The Night the Full Moon Sets
"Nn— nngh!"
He could hardly remain outside with Laura in such a state, so he gagged that ill-mannered mouth with a strip of cloth, as if bridling it, took a room at a nearby inn, and stepped inside.
"Hhh...! Hnnnngh—!"
"Ha..."
It was a mercy her strength was so pitiful. Had she been even average, she would have given him a great deal of trouble.
"Don't expect any consideration from me."
Click. He locked the door, seized her by the back of the head, dragged her to the bed, and at once hauled the blanket over to bind her limbs tight.
"Where is it..."
Then he searched her body from head to foot for the personal altar any black mage was bound to carry.
"This, then..."
A silver rosary, worn like a necklace. He saw nothing else concealed on her, so he took it and dropped heavily into the chair by the window.
"Nn...! Hnnngh!"
Bound at every limb, Laura thrashed on the bed like a fish just pulled from the water. A black mage with no corpse nearby to enslave, however, was no different from an ordinary person. The corpse she had been commanding lay beside him, and the qualitative gap in their mana was such that even if she recovered what she had spent, she would never wrest it from him. The altar, too, was already in his grasp. So he withdrew his attention cleanly and sank into thought.
Every last one of Laura's actions was bent on harming people.
This is no withdrawal. It can't be.
If any maker sold a drug with side effects like these, their neck would have been taken in the underworld long ago.
A madness she was born with, then...
No. Had that been the case, they would never have sent her to the Academy in the first place. The pretext would have been more than sufficient. Why hide it, and go to the trouble of dispatching her as a hostage?
He went on turning his own conjectures over, until one hypothesis rose in his mind and a chill prickled up his spine.
What if the Implementation Rate Laura showed back then, enslaving Isabel's corpse, was never a matter of talent at all, but of blood?
And tonight, of all nights, a full moon hung in the sky. Laura's birthday, as he remembered it, fell in early March as well. He had seen it in the papers Jeremiah had given him, so of that much he was certain. Could so many coincidences pile upon one another in a single hour?
In short: the present head of Rosenberg had lain with a woman of House Genova who had somehow survived, and Laura had been born of it.
It may be a leap...
Even so, the likelihood looked considerable. Had Laura not come at him with some private certainty already in hand?
Now it makes sense.
He had taken her attempt to enslave Isabel's corpse without so much as passing through Feedback for confidence born of thorough intelligence. It had not been that. It had been confidence in a shared bloodline.
Ah...
But then why had she not known of the Full-Moon Quirk? A woman willing to bear a child would have had every reason to tell the man she lay with that truth, and more besides.
Unless...
The act had not been by consent. Suppose the present head of Rosenberg, coveting a Genova bloodline said to flower into extraordinary talent in some one field without fail, had imprisoned that woman and got Laura upon her by rape. Yes. Then it would be entirely understandable that the woman, out of vengeance, had never spoken of the Full-Moon Quirk.
The form of the quirk isn't fixed...
Even locked away, she might have suffered a quirk she could satisfy alone and in quiet, without ever being caught. No. She must have. Had it been discovered, the present head of Rosenberg would never have enrolled Laura at the Academy without taking some measure first.
"...Laura?"
Just as his private conjecture was hardening into certainty, the silence ringing through the room struck him as far too deep. Unease pulled him out of his thoughts, and he looked to the bed.
"What—!"
A wet, choking gurgle. Laura was a breath away from suffocating.
"Crazy bitch—!"
The curse tore out of him on reflex. He reached over and yanked free the cloth stoppering her mouth.
Crunch.
"Kh—!"
As if she had been waiting for nothing else, Laura bit down on his middle finger. Metallic blood filled her mouth, and she smiled, a lascivious smile soaked through with pleasure.
"Ha..."
He did not know the Full-Moon Quirk in any detail. He had read Isabel's core memories, yes, but those had been nothing more than scattered fragments.
What I do know is this. I can't leave her as she is.
Fine. There was no reason left to keep turning it over, so he shrugged out of his suit jacket, hung it aside, caught Laura by the hair, and pushed the middle finger of his other hand between her teeth.
Crunch. Crunch.
She took the finger at once and worried at it like a starving dog.
You can't educate someone who has no reason...
But even with nothing left but instinct, training was possible. Laura's present state was no split personality. Break her in clearly now, and it would serve him later, whenever the Full-Moon Quirk seized her again. From this night forward, the only person Laura would be able to rely on was him. Why would he tell anyone else, and go begging for help? The situation itself was one he welcomed.
Of course, if he meant to apply pressure that way, he would have to prove that the Full-Moon Quirk had truly existed in House Genova. That would not be difficult. Other black mages who knew the fact need only enslave Isabel's corpse and receive Feedback successfully, and the proof would be made.
"Laura..."
No. Not that. Laura de Charles Rosenberg was a human name. What he meant to break in now was a beast without reason, and it would be better to give her another name and call her by it.
The name itself...
Might become a keyword that called the breaking to mind.
What would suit her.
He drew his finger from her mouth, closed a hand around Laura's throat, and sank into the question.
There was a puppy I kept at the Brutein estate when I was small. Its name was...
Belka, wasn't it.
"..."
He shook his head. Even so, pinning a dog's name on her would not do. He turned her full name over in his mind.
"Charles. Charles will do."
And so he settled on Charles.
He drew Laura into his arms with the thought of breaking a beast, not a person, and set the cloth between her teeth once more.
"Hhh! Nnh! Nnnnh!"
Her mouth had a bad habit. A muzzle was essential. In exchange he loosened the blanket from her limbs, wound it about her waist, and knotted it fast to the leg of the bed. Freer now, Laura clung to him and flung a hand out, rough and wild.
He caught that hand at once and forced her back down onto the bed.
Does she feel no pain?
He had the wrist bent back behind her. A little more and it might dislocate, yet Laura showed not a flicker of hurt and only thrashed the harder. He had half expected as much from the moment he struck her in the solar plexus.
So be it...
He simply would not be able to break her through fear of pain. She seemed to take a certain pleasure in the act of trying to harm someone. Control that, and the rest would follow.
"Ah... agh!"
The moment he finished the thought and opened the distance, Laura chased after him as a matter of course, only to be yanked short by the blanket at her waist.
"Hh, hhk!"
At once she reached to undo it. So. No reason, and yet her intelligence was intact. Of course it was. Otherwise she could never have enslaved a corpse and worked magic through it. But—
"Charles. I don't believe I said you were allowed to undo that."
He had given no permission, and still she meant to slip a collar he had set with her own hands. Defiance did not come more brazen than this.
In the next instant she had the blanket at her waist undone clean, and came at him like a zombie. He seized control of the corpse she had been enslaving and raised a barrier of ice.
"Nn! Nnn!"
Thud. Thud.
A mage of lower rank cannot perceive the formula when a mage of higher rank manifests a spell. The furthest a formula can be recognized is one's own rank. Between mages, the gap in grade is absolute.
I truly didn't expect the corpse of a Euclid-rank elemental magician... Still, Rosenberg's foundations are nothing to scoff at.
Watching Laura hammer the ice with both hands, he came forward slowly, let the barrier fall, overpowered her by strength once more, and bound the blanket about her waist again. He repeated the whole business perhaps ten times.
"Hh, nnh..."
The blanket drew taut and stopped her hard from reaching him, and this time Laura made no move to undo it. She had understood. The instant she loosened it, an ice barrier she could do nothing against would rise and shut away the only being she was able to harm.
"You learn quickly."
The corner of his mouth curled. He stood where he was and faced her. The next matter was to close the distance by a single step whenever she performed some particular act he wanted.
"Brruu..."
She flailed, stretching toward him with hands that could not reach, drooling like a premature infant. More precisely, like a puppy.
A step. The moment Laura awkwardly lowered her waist a little, he took one quiet step forward.
"Uh...?"
She tipped her head, as if puzzled.
Another step. Another. Once she dimly grasped the relation — that the nearer her hips came to the floor, the nearer he came to her — she did not merely sit.
"Hnn! Hnnngh!"
She flopped onto her back where she lay.
"Yes... good. Charles."
The result was a little beyond what he had expected, and it threw him for a moment, but she had acted as he intended all the same. He crouched before her and opened both arms.
Laura shot upright, threw herself into his embrace, and stretched out her slender hands to seize his throat, straining as if she meant to choke the life from him. She looked so sickly that he had expected, at best, the scent of simple health, and at worst a body steeped in the smell of medicine. What stole into his nose instead was unexpectedly sweet, and green.
So long as she doesn't grow greedy here...
He had no wish to carry the training any further himself. Laura, without reason, of course grew greedy. She raised her nails and tried to drive them through the vein in his neck.
"Charles."
"Nnn...!"
It was a line crossed past all mistaking. He frowned and put a good distance between them at once.
"Hrrb... hnnngh!"
Then, just as she had learned, as if to call him back quickly, Laura dropped flat on the floor.
"..."
Seen like that, she was a large dog and nothing else. The behavior itself was commendable. Still, once a line had been crossed, ought she not offer some sincerity of greater worth to smooth it over? And yet what more could he ask of a Laura who had lost her reason, beyond sit and lie down?
"Kkhng! Kk-hnnngh!"
Yes. There was no need for him to agonize over it. Laura supplied the answer herself. She clapped her hands. She squirmed with her belly turned up to him. She rolled across the floor. Thanks to that, he learned against his will that she wore underwear far too mature for her years. So that was her taste.
"..."
In any case, the string of antics proved more amusing than he had expected. He spent some ten minutes appreciating tricks that were not quite tricks, and then drew near her again. Fortunately, this time a single correction was enough. Whether the lesson had taken completely, she only squeezed his neck, pressing and pressing, without ever raising her nails.
"Nnh..."
Even so she made her disappointment naked, as if it were not enough, and the experience already beaten into her—
He surged upright and stepped back. She had not raised her nails to pierce the vein. Among the ways Laura might kill him with her hands, however, she had, for an instant, moved to carry out perhaps the most primitive of them all.
"Charles."
The hand that had seized him at the groin, meaning to burst him, and then stopped, circled in the empty air with a strangely rhythmic grace. It was a mercy he had reacted quickly. Had he been a moment late and the disaster come to pass — no, had that disaster been the bursting of only one side — he would not have been able to endure it. He would have burst the remaining half himself, or cut it away. This body of his suffered from precisely that compulsion.
"Hrrbuu...!"
Knowing nothing of the thought, Laura only looked at him across the distance and began, once more, to perform her grotesque little tricks.
"..."
And so he wore the quiet night away, breaking Laura — Charles — who had sunk into the Full-Moon Quirk and lost her reason.