Ciel Midford
It hurt.
The dissonance of organs cut open rode his spine and drove, whole, into his mind, so that even as they lifted him and carried him an immense pain kept seeping in. He had bled so much that his sight swam behind his glasses, and the dark night sky seemed to glow a pale violet. That he could keep from losing consciousness even now was only because his body had been thrown out of symmetry—one side of his waist run through, the other left whole. Should he ask the physician who took him to the table to open the other side as well, and leave an identical scar?
He held that paltry thought for only a moment. The careful steps of the people carrying him came to a stop, and he turned his head.
And at the end of that gaze—
Ciel Midford was walking out through the prison of fire raised by an Apollyon-rank Elemental Magician, the elder of House Rosewell. Watching him, he let out a laugh so empty it was almost nothing at all.
Euphemia...
You told me that if I drove Ciel Midford into despair, he would bow to reality.
But look.
A protagonist is that breed, by nature. Even in a plight that would break an ordinary person and plunge them into despair, he overcomes it, cradling a brilliantly shining miracle, and tries to cut down the evil standing at the opposite pole of fate.
Yes.
Whether he carries a happy ending. Whether he carries a bad ending. Apart from whatever shape the protagonist's life may take—
this world...
wishes for my death. For the villain's death.
But the Netherworld did not wish for his death.
A heavy boom. A long, grinding creak.
He had never wanted it. Even so, a vast gate of the Netherworld descended before Ferzen and was forced open, and formless chains drove in through it. At the same moment the nameplate engraved upon the Underworld Gate locked fast by force.
And the something hauled out from beyond—
"Meeeeh!"
With a goat's cry one might almost have called familiar, it devoured Ciel Midford's sword, still steeped in an incomplete power to ward off magic.
Flutter. Flutter. Flutter.
No wind was blowing, and yet a book appeared all at once, shedding a reek of ill omen, and flipped itself to a certain page. One unusually long name burned bright there, as if demanding that Ferzen read it.
"ξμφφ……"
It was plainly a language he did not know. And yet Ferzen could read it as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
The moment he spoke the name, a liquid darker than darkness began to drip from the moon risen into the night sky, soaking the gate of the Netherworld. At the same time the Netherworld anomaly that had been peeking out with only its head—the one that cried like a goat—used that fluid as a lubricant and stepped smoothly forth.
A cry like a goat's, and yet not a single feature that resembled a goat: an anomaly dwelling on the second floor of the Netherworld, Raurava.
An anomaly one would not, ordinarily, even make contact with. Why...
Some anomalies were raised from the first floor of the Netherworld, granted a name, and climbed the floors little by little as they built a record of bargains. Anomalies born through propagation, by contrast, were given the nature of being able to "grow," of themselves, as far as their mother's floor. It took a long time, and because of that such anomalies almost never answered a black magician's call.
Pain lanced through him. Ferzen's head began to ache.
This was knowledge that had never spread through the world—a fact no black magician had known. So why had he seen that the anomaly was a thing born of propagation, and why, the instant he recognized it, had the knowledge bound to that fact risen in him?
He did not know. He did not try to know.
The mind that had barely held out wore thin, and his eyes drifted shut. His side was torn, and he had already lost a great deal of blood; the pittance of mana still left in him was wrung out by force by the Underworld Gate, and mana exhaustion came over him as well. Ferzen's head dropped.
And so, the moment the summoner's consciousness broke, the anomaly that had run its tentacle through Ciel's body faded of its own accord back into the Netherworld.
On the seventh of May, the imperial banquet ended, leaving nothing behind but turmoil.
"Hmm."
Watching the banquet's aftermath being cleared away in disarray, Gremory quietly turned her head.
Inas den Preussen Robelium. She knew all too well why he had deliberately insulted Ferzen and provoked him. She knew it so well that she had praised his mettle in silence, and had been watching with some amusement the play he staged for her sake. But when she saw him move as if to harm the blood of Brutein, she could no longer tell where the theater ended.
Fortunately, that doubt was answered by the wretched howl of Prince Inas as he was dragged away to the prison. All of it had been arranged beforehand with Ferzen von Schweig Ruerug. And the attempt on his life had been the knight Ciel Midford's act alone.
If all of that is true...
Assuming Ferzen rose safely, it seemed a board she could still shape to her liking. Depending on how the matter ran, she might even take two gains at once.
A thick smell of blood drifted in.
Ferzen's blood stretched in a long trail into the operating room. Watching the physicians draw blood from others and pass it inward for his sake, Euphemia felt—wife though she was—like someone who had come uninvited.
When would the surgery end? It was already drawing on toward three in the morning. Euphemia knew nothing of medicine, but she could be certain of this much: the air of the place was anything but ordinary.
The door banged open. A physician in surgical dress came out, his face hollow with exhaustion. The distinctive sterilized gown was blotched a deep red with blood, and his sunken eyes looked like a dead man's.
"Take over for me."
"How is he..."
"Go in and see."
A major surgery that runs long heaps no small fatigue upon a person. And when the patient was of Brutein blood, the weight bearing down on these physicians—already heavier than for any ordinary case—must have been beyond words.
Teeth ground. The physician who had come to relieve him stepped inside, and the one who emerged peeled off his gloves, snatched up a cookie heaped with whipped cream, and forced himself to chew. He meant to take in food dense with calories and buy back, as efficiently as he could, the strength he had spent.
"Draw more blood."
"Didn't we already draw plenty and send it in?"
"It isn't enough. I can't stop the bleeding at all. It's a wonder the patient's strength has held this long. I'll speak plainly—I'm prepared for my head to come off."
Euphemia, there as his family, was sitting nearby, so the physicians kept their voices as low as they could. But the place was utterly still, and their words reached her ears faint, and exact.
"I— I...!"
She rose in a rush from where she sat, went to the physician before her, pushed her sleeve back, and held out her snow-white arm.
"Please... draw my blood..."
"...Is the blood type the same?"
He had watched her sit motionless until now and only come forward at this moment, and a puzzlement entered him as he asked the most basic of questions. Euphemia could not get out a single word. Same or different hardly mattered. She did not know Ferzen's blood type at all.
"Count Ruerug is type B."
"Ah..."
At the physician's words she carefully drew her trembling arm back. Then she took a faltering step, returned to her place, sank down without strength, and bowed her head.
Why did a lingering pain gouge through her chest, simply because she could be of no help at all to the man inside that room? Perhaps it was guilt. It had plainly been she who defended Ciel to the last and tried to keep him safe—Ciel, who had tried to kill him.
But truly, Euphemia had not known. She had not known that Ciel, that Ciel Midford, would go so far. That for her sake he would throw his life away, and try to kill Ferzen.
And she was not glad of his sacrifice. Not in the least. It bore only sorrow, and even anger bloomed. What remained, after going this far? In the worst form there was, did they not only inflict pain upon each other?
Ciel Midford, shut in the prison of the Imperial Palace, waiting to be executed. Ferzen von Schweig Brutein, drifting between life and death in the operating room. And she herself, powerless—Euphemia El Lorraine Ruerug.
A drop.
Tears spilled from her golden eyes.
Ciel...
I don't know what it is you're trying to give me. But if the way forward hurts this much... then rather— a life lived on, tamed by Ferzen, would be far better.
Euphemia clutched the hem of her skirt tight and wept aloud, in grief.
And so.
Six in the morning.
Still, Ferzen had not come out of the operating room.
Only the sun rose, quiet, to say that it was morning.