16 — Epilogue (Volume Zero, Complete)
That was the headline printed on the front page.
The incident in the Fullerene Ghetto—the Larks District—had been brought to a close, and after a light coat of embellishment, the broad shape of it was released to the public. Any mention of Irok Dehaja's magic vanished as if that were only natural. Knowledge of the worst magic in history was far too dangerous, and so it was buried from the masses in absolute secrecy.
Serzif's part was neatly cut out as well. A Guardian Saint was the Azurik Free Federation's most vital strategic asset, and a single move of theirs could shift the posture of a hostile nation. The Saints' movements were therefore kept under the strictest confidence, and Serzif's exploits never reached the public ear.
And so, overnight, Pale became known as the great mage who had felled an ancient dragon all on his own.
Serzif, for her part, took what she considered a responsible stance toward the Larks Free Zone. She had failed to obtain the iron sphere in which Irok Dehaja's magic was sealed, yet she still promised Rekdos what he had demanded: humanitarian aid for the Larks District, and a guarantee of its autonomy. In her own way, it was a display of a Guardian Saint's pride.
Pale's fame as the great mage who had slain a dragon shot into the heavens. The man himself, however, was thoroughly dissatisfied.
"Honor has its place. I'd still rather they'd paid me."
From the start, the only reason Pale had nearly killed himself grinding through the dust-choked Larks District was money. His goal had been the emergency funds he needed to stop Theora from having the Dragonheart Office swallowed by her bank. But the magic of Irok Dehaja—the very thing meant to be traded for that money—had been destroyed by Capra. Preventing the catastrophe of that magic falling into a dragon's hands had mattered more, of course, so there had been no other choice.
In the end, Pale had worked for nothing, and Elphelit Bank's pressure to seize the office only grew fiercer. And so he had resolved, at last, to steal.
"And who exactly are you calling a thief?"
"Isn't what we're about to do theft?"
Capra said it, dumbfounded by her master's words.
Pale and Capra stood before a vault. It lay in the basement of the Dragonheart Office building, sealed behind a massive iron door that called a bomb shelter to mind. Before that door, both of them stood with shovels in hand.
"This vault belongs to the Dragonheart Office to begin with. We simply can't open it without the Magic Crest."
"As far as I know, it becomes Elphelit Bank's property in three days. So wouldn't what we're doing right now be illegal?"
"For the moment, at least, it's ours."
Pale was forcing the point, and Capra could only sigh at the stubbornness of it.
"Aaah—if I had to end up with a master, why couldn't it have been a pretty woman with money? What did I do in a past life to get stuck with a broke man?"
"Tried to destroy humanity, I'd imagine. Now shut up and move your hands. Dig through the floor, come up under the vault, and we can get inside."
"Is there even money in this thing?"
"There are things more important than money. The magical legacy of the Dragonheart Office. Far more valuable than any cash sitting in a bank."
Pale said it in earnest. Capra, who knew nothing whatsoever about magic, answered with a hollow, soulless Oh, is that so?
Digging through a concrete floor with a shovel was not work for human beings. Only a mage and a magical puppet—beings who had already stepped past human limits—could even attempt it, and even for them it was brutal. After a long stretch of digging, Capra set a hand on her waist and put the shovel down.
"Capra. Stop loafing and work."
"Oh, come on. I've been shoveling for hours. Let me rest a little."
"There's no time to rest. We have to get the contents out before the creditors come crashing in."
"An actual criminal..."
"Quiet."
Faced with her monstrously unreasonable master, Capra set a hand against the vault door and tried to catch her breath. And in that instant, light began to spill from the left hand she had pressed to the iron.
"Huh? What's this?"
"Capra. I told you not to rest."
"No—Master, look. The back of my left hand is glowing."
"What?"
Pale turned with an irritated scowl, ready to ask if she was talking in her sleep. But light really was coming off the back of Capra's left hand. The trouble was that the sigil blazing there was achingly familiar, and at the same time something that had absolutely no business being on that hand. It was the image of a roaring dragon: the Magic Crest passed down through the Dragonheart line for generations.
"Why in the world is that on your hand!"
Pale flinched as if struck, flung the shovel aside, and snatched Capra's hand in a flash. And in that moment, the crest on the back of her hand flared bright. Pale's consciousness blurred, and when he came to, he was standing in a space like the cosmos itself.
"This place..."
While he stood there in confusion, a woman's voice reached him from behind.
"Pale."
At a voice he had missed beyond words, Pale turned as if possessed—and there stood his wife, Sabia Dragonheart. Soft blonde hair fell to her shoulders; her face was quiet and intellectual. She wore the plain white dress she had always favored. Her blue eyes shone like jewels, and her skin was as white as a beach where no one had ever walked.
From the crown of her head to the tips of her feet, she was the very image seared into Pale's memory, missed until it ached. She looked, for all the world, like the dead returned to life. Regrettably, the dead do not come back. Irok Dehaja had, of course, clawed his way out even of death—but he was a monster beyond all measure, an exception no ordinary rule could cover.
Pale wanted nothing more than to run to Sabia that instant and take her in his arms. Sadly, he knew exactly what the woman before him truly was. A last will, left inside the Magic Crest. One of the crest's secondary functions: a means of sealing one's thoughts within the seal, so that matters of its succession could be settled.
"Pale... my love."
Even so, at the voice of his wife—the voice he had ached to hear—Pale felt as if his chest were on fire.
"Pale... I have so much I want to say to you. It is hateful that so few words can be left in this place."
"Ah... I could talk with you, the one I love, all day long..."
"......"
At Pale's earnest words, Sabia's lingering thought wore a pained expression.
"Pale. There is something of the utmost importance. You must remember it."
"Yes. I'll remember... I swear it..."
"First, above all else—our child is alive."
"What?"
For an instant, his wife's words struck him like the butt of a rifle across the skull.
"No... that can't be. Our child died. And the child was only a fetus, early in the pregnancy. How could they possibly still be alive?"
"Did you see the body with your own eyes?"
"No, that's..."
The question from his wife's thought stopped the words in his throat. He had never been able to bring himself to look upon the child's body. He had felt as if he would collapse, and in the end he had turned his eyes from their child's last moment.
"Then where is our child? How am I supposed to get them back?"
"...Irok Dehaja. He is the key to all of this."
"Again... that damned Irok Dehaja..."
Irritation was beginning to crawl up through him. The name had come out of a dragon's mouth out of nowhere, and out of a Guardian Saint's as well. Wherever he went, all anyone ever spoke of was Irok Dehaja. And the real Irok Dehaja was the magical puppet he himself had made and put to work—yet that damned doll wouldn't offer so much as a fingernail's worth of useful information.
"Sabia, tell me... What is Irok Dehaja, really? What did he do, for the world to end up like this?"
"...Pale. This incident is far more complicated, and far vaster, than you think. I cannot tell what is good and what is evil, nor how terrible a being lurks behind it all."
Sabia's face was troubled, and the sight of it felt as if it were tearing his chest open.
"But one thing is certain. Our child is alive."
To his question, Sabia only smiled.
"If you are speaking with me, then you must have met Irok Dehaja. If that is so, you will be able to recover our child as well."
"......"
"Pale..."
Toward the bewildered man, Sabia's lingering thought left its final words.
"...How am I supposed to not worry?"
"......"
"I can't keep a promise not to worry about you. But our child—I will bring them back. That much, I promise."
At his words, Sabia's phantom smiled, and then vanished like foam.
When Pale's mind returned to the real world, Capra was there with her head tilted, poking his cheek.
"Masteeer~ Master? Did you die?"
"......"
Pale seized the hand jabbing his cheek, glared at her, and asked.
"Irok Dehaja... What... are you, exactly?"
His eyes were not what they had been. He had always looked at Capra with distaste, but now his gaze held a fear and a revulsion, as if he were looking at something that did not belong to this world. Faced with that deadly serious question, Capra answered with the worn-out look of someone sick of hearing it yet again.
"A dumbass whose greatest joy in life is eating a hamburger and playing games at three in the morning."
I had no idea why, but the thing on the back of my hand was, apparently, the very Magic Crest of the Dragonheart family that my master had been searching for so desperately. When I asked why the hell something like that was on my hand, he said nothing at all.
And so the whole business of eating dirt and fighting a dragon in the Larks District had turned out to be one colossal waste of a dig. So long as the Dragonheart family's Magic Crest was on my hand, we had never needed to grind ourselves raw chasing money in the first place.
"But we saved the people of the Larks District. It wasn't entirely without reward."
My master said it while striking a pose. I, however, remembered perfectly well the man who had been sick with worry over money, muttering to himself that cash would have been better than honor.
By virtue of the crest, he formally took hold of the Dragonheart Office's corporate assets and the family's property rights. And he presented that fact, without a hint of shame, to Theora Elphelit—the woman at the start of this entire mess.
"I trust this makes it clear that our Dragonheart Office is more than capable of repaying its debts. If you still intend to acquire the office, then we will settle our accounts and cut every dealing with Elphelit Bank."
"......"
At his words, Theora wound a lock of her pink hair around her finger and fiddled with it, then let out a sigh.
"No. The Dragonheart Office's finances are quite stable. It was enough that you showed me that."
She said only that much, and withdrew.
She had never truly meant to acquire the Dragonheart Office. She had only been probing the opening left by the missing crest. Now that my master had formally inherited the estate through it, even Elphelit Bank had nothing to gain by forcing a break with the Dragonhearts.
Well. Before any of that, I figured Theora just wanted to get close to my master.
The man she loved without return had sunk so deep into despair that he went and bought something like a magical puppet, and the lid had blown clean off—her possessiveness toward him spilling out in a very strange direction. Even I, a man who'd never been with a woman, understood the logic behind Theora Elphelit's behavior. My master, meanwhile, hadn't noticed a thing.
"That Theora. Doing something so pointless..."
"Well... Miss Theora probably didn't mean any real harm, did she?"
"Harm, no. She was simply reassessing a business partner's competence, as a woman of Elphelit Bank. We showed her what we could do, so she backed off. That's all."
"Hmm... You really don't understand a woman's heart, Master."
"A woman's heart? I've no idea what you mean. And you, of all people—you've never even had a wife—are hardly the one to say it."
"That's true, I suppose."
And so our first journey came to an end.
I look into the mirror in the bathroom. A woman in pink pajamas stands there. The only differences are the horns on her head, and the long ears covered in pure white fur.
"What the hell is wrong with this world..."
A world where everyone knew my name, where they called me the worst mage in history and feared me—a strange world I had never imagined, not even in a dream. Honestly, I could have shrugged it off if it were only ordinary people who knew my name. But when it came out of the mouth of a dragon I was seeing for the first time in my life, I was well and truly sick of it.
I look at the face in the mirror once more. At first the strange appearance had made me wonder what on earth I was looking at. Now I have been forced to accept that this is my new body.
No longer human, but a magical puppet—where does a body like mine end up? Just imagining it left me unmoored, the answer impossibly far away.