Night Duty
The central hall of the dormitory.
A model built in the likeness of the dormitory's interior stood there. Each door bore a student's name and a room number. If the door hung open, that student was not inside the room; if the little flag before it had been raised, they were somewhere within the dormitory.
Once I had confirmed that every flag stood raised, I sat quietly in the lobby.
Students were free to wander until ten at night. Past that hour, unless the professor on duty granted separate leave, an anomaly that haunted the first layer of the Netherworld—the Rule-Keeper's Wraith—would appear and scream at them without end to turn back.
A duty professor had only two tasks: to cut an outing pass in one's own name when a student with particular business wished to leave, and to send the students back to their rooms before ten. Beyond those two, there was nothing that had to be done.
Afterward, unless something unusual arose, one simply slept in the duty room and let the hours pass like a watchdog left to mind the house.
However I turn it over, the efficiency is abysmal...
It was a mercy, at least, that the Netherworld anomaly—the Rule-Keeper—gave warning of intrusions from outside. Had it not, I would have had to keep vigil through the night as well.
Tap.
Tap.
"......"
Professor Ilaina—Princess Elizabeth, to be precise—sat down beside me with her necklace removed. She crossed her legs with a languid, alluring ease, and the look she turned on me was sharp indeed.
She would not know, however, that this was the moment I had already seen through her. I decided to ignore her, lowered my eyes to the sheet pinned with a thumbtack, and went on setting down the points of the second week's lecture.
There had been no special reason for naming, in advance, the broad word magic as the theme of that second week in black magic. In this world, setting black magic and elemental magic aside, the ability common to every mage was to perceive a spell's compositional formula and to nullify it.
Perception of a compositional formula is possible only when the mage accurately understands some particular concept. That concept must possess a difficulty—an order, to put it simply—and it must also be possible to set the volume of mana the mage expends against it.
Because of those conditions, the concept this world's mages chose for perceiving a formula was mathematics. Concepts that possessed an order were plentiful, but far too many of them failed where a volume of mana had to be measured against them, and so mathematics, relatively easy to approach, was all but bound to be selected.
The original work's setting had nothing particular to say on the matter. The author, I suspected, had simply not wished to dig too deeply into mathematics, and had therefore placed an Aura Knight's talent in the protagonist's hands.
From Lee Seojin's point of view, however, there was one further concept that could be joined to the perception of a formula even without mathematics. It was the rendering of dimensional ideas as figures—something any modern soul fond of science-fiction films has heard of at least once.
Join the points, and they become a line. Draw the lines, and they become a plane. Gather the planes, and they become a solid. Mass the solids together, and they become a hypercube.
A notion that begins at the zeroth dimension and advances toward the nth could be explained, simply, by this.
But once one passed the grade likened to the fourth dimension—the higher realm, Termiel—it would be better to choose, as the means of understanding a formula, the old habit of reducing it to equations. However keen a person's spatial sense, no one can accurately perceive and draw a five-dimensional figure that takes a hypercube for its cross-section. Even I, told to picture a figure whose cross-section was a tesseract, could not have drawn it.
So the mages of this world were not wrong to devote themselves to mathematics and try to grasp a spell's formula as an equation. Still, this was a world in which even a mage who reached the rank of Euclid was rare. Set beside the labor of perceiving a formula as an equation, the other way would be far more efficient.
I meant to announce it not only in lecture, but in a paper written and made public apart.
Mages are a breed that loathes, to the last degree, sharing what they know. Uriel, professor of elemental magic, was an example. Knowledge she had learned from someone, or obtained through a bargain, would require prior consent before she could teach it at the Academy. And yet even such people were, on the single matter of the concept by which a formula is understood, remarkably willing to work together and to lay their findings open.
Toward certain persons who had to be handled with care, my name was already mud. Toward the rest, I was only the second son of House Brutein, a man who seldom showed himself in private company. No harm in earning a reputation beforehand.
Creak.
"......"
I was nearly finished with the outline when the creak of a wheelchair crossing the lobby made me lift my head.
Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia. It was her.
Thud!
"Ngh...!"
"What is—"
"I'll see to it."
I pressed Her Highness Princess Elizabeth, who had started to rise, back into her seat, got up myself, and walked toward the dormitory's front gate.
That distinctive red hair, bound into twin tails and let down her back, stirred. Lizzie turned her head and looked up at me.
"Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia. Did you not read the regulations? After seven, no one may go outside unless the professor on duty separately issues an outing pass."
"......"
Silence hung between us.
"Will you not answer?"
"I wasn't well... I only meant to see a physician for a moment, and come back."
"I see. A cold? Your voice is badly hoarse."
"......"
"Even so, return to your room."
"But my body—!"
"I will summon a physician myself and have one brought to you."
At that, Lizzie flinched.
"What did you... say?"
"I said I would summon a physician and have one brought. The temperature is swinging sharply just now. Go out dressed as you are and take the cold wind, and you will only make your condition worse."
"......"
"Go back quietly, and lie down upon your bed."
Anything further would be meaningless. So I judged, and I left the dormitory.
Creak.
"What in the world..."
Back in her room, Lizzie enslaved a corpse, had it take her up in its arms and set her down upon the bed, then muttered to herself in a voice that could make no sense of him.
Kindness, needless and nothing like him. Gratitude did not come. What rose instead was a nausea she could not endure.
If he had known how to spare a thought for the sick, would he have smashed her other foot—the one that had only been sprained—to pieces like that? To be unable to walk was more than an inconvenience of daily life. It forced a person to sit, and to lie down. Over a long stretch of years Lizzie's body had weakened by degrees, and the girl who had been healthy before the age of twelve had suffered one petty illness after another ever since.
Ferzen von Schweig Ruerug.
That man was, for Lizzie, the root of every evil.
Knock, knock.
A faint knock, and then the door banged open. A physician in a neat white coat stepped into the room.
"Please, come in..."
Ferzen, of course, was behind him.
"Pardon me a moment, while I look at your condition."
"Yes..."
Lizzie nodded and gave herself over to the physician's hands.
"The inside of your throat is badly raw, and there is inflammation around the tonsils."
So that was why it stung every time she swallowed...
"I will roll your sleeve up for a moment."
"......"
Lizzie knew all too well what those words meant. The physician had already read her history and knew she had never shown an ill effect from the drug in question. He found the vein slowly, then gave her the antibiotic by needle as gently as the thing allowed.
"Kh..."
Ironically, a person who has been injected many times feels the pain more keenly than one who never has. The body remembers the sensation, takes fright ahead of the sting, tightens the muscle, and calls the old hurt back to life. Lizzie tried not to let it show. She did not want Ferzen to see her groan that she was in pain.
"It is finished."
He drew the emptied syringe out slowly, laid a swab wet with alcohol over the spot, and wound a small bandage around it, pressing as he wrapped.
"If you are no better in three days, come again, or send for me. I will take my leave, then..."
As the drug circling through her vessels reached her throat and the pain began, slowly, to sink, the color in Lizzie's face improved a good deal. A strangely hazy feeling seemed to urge her to sleep at once and take a proper rest.
Ferzen, who had been standing still by the door, met her eyes once and turned his back. He knew that if the two of them were left alone in the room, it would send her trauma into a fit.
"Are you... afraid?"
"......"
Unexpectedly, it was Lizzie who stopped him first.
"What do you mean?"
"House Alfred will be joined with us soon, so..."
"Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia."
"......"
"You need not worry. I am not frightened by so little as that."
Ferzen turned, and those crimson eyes of his settled on her.
"Nor do I intend to deny before you what I did to you."
What he had done—to speak of it as an incident, and not an evil—was Ferzen's own frantic struggle.
"I am aware of the hostility House Claudia bears me. But this one thing, Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia, you will remember."
"......"
"If you try to tear out my throat and fail, you must accept what follows with composure."
The nature of mana most threatening to Ferzen was not an Aura Knight. It was a black mage of the same kind. An Aura Knight and an Elemental Magician could not, at least, seize a corpse under a black mage's control. Another black mage could, if aptitude and skill stood higher. Yes—under that supposition, the person most dangerous to Ferzen was Lizzie.
"Rest easily."
"......"
With that, Ferzen left the room.
Afterward Lizzie, lying on the bed, let out a thin, scoffing breath.
"How very fine..."
A dignity that did not so much as waver, even around the evil he carried. Turning that splendid figure over under her breath, Lizzie drew the blanket up.
Just as Ferzen had said, if Claudia's fangs failed to tear into him, she meant to bear the aftermath quietly as well. One who means to harm another must be prepared to suffer the same.
"Hmph..."
But if it truly came to that, even a single night would do. She would seduce him by whatever means she had, climb onto the bed, sink her teeth into him there so he could never leave a descendant, and then kill herself cleanly. After that, whether he mutilated her corpse or enslaved it to heap still greater shame upon her was none of her concern. By then she would already have arrived in the Netherworld.
"......"
Sleep came down on her in a rush. Lizzie closed her eyes, at ease.