I Respect You, Teacher Carrier
People who wear hats in the summer are a remarkable breed. Sweat runs from the scalp, the itch follows as a matter of course, and keeping the hat on anyway means none of it bothers you. Which was precisely why Lupin — conical bamboo hat on her head, gauze veil draped over even that — arrived at a conclusion.
Wow. The space around her face had become a private steam room. Were they planning to serve someone's face as boiled pork?
In the end she didn't last thirty minutes. Off came the veiled hat in one sweep, clutched to her chest, and her face was as dewy as if she had just walked out of a steam facial.
"Yeah, I really don't think this is going to work..."
"What do you mean, not going to work? What isn't?"
"It's too hot. The Cheonghwa outfit is fine — the cloth's light, the breeze goes right through. But the second I cover my face, my breath catches. Sweat just pours. I am seriously making it rain inside this hat all by myself. You know that thing? When it rains and the drops come off the eaves, plip-plip-plip-plop. That's running down my bangs. Plip-plip-plop."
Lupin, far more talkative than usual, delivered an entire speech. It accomplished nothing.
"So you're giving up on the treasure chest?"
When Klein came at her like that, there was nothing to say. Lupin deflated on the spot. For once, the balance between them had flipped.
Cheonghwa's summer was, of course, far kinder than the hellish homeland whose four seasons Lupin had endured. That dreadful humidity — the chronic disease of summer back home — wasn't even half as bad here. Even so, she was the sort who secreted broth from her entire body the moment heat got hold of her. Bamboo hat and veil went over her face and head, and it was a waterfall. For some reason this particular constitution had not changed much between before she worked herself to death and after.
That was because Lupin handled aura in a way unlike the people of Elysium. The only one who understood as much, for now, muttered it like a sigh.
"Lupin doesn't cultivate aura the way we do. So there's nothing to be done. The longer you keep at aura cultivation, the more your heart gets used to circulating it, and the aura running through your whole body keeps the heat and the cold off you."
In the language of Cheonghwa, they called it Impervious to Heat and Cold. Put in terms Lupin would actually understand, it amounted to plastering your entire body with those electromagnetic-wave-blocking stickers whose principle nobody can explain, and thereby fending off bad waves.
"I can't cultivate aura.... So summer's just supposed to kill me...."
Privileged whining, Klein thought, and kept it to herself. Lupin was a Star Apostle who had happily munched down even the Fragment of the Stars that once sat inside the Holy Ark. Her method differed from an Aura User's, that was all. Figure out the trick, and what was a little heat? Fall into lava and she wouldn't burn. Drop into a hell of ice and she wouldn't freeze.
"It's only while we're in Cheonghwa, so bear with it. Giving up on the treasure chest?"
"There is holding the prize over someone's head, and then there is this."
Meanwhile, behind Lupin's back, Klein rolled her hair round and round until it sat in a neat bun. The bamboo hat had a hole through the crown; you threaded the bun up through it and fixed it in place. Then you wound a cord around the veil, secured it, and let the gauze fall. Ta-da. Behold the birth of an ordinary swordswoman of Cheonghwa — navy martial robes, face concealed.
"Mm. This ought to do. Nobody's going to recognize you."
A pink bun jutted up through the hole in the hat, but the black veil took care of that as well. Klein, who had finished her own preparations long ago, covered her head in turn.
"Good. Let's go!"
Klein's mood had improved. Lupin's had not. Not even a minute under the veil, and beads of sweat were already gathering on her scalp, her face, her neck. Air did pass through the gauze, but hot was still hot. Her baseline temperature had simply gone up one degree. That was her story, and she was sticking to it.
Ah! I want to wind the music box!
Wind it, and it was a portable air conditioner on the spot. A thought that belonged to Lupin alone.
So what happened to the spring, huh?
Those bastards snuck it off behind the bandits' backs, they did.
She was trading pointless lines like that with herself when an unexpected savior appeared.
"Mom—! Lupin!"
It was the clone Ekaterina had posted at Lupin's side. If Lupin supervised Ekaterina's automatic chests by way of pigeons, Ekaterina tailed Lupin by way of a clone. Ekaterina's efficiency was, naturally, far worse, and she lost Lupin as a matter of course. Even now she had only just found her, after scouring the whole area, in the middle of a secluded forest.
Klein startled at the sudden appearance of the madwoman and retreated three steps.
"Wh-what. Don't tell me you've been tailing us since Rostov?!"
Lupin was a little surprised herself, but the veil had her too hot to care, and nothing in Ekaterina's expression struck her as suspicious, so she left the two of them to it.
"This is why sharp little brats are the worst. Anyway. Give me a moment to talk with Lupin?"
"Talk here. Right now Klein is as good as Lupin's proxy."
"...Proxy? What kind of nonsense is that? How are you Mom... Lupin's proxy? Leaving me out?"
"You're the weird one, actually. What did the idiot who got thrown out for doing nothing but weird things ever do right?"
A tiny chihuahua and a massive Tosa glared murder at each other and growled. But Lupin was a person who required an external brain, and with Yegor gone, Klein currently occupied that seat.
"Ekaterina, I don't know what this is about, but let Klein hear it too."
However displeased she might be, what could a dutiful daughter do when Mom told her to behave? Ekaterina grumbled in a voice gone considerably subdued.
"I want you to hold on to this. It's a component of something extremely important, so don't lose it, and keep it safe. Understand?"
She didn't explain what the object was, in case Lupin did something careless with the knowledge. The precaution was wasted. Lupin recognized the thing at a glance.
◈ A perfect match for the music box
"It's a spring that fits Frederica's music box exactly."
Lupin had been singing music box, music box for hardly any time at all, and here the spring was, arriving with impeccable timing, as if to say go on, give it a try. Master had told her not to wind it — but when had Lupin ever been a person who accounted for risk? The appraisal had even said that a deal with the Ice Spirit King would let her keep her body cold whenever she wished.
It really was an air conditioner.
She had already handled plenty of pigeon spirits, and her confidence was full to the brim. They were deep in the mountains besides, not a soul around, and thanks to the pigeons she had met along the way her spirit affinity had already hit Grade V.
A Spirit King? Get cocky with me and you're dead.
"I'm gonna take a quick look around, all right?"
Just to make sure there was no one nearby who might get caught up in it, Lupin gathered the music box and the spring and left at once. She vanished clean, and the tension settled in of its own accord. Klein edged away from Ekaterina's clone, widening the distance by inches. Her plain-clothes sword had been taken and had disappeared along with Yegor's bag, but even without it she could manage an aura whip.
And yet.
Ekaterina didn't move so much as a step. She simply stood where she was and stared at Klein.
Puzzled, Klein asked.
"What's with you. Something about you seems... different from usual......"
Whatever she was so proud of, Ekaterina planted both hands on her hips and lifted her nose.
"What. Surprised I've gotten this gallant, are you? Ha. Together with Mom— with Lupin, I am invincible. No one in the world can stop us!"
Roughly translated, this meant every treasure chest in the world belonged to them, and they were far too busy hunting treasure chests to go around flipping up women's skirts. The leap was so extreme that even Klein, who prided herself on being one of the sharper minds in the Cult, couldn't follow all of it.
"Anyway, I'm going back to where I was."
The meaning tucked inside those words, though, Klein caught at once.
"You'd like me not to show my face around here at all. Just get lost, somewhere far away?"
"But things I need to report to Lupin come up now and then. What am I supposed to do? You'll understand. Oh my — don't tell me you're jealous because Lupin and I look too close?"
The Twelfth Seat of the Imperial Roundz, squirming before a Thirteenth who amounted to little more than a mercenary on a freelance contract. Klein was just opening her mouth to jeer — What, that doesn't even twist your guts? — when it happened.
Krrrr-CRACK.
A roar like hard rock grinding rock to pieces rolled through the trees. Only it wasn't quite rock. It was a clearer sound: enormous ice colliding, splitting, and packing together again. The same sound was described in the battles between Snohaim's spirit masters and the ice spirits, in the Great Encyclopedia of Formless Aura.
And so the erudite Klein, and Ekaterina, who knew Snohaim's circumstances, turned their heads at the same time.
"...What. Is that."
Above the forest, an ice spike had thrust upward on a sheer slant. Klein was merely startled. Ekaterina was aghast.
"H-how?!"
How was she supposed to have known that the mother she had trusted without a shred of doubt would wind the music box right this instant?
Meanwhile, where Dharma Protector Cheong and Ekaterina's true body were.
Izdi, the last bloodline of Snohaim, suddenly broke into a pouring sweat and cried out in distress.
"Dharma Protector Cheong... I'm suddenly so hot..."
"Pardon? What do you mean by......"
The people of Snohaim lived in the cold north, and heat undid them. But royalty who could activate the music box were, by that very blood, able to raise a thin film of frost and the like, and so go free of the heat. It was the influence of the power left behind by Frederica, the Ice Spirit King. It was also a brand, marking the one who would someday become Frederica's vessel.
"The ice... won't form."
And yet that special power was leaving Izdi. Those clear blue eyes began, little by little, to darken.
Just then a great spike of ice came into Dharma Protector Cheong's view from the high ground. Judging by the speed and direction in which the mountain birds had taken flight, the moment it formed and the moment Izdi's power vanished were nearly the same. He turned a resentful glare on Ekaterina, but only for an instant.
"To think someone as close to the spirits as the Princess still remained on this continent...?"
Wonder came first, and worry with it. It meant that someone of high spirit affinity had just spent their life.
"Don't tell me you delivered the spring to someone behind my back?"
Ekaterina, who already knew the truth, avoided his eyes.
"Uh? Uh... I thought that would be safer."
"That person has activated the music box."
She had already known that, too, and it left her with nothing to say. Dharma Protector Cheong, who had traveled with them the whole way looking thoroughly cowed, exploded into a fury.
"Frederica's music box is under a curse as we speak. If I do not tune it, it is nothing but a device that takes lives! Why in the world would you do such a thing?!"
He hauled Izdi onto his back at once and leapt down the mountain. Ekaterina caught him in a heartbeat, seized him by the scruff, and began striding across the ridges. Her face was as grave as someone who had just lost their family.
"Then you should have told me that sooner!!"
