Mage Milia (2)
Truth be told, Milia had no spare attention to waste on someone like Jim.
Confronted for the first time in her life with a wall she couldn't climb, she could only groan in frustration, frozen between pushing forward and backing off. A mere demon was the last thing on her mind.
But from Jim's position, blending into the Hero Party was a matter of survival, which meant he had to engage with Milia again and again.
"Milia, may I have a word with you?"
"No."
"Understood."
Frankly, he was a nuisance. She had no interest in him whatsoever; all he did was hover at the edge of her vision and irritate her.
"Milia, Milia. May I have a word with you?"
"No."
"Understood."
But Jim did not give up.
"Milia, Milia, Milia, a quick word, if I may—"
"No."
He came back again and again, and each time Milia refused him as though it were the most natural thing in the world. And yet...
Before she knew it, Milia was tracking his every movement.
Astonishingly, this was all part of Jim's scheme. If someone who usually pestered you stopped being visible, that absence itself became impossible to ignore. It was simply a reasonable strategy Jim had devised for fitting into the Hero Party—one born of experience, from the way his superiors in the army used to come hunting for him whenever he stayed out of trouble for too long.
"Milia."
"Wh-what is it you need?"
At last, a conversation took place.
Having only just decided to actually talk to Jim after weeks of maintaining her iron wall, Milia found herself growing nervous. She had always been painfully shy around strangers.
Ironically, conversation had been easier back when she didn't care about the other party at all.
Still, in a way, Milia could sense that this was an opportunity.
"May I ask what your hobbies are?"
"H-hobbies?"
"Yes! Your hobbies!"
A direct approach with a clear objective. And precisely because it was so direct, Milia could manage it.
Esmeralda and the others would only have smiled awkwardly whenever she hesitated or stammered. Everyone, Esmeralda included, already knew that Milia was hopelessly, almost comically bad with people, and so they were all patiently waiting for the day she could open up on her own.
And in that situation, Jim chose to force his way through.
A truly thoughtless assault, undertaken purely for the sake of his mission. Yet, ironically, it was exactly what Milia needed. With a timid friend, sometimes someone has to speak first.
"I-I, d-don't really have any..."
"Then how do you usually spend your time?"
"...Magic research?"
Perhaps because it was her field of expertise, Milia didn't stumble over these words.
She was the type who, once a familiar topic came up, would grow talkative with a completely unearned confidence. Normally, Esmeralda, Irina, and Tina would have wanted to engage with Milia when her mouth finally opened like this—but they simply couldn't keep up.
"If your magic keeps dispersing, have you considered anchoring it to the earth and casting from a fixed point?"
Jim was, after all, a mage. What's more, at this point in time, he was a mage of higher attainment than Milia—though only in black magic, admittedly.
As long as he was playing the porter, he couldn't flaunt his knowledge openly, so he would drop hints for her instead, couched in roundabout phrasing. A calculated move to capture her interest.
The tower masters, as a rule, simply handed Milia a single book and left it at that. They were busy, certainly—but even that much had been enough, because Milia absorbed knowledge on her own with terrifying efficiency.
"...I'll try it."
Which meant the hints Jim offered became rich nourishment for her.
Without realizing it, Jim was strengthening the Hero Party with his own two hands.
And so Milia, whose tongue was loosening, and Jim, diligently working his charm offensive against her, gradually began trading more personal matters.
"So what you mean is that you usually read books? Then reading is your hobby."
"Is... is that what it is? So that's what a hobby is."
"What a coincidence, then—reading happens to be mine as well!"
Jim was trash.
Now, it was true that reading really was one of Jim's hobbies. That part was no lie.
But he knew perfectly well that reading was not Milia's hobby.
Milia had no hobbies at all. That was the conclusion of Jim's long observation.
She showed almost no emotional expression, and though she stammered, she wasn't actually afraid of anyone. She simply had never grown accustomed to conversation itself. The reason she'd claimed reading as her hobby was merely that she had been engaged in the ongoing project of expanding her knowledge through books.
"I'll lend you some books I enjoyed sometime."
"Ah... sure."
And so Jim lent Milia a novel he'd been reading, and she—true to form—clutched the single volume and began to study it.
Yes: through an ordinary novel, something entirely unlike the books she knew, which contained nothing but magical theory—formulas, flow vectors, combinations, reversals.
"So this is what people call hatred."
Through such books, Milia came to understand emotion.
Like a hatchling pecking at its shell, struggling to break out into the world, she devoured book after book. Jim's loans had baffled her at first, but she was quickly captivated by the emotions flowing between people, carried from line to line in strings of text.
Among the books he lent her, alongside the systematic, philosophical works she already knew, were stories of pure, shameless nonsense—and so Milia often found herself frowning.
"This is impossible."
"In what way, may I ask?"
And so she confronted Jim about the garbage he'd gifted her. In situations like this, one should express irritation. She had learned that from the countless books she'd read, and so she acted accordingly. Her conversation had become natural without her even noticing.
"The idea that an ordinary person could cast spatial magic just by clicking their shoe heels together? There's no way that's possible."
Yes—she was trying to analyze even the fantasies in fairy tales. And when she failed to understand them, she finally grasped, for the first time, that all of it was make-believe.
"Ah, I see."
At the sight of Milia interrogating him with her brow furrowed, Jim grinned as though everything were going exactly according to plan.
"Is it truly impossible, though?"
"...What do you mean?"
"Milia, would you care to read this one?"
"..."
Milia's eyes narrowed into a suspicious squint, but before long she began skimming the book he handed her. Her gaze raced across the pages at tremendous speed—then, in an instant, it stopped, as if pinned to a single page.
"...The heavens?"
"Yes. Milia, do you believe the heavens—that is to say, heaven—exist?"
"I... don't know. I've never seen it, and I have no way to verify it."
"It is said this world belongs to the three realms. Among them, the realm of desire is said to encompass six worlds—and within them, it is said, there is both what we call hell and what we call the heavens."
"Is that Church doctrine?"
"A tradition that has taken root among the people."
Even among mages, opinions were divided. Some inferred heaven from the existence of god; others argued that precisely because god existed, heaven could not.
On such questions, there was no correct answer.
"This world is still full of things we don't understand. Even if you learn through books, some things simply cannot be accepted unless you see them with your own eyes."
"You think so?"
"I do. Which means there may yet exist a grand mage who can grant ordinary people the use of spatial magic with nothing more than a click of their heels."
"I... see."
Milia nodded slowly.
She had learned through books. She had learned from the tower masters' words and their instruction. But that was not the only way to learn.
When she had come face to face with her parents' corpses, she had tilted her head at something she herself could not name. Yes—she had believed until then that nothing could shake her. But seeing it with her own eyes had taught her otherwise.
"Hey, Jim."
"Yes?"
"What expression am I making right now? If you had to define the emotion behind it, what would you call it?"
Something inside her had changed. No—it had been changing for a long time. This conversation had merely been the trigger. The heart of the girl who had moved and acted like a machine had begun to churn.
Yes, she had believed she saw everything. She was special. She was a being different from everyone else. That was how she'd been raised, how she'd understood herself.
But looking upon her parents' bodies, she had learned an emotion she didn't know. She had learned what it meant not to know.
And so she could not identify the feeling rising within her now. She could not define it for herself.
"Well, from where I'm standing... I'd say contentment? It suits you, seeing you smile like that. I hope you'll smile often from now on."
"...You think so?"
Emotion was something the head could never understand, no matter how it tried. Something only the heart could feel. That was the lesson Milia had learned—that she herself could never know everything.
And so she stopped restraining the incomprehensible impulse lodged in her chest. She released the flow she had dammed up in childhood, in her desperate attempt to escape her suffering. Emotion was not something the mind could parse, after all.
Now she knew that.
"Hey, Jim."
She knew everything he'd told her so far was lip service. She knew he was working some scheme on her. She was a genius, a special person—surely she could handle whatever trap he might set.
But now? Well now. Whether this was Jim's intent or not, she simply couldn't tell...
"I'd like you to lend me more books like this. Fun ones."
"Ah—of course."
She had fallen into his spell. And she had come to believe that this wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
Because unlike everyone else, he had kept coming back to talk to her. Because he had knocked, again and again, on the door of her heart.
"Mm. Then I'll look forward to it."
Because she had come out into the world.
That day, Milia learned an emotion called the flutter of the unknown.
Tap.
Milia was at this moment inside one of the Seven Great Towers—the Glacies Magic Tower, devoted to the study of water, ice, and stillness.
She had just closed the last of the books she'd gathered from her wanderings around the village. In other words, she finally had free time.
"Jim."
Milia still knew nothing about emotion. She couldn't precisely express what to call what she felt. But she had not given up the effort to understand it.
Because simply accepting it wasn't enough. Even for things the head could never grasp and only the heart could feel, she refused to abandon the attempt to prove them.
This, too, was something she'd learned from Jim. Something she'd come to know through him.
I cannot know everything. And yet, if I believe it exists all the same...
And so Milia believed that nothing was impossible. She widened the bounds of her imagination and reached out to touch the world. And since the ways of learning never cease, she too could not simply declare anything impossible outright.
Thus she turned her feelings over and over, compared them again and again, verified them time after time.
And at last, Milia arrived—tentatively, carefully—at a provisional name for the emotion she was feeling now.
"I want to see him."
The name she had given that feeling was longing.
And behind her back, as if to embody that tenderness, black tentacles writhed and pulsed, dripping viscous fluid in fat, heavy drops.
Hiiiiissss!
Wherever the fluid touched, the surface melted away as if corroding.
Milia gazed at the slime that was the expression of her heart, and thought:
"I wish he would stay with me forever."
It was autumn.