Ciel Midford
"The assignments due on the twelfth of April were graded by how much of the information did not overlap. Which means, of course, that the more it overlapped, the lower the mark."
I took the attendance roll from Euphemia, stepped into the lecture hall, and began by reading out the notice on the assignment.
"The scores will be posted the moment the first semester's final examinations end, and the textbook to be issued to the next incoming class will be prepared at the same time. And so..."
A glance caught Lizzy. Her color was unusually bloodless. I walked on toward the blackboard.
Her student profile did note that she was often plagued by minor illnesses, but if she were truly too sick to sit a lecture, she would judge that for herself.
"Lastly. During the fourth week's lecture, while I was explaining the Aura Knight, someone asked whether one had to live through that same training in order to raise the Implementation Rate."
"Th-that was me!"
"Yes. It was an excellent question."
The boy shot his hand up and grinned, loose and foolish. I wrote memory on the board and drew a circle around it.
"How well you know the life of the corpse you mean to enslave becomes comprehension, and that comprehension helps raise the Implementation Rate. However..."
When one drew Feedback from a given memory, a still greater gain was possible if one could enter into the emotions that memory had carried in life.
Most black mages lived and died without ever knowing it.
Joy, sorrow, anger, hatred—these were fragments everyone met simply by living, and even in the moment one took Feedback from a particular memory in order to raise a corpse's Implementation Rate, one did not, as a rule, step outside that familiar range of feeling.
And yet there were emotions difficult to share. Singular ones. They certainly existed.
The prime example was what a soul felt amid the carnage of war.
Must a black mage, then, undergo the identical experience in order to feel that emotion?
No.
Of course, what the slaughter of war stirred had almost nothing that could stand in for it. War was too particular a place. Set aside the repetition of territorial battle, and substitutes scarcely existed at all...
"Take Isabel Ron Pierre Genova—the imperial witch I am presently enslaving—as our text. House Genova practiced marriage within the blood, and so Isabel felt the transgression of being wed to her own brother."
"..."
"The feeling called a sense of transgression need not come, as it did for Isabel, from a consanguineous marriage. One may meet it well enough through other acts."
And so a black mage had to know many things.
And had to experience many things.
Then, in the moment of need, those things would stand in.
"In addition... hm."
My throat ached.
I let the sentence end, took a mouthful of black tea, and wet the thirst rising there. I meant to take the lecture up again.
Laura was staring at me. Those characteristic crimson eyes held steady, unblinking.
Was she displeased with the lecture? More amusing was the childish notion that if she sat in the back and used the bulk of the student in front of her as a shield, I would not see her.
We had been entangled long enough that it looked, to me, like nothing more than a cute little greeting. Even so, I called her name with a touch of mischief.
"Laura de Charles Rosenberg. Have you something to say to me?"
"Hic!"
All thirteen students turned to look at her at once. Laura hiccuped and shook her head from side to side.
Answering in that fashion struck me as ill-mannered, but I knew the stutter, so I let it pass quietly and went on with the lecture.
Later—ten minutes before the end.
I handed out the charts one after another, each bearing the basic facts of the corpse that student would be assigned.
"You will see it when you read them. All fourteen corpses worked as mercenaries in life. That each of you has been given the opposite sex was intentional, and I will hear no petitions. In place of the midterm that was omitted, the final will be a test in which you take autonomous control of the corpse assigned to you and subjugate monsters. Raise your Implementation Rates diligently."
At the last step I stopped before Lizzy's desk and held out a chart.
She did not so much as meet my eyes. A strengthless hand received it, carefully.
"Lizzy."
"Yes..."
"If you are ill, go to a physician. Do not sit through the lecture out of stubbornness. An absence for sickness will not be cut from your attendance."
"I'm not... sick."
"Are you certain."
"Yes..."
She looked lifeless no matter how I studied her. But she had insisted this far, and it was no longer my place to interfere. I ended the lecture and walked toward the main building.
Ferzen's office had been furnished in a dull, hushed interior.
Euphemia sat in the chair there, folded herself over the desk, and closed her eyes.
What was that...
When she had called the roll in Ferzen's place, several students had deliberately given no answer even after she spoke their names.
Had it been only the girls, she might have guessed. The boys had done it too, and so she could find no reason.
Had she looked so easy to slight?
No. The woman called Euphemia El Lorraine Ruerug might be easy to slight, perhaps. The place of wife to Ferzen von Schweig Brutein was not. Euphemia knew that well.
And people did not bare their hostility at a first meeting merely because someone looked easy to push.
...
The woman who worked next door to Ferzen's office had been the same.
Why was everyone she met in the capital so desperate to tear her apart?
It would have been easier to tell Ferzen that certain students had refused to answer when she called the roll. Honestly, she hated taking help over a thing this small.
The door flew open.
Ferzen, the lecture finished, came into the office.
In that monotonous room there was nowhere to sit but the single chair before the desk. Seeing him approach, Euphemia rose. When he had settled comfortably into the chair, she perched lightly on his lap, as their time together had taught her to do.
The response that came back was lukewarm.
"Sh-should I stand?"
She half-rose, reading him, and the hand he set on her waist pushed her toward the desk.
She rose onto her toes as if it were natural and sat upon the desktop, drawing her legs together so the underwear beneath her skirt would not show.
"Euphemia."
As if to scold that modesty, he spoke her name low. Euphemia opened the legs she had closed and shyly revealed the pure-white panties she wore.
"Hah, nn..."
Ferzen's hand traced her bare legs.
It did not end there. The hand climbed, slipped inside the skirt, and kneaded lewdly about her thighs.
Was this a kind of signal?
She suffered a little conflict within, then caught her hem and drew the skirt up herself.
A kiss.
"Anh...!"
Ferzen held her waist so she could not flee, bent his head, and kissed her gently near the navel.
Another.
"Nn...!"
It did not end at one. He teased her thickly, over and over, and Euphemia covered her mouth so the sound would not leak out of the room.
"Hik...!"
Then the tongue he put out stabbed into the daintily indented navel. She could endure no longer. She dragged in an empty breath, and her body shivered.
"Hnn! Nn...! Aahn...!"
It felt as if her whole lower belly had become one sensitive place. A crawling pleasure climbed and would not stop.
At last Ferzen's hand pressed softly near her breast. Euphemia collapsed, strengthless, onto the desk, and was toyed with as defenselessly as a puppy lying with its belly bared.
"Nn, hnn..."
A little later, when Ferzen lifted his head, the white panties—soaked and sticky with the slick that had spilled—clung lewdly to the plump, swollen sex and laid its shape bare.
He pressed.
"Nn...!"
Index and middle finger joined, he slowly bore down over her crotch, and the sticky fluid seeped out in an obscene stain.
Nudge the panties a little aside, and the pink sex, opening and closing, would breathe out the thick scent of a female tempting a male.
A truly bewitching sight.
"Euphemia."
He had not seen it. Even so, a woman who had walked into that lecture hall alone would have taken clear hostility from more than one student. Speak gently to such a woman—pretty, lacquered comfort—and how much of it would ever take?
But there was such a thing as the suspension-bridge effect.
Shrink her beneath other people's malice, then stir and spend the most primitive of human appetites, and the result was simple. He would remain the only one who gave her a great joy.
"Lie on your stomach."
"..."
The place was what it was. Color rose in Euphemia's face, and she seemed to feel a psychological resistance.
"Quickly."
He patted her thigh and urged her.
Euphemia turned herself over, offered her hips, and lay quietly face-down.
"Ah..."
The white panties came down and caught at her ankles.
A wet sound. Ferzen's finger sank into the soaked sex, crooked like a hook, and scraped with familiar gentleness at one particular place.
"Nnn...!"
She might have hated it. Even so, those full hips swayed as if to coax him.
A seat of learning, a theater of society—the Academy. To push her hips out there and have her sex stirred made Euphemia feel she had become a wicked child, and the sense of transgression rose in her. Yet when his fingers drove in—not the middle alone, but the index as well—and churned her without restraint, she panted in pleasure and clenched, again and again, around what had entered her.
"Hah, mm— mmph..."
Ferzen straightened and bent his head to kiss her gently. The fingers buried in her sex were still raking the inner wall, so her tongue moved more clumsily than it ever had. He caught that tongue with practiced ease and went on with a deep kiss, thick with affection.
"Hik...! Nngh! Nnn...!"
Soon her body trembled. Ferzen pushed his fingers a little deeper and pressed hard at the pebbled place.
"Hah...! Ah, ah...!"
She was past trembling, nearly in convulsion. He drew her in as if to pin her body beneath his own.
A twitch.
Another.
How could every frail shiver that came through his arms be so unbearably dear?
A wet slap.
"Haahn..."
He patted the drenched sex with his palm, and a faint, vulgar sound, like water striking, spread through the room.
The white papers on the desk had drunk the slick that fell from her, and each one bore a stain like a raindrop.
A sniffle.
Afterward, as the afterglow of climax slowly thinned, Euphemia sniffled like a child who had lost the road to some sorrow and self-disgust she could not name. But Ferzen licked those tears and tapped her thigh, and she parted her legs and lifted her waist, awkward and unsteady.
A soft slide.
"Nn..."
Then, very gently, he wiped her damp sex and drew the panties up from her ankles, dressing her again.
Even in trifles like these, his hands always found their way in.
"Huk, nnn..."
Euphemia knew, dimly, that the man who gave the sickness was the man who gave the cure. But since she had left Ruerug, not one person had shown her any kindness. She hid her face in the arms that drew her close and rubbed her cheek against him.
A pool found in the middle of a desert—even if it is only muddy water, who can pass it by without drinking?
"You will be getting hungry. Let us go and eat."
"Mm..."
Somehow the hour had come to point at eleven in the morning. The two of them rose together.
But a faint afterglow still lived in Euphemia's legs, and now and then they trembled like those of a calf not long born.
Ferzen offered his arm so it would be easy to take. Euphemia laid hers upon it and left the office half-leaning into him.
Seen only from a distance, the two of them from behind were nothing less than the very image of a harmonious couple.
Everything that discomforts a person now will, in the flow of time, turn at last into trifles.
As those words had it, I hoped—sincerely—that every matter I was fretting over would, by tomorrow night, become a joke I could take with a glass of wine.
"..."
A mere six days had gone by far too quickly. Already it was the seventh of May.
Far off, the Imperial Palace rose aloof, holding tonight an unusually splendid light. I looked at it and quietly worried a cigarette between my fingers.
There would be no trouble in forming the occasion, now that a pretext was in place.
The only question was whether I killed him, or failed to.
Yesterday—the sixth of May—I had stayed up through the night managing Laura's quirk, and so from after lunch I had lain in bed and slept deeply.
Thanks to that, not even an hour after rising, my mind was clear.
My condition was the very best. Not a single flaw.
"Um..."
The balcony door opened, and Euphemia, in a dress bright as snow, peeked her head out.
As I had ordered, there was no excessive ornament. A dress that breathed beauty, quite literally, through dignity. One could indeed call it Azalea's craft.
"Yes. Let us go."
I took the hand of Euphemia, who could not quite keep still.
She, too, dimly guessed that the moment we entered the palace banquet, Ciel Midford would be there.
But neither she nor I mentioned it. Neither of us tried to let it show.
We boarded the carriage and went on toward the Imperial Palace.
Through the window, the night sky. The countless stars set there gathered close beside the tilted moon, as if they too had guessed that something interesting was about to happen, and shone down upon the night.
Have they all come...
Before the doors of the vast imperial banquet hall, the official holding the list furrowed his tired eyes.
Even among those invited, eight had yet to enter.
Of course, if one counted those marked absent the instant the list was completed...
Ferzen von Schweig Ruerug
Jeremiah von Griel Brutein
With those two, it was ten.
They had been recorded absent not on the day itself, but at the moment the list was drawn up, because they were of Brutein's blood.
Those who inherited that bloodline would never attend an affair under imperial auspices—least of all one that would raise the curtain on the struggle for the throne.
"Hm...?"
Soon it would be half past nine.
The official had judged it about time to leave his post, but a carriage climbed the hill and entered the Imperial Palace.
"Hah..."
The banquet did begin at half past nine, yet courtesy was to arrive by nine. What nerve was that?
No. At the very least, one ought to come earlier than His Majesty the Emperor.
Inside the hall, His Majesty the Emperor of Ernes and his empress were already seated. To walk in now was an ill-mannered, arrogant act, all but declaring oneself the master of the banquet.
Did they not know it would be better simply to stay away, and later open a private line to whichever prince they favored?
Hmph. Some provincial noble who cannot even loiter in the center, I suppose. When you enter, I shall cry your name in a great voice.
As the power of the imperial house grew, the officials who belonged to it took an enormous pride in working for it. And when someone behaved as if ignoring their master, His Majesty, their insides naturally twisted.
"Uh..."
But light fell across the carriage turning into the carriage court and revealed the house emblem engraved there. The official guarding the entrance wore a look of disbelief and opened both eyes wide.
Then Ferzen stepped down, ever neat in a black suit, and came forward with his wife, Euphemia.
"..."
"Take it. How long must I stand here holding it?"
"Y-yes..."
The tall man looked down at him with those distinctive crimson eyes. The official felt a pressure that seemed to stop his breath, and he hurriedly accepted the invitation held out to him.
He ought then to have opened the doors of the banquet hall.
His head was in confusion, and he could not.
Ferzen passed him with indifference, stood before the great doors, looked at Euphemia—drawn tight with nerves—and held out his hand.
"Straighten your back."
"Mm..."
"There is nothing to find difficult. Most of them will only look. They will not even try to approach."
"..."
"So remember only one thing."
Ferzen lowered his head and whispered at her ear, low, in a mid-toned voice that was pleasant to hear.
Then he reached forward and opened the doors.
Beyond them, splendid light spilled out, and the music of the court orchestra. Nobles dressed with formality were conversing, each with each.
"Ah..."
Ferzen had said there was nothing to find difficult, but Euphemia was cowed at once. Never in her life had she attended a banquet of this scale.
Yet his dignified steps went forward without a waver, and they became a guide. Clumsy as she was, Euphemia went after them.
At the same time—
"F-Ferzen von Schweig Brutein enters!"
The official who had guarded the door came to himself and, belatedly, announced the entrance to those within.
In his fluster he used the surname from before it had changed, and he did not so much as mention Euphemia, who attended as wife.
Even so, the name of House Brutein alone drew every noble's gaze in the hall at once.
A measured step.
The click of a heel.
Then, standing before the Emperor and Empress of the Ernes Empire, Ferzen opened his mouth as if to correct the cry of a moment before.
"I, Ferzen von Schweig Ruerug..."
"I... Euphemia El Lorraine Ruerug..."
The noisy hall grew still, as if it were holding its breath.
No. Only the court orchestra did not cease to play.
In an instant the banquet hall lost its original purpose and degenerated into a concert that had merely gathered an audience of nobles.
That was the weight and the worth of the name Brutein.
If the imperial dignity were likened to the throne, then it would be no exaggeration to call the Imperial Crown itself Brutein.
But no one called that arrogance.
It was a thing proven across a long history.
And the blood of that Imperial Crown now stood before their eyes.
Ciel Midford.
I looked at the protagonist of this world, standing at the side of the second prince of the Kingdom of Robelium, and I thought, quietly.
If human beings are actors set upon the stage called life, then the house across from them is death—the Netherworld—and that is the audience.
Yes. And so...
Let us bring the curtain down.
I will take back the part that was given to you. I will send you into the seats called the Netherworld, and leave you no choice but to watch the stage of the life that I perform.