Not How a Normal Person Thinks
"...I really don't know if this is all right."
"We got permission, didn't we...?"
"I swear, I'm going to lose my mind..."
Mariella let out a long sigh.
My conscience twinged. ...No. It did more than twinge.
"Still... thank you, Mariella."
If it hadn't been for her, I never would have secured a comfortable room to myself. For that, I could only be endlessly grateful.
"...Even so, are you really sure? You could just share a double with me..."
"It's fine. Hehe."
"......"
Mariella looked at me without a word. Worry? Irritation? The expression sat somewhere awkwardly in between.
"...Hey."
The door creaked open, and Mariella went in.
It slammed shut behind her, a little too loud. Was the window in there standing open?
I opened my own door. The room right beside hers.
Though calling it a room was generous. This was the storage closet under the stairs.
"Cough."
Dust rose in a pale cloud. Light leaked in, but the window was far too small to fill even this cramped space.
An adult of ordinary height couldn't have stretched out to lie down. I could manage it without trouble, and that was the end of my advantages. Once the clutter was cleared away, there would be room to sleep and nothing else.
Why had they agreed to let me use a place like this as a room?
...No. I could guess. The smile on the dorm matron's face had been an open sneer. She'd probably expected me to take one look at the closet and flee, wailing that she'd had no idea it would be this small.
Too bad for her. The size of a room didn't matter much to me.
My primary field was dimensional magic, and dimension included space. Warping a cubby this small into something wider was not especially difficult.
I wasn't an idiot. Why would I pay single-room rates for a closet?
...Even so, I couldn't start the work right away. It would have to wait until night. There was too much to prepare.
"If I want soundproofing, and a large spell that won't get me caught, I'll have to parse the barrier's structure too... What else do I need... Oh, I should call Kuro and Nero. And also..."
It felt like a flame burning deep in her chest. Faces kept rising, one after another, and each one fed the fire until it burned hotter.
Someone might have called it love. Mariella knew it was not. This heat was of an entirely different grain.
The flame's name was anger.
Mariella was furious. She trusted herself to keep emotion off her face; she had been taught how since she was small, and unless something was truly out of the ordinary, nothing showed. Today, it showed. The shocks had come one after another, and that was how hard they had landed.
Of course, the room was empty now, so she could be as angry as she liked.
Thud!
Thud!!
She had tossed her bag somewhere on the floor and was face-down on the bed, hammering the mattress with her fists. It was no cheap thing. The spring-back was excellent.
Harsh breaths and dull impacts traded places — gasp, thud, gasp, thud — as she beat the bed.
Then the sounds cut off all at once. Mariella rolled over and stared at the ceiling.
"......Sis. This is too much for me."
Was Emily Staria even a person who had been taught how to live among other people?
The thought had been circling her head for a while.
Fine. Forgetting the alias she herself had been given. That could happen. ...She would allow that it could happen.
It had drawn suspicion she needn't have drawn, but fine. Allow that, too.
But why, in front of all those people, do a thing like that? She could have simply taken a double. What kind of human being in the world could declare, that brazenly, that there was nothing wrong with living in a closet under the stairs?
...No. All right. A person could say it. They could.
But then, to the flustered clerk insisting it was not a decision she was authorized to make —
What, exactly, was that?
Thank goodness no one else had been around. If there had been, Mariella would have slapped a hand over that mouth herself.
"...Did she hate the idea of sharing a room with me that much?"
Living in that closet, at the same price as a single...
It defied common sense. Which was probably why the matron had allowed it — less permission than a go on, try it if you can.
She was probably back in her office already, running a bet on how many minutes it would take Emily to come crawling back and say she didn't want the closet after all. That smile had meant something.
As expected. Mages were all lunatics. Except Sis.
Why had she insisted on that cramped room? Did she dislike her? Rather than share a room, she would rather shut herself into a closet like that. That was what it amounted to.
The flame that had been burning so hot had cooled, somewhere along the way, to a low blue. Her chest felt tight and heavy. On an ordinary day she would have studied at a time like this. Today she didn't even have the heart for it.
"Haa..."
The overwhelming gap in talent. Having witnessed it, everything looked futile.
The anger. The gloom.
All of it, because of one person.
"Sis... she's more of a burden than I can carry..."
Her eyelids sank, slowly, before Mariella even noticed.
"Ugh..."
A stretch brought a series of cracks from my joints. Inevitable, after working crouched down for so long.
The preparations were finished. All that remained was to cast the spell slowly, taking my time, so the barrier wouldn't notice. Magic worked without a wand had a structure the barrier couldn't detect, but this one acted directly on space, and the barrier might still react.
"...An hour and a half."
An awkward stretch to just sit through. Was there anything to do?
"...Should I get something to eat?"
That would do.
Eat with Mariella, look around outside a little, and come back — the timing would be just about right.
Once I decided, I moved fast.
I paused the spell, opened the door, stepped outside, and cast it again. I didn't forget to lock the door.
Knock, knock.
"M-Mariella...?"
Knock, knock, knock.
"Mariella...? Are you asleep?"
I knocked, and nothing answered.
Asleep? Well, she had reason to be tired.
Then what was I supposed to do...
"......"
I went back to my room. I'd only wanted to kill time. I hadn't actually been hungry.
The room was dark. The sun had clocked out long ago, and the only light was a faint pallor leaking from the magic circle — so weak I could barely make out the shapes of things in front of me.
Maybe I should just sleep too. I'd need the space expanded before I could sort my luggage anyway...
Tap. Tap.
"Hm?"
A sound from the window. Something knocking on the glass.
I moved, and black shapes came into view. Shapes I knew.
I opened the window. With a flutter of wings, they came inside.
"We're here, nya."
Nero and Kuro wandered the room. I stayed crouched where I was and watched.
"That face is a wreck."
"...You startled me."
"Something eating at you, nya?"
"No."
What's with them all of a sudden?
"Then why are you alone in a room like this, nya? Where's that girl, nya?"
"You mean Mariella...?"
"Don't know the name, but that's probably her, nya."
"Mariella is in Mariella's room."
Nero's head tilted slightly to one side.
"Dorms are two to a room, aren't they, nya?"
"They are... How do you know that?"
"Heard it while I was wandering around, nya."
Good at gathering intel...
"So. Why are you alone, nya?"
At Nero's question, I explained what had happened that morning — the long saga of securing a single room. I told them both that, through my outstanding gift for improvisation and my meticulous powers of observation, the fruit of my labor was this closet.
And then.
"...Wench. I have thought this for a long time, but this body is more human than you."
"What...?"
The moment I finished the story with pride, what came back was Kuro's scolding.
Why?
"I really didn't want to hear that from you."
"Sorry, but this time the crow's right, nya..."
"You too, Nero?!"
"Tsk, tsk. Foolish wench. Think carefully upon what you have done."
"Think...?"
Nero jumped and hung from my shoulder. My body tipped slightly to the right, and a voice reached my ear.
"Master, think, nya. That woman offered to share a double, and you dug in your heels and took a single — no, this closet, nya. So what is the woman who offered the double going to think, nya?"
"Uh... that she gets a double all to herself, so it's nice and roomy...?"
"Master, do you not have a brain, nya? Obviously she's going to think you hate her and you're avoiding her, nya!!"
".........Huh?"
Wait...?
People can think that?
...Is that how it works?
"No, I... I just like having a room to myself... so of course I thought Mariella would, too..."
"...I am speechless. To think this body lost to an imbecile like that..."
"D-don't call me an idiot...! Don't you know you're not supposed to force other people into things you hate? That's why I took a separate room..."
Wait. Seriously?
Now that I thought about it... when she'd gone into her room earlier, she'd slammed the door. Was that why?
"W-wait, what do I do..."
"Start with an apology, or an explanation, nya."
An apology...
Doing it empty-handed felt a little wrong. If I apologized with a gift, most people wouldn't refuse...
"Kuro! Phone mode!"
"Connecting."
"I didn't even say who I was calling..."
"The humans you speak with, besides that girl, scarcely amount to more than—"
External Channel — Connected
Proxy: Kuro
"Emily? What's wrong?"
Kuro's words cut off, and a woman's voice spilled through. A voice I knew very well.
"Ria...! Help me, please...!!"
She was Mariella's older sister. Surely she would know something.