Sheryl Tusin Ogatorf
Sheryl Tusin Ogatorf
Adapting to Ogatorf Manor was easier than I'd expected.
I figured the biggest factor was that they'd introduced me without mentioning my connection to Ragnis at all, so there was no awkward fussing or walking on eggshells. The whole thing was resolved as "happened to bump into a kid who showed some talent and somehow ended up bringing him along," and the overflowing diligence I displayed after that self-introduction was enough to win over the family members and the servants.
Except for Sheryl, who I ended up butting heads with very intensely, nobody disliked Eldmia, the epitome of hardworking, sincere, and capable.
"Chilly."
About a year and five months had passed since Lord Ekaf hired me like that. Now that I was in the capital, whenever this season came around and winter started creeping in, I'd be reminded of when I first met Asilie and felt lonely for no damn reason.
Even though I'd clearly been living pretty damn hard, this time I didn't get the feeling that time had flown by that fast. Still, there were plenty of things you could call changes.
I turned fifteen and got a little taller, to the point where now absolutely no one would believe I was fifteen, and I'd put on more muscle, and my swordsmanship improved. I'd learned how to refine aura and figured out how to apply it, which let me use Magic Power more skillfully—a major accomplishment.
And it wasn't just me—through the letters we kept exchanging, I could tell there'd been changes for Asilie too. Stories about how the horse she'd raised for ages seemed to be nearing its time, how she'd tried cutting her hair a bit shorter, how after Alisha's persistent nagging she was now staying together with her at Alisha's inn and just going to check on the cabin now and then, and so on.
Aside from the horse I'd been with since I was eight now living on borrowed time, every story was good news, so I could rest easy.
The war with the Demon King's Army had been going on for seven years now—and I genuinely thought it was damn lucky that no bad news was reaching me.
Most of all, the luckiest thing was that the bastard who'd wrecked the foundation of my life apparently wasn't dead yet.
"Eldmia!"
Sheryl's shout, vaguely audible from a distance and familiar to the point of being sickening by now, snapped me awake in an instant. With her, she never shouted twice, so instead of responding with words I had to show myself fast. I grabbed the leather gauntlets and practice sword I'd set aside and ran.
The squires' quarters weren't far from the garden where Sheryl was. At a full sprint, did it even take thirty seconds? Despite it being February, roses bloomed profusely throughout the garden. I approached the girl standing at its center and, with what I considered proper deference, handed her the gauntlets and longsword I'd been carrying.
"Take them."
The eldest daughter of House Ogatorf, who'd tied up her well-maintained platinum-blonde hair and stood with her arms crossed in riding clothes, turned her head toward me, her purple eyes—the exact same shade as the family head Ekaf's—glinting.
I held my posture, staring straight back at that gaze. Originally, as a servant, proper etiquette would have been to bow my head and even kneel on one knee while presenting them, but with her, that was the exception.
If I looked away, she'd smack me upside the head. If I knelt, she'd knee me in the face. Why the fuck? I had no idea. She didn't hit anyone else—just me.
Even though over a year had passed since our first encounter, this infuriating brat maintained the same utterly consistent crankiness. I could be absolutely certain it wasn't something like puberty. She was just born that way.
Sometimes it lasted three seconds, sometimes ten. She'd start these bizarre staring contests that occasionally made me wonder if something was wrong with her, so I'd learned to just accept them as time to study her face.
Hm. Her red eyeliner looked like it went on better than usual today.
Every time I saw her, I thought the same thing. Sheryl was cute.
If she weren't cute, I'd have smacked her backside raw ages ago.
Since that hadn't happened yet, she damn well better be at least passably cute.
Sheryl Tusin Ogatorf, the eccentric whose reputation was widespread even at the academy, locked eyes with me for several seconds like that, then nodded and accepted the sword and gauntlets. That bizarre, unidentifiable behavior almost felt like some kind of ritual by now.
"Take your position."
There was no need to answer. She genuinely hated trivial replies. So I quietly stood across from her, pulled on the gauntlets, gripped the longsword, and settled into my stance.
After a brief silence, Sheryl launched herself forward with no signal at all and swung her sword. That was the signal, more or less. The sound of blunted training blades clashing began to fill the garden. It was a morning routine that'd been going on for the entire year I'd worked as her personal butler.
At first, it hadn't been some weird-ass position like this.
I was just a servant who worked hard, observed hard, and worked out hard whenever I had time—doing everything I was supposed to do.
Naturally, I did the work well. Everything on the practical work side, aside from etiquette, ultimately took place within the bounds of common sense and knowledge, and since I retained my memories from my past life, I could understand things in one go that others needed to hear three times to grasp.
It was like being a veteran sergeant surrounded by kids who'd been told to level the ground with shovels and were still wondering what 'level the ground' meant. Naturally, there was almost no work that was genuinely new to me. Before long, everyone treated me as the quick-learning kid who could even do mental arithmetic, and I started standing out in all sorts of duties whether I liked it or not.
But the balance that had been maintained to some extent started twisting sharply barely three months in, after I won a sparring match that was suddenly proposed.
The guy was someone who was formally undergoing the apprentice knight process. He was also a guy who was seriously letting his guard down just because he was facing a kid four years younger than him, and a guy who was either too clueless or a bit dim to understand what it meant when the family head personally ordered a sparring match. Looking at it that way, he was a pitiable guy, but I didn't feel like cutting him any slack, so I just won by clocking him in the jaw and knocking him out in one hit.
I only belatedly understood why Ekaf, who had known my skill level all along, staged that little performance so late. By then, though, I'd already become the personal butler to House Ogatorf's Young Head.
Watching Sheryl get counterattacked by me just now after launching an attack similar to that apprentice knight's back then, the memory suddenly came to mind.
"Tell me."
Sheryl could be terse and all over the place, but after all this time I'd developed a Sheryl-specific skill: no matter how badly she'd explained something, I could still understand exactly what she meant.
What this meant was: she didn't know what she'd done wrong to get countered in one blow like that, so I should spell it out for her myself.
"Unless a person's wrapped themselves well in Mana, getting cut by a sword means dying or getting hurt."
Sheryl was sharp. Even when obvious truths came out of someone's mouth, she had the composure to hear them out to the end rather than nitpick the obviousness and argue back. For someone who was barely fifteen, whether it was a difference in the education she'd received or not, she operated on a completely different plane from the typical peers that came to mind in my head.
Having to spout "do this and you die, do that and you die" talk to a fifteen-year-old was headache-inducing, but I chalked it up to the world being that kind of world and let it slide.
"But if cut wounds pile up and pile up and you lose too much blood, you die too."
"...Am I committing too hard to big attacks?"
She was good at listening, comparing, and then summarizing. Sharp.
"That's exactly it. Thinking of practice as real combat and going all-out with the intent to kill is good, but that's such an easy-to-read method that it's not very effective."
When I relaxed my stance, resumed probing, and nodded, Sheryl understood immediately and came in with a thrust. Even that went more than a step too deep, as if she meant to skewer her opponent outright, so I lightly knocked it aside, caught the blade, and swung the crossguard toward her forehead. Thunk. It stopped almost against her nose, but Sheryl didn't blink. Her eyes stayed fixed on the tip of the crossguard beside her left blocky eyebrow.
'Is this seriously just raw talent? Is she actually a past-lifer or reincarnator too?'
"I heard the sword in your hand is the weapon, not just the blade."
"Why 'you heard'?"
"Because I picked it up secondhand too?"
Even after I'd reincarnated, I wasn't some born genius.
Even if I'd lost my hometown at eight, cut down a wyvern knight (presumed) from the sky at fourteen, and was currently walking a mind-blowingly hardcore route where I'd connected with a renowned kingdom knight and was training relentlessly to achieve my revenge and purpose—at the end of the day, I was just someone whose mental faculties were a bit ahead of the curve.
I didn't have the actual skills to go around teaching others like some hotshot. Most of it was other people's knowledge.
"Why can't I pick things up?"
Sheryl's left blocky eyebrow gave a tiny twitch. Ah. I had no idea why, but she was one step away from sulking.
"You're busy as hell, and you go to the academy on top of that, dumbass. Unless the teachers tell you stuff, the rest of them are all more or less your peers—what the hell would they know?"
That wasn't wrong. In pure swordsmanship, House Ogatorf was at least the Royal Academy's equal, if not better. The academy's huge advantage was simply that it let students study many different subjects and experience things beyond swordsmanship.
After Sheryl, somewhat convinced by my answer, settled her dissatisfaction, the sparring continued for an hour with short breaks mixed in.
It wasn't easy, but Sheryl only began to show the slightest fatigue near the very end. Wondering whether that was bloodline or early training at work, I left the sweating Sheryl with the maids who helped with her bath, returned to the squires' quarters, washed up, and got ready to change.
I put on my butler uniform, which felt imposing every time I saw it, and my pocket watch, sprayed on my work cologne, then strapped on my longsword and belt and hurried to the main hall.