New House Syndrome (2)
The face that had been giggling drunkenly suddenly grew serious. Ruwen was a hedonist who didn’t rate her own faith particularly highly, but as a priestess she still upheld the minimum duties of her station. Setting the bottle down quietly, she gently took Alicia’s pure white hand—completely free of calluses.
“Sister, it looks like you’ve been struggling a lot lately.”
At that moment, a single beam of moonlight fell across the terrace, slipping past Ruwen’s veil. Her ash-gray hair fluttered in the night breeze, and her deep blue eyes sparkled with a soft glow. The atmosphere was so sacred it was almost unreal. It was hard to believe this was the same person who had been emptying entire bottles and slurring her words just moments ago.
“Wh-what? Why are you acting like this all of a sudden?”
“You don’t have to hide anything in front of me. We’re comrades, aren’t we? Just as I thought—even while pretending otherwise, you were shocked by Brother Thulen’s death.”
In reality, Alicia merely shrank back with a startled expression. No one could say where such strength came from in such a tiny body, but a mage who never exercised had no hope of escaping Ruwen’s grip.
“Come, let’s pray together.”
“No, why are you talking about prayer when you were just drinking! Isn’t that blasphemy?”
It took a long, painstaking explanation to clear up Ruwen’s misunderstanding.
“Of course I’m sad the old man is gone. But once you join the hero’s party, you have to be prepared for death at any time.”
Alicia shook her head and lightly pressed her fingers to her brow.
“Besides, why would you assume I’d be foolish enough to wallow in something like sadness? That’s completely irrational. The dead are mourned, and the living move forward. Getting buried in the past is no attitude for someone pursuing the path of magic.”
Ruwen watched closely as Alicia chattered on with her usual arrogant expression, chin slightly raised. Then she let out a bright “Puha!” and picked up the bottle again.
“Uhehe… I was wondering what it could be. What a relief…”
“Seriously. What kind of misunderstanding did you even have?”
“But stiiill… when someone who usually goes on about being a super-genius beautiful girl suddenly starts talking about serious worries, I can’t just let it slide as her comrade and priestess…”
“I can see exactly how you’ve been thinking of me. Haah, this is why non-mages are impossible.”
Ruwen quickly returned to her usual self and began blowing across the mouth of the bottle. Alicia gave her a light side-eye.
“Still, it wasn’t empty talk when I said I felt skeptical about my own talent.”
“Uhehe…?”
Alicia elegantly tilted a glass of wine that was practically juice. The sweet flavor and rich grape aroma filled her mouth before the alcohol could even assert itself, but the thoroughly intoxicated Alicia opened her mouth with a languid expression.
“You know, the world really is vast.”
“Wooow… I’m getting surprised a lot today… To hear something like that from you of all people, Sister.”
“Hey. I’m trying to speak seriously for once. Are you going to keep teasing me?”
“Puh…! Sorry, sorry. Don’t get mad…”
Even though she had teased her plenty, this was the first time Ruwen had seen Alicia show a vulnerable side in front of anyone else, and it felt refreshingly new.
‘As expected, humans really are the most entertaining.’
More than anything, Ruwen found the current situation itself quite interesting. Until now there had always been a certain wall between them even when they were close, yet here Alicia was, approaching first to tear it down.
‘It would’ve been even more fun if the old man were here, though.’
Moreover, the faint bitterness that lingered in a corner of her heart despite her pretense made her realize that a comrade’s death affected her more than she’d expected.
“You saw it too, right? That magic that pierced the mutated Draconid—the one that looked like a dragon—in a single strike.”
“Ah, that. At first I thought the hero must have done something, but he personally said it wasn’t him…”
“Goodness. You really didn’t know? Well, that’s not what’s important, so let’s move on. Honestly, I didn’t even know magic like that existed.”
“Hehe, so even the super-genius beautiful girl, the youngest archmage in history, had magic she didn’t know about… Hic!”
Oops. She’d been told not to tease. Ruwen hiccuped and clapped a hand over her mouth, expecting Alicia to explode in anger, but the other woman calmly acknowledged the truth.
“I was arrogant. From the time I was little I heard the word ‘genius’ so often it felt like nails hammering into my ears, and after I became the mage of the hero’s party everyone was too busy praising me no matter what I did.”
“Uhehe… I know that feeling very well… Honestly, even though there’s no priest as bad as me, once I joined the hero’s party they made a huge fuss about canonizing me as a saintess or whatever. Sigh…”
Since it was a story she could relate to, Ruwen found herself nodding. It was true that their superior abilities had allowed them to join the hero’s party. Yet after joining, it was impossible to deny that the label of “hero’s party” overshadowed their actual skills.
“That’s right. There really is no priest as bad as you, Ruwen.”
Maybe she had been quietly keeping score for all the teasing.
“Drinking every day, gambling every day. It’s amazing how you enjoy every possible pleasure yet show zero interest in men.”
“Puh… Well, even if the scriptures don’t forbid drinking or gambling, they very clearly state that one must remain pure until marriage…”
Alicia curved the corners of her eyes and spoke in a deliberately mischievous tone. Ruwen, however, didn’t even blink.
“That’s funny. Aren’t you just interpreting that doctrine however you like?”
“Well, you don’t have any dating experience either, do you, Sister? Despite being so popular… Uhehe…”
“It’s bothersome. I hate wasting time for no reason, and I have zero interest in fawning over men stupider than me just because I’ve gone blind with love.”
“Same here… Puh, at this rate we might both die as old spinsters…”
One drunk on alcohol and the other drunk on the atmosphere, their conversation veered wildly off course. A strange silence settled between the two women facing each other—then, as if on cue, they both burst out laughing.
“Ahahaha!”
“Ehehe! Puhup…!”
They laughed for quite a while.
“We seem to have gotten a little closer, don’t we, Priestess Ruwen?”
“Uhehe… Agreed.”
By now the wall that had remained between the mage and the priestess had completely crumbled. They clinked glass and bottle together, then silently gazed up at the night sky.
“Even though we got sidetracked, the hero actually asked me for a favor. He wants me to find the mage who blew up the Draconid in one shot.”
Once again, Alicia was the one who brought the topic back.
“Hehe… You said you didn’t even know what kind of magic it was?”
“That’s exactly the problem. Whoever they are, it’s a mage who far surpasses my level. At minimum 8-Circle, possibly even higher. The fact that their identity can’t be confirmed in the Akashic Records suggests they deliberately concealed it.”
Ruwen tilted her head.
“Hmm… I’m asking because I don’t really know, but is it even possible to fool the Akashic Records?”
“It is. If an archmage truly sets their mind to it. To explain it in a way a non-mage can understand, it’s less about fooling the Akashic Records and more about fooling the person reading them.”
“Uhehe… It sounds like something I both understand and don’t understand at the same time…”
—Gulp gulp!
Alicia watched with a wry smile as Ruwen chose to pour more alcohol rather than struggle to understand a field outside her expertise.
“Of course, people like that are considered tremendous eccentrics even among mages. Unless their personality is severely twisted or they have a dirty secret, hardly anyone would turn down the honor of having their name recorded in the Akashic Records.”
“Well, in the Goddess Church, it’s roughly like being canonized as a saint or saintess…”
“That’s a good comparison.”
“Uhehe…! To receive praise from the super-genius beautiful girl archmage. What an honor…”
Alicia spoke to the jesting Ruwen in an utterly calm voice.
“It seems the hero wants to recruit that mage into the party.”
“Pukek—cough! Wh-what did you just say?!”
The sudden bombshell twisted Ruwen’s relaxed expression into something bizarre.
“We already have a mage! What are you even talking about? No matter how rude the hero is, this is too much! Does he have no consideration for people’s feelings?!”
She must have been truly shocked; her usual drawl had completely vanished.
“Calm down. It’s still only a guess. This is just my personal thought.”
“Th-that’s true… Now that you mention it… It’s not like anyone else, but that hero really has been unusually obsessed lately… Wait, then you should have said that first! So all that talk about the limits of talent wasn’t just random!”
“It can’t be helped. Personnel decisions in the hero’s party are solely the hero’s authority. When a vacancy appears and we need to fill numbers, seeking out a superior mage is an extremely reasonable decision from his perspective.”
An irrepressible wistfulness clouded Alicia’s face, which had always been so haughty and arrogant.
“Thanks to this I’ve gained great enlightenment as well. So if we find that mage, I’m thinking of yielding my spot in the hero’s party and simply asking to become his disciple.”
“Wh-what are you saying?!”
“Well, that was half a joke. Since I’ve accepted the hero’s request, I plan to focus on analyzing the residual mana traces left on the Draconid’s corpse for the time being. If there’s anything to study, I’ll study it, prepare the handover, and…”
Before Alicia could finish, Ruwen cried out.
“Ah, no way!”
While the hero himself had expressed no official intention and the mysterious archmage hadn’t shown even the tip of his nose, a rather serious misunderstanding was steadily piling up.
“Ptchoo!”
Kevin sneezed violently.
“Someone must be talking about me somewhere.”
After wiping his face once with a handkerchief, Kevin immersed himself in preparing for the civil engineering work while observing the newly created tributary of the Lethe River through Observation magic.
“Partner, ready?”
—Nod nod!
This task would rely far more on the Tulpa’s role than on Kevin himself.
“Sorry for making you do the hard work. My magic skills are still lacking, so this kind of manual labor is a bit much for me.”
After all, at his current stage there were various limits to exercising large-scale physical force.
Kevin’s realm was only 1-Circle, after all.