Why I Had to Go to the Magic City (3)
Charlotte gazed out the window at the passing scenery.
The snowfields of the North, so familiar to her, soon gave way to verdant green plains. At times the land turned to sooty industrial districts, then to orange wastes where gritty sandstorms whipped across the earth.
The knights had let out long sighs at her stubborn insistence on riding the long-distance train alone when an airship would have gotten her there in a single day. But whether they sighed or not, the days of solitary travel were deeply satisfying to Charlotte.
It was worth digging my heels in for.
There was an overwhelming thrill to it that she could never have felt simply by looking at the landscape paintings hanging on the walls of the Grand Duke's residence. Thanks to that, the gloom that had hung over her for the past several days finally lifted, if only somewhat.
She was someone I never saw coming.
It wasn't just Charlotte herself. The princess with the famously sharp mind, the second son of the Imperial Knights' commander — this year's incoming class at Eretz Academy was unusually full of people worth watching.
Having heard all the various rumors about them and pieced them together, Charlotte had concluded that in Practical Magic, at least, she would be the strongest of the new students.
So she had taken the entrance exam with complete confidence — and a little while later, received notice that she had placed second among the incoming Practical Magic students.
Second place.
It was the moment her ambition — to hold the top seat of the Practical Magic Department for three straight years and graduate in glory — was blown to pieces before it had even begun.
The second daughter of the Magic Security Bureau's Minister.
And she hadn't merely been first in the Practical Magic Department. She had been the top-scoring new student in the entire academy.
When Charlotte first heard the news, nothing she reached for would stay in her hands.
Lady Arbanka. Yes. I'll remember that name.
A faint smile played at the corners of Charlotte's mouth. Somewhere in the midst of savoring her train journey, the bitter sting of losing the top seat had quietly given way to curiosity about the girl who'd taken it.
— We will be arriving at Carpen Station shortly. —
Carpen, the capital of the Empire.
Only a few more stops remained before the train reached the Magic City. The pleasant journey had, before she knew it, drawn near its end.
The platform, befitting the imperial capital, was crowded with masses of people waiting for the train to pull in.
There are a lot more uniforms now.
When she had first boarded in the North, Charlotte had been the only passenger in an academy uniform. At the stations afterward, uniformed travelers had been scarce too.
And so she had enjoyed a small private game of guessing each passenger's occupation and destination by their clothes as they came and went at every stop.
An academy student, destination... well, the Magic City for all of them, presumably.
By the time they reached Carpen, the great majority of the passengers were wearing uniforms.
"I wonder if Lady Arbanka is among them."
It was just as Charlotte murmured this to herself, watching the crowd of academy students.
Click.
Without so much as a knock, the compartment door swung open.
How rude.
Charlotte frowned slightly, then turned her head to look at the intruder's face.
Uh... who is that?
It was a woman shrouded in gloom.
Deep blue, disheveled hair brushed lightly over the corners of her eyes. The buttons of a black long coat, falling to her knees, were fastened all the way to the throat. On her feet, work boots. Between black leather gloves and sleeve, glimpses of skin so white it went beyond pale — it was bloodless.
A soldier?
Her outward appearance looked fragile enough to snap if you tapped it. The weary eyes that looked down at Charlotte were heavy with fatigue and annoyance.
But those feelings were fundamentally different from helplessness. If one had to put it into words, they were closer to the eyes of a beast of prey idly gazing down at its feed.
There's no mana at all — she can't be a mage.
But there's no way she's just an ordinary civilian who can't use magic.
Assassination isn't the goal. If she'd meant to kill me, she'd have moved fast, before I even noticed to guard myself.
A kidnapper after ransom? Or hired by someone?
Dice.
Charlotte drew on her mana with careful precision.
Now then — how are you going to play this?
She readied herself to cast at a moment's notice.
The train was currently stopped in the heart of the capital. Shattering the window alone would bring station staff and a crowd of onlookers running. Drawing every eye like that would be more than enough.
At last, the woman spoke.
Fangs. Through the small gap of her parted lips, a row of teeth like saw blades glinted for an instant.
"She's... here, but."
It was a voice so timid and creeping that all of Charlotte's careful vigilance felt utterly pointless.
"How, do you know me?"
"...Huh?"
I'd overheard her muttering something about "Lady Arbanka this, Lady Arbanka that" as she passed through the corridor, so I reflexively opened the compartment door.
The Bureau had a habit of making contact in ways just like that, so I'd assumed this was more of the same.
Instead of a Bureau agent, there was some white-haired schoolgirl in a uniform sitting in the compartment.
What is this? A new recruit? And what's with that uniform?
For a moment I wondered if they'd brought in yet another agent whose screws had come loose somewhere, but thankfully it was nothing of the sort.
The girl, who introduced herself as Charlotte, was a genuine student — no cosplayer, no deviant — and, it turned out, an incoming freshman at the same academy as my younger sister.
Her talk of "Lady Arbanka" had been about my sister, too.
That should have been the end of it: we cleared up the misunderstanding and went our separate ways. It would have been nice.
"So you really, truly can't use magic at all, unnie? You're just an ordinary person?"
"That's right."
Accepting Charlotte's invitation to ride together, without thinking much of it, had been the root of the trouble.
By the time I realized it, my arm was already in her grip, and there was no escaping the conversation.
"That's kind of fascinating, actually. I was absolutely sure you'd be some terrifyingly skilled mage."
"Were you."
"When you tilted your head ever so slightly and looked down at me like that, I genuinely thought I was going to die right there. If you'd been even a little later, I probably would've smashed the window and thrown myself right off this train."
"Well. I'm glad I wasn't late, then."
Truly, honestly — for some reason, Bureau people had this deeply rotten habit of blaming every single explosion on me. I'd come within an inch of getting slapped with the label of bombing fanatic or terrorist yet again.
"But opening ceremony's still two weeks away, so why are you... Oh! Are you going to sightsee with your sister?"
"No."
"Huh? Then why?"
"An acquaintance of mine is short-handed at her shop. I'm going to help out."
Afternoon Lasagna, was it? That was the name of the shop. The cover story was that I'd been hired on as a part-timer there for about a semester.
Charlotte, hearing about my undercover assignment, gave a slight frown.
"Something about it seems wildly ill-fitting, and yet somehow, surprisingly, it also seems like it might suit you..."
After scanning me up and down a couple of times, the corners of Charlotte's mouth soon curled into a grin.
"May I come visit?"
"No."
"I'll look forward to it."
Right. That meant she was definitely coming. Telling her not to would accomplish absolutely nothing, so I'd just leave it be.
She'd come by a few times and get bored, then wander off. Probably.
"So you won't be attending the opening ceremony because of work?"
"Hmm..."
The truth was it had nothing to do with work — the person in question had simply refused to attend. But there was no obligation to be honest about it.
"That's—"
"Should I find someone to work in your place on the day of the ceremony, unnie?"
"I don't lose."
I barely managed to wrench the conversation back on course.
Well, whatever. We were both incoming students, and the top and second seats of the same department were bound to cross paths plenty. It would all come out naturally, sooner or later.
"...I don't really get along with my sister."
It wasn't so much that we were on bad terms with each other — more that I was the object of that child's one-sided hatred.
I don't know why.
When I asked, she never answered.
Well. I'm sure she has her own reasons.
"Still, I think you ought to attend the opening ceremony."
"I don't know about that."
Every year, on the day of the academy's opening ceremony, incidents of terrorism occurred at a suspiciously high frequency.
Because of that, the background checks on visitors were always thorough. Proving one's relationship to an enrolled student was a procedure every single visitor had to undergo, no exceptions.
For starters, we would have to meet at the checkpoint at the academy's front gate, which already ruled everything out. No matter how long I waited at that checkpoint, that child would never come out to meet me.
Even if I got arrested as a suspicious person right in front of her, she'd probably just glance at me like I was a bug and walk on by.
Going was pointless anyway. I'd be turned away at the door.
"Hmm..."
Charlotte, having worn a suitably grave expression for show, soon flicked her fingers through the air.
"You're right, it won't be easy."
"It won't."
"But it's not impossible."
Charlotte broke into a sweet, beaming smile.
"Then I'll simply invite you myself."
I cannot operate magical devices.
Hearing that on its own, you might not think it was much of a problem — but it was, in fact, a fairly serious matter.
GMS was a world built around magic. Which meant that the development of its civilization, too, had largely proceeded on a foundation of magic.
Where Earth had energy resources, this world had mana; where Earth had machines, this world had spells.
Humanity, intoxicated by the genre-typical convenience of an all-purpose resource, neglected any technological progress outside of magic. As a result, magic here was, for all practical purposes, civilization itself.
To put it in terms anyone could understand:
I, the great archmage Alpinia, cannot use a smartphone, a microwave, or a hair dryer. Not one of them.
"...Can someone really be that hopeless with machines?"
"Yes."
After arriving in the Magic City and getting off the train, Charlotte suggested we exchange comm-unit numbers to stay in touch.
But forget exchanging numbers — I didn't own a comm unit in the first place.
And I obviously couldn't hand over the Inspection Unit's hotline number, so I fudged it: I claimed I was such a catastrophic technophobe that the devices broke merely from my touching them. Which, in fairness, was true.
I had conveyed the unfiltered, unvarnished truth, and yet Charlotte's eyes were full of doubt. Still, apparently she didn't quite have the nerve to run the experiment of pressing her own comm unit into my hand.
"I'll be waiting to hear from you."
Having written her comm number on a slip of paper and pressed it firmly into my palm, Charlotte disappeared into the crowd thronging the platform.
Do I even need this?
There was, of course, the option of dumping it in a trash bin and erasing the whole encounter from history.
Just as I stood there turning the slip of paper over in my hand, agonizing over the choice —
"Welcome, to the Magic City."
A nun's habit so immaculate it was almost suffocating. A veil that concealed a single strand of hair. Eyes narrowed so thinly it was hard to tell whether she could see properly at all.
Suddenly, a joke Subordinate No. 1 had once made floated up from memory.
"Do you require... an autograph?"
The corners of her mouth curved into an arc.