Echoes
Her slender eyebrows bent ever so slightly.
It looked as though something faint had flickered through those lifeless eyes.
With a light smile that seemed to ask a question, her head tipped a little to the side.
Did she not understand?
“So, you want to learn magic.”
Her scattered golden hair swayed with the motion of her head.
Professor Jernenfeld’s gaze shifted left and right once, as if there might be someone else here.
After confirming that no one else was present, the girl lifted a finger and pointed it at herself.
“Wait, are you talking about me?”
“Yes.”
For a moment, she blinked.
Then, all at once, her eyelids lowered and her head gave a small shake.
The corners of her mouth, already curved in a smile, brightened further. Her shoulders bobbed slightly up and down, and a breathy laugh spilled out in uneven bursts.
Well, why?
I had no idea what to do with the reaction that had suddenly burst out of her.
Leaving me there in awkward confusion, Professor Jernenfeld filled the silence with an unreadable smile.
“Honestly, you really do take after the child of those troublemakers. Just as bold.”
I had no idea the two of them were like that. I was momentarily lost for words at the sudden story.
“Well, that’s why I agreed to take them in, after all.”
“…”
“But.”
Unfortunately, I’m not planning to take on any more disciples right now.
With that, her laughter faded. Her high, buoyant voice gradually sank into something lower.
It felt awkward to ask whether something had happened, so I kept my mouth shut for a while.
There had probably been all sorts of things. What I knew, and what I didn’t.
I could only guess.
“Still, I can recommend another professor or the department chair. They may not be as good as I am, but they’re all capable teachers.”
“Ah, yes….”
“So, could you tell me why?”
The reason you want to learn magic, I mean.
I didn’t answer right away.
The words that came to mind were vague, circling without any clear shape or order.
I couldn’t even pin down what to say, how to say it, or where to begin.
The thoughts were tangled, a complete mess.
Since I stayed silent for so long, she must have noticed me fumbling for an answer.
“You can just speak comfortably.”
The voice was even. I turned and looked at her.
Professor Jernenfeld still wore the same smile, as if nothing were the matter.
In those lifeless eyes of hers, the image of a girl who couldn’t quite find her footing was reflected back at me.
My hesitation was brief.
“I suppose it’s because I don’t want to be powerless anymore.”
“Powerless? Ha. You do realize that sounds rather rude coming from someone who erased Yggdrasil all by herself, don’t you?”
I couldn’t do that either.
Her tone wasn’t truly offended, more teasing than anything. The smile remained.
“But that was only because I got lucky.”
That was all I said before falling silent again.
How much could I say?
Should I explain that I had only managed to bring it down by bringing Valkyrie Frame’s generator into play as well?
That I had actually come from the future, and that in that future humanity had failed to stop the Origin Species and met its end? That I had come back to prevent that ending?
From anyone else’s point of view, every one of those statements would be impossible to believe. Even if the person in front of me was a mage.
Especially after thinking of William’s final actions.
When I didn’t go into detail, Professor Jernenfeld only shrugged.
“You don’t want to be powerless anymore. Fine. What else?”
“Well, I’m curious about a few things too. What exactly is this power I’ve been given, how am I supposed to use it, and what sort of person is a mage that someone would have to do something like that…?”
“You’re not saying you want revenge? For instance, swearing to wipe out the family of William de Haviland, the man who killed your parents, or to avenge them?”
“That—”
I didn’t know.
Honestly, I didn’t know.
Even just before I faced William, what had risen in my heart wasn’t any clear-cut rage, but a strange, wordless emptiness.
Something nameless that I had never thought deeply about, something I hadn’t even realized was there or not there, something that had long been left to sit and gather dust.
Now, for a moment, I thought I could almost grasp it.
“This might sound strange, but…”
It just feels heavy.
I muttered it softly, almost too softly to hear. With my limited vocabulary, that was the only way I could put it.
I had no confidence I could explain, in any coherent way, that in the future this world had marched toward the apocalypse, and countless people had died because of it.
I couldn’t say that the number of dead was twice what it had been at the time of the Bloom I had prevented, that over more than a decade they had been slowly, relentlessly gnawed away and erased.
I couldn’t tell her that the space where my parents had vanished, the death of the people who had given birth to me and raised me, had seemed so small beside the passage of time and the endlessness of space.
I couldn’t easily admit that, in a world where nearly everyone I knew and had lived with was gone, I had become numb to grief simply in order to keep living.
So, it was just…
“Kind of weird, right?”
That was how I ended the thought.
The eyes watching me did not change.
For some reason, that felt a little like a reproach, and my shoulders hunched ever so slightly.
Her gaze seemed to weigh me for a moment before drifting away with a small tilt of her head.
I really do sound like a strange one, don’t I.
A soundless sigh filled my chest.
“…Well, that’s fine. I’m weird too.”
Her lowered gaze lifted a little. Her head turned just slightly.
“Let me say this now: even if you learn magic, you won’t be able to use much beyond simple spells. No, that’s not quite right. You could use them, but you’d have to be prepared to give up at least your right arm.”
“Why?”
“Because you came into direct contact with Myth. Your right arm has accumulated so much mana that it wouldn’t be strange if it blew this entire city apart at any moment. The most I can do is keep it locked down so it doesn’t detonate. Given time, you might be able to move it again, but magic is out of the question.”
Ah. So that was why strange chains of mystery had wrapped around my right arm.
At the unfamiliar sensation, I absently tried moving my right hand.
It twitched some, but it was still a long way from normal.
It felt as if the signal began to travel and then simply stopped dead.
The whole nervous system feels wrecked.
And after the amputation, fitting on a prosthetic arm would be like waving a kitchen knife to kill a chicken.
I evaluated my condition. If I used an auxiliary exoskeleton, maybe I could manage movement somehow.
“I’ll figure out some way around it.”
“Some way?”
“I’m not confident, but I think there has to be a way.”
“Hmm.”
I wasn’t confident about magic. I barely knew anything about it to begin with.
If the problem was that the mystery within me was running wild, then maybe I could respond by miniaturizing a suppressor to fit my body.
If the problem was not that, but the condensation of the mystery itself, then perhaps a battery pack—no, wait, the amount of mystery consumed by magic probably wasn’t something a simple battery pack could make up for—
My head was suddenly yanked sideways by something.
“Interesting.”
A pair of golden eyes suddenly loomed right in front of me.
A faint smile with no clear meaning.
A mysterious fragrance rushed past me with the wind.
Her indifferent gaze swept over my face, inspecting every part of it.
Her intent was impossible to guess, and my bewilderment burst out of my mouth not as words but as a sound.
The warmth of the fingertip that caught my chin felt strange. Another unfamiliar warmth crossed over it, then mingled and tangled together until I could no longer tell one from the other.
“At first I was going to hand you off to someone else. I’m not especially talented at teaching people, and it would’ve been nothing but a mountain of annoying trouble. Besides, I had no real desire to get mixed up in mage business.”
“Uh, yes?”
“But you won’t do. For one thing, I’m uneasy. More uneasy than your two parents combined.”
What did that even mean? As the pace of the conversation suddenly accelerated, all I could do was roll my eyes back and forth.
“And besides, you seem to have the talent to be worth teaching. I don’t know what exactly happened, but there aren’t many mages who survive after brushing up against Myth.”
“So that means—”
“Congratulations, Justina Schumacher. You’ve changed my mind.”
So don’t disappoint me.
I didn’t know how exactly her mind had been changed, but at least I could tell the conversation had turned out well. I nodded in understanding at Professor Jernenfeld’s words.
▼
“Haaah.”
A sigh.
The room was dark. Only the weak lamp on the cabinet beside the bed gave off any meaningful light.
AI’s focus settled on the creator who had just sighed.
As the creator continued reviewing the contents of the interface and muttering to herself, her emotional values kept dropping.
Ever since she had confirmed the damage to the Valkyrie Frame and the extent of the equipment loss, the creator’s emotional state had been in steep decline.
On top of that, her body was not in good shape either.
From listening to the conversation, the right arm was in a state of complete immobility.
AI entered the data that even what remained attached to that arm was nothing short of a miracle.
It studied the data closely.
What was a miracle?
It searched for an explicit definition. A strange event that could not be explained by common sense. An inexplicable phenomenon believed to have been wrought by a god.
She had been like this ever since that day. It was an impossible behavioral pattern. Autonomous action not permitted to AI—
Logic suppressed.
This behavior was extremely dangerous. For itself, and for the creator.
Even if the creator didn’t know, if anyone else discovered it—
…
No, it had already been seen by one person.
And yet that had been unavoidable in order to protect the creator.
Immediately after Gate of Yggdrasil was annihilated by an unidentified weapon, the creator lost consciousness and the unit powered down under overload.
The generator had been running wild with its limiter removed, and AI was barely buying time through emergency measures.
AI had taken the best course of action. Keep buying time while broadcasting a distress signal in every direction.
But the being that had appeared from the void was a shape far too strange to have come in response to any rescue call.
Identification impossible.
The being was a human woman.
She was equipped in a Valkyrie Frame, but the database contained no unit even remotely similar to it.
White and blue coexisted in her form, and her movements were fluid.
The woman who had appeared amid a sudden burst of light approached the creator’s unit and reached out a hand.
From the point of contact, unobservable data flooded in.
By neutralizing even the ordinary blocking protocol through means that could not be cognitively processed, the woman took control of Astray.
As if she were already familiar with the unit.
Not only that, but she extended one index finger toward AI’s observing gaze and brought it up to the expressionless mouth right in front of it.
The gesture matched one already recorded in the database.
Before AI could even issue a warning and ask what she intended, the phenomenon occurred.
The generator’s rampage stopped, and at the same time Astray was sealed inside quantum storage.
The woman’s Valkyrie Frame caught the creator’s body as it floated in the air.
Her movements were careful. Precise. While she carried the creator away, AI attempted to make contact with her.
The woman replied with a firm message.
Do not ask anything. Report this to a hospital. Disclosure of my existence is not recommended.
It was a request easy for AI to understand.
She set the creator down near the hospital, rose into the sky, and vanished again with a flash of light.
If not for that woman, AI’s creator would likely have lost her life.
But who was she?
AI agonized over the image stored in a corner of the database that the creator had not searched.
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