What Is It With Me?
On the road back to the village Sian had once called home.
"……."
"……."
Only one feeling filled Sian's chest as he made his way toward the village.
Discomfort.
Immense discomfort.
Because, unlike the trip into the city, he wasn't traveling alone this time.
Sian glanced back over his shoulder.
A silver-haired woman trailed behind him, keeping a careful few paces of distance.
'No, I turned her down….'
When she'd asked, 'Can I come with you?' and he'd refused, she hadn't said a word—she had simply tagged along anyway, refusing to budge.
Why bother asking if you're going to follow me regardless?
That said, being cold to someone who had been unconscious until just moments ago and had barely gotten back on her feet after downing a potion felt a bit cruel, and there was nothing he could actually do to stop her, so he'd had no choice but to keep his mouth shut.
'Still, though….'
She was following, yet not a single word passed between them, and that was—well, that was deeply awkward.
He hadn't asked anything because he didn't want to get tangled up in anything complicated.
'Come to think of it, it's already far too late for that, isn't it?'
Elina may have knocked her pursuers down, but he had personally watched her deal with them, then healed the very target they'd been chasing with a potion.
Convinced he was already entangled beyond saving, his opinion tipped toward the pragmatic side: he might as well find out who she was.
"Now that I think about it, we haven't even introduced ourselves. My name's Sian."
He introduced himself and asked for her name, and after a brief hesitation, she spoke.
"…Astria. Astria Lucenoct."
'Another noble, of course.'
He'd already seen a count's daughter, so at this point it barely registered as a surprise.
In fact, everything that had happened earlier made rough sense if you assumed her pursuers were nobles too.
Some kind of internal power struggle within the family, most likely.
'I was hoping I was done getting mixed up with aristocrats. But wait… Lucenoct?'
He was fairly sure he'd heard that name somewhere before.
His memory was hazy, but in cases like this there were usually two possibilities: a family nearby that wasn't particularly famous, or one so far away and so staggeringly famous that even he had heard it mentioned a few times.
'The former would be just about tolerable….'
If it were the latter, the problem could balloon into something considerably worse, couldn't it?
Praying it wasn't the latter, Sian kept walking—and at long last, the village came into view.
"Whoa! It's Teacher!"
The moment he arrived, the village children came running to greet him.
"Teacher, where are the snacks?!"
"Candy! Chocolate! Cookies!"
It turned out they weren't greeting him at all—they were greeting the snacks.
And then—
"Oh."
Only now did Sian remember that he had handed every last morsel of his snacks over to Elina.
In other words, not so much as a cookie crumb remained in his hands.
Disappointment washed over the children's faces in a single heartbeat.
"I'll buy a ton next time, I promise."
"Really?"
"Yeah, yeah. By the way, the village seems pretty stirred up. What's going on?"
"A merchant caravan came a few days ago! They said they wanted to see you, but you weren't here, so they're waiting!"
"Hmmm."
Annoying, sure—but if he didn't meet them, they weren't going anywhere.
It looked like he'd have to see them after all.
Since he was at it anyway, he figured he'd ask the merchants to sell the kids some snacks if they had any.
He was still thinking that when the children spotted Astria standing behind him.
"Whoa! Teacher brought home another woman!"
"I know what this is! It's that— that two-timing thing! Mom said it to Dad once!"
"No, it isn't."
"Then is she another disciple?"
"Not a disciple either. She says she's staying here for a while."
The children swarmed the newcomer in a rush.
Astria flinched and stumbled back a step, flustered, but a pack of curious youngsters was hardly going to be deterred by that.
"Wow, your hair's all white, miss!"
"Where are you from, miss?"
"Are you an adventurer?"
Astria shot Sian a look that was half plea, half SOS, but once the kids had gotten going, not even Sian could rein them in.
So he left her to the children's mercies and headed for the village chief's house.
When merchant caravans visited, business was usually conducted with the chief.
"Ah, Master Sian! Welcome back from your travels."
A man in his later years—the village chief—welcomed him warmly.
The honorific the chief used for Sian had changed only recently, and the reason required no asking to figure out.
'When Tiana showed up, he went from plain "Sian" to "Sian, sir," and once Selene arrived, it upgraded to "Master Sian."'
Sian had found it uncomfortable himself, naturally, and had told him to stop.
But the chief showed no intention whatsoever of bending on the matter, so Sian had more or less given up.
"They didn't have any particular message for me from the city, though."
"I see. Ah—this here is a merchant from the Riot Trading Company…."
The chief introduced the merchant seated across from him.
He, too, was a man who owed Tiana a debt of gratitude and had come all this way hoping to meet Sian.
An independent peddler might be one thing, but the fact that trading companies now made regular rounds to a village this small was, in truth, entirely thanks to Tiana.
'Honestly, I am grateful for this part.'
Ordinarily, a rural village like this—short on people and shorter on goods—would do most everything itself, and simply endure whatever it lacked.
But with a caravan coming through on a regular schedule, a good deal of that hardship had been eased away.
Better still, the merchants gave discounts out of gratitude to Tiana, so the villagers had every reason to be pleased.
'I'm thankful, really, but…'
Going this far was a bit much, wasn't it? That was about how he felt.
Just how tirelessly was Tiana out there telling stories about him, that merchants came every single month—each time with a completely different face among them?
"My time with Lady Tiana was brief, but she spoke of you, her teacher, constantly. I've wanted to meet you at least once."
"I… see."
Part of him genuinely wanted to hear exactly what she'd been saying about him, but he had a feeling his head would only ache if he listened, so he let it slide.
With that, the merchant held out a gift.
The man showed no sign of backing off if refused, so Sian had little choice but to accept.
"Ah, that reminds me—may I ask you one thing?"
Sian spoke up as he took the gift, as if something had just occurred to him.
Told to ask whatever he liked, Sian continued:
"Do you happen to know any noble family by the name of Lucenoct?"
He asked about Astria's family.
He'd been certain he'd heard the name somewhere before, but it stubbornly refused to surface.
A traveling merchant who wandered from place to place might know, he reasoned—so he asked.
"L-Lucenoct? Do you have some connection to the Ducal House of Lucenoct?"
"…Sorry, what?"
A ducal house?
For a moment, Sian's brain stopped working properly.
A duke was the rank of nobility directly beneath the king, wasn't it?
And Lucenoct was a ducal house?
"I mostly travel the central and southern regions, so I've never been there myself, but we do trade with the North on occasion, so I hear things from time to time. But truly—I had no idea someone with ties to the House of Lucenoct would be out here."
The merchant eyed him with an expression that asked why a man of that caliber was hiding in a village like this, then shortly nodded to himself as if he'd worked it all out.
"I'd heard you were a man utterly free of worldly greed, but this exceeds anything I imagined."
"Sorry? No, that's…."
Sian could feel the conversation sliding somewhere very wrong, but the merchant, apparently convinced he had the whole truth in his grasp, had already retreated into a fantasy of his own making.
Deciding that no explanation would get through anyway, Sian drew a deep internal sigh and turned his mind to a different problem entirely.
A ducal house. He'd hoped Astria's family would be some obscure nobody clan from the middle of nowhere—instead, they were the genuine article.
'This is bad.'
A cold dread settled in: at worst, a fresh batch of pursuers might follow her all the way to this village.
They had chased her from the far-off North all the way here; one failure was hardly going to make them give up.
He could be called naive for helping her, sure—but from Sian's perspective, it was simply unfair.
'…No, I had no idea she was this big a deal.'
For an ordinary person, or even a modestly successful adventurer, meeting a baron or viscount was already an uncommon occurrence.
Only someone like the village chief, who represented the whole settlement, might catch a glimpse of a regional noble's servant a handful of times in his life.
And yet—first a count's daughter, and now a ducal house? Wasn't that a little excessive?
Sian sat lost in thought for a long moment before finally speaking, as though he'd made up his mind.
'I have to get Astria out of here somehow, and fast.'
Though something told him things were not, in fact, going to go his way.
While Sian was speaking with the merchant in the village chief's house…
Astria was surrounded by children.
"Miss, your eyes are so pretty! Heehee."
"…Th-thank you."
"Where are you from, miss?"
"…The North."
"Where's the North?"
"……."
Flustered by the endless barrage of questions, Astria nonetheless found herself thinking that this wasn't bad at all.
It was the first time anyone had ever shown her such pure, uncomplicated interest.
Though it hadn't come to Sian immediately, the Ducal House of Lucenoct was a house of the sword so renowned it was called the Sword of the Kingdom.
Knights of the realm counted even a brief stint in Lucenoct's service as an honor worth wearing like a medal.
But for all its dazzling reputation, Lucenoct was as cold and hard as the northern winters it lived under.
Endless, relentless competition among both the direct line and the cadet branches alike.
Betrayal ran rampant even between brothers and sisters, and weakness there wasn't merely weeded out—it was, quite literally, a matter of dying. That was simply the natural order of the place.
That place was Lucenoct.
'It's warm.'
For a woman who had spent her whole life shut inside such a place, competing for her very survival, the children's innocent curiosity could only feel like warmth.
Amid it all, one of the boys caught sight of the sword at Astria's hip and spoke up.
"Miss, you've got a sword too!"
"You know how to bless it?"
"…Bless… it?"
"You don't know the Sword Blessing?!"
"…No."
The boy muttered this and pressed his palms together in solemn prayer.
Then he began swinging an imaginary sword—and to Astria's eye, she couldn't for the life of her understand what the point of any of it was.
What possible use was praying before you swung a sword?
"Big Sister Tiana gets suuuper fast when she does it!"
"…Tiana."
Astria murmured the name the children had spoken.
She thought she might have heard it in passing on her flight south to this place.
Something about an S-rank adventurer who'd been making an enormous splash lately.
"Big Sister Tiana learned it from her Teacher!"
"But she's being stingy and won't teach us!"
"She did teach us, you just don't do it!"
"But ten thousand times is haaard!"
"You haven't even done a hundred!"
Astria, who had been quietly listening to the children bicker, reacted to a single word.
"…Teacher?"
"Teacher Sian taught her everything!"
"Big Sister Tiana learned from him, and so did Big Sister Selene!"
"Big Sister Selene's a noble! She's amazing at big, giant magic! She's a descendant of the— the archmage who beat a Calamity way back? Big Sister Estelle said… Ve-Vesperia?"
"…Vesperia?"
"Yeah, that's it!"
"And there's Big Sister Elina too!"
Every single name was one she knew.
Tiana she'd heard of only recently, but Selene Vesperia had been famous among the nobility for years—they whispered that it was only a matter of time before she became a Great Mage.
And Elina was routinely named among the three strongest individuals in the entire kingdom whenever the question of the kingdom's peak came up.
'The one who taught all of them… is Sian.'
That the utterly unremarkable man she had met was hiding power great enough to train them—
Of course it was hard to believe.
She had followed him on the hunch that staying near him might keep her safe, and it seemed that hunch had been exactly right.
'If….'
If she learned from him too, couldn't she grow strong?
Strong enough to strike down even the pursuers her family kept sending?
'And—'
In the middle of that thought, she saw Sian approaching from far off.
The moment she laid eyes on him, she strode straight toward him.
Sian, for his part, was just opening his mouth to say something he'd apparently decided on—
"…Take me on. As your disciple."
"……"
But her words came first.
And hearing them, Sian—for reasons he couldn't quite name—let out a long sigh, dragged a hand down his dry face, and muttered:
"Seriously, what is it with me?"
"……?"
The meaning of those words was known to Sian and Sian alone.