The Addict
The courier came once every three days.
Each time, Leon Lauderdale of the Imperial Academy's Faculty of Swordsmanship prayed with everything he had. More precisely, he spent every hour he was not already high begging the god of heaven to let him have just a little more—to make the courier miscount the pills and slip in one extra Mong-rong-i by mistake.
Heaven's god betrayed that desperate prayer every time. With divine power, it should hardly have been difficult, and yet Leon was ignored without fail: turned away, ground underfoot, and left with nothing but the exact prescribed dose. For a god, the bastard was remarkably petty.
Rotten bitch. No—rotten bastard?
It didn't matter.
What mattered was something else. The quantity of medicine he received free of charge from Madoff Pharmaceuticals had not changed in months. Mong-rong-i—morphine—six pills. And Beol-leong-i, ephedrine, six pills. Three days' worth. He took one of each together.
There wasn't really a reason for mixing them. Mong-rong-i and Beol-leong-i simply had to go together. The two must never be parted, and could never be parted, like that couple standing so fondly by the Academy lake...
No. More than that.
How could you compare them to some pair of lovers? Mong-rong-i and Beol-leong-i were closer than twins. Family might scatter to the winds, but those two must never be separated. Leon resented, all over again, that he lacked the words to explain properly why the two absolutely had to stay together.
Taking them together felt wonderful. It had when he first tried them, and it did now. It was good, truly, but...
Why won't they give me more than this?
Fuck.
Leon spat the curse and stared at the little pill bottle. Only four pills remained inside. And once those were gone? Hell began. A Madoff Pharmaceuticals man would of course deliver another three days' worth, but that was no comfort. It would only be six and six again—that stifling quantity, unchanged no matter how many dozens of times he checked it, nowhere near the volume Leon wanted.
Naturally, he had tried asking.
"A friend stole them."
"Which friend?"
"Huh?"
"Don't get clever while you're taking them for free. Mr. Allan gave orders to cut you off the moment you try anything. ...And don't glare at me like that."
It hadn't worked in the slightest. He lied, he made excuses, he even begged, and still it was only the prescribed dose. He could take more. He wanted to take much more. Why they gave him only this much was a genuine mystery. Double it, and he could stay high all day. Not merely double—he was confident he could handle triple. So why?
Leon found his present circumstances both unjust and pitiful.
I gave up fifty thousand thalers to get the drugs, so they ought to give me fifty thousand thalers' worth. No—not gave up. What was I supposed to call it. ...Anyway, why won't they give it to me? What do I even have to do to get more Mong-rong-i and Beol-leong-i?
At present, Leon Lauderdale had only one hope.
Swordsmanship.
He didn't know why, but the couriers sometimes took an interest in his skill. He couldn't fathom why they would care about something as trivial as swordplay, yet if he trained and produced results they would surely give him more drugs—enough that he could sneer at those idiots who puffed away at plain opium and called it delicious, and enjoy himself properly.
"That's the only way."
As usual, Leon took his dose and headed for the training yard.
It began with image-training. Honestly, that meant sitting in a daze in the middle of the yard—sprawled there, staring at the other students, exactly as he did through every lecture.
"Um... Senior?"
A junior asked him to make room. He ignored them. If he sat blankly like this, the feeling would come eventually.
A little later, killing intent began to gather in Leon's face. The drug was moving through him, and a demon had appeared before his eyes. An imaginary demon, of course.
"You son of a bitch!"
Leon drew his sword and surged to his feet in a blaze of fury.
At first the thing had been nothing more than a figure sketched because he needed an imaginary opponent. Other swordsmen did that much often enough. But he was always hungering for the drugs, and the imaginary enemy had begun to take on an increasingly grotesque shape. The genial-looking courier who had brought him the medicine in the early days; the old courier who tossed the pills at him as if it were a nuisance and left; the friend who, when Leon boasted that he thought he had brushed the Wall of the Mind, had sneered, "You...?" The faces of those vicious bastards blended together and grew ever more hideous.
Why won't you give me the drugs...!
Enraged, Leon began to swing at the demon. Sometimes he flailed. Sometimes he drove in savagely. He even screamed and rolled across the ground.
"Aaaagh!"
From a certain point he simply threw himself into a furious sword-dance. The demon had mocked him by dancing one of its own, and he was only following along because he refused to lose.
"Crazy... moron..."
"Let's just go to the second training yard."
"Don't insult him. Even like that, he's second. Or third. Something like that."
The students muttered, but Leon, sunk completely into the bout, paid them no mind.
Drugs. More drugs. That was the sole reason Leon Lauderdale swung a sword. His training went on with the drug in his blood, past midnight.
There was no other way to describe Leon Lauderdale's current state.
"He claims he has reached the Wall of the Mind. Just in case, I confirmed it with the swordsmanship professors, and the credibility... honestly, there doesn't appear to be any. They say he dawdles through every lecture with a vacant look on his face. Last month, when they went out on a practical deployment, a demon worshipper attacked the students, and even then he only watched from the rear."
It was the report of the knight I had sent to look into him.
The Wall of the Mind, a fragment, enlightenment—the phrasing didn't matter. The claim was that he would soon reach Master.
Looking only at Leon's original talent, there was nothing strange about it. If anything, it might even be a little late. In the original, he was the man who gained enlightenment in the midst of his duel with Marcella and stepped into the realm of Master. All of that had lost its color by now, but still.
Common sense said it was most likely a lie. Even so, it was worth confirming. If by some chance it was true, it would help deal with the incidents from the original that were still to come.
In the original, the demon worshippers had begun to run rampant during the Academy's winter break. That season was already drawing near.
The worshippers themselves were merely fanatics and terrorists of the Dark Cult, no great threat. The demons that manifested using their bodies as vessels, however, were dangerous. Their strength was bad enough, but they used their cunning as well. Some were crude enough to attack the Academy entrance ceremony outright. Others were the sort that stirred strife on the scale of nations.
If the Empire gained even one more Master, it would be meaningful help. He won't be able to take the lead and settle things the way he did in the original, but still.
Deciding I ought to see Leon Lauderdale one last time, I set out for the Academy.
My expectations were low.
The man had spent nearly a month steeped in Chandler's Syrup and opium-and-rum, and for more than three months after that he had lived dependent on ephedrine and morphine. He was bound to look less like a genius on the verge of Master than like a wreck pickled in drugs.
I had no intention, obviously, of handing out free drugs forever. By now a single dose—fifteen milligrams of morphine and forty milligrams of ephedrine—would no longer satisfy Leon, and he would be nursing a grievance. If there was no use to be had even from his strength, it was time to be done with him.
This visit was for that.
The moment I arrived at the Academy, expectations that had already been low slammed into the floor.
"That's the Morphine."
Students were whispering it while looking at me.
Being recognized wasn't strange in itself. My notoriety was already considerable, and between the military morphine contract, the Third Princess's fall, and my part in the Medellin coup, I had the attention of the nobility. The problem was that they weren't doing it from a distance. They were whispering right in front of me.
From their faces, they seemed to know morphine was used for pleasure as well. I couldn't be certain, but I suspected they were opium addicts.
And they're first-years, at that.
I had heard about the Academy's condition, of course. They had gone so far as to introduce surprise dormitory inspections and a roll call because of the opium, hadn't they. That had let them clear the opium dens out of the dorms... but wiping the thing out was still a long way off, I was told. Dropouts this semester alone numbered in the double digits, and some of those dropouts loitered around the Academy, keeping up a steady exchange with students still enrolled.
Drugs had already fouled the Academy. It wasn't hard to guess the state of Leon, something of a pioneer in that regard. I would probably have to make the decision before the day was out...
"Your Grace the Marquess."
Marquess?
The voice came absurdly from behind me, and I turned at once. A student stood before me, staring blankly. A mouth hanging half open, a sparse beard, and a posture tilted in some way I couldn't quite specify. The Academy wasn't starving anyone, yet his frame was gaunt. It was a face I remembered, but I couldn't readily show that I knew it.
Leon Lauderdale.
He stood before me in a state that made plain three months was no short span.
Better not to ask about the marquess business. There was no telling what chain of thought had produced it, and even if I asked him, he wouldn't be able to explain. I had kept him to the prescribed dose just in case... and sure enough, it had failed. I was turning over how best to close the matter when Leon spoke first.
"The drugs...!"
"I didn't come to make a delivery."
"No, no, that's not it, it's— um... I take them at six, and at ten. I have to, or I can't see the demon, but, but I don't have any left right now. You promised. If I proved I'd gotten the fragment, you'd put two extra morphines on each time. You promised. So why only the morphine... you'll increase it, right? The Beol-leong-i? What about the Beol-leong-i?"
"......"
"I'm not picking a fight."
Had he struck some bargain for extra supply with a person who existed only in his head? Terrified of being caught out by me, he was still begging with his palm held open.
I had Bono, whom I had brought along as an attendant, give him the drugs.
"Leon Lauderdale. You told one of my people you had attained enlightenment. Prove it. If you need a sparring partner, I'll find you one."
"Yes, sir!"
He answered at the top of his lungs, tipped the pills into his mouth all at once, and ran for the training yard—the protagonist of the original. Perhaps because he didn't know the free drugs had reached their end, his face was terribly bright.