The Hazy Full Moon
The next day, Ferzen arrived at the Imperial Academy with Euphemia, and from early morning he was obliged to receive the greetings of a great many people.
Those who would ordinarily have felt a wary distance before the name written on his doorplate now made a point of ignoring that discomfort, and knocked all the same.
The reason was simple in the extreme. They wanted to beg Ferzen, a black magician of Apollyon rank, to open the third floor of the Netherworld and broker a transaction on their behalf.
Quite apart from the information each house kept privately about the anomalies of the third floor, the Anomaly commonly known to heal missing flesh and wounds was the sole remaining hope of those who did not lack for coin. And not only simple injuries—the loss of a limb in particular. If it was a disease the medicine of this world could not cure... yes, if it was cancer, that too could be mended through the Anomaly in question. Disease did not properly fall within the creature's domain, but if every part of a metastasized organ were cut away at a stroke and then restored through it, a clean and total cure was possible.
"How tiresome."
Even so, Ferzen refused every one of those meetings. In part because he wished to preserve the scarcity of the thing, and because he meant to raise his own worth.
Still, should I ever need a great sum in haste...
By this means he could draw in a fortune in a very short time.
"I will step out to the washroom."
"Mm. Go on."
Everyone who had come to the office had brought a bouquet or a potted plant by way of congratulations, and Euphemia was setting them in neat rows about the room, smiling as she worked. Did she know that if those arrangements later failed to sit in symmetry, the one who would have to put them right was herself?
The latch clicked. He opened the door and stepped out into the corridor, and he was just about to enter the washroom when he came face to face with Uriel, emerging from the women's washroom beside it.
"Congratulations. I heard you were raised to Apollyon."
"So I was. I'll take the sentiment gladly. More to the point—did you leave the house? A physician called yesterday, received no answer, and turned back as he was."
"I—I was asleep."
She had been retracing, over and over, the marks he had carved into her and left behind. She could not say that, and so Uriel stammered out a lie.
"I see."
That was the only thing he had wanted to ask. Ferzen meant to pass her by without interest, but Uriel caught his wrist. Someone tall might not have noticed. Someone short, standing close before Ferzen where he stood, could see the kiss-mark at the side of his neck.
"Have you something to say."
"......"
Uriel was silent for a moment, still holding, undiluted, the feeling that had sunk into her own scent and boiled there. Had he gone home and spent that desire on his wife—that plain, unimpressive woman?
"Your tie is loose."
She reached out, took hold of the loosened tie, and drew it tight. The collar pressed close against the nape of his neck and hid, just as it was, the trace that he had lain with someone the night before.
"...My thanks."
"Don't."
At that lukewarm thanks she did not so much as look back. She passed him and went into her own office, sat down on the sofa, and faced the mirror beside her. She briefly undid her scarf and slowly traced the red mark and the bite scored into her neck.
"Bastard..."
As expected, nothing kind came of it.
Taking the attendance roster from Euphemia, Ferzen entered the morning lecture, approached the blackboard, and took up a piece of chalk.
"There are many ways to make a person ambitious, but the surest of them is to set a reward upon the goal."
He tapped the board with the chalk and glanced back over his shoulder.
"I expect there are some among you who mean to come find me separately, once the day's business is finished, at five in the afternoon."
At his words, several students flinched in silence.
"And that will be meaningless, so you will stop."
"......"
"I have no intention of opening the third floor of the Netherworld and brokering a transaction for just anyone. But once this year's lectures are entirely finished, I will grant a single student—the one who has earned the highest marks across the first and second semesters—the right to request, on that house's behalf, that I open the third floor and broker a deal."
The hall stirred into a restless murmur.
"Professor."
"Speak."
"Isn't that... unfair?"
"In what way."
"I don't mean to feel superior about minding one's grades, nor to condemn it... but there are people who have no need of them."
Ferzen did not particularly deny it. Some students meant to use their marks at the Academy as the foundation of a later life, while others regarded the place as nothing more than an extension of society. From the very start, had he himself not long since seen through the truth—that this Academy was no more than a symbol by which the imperial house held the heirs of each domain as hostages and displayed the power of the throne?
"If you mean to offer even people like that some motivation... what of dividing it by semester?"
There were those who had slighted the assignments Ferzen had set. However desperately they applied themselves now, overturning the result would be too much to ask.
"I am a professor."
"......"
"Do you think it wrong to give a slightly better reward to the student who is, relatively speaking, more desperate? Some nobles look upon commoners who live diligently and conclude that, however they try, they will never escape the yoke of poverty."
"I think we've strayed a little from the subject."
"And yet that is how it is."
"......"
"Effort does not betray the one who makes it. The goal one hoped for, and the dream—those do."
Through effort, one becomes even a thousandth of a percent better than yesterday. In the end, the goal or the dream goes unfulfilled more often than not.
"So I merely thought that those who labor in earnest at things someone else calls nothing, things held to be trivial, ought to receive a reward that is at least a little certain."
Ferzen rolled up his sleeve and briefly swept his gaze about the room. Then he fixed it on Lizzie.
The words had been polished to a shine, but contrary to their surface, what lay beneath was an attempt to draw the noose tight around her once. A fair amount of time had passed, and still she had not come to him. That meant she had refused the demand he had made at the conference. Then, when a goal was set before her in this fashion, what reaction would she show? Would she go on managing her marks diligently, as she always had? Or, thinking that the harder she worked the more she was thrashing toward the mercy he had hung out for her, would she fall into a dilemma?
Ferzen von Schweig Ruerug. What he was constructing was a kind of haunted house. If she did not yield to the many traps laid along the path of escape, and succeeded in stepping outside, she would have overcome that trauma and might become a black magician of a higher order than he himself. But if she could not, and yielded along the way—if she failed to endure, and cried out to be let out...
"I will begin the lecture."
He folded the thought away and turned his back.
"In the lectures I have given until now, what I have placed my emphasis upon has been, in the end, the human being. But a black magician need not use a person at all. If it is a corpse, any corpse may be placed under Enslavement."
Watching him carry the lecture forward, Lizzie bit her lip. She had faintly understood what the words that opened the hour were meant to mean.
"So today... I thought I might lecture on the corpses of what people commonly call monsters. Some of you will find that strange. Those who hold the remains of an Elemental Magician or an Aura Knight who walked those paths, all the more so."
I won't yield...
Even to Ferzen's voice, which she wanted only to let wash past her, Lizzie forced herself to listen.
I... I'll take you as nourishment, and I will bloom. Without fail.
"But in a war, or a war between domains, where the many meet the many, making use of a monster's corpse is remarkably cost-effective. Why do you suppose that is?"
At Ferzen's question, Lizzie forced her mouth open.
"Animals of low intelligence... their actions are limited, and even those limited actions have become habit, so with only a little Feedback one can obtain a high Implementation Rate."
"...Yes. That is correct. Among animals, the human is the being capable of the most complex thought, and for that reason, understanding the whole of a single person's life is close to impossible. Monsters are not like that."
The mercenary associations assigned to each domain also sold, for a fee, detailed information on the monsters of nearby habitats. With that knowledge alone, one's comprehension could be raised considerably.
"There is that matter of cost, but... particularly when they gather in groups, there is always a head—that is, a leader."
"......"
"Kill that leader and enslave the corpse, and the monsters under it need not be killed. With a simple command they can be thrown into a domain war, or a war, and used as fighting strength."
As Ferzen's words lengthened, time gradually passed. The students seated at the joined desks began to let their postures slacken, but Lizzie, sitting in her wheelchair with only an ordinary desk before her, had no cause to let her concentration fail. And so, engraving his knowledge into her mind one piece at a time, she clenched her slender hand tight.
Someday... every element that composed that arrogant, self-righteous man. She would dismantle him completely, force him to submit, make him lick the instep of her ruined left leg, and grind beneath her heel that face he wore as a mask of hypocrisy.
"Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia."
She flinched.
"Asleep, are you."
"N-no..."
Yet, enough to make such resolve seem hollow, Lizzie's body startled even at the sound of Ferzen calling her name. Since that day in particular, merely being in the same room was enough. Her ruined left leg ached, now and then.
"Then raise your head."
"Yes..."
Each time, Lizzie cursed her own powerlessness without end.
When the lecture ended, Ferzen walked over to Laura.
"You know, do you not."
"Y-yes..."
A great deal had been omitted from those few words, but Laura understood them easily enough. Today was the fourth of June—a hazy day, for all that the rainy season had packed the sky with dark cloud.
"Then I will be waiting."
"Yes..."
It was, without fail, a day on which the full moon rose.