Roman's Shadow
Schluss felt something gurgling out from his stomach as his body grew colder and colder. So this is what dying feels like. Marie must have felt this same pain when she died. Even in the midst of such agony, she left me her final words for the sake of her son. All I could manage were strange groans. Strange thoughts kept flashing through his mind. Was this what they called one's life flashing before their eyes? No, it felt a little different. A life flashing usually meant memories of the past passing by, didn't it? Either way, he had thought he was going to die.
"······I knew it would come to this."
A warm sensation touched his fingertips, and a sweet voice flowed into his ears. As if he had been holding on just to hear that voice, his consciousness faded away instantly. He truly believed he had died at that moment.
"Ugh······."
Schluss woke up with a groan. The moment his vision cleared, he quickly assessed the situation. He was lying in bed. Judging by the atmosphere of the room, it seemed to be a hospital ward. Though it felt as if he had only just lost consciousness, the pitch-black sky outside the window told him that quite some time had passed. His fingers felt strangely slick. Had they been dipped in water? He struggled to turn his head to the side. There had been constant rustling sounds coming from his right.
"How are you feeling?"
"Haa······."
It was Iris, as expected. The moment he saw her smiling face, a laugh that sounded more like a sigh escaped him. She must have used her signature original recovery magic, the one called a miracle. It was a spell that consumed an enormous amount of mana and stamina, yet she had willingly cast it to save him. He was grateful, to say the least. ······Setting aside the question of why she had saved him in the first place.
"I feel like I can manage."
"Then that's good enough."
Iris smiled brightly. Her recovery magic wasn't omnipotent, of course. It couldn't bring back the dead. And Schluss had been on the verge of death. It was only natural that his body remained completely paralyzed, as if numb all over. In about a day, he should be able to move again, though the pain in his abdomen would likely persist.
"Schluss."
"What is it?"
"I once asked you what future you had seen."
She had. On the first day of the semester. The moment he first saw Iris, he had rudely asked her outright what future she had seen. She had found it difficult to answer back then.
"Schluss. I saw a future where you died. A future where you bled from your stomach and died a miserable death behind the event hall."
"······."
"A future where you fought alone against a threat no one else noticed, dying a lonely death without anyone ever finding out."
A future where he died. That meant the future had changed. So the future observed by her foresight could indeed shift. It was a setting he had never thought deeply about, and now he realized it for the first time.
"Iris."
"Yes. What is it?"
"······Thank you."
He turned his head and offered his gratitude. He never would have dreamed that a day would come when he felt genuine thanks toward a character from the novel he had written. Iris had surely saved him for her own reasons, but even so, he was still grateful. Iris was undeniably one of the people to whom he owed the greatest debt—perhaps second only to Marie.
"You're welcome."
"Did you wait until I woke up?"
"Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't."
"······?"
Iris smiled and rose from the bed. It was a smile filled with an unsettling sense of mischief, like that of a little devil. Only then did Schluss realize that something was going wrong.
"Schluss! I heard you woke up!"
"Mr. Heinkel! Do you remember what happened when you stopped the terrorist attack?"
"I heard you fought the culprit in close combat! Could you tell us specifically how you fought······"
The door burst open and people poured in like a flood. Every one of them held a notebook and pen—they looked like reporters. But how did these people even know he had stopped the terrorist attack? Schluss whipped his head around and glared at Iris.
'It was you.'
But Iris merely shrugged and walked out of the room through the door. So Iris had spilled everything. That he had dismantled the spell meant to blow up the entire event hall. That he had prevented the worst possible terrorist attack. Even though everyone would have passed it by without knowing if Iris had simply stayed silent, she had deliberately brought it all to light. Thanks to her, he was about to become a celebrity. Though he had already been fairly well-known before······.
"Iris! What the hell are you doing—"
"Schluss! Please give us an answer!"
"Mr. Heinkel! How exactly did you notice the existence of the spell······"
His desperate cry calling for Iris was drowned out by the reporters' shouts. And soon, Iris disappeared from his sight. So this was how she was going to play it.
"Haa······. This is driving me crazy."
One day, he would pay her back in the exact same way. Schluss gritted his teeth and made that vow.
"Hurtlocker."
"······."
"Hey, you bastard."
"Don't talk to me. I'm in the middle of reviewing the fight."
Eric sighed and turned away. Whenever Hurtlocker experienced something shocking, he would often close his eyes like this and sink into thought alone. He would replay the battle situation in his mind, calculating every possible outcome that could have occurred at the time. Hurtlocker called this process "reviewing."
'Well, it must have been shocking.'
Hurtlocker had been defeated. The man known as the strongest assassin in the kingdom's forces. And his opponent hadn't even been an Elste-class mage or a high-ranking knight. Just a freshman at the Imperial Academy. And a commoner at that. Moreover, the opponent hadn't even been fully prepared, while Hurtlocker had been armed with daggers when he lost. He would need time to recover from the shock. Eric decided to leave Hurtlocker alone for a while.
Meanwhile, Hurtlocker was—
'Just why did I lose······?'
He was gritting his teeth, desperately analyzing the cause of his defeat. The moment he had faced Schluss, he had felt that something about the man was off. But that had been the case every single day. That man with the dead eyes would have looked suspicious no matter when or where you saw him. What truly felt wrong was the moment they crossed paths. Hurtlocker had sensed something sharp and twisted his body to react, but he had ended up giving Schluss the first move. That meant Schluss had known from the very beginning that he was the terrorist. But how? By what means? These questions were impossible to answer no matter how many times he pondered them. After all, the very fact that Schluss had dismantled the spell was incomprehensible to begin with. In any case, Schluss had known from the start that Hurtlocker was the culprit and had deliberately stepped in to interfere with the terrorist attack. That much was fine. It made no sense whatsoever, but he would accept it for now. But the real problem came after that.
'I was overwhelmingly at an advantage.'
Hurtlocker had been armed with daggers. He had smuggled them into the event hall by hiding them in the form of mana using material decomposition magic. Schluss, on the other hand, had been empty-handed. Bare hands versus daggers. Without external intervention, the outcome should have been obvious. At least, that was what Hurtlocker had thought at the time. Because Hurtlocker's internal circuit was the kind that appeared once in a thousand years, perfectly optimized for close-quarters combat. It would be a lie to say he hadn't been shocked when he saw Schluss keeping up with his movements. Moreover, there had been a moment when Schluss had even surpassed him in speed. That phenomenon couldn't be explained unless Schluss had been capable of moving like that from the very beginning and had deliberately held back.
"Damn it······."
Hurtlocker felt both frustration and humiliation. Schluss had dismantled every single one of Hurtlocker's signature spells that activated simultaneously with physical combat. There had been a total of five light-attribute spells designed to shoot toward Schluss from all directions. Even though they were beginner-level spells, the computational speed had been abnormal. He wanted to believe that someone had secretly helped Schluss. Otherwise, it would mean that Schluss had surpassed Hurtlocker even in multitasking ability.
"Haa······."
Hurtlocker raised his arms, which were wrapped tightly in bandages, and let out a deep sigh. Eric's assessment was that the bones had been properly set, so they would heal in just a few days. It was the first time he had lost both arms in combat. In the situation where he could no longer use his arms, Hurtlocker, whose face had been grabbed by Schluss, had felt a sensation he had momentarily forgotten. The fear of death. The thought that he might really die was becoming reality, and his life flashed before his eyes. But Schluss had let him go. He could have killed him with just a little more force. Had he run out of strength? Probably not. Schluss had clearly spared him on purpose. But why······? Hurtlocker's mind instantly grew complicated—
"Ah, whatever!"
He soon gave up on reviewing and ruffled his hair. No matter how much he thought about it, there had been no better options. Hurtlocker had made the best possible moves. And yet he had lost. The fact that Schluss had simply been stronger was something he couldn't accept, and it felt as if his anger would explode.
'At least I managed to eliminate him. That's a relief.'
One way or another, he had succeeded in killing Schluss. Even if Schluss had spared him, the man was dead and Hurtlocker was still alive here, so couldn't this be considered a victory rather than a defeat? This kind of self-consolation was—
"Hurtlocker! You bastard! They say Schluss Heinkel is alive?"
"What?!"
Hurtlocker's self-consolation was shattered by Eric's urgent voice.
"It's in the articles? They say he survived?"
"That can't be. I stabbed his liver. There's no way to stop liver bleeding with any kind of magic."
"Are you sure you stabbed his liver?"
"I'm certain."
"Then why is he alive?"
"······."
"Hah. So even you make mistakes sometimes."
At Eric's mocking tone, Hurtlocker ground his teeth. How could he possibly fail at stabbing a person's liver when he had done it dozens, hundreds of times? How could he be mistaken after stabbing it? The sensation in his hand had definitely been the feeling of piercing into a liver. Hurtlocker felt as if he would go mad from the injustice of it all.
"By the way, what happened to Schluss?"
"What do you mean?"
"Shouldn't we change him from a surveillance target to an assassination target?"
"Hmm······."
Eric grabbed his chin and pondered for a moment. Schluss was certainly a dangerous individual. He possessed computational ability sufficient to detect and dismantle a massive hidden spell all by himself. On top of that, he had close-quarters combat skills that surpassed Hurtlocker's. But that didn't necessarily mean he had to be killed immediately.
"No. Not yet."
"Why not? His level of danger is comparable to Roman's! We need to eliminate him right away—"
"We don't know that yet. We can't tell whether Schluss stopped us or stopped the terrorist attack."
"······."
Hurtlocker's mouth closed. In other words, they didn't know whether Schluss was hostile to the intelligence agency or had simply acted to prevent casualties. If it was the latter, Schluss might not be such a great threat to the intelligence agency after all.
"Eliminating Schluss as well would require the intelligence agency to prepare for considerable losses. So let's just pray. Pray that Schluss doesn't know much about the intelligence agency."
"······."
It was a wise course of action. Increasing the number of powerful enemies was never a welcome prospect. But Hurtlocker felt a corner of his heart growing frustrated. The thought that Schluss was an enemy of the intelligence agency kept growing stronger. There was no evidence. It wasn't even a wish. It was simply an instinctive feeling.
***
"Huu······."
Standing in front of the hospital room door, Erika let out a deep sigh. Just facing the person who would be on the other side was enough to make her nervous. He had always been someone she found difficult to deal with, but the scene she had witnessed earlier made it even worse. About four hours ago. When she had come to find Schluss Heinkel and peered inside through the slightly open door.
"Huh?"
"······."
She had seen Schluss lying asleep. And she had witnessed Iris sucking on his finger. Erika, flustered, had blushed and slammed the door shut. But before she could even run away—
"Where are you going, Lady Erika? Weren't you here to see Schluss?"
She had been caught by Iris, who had come out of the room. Even in that situation, Iris was still wearing a meaningful smile.
"Um······ What were you doing earlier? I must have seen it wrong, right?"
"What do you mean?"
"You······ putting Schluss Heinkel's finger······ in your mouth."
"Ah, that? You didn't see it wrong."
So she hadn't seen it wrong. Then why on earth······? Erika carefully opened her lips again while watching Iris's expression.
"If it's not too rude to ask······ Could you tell me why you did that?"
"Why? It was just a medical procedure."
"Huh? What do you mean······."
"My recovery magic uses saliva as a medium. The more it's applied, the greater the effect becomes."
"Ah! Aah!"
Erika fanned her face in a fluster. So it had been to maximize the effect of the recovery magic. She felt so ashamed of herself for having strange thoughts that her face felt as if it would burn up.
'But if it was just about applying saliva, was there really a need to suck on his finger directly?'
Erika had that reasonable suspicion, but—
'Well, it must have been necessary for some reason.'
Already unable to think properly due to embarrassment, she simply accepted it.
"So you were in the middle of treatment······."
"Yes. What did you imagine we were doing?"
"No, I just thought the two of you······ Never mind. I should ask this first. What exactly is your relationship?"
"Me and Schluss?"
"Yeah."
"Hmm. I think it's probably the kind of relationship you're thinking of."
"Th-the kind of relationship I was thinking of?"
At Iris's counterattack delivered with a relaxed smile, Erika felt dizzy. And that was the last scene of her recollection. Erika had simply returned home after that. And now, having heard that Schluss had woken up, she had come back to the hospital room. Thinking about it carefully, Iris and Schluss's relationship didn't seem ordinary. No matter how she looked at it, the two of them seemed far too close for people who had only recently met, especially considering the gap between a commoner and a noble. Perhaps their relationship was······
"Huu."
Erika shook her head and knocked on the hospital room door. Though her suspicion had nearly become certainty, she pushed it out of her mind for now. There was something more important. Even if Schluss had been able to perform all those heroic acts thanks to selling his lifespan to a demon, the fact remained that he had saved many people. Erika's mother, Lady Lichtenburg, had also been at the event hall. Setting aside the fact that she didn't like Schluss, she needed to properly express her gratitude for saving her mother's life. But······
"······?"
There was no sound coming from beyond the door. Erika tilted her head in confusion and slid the door open. And at that moment, she felt as if her breath had been taken away.
"Stop right there."
"······!"
Next to the bed where Schluss lay, a man in a black suit was sitting. Roman von Bayern. The legend of the imperial army was there.