The Birdcage of Many Colors
Watching the beast-kin warrior collapse under the weight of her own technique, I had to admit the chat was right to be stunned — though copying a skill was hardly difficult. Unless someone had woven a special concealment over it, all you needed was a grasp of the mana flow and structure of the technique, and reproducing it was simple work.
The truly difficult one was actually the other spell — the high-difficulty magic I had hurled at the beast-kin: the Birdcage of Many Colors. As the name suggested, it was not a technique of the celestial kin. It was a spell tied to a noble girl I'd met long ago, one who bore the epithet "Many Colors." My encounter with that child had been brief, but she remained one of the people I remembered with surprising clarity even now.
"No! Sealing someone's skills is straight-up cheating!"
Eeek!
The beast-kin, now so thoroughly paralyzed that she couldn't so much as wag a finger, shrieked at me. No matter how desperately she tried to activate her skills, they simply refused to trigger.
"What a shame."
"That's cheating! CHEATING! Where does stuff like this even exist?!"
"Right here."
I drew out my spear and drove it straight through the beast-kin's heart.
And just like that, she exited the stage, utterly anticlimactic.
Where did I get it, huh.
Whether I could call it something I'd obtained, or something I'd made, was honestly hard to say.
"Let's just say... quite a lot of things happened."
Once upon a time, there was a kingdom that lost half its territory to the demons. With the royal court paralyzed and crumbling, a marquisate on the very brink of ruin was left to stand on its own. And just then—
'Saintess!'
—a child had been born carrying the remnants of a demon within her.
The heir to the crumbling marquisate was born — a child with hair of many colors, not the deep indigo that was the symbol of her house. The family suspected the child's bloodline, but through the judgment of one of the few high mages who still remained, it was proven that she was indeed of the marquis's blood.
Just not pure blood.
Her hair color was so unusual it bordered on the bizarre. And dwelling within the young girl's body was a remnant of power — the same hue as her hair. That remnant was a fragment of the wicked demon who had blasted away half the kingdom.
The marquisate's few remaining nobles clamored that the girl had been tainted by evil and begged to snuff out the future trouble at its root. Her father, the Marquis, refused outright. Instead, he called upon his own power as a mage and the strength of his fellow mages to seal the aura within his daughter.
It was a mere leftover fragment — abandoned and forgotten even by the demon itself, high-ranked though it had been. The mages and the Marquis firmly believed that as long as they kept careful watch over the girl, the wicked power would never burst free.
And so, on the girl's fifteenth birthday—
the feared calamity finally struck.
Coloris, the Demon of Color, who splattered 'color' across the world. The girl, who had lived her whole life warily avoiding color of every shade, welcomed the dazzling birthday party she had dreamed of for so long — and the party's ballroom was overwhelmingly, gorgeously vivid.
In that instant, her seal wavered.
The color burst free.
Every 'color' around her began to melt and bleed away, and the bars of the cage meant to hold the bird began to rattle and clatter violently.
One more moment like this, and everything around her would be drained of its hues — and the girl would face the very same terror the kingdom had suffered when it lost half of itself. That was the moment I appeared before her.
"A demon... it was not, after all."
To be precise, I had come to her. The girl, her mind dissolved into madness, caught sight of the blue I carried and lunged at me —
"...Huaah?!"
KRAKA-BOOOM!!!
—and was flipped head over heels and slammed straight into the floor.
Hm. Clean.
"Atana! What on earth—!"
"Y-You're the vanished Saintess...! Why would you do this to Atana?!"
"Rest assured. She won't die."
Uuuugh...
"...Anyway. That's the situation."
Perhaps I had hit her a little too hard.
The many-colored bird had been returned to its cage.
This was a bird that must never be allowed out.
"A demon's remnant... I see. That explains it."
I gazed down at the sleeping girl as I listened to the Marquis's account. Her injuries were already healed — divine power saw to that easily enough.
The war between demons and celestial kin left untold devastation in its wake. And the trouble wasn't merely the material damage — the aftermath always carried something else, something capable of inflicting harm a second time over. Among such leftovers were the lucky few who obtained a demon's or celestial's remnant and swaggered about as if they had become gods themselves.
This child was surely not one of them, but still.
I looked at the girl's arm. A bird of many-colored feathers tilted its head there, and around it was drawn a barrier — the image of a cage barring the bird's activity. It wasn't the work of a Grand Mage, but it was respectable, meticulous magic all the same.
And yet, to seal the power of a high-ranked demon like Coloris, it was stretching things considerably.
"It's a miracle you've gone this long without an incident."
"Th-that's true. From the moment she was born, we stripped nearly every color from her surroundings."
Now that I looked around, it was certainly true that this was not a scenery rich in color. One glance told you the whole space was crammed with drab, muddy hues. Even the grass outside had turned gray.
"Then why hold a party like that?"
"...We promised her. We told her if she held out until she turned fifteen, we'd throw her a grand celebration..."
"I don't understand. If she'd only ever seen a world without color, she wouldn't even have known such a thing existed."
A person who had never once seen the color blue could hardly know what blue was. Unless someone told her, she wouldn't even have cared to ask.
At my question, the Marquis let out a long sigh.
"The child found a fairy-tale book in a corner of the study — one we'd failed to clear away. A colored fairy-tale book, with a birthday party painted inside."
"Hah."
"We believed that if the mages kept a careful watch, we could handle whatever came... but I see now how arrogant we were."
Fools.
Knowing full well what disaster this thing could unleash, they still went ahead and staged a party. Truly ignorant people.
Truly.
"...Though I have to say, you seem rather different from the Saintess I once knew."
"I haven't changed a bit since those days."
"You have. The Saintess has changed a great deal. Above all — you were never so... brutal, before."
Brutal, was it.
Well, I had picked up a bit of that, yes.
"I've been cracking too many skulls over the years."
"Pardon?"
"Exactly what I said. And besides, I'm not the Saintess anymore. Just a vagrant, really."
Nothing more than a vagrant who couldn't die and so went on living. That was all there was to call me now.
"That can't be true. The Saintess saved over a hundred thousand people — how can you say such a thing?"
"All ancient history."
"As I understand it, a mere three months ago you appeared near Teves and saved the people there. And you saved someone again just moments ago, in fact."
"...You're remarkably well informed about useless things."
Hadn't she said the place was clearly finished, ruined? Then why did she keep hearing about it?
"I am a mage myself, whatever I may look like. To save this child, I've been continuing research through magic transmission gates with countless mages across every region."
"......It isn't work I do by choice. Nor did I come here to save the child."
"I know. I've heard at least the broad outline of the Saintess's comings and goings."
My path did swing this way and that with whatever emotion seized me at the moment, but broadly it split into two pursuits. One was seeing through to the end of the 'main quest' — whose ending I couldn't even predict. The other was eliminating anyone who abused the remnants of demons or celestial kin, or who threatened to sow chaos in the world.
The reason I had come here, too, was simply that I'd sensed a demon's aura while passing through the area.
"Savior of humanity and great Saintess, Lily Elbrit — I beseech you."
The Marquis rose from his seat and bowed his head so low that his forehead nearly touched the floor.
"I swear such an incident will never occur again. So I beg of you — could you not simply pretend you never saw Atana, and let this pass?"
"Do you have any guarantee such a thing will never happen again?"
"That..."
"Once a seal breaks even a little, it will all come pouring out like a bursting dam. Your current level of magic wouldn't stand the slightest chance of holding it."
That they had managed to wall up a high demon's remnant this long with merely human magic was itself a miracle. But the seal had broken now. From this point on, the merest glimpse of color would be enough to set it off, and next time there would be no holding it back at all.
"...There must be some way..."
"Why did you not kill her? If I had not come today, your entire house would have been wiped off the face of the earth."
If it couldn't be contained, the girl should have been put down long ago. Worse still, even without a birthday party to hasten things, the seal had grown so fragile that within a few years it would have unraveled on its own.
The Marquis shook his head, firm and unyielding.
"How could a father kill his own daughter? That is the act of a demon."
That is the act of a demon, was it.
A short laugh escaped me at the Marquis's words. He swallowed hard at the sight, and an edge of killing intent so sharp it nearly smothered the air spread faintly through the room.
"The celestial kin are no different."
"Pardon?"
"Never mind. Truthfully, I never intended to kill her."
If I'd wanted her dead, she'd have been dead already. I had no intention of putting down an innocent child who had never once abused that power.
I reached out and touched the sigil. The blue cage swayed, and the 'color' sleeping within it flinched.
"Ah, please, be careful, if you handle it carelessly—"
CLANG!
The cage that had shimmered with a thousand colors turned a single pristine white. The Many Colors bird sensed the change and battered frantically against the bars, but it was all for nothing.
The demon of many colors glared at me with pure, seething loathing. I smiled breezily back at it.
Come find me if it burns you so, you paint-splasher.
Not that a coward like it ever would. It probably couldn't care less, honestly.
Glancing sideways, I found the Marquis staring at me with an expression of utter, hollow disbelief.
"Is something the matter?"
"...The magic I spent fifteen years crafting... in a single moment."
"Naturally. I've been offered the deanship of the Empire's academy, you know. This much is simply basic etiquette."
"......I'm beginning to suspect my eyes are deceiving me."
"Shall I give you a good smack?"
Nothing cures a deranged mind like a solid blow.
"N-no, that won't be necessary."