight accepted. Better yet—let us settle it here and now: not duke against academy, simply one person against another. You are a mage of sorts yourself, are you not? Say you will stand across from me alone, and I may yet credit your nerve.”
“Urk… nnngh…”
You know, that might have been the first time in my life I’d heard a person actually say nnngh out loud. Anyway, his breed folds fast in front of real authority. Men like him spend their whole lives as far from battlefields and bloodshed as they can get, and the quiet hint of direct violence clearly hadn’t hurt either.
“Well? What will it be?”
Under Merlin’s glare, the duke spun on his heel.
“Tch… c-consider yourselves lucky! T-today… today I’ll let it slide!”
Incredible. He’d actually said the stock villain line on his way out.
And so, with the crowd’s cold stares on his back, he made to slink away, at which point Merlin drew a crystal ball from inside her coat.
“Ah. One thing I forgot to mention.”
“What now?!”
“Every word spoken here has been recorded by a magic tool. You are aware, I trust, that this academy governs itself. Politics does not reach inside these walls. What you did today was naked political interference in academy affairs, and I shall lodge a formal protest through the mages’ academic society in due course.”
“Do whatever you please!”
“I shall. Of course, the moment I do, that reputation your house craves as a great family of mages dies on the spot. I would rather not hear complaints afterward, so I am telling you now. Here.”
The duke went a fresh shade of pale and let out a strangled groan. He opened his mouth to fire something back, then seemed to realize he had nothing left to fire, and shut it without a word.
And at the very end, Sheryl turned to the duke and delivered the finishing blow, spitting the words out:
“…At times like this, there is a correct thing to say. Namely… get lost, and don’t ever come back.”
The duke fled. And that, more or less, was that.
The moment he was out of sight, Sheryl turned to me and beamed, her whole face lit up with it, and I smiled right back at her. Then it hit me, and my breath caught.
“Sheryl? Just now… did you…?”
“…Mm. What is it, Ephthal?”
“That’s the first time… you’ve smiled. Isn’t it?”
She’d laughed out loud at our dinner party once before, true, but even then her expression hadn’t moved a millimeter. This time, though—just now, unmistakably—she had smiled.
“…Mm.”
Sheryl pressed a hand to her cheek to check, and apparently found the smile still sitting there. Because one heartbeat later her whole face went scarlet, quick as a flipped switch. Even she hadn’t seen it coming, it seemed… or rather, what really got her was being seen.
“…A grinning face is not for showing to people.”
Hm? Wait, so the blank face was never natural? She’d been keeping it up on purpose this whole time?
She stayed sulky about it for a while, clearly stewing over having been caught. But in the end she gave a great, decisive nod, like someone settling accounts with herself.
“…You have seen it once. After that, it is all the same.”
And then she spread both arms wide and came running and leapt at me, wearing a smile like a sunflower in full bloom, strong and bright.
“…Huuug.”
I laughed out loud at that. There’s just a trace of Isaac left in her face, the faintest touch, and one look at it sent a whole lifetime of memories flooding back at once.
—A long time ago, Isaac and I had a blazing row about it. A child, with a spirit? Are you insane? There’s no telling what could happen. Drop it. That was me talking, back then. But now… now I think the answer Isaac reached—to have that child—was no mistake at all.
—Because Sheryl is right here: this lovely, and this alive. And faced with that smile, even the Thunder God Emperor himself has no choice left but to run up the white flag.
“Hey, Sheryl?”
“…What? Ephthal?”
“Thank you for being born.”
And I held her tight, as tight as I could. As if my arms could apologize to her: to Sheryl, the child whose very existence I’d argued against, a lifetime ago.
