Newman (5)
Did I ever mention how many of the characters in Soul Academy are unhappy people?
To put it more precisely, among the main cast, the ones who aren't unhappy are the smaller group. Each of them carries some misfortune, big or small, and resolving or overcoming it is what the character quests of Soul Academy are all about.
Just look at the characters I've met so far.
Arthur Soladin, our poor little Pitiful Prince, is a man haunted by a compulsion to be perfect ever since he lost his mother.
Frey Kent can't feel emotions, so she throws herself into life-or-death struggles with a maniac's obsession.
And Phoebe is a walking bomb packed with misfortunes even she doesn't know about.
This is exactly why Joy is my favorite character. Out of this huge roster, she's the only one with no real connection to tragedy.
Her family is fine, her personality is fine, and her only real worry is that it's hard for her to make genuine friends. Plus, the way she fumbles through everything is honestly adorable.
This morning, when she desperately tried to keep up with me and Frey's pace and collapsed flat on the ground from sheer exhaustion, I really couldn't hold back my laughter.
She does such genuinely idiotic things, and yet the moment she catches her breath and gets back up, the cold villainess is right there again. It's endlessly entertaining.
Anyway, with the situation being what it is, it stands to reason that the Inferior Young Master has his own misfortune too. His performance is middling, sure, but he's still one of the major NPCs.
After all, there's an achievement tied to Jackal's route.
Jackal Burrow's misfortune is his inferiority complex toward his own brother.
A brother who was overwhelmingly, absurdly better than him in every way.
A brother everyone believed would one day bring prosperity to the Burrow family.
A brother whose brilliance was so blinding it trapped Jackal in his shadow.
A brother who, in a sudden accident, threw his own body away to save others.
Even after his brother died, Jackal Burrow never escaped that shadow.
His parents never emerged from their grief over the loss.
The family retainers paid him hollow praise to his face, then behind his back tore him down with endless comparisons to a dead man.
Worst of all, Jackal himself kept measuring himself against his brother, shoveling his own self-worth deeper and deeper into the mud.
There's a reason Jackal, who had originally been a child who loved nothing more than to play, was flailing so desperately to become the best.
"How do you even have that?"
And the necklace I was holding out right now was a memento of Jackal Burrow's older brother, Jail Burrow.
The necklace Jail Burrow had worn at all times, without fail.
A necklace that, by the terms of his will, should have been passed down to Jackal.
The reason it was in my hands was simple: when he died saving others, someone stole it from his body and sold it off as contraband.
The dead can't speak for themselves, after all.
By chance...
"I got it by chance, actually. The Burrow family seal embedded in it caught my eye."
There was no way Jackal wouldn't recognize it. This was a boy who had trailed after his older brother since childhood, who even now lived in that brother's shadow.
He'd remember anything his brother ever owned. Vividly.
If things proceeded according to the game's script, Jackal would now demand I hand it over. Then the moment his fingers touched the necklace, the enchantment woven into it would trigger, a quest would spring into existence, and once we solved the task together, Jackal's heart would swing open like a door!
And after that, all I'd have to do was sit back and wait to see what the pathetic Chief God would hand me!
I was happily sketching out that rosy future while waiting for Jackal's answer when I noticed something deeply wrong with his expression.
"So what am I supposed to do about it?"
Jackal, who had been staring at the necklace in silence, slowly lifted his head. What filled those eyes was a hatred as deep and dark a red as his own hair.
"I'll ask you once more. What is it you want me to do?"
In the game called Soul Academy, those were not the words that came out of Jackal's mouth.
In the game, Jackal said, That's not something a nobody like you has any right to carry — and demanded I give the necklace back.
"Were you planning to bargain with me using that necklace? What a shame. I have no interest in that thing."
Liar.
"Inferior Young Master. Are you trying to deceive yourself? What a pathetic little thought."
The words slipped out of me on reflex, translated into the tongue of the mesugaki, and seeped straight into Jackal's ears.
He didn't furrow his brow. He didn't get angry. He simply said nothing at all and rose from his seat.
The sight of his back as he gathered his book and walked away was so heavy that I found myself utterly unable to call after him.
It was only long after Jackal had left the library that I finally came back to my senses.
What... what on earth just happened?
Why did Jackal look at his own brother's necklace, recognize it, and then just walk away and leave it behind?
Why?
Jackal Burrow remembered his brother.
He remembered a man who seemed incapable of even understanding the word inadequate. His brother, whom everyone expected to lift the Burrow family to greatness. And that idiot — that fool who threw his own life away for strangers before he could ever fulfill a single one of those expectations.
He had to remember.
From that day on, the minute hand of the Burrow family clock — a clock that had lost the gear called Jail — never moved a single step forward.
Jackal hated it.
He hated his mother, who wept for his brother as if every day were the day of the funeral. He hated his father, who drowned each day in drink and took his rage out on Jackal nightly. He hated the retainers of the household, who had sunk into a silence deeper than any grave.
Not a single one of them suited him.
So Jackal strove to escape that day. He exerted himself to become a son worth being proud of. He abandoned the games he so adored and took up training instead. He embraced the books he'd once whined about ever needing to read. He clenched his teeth and forced himself to carry a nobleman's dignity.
All to fill Jail's empty place himself.
To become a gear in the machine of House Burrow. To push the minute hand forward and move the family ahead.
But no matter how desperately he thrashed, nothing changed.
No matter how brilliant his results, his parents never looked his way. The retainers praised him to his face and gutted him behind his back, always against the same yardstick: his brother.
He was a lonely boy left behind in a world that had simply stopped.
The only thing Jackal could do was curse his brother — the brother who had abandoned him and walked away — curse him, and curse him again.
And so, when Lucy Aln held out that necklace, Jackal knew exactly what it was in an instant.
Because he remembered the last image of Jail he'd ever had — his brother flashing him a smile, a farewell, on the day he died — he couldn't possibly have forgotten the necklace hanging around that brother's neck.
Why is Lucy Aln the one holding it?
Unable to make sense of it, Jackal finally spoke — and Lucy Aln answered with that signature, insufferable grin.
"Got it by chance."
By chance.Got lucky.
To Jackal, that chance was so bizarre it bordered on the uncanny.
The necklace of the brother he was flailing so hard to climb over. And now Lucy Aln — the very person feeding his inferiority complex day after day — had stumbled across it by chance.
Jackal Burrow hated Lucy Aln.
There was no grand reason behind it. He simply despised her because she was better than him. That was all.
In scholarship, Lucy Aln was an overwhelming existence. Her entrance exam score had been the kind that carved itself into the Academy's history — a height Jackal, even now, could scarcely imagine reaching, let alone surpassing.
Combat? Just look at how she'd defeated Frey Kent — the girl who had once toyed with Jackal like a plaything — in a previous tournament.
They weren't even playing the same game.
So was she lacking anywhere else? No. She wasn't.
The only flaw Lucy Aln had was one: her personality. An arrogant, insolent temper that looked down on absolutely everyone, whether they stood above her or below her.
And that one flaw was exactly why Lucy Aln was still avoided within the Academy walls.
Maybe things had been different in the past, but the Lucy Aln of today was no fool. There was no way she didn't know that if she simply pretended to be humble, she could win people's affection.
A girl too stupid to grasp even that could never have taken first place on the entrance exam, after all.
The way Jackal saw it, that arrogance was a declaration: I will not bow my head before anything or anyone. It was an uprightness that said, no matter how the world judged her, she would walk her own path.
Jackal hated that uprightness.
Because he could never be upright himself.
Because he, a boy bent and reshaped by everyone around him, forced to live according to what others expected of him, could never manage it.
Because no matter how badly he wanted to stand straight, in the end he always broke and buckled.
He hated the uprightness he could never achieve.
And that was why, when he saw the necklace — and lifted his head to meet Lucy Aln's infuriatingly amused eyes — he thought of his brother.
He remembered that uprightness of his brother's, the way Jail had lived without glancing sideways at anyone's opinion, and had been loved by everyone for it anyway.
So he shouted that the necklace meant nothing to him. He declared that his brother weighed on his mind not in the slightest.
If he admitted to Lucy Aln that he needed that necklace, it would feel like admitting he was still crushed beneath his brother's shadow. He had no other choice.
"Inferior Young Master. Are you trying to deceive yourself? What a pathetic little thought."
In that instant, Lucy Aln smiled — as if she had seen straight through to the rot in his chest.
At the sight of that smile, Jackal shot to his feet.
Rudeness? Discourtesy?
He couldn't have cared less. He simply knew that if he exchanged one more word with Lucy Aln, he wasn't going to be able to bear it.
So he fled the library and walked for a long while without thinking about anything at all — and only after he'd left the building, staring up at a sky choked with clouds, did he slam his fist into the Academy's white wall.
"Inferior?Me?"
Lucy Aln. That damned, accursed woman.
Since it had never once occurred to me that Jackal might refuse the necklace, my head was a hopeless tangle.
What the heck? Why did he just leave the necklace behind and walk off?
He clearly went pale the moment he saw it, so there's no doubt he recognized what it was. But this was an event that had never once happened in the game, so I couldn't even begin to guess what was going on.
Some new variable had appeared, and I couldn't get the faintest read on what it was.
Ugh. Damn it.
At this rate, the plan to raise Jackal's affection and clear the quest the pathetic Chief God handed me has to be scrapped. If I knew what the problem was, I'd try to solve it — but without knowing, I've got no move to make.
So I'll just pivot. I'll look for ways to raise Arthur's or Frey's affection, and if nothing pans out, I'll consider other options then.
It's not like it's impossible. There are a hundred ways to skin this cat.
Still, it stings. Something I thought would resolve easily just got complicated. Why is it that ever since I fell into this world, nothing ever goes the way I want?
...Could Agra have his fingers in this too?
I was deep in another round of furrow-browed brooding when a presence nearby made me look up.
There it was — today's Academy dessert special, the one I'd ordered.
A parfait. I'd only ordered it a few minutes ago; that was fast.
I scooped up a spoonful of the ice cream sitting on top and popped it into my mouth, waving my hand at the sweet, silky, cold rush of it.
When your head hurts, sugar really is the answer. Thank goodness this is a medieval-style fantasy. If it were actual medieval times, I wouldn't even be able to dream of a luxury like this.
Smiling at the sweetness filling my mouth, I kept my thoughts moving as I dug in for another spoonful.
Changing the plan itself isn't hard. Once I've got the Seal of the Crow and access to the Newman network, my options multiply. Until then, I suppose all I can do is hope Cuz Newman tracks down that elixir quickly.
"Nom."
And in the meantime, I'll just drag Joy and Frey around doing grunt work.