A Gift Beyond Measure
"What is this monster of a brat?! Get out of here, right now!!"
"?"
Nephthys simply went on licking her ice cream with an expression of pure, innocent bliss.
When Nephthys refused to budge, Byeolya bristled like a cornered beast and began venting deadly poison from every inch of her body.
Hiss! Hiss!
The ground around her, several meters in every direction, began melting into a zone of lethal green toxin.
Simon hurriedly evacuated the group members behind him. Lorraine, startled, called out.
"Professor, please calm down!"
They were one step away from a catastrophic accident.
"...Wait a moment."
By a hair's breadth, it was Byeolya's sanity that returned first. In her mind, there was only one being who could be a monster of this caliber.
"...You. Are you that Witch of Death?"
"Yep!"
Nephthys answered with a bright, beaming smile.
Only then did she calm down. Byeolya gathered the poison leaking from her body and straightened up. The toxic fluid pooled on the ground was sucked back in through her feet and vanished.
"...Ha. Do you even count as human? You look like some absurd monstrosity to me."
Lorraine's brow twitched.
"Professor Byeolya! That's far too rude—"
"She's right. Not that it's wrong or anything."
Nephthys, cheeks bulging as she polished off the last of her ice cream, looked at her and said, "Anyway! No more stirring up trouble! I had to swallow every insult imaginable from the elders to recruit you! If you don't cooperate, I'm going to get angry!"
Nephthys puffed out her cheeks in a show of faux indignation.
'S-she's adorable.'
That was how it looked to everyone else, but Byeolya broke out in a cold sweat as if she were staring down a genuinely terrifying monster.
"You caused such a fuss that I came all this way myself! So you'll be coming to Roc Island now, won't you?"
"..."
The professor, who had been eyeing her with wariness, let out a long, deep sigh.
"Doesn't seem like I have much of a choice."
"Kajan. Please escort her."
Kajan nodded and gestured for Byeolya to follow. She offered no further resistance, trailing after him.
Then her eyes met Simon's, and she smirked.
"See you at school. Simon Polentia."
"Ah, yes, Professor!"
Once the two of them and the Thieves' Guild operatives had departed, Nephthys turned around.
"Hello there, first-years! Hi there!"
She bounced up and down in place, waving her hand. Only when Lorraine behind her signaled them to raise their heads did the four of them, still frozen like statues, finally look up.
"Hehe, must be because you're first-years. So young and cute!"
Everyone's gaze gathered on Nephthys for a moment before scattering.
"How are everyone's injuries?"
"All healed!"
They answered in unison, loud and clear.
Simon, who had grown comfortable around Nephthys by now, was relatively at ease, but the three behind him wore taut, tense expressions.
"Then head back to the lodging and get some good rest. Tomorrow we prepare for the new semester! The Integrated Second Semester will be tough in more ways than one!"
"Yes, ma'am!"
All four of them bowed to her once more and turned to go.
That was when Nephthys added one more thing.
"Simon! Come with me for a moment!"
Simon stopped in his tracks.
"M-me?"
* * *
Late that night, on the streets of Langestin.
"..."
From Simon's perspective, it was a situation practically engineered to make him nervous.
He was walking sandwiched between Nephthys on his right and Lorraine on his left.
Along the way, Nephthys had stopped at a street stall and bought three more ice creams. She'd only ordered two at first, but the vendor, failing to recognize her, had thrown in a third for free, calling her a darling little thing.
"Nom nom."
Naturally, she was not the charitable sort who would surrender ice cream to children a few hundred years her junior.
Simon, who had been staring absently at Nephthys happily munching away, turned his head. A faint smile had settled on the lips of Lorraine, who had been walking along with a blank expression.
"Have a good break?"
"Ah, yeah. You?"
"Me? Just rolled around at home, nothing special."
While the two classmates exchanged light small talk, they arrived at Campbell Road without realizing it. Simon's gaze shifted to Nephthys.
"So why did we come to Campbell Road?"
Having finished her ice cream, Nephthys was casting a recognition-disruption dark spell over her own face. Plenty of people on Campbell Road would know her on sight, so a light disguise was in order.
With the spell over her face, she broke into a wide grin.
"I brought you a present!"
"A... a present?"
"You made a huge contribution to capturing this era's Saintess of Purification, didn't you?"
At those words, Simon scratched his head, embarrassed.
"I don't know that it counts as much of a contribution."
"If you and Kajan hadn't handled things so well, the damage would have been far worse. Between that and your identity, there are too many tangled interests to hand you an award openly at the opening ceremony—but I certainly wasn't going to let it slide with nothing at all!"
Simon waved his hands in flustered protest.
"N-no, really! There's no need to go that far—!"
"Take it while I'm asking nicely, Simon."
Lorraine cut in from the side with an amused smile.
"Kajan and Serne have already each received the reward they wanted. You're the only one left."
"Then let's go, let's go! Shall we see if the order has arrived?"
Nephthys waved her arms and marched energetically ahead, with Simon and Lorraine following in her wake.
They arrived at the very shop where Simon had once purchased his subspace item.
The three of them were led down to an underground showroom where expensive subspaces were on display.
"Welcome, welcome! Lady Lorraine!"
An old woman appeared, draped in a luxurious mink coat, gold jewelry jangling from her neck, her fingers, and everywhere else.
Lorraine waved in friendly greeting.
"How have you been, Stephanie?"
"Same as always, my lady! And the young gentleman beside you..."
Stephanie's eyes lit up.
"Would that be the Kizen student who purchased Gallen Eclipse's 4,000UB subspace?"
Simon made a surprised face.
"You remembered me?"
"Of course I remember a VVIP customer who bought expensive goods the very day of the entrance ceremony! And last but not least..."
Stephanie looked at Nephthys, whose face was obscured by the recognition-disruption spell.
"That is someone else's face, but I would wager you are Lady Nephthys?"
"Oh! How did you know?"
"You are with Lady Lorraine, and there is ice cream smeared around your mouth."
Nephthys touched her own cheek and the spell dissolved. Smiling, she raised her hand in a jaunty wave.
"Hello, Stephanie!"
"A pleasure as ever."
Stephanie chuckled.
"It feels like only yesterday we were two little tykes running wild through the fields together. Now this old crone has bent into a hunchbacked grandmother, yet Lady Nephthys hasn't changed a whit."
"Mm! Mm! Those were such fun times~"
For a brief moment, the two old women drifted in shared nostalgia.
"Ah, but you came this time for that item, didn't you..."
"That's right! We're here to see it."
"One moment, please."
Stephanie cast a glance backward, where four employees were hauling in an enormous crate.
They grunted as they set it on the floor, and there, atop a bed of red cushioning inside the gigantic box, lay a single small necklace.
'Is... is this excessive packaging?'
Nephthys stepped forward and reached out to touch the necklace.
But her fingertip never made contact—it bounced away with a sharp ping! Instead, an immense web of magic circles spread out through the air and began rotating, each at its own speed.
"Whoa!"
Simon and Lorraine cried out in surprise and took a step back.
"All of those are security mechanisms. Now, sign here, Simon."
"S-sign? Where, exactly...?"
"Just inscribe any characters you like, in Jet-Black, onto the rune script of the magic circles I point out to you."
Following Nephthys's instructions, Simon had to sign every one of the twenty magic circles floating in the air. There were so many that finishing all the signatures alone left him slightly worn out.
Once the work was complete, the security mechanisms disengaged, and Simon could finally pick up the necklace.
He lifted it slowly. A diamond-shaped artifact resembling white crystal hung from the chain.
"Put it around your neck."
Simon did as he was told and carefully donned the necklace.
"Next, infuse the artifact with your Jet-Black."
"Understood."
Simon gripped the artifact in his hand and channeled Jet-Black into it. The artifact's color shifted to a deep bluish-black, and then it faded away as if melting into thin air.
"Uh, huh?"
Simon flailed, trying to grab the vanishing artifact, but it was no use. Once it had completely vanished from his hand, he could only stare blankly at the empty air.
'Did I do something wrong?'
At Simon's near-tears expression, Nephthys and Stephanie burst out laughing.
Lorraine shook her head at the lot of them, as if to say she'd seen enough of ill-tempered old people for one lifetime.
"It didn't disappear, Simon. The anti-theft magic activated."
"Anti-theft magic? What's that?"
"In the heat of battle, the necklace could get ripped right off your neck. So instead, it's inscribed on your body in the form of a sigil. If you look at your chest—"
Before she could even finish, Simon began frantically unbuttoning his shirt. Lorraine, who had been standing there absentmindedly, smoothly turned her head elsewhere.
Having undone the buttons and looked down at his chest, Simon finally breathed a sigh of relief. Just as she'd said, a bluish-black sigil was drawn on his skin.
"All preparations are complete. Now let us try using it right away."
Stephanie said, rubbing her palms together.
"The usage is simple. Simply ignite the sigil with Jet-Black."
Simon nodded and sent the Jet-Black within him flowing into the sigil, activating it. It began to glow with a soft dark radiance.
"The subspace applies to the open air over a wide area. Concentrate on the sigil in your mind, and grasp at the empty air behind your back."
"L-like this?"
As Simon reached back with his arm, he felt something in his grip—something as solid as if it were mounted on a wall.
"You've got it! Think of it not as an imaginary lever, but as an imaginary sliding door. Now, with the image of sliding it open with all your strength...!"
Screeeeeech!
"Fling it open!"
BOOOOOM!
A colossal portal, stretching more than twenty meters in length, unfolded diagonally in the direction Simon flung the door—wide enough to nearly fill the entire vast underground space.
"...Wow."
"The design references Lady Lorraine's ability."
At Stephanie's explanation, Lorraine was seen smiling faintly to herself.
"This is a subspace exclusively for undead! If the subspace you currently carry, Student Simon, holds 4,000UB, then this one comfortably exceeds 100,000UB!"
Simon's jaw dropped.
"It holds more than twenty-five times the capacity of the one I'm carrying?"
He peered into the portal he had opened. It was not a subspace—it was, quite literally, a boundless open field.
"Precisely! In exchange, it possesses no other functions whatsoever—no deployment features, nothing. It is a subspace built solely for housing a large-scale undead army!"
Stephanie smiled.
"Naturally, a subspace on this scale is never sold on the open market. It could not be converted into a price at all."
Simon was simply too stunned to speak; he stood there blankly, forgetting even to say thank you.
Stephanie's gaze turned toward Nephthys.
"By the way, Lady Nephthys?"
"Yes?"
Stephanie lowered her voice.
"A subspace of such absurd, colossal capacity is something only a top-tier summoner would ever use. Why, then, are you gifting such an item to a first-year Kizen student?"
"Hmm, who knows."
A meaningful smile played at the corners of Nephthys's mouth.
"I'd say the day will come when he'll need it."