Mage Milia (6)
This scene takes place the moment Esmeralda left the room, chasing after the fled Irina.
And in that instant, a presence that had slipped free of everyone's awareness finally began to move.
"Milia. Happy birthday."
The demon spy, Jim.
Why would a man who had done nothing but shovel food into his mouth all evening choose this exact moment—when everyone else had vanished—to finally show his true colors?
"Thanks, Jim. Though, have you actually been enjoying the party?"
"Yes, thanks to you, I've had the chance to taste delicacies I'd never even laid eyes on before. I'm truly grateful for the opportunity."
"I'm glad you feel that way."
Jim offered Milia a bow of unmistakably polished etiquette.
To anyone who didn't know him, he would have passed for a nobleman rather than a porter. That was how practiced he looked.
As if he'd been born to it.
"Ah, but I'm afraid I've eaten rather too much. I find myself wishing to step outside and get a little air, by way of exercise. Might you be able to show me the way out of the Tower?"
"Sure. No problem. I wanted to talk more, but your health comes first. We can always talk later."
"Thank you for understanding."
"Then come on. I'll walk you out."
Milia set off ahead, her face utterly blank.
And precisely because she walked in front, Jim had no way of knowing.
What expression she was wearing at that very moment.
"Finally alone together."
Milia was smiling brighter than she ever had before.
Except…
Her eyes were deader than they had ever been, too.
Even with the guest of honor slipping out of her own party, the surrounding mages didn't so much as glance up.
That was simply what Milia meant to them.
The pride of the Magic Tower—and yet, a person no one could ever claim to be close to. Yes, like an actress in a famous troupe. Everyone admired her from afar, but not a single one of them actually knew her.
That was why Milia drifted, an outsider even within the Tower's own walls.
Jim, walking behind her, was suddenly struck by a thought.
Is Milia… angry right now?
Her blank expression, somehow, read as fury.
Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing who the target of that fury might be.
"Milia."
"Mm."
"I think it would be alright to let a little of it show on the outside, you know."
"……"
Milia's footsteps stopped.
The two of them had already left the Tower behind—out beyond even the range of the warming enchantments, into air so cold it bit to the bone.
She turned around and looked at Jim with her usual expressionless face.
"Let it show, you say?"
"Ah—yes."
But to Jim, that expressionless face looked somehow, terribly cold.
And as if to prove it was so—
"Then, Jim. May I ask you one thing?"
"Of course, Milia. Is there something on your mind?"
With a voice like frost, a gaze that chilled the marrow, and a gesture that brooked no argument, Milia spoke.
"You're planning to run, aren't you? Starting now."
"……"
It was a warning.
"Don't, Jim. Don't run away."
Her mana reached out and laid claim to the world, and a spell unfolded.
Her new technique—the very one she had demonstrated for Jim only recently.
A formless, viscous black sludge gathered and writhed, then bloomed open like a flower.
A flower of clinging, tar-black liquid—and it did not stop there. It kept expanding, kept squirming, restless and hungry.
Yes. That viscous black liquid was writhing exactly like—tentacles.
"Then you die."
Only now did Jim understand.
This was no coincidence.
She had known he meant to bolt from the very moment he'd excused himself to get some air.
"I'm going to kill you."
And that everything she said now, she meant with her whole heart.
All of this had begun around the time Esmeralda, Jim, and Irina borrowed their party formal wear from the Tower and went to change.
While they were away, Milia—the true centerpiece of the celebration—had been in conversation with Glisha, the woman who had thrown her the birthday party.
To look at them, one would have thought them mother and daughter.
Glisha was, by Tower Lord standards, relatively decent of character.
Yes—and it was precisely because of that, that she made a point of attempting personal conversation.
"Your friends certainly have… character."
"Yes. They're all very distinctive."
Milia answered with a stock reply.
Glisha nodded along even to that perfunctory response.
Their conversations always went like this.
Milia had spent far too many years with her emotions bleached pale and faded.
And Glisha had long since grown accustomed to it, so she simply repeated the same hollow ritual questions—knowing full well the girl had changed. Knowing that, in the end, nothing between them ever would.
This was Glacies Magic Tower.
A place devoted to the study of water, ice, and—stasis.
And that 'stasis' included the refusal to let one's humanity slip away.
The moment one began consciously regulating that balance, one was already well down the road of madness, and Glisha was no exception.
And yet she genuinely worried for Milia.
"Distinctive, certainly. But I wouldn't call them good friends."
Which was exactly why she never hesitated to say things that would make anyone else bristle with anger.
Milia was a wise child.
Speak to her this bluntly, and she would understand.
"They lie, all of them. Did you know that?"
So Glisha felt no need to hide her true thoughts, no need to soften her words for Milia's sake.
The Milia she knew was a genius who never questioned what she was taught—she simply understood it, instantly.
"The Hero is too busy reading the room to think for herself, and the Saintess is too busy lining her own pockets. Why, even the humble porter lives a life wrapped in concealment."
Yes—she, too, was in the end a mage hovering near transcendence. An autocrat of her own research.
Whatever she did for Milia's sake, it was still always the gaze of an outsider.
And so she didn't know.
That her words might strike the one wound Milia could not forgive.
"I don't pretend to understand why you keep a demon as a slave, but nothing good ever comes of keeping such dim-witted trash close at hand."
"Jim is—!"
That Milia, too, could be angry.
She cut her own words short, mouth snapping shut as if startled by herself.
But she wasn't the only one shocked. That flash of unambiguous emotion—so unlike her usual self—made Glisha's eyes go wide. It wasn't the act. It wasn't the social varnish a person wears to get by among others. Milia had gotten angry. She had heard her friend insulted and could not swallow the feeling.
Vividly, more vividly than she had ever felt anything.
"……Jim is a good friend."
"You've changed… more than I imagined. No—no, that isn't the point. It was that boy, wasn't it? He's the cause?"
Milia's growth was a good thing.
But if its source was a demon, it was something that could never, ever be overlooked.
Milia belatedly realized her slip and bowed her head slightly—but Glisha paid it no mind at all, pressing on with her interrogation.
To a mage, emotion is excellent fuel for growth.
Of course, once one reaches a certain height, it becomes nothing but an obstacle to be purged—but at Milia's current stage, it could be potent medicine.
Which was what worried her.
"……But that boy—he isn't even a High Demon, is he?"
And with an opponent like that, no less.
The times were perilous in the extreme.
Leviathan, the Demon King who had held his throne unshaken for decades, had been murdered, and a new Demon King—Belphegor—had ascended.
The Heavenly God Order, so ancient that even its true history had passed into guesswork, had lost its god and fallen into ruin.
The dragonkin, forever self-appointed arbiters of the world, had turned on humans and demons alike and begun rampaging like things possessed.
In a world like this, deep ties with a demon were not merely unwise. They were dangerous.
Glisha's tone grew markedly more careful as she offered her counsel.
"With a slave—or an experimental subject—you really mustn't grow too attached…"
"Jim is not a slave!"
"All the more reason not to, if he isn't! Have you not heard? Demons are running wild wherever they please across human lands as we speak!"
As Milia's voice rose, so, unconsciously, did Glisha's.
Autocrat she may have been, but her worry for Milia was entirely sincere.
Milia was the child destined to fulfill the great shared wish of all seven Magic Towers.
How could she stand by and watch a girl like that be enthralled by a demon of unknown origin and murkier convictions?
Glisha believed she thought of Milia as a daughter. In truth, she had only ever looked at her the way one looks at a possession.
Milia had known that for far longer than a day or two—but today, of all days, it cut her to the quick.
Yes. In secret, in a place where no one had ever shown her the slightest interest, she had been steadily, patiently learning what feelings were.
"Milia…"
Only when Milia's tears began to fall, one after another, did Glisha finally turn her gaze inward.
Self-contemplation is a mage's cardinal virtue. That was why mages were so adept at governing their emotions—and why, in the end, they could discard emotion altogether.
Glisha, who had sought to stand in the place of Milia's parent, had been the one swept away by feeling.
She knew it was a poor state of affairs for a mage. But she did not suppress it. Right now, it was what was needed.
"Milia, I'm sorry. But demons and humans simply cannot walk hand in hand. You know that as well as I do."
No half-blood is ever born between demon and human.
If a child is conceived between the two, that child is always, without exception, a demon.
The problem isn't merely the absence of mixed blood. The problem is the clear, uncrossable line drawn between the two races.
Demons are not like humans.
fatally, lethally unlike them.
"We can't live alongside them. You know this."
They are creatures ill-suited to fellowship.
The Demon King's Army held its discipline through the overwhelming power of the Demon King herself—but at their core, demons were little better than beasts.
They had no such thing as human attachment.
That was why they gave their own names, and each other's names, so carelessly.
It meant that, by nature, they had no need to call out to anyone at all.
To grow close to such a being—to fall in love with one—was a profoundly painful thing. Because they could leave at any moment. Because on a single fleeting whim, they would walk away from those they had spent a lifetime beside.
"……"
Even Milia found it hard to answer Glisha's earnest counsel.
Truthfully, she had known the problem all along.
Jim was kind, and he could be spoken to. But the other demons were not.
The vast majority of them were stupid, thoughtless creatures concerned with nothing beyond their own appetites.
The only ones who carried even a modicum of discipline or feeling were the rank-and-file soldiers bound by overwhelming force, or the High Demons.
But Jim—Judging from his very name, he was no High Demon at all, was he?
"Then…"
Milia had thought about that problem too.
How could she not?
She had felt it with her own skin, only recently.
Because Jim—the Jim who had spent three years at her side—lately thought of nothing but escape.
Yes. Those three years that had changed Milia's entire life might have been, to Jim, nothing but a tiresome burden. Something he couldn't wait to throw away. Something it wouldn't matter at all to lose.
That was what it felt like.
And it was heartbreaking.
So—
"Then I just have to make it so he can't think those things at all."
"Milia, you…"
Milia had learned necromancy.
Because it seemed to be the only way to place Jim entirely under her control.
Just as she had done to herself, long ago.
Strip the emotions away. Hollow him out. Turn him into a docile, obedient doll.