Encounter
Encounter
I was glad to see some familiar faces after so long, but there was an unwritten rule about not dragging tired people into lengthy goodbyes.
After finishing our meal, we promised to meet again and headed for the Raviel Wyvern Station. Originally, we'd planned to part ways at the inn, but they insisted on seeing us off all the way to the station, saying we'd been a huge help yet again, and I couldn't bring myself to refuse their sincerity.
As I watched them stroll along the street with us, laughing cheerfully despite their obvious fatigue, a faint smile on my lips, Asilie poked me in the side and spoke up.
"You're getting quite a lot of trust from them, considering you've only traveled together once?"
"Of course. Look who taught me."
If nothing else, I could now be certain that we'd have to reach at least Red-rank, the 4th tier, before adventurers roughly on par with our level started to appear. With a little more effort, it wouldn't be too hard to reach the next step up, Purple-rank. Not that it was purely about brute combat ability, of course—so it'd take a bit more time.
"Anyway, you say you can see the flow of Magic Power. That's the first time I've ever heard of such a thing in my life. Maybe it's similar to a demon eye? Should I call it Magic Sight then?"
While Gaendal's party went up to their lodgings to drop off their equipment, I quickly relayed what I hadn't been able to tell her earlier. Asilie's reaction was more underwhelming than I'd expected.
She herself said she'd never heard of anything like it before, and when I thought back to how everyone—including Ragnis—had been shocked every time I used it to cut magic, I'd expected her to be a little more flustered. Her calm reaction was surprising.
"You're taking this pretty calmly?"
"Of course. Think about who I've been living with."
Having suddenly become some kind of conglomeration of things an elf who'd lived over 120 years had never experienced in her entire life, I could only make a dumbfounded expression.
"You talk as if I'm some hotbed of incomprehensible mysteries. There are plenty of people in the world who leap around more than I do."
"Sure, that's true, but at 15, would there be more than a handful of people who leap around like Eldi? Even the man they called the youngest Aura Master was 25. But right now, Eldi, you're using Magic Power and all, but judging by your movements alone, you seemed like you could fight without trouble against people who are Aura Experts."
"What the hell. Aura Master? Expert? There are such things?"
My eyes went wide at the fantasy-novel-sounding words I was hearing for the first time in my life, even while working for House Ogatorf. Everyone who saw me just called me an Aura user.
"Magic has tiers, so obviously Aura has tiers too."
"No, but the bastards who see me all just say, 'He's an Aura user!'"
"Maybe it's because that's really all they can sense from Eldi?"
So, to those who can use Aura, my level was so negligible I was just an 'Aura user', and to those who couldn't use Aura, they just couldn't grasp my level at all, so they lumped me in vaguely as an 'Aura user'.
Thinking about it, that was a damn sound and reasonable deduction.
In the end, fifteen years into my reincarnation in this other world, I learned that people who used Aura were divided into Beginner, Expert, and Master. Collectively, they were called Aura wielders or Aura users.
"The classification is pretty simple."
"It's an ability that relies almost entirely on feel, not like mages who study it as an academic field. I heard the standards were set not by saying, 'If you can do this to this extent, you're this grade,' but more like, 'If you can roughly do this, you seem to be around this grade.'"
I'd wondered, and sure enough, it was a typically warrior-like reason.
We mingled like that, sharing various stories about what had happened during the week I'd been away, and by the time we arrived at the Wyvern Station, I spotted Gies, who was tossing feed to his wyvern and drinking water.
No one had expected him to arrive so early, and Yekaterina, the most surprised of us all, was the first to speak.
"What, you were already here?"
"Ah, everyone. Did you settle things well?"
"We settled them decently. But how'd you get here so early?"
Judging by the gleaming wyvern—which seemed to have been wiped free of dust, unlike earlier—and Gies with his sleeves rolled up, I ran some rough calculations and it was clear he'd arrived much faster than when we'd flown together. We hadn't even spent that much time chewing out the guild leader. Amazing.
Our shared curiosity was surprisingly resolved in an anticlimactic way.
"There's no need to control speed when there are no passengers. I came back at top speed."
Smiling, Gies personally proved that he hadn't treated that guy Gwens, who'd been riding behind him, as a person at all.
Then, he naturally pulled an antique-looking letter envelope from his chest and handed it to me.
"When I arrived at the mansion, the guards informed me that a letter had come for you, Eldmia."
"A letter? There's no one who'd send a letter to me at House Ogatorf."
"It had quite an antique-looking envelope and seal wax for something like that. There was something inside too."
Duke Lesrom, who'd sent his flight permit in secret, wouldn't have sent a letter again now, and Zikmel wouldn't have expensive letter envelopes or seals. So who the hell was it? It wasn't particularly secret, so as I prepared to open it right there in front of everyone, my companions gathered around with curiosity.
In this world, even reading a letter became a sort of spectacle if it wasn't private. Having grown used to that myself by now, I didn't particularly try to keep my distance from them. On the contrary, I even knelt down to adjust the height so Gin could read it more easily.
"Oh, the envelope alone looks a bit expensive, doesn't it?"
At Rellie's words, I reflexively nodded. It wasn't wrong, after all. But when I tore open that slightly large envelope and saw the contents, we couldn't help but be shocked once more.
"Blank paper?!"
"Ah, wait. I think I'm gonna get dizzy."
Because, like a matryoshka doll, another letter envelope made of white paper—something you could easily see in the modern world—had appeared inside.
In this world, that stuff's a luxury item expensive enough to make your eyeballs pop out. Hell, even genuinely well-made books are rarely made from white paper, which says it all.
Just from the fact that someone had made a letter envelope out of that and sent it, from a normal perspective, it'd be natural to feel like it was practically pissing money away. Naturally, everyone's attention focused on the letter envelope in my hands as if it were some kind of treasure.
I pulled out the letter envelope that had stirred so many questions in that short moment and examined the seal wax. Over the entirely non-standard pure white wax, some kind of star-shaped candy-like emblem was stamped.
White... star...?
"White paper and white seal wax. I could believe it's a letter from the Empire."
This time, Gaendal reacted as soon as he saw it. Was seal wax expensive too? I had absolutely no idea about this. At any rate, his reaction was half astonishment, half alarm.
From an adventurer's standpoint, receiving a letter out of the blue from someone equivalent to a high noble would be nerve-wracking as hell. Hell, even without knowing who sent it, seeing in real-time someone flaunting a luxury that only a fairly high-ranking noble could afford—wouldn't that normally be a terrifying phenomenon that shouldn't even happen?
Of course, I wasn't normal, so I had to feel something completely different.
"Esmue?"
I muttered quietly to myself without realizing it and carefully broke the seal wax to examine the contents. Inside were two sheets of paper that seemed just as high-quality as the envelope, and a thin ring.
But what caught my eye even before the contents of the letter was the crest neatly stamped at the top of the first page.
"The Dragon Entwined with Sword Crest and the Star Crest...!"
"I-it's really from the Empire? And it says First Princess at that?!"
The people craning their necks to examine the contents with me suppressed their voices in admiration. And then they hurriedly covered their mouths, worried someone nearby might have overheard.
"Ega? Is this really an Imperial letter? Really? A letter from the First Princess, the one they call the Iron-Blood Princess?"
Among our party, excluding Asilie and me, Rellie in particular wavered in shock and astonishment, agonizing over whether it was okay to gawk at this or not. But since it was a sudden situation for me too, I couldn't exactly address that.
First, I confirmed that the official letter disguised as a personal note expressed strong regret regarding the series of schemes and incidents unfolding around Ragnis, while simultaneously concluding that the Empire would do its utmost to step forward for her innocence. I could only tilt my head.
"Why send this to me?"
Because no matter how I looked at it, there seemed to be no reason for me to personally receive it and deliver it to the royal family.
"I think... it's probably something like pressure or a warning toward the royal family."
Asilie, who'd been quietly reading the letter alongside me, answered after a brief moment of thought.
"Just the fact that this situation occurred at all comes very close to expressing extreme regret in a way that says the royal family doesn't deserve to receive an official Imperial letter directly... something like that. Whether Eldi delivers it directly or delivers it through Lord Ekaf, the royal family will get pretty noisy."
"Is this sort of thing common?"
"It's not common, and under normal circumstances, you could even say the Empire is being rude, but this time is a bit different."
Even without Asilie elaborating further, I could easily guess why this time was different. The official letter seemed to conclude there, but since there was nothing written anywhere about the ring, I unfolded the second sheet of paper.
I figured it'd come with the official letter and would say something like 'use this ring to prove and guarantee your identity.'
With that thought in mind, when I naturally unfolded the second sheet of stationery, I had to regret my own complacency.
"From my White Star... to my beloved Black Star...?"
Because we all read the first heading together without a moment to breathe, attention was now focused on me, not the letter.