Chapter 1 – The Jade-Haired Dragon Princess
The academy training ground, and the hour was dusk.
“We are absolutely coming with you!”
The one who declared it, positively brimming with fight, was Anastasia.
She and I stood facing off, while Merlin and Maria watched from a distance to see how it would go.
Well, to explain how it came to this.
There’s no question the Fire God Emperor has a hand in the business this time. Which means the situation could turn dangerous even for me, and bringing Anastasia and Maria along, Merlin aside, was a bad idea. Bluntly, they’d be a liability, and I couldn’t guarantee their safety. So, reluctantly, I’d ordered them to wait at the mansion, and that had drawn no small amount of discontent.
“I-I-I’m always with Master! I want to stay by your side!”
Their being so attached to me is a happy thing, but that’s a separate question from this one.
Sheryl, for her part, can handle higher-order magic than the other two, so I judged she could keep herself reasonably safe and let her come. There’s also the fact that she’s tied to the Ice God Emperor to begin with. It seems Brad opened the Root of Roots the other day by devouring the soul of Sheryl’s sister, and there’s a real chance Sheryl’s very existence is bound up with the Fire God Emperor. If so, then even at some risk, better to keep her at hand.
“Haaah? Sheryl gets a pass and I’m the dead weight? You’ve got some nerve!”
And there Maria came biting back, her voltage cranked to its very peak.
Having caught a backlash of that force, I set the two of them a challenge.
“So here’s the deal: manage to surprise me, even for a single instant, in a mock battle, and the win is yours, Anastasia.”
“I-I-I’d like nothing better!”
Both of them, temperament-wise, are the charge-straight-down-the-middle type. Well, Anastasia’s a touch questionable on that score. Either way, when it comes to making a point land, there’s no beating the plainest, clearest method.
“All right, Merlin, if you’d do the honors.”
At my word, Merlin gave a firm nod.
“Then—the mock battle begins!”
The instant Merlin spoke, Anastasia sprang far back to open the distance. At the same time, by way of a parting gift, she flung a short blade, a mock knife, of course. Given her fighting style up to now, an ambush with a thrown weapon right off the whistle was well within my expectations. I knocked the knife down with my sword.
At that, Anastasia snapped her fingers and set off an explosion spell underground. The ground shook with the blast, and she leapt back once more. And there it dawned on me: her very first jump hadn’t been to open distance from me at all—
“Ah, I see.”
The ground gave way beneath me. Footing gone, I dropped into a pitfall Anastasia had prepared in advance. The hole was maybe ten meters in radius and two deep. And looking down… oh, come on, the bottom was bristling with bamboo spears. Their points looked to be smeared with poison, too. Ha, she’s come to kill me outright, I thought, and had to smile.
“It’s a numbing agent! Even you, Master, can’t shrug off poison from an ambush… huh?”
“Merlin can float. You think I can’t? Honestly, I’m impressed you went to all this trouble, but this much won’t close the gap between us.”
I halted my vertical drop by force of magic and rose slowly back up, then set down at the edge of the pit. I was partway through “So no, I can’t take you along—” when Anastasia pulled something round from her coat. Seven spheres in all came flying at me and the ground around me—and burst with a sharp pop.
“Smoke bombs?!”
Knowing Anastasia, I’d figured the pitfall might not be the only trap, so this too was more or less anticipated. The area vanished into smoke in an instant, but I made a point of staying calm and called out to her.
“Rob me of my sight, and I can still read what’s around me with detection magic—like this!”
The detection spell I’d cast caught Anastasia closing on me from behind at speed. A mock sword came down at me from high overhead. I slipped it aside and drove a counter-thrust into her chest.
“Guh…!”
A clean hit, and the thud of a body crumpling. And there something felt off. I cast a wind spell at once to clear the smoke. Why did it feel off? Because the sensation of the chest through my sword had been… oddly full. More to the point, I’d felt something far too ample for Anastasia. And when the smoke lifted, there—
“Irene-san…?”
The one lying there was Irene-san, the Student Council vice president. Ah, that explained the far-too-ample feel. But why on earth was Irene-san here?! While I stood there flustered, Irene-san smirked.
“A Level 4 disguise spell. It only lasts a few minutes, but Anastasia-san assured me that would be plenty, and asked me for the favor.”
Come to think of it, Anastasia had gone off to the washroom right before the match. I’d known she was setting something up; so this was it. Which meant—
—I hadn’t been fighting Anastasia at all, from the very start.
And when I noticed she hadn’t cast a single spell since the opening, I let out an “ah” of understanding. Of course, her read was that I’d pick her out by the habits of her spell-craft. That was the plan. But then where was the real Anastasia?
And there the earth at the bottom of the pit went churning.
“A hole under the hole… a false bottom!”
The one who came bursting up was, naturally, Anastasia. She emerged with her right palm already leveled at me and fired instantly.
“Level 4: Shining Arrow!”
The fastest bolt in the Level 4 bracket. Small in power, but the formula comes together quickly, and the arrow itself is quick as well. Honestly, this had caught me completely flat-footed. I hadn’t built a single formula. I twisted my body to dodge, but I wasn’t going to make it. In a scramble I threw my palm out toward the arrow—
“Level 6: Black Guardian!”
I got it up just in time. My defensive spell snuffed Anastasia’s out on the instant.
“E-even… doing all this… I couldn’t land a single hit… Master really is in a class of his own.”
Anastasia had gone teary-eyed, though… well, she was rather missing the point. I glanced at Merlin, who wore the look of a woman biting down on something bitter, as if to say she had no choice but to acknowledge it. And I felt the same.
Honestly, I was lost for words. The thing was, in this case I’d had no choice but to use a defensive spell. No, made to use it is the truer way to put it. Had it been Merlin rather than Anastasia running that gambit, I might well have lost, and that’s no exaggeration. What let me weather it was the overwhelming gap in raw ability, and the fact that Anastasia had closed that gap with the tactic of the ambush was simply true. At the very least, this was the first time in a one-on-one fight that I’d used a defensive spell against an opponent this far beneath me in skill.
“No, I’m impressed, Anastasia.”
At my words her face lit up.
“Then, does that mean—?”
“You’ve walked the back roads all your life. Running away is your true trade, isn’t it? The moment you sense danger, you bolt, flat out. That’s the condition.”
“Yes! Yes! Thank you, Master!”
I let out a light breath, then walked over to where Maria was standing.
“Maria. This is hard to say, but… you don’t have Anastasia’s quick wits, so I can’t take you with me.”
“What? The wind’s up. I can’t hear you.”
It did seem the wind had suddenly picked up. So I stepped closer to Maria and said it again, louder.
“Maria. This is hard to say, but—”
“Like I said, the wind, I can’t hear you. Come closer and say it right in my ear.”
As told, I put my mouth to Maria’s ear and opened it once more.
“Maria. This is hard to say, but you don’t have Anastasia’s quick wits, and you’re short on power, so—”
An ambush.
Maria pressed her lips to mine.
“…Eh?”
“I just had to surprise you, right? By the way, the wind was Vice President Irene’s spell.”
Maria traded a glance with Irene-san, and the two of them grinned like a pair of pranksters.
Damn it…
Still, that she’d surprised me was a fact I couldn’t very well deny.
“So I’m coming. To make sure no strange bugs get on you… I have to come along.”
“Strange bugs?”
“…Well, you’ve got a habit, haven’t you? A habit of… picking up odd things.”
On that point, I had no comeback.
At any rate, a man’s word, once given. Honestly the two of them are both baggage, but I’ll take it as training for myself and let it go.
⁂
The inter-academy tournament was a month off, and until then I’d been granted leave from the academy. As for Merlin, it seemed she had a preposterous backlog of paid holiday saved up, so this went down as her finally using some of it. There’d been a fair bit of wrangling, apparently, but once she digs her heels in there’s no moving her, and she strong-armed it through.
Then, four days’ travel by carriage toward the ducal domain, and we arrived at our first destination: the Dragon’s Treasure Vault.
We entered a cavern in the mountains, far from any village, and walked the dark, chill rock for maybe fifteen minutes. Then the path switched abruptly to laid flagstone, and when we opened the gate at its dead end—there was another world spread out before us. A lobby that called to mind the social floor of a royal court, long-pile carpet underfoot, gold and silver treasure, busts and paintings everywhere.
The keeper came out from a back room the moment we entered. Merlin, already an acquaintance, spoke with her a while, and the keeper began to laugh, low and amused.
“Fufu. Open the vault and let you leaf through the books Sasha-sama entrusted to my keeping? My, my, and what foolishness might you be talking, Merlin-chan?”
She looked like a human woman in her late twenties. No, that’s not right. A flawless, otherworldly beauty, as though she’d stepped out of a painting in a gallery. There was even a kind of bewitching quality to her; she gave off the sense of something not quite of this world. Her chest, too, was enormous. Beyond human, really. I am, after all, a man, so it would be a lie to say this bosom, all but bursting its bounds, didn’t catch my eye.
—Off every scale there is.
Merlin is quite well endowed herself, and the first time I saw her it gave me no small jolt, but this was on another plane entirely.
—Rocket boobs.
The words surfaced in my head. A bosom sturdy enough to carry a man’s dreams clear past the stratosphere… what in the world am I thinking. And with an outfit that bared her front so freely, the thoughts came all the more readily. But that aside.
“Of course I never imagined you would comply meekly, Svetlana.”
So the two of them stood glaring at each other. Hm. They’d been on good terms once, if memory served, yet here we were.
This Svetlana, incidentally, is someone with whom I have a not-shallow history. When she was small she was quite attached to me, and since she looked for all the world like a little doll, I doted on her in turn. Ordinarily she keeps a human form; all that’s left of her Dragon Emperor blood, her Emerald Dragon nature, is the deep jade of her hair. That much hasn’t changed from the old days.
“In any case, I refuse. You see, Big Sis dislikes lending her aid to the weak. To put it more precisely, I don’t mind lending humans my strength. It’s more that I decline to count the weak as human at all.”
“Hoh. And what do you mean by the weak, Svetlana?”
“Because there’s simply no end to it. A giant’s turned up on that mountain; a herd of river-horses has come to that stream, please save us, Dragon Princess-sama. You must have had your share of the same, Merlin-chan?”
“I’ll not deny it. That the powerless lean on the powerful, and swarm to them, is only to be expected. But you too are one who carries on Ephthal-sama’s will. As I recall, you used to set off gladly to hunt down the villains and the monsters that preyed on the weak…”
“Since the Magia Burst four hundred years ago, humankind, your demon race included, has changed. So at a certain point Big Sis’s thinking changed too. I’ve no particular wish to harm humans now, but neither the obligation nor the free time to go out of my way to help them.”
“To put it plainly,” Svetlana said, and clapped her palms together.
“There’s no end to it, truly. Handle a river-horse yourselves, or Big Sis is in real trouble. Help a few times and it becomes the expected thing, and then if so much as one casualty turns up in a matter I’ve had a hand in, there’s always some fool who complains, isn’t there?”
“I can’t say I don’t take your meaning. When goodwill on our side comes to be taken for granted, that sort of thing does tend to follow.”
“So Big Sis lost all interest in human beings. Getting mixed up with the weak is nothing but a nuisance.”
Calling herself Big Sis, though, one does wonder about that. Well, from the look of her, I suppose it fits well enough. And there Maria pushed into the conversation.
“Th-there may well be something to that about humankind, but isn’t the way you put it a little cruel? For weak people—people who can’t use magic or body-strengthening the way we can—even a low-ranked monster is a genuine threat!”
“Fufu. Fufufu!”
As if this were the finest entertainment, Svetlana clapped her hands over and over and laughed.
“Just now… did this little elf child say ‘we’? That’s too much, ha, ha, hahaha! Don’t tell me you fancy yourself as something other than one of the weak?”
“…At the very least I can manage a river-horse or two.”
“No, no, this is a surprise even to Big Sis. You genuinely believe you stand on the same side as I do. A little slip of a girl, convinced she’s a cut above the rest… fufu, this is why there’s no saving fools.”
At the remark Maria puffed out her cheeks.
“…I’ll have you know I won my way through the academy’s representative selection, and I’m bound for the national tournament.”
“Fu, ha, hahaha! Ahh… kh, hehehe… of all the things to say… a tale about the little ones at a magic academy? My, my, now there’s a story on a scale to leave Big Sis reeling.”
“Wh-what’s so funny?! The national tournament is the glory of every young mage—”
“Turn it around, then: can you tell one mite apart from another by size? Come to Big Sis with talk on that microscopic scale: this one’s a hair bigger, that one a hair smaller, and all she can do is laugh.”
“H-hang on… mites… what is it with you?!”
“The plain fact is that, students aside, if you ask Big Sis to weigh the difference between mages of the present age—four hundred years back would be another matter—all she can do is shrug in bafflement. Let’s see… you’d have to be at least the level of that Merlin-chan there to be worth discussing at all. That’s the lowest line below which Big Sis simply lumps you all in together as the weak.”
And there Svetlana’s eyes shone with an eerie light.
“Since words won’t reach you, I’ll have your body understand instead. This is the Jade Eye, one of the innate powers of the Emerald Dragon.”
The instant she spoke, Anastasia, Maria, and Sheryl dropped to their knees where they stood. Their faces drained of color in a heartbeat, and they began to tremble, fine and quick.
“There, you see? Big Sis merely let out the Dragon Emperor’s aura she’d been keeping in check, and not one of you can so much as stir, can you?”
“What this does,” Svetlana went on, “is slip past the cortex the fruit of wisdom built up, and speak to the deep places of the brain, to the instinct of humankind itself.”
“Speak… to…?”
“Just so. It makes you grasp—by instinct, not by reason—absolute power, and the sheer difference in rank. How frail a thing you truly are: this eye teaches its object that lesson well. Exactly as it’s teaching the three of you now. Ordinarily you’d not manage a word, so allow me a correction: you aren’t mites. You’re more like flies.”
“Flies… you… damn it…”
“That’s right. Not mites but flies. I’ll grant you that much special treatment. Fufu. There, I’ve made Big Sis herself acknowledge the gap between you and the truly weak. Are you satisfied now, little elf?”
To Svetlana’s low laughter Maria answered through gritted teeth, dredging the words up in defiance.
“You… absolute…”
“Tell me, little elf. Why are the dragonkin strong… have you ever stopped to think on it?”
“How would… I… know…”
“Because we are born shouldering the fate to reign through absolute power—that is the Dragon Emperor’s bloodline. An uncrossable wall, the law the gods laid down: the barrier of species.”
Her words left me thunderstruck. I stood rooted where I was, able to do nothing but gape. No—my jaw hung open and would not come back up.
—What a monumental… swelling of the head.
Four hundred years ago, when she was a knee-high little thing, she’d been so honest and so dear. But it seemed her attitude had swelled right along with her chest.
Then Svetlana let the low laughter die and made her face grave.
“And yet, on rare occasion, there’s a human who breaks that wall by sheer effort, which is exactly why humans are interesting. And so Big Sis, half-resigned about the humans of today, goes on keeping her interest in mages.”
“…What do you… mean?”
“That you grovel and are scorned beneath me now is simply because you haven’t reached the stage. Big Sis respects the Undead Emperor, for one. And there have been others, over the years: humans I held in genuine reverence.”
At that Maria, greasy with cold sweat, wore a smile of triumph all the same.
“Then this… is a joke, isn’t it. All that lofty talk… but there’s one right here… who’s reached this ‘stage’ of yours… isn’t there?”
Maria sent her gaze my way, and when Svetlana followed it and looked at me too, our eyes met. And Svetlana’s went wide, wide as they could go.
“…Well now, this is a surprise. You, it seems, are one of us. But an unfamiliar face. Perhaps not one who has lived since four hundred years past, but a child born after the Magia Burst? Fufu, Big Sis is glad, truly. It seems the humans of today aren’t quite past saving after all.”
“Well, glad to have pleased you, then.”
Delighted, Svetlana came trotting over to me and looped both arms around my neck.
“Your name, will you tell Big Sis your name?”
“H-hey, what are you doing?!”
She drew my face in against her chest, and—
—Smush.
My face was buried, whole, in that vast valley of a cleavage.
“Come now, Big Sis is honestly just so happy right now! Your name, your name, won’t you tell me?!”
“S-stop, please! Uh, my name is… Ephthal! Ephthal Alcott!”
Squeezed head-on between two overwhelming masses, I half-shouted it in something like desperation, and Svetlana froze on the spot.
“Um… Merlin-chan? This child is with you, yes?”
“Or rather, it is I who am with him.”
“What are you talking about. Well, your disciple, or something of the sort, I suppose… or are you making sport of me? Ah, yes, of course. The two of you are making sport of me.”
“Because,” Svetlana went on, “there is no earthly way Merlin-chan would let a companion of hers give the name Ephthal, the same name as my husband, the Thunder God Emperor I loved four hundred years ago.”
At the words, everyone but Merlin went wide-eyed, and then—
—turned on me a look that said what exactly did you get up to in the past.
And, if I wasn’t imagining it, there was a faint thread of killing intent woven through every one of those looks.
I let out an enormous sigh.
⁂
“Um, so, ehm… when I get big, please make me Ephthal-sama’s bride!”
That was Svetlana at five, back when she was still missing teeth. Having saved her life under certain circumstances, I’d become the little girl’s first object of love.
“Ah, once you’re grown and a fine woman, sure.”
And I, at the time, had answered that as a joke. Yes, I’d certainly said something of the kind—but it seemed the child had taken me at my word.
“And so, for that very reason, it’s a settled and self-evident fact that Big Sis, grown now into a fine woman, is Ephthal-sama’s wife.”
“How many times must I tell you Ephthal-sama has a wife, Bridget-sama?! This is exactly why I loathe having to meet you!”
“Oh? The dragonkin practice plural marriage. Big Sis doesn’t trouble herself over the fine print. And frankly, I’m rather worn out with you too, forever declaring nonsense like you are not his wife! So I’ve no particular urge to see you either. It’s quite all right.”
“The one talking nonsense is you! Ephthal-sama is already dead and gone!”
Ah, that’s the line she’s taking. Well, letting Svetlana in on the fact that I’m me would only make things a headache, so it’s a sound call. Yes, I firmly and unreservedly endorse that route.
“A-anyway! Hold on a moment, Svetlana!”
“Oh? Hold on? Whatever for?”
“There’s a complicated situation on our end. A brief strategy timeout.”
“…Hmm? Fine, then. Keep it short.”
So Merlin came over and, to keep the conversation from being overheard, raised a sound-blocking barrier.
“When Svetlana presses for details, our base line will be that Ephthal-sama is my disciple, forgive me for it. And as for who you are now, we’ll go with this: that a family line descended from the Thunder God Emperor’s lover of four hundred years ago has in fact survived. That’s the version with the most weight behind it.”
“That’s fine, Merlin.”
And there Maria puffed out her cheeks, out of sorts.
“Hey, Ephthal, what exactly is going on? I get that that woman’s spouting nonsense about some childhood promise, but.”
“Yes. Why do Master and the Dragon Princess know each other in the first place? And you saved her life? What in the world happened?”
“No, nothing outrageous, nothing so grand. Just… normally, you know… it’s a four-hundred-years-ago story… and, well, normally…”
“Normally?”
“Yeah. Normally, a Dragon Emperor I was acquainted with asked me to look after little Svetlana, and I ended up having to put down the demon dragon-god Echidna, who was after her.”
“There is no ‘normally’ about that!” “What kind of normal is that?!”
The two objections came back at me without a beat’s delay. Sheryl, though, took no part in it, and only gave a small nod.
“…For the first Thunder God Emperor, that is simply ordinary. An anecdote of exactly the scale that suits Ephthal, an ordinary one, I would say.”
Sheryl looked oddly proud about it, but never mind that.
“Look, four hundred years ago it was an ordinary sort of story. I teamed up with the Ice God Emperor to drive the thing off. I could hardly have taken Echidna on by myself.”
“Four hundred years ago was… on another level entirely, wasn’t it.”
Maria, face gone pale, swallowed hard.
“Maria, student?”
“What is it, Merlin-sama?”
“Even four hundred years ago, this was not ordinary. It is only that this person and his friends are strange in a great many ways. Which is precisely why, four centuries on, he still, now and again, drifts somewhere off the map of the ordinary world.”
“But, Ephthal? You really are a piece of work yourself.”
“A piece of work how?”
“I knew you had a habit of picking up odd things and getting attached, but a dragon princess, on top of everything…”
Maria and Anastasia traded a look and nodded at each other, wearing expressions I couldn’t quite name. And there Sheryl murmured, under her breath.
“…If we’re talking about that, Maria and Anastasia are strange too. In personality, mainly.”
Then Svetlana called over to us, sounding irritated.
“Not finished yet, Merlin-chan? Big Sis isn’t so terribly free, you know.”
Merlin gave a small nod, snapped her fingers, and released the sound-blocking barrier.
“In any case, Svetlana. We have reasons of our own for needing to see Sasha-sama’s books.”
“And I told you I refuse, did I not?”
“That you dislike me personally I know full well, and I’m no fonder of you. But the line you drew was that you would not lend your strength to the weak, yes? Whatever you make of me, this black-haired boy, at the least, has shown you his power.”
“That’s…”
“So which is it, will you lend us your aid or won’t you? By the very nature of the vault, the management of Sasha-sama’s books has been left to you, and the authority to grant access with it.”
And then, with a look of triumph, Merlin went on, prefacing it with, “Surely you don’t mean to tell me—”
“—that there was a lie in those fine words about not minding to lend the un-weak your strength? Ha. A proud princess of the dragonkin, caught in a lie. Now there’s a thing to make one blush for her. This is what they call giving the whole game away.”
“Kh…”
Arms folded, Merlin turned a look of open contempt on Svetlana. They really are on wretched terms. As I recall, Svetlana first came to us when Merlin was six. Svetlana herself would have been five at the time. In the few years they lived under one roof there were certainly quarrels, but at bottom they’d been like a pair of close sisters, and yet…
Still, Merlin, provocation this childish, is it truly going to work? A plan to rub her pride the wrong way and bait her, most likely, but. And as I fretted over it, Svetlana bit her lip in mortification, a why, you, and half in desperation cried out:
“Fine! I’ll grant you your viewing!”
Good, easy as ever! I’ll admit that with four full centuries gone by I’d been rather anxious, but at the root of her the character hadn’t changed a whit from childhood, and she’s as easy to handle as she ever was. Squabbles over snacks, squabbles over stuffed animals, whenever those two fell to fighting, this was always how Merlin ran rings around Svetlana.
“But there’s a condition, Merlin-chan.”
“A condition?”
“You know the territory of the foreign tribe begins some twenty kilometers south of here? It seems the foreign tribe has gotten hold of the Scarlet of Hades, from where, I couldn’t say.”
“The Scarlet of Hades…?”
Merlin and I looked at each other. The Scarlet of Hades is the very artifact noted at the head of Sasha’s research papers, the one recorded as a possible substitute for the Key of Solomon.
“But that thing was a super-class restricted contraband even four hundred years ago. Its method of refining was lost over a thousand years past, and there should be no more than a handful left in all the world. How on earth would the foreign tribe come by such a thing?”
“That, Big Sis doesn’t know. But it’s solid word from Big Sis’s own network as a collector of treasures. You may take it as ninety percent reliable and better.”
Well, in the end it all comes back to the same knot, doesn’t it. The Fire God Emperor shows every sign of collecting souls, and a legendary artifact of the necromancer’s art on top of that. One can’t help but catch the suspicious smell of it.
“What will you do, Ephthal-sama?”
“What is there to do… we’ve no choice but to take the deal.”
It’s settled beyond doubt that the thing is an artifact bearing on magic aptitude. On top of which it’s a super-hazard, capable in theory of creating and sustaining undead by the thousand. There’s no leaving it in the hands of a foreign tribe, obviously. And recovering it stands a good chance of proving useful to the aptitude cure down the line. So here too, taking the deal is the only real option.
“Crush the foreign tribe and win the orb. Simple enough for you, wouldn’t it be, Merlin?”
“And why not simply go and fetch it yourself?”
“Ha. Big Sis—born as the finished work of Eden, bearing both the fruit of life and the fruit of wisdom, both power and knowledge together—Big Sis, no… I, am to raise a hand against a rabble of human foreign tribes?”
Then, with a peal of high laughter and a coldness in her eyes, Svetlana pronounced:
“—That would not be elegant.”
“You truly are the same woman you always were. The upshot is simply that you can’t stomach doing as I say without a fuss.”
Struck somewhere tender, Svetlana choked on her words with a strangled “kh…”
“I’ve had no taste for you since the old days. Forever getting your head patted by that person merely for being the direct disciple…”
“I return the words unaltered. Forever trailing after Ephthal-sama and me through every hour of our training, and getting in the way…”
The two of them glared, the air taut enough that a fight might break out on the spot. And staying here much longer risked their catching on to any number of things. Of the thirty-six stratagems, retreat is the finest, as the saying goes. I clapped Merlin on the shoulder.
“Well then, shall we be off, Merlin-sama? To deal with this foreign tribe!”
And just as I was making to hustle us out of there—
“Wait a moment, you?”
“Y-yes? What is it?”
“You’re Merlin-chan’s disciple, are you not?”
“W-well… more or less.”
My eyes darted, I’m sure, but good, Svetlana didn’t seem to have noticed a thing.
“Then might Big Sis call you Junior, from here on?”
“J-Junior? What are you suddenly—?”
“Yes. Big Sis can’t abide this old woman called Merlin, but a capable mage she does love.”
“If I’m an old woman, then so are you, Svetlana!”
“Oh? The firmness of our skin rather differs.”
At that Merlin studied Svetlana closely, then looked down at the back of her own hand—
“Damn it all!”
—and, with the cry, slammed a fist into the wall. Now, Svetlana’s skin was certainly the dewier of the two, but surely that’s a matter of toner and skincare rather than anything else. Merlin does mind her appearance, but she’s a warrior at the core and mannish with it. Against a Svetlana who lacquers on the manicure, there’s no imagining she’d win on sheer diligence of upkeep. And there Maria put her oar in.
“No, from where I’m standing, Svetlana-sama, you’re also—”
Maria had evidently found her opening—here, this is where I can win!—and wore a bold little smile. Svetlana studied Maria just as closely, then looked down at the back of her own hand—
“Damn it all!”
—and, with the same cry, slammed a fist into the wall.
That got a small laugh out of me. One way or another, they really are just as they were: like sisters. Merlin the elder, Svetlana the younger, forever chasing Merlin’s back and copying whatever she did.
“So why Junior, Svetlana-sama?”
“Well, you see, Big Sis is in fact a mage of the Ephthal school herself, a small one. To that old woman over there—to Merlin—I’m a sister-disciple under the first Thunder God Emperor, Ephthal-sama.”
“A mage…?”
“Yes. I’ve gone on honing the craft for all four hundred years.”
And at that, my chest went warm and tight. Born strong from the start, she’d never had any need to use magic. And yet she’d always tagged along to my training with Merlin… and before I’d quite noticed, I’d been teaching magic to this child as naturally as to Merlin herself. When the time came to send her back to the Dragon Emperor, she’d wept, and carried home a great armful of grimoires, saying they were the bond between us.
—She’d gone on studying magic all this time.
The thought caught me off guard, and, unbidden, the backs of my eyes went hot.
“Humans are, I do think, weak and dull things for the most part, but here and there among them is someone remarkable, someone who crosses the barrier of species by sheer effort. And that’s why the birth of a fine new mage makes Big Sis so honestly glad.”
Svetlana wore the far-off look of someone remembering something. She smiled, and gave a small nod.
“Everyone who studies magic in earnest is a fellow traveler on the same road. So I’ll take the liberty of calling you Junior. The effort you made—driving yourself, in a mere human body, to the level of not so much as flinching at Big Sis’s aura—is worthy of nothing but admiration and respect.”
“…”
“By the way, Junior, haven’t the two of us met somewhere before? Big Sis did just now… throw her arms around you, didn’t she?”
A single line of cold sweat ran down my back. Better, without doubt, to beat a retreat from here at once. And, just as before, Svetlana looped both arms around my neck and pulled me in, pressing my face to her chest.
“There, you see! The urge to do this came out all on its own! This is a greeting Big Sis—no, that the dragonkin—give only to those they’ve truly opened their hearts to.”
No, did the dragonkin ever have any such custom? Then again, Svetlana’s about the only female dragon I’ve ever known.
And so, for my part, there was only one way to answer.
“No, this is the first time I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you.”
In this life, at least, I added, and smiled wryly to myself.