The Expulsion Committee (5)
The underground conference hall of Vermouth Hall.
The airless chamber, sealed without a single window, was thick with a suffocating tension.
From a corner of the gallery, Ayra Vermouth swept the room with cold eyes beneath a hood pulled low over her face.
Her very presence was an intrusion. A faintly gleaming honor brooch rested against the folds of her hood—no mere ornament. It was the mark of a house granted only to a chosen few, to those of the highest blood even within the Empire. The low murmurs drifting around her carried curiosity and awe at what she might be.
"Who… who is that? A cadet?"
"Idiot. Why would a cadet be standing there watching in a hood?"
"Then why would someone that highborn bother coming to a mere cadet expulsion hearing?"
Most of the whispers ran along the same lines—which house's young lady she might be, why someone like her would set foot in a place this shabby.
"My lady, are you certain this is wise?"
The man seated beside Ayra, hood drawn equally low, murmured in a low voice thick with concern and scrupulous respect. He was Alfred, her long-serving knight-escort and most loyal retainer. Ayra answered only with the faintest of smiles. Her gaze never left the center of the chamber—the defendant's seat, where Ian Darkest sat.
"To go out of your way for a noisy affair like this… could it be that you came to observe Sir Lionel Darkest?"
Alfred asked carefully.
"I hear he is quite the capable prodigy within the Academy, but whether he will grow into someone worthy of the Imperial— ahem. Of our house's attention remains to be seen. He does not strike me as a talent that warrants my lady's personal involvement."
Even at Alfred's words, Ayra simply continued to watch the center of the hall in silence. Her crimson eyes were as still and unreadable as a bottomless lake.
Lionel Darkest. A man whose ambition ran large, whose vessel was small, and who—most critically—lacked the ability to sense a true threat.
No matter how desperately Ayra needed every scrap of talent right now, she had no use for a man like that. Taking him in would only be a loss.
Then the heavy conference doors groaned open with a dull clang. Every gaze in the room swung toward the entrance.
Cherry-blossom pink hair fluttered as Linea Judith stepped into view. Her appearance sent ripples through the chamber like a stone cast into still water.
Whispers erupted among the spectators and even among the professors.
"Th-that is… Linea Judith of the Blue Magic Tower! Why would she be here…?"
Alfred muttered, unable to hide his shock. The usual composure had drained from his voice.
A mage who commanded time itself—and a genius of the Judith family, no less—descending into a mud-slinging fight like this was something he had never anticipated. Ayra flicked a glance at Judith and twisted the corner of her mouth upward.
"Hmph. That vixen. Already caught the scent and crawled her way here."
"…Vixen, my lady?"
Alfred echoed, flustered, but Ayra did not answer. Her eyes were already locked on Linea as she moved toward the witness stand.
Linea Judith. Had she, too, recognized the value of the "variable" that was Ian Darkest?
Among the western territories of the Empire that had suffered near-annihilation, Seorigol had taken the lightest damage by far.
An irregular like that always hid a secret.
That was precisely why Imperial Princess Ayra Vermouth had bothered to conceal her identity and return to the Academy she had once graduated from.
And now even Linea Judith had appeared.
She must have her reasons for defending that Ian.
Or was there something more? The situation was growing interesting.
Linea Judith began Ian Darkest's defense without a moment's hesitation. Her voice rang clear and firm; the logic she had prepared was cold as ice and hard as steel.
"Sir Lionel Darkest has claimed that Cadet Ian Darkest spread falsehoods and thereby tarnished the Academy's honor. But what, exactly, were those 'falsehoods'? Was it not a warning of the coming Eclipse? And that warning, regrettably, became reality. If Cadet Ian's warning was a falsehood, then are all the countless victims present in this hall today merely ghosts who imagined what they saw?"
Linea dismantled Lionel's evidence one piece at a time.
She argued that Ian's "negligent academic attitude" had been an unavoidable choice born of devotion to his fief's management and preparation for disaster. The vague charge of "bringing dishonor upon the family," she dismissed as nothing more than the product of the unjust discrimination he had endured as a bastard son.
Her defense was meticulous. Rather than pleading to emotion, she used razor-sharp reason and logic to dismantle Lionel's side point by point.
"Furthermore, you pointed out that Cadet Ian's fief of Seorigol is financially strained. But I must ask—has the Darkest family ever given Cadet Ian proper support? Who was it that tossed him barren land and the barest minimum of funds, then left him to rot? In such circumstances, is it truly something to condemn that he refused to abandon his territory, and even foresaw the coming catastrophe and sought to prepare for it?"
The confident smile on Lionel's face gradually faded. The hangers-on seated beside him, including Professor Oily, could no longer hide their dismay.
That Linea Judith was defending a mere Academy cadet at the level of a professional advocate?
It was almost unheard of.
A subtle restlessness began to stir through the chamber.
And Linea's defense went beyond simple advocacy—it was a frontal assault on the hypocrisy of Lionel and the Darkest family itself.
"…At this rate, Cadet Ian Darkest may well escape expulsion. Is this… the picture my lady desired?"
Alfred asked carefully. Ayra's face remained expressionless as she murmured under her breath.
"Not yet."
Lionel would counterattack now.
Why was that man so determined to crush his half-brother to the bitter end?
He, too, must have sensed some kind of threat.
Ian Darkest.
The reason Ayra had come here today was, indeed, to see him.
But of course, it was also nothing more than simple curiosity.
The irregular of the western Empire.
Whether there was anything special about him.
And so far, what she had seen was still lacking.
She had no idea how he had managed to reel Linea Judith in, but…
Linea Judith was always a lunatic to begin with.
Linea herself was a walking bundle of variables, so she was useless for judging Ian.
Cornered, Lionel was preparing his final thrashing. He drew a breath, then delivered a statement that froze the entire chamber solid.
"Ian Darkest is… colluding with an Aberration!"
Silence crashed over the hall as if ice water had been dumped across it.
The ominous dread carried by the word "Aberration" spread in an instant. Ever since the Eclipse, Aberrations had become objects of vague, primal fear.
Lionel pressed on without flinching. "On the day my longtime retainer, Cadet James, vanished, Ian Darkest was engaged in something suspicious near a secluded fountain on Academy grounds! There are witnesses who saw it!"
At Lionel's gesture, several students stepped forward to the witness stand. One after another, faces pale with fear, they testified that they had seen Ian performing what looked like a grotesque ritual at the fountain.
Their words were disjointed, but phrases like "black water," "unpleasant whispering," and "James who disappeared" repeated again and again, swelling the suspicion around Ian.
"Th-that night… Ian Darkest was muttering to himself and threw something into the fountain… it looked as if… he was offering a sacrifice!"
"And after that… James never came back! I'm certain… certain that Ian Darkest offered James to an Aberration…"
Murmurs rolled outward like a wave.
Eyes now colored with suspicion and terror turned toward Ian.
"…He commands Aberrations?"
Even Ayra furrowed her brow for a moment.
In that case, Ian Darkest's peculiar achievements would not be so impossible after all.
…Wouldn't that make him a prime experimental subject instead?
The ability to handle Aberrations beyond human comprehension. It was a talent so alluring she wanted to seize him on the spot and put him through every biological experiment imaginable.
Of course.
The man himself wore an unmistakably troubled expression. A flicker of bewilderment crossed his face, along with something like resignation. He clenched and unclenched his fist, as if weighing something carefully.
Then Ian let out a short, dry laugh. It was not resignation. It was a strange smile—the smile of a man who had decided something, or of one who had let everything go.
"I didn't want it to come to this."
He rose from his seat and walked without hesitation toward the witness stand. Where anxiety had been, a peculiar confidence now colored his steps. He looked like a man standing in the eye of the storm.
Ian took his place at the stand and met the sea of suspicious stares filling the chamber head-on.
The instant his gaze swept across the room—
"…Hn?"
Ayra staggered, a startled breath escaping her before she could stop it.
"Wh-what is it, Your Highness? Are you all right?"
A flustered Alfred rushed to steady her.
Ayra shook her head and straightened at once.
"I'm fine."
…Just now, something like a memory seemed to brush past me.
What had that strange sensation been?
Unable to place it, Ayra looked down again.
Ian's roaming gaze locked onto Lionel.
That stare cut like a blade, as if it might pierce straight through Lionel's arrogant mask.
Hss.
The moment Ian drew breath to speak, Ayra found herself holding her own breath with him.
"The one in bed with an Aberration… is you, Lionel."
Silence.
A choking, breathless silence settled over the hall, the kind that heralds a coming storm.
The startled Ayra curled the corner of her mouth upward.
What is this?
She had come to see Ian today purely to satisfy her curiosity. If the boy happened to have ability, she had planned to keep an eye on him at most.
But the board was becoming far more entertaining than she had expected.
"How are you going to play this, Ian?"
Ayra's eyes gleamed as she looked down upon the floor below.