Agnes-Style Spirit Contract (1)
Another week had passed since that day.
Before anyone knew it, the second semester of our first year at Luminor Academy had all but run its course. Most of the second-semester lectures would wrap up next week, and after that, only the end-of-term Hunting Festival — the one nearly the entire Combat Department took part in — remained on the calendar. Which meant that if there was anything I needed to settle before the term ended, I had precisely this week to do it in.
…And right now, two major problems remained on my plate. The first was somehow managing to take a single match off Harold in next week's magic swordsmanship class. The other was getting a lower spirit attached to Agnes before this semester's Spirit Affinity lectures came to an end.
If I didn't have both squared away in advance, they were bound to cause trouble in my future relationships — one with Harold, and the other with Agnes.
Well then. I suppose I'd better start with what needs doing right this moment.
The event where you place a newborn spirit into Agnes's hands and have her form a contract. I hadn't exactly pursued Agnes's route, but I had a rough idea of what the method involved. Theory time was over. Now was the hour of the practical contract.
The Spirit Communication lecture ended as usual, leaving the classroom empty. For our by-now-traditional voluntary supplementary lesson, Agnes and I were once again hard at work on her training — coaxing a spirit to accept her.
"You remember what to do, Miss Blaze? Just breathe in slowly, refine the mana, and breathe it out."
"Haaah, hooo… Haaah, hooo…"
"How is it, Sally? Sei?"
'Mmm~! Compared to how it was at the start, it's pretty good? I'd say if nobody was paying close attention, they might not even notice?'
'…Agnes, now, no weird smell.'
…"Weird smell," honestly. What a way with words.
While helping Agnes train for her spirit contract, I was also doing my best to correct Sei's hopeless speech habits at the same time.
"One moment, Sei. I've told you not to use expressions like that. Telling a girl her mana smells like it's rotting can very easily wound her—"
"…The kids' opinions are fine, so you just shut— quit worrying about it."
"Your focus is slipping, Miss Blaze."
"…And whose fault is that?"
Honestly, that habit of hers — the instant anything went wrong, lashing out at everyone but herself — really needed fixing.
Still, all things considered, the plan to attach a lower spirit to her was proceeding smoothly. For now, at least.
In order to attach a newborn lower spirit to Agnes, we first needed to suppress the foul stench radiating from her mana. Even spirits far too young to have formed any concept of what mana "tastes" like still instinctively recoil from a bad smell — that much was simply unavoidable.
Hiding that scent and luring the spirits in close enough to contract was, for the time being, the only way Agnes could manage a spirit contract at all. For her own sake as much as anyone's, she needed to build up a little more patience.
And like any classic fire mage, she'd fly off the handle at the slightest provocation — that temper, too, had to be kept on a leash for the time being.
"As I've told you before, Miss Blaze. If you don't keep that small-dog temper of yours in check for a while, then in actual combat—"
"…Rosewood. Let me say this just in case."
"Yes, Miss Blaze?"
"…The only reason I'm calmly putting up with your shameless attitude right now is because I need your help with the spirit contract. Nothing more."
"You were calmly putting up with me? I'm far more astonished to learn what your temper must be like normally, if this counts as restraint."
"…Just try failing to get me a spirit contract before this semester ends. I promise you, I won't let it slide."
…Well. If it came to that, I'd very likely suffer something genuinely unpleasant.
The most probable future was my name being called out by Agnes in the evaluation duels of the very next semester. In a duel between mages, the gap between Agnes and me was overwhelming. And since she was a competent character to boot, it probably wouldn't take her long after the fight began to figure out that Mana Blast was my one and only trick. If that happened, there was a very real chance she'd spend the entire duration of the Magic Department's evaluation match toying with me, raining down fire magic in what would amount to outright torture.
For a moment, I could see it — a future in which I was begging her to just kill me already so the death-prevention magic would activate.
If I want to avoid a future like that, I have to make this succeed no matter what.
Right now, Agnes was the only student in the entire Spirit Communication lecture who had yet to contract with a spirit. If she failed and let the semester end that way, then judging by the grades that would be wrecked and the humiliation that would come flooding in, a revenge of exactly the scale I was imagining would absolutely find its way back to me.
…And that was precisely why I had spent the entire past semester putting Agnes through her "preparations" for a spirit contract.
"There's no need to worry, Miss Blaze."
"About what?"
"Because the time has nearly come for you to make your own spirit contract, Miss Blaze."
"…Wha — what? R-really?!"
"Two nights from now, please come to the Dark Forest north of the academy."
"Two nights from now…?"
"Yes. The night after tomorrow will be the one and only day you can form a spirit contract, Miss Blaze."
"…That's quite a claim. Are you prepared to take responsibility for it?"
"Of course, Miss Blaze."
In my past life, I had logged well over two thousand hours in Luminor Academy alone. With twenty-four playthroughs' worth of endings under my belt, there was no way in hell I'd have missed the date of an event this major.
Two days later. The entrance to the Dark Forest.
For a number of reasons, I had arrived a little later than planned.
Agnes, who looked as though she'd been waiting for quite a while already, scrunched up her face the moment she spotted me.
"You're here early, Miss Blaze."
"…I'm late, though."
"Arriving early solves nothing. What matters is entering the forest at the appointed time."
"Then you should have told me the appointed time properly…!"
"And there's no harm in being prepared ahead of schedule, is there?"
"Gh — ghh…!"
Seriously, if only I could fix that short fuse of hers. Knowing her, she'd probably blow up mid-contract, botch the whole thing, and then come blaming it all on me. In any case, since I hadn't slipped out of the dorm in the dead of night just to torment her, I fully intended to see her spirit contract through to the end. If nothing else, I was terrified of the retribution she'd dish out if things went wrong.
"By the way — how does someone like you even manage to sneak out at this hour?"
"Pardon?"
"Does your fiancé let a girl wander out alone this late at night? Things not going well between you two?"
"…I haven't the faintest idea what you mean, Miss Blaze. Young Master Edan and I are, for various circumstances, merely lovers at present. We are not engaged."
"I watched the two of you sucking face down by the lakeshore, you know."
"That was part of a life-saving procedure known as artificial respiration—"
"Spare me. Just tell me how the contract works. Fail today and I really won't let it go."
…Honestly, that temper of hers.
Ugh, whatever. Once this semester was over I'd have no reason to deal with her anyway, so I just needed to grit my teeth and bear it. Rather than drag things out with a pointless argument, it seemed far wiser to get on with my original purpose — helping Agnes form her spirit contract.
First, I explained to her the principle behind why a spirit contract would be possible for her tonight.
"First, allow me to explain how you'll be able to form a spirit contract, Miss Blaze."
"…Fine."
"For that, you'll need to understand what kind of day today actually is. Does any particular date come to mind?"
"…A date that comes to mind? How am I supposed to know just from that?"
"Really? I'd have expected the top student of the Magic Department to know. Well, I suppose I have no choice but to explain it to you—"
"…The night of the year's largest full moon. The fifty-fifth cycle since Archmage Heinz Stein's passing. The once-per-century planetary alignment. The date of the first printing of Volume One of Bez's fire magic textbook, Fireball Fundamentals."
…Oh. So she knew it perfectly well.
It figured — top of the Magic Department or not, when it came to dates relating to magic, she reeled them off like some kind of living wiki page.
"And here I thought you didn't know. You know it quite well, in fact."
"…What does the fifty-fifth cycle since Heinz Stein's death have to do with my spirit contract…"
"The planetary alignment that returns once every hundred years. That is the condition that makes a spirit contract possible for you, Miss Blaze."
"……"
"Not the fifty-fifth cycle since Archmage Heinz Stein's death, I mean."
"…I knew that."
I let Agnes's stubborn reply slide and gave her a brief explanation of the currents of mana that rose in tandem with the planetary alignment — about the night when the full moon and the day of alignment happened to coincide, and about the day when the mana of the entire world came to a boil and every manner of mana phenomenon ran wild.
"Yeah, I know that much. That full moons sometimes cause anomalies because of their influence on mana. That monsters are affected too, and grow all the more ferocious."
"A full moon is itself a kind of planetary alignment, after all. To be precise, the moon is a satellite rather than a planet, but the effect is nearly identical, so there's no need to concern yourself with the distinction."
"…Satellite? What's that?"
"Setting that aside, I think your attention is best spent on the fact that today is the day of alignment. If you miss today, the next time you could form a spirit contract will likely be a hundred years from now."
"…Fine. I won't pester you, so just get to the point."
"What matters is the mana phenomenon. Among the anomalies born of the world's mana boiling over, the 'birth of spirits' is included."
"…And how would you even know tha— no. Go on."
"These newborn spirits, barely moments old, are the only spirits you can contract with right now, Miss Blaze."
"Spirits that were just born… what?"
Tilting her head, Agnes asked me to repeat myself, evidently failing to grasp my meaning at once. So I laid out the principle of the spirit contract for her once more, as simply as I could.
"Noble houses frequently hire wet nurses to look after their infants, don't they?"
"Yeah."
"One reason a hired wet nurse is so difficult to dismiss is that the child comes to remember the 'taste of her milk' and grows comfortable with it."
"…Yeah."
"So what you must do today, Miss Blaze, is make the newborn spirits taste your mana before anyone else's. Let them grow accustomed to that flavor, so that compared to any other mana in the world, yours is the one that tastes best to them."
"……Oh. Ohh!"
"It seems you understand now."
She had grasped, it seemed, the reason I had gone to the trouble of dragging her out to the Dark Forest on such a dangerous night.
From here on, it was finally time to reap the harvest of everything she and I had worked for.