The Aust Ducal House and the Celebration (2)
A few days later, a carriage bearing the crest of House Phoenix arrived at its destination — the mansion where House Aust had opened their ballroom for the evening.
The ballroom was already in full swing, a clamor of voices rolling through the hall. Crowds packed every corner — nobles, for the most part, and the attendants who served them. Food had been laid out in lavish abundance.
"Until the celebration officially begins, wait quietly."
"Yes. I understand."
At the words of Count Sunlight, head of House Phoenix, his son Free nodded and moved off elsewhere.
The waiting room of House Aust's young lady.
"Oh my! Lady Aura, you're so beautiful!"
"......"
The star of tonight's birthday banquet sat before a mirror while a maid attended to her finishing touches. Aura — her hair a pure-white ponytail, her eyes a blue-green — wore a dress of the same unsullied white as her hair. The maid who had dressed her was making a fuss all by herself, going on about how radiant she looked.
"Last of all, let's tie this red ribbon at the back of your hair! It will complement Lady Aura's style wonderfully. You're sure to stand out in the ballroom!"
"......"
Aura still said nothing. She simply sat there like a doll, her expression dark.
"...Thank you. I'll take care of the rest myself."
"Yes! Then I'll take my leave!"
The toilette was nearly finished anyway; Aura could be left on her own. The maid withdrew.
Aura let out a quiet sigh.
...Father. What on earth is he thinking? He can talk all he likes about how the times have changed. But a man who has spent his entire life training with the sword — to suddenly tell his own child to learn magic instead...
She was sad. The person she had loved and looked up to all her life — her father, famed across the continent as the Sword Saint — had told his own daughter to set aside the blade and take up magic.
I'm a swordswoman. I have no desire to become a mage.
It wasn't that she disliked magic, exactly. But she had been born and raised in this house of the sword, House Aust, from the moment she drew her first breath. Even at her first-birthday ritual, the object her infant hand had closed around had been a small sword. That was how deeply Aura's fate was bound to the blade — inseparable, impossible to cut away.
So the age of the sword is over, and the age of mages has come? Even so — how could he say such a thing to his own daughter?
As she turned the memory over again, she felt tears welling at the corners of her eyes before she knew it, and wiped them away with her hand. One drop slipped past her fingers, traced the line of her cheek, and fell from the edge of her jaw to the floor with a soft tap.
That was when it came. A knock at the door.
"Lady Aura. It is time for you to go out."
The hour had come. Time to step outside.
"...I understand. I'll be ready and out shortly."
She wiped beneath her slightly reddened eyes with each palm in turn, then rose from her seat. Whatever else, this birthday party had been thrown for her. She could hardly refuse to appear. Tonight, the star of the ball was no one but herself.
And so Aura's footsteps carried her toward the ballroom.
"The house of the Sword Saint, huh..."
I was standing to one side of the ballroom, having just picked up a plate from a long table draped in white cloth. With my other hand I speared food from the spread with a fork and brought it to my mouth. The journey here had offered nothing worth eating, and I had been craving a proper, lavish meal for some time.
Even as I ate to quiet my hunger, another part of my mind was turning over the Sword Saint's house that had hosted this party — House Aust.
From what I looked into before coming, House Aust is one of only two ducal houses in the Empire. And unlike most, they are a family that specializes not in magic, but in the sword.
So why had that same house of the sword — a family that had clung to the blade all this time — suddenly decided to throw a party like this? By "a party like this," I meant the nobles crowding my field of view in every direction, dressed in every shade of splendor. One look was enough. The power they carried was not the battle-aura of swordsmen, but mana — magical power. Their children, too, every last one of them, held mana in their bodies. I had already confirmed as much through the magic circle that had risen in one eye.
Not a swordsman among them. All of them mages.
I had invoked magic this way once before as well, through the blue pentagram inscribed in a single eye. It was one of the signature spells I had favored on the battlefield in my previous life: Magical Eyes.
The burden was heavier than it looked. Deploying it in both eyes was generally difficult, so under ordinary circumstances I could activate it in only one. It was a magic I had developed independently in my previous life, stumbled upon while devouring low-grade grimoires.
Magical Eyes had been modeled after what mages called a second heart — the Mana Heart formed by concentrating mana in the actual heart. A mage takes in the natural mana drifting through the surrounding air, converts it into their own, and through that process forges another heart within the heart. The fundamental purpose of creating a Mana Heart is to fix the mana one has so painstakingly drawn in, so that it does not scatter — and, ultimately, to store it, so that it can be drawn forth at will whenever one wishes. Through that organ, that medium, a mage gains the ability to wield the mana within their body with far greater freedom.
And I had grafted that principle onto my eyes. More precisely, not the eyes themselves, but the optic nerves. Anyone who studies magic eventually finds that a certain degree of biological knowledge becomes indispensable, and I had, in the past, devoted some study to the structure of the human body. Based on what I had learned, the blood vessels of the brain and those of the heart are connected. Using that connection, I could move mana from the heart to the brain, deliver it to the optic nerves, and turn one eye into an entirely separate medium for mana.
Put simply, I now possessed two mana mediums — two Mana Hearts — in a single body. This artificial medium, Magical Eyes, allowed me to trigger silent casting at far greater speed, skipping the usual sequence of steps and bypassing the heart altogether.
It was only January, and the weather was still rather cold. I had the body of a child who had only just turned ten this year, still downy and peach-soft, and of course I had not yet adapted to the chill; I felt it more keenly than anyone else in the room. The indoor air was fairly warm, but if I had known, I would have layered something thicker underneath before coming. Idle thoughts like that carried me through the last of the food. I set the empty plate quietly back on the table and was looking for something to drink, my throat dry, when—
Bwoooom—!
A trumpet blared, sudden and huge, and a man cried out across the ballroom.
At last the host of the ball — and the true star of the evening — were about to show their faces.
Down the broad central staircase came a towering man of gray hair, his presence solid and formidable, his features carved in strength. The tuxedo he wore strained around a body packed with trained muscle, looking for all the world as if the seams might burst at any moment.
Beside him, descending the same stairs with modest, measured steps, was a beautiful young girl whose hair was a pure-white ponytail. Her skin was flawless, without a single blemish, and beneath blue-green eyes a beauty mark drew the gaze and held it. Her dress, like her hair, was pure white and edged with frills; a large red ribbon at the back of her head seemed to finish the whole arrangement, pinning her style in place.
"......"
That little girl was, by some coincidence, the same age as I was this year — the widely known only daughter of the Aust Ducal House, Lady Aura von Aust.
Before I knew it, the boys my age standing nearby — children still, every one of them — had gone slack-jawed at that luminous beauty, a flush rising uniformly across their faces.