5. Send Her Back Before She Becomes the Heroine
5. Send Her Back Before She Becomes the Heroine
I shut the door, drew the blackout curtains over the window, and waited for Beatrice.
In the darkened room, she hesitated for a moment before approaching the bed, her expression resolved.
"First, remove your outer garment and have a seat here."
"......Take off my clothes, and sit here?"
"Yes. You may lie down if you prefer."
"......I see. So that's how it is. I really was naive, wasn't I? There's no way you'd share something like that for free."
Huh?
What's gotten into her all of a sudden?
"But if it means I can escape this lifelong disease that's tormented me forever—even for just a moment."
"Your Highness?"
"I'm prepared. I was the one who said I'd do anything, so do as you please. The curtains are drawn, but it is my first time, so please be considerate......."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"Excuse me?"
Fuck, has she lost her mind?
I told her to take off her outer layer and sit on the bed, and she's putting on a whole show about resolve and first times.
"It's nothing like that, so drop the weird posture and sit comfortably. What do you take me for, some kind of horny dog? That's genuinely offensive."
"Ah, I......."
"Don't bother with excuses. Do you realize how deeply insulting what you just said was? I don't say this lightly, but I have absolutely no sexual interest in you whatsoever, Your Highness."
"......I see."
She's completely mortified now. Did she actually think that having a big chest and a pretty face meant every man would demand that sort of thing? That's textbook arrogance.
Sure, Beatrice is beautiful. In the communities where I looked up strategy guides, she had the most fan creations by far, and there was a lot of artwork that leaned pretty heavily in that direction. Her chest was enormous, too.
But by this point, getting worked up over a popular game character is long past me—I only played Dark Kingdom for about ten hours, and I've spent five whole years living in this other world since then.
Now that I've been working as Finance Director, all I see is a student with a pretty face and, more to the point, a building-destroyer: one of the Financial Destruction Four Heavenly Kings.
Fortunately, she still had enough shame to recognize the embarrassment. Her face went bright red, she ducked her head low, and she sat quietly on the bed.
"Now then."
"Y-yes."
"Use magic."
"What?!"
"Until you've exhausted every last drop of your mana. Scrape it all out. Every bit."
"......."
"I mean absolutely empty."
That was the first step in curing her chronic disease.
But Beatrice looked deeply bewildered.
"Finance Director, you've seen my affliction—why on earth would you......? This entire dormitory will collapse!"
"No attack magic. [Luminescence] will be enough."
"Oh."
"So, are you going to do it or not?"
"N-no! If it's Luminescence, then......."
[Luminescence]
Luminescence: the foundational spell for producing light.
Its mana consumption is substantial, but its sheer utility means every mage learns it.
And it was the opening pattern of Beatrice's boss fight in the game.
'Once the battle starts, she casts Luminescence and runs off to the top of the clock tower.'
All she did was flee unilaterally, while the out-of-control Luminescence spell shrouded the tower in erratic light, forcing you to navigate around it...... It was less a boss fight and more a platformer stage.
When I first tried it, I thought, what kind of boss is this?
You start at the first floor of the clock tower, where the boss fight takes place, push through the interference from her Luminescence, and chase her all the way to the top. Only then does the real boss fight begin.
"Normally, Luminescence consumes a great deal of mana during creation and is efficient to maintain, but I want you to keep shoving mana into it regardless. Worst case, if it runs wild, it's just light flashing in different colors."
"Haaah, haaah......!"
Flash!
Beatrice followed my instruction to empty herself completely and poured mana into the Luminescence spell without pause.
Predictably, overloaded with her immense mana, the spell quickly slipped beyond Beatrice's control: now blazing with searing brightness, now flickering with the faintest glimmer, its form warping into every shape except a perfect sphere.
She couldn't even dispel her own magic at will. This brute-force approach was the best way to drain her dry—back when I played the original game, and now.
So I watched. I watched the Luminescence spell go haywire in every conceivable way—a light show in the grip of an existential crisis. Or I shut my eyes until it was over.
"It's getting...... about time......!"
"Keep going. Don't stop."
Maybe thirty minutes had passed. Beatrice's arms were trembling, and cold sweat was trickling down her skin.
To a mage, mana is like air. It's always there, easy to inhale and exhale, but you can't endure for long in a state of complete absence.
Beatrice's reaction was closer to an instinctive rejection. A body steeped in mana her entire life was refusing to be emptied out.
But she had to do it. I'm not a mage, so I can't know how much agony she's in right now—but she still had to do it.
"Didn't you say yourself you'd do anything? Don't forget that."
"Hrrk......!"
It was excruciating.
Beatrice clenched her jaw tight enough to draw blood and squeezed her eyes shut. The moment she forced even that last handful of remaining mana into the Luminescence spell—
Her body no longer held a trace of mana.
"Kurk—!"
"Now. Absorb the mana in the bed."
"Hrk, hck."
"I know it's hard to breathe. Every instinct is screaming at you to suck up all the mana you can. But do it slowly, carefully. Absorb only the bare minimum and leave it at that."
You think I told her to sit on the bed for nothing? This bed is an artifact.
The Chairwoman gave it to me as a gift last year, when I'd driven myself to the verge of collapse from overwork and sleep deprivation. It was supposed to smooth the flow of mana and promote deep sleep.
Since I'm 1st Rank and barely possess any mana to speak of, it wasn't much use to me—but as a soft, comfortable bed, I was perfectly happy with it.
And now Beatrice was—
In a state of mana exhaustion, drawing on the mana embedded within the bed artifact.
She could have gulped it down like a man dying of thirst lunging for water. But she kept her bloodshot eyes open and did as I said: holding only a single drop, as if from a bottle—the absolute bare minimum of mana in her body. Just enough to keep going.
The preparation was complete.
"Don't absorb it—use the mana still remaining in the artifact. Cast the spell with that."
"Ugh...... aa......."
"Luminescence. Focus."
Barely able to speak, Beatrice lifted a trembling hand with great effort.
Even through a face contorted with agony, she used the mana from the bed artifact to muster a spell.
[Luminescence]
That light—
"Ah......?"
"Do you see it?"
"Hrk, cough."
"Try to control it however you like."
It wasn't running wild. It didn't spiral out of control. The light shone clean and steady in a perfect sphere.
Beatrice's bloodshot eyes flew wide open. When she moved her hand, the Luminescence spell moved with it. It grew larger, dimmer, brighter—everything according to her will.
And at the same time.
Drip. Drip.
".........."
"Ugh...... ah......!"
Beatrice was crying.
For the first time in her life, a spell obeyed her intent. She could barely manage a proper voice, but she kept making sounds through her tears.
Groans layered with lament I couldn't begin to measure, with awe, with longing.
She moved the Luminescence around for a long while. By the time the sheets were soaked with her tears, I stepped out of the room briefly, brought back a bottle of elixir, and handed it to her.
"Drink."
"......!"
Gulp. Gulp.
To a mage, an elixir that replenishes mana is much like water. To someone who'd absorbed only the dregs of mana while utterly drained, it must have looked like the water of life itself.
Beatrice downed the entire bottle in one go, and for a moment her expression went blank.
Then she raised her head and looked at me.
Her eyes were filled with absolute trust.
"How......?"
"The Chairwoman put forward a hypothesis. If a spell manifests normally but becomes impossible to control immediately afterward, perhaps the problem lies in Your Highness's mana itself."
"My mana?"
"More precisely, I believe it's a matter of constitution. A constitution in which your own mana degenerates into something uncontrollable."
This is all bullshit. I was just making up an excuse based on what I'd seen in the game.
Even so, Beatrice listened with utter seriousness. After all, she had just experienced a miracle with her own eyes.
"So, not using my own mana......."
"But external mana—mana stored in an artifact—to cast the spell......?"
"Exactly. However, even if you absorb mana from an artifact, it immediately mingles with your own mana. That's why we needed to empty you out completely first."
If I had to draw a comparison, Beatrice's mana is like seawater, and an artifact's mana is like fresh water.
To use fresh water as-is, any remaining seawater will just contaminate it and leave you with unusable brine. So you drain out every last drop of seawater and ensure you're working solely with fresh water.
......That was the tooltip that appeared in the game after you recruited Beatrice as a companion.
"So that's why it's not a permanent cure—only temporary."
"That's right. Every time you cast magic, you have to reach a state of mana exhaustion, and then use an artifact's mana to cast."
Even just now, it took over twenty minutes to reach mana exhaustion, and on top of that, it requires an artifact.
What's more—
"Take a good feel of the bed."
"Huh? The artifact is......?"
"Forcibly extracting its embedded mana will almost certainly destroy its original function. The efficiency is terrible to begin with, anyway."
An artifact drained of mana is almost certainly ruined, and even when you do manage it, the efficiency is abysmal.
Even if you extracted every drop of mana from the bed artifact, I doubt you'd manage more than a few [Fireball]s.
This right here was the reason I'd been reluctant to share this method with Beatrice.
'Put bluntly, it requires an obscene amount of money.'
Of course, she may be the fourth princess, but she's still a royal princess. Buying a decent number of artifacts and carrying them around wouldn't be much of a financial burden for her.
But that's when she was back home. Here at the academy, she doesn't have much money. And artifacts, just to be clear, are the sort of thing even most nouveaux riches wouldn't dare buy on a whim.
'Last time she brought bribes, she even said she couldn't bring much.'
To win that duel against Chloe, she'd need a substantial number of artifacts, and to buy them, she'd have to pay with the valuables she brought with her.
I'll say it again: artifacts do not come cheap. Add to that the fact that no one knows exactly how many artifacts you'd need to beat a mage of Chloe's caliber, so the correct answer is simply to buy as many as you possibly can.
But if she did that, the additional bribes I was going to squeeze out of her would vanish!
Yet if I took more bribes now, she wouldn't be able to buy the artifacts she needs to face Chloe. A genuine dilemma...... but not one without a solution.
"With this, do you think you could get it back?"
"Of course—of course! Thank you so much......!"
"Then───"
"You mean I should show my appreciation, right? Don't worry! I'll give you all the remaining valuables and everything else that's worth money!"
"Excuse me?"
What? If you do that, you'll have no money.
How exactly are you supposed to buy artifacts?
"Don't you need to purchase artifacts?"
"I can earn money. It doesn't matter how long it takes—if I work hard and save carefully, eventually the money will come. But what you've done for me, curing my affliction...... that's something money could never repay."
"You're not allowed to leave the academy. How do you plan to earn anything?"
"As I've been coming and going, I've noticed there are plenty of part-time jobs. Artifacts may be expensive, but if I work hard enough, I'm certain I can—"
"Stop talking nonsense and use that money to purchase enough artifacts."
"Finance Director......?"
Why are you looking so astonished? Did you actually think I'd take it?
If you were an ordinary student, I absolutely would have taken it. But you're a building-destroyer. You already have a track record of wrecking five lecture halls.
And it's obvious you're about to start practicing magic constantly from now on, so leaving you at the academy long-term is out of the question. Do you have any idea that if you tried to save every coin from a part-time job for a whole year, you'd barely scrape together enough for a single artifact? It's hopeless.
"A private audience with the Chairwoman...... I'll find a way to arrange one for you somehow. And get your pendant back as quickly as possible."
"......Why?"
"Your Highness?"
"Why are you doing this......? We're only connected through a bribe, aren't we?"
Because the most financially advantageous outcome is for you to duel Chloe and go back to your own country as fast as possible!
......Probably shouldn't say that, huh. Better to gloss over it with some generic platitude.
"I may not be an instructor, but I am a member of this academy's staff. Our initial meeting might have been over a bribe, but you are still a student of this academy, are you not?"
"......Ah."
"Besides, the bribe I took last time was fairly substantial. Let's consider that sufficient payment already."
So please, go home. And seriously, don't destroy any more buildings.
My original goal of extracting even more bribes has fallen through, but the most critical objective was always getting the building-destroyer to leave, so it's fine.
So long as you leave, I can hold out without any variables until the investment funds come through!
"Finance Director."
"If you feel you must do something, a donation once you've returned to your homeland would be more than enough. I'm sure the Delphia Kingdom can't send bribes all the way here, but a donation—there's nothing wrong with that, is there?"
"......I see. So that's how it is."
"Hm?"
"I understand, Finance Director....... No, Adam."
Why's she suddenly using my name?
I blinked at Beatrice's sudden gear-shift, then caught the look of deep resolution on her face and instinctively took a step back.
"I absolutely won't let you down. I swear it!"
"Uh...... sure."
Which means you're definitely going back, right? I'm trusting you on this.
Beatrice held my gaze with a solemn, determined expression, then tilted her head as she noticed something.
"Hm? Adam. What's that in your front pocket......?"
"Huh? Ah, it's just a cigarette."
"Who carries a single cigarette around by itself? And come to think of it, that cigarette looks familiar somehow."
"You must've seen people smoking them back in your home country."
"No, that's not it at all. Wait a moment."
"Ah."
Beatrice has seen one of these before? It's not even a regular cigarette—it's a special product!
Well, she must be mistaken. It doesn't look particularly different from a normal cigarette.......
"This smell...... Are you serious?"
"Your Highness?"
"Adam, this isn't a normal cigarette at all! This is a cigarette-form military stimulant manufactured in our kingdom───"
"Shh."
"......Adam."
"It's merely a supply item required for work."
"......Those books, those papers, the fact that you live in this dilapidated dorm, and now this so-called work cigarette on top of it."
"Ahem."
"Adam, are you being properly compensated for your efforts? Are you being treated fairly at this academy?"
I wonder? The pay is definitely good. It's just that I pour nearly all of it back, keeping only the bare minimum to survive, to help shore up the finances a little.
Is it passion exploitation? Eh, once I get us through this bankruptcy crisis, my job is guaranteed for life, so it's worth it.
Once that's done, I doubt even the Chairwoman has enough of a conscience to keep piling on more work. I'll just hire more people for the Finance Department and coast.
......I had no reason to explain all that to Beatrice one detail at a time, and no intention of doing so.
More importantly, our business here was finished—time to kick her out. I still had to talk with the Chairwoman about Beatrice again, and if the discussion with the king was already over, we'd need to confer about that too. There's still a mountain of work left.
"Your Highness, if you intend to defeat Student Chloe, shouldn't you be practicing diligently starting right now?"
"Adam."
"And I must ask that any practice be conducted exclusively in the training grounds or the exercise chamber. Absolutely nowhere else. Under no circumstances!"
"......Adam."
"Now, I still have work left myself, so if you'll excuse me."
A soft click.
With that, I physically ushered Beatrice out of the room and closed the door behind her.
".........."
Beatrice.
Stood there in a daze in front of the door for a long, long moment before she finally left.
......What is seriously up with her?