Who Are You, Really?
"Nnngh..."
Seria let out a small groan.
The thing weighing on her was finally showing its true face: a wallet whose bottom was coming steadily into view. The store had been shut for a while—a blessing, of a sort—and she had been all but forced into fasting, her body hardened until she could get by on a single meal every two days. That had left her a little money to spare. In the end she had spent even that.
She had scraped by until now, just barely, but as the semester went on the things she needed multiplied, and the money she had to spend swelled right along with them.
I can't ask them to send more from home...
She was their only daughter, and she knew her parents' circumstances better than anyone. Even the allowance they sent her now must have been earned through hardship she could scarcely imagine. Commoners in this age did not make money. They only earned enough to eat, and that was why they were called common folk.
"What do I do..."
No clever way out came to mind, and the tightness in her chest only grew.
I want to go to the store with Ekaterina one more time...
What stung even more was that she had no way to repay the friend who had helped her. In truth, once she and Ekaterina had started speaking, the young ladies' harassment had vanished as if it had never happened. They were not close enough to call friends, if she was honest—and yet merely exchanging words with the Grand Duke's daughter of the North had been enough to bring that about. Seria felt all over again just how formidable the power of connections could be.
In an academy where blood, talent, and the rank and wealth of one's parents were everything, connections were bound to hold absolute value. Not that she meant to buy standing by paying Ekaterina back in material things. Raised by parents who had taught her to live by her conscience even without money, Seria despised that sort of person. She was simply sorry.
"How did the dumplings taste?"
"They were all right."
She had learned, as a matter of course, how to hide what she felt, so it was not especially hard to read the real meaning in Ekaterina's words. If Ekaterina—who usually spoke little and showed even less—went so far as to pass judgment on the taste of food, it was plain how well it had suited her.
There was a clear difference between Seria, raised poor and trained to choke down her wants, and Ekaterina, for whom silence had become second nature because of the life she led and the station she held. The result, all the same, was much the same.
And then a thought flickered through her mind.
All right. I'll try throwing myself on the academy's mercy.
In an academy steeped in elitism, no real achievement meant no reward to match. But if she bowed her head somehow, might they not take her circumstances into account? Her parents' efforts were efforts, yes—but without the money the academy paid out each month, she would have had to quit long ago. So this time, too, she ought to be able to get help.
Seria decided to hang her hopes on it, just once.
Delilah turned the empty bottle of hangover cure this way and that. The label bore nothing but a line boasting that it was good for hangovers, and a logo. The ingredients would have been printed there as well, once, but they had been erased in the crossing between dimensions—a fact she had no way of knowing. This was a world where no food-safety law had ever been written, so it hardly mattered.
"Hmm..."
She hated to admit it, but just as Dante had said, the hangover cure was akin to the potions she brewed. Hovenia fruit, said to be good for the liver; turmeric; thistle—the extracts of any number of medicinal herbs came through, intact, on the tip of her tongue. The concentration, though, was extremely thick. If a potion of her own making were sugar water, this was honey itself. The difference in strength stood out that starkly.
What kind of process did this go through?
The blending of ingredients and the work of concentration were the measure of an alchemist's skill, and the hangover cure in front of her soared far past the level of any ordinary potion—past even the potions she made herself. She had thrown hers together in a hurry, of course. If she sat down and crafted one properly, she could make something better than this as many times as she pleased. Even granting that, it was absolutely not a thing she could dismiss.
He did say some of the goods in the store were things he'd made himself.
Delilah's eyes narrowed. In other words, Dante might be capable of brewing a concentrate this strong with his own hands. He might be hiding something she didn't know.
Hmm.
With a curious little hum, Delilah set the bottle down. Then she stared straight at Dante's face and lifted one corner of her mouth.
"Dante. What's your real identity?"
The question came out of nowhere, and it seemed to catch him off guard. He hesitated a moment before he answered.
"I'm nothing more than a humble shopkeeper."
"Liar."
She shut that down at once.
"I thought it was strange they'd ever pick an ordinary person. You're hiding some enormous secret, aren't you?"
"...Pardon?"
"A past you can't casually tell other people about, for instance..."
Delilah set a finger to her chin and tipped her head.
"Or maybe the imperial family sent you to keep an eye on the academy?"
At that, Dante finally burst out laughing.
"I thought curiosity was the only thing you had in excess, but your imagination is just as rich. I swear by the heavens, it is absolutely not the case."
"Yes, yes. I'm sure that's what you'd say."
Delilah had no intention of simply taking him at his word. When she had asked who he really was, that flustered look had plainly meant there was something there. A sharp guess, if it was sharp—though still a fair distance from the truth that Dante had been reincarnated from the modern Earth of the twenty-first century, and that he even carried an otherworldly cheat besides.
What an interesting man.
A peculiar interest stirred in her, but she decided not to put him on the spot any further. She already had a record of making a spectacle of herself. There was no need to chip away at her image any more than she already had.
"Well, so what? Everyone has at least one secret they can't tell other people, don't they? Relax. I'm not the sort of woman who pries into every little thing."
She smiled, bright and easy, and asked:
"We're still friends, aren't we?"
When Delilah had abruptly asked who I really was, my blood had run cold.
She grabbed the completely wrong end of it, though.
She seemed to be laboring under some grandiose misunderstanding, and even when I told her it wasn't true, she showed no sign of believing me. We'd muddled past it somehow, so for the moment I could breathe. Time would make it plain enough that I was a nobody. No point rushing it.
It really is enormous, though.
I was out walking the academy grounds. I couldn't stay shut up in the store or my room all day; I needed the air, or I'd lose my mind. I'd taken a rough look around on the first day, and there were still more places I didn't know than places I did. Bit by bit, I was widening the map in my head. The grounds were that vast—beyond anything in Korea, and beyond comparison even with the finest universities abroad.
The main building stood at the crest of a slope atop the coastal cliffs at the very edge of the continent, and below it lay the dormitories, the research wings, and the rest of the facilities. Inland, a vast forest opened out; even by carriage, the nearest city was days away. It was an educational institution, in a word, but it might as well have been a fortress. Academy in name only—beyond the grounds proper there was a village where civilians hired from outside, people like me, lived, along with farmland enough for the place to sustain itself completely. No castle walls, and still it put an ordinary domain to shame.
Well. It would have to be, to call itself the finest school on the continent.
Just then I was passing an artificial lake whose making I couldn't begin to guess at, cutting across a lawn that served as both training field and place to rest. That alone should suggest how wide the academy was. My feet carried me, at last, to the edge of the forest. It was kept well enough that outdoor classes were sometimes held there—safe enough that even an ordinary man like me could use the paths for a walk.
And there I ran into someone I hadn't expected.
"Oh? Principal, is that you?"
Her hair, like threads of silver, was so out of place against the forest that it caught the eye even from a distance.
"Hello, Dante."
I returned the greeting and asked what she was doing here.
"Taking a walk, the same as you."
For someone out on a walk, she had been standing in one spot for quite a while, as if she had been waiting for me. Out of habit, I took in how she was dressed. An appearance seal in the shape of a thin pair of glasses. A black, old-fashioned robe that gave nothing of her figure away. The pointed hat that was as good as a mage's emblem, though, was not on her head where it belonged. It was clutched in her hand.
"How is business?"
As she asked, a gentle smile rose on that pretty face, whose thoughts were impossible to read.
"Well. So-so."
I'd been about to ask, half in jest, whether she'd gone and issued some ban on the store, and then I thought better of it.
"Nothing out of the ordinary, I hope?"
Out of the ordinary. I'd spent two days dealing with some truly awful customers. Did I really need to say so? It must already have shown on my face, because the principal tilted her head. In my previous life I had been trained to keep what I felt hidden, but as I let go, one by one, of the habits I had picked up to adapt to this world, my feelings had started to show of their own accord.
"Is something troubling you?"
"If you mean troubles, yes. Business simply isn't going well."
And the thing I had gained from all of this was precisely the ability to brazenly talk my way around the truth.
"Aha."
The principal nodded, then went on in a soft voice, as if she understood perfectly.
"Given the nature of the academy, it can't be helped. Step into the dining hall and you can eat every delicacy of land and sea to your heart's content."
She was probably right. Catering to the tastes of noble children would be fiendishly difficult.
Still, once they get a taste of the punch in ready-made food brought over from the modern world, they'll change their minds.
The people who had come by so far had proved as much in person—though the last man to eat the buldak, those viciously spicy chicken noodles, seemed to have sampled "stimulating" in a rather different sense.
Then a question occurred to me out of nowhere.
"If you knew that, why did the academy permit a store in the first place?"
Now that I thought about it, it was strange. However much land they had going to waste, the academy had no reason to keep a store that couldn't even do business.
"Surely you haven't forgotten? I gave you a month precisely so you could prove that."
"Wasn't that a condition you set to see whether I was fit for the shopkeeper's post?"
"Hmm."
The principal wore her usual unreadable smile.
"Shall we take a little walk together?"
In that moment, refusal was not a choice I had.