46. The Junkie
The reception room attached to the Academy's Office of Academic Affairs.
I was waiting there for Leon Lauderdale.
"Student Leon will be along shortly. Please wait just a moment."
The Academy's manner toward me was polite to the point of excess. I had shown up without warning and announced that I meant to sponsor Leon, and they had helped at once; a professor holding an administrative post had even come out in person and run his mouth about what an honor it was to meet me. It was hardly the reception a young knight like me had any business receiving.
They're only acting like this because Sienna is standing behind me. Them, too.
With Anais gone off to a better place, Sienna's standing had climbed sharply. She was not yet someone you could set beside Victoria, but it was hard to say she lagged far behind either. That Sienna was on particularly close terms with the Empress was already common knowledge, and as a shareholder in Madoff Pharmaceuticals she was the envy of the nobility.
And I was that Sienna's closest confidant and business partner. It was only natural the Academy would handle me with care. Thanks to that, I could sit where I was and have Leon summoned. I was grateful for it.
That aside, why isn't he here?
I had been waiting more than an hour, and there was still not so much as a sign of Leon. The Leon I had sent for never came. Some unrelated student kept loitering instead, going, "Oh...? You wouldn't happen to be President Allan, would you? What a coincidence."
That he recognized me at all was suspicious in itself. He did not even stamp his face on the moment and disappear. He started in with something stranger.
"Um. President Allan? I would like to offer a proposal of mutual benefit."
"A proposal?"
"Ah, you must be surprised. A mere undergraduate daring to put the word proposal in his mouth may well offend you. But just as you serve at once as bodyguard knight and businessman, I too am drawing up a venture while still a student."
"......"
"I ask only that you consider it seriously. If you permit me, I will explain the plan."
The boy who claimed to be a third-year in the magic faculty was talking this nonsense. He even already knew the name ephedrine.
I only brought that up at the exchange to lean on the Chandler's Syrup investors. He's picked it up already?
I had heard, in a general way, that the health syrup had worked its way into the Academy, but I had never expected someone to start talking business at me. An undergraduate, no less. True to a place where the Empire's talents gathered, they learned at a respectable speed.
Admiration was one thing. I had no intention of humoring him.
"President Allan. I really am confident I can work like a dog...!"
"I don't need it."
"No, just hear me out first."
"It's fine. I don't have to. It's obvious. You'll open a route to market, so let you have some of the goods. That's it, isn't it. From the look of you, you've already tasted money. If what you're handling now is that syrup, you'd better stop. It's forbidden by imperial decree."
His eyes wavered at that, so he really had sold the syrup. Dealers already at work inside the school. Fast, truly.
"I haven't... done anything. Only the planning."
"Then finish it at the planning stage."
Only then did the nameless third-year of the magic faculty slink away. I did not pause to lament the sight of a nineteen-year-old playing at this. In my previous life my younger brother, in his second year of high school, had hired Southeast Asian porters and made a habit of smuggling ketamine across borders. Being young could just as easily mean being eager. Reselling would only ever amount to a petty scale in any case.
Even so, I could not simply watch that and let it pass. Where there was someone selling, there was someone buying. Suspicion of Leon rose with it, naturally enough.
Of course, the rational view was to call it needless worry. How many students did the Academy have? The magic faculty and the swordsmanship faculty, which screened for prospects above a certain level, were select elites, but the other faculties carried a quota of a thousand to a year. Among all those students, the chance that Leon—the one entangled with me by interest—was a junkie was not quite zero.
But it was thin. It had to be. A genius who grew just by breathing would have no reason to take syrup for a little tonic effect, and it did not seem likely he had used it as medicine for the flu or a stuffed nose. Unless Anais had handed it out free, fishing for publicity.
There's no way he's a junkie. What would he even be short of.
All I wanted was for Leon to appear with a sound face and put the unease to rest. I would offer him a sponsorship of fifty thousand thalers and a few suitably encouraging words; Leon, his pockets fattened, would sit quiet until the Church's request came and he joined as escort to the Saintess; and the two of them would go to the Great Forest and be remade as standard-bearers of peace. A road on which all of us could live happily.
See him in the flesh, and I'll be able to be sure.
But no matter how long I waited, Leon did not come. I could not wait forever, so I decided to move myself. A man mad for the sword might well have brushed it off with I don't need money or anything of the sort and buried himself in the training ground. If that was all it was, I was perfectly willing to forgive him. Forgiveness was not even the whole of it. I was inclined to lavish twice the sponsorship on him.
Thinking so, I stepped outside.
And then.
In front of the reception room, some vagrant was sitting bolt upright in formal posture.
What the hell is this bastard.
He was in a cadet's uniform, so he was no vagrant. My mistake had not been groundless, though. Hair plastered flat, as if he had been sprawled out all day; cold sweat running without end down his forehead and neck; breath coming hard and fast. He was even squeezing his eyes shut and snapping them open again, repeating it so quickly it was maddening to watch. Human, and yet not the shape of a human.
Surely not. The moment I muttered it, the hope broke.
"Fifty thousand thalers?"
The question he tossed out, smiling bright as anything. I muttered fuck under my breath. The situation left me no other choice.
"I'm sorry! I skipped breakfast... or was it lunch. Ah! Both meals! Something came up, a little, so I didn't eat, and I couldn't mess up in front of my sponsor, so I had nine spoons a bit ago, okay? Normally that makes my energy go boom, but today it's kinda weird! ...Ah. Sweat."
He broke off mid-ramble and twisted his face every which way, complaining that sweat had gotten in his eyes. I did not want to admit it, but this was Leon.
From the way he kept making excuses, he seemed at least to know that his condition was off. He was working very hard to explain to me that he was absolutely never like this normally. I did not need the explanation. What he had shown me so far was enough to take his measure.
The largest clue was the familiar smell coming off Leon's body.
Opium.
I handled the stuff until I was sick of it, extracting morphine, so telling it apart was not difficult. It is nothing like the smell of tobacco. From his saying he had skipped two meals, he had been smoking for six hours at the very least. Maybe longer.
"The opium. How much did you smoke?"
"Huh?"
"You heard a sponsor had come and wanted to get your strength back in a hurry. So you gulped down health syrup on impulse. Ten spoons... I can't say for certain, but that ought to be half a bottle at least. Am I right?"
"More than half a bottle!"
"...Right. More than half a bottle. And then you actually got to the meeting and found you couldn't hold yourself up, so you sat down?"
"You know that feeling. Wow."
So he had smoked opium straight through half the day, and right afterward had eaten syrup. A lot of it. A very great lot. Opium and the syrup both belonged to the softer end of things, set beside the real article. But even soft had its limits. That he could enjoy it like that and still be holding on to his mind was almost admirable. Had an ordinary person done this, death might have been avoidable, but a coma would have been hard to escape.
A protagonist really is a protagonist.
Looking him over closely, he did wear a protagonist's looks. Deep blond hair; green eyes whose pupils had blown wide from the high and were slowly settling back toward normal; a face reasonably handsome, if you set aside the facial muscles twitching however they pleased. It matched the Leon described in the original.
Yeah. The shell is close enough.
The contents were already ruined. The stretch of time could not have been long. But early on, people often took it because it was genuinely fun, purely for the pleasure, and words did not get through. It was even hard to make them understand that drugs were self-harm. The body was still going strong. Leon was a man who had stepped into that introductory stage.
Quit at once, and he could weather a few weeks of withdrawal and come back to normal. Otherwise the situation would worsen at speed. A stronger drug. A larger dose. And from some point on he would reach a place where no ordinary narcotic could give him pleasure, and he would try extreme methods. For the sake of getting the drug, he would refuse nothing.
What do I do with him.
If it were up to my heart, I wanted to leave him to live his own life. Knowing what lay ahead, I could not. Even if I jumped in myself and settled the conflict with the elves—and that was no easy matter either—what about afterward? Without a genius who grew in steps each time he overcame an incident, the damage would swell past anything anyone could bear. Someday that damage would reach me too. That much was obvious.
Had he read the worry off my face? Leon, who had been rambling without order, had at some point taken on a grave expression and was looking at me. A face so solemn it made me forget, for a moment, that he was a junkie.
...A moment later, what came out of his mouth erased the expectation.
"So when do you give me the fifty thousand thalers?"
"...What?"
"Fifty thousand thalers!!"
Was he telling me to hand over the money and get lost? Leon thrust a fully opened palm toward me, drumming on the table as if to say produce it, now.
"You're not giving it?"
When I gave him no answer, he went so far as to glare. A dry laugh escaped me before I knew it.
"Leon Lauderdale. Do you happen to remember my name? Your teaching assistant would have told you."
"I know. Fifty thou... huh?"
Leon tilted his head. It was a look that let me guess where a lump sum would go if I put it in his hands. I did not know what price the health syrup was fetching on the black market just now, but fifty thousand thalers would let him enjoy it for a very long time. And not merely gulp it down—there was every chance he would gulp it down inside a cloud of opium smoke. A pipe in one hand, syrup in the other.
He's already pickled. This isn't a stage for talking him around. And there isn't time for that, either.
I did not feel any fresh disappointment. Rather, confirming Leon's condition let me finish the dilemma quickly. If making him quit was impossible, and simply leaving him alone was impossible too, then only one method remained.