An Unexpected Stroke of Luck
Four years had slipped by since Rone first manifested her magic, and in that time, quite a lot had changed.
“Vel! I brought you a present!”
“Oh, um... thanks.”
The biggest change, oddly enough, was that I was no longer the one showering gifts—I was the one receiving them.
Whenever boredom struck, Rone would show up at our house and press some glittering stone she'd picked up somewhere, a stray coin, or sometimes fruit plucked from the hill behind our home into my hands.
Was this what they meant by a magpie repaying a kindness, or something like that?
I'd always assumed that once she became the great archmage of the future, I'd be the one perpetually offering tribute at her feet. Watching her already start paying me back now stirred a strange, wistful feeling in my chest.
I've never actually raised a child myself, but I imagine this must be what a father's heart feels like.
That said, it's quite a haul today.
I'd expected another piece of broken glass hauled in from who-knows-where like last time, but today she'd brought an entire basket.
A quick glance inside revealed fruit and vegetables piled nearly to the brim.
There were even apricots in there—both of our favorites.
No matter how you sliced it, this was clearly something she'd brought because she wanted to eat it herself. Best not to pry clumsily at the basket; I should defer to the future great archmage's appetite.
So there I was, turning the basket this way and that to see what else was inside, when Rone, standing beside me, suddenly rubbed her hands together and called to me in a careful voice.
“Um... hey.”
“What is it? Something on your mind?”
“Mmhm, not exactly, it's just...”
It wasn't the sort of thing you'd say to a girl, but she looked like a puppy desperate to go outside.
Usually, when Rone hemmed and hawed like this, it just meant she was too self-conscious to get the words out. One more nudge and the answer would come spilling out.
“It's okay, just say it. Did something happen?”
“It's n-not that. It's just... you haven't been praising me much lately, Vel.”
“Praising you?”
Ah, she meant the head pats.
It wasn't that I'd stopped because I disliked doing it—now that we were getting older, laying hands on a girl's body so freely just felt like it would be rude.
Besides, lately I'd caught faint hints that Rone herself was avoiding physical contact with me. She never said it outright, but whenever I grabbed her hand climbing the hill behind the house, she would suddenly shrink into herself.
She used to be the one throwing her arms around me all the time, too, but those days had quietly stopped altogether.
Is it puberty?
That was the only theory I could come up with, though it didn't quite sit right.
I'd heard that girls hit puberty earlier than boys, but surely even so, it didn't arrive at twelve.
Either way, good work deserved recognition, so I should praise her.
She was clearly hoping for it anyway, so there was no reason to hold back.
“You did great. Thank you.”
“Hehe... Mm!”
When I ruffled her hair with genuine gratitude, a bright smile bloomed across her face in an instant.
In my eyes, she still looked less like a twelve-year-old and more like a toddler of two.
Did most kids stay this pure all the way to twelve? I honestly couldn't say.
“Hm? Wait, what's this?”
As I rummaged further through the basket, I discovered a strange fruit wedged in among the apricots.
A fruit of crystalline blue, as if it had swallowed the sky itself.
Small enough to fit neatly in my boyish palm.
It wasn't a fruit that existed anywhere in my memory. What on earth was it?
“Oh, that? I found it lying around! It looked so neat that I wanted to bring it back for you.”
“Really, now.”
So the habit of showing me every interesting thing she found, before anyone else, was alive and well.
Though I never thought I'd be hearing I found it lying around in this particular case.
“Sniff, sniff.”
I gave it a cautious test sniff, but there was no distinctive scent of flesh or pulp.
Since it was a fruit I'd never seen before, eating it felt a little reckless too.
Still, it was a pretty thing to look at. Maybe I'd just keep it stored away somewhere.
“It might be poisonous, so let's set this one aside and ask Sis or Mom and Dad about it later. Got it?”
“Okay!”
Fortunately, as I slid the fruit off to the side, Rone didn't seem particularly bothered.
I'd worried she might sulk, thinking I'd rejected her gift—but if simply giving me a present was enough to make it meaningful for her, then she really was sweet beyond measure.
“By the way, Rone, where did you find that fruit?”
“In the cave up on the hill! It was sitting in a spring, all floating in the water.”
“A cave?”
Did she mean the one the wild boars used as their den up behind the house?
That girl had no fear at all. The air around that place had always given me the creeps, and I never much liked setting foot in there myself.
Well, I suppose Rone's never been the timid type.
Unless it was a snake, I'd seen her swat away spiders and the odd crawling bug with her bare hands before.
For all her delicate looks, there was a surprisingly rugged streak in her.
Though it was rather amusing how quickly she'd revert to her usual scatterbrained self the moment she was in front of me.
“Well, I've got my present, so today I'll play with you as long as you want.”
“Really?”
“Of course. Anything you feel like doing?”
“Hmm... I wanna take a nap with you!”
I'd been racking my brain for things we could play together, and she wanted a nap?
Not that I wasn't grateful—I'd just been moving my body myself—but wasn't she being considerate to a fault?
“We could do something else instead, you know.”
“Mm-mm, it's fine. Napping with you is the most fun there is.”
I offered her an alternative just in case, but Rone shook her head, firm in her desire to nap.
Somewhere in there, I couldn't help feeling she was politely implying that I was a boring playmate.
Of everything she'd ever done with me, a nap ranked the highest.
All those days spent scheming up one fun game after another, desperate to win points with her, flashed before my eyes like a passing lantern show.
Well, a win is a win. If it spared me the effort of entertaining her, who was I to complain?
And so, at Rone's insistence, I burrowed into my own bed and we drifted off into a deep nap together.
The bed was so small we had to press right up against each other—but that was nothing new after all these years, so I let it be.
About a month had passed since Rone brought home that unidentified fruit when I found my gaze drifting, again and again, to the shabby table where it sat, unable to shake the strangeness pooling in my chest.
Why hasn't it rotted?
A full month on, the blue fruit Rone had carried home still held its shape perfectly.
Not a single bruise, not even a hint of fading luster—it hadn't changed in the slightest from the moment she'd brought it in. It looked like a model crafted to imitate a fruit from that other world of mine.
What is this thing supposed to be?
Among every fruit I could remember, not one of them simply hung on a tree forever, and none could survive a month in open air at room temperature like this.
Even a banana would start speckling brown across its yellow skin by now, and a persimmon would have ripened soft and sweet.
Could it be... not an ordinary fruit after all?
The moment that thought took shape, it dawned on me—this world was a fantasy world.
And in a fantasy world, there was always that one name that appeared in every story worth telling.
Don't tell me... an elixir?
The kind of thing that showed up constantly in the martial arts tales I used to read.
Like the mythical ginseng roots shaped like children—one bite, and they'd boost your strength, granting the fruits of decades, even centuries, of training in a single swallow.
Of course, I had no real certainty that such a treasure had just fallen into my lap out of nowhere.
But elixirs had undeniably existed in the original novel, so it wasn't an impossible notion.
Besides, the detail that it had been resting in a spring inside that cave kept nagging at me.
Fine, I could accept that a storm might have blown some fruit in from somewhere—but why would exactly one strange, never-before-seen fruit be sitting there, all alone, in that place of all places?
I lay there staring at the fruit in silence for a long while, then finally shot upright.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Even if the thing was poisonous, as long as one bite didn't kill me, I'd survive to regret it.
And if it were truly something that dangerous, there was no way my parents—nearly forty years living in these parts—would have failed to notice it.
If anything goes wrong, I apologize in advance. Father, Mother, Sis.
With that resolution fixed in my mind, I looked at the blue fruit in my hand, opened my mouth wide, and bit into it without hesitation.
Squelch.
The taste was rather peculiar.
It was like the figs I'd eaten back in that other world—mildly bland yet faintly sweet—and the flesh was so abundant it practically overflowed from my mouth.
I finished it off cleanly, all the while bracing for stomach cramps or a wave of nausea to hit me at any moment.
Astoundingly, nothing happened. My body felt no different at all.
Was it really just an ordinary fruit?
It was an anticlimactic ending, to say the least.
If only my stomach had at least started cramping, I could have shrugged and thought, welp, that was an idiotic thing to do, and moved on.
Still, better this than making myself sick, I decided to take the positive view.
I'd give Rone my full review whenever she came around next.
And so, with a light heart, I was just about to step outside for a bit—
“Huh?”
I couldn't name the feeling exactly, but my steps somehow felt lighter.
I'd never been overweight, so I couldn't put it precisely, but it was as if my body weight had suddenly plummeted.
My whole frame felt lighter overall, and my footwork was unmistakably quicker.
Along with it, my mind had gone crystal clear, as if some heavy fog that had been lying across it had lifted away.
There'd always been a faint, hazy residue clouding my thoughts whenever I concentrated or sat idle—a feeling that, too, had now vanished without a trace.
Wondering if it might just be the placebo effect, I grabbed the wooden sword I'd been using for training lately and headed outside.
I settled into my usual stance, gripped the wooden sword in both hands, and swung it with everything I had.
Once didn't stop me. Twice, three times—until my body screamed for mercy.
Whoosh! Whoosh!
Thirty swings.
Forty.
Fifty.
Even after all that, I could barely feel any strain in my arms.
Barely any time had passed since I'd started training, and with my original body, my shoulders and arms would have been aching by the twentieth swing at the latest.
So it really was an elixir?
Except that didn't quite fit either—there'd been no sensation of tremendous power surging up from within me.
My body had simply grown lighter. The burden had simply lessened.
Really, that was the whole of it.
Wait a second. Could this be...?
At that thought, something suddenly surfaced in my memory.
From the original novel—the existence once hailed as the fruit of dreams for all martial artists.
The Grace of Mephisto.
An elixir that didn't amplify the power of whoever consumed it, but instead raised the ceiling of their growth and breathed vitality into their body.
If I remembered correctly, it had certainly worn a blue exterior in the novel as well.
It had only ever been mentioned in passing—the story never showed anyone actually eating it—and so, brushed aside by my memory, I'd completely forgotten it existed.
But then... had I really just picked that fruit up and eaten it?
If it's true, that would explain everything.
Clutching my fist tight, I steeled my resolve.
Perhaps this was a god's first and final blessing, granted in pity for a mediocrity like me, born without a scrap of talent.
So that the ordinary fool born beside a genius childhood friend could at least chase at her heels from behind, rather than losing sight of her entirely.
In that case, I intended to milk it for all it was worth.
Six years until the Academy's entrance exam.
Within that time, I had to do everything in my power—and then some.