An Incredible Summon
After Evelyn left, and with my life in the mansion more or less guaranteed, I started to feel that it was about time I got around to repairing the place. She had fixed the door, yes—but that was only the door she herself had broken. The rest of the mansion was still in a truly miserable state. Holes gaped here and there across the ceiling, and the windows were a total loss. If a storm ever rolled in, I would probably get to enjoy a waterfall from the comfort of indoors.
Fortunately the sky was cloudless and clear, so rain didn't seem likely anytime soon. Still, nothing promised it would stay that way. And besides, the place was loud. Try to lie down in peace and every sound in the world came pouring through the cracked walls and the empty window frames. There was no soundproofing at all—owls hooting, crickets chirping, and every so often the howling of wolves. Those noises went beyond mere inconvenience. They made me anxious. After all, the whole reason I was holed up in this mansion was those wolves.
I am not one of the Three Little Pigs, and the idea that I was too scared of wolves to leave the house was honestly ridiculous. But what was I supposed to do when I really was scared? I had never liked dogs much to begin with. Anyway, the mansion as it stood was far too shabby to pass for a brick house you could feel safe in.
Renovating it, though, was genuinely backbreaking labor—far too difficult for someone as frail and unskilled as me. And there were limits to how much I could dump on Unit 1 or Unit 2. In the end, the only thing I could do was...
The next morning, just as she had announced the day before, Evelyn really did come back. So I decided to make use of her.
"Would around here do?"
With Evelyn as my guide, I had left the mansion and come deep into the forest, and now I looked around. Huge trees crowded the view. There was no dust, and nothing that looked particularly dangerous. Good. Summon here, and I might actually get a different kind of summon.
"...Yes. I'll give it a try."
I drew a deep breath and began to focus. Knowing someone was watching kept breaking my concentration, but I pushed through anyway, hoping this chance would land me a summon that was a little cooler and a little more useful. A moment later, fog began to settle slowly in front of me. Yes—it worked!
Evelyn, who had been watching with her arms folded, looked faintly intrigued.
"Something really is happening...?"
Was this her first time seeing summoning magic? Well, spectacular magic probably wasn't a common sight in a starter village. Even in the game, you had to level up a fair bit before summoning magic let you handle a proper summon. Back when you were still scrapping in the beginner village, even a summoner had no choice but to fight like a total scrub. Oh. Thinking about it that way, weren't my character specs actually pretty high? If I could cast summoning magic whenever I wanted, maybe I wasn't as much of a noob as I had thought.
I was still turning that over when I looked again, and the fog had gathered into something much larger than I expected. Which meant the summon itself was going to be pretty big...
"Ira, are you sure this is really all right?"
The smoke had swollen until it was nearly as tall as the surrounding trees, and Evelyn, a little flustered, started checking my face. The expression she found there probably wasn't much different from her own. I don't know either. What is this? I was starting to get scared myself and tried to cancel the spell, but whether the summoning had already finished or not, pulling my hands back did nothing. That special-effects fog kept condensing. Sensing that things were taking a bad turn, Evelyn tucked me behind her and drew her dagger. We held our breath, braced for whatever was about to emerge.
At last the fog cleared, and what appeared was...
"...A tree?"
Just an ordinary tree, the kind scattered all over the woods around us. Faced with this absurd result, Evelyn and I turned to look at each other.
"...So. I guess it really is true that your summoning is heavily influenced by the surroundings."
She was clearly forcing herself to keep the mood up, and I couldn't say a word. I just buried my face in my hands. I knew, intellectually, that a tree was a living thing too, and that summoning one in a forest full of trees wasn't completely nonsensical.
But!
Even so!
A tree was still a bit much...
I was still failing to hide my disappointment when, from somewhere, a noise like twisting wood began to sound.
Crrrk...
Drawn by it, I looked up—and the tree I had just summoned was moving. Not swaying in the wind. Moving on its own. It turned toward me and lowered a single branch, as if offering a hand. This couldn't mean...
"Ira, don't tell me this is a tree spirit?"
At Evelyn's words, I finally understood what I had summoned. Good heavens. It wasn't just a tree—it was a tree spirit!
Whoa.
Unit 1 had been a skeleton, and Unit 2 a pathetic little dust spirit, and on my third try I already had a summon this magnificent! Woohoo! A tree spirit. Even I hadn't imagined something this cool would come out. And since I had never used one in the game, I was dying to find out what it could do. I was so excited that I climbed up onto Unit 3's branch and sat there grinning, and that was when Evelyn spoke.
"You know, I thought all you could use was black magic."
"...Pardon?"
Black magic? If anything, that was the field I knew even less about. Then again, her first impression of me had been a skeleton and a bunch of soot-balls, so I could hardly complain if she had mistaken me for a necromancer. But now she would finally know my class properly. I wasn't a necromancer. I was a summoner. Raising the dead had nothing to do with me. ...Probably. Honestly, even I didn't really know. Well, the game had treated necromancers and summoners as separate classes, so they were probably different.
In any case, whether she was relieved to learn I wasn't some gloomy black mage who could only handle skeletons and little balls of soot, Evelyn's expression had grown much more at ease than before we left the mansion. Black mages and summoners probably did carry different reputations. And tree spirits weren't particularly aggressive, so people didn't think badly of them. That might have put her even more at ease about what my power actually was.
"So, what are you going to name that tree spirit?"
What kind of question was that? Something like that was already decided, obviously.
"Unit 3."
"...You're serious?"
I nodded. Of course I was serious. As I have said, I have no talent for naming things.
And so we returned to the mansion. Unit 1 and Unit 2 seemed quite startled by the Unit 3 I had brought home, and Unit 2-1 even looked a little jealous. Was this what it felt like to watch your parents step out for a bit and come home cradling a second child? Well, it couldn't be helped. Even I couldn't spend my whole life with just the two of them. I would rather die again than live out my days surrounded by one skeleton and a dust spirit.
"Ira, I'm going to go on patrol for a bit. While I'm gone, get to know that... Unit 3."
"Yes!"
With that, Evelyn stepped out, saying it was time for her regular forest patrol, and I called Unit 3 over to take the first step toward repairing the mansion.
"Unit 3. Come here!"
Rustle. Creak. Groan...
The sound of twisting wood, rustling leaves, and heavy footsteps all arrived at once. I immediately pointed at the leftover materials from Evelyn's repair of the front gate and ordered Unit 3 to haul them and fix the roof.
But it absolutely refused to move the materials. No—it wasn't merely refusing to carry them. It wouldn't even go near them. I went around behind it and shoved with everything I had, and Unit 3 still didn't budge.
"Why won't you listen to me?!"
I huffed and studied its reaction more carefully, and it struck me that the thing seemed scared. Scared? Of what? I didn't understand, so I looked at the materials again, and then it hit me.
"Oh. Don't tell me..."
These materials were wood. And Unit 3 was... also a tree. In its eyes, was that construction lumber looking like the hacked-up corpses of its own kind? The moment the thought landed, I smacked my own forehead and let my head drop.
"All right. Forget it..."
That was on me. I wouldn't ask it to move the lumber.
"Then... do you think you could fix this?"
As I spoke, I pointed at a wall leaning as if it might collapse at any moment. I figured all it needed was a little force to stand it back up. Unit 3 strode over to the wall as if to say leave it to me. And then—
CRASH.
...it cheerfully shoved the wall clean over.
I stared at the scene for a long while, then quietly dragged a hand down my face. I was going to lose my mind.
"Just go stand over there..."
Better not to give it anything to do at all. Whereupon Unit 3 cheerfully strode over to the garden I had pointed at, sat down, and put down roots.
...And so I, who had thought I'd pulled an ace of a summon, had in fact acquired nothing more than a single ornamental tree. The fact that Evelyn, returning from patrol a little later, took one look at the state of the mansion and was thoroughly appalled is another story. For the record, in the end it was Evelyn who patched the roof.