Ten Years After Another World
Ten years had passed since I was reborn in another world.
A great deal had happened in that time.
If there was one thing I had managed to learn across all those years, it could be summed up like this.
Another world. A gender swap. Reincarnation.
I had read my share of web novels, so none of those were words I was seeing for the first time. If anything, they were familiar. And familiarity, of course, meant I had run into them often enough to wear the shine off.
In plain terms, it meant I still had no idea where I was. I still did not know which novel I had been dropped into. For all I knew, it was not a novel at all, but a game, or a comic.
"Haa."
Fretting over it would not conjure an answer. I could worry for a hundred days and it would still mean nothing. Either this was some story I had never read, or there was no original work at all, and this was simply a genuine fantasy world.
Skrrk.
"Ah."
The sound of tearing paper snapped me back. I looked down and found the page split open beneath the sharp nib of my pen.
"Haa."
I sighed and flicked my fingers. A faint drain of strength followed, and a gleaming diagram sketched itself in the empty air. The light faded. The torn paper was whole again.
Magic.
That was why an elementary-school girl—or so I estimated—who had fallen into another world had managed to live ten years without any particular disaster. I had a talent for magic. More precisely, I could not have failed to have one.
Was it not the most ordinary cliché of all? A STEM graduate student gets isekai'd, discovers that the principles of magic are nothing but mathematics and physics and the rest of the hard sciences, and becomes ridiculously overpowered. There was nothing special about it. I had simply become the person that story happened to.
Even so, it had been fun. I had never disliked learning things in the first place. Once I sank deep into something and gave myself over to it, every stray thought fell away. Parents, family, every other human relationship—I could forget all of it.
Live like that for a few years, and eventually the body starts moving on conditioned reflex even when there is nothing left to brood over.
Just like now.
Bang!
"Kyaa!?"
The noise made my body flinch before I could think. It was a little sad that I—who had never been the picture of rugged masculinity, but had at least played my share of horror games without flinching—had turned into such a coward. Still, they say the mind follows the body, so there was nothing to be done. Let me say it again: I am absolutely not a coward.
I turned toward the source of the sound, and the first thing that caught my eye was a chest I still had not grown used to, no matter how many years I spent looking at it. I was a girl now, so describing it that way probably was not a problem. Probably.
What registered next was a head of curly blond hair, and a face drawn tight in clear displeasure.
"Huh?"
Displeased?
I checked the clock tucked in the corner.
Ten o'clock.
Having confirmed that, I turned back.
"Emily."
"I'm sorry..."
I dropped my head and put on the most pitiful voice I could manage. It was a survival tactic of sorts. Just as they say you cannot spit on a smiling face, very few people will raise their voice at a child who looks that wretched. And in practice, it worked.
"...So long as you know. I was worried."
"Yes..."
"Come downstairs and eat."
"Okay."
Emily Staria.
Long white hair, dry and brittle, and blue eyes. Set aside those dull, lifeless pupils, and it was the sort of face that might have been fairly popular with the children at school—the name of an eighteen-year-old girl who stood all of 141 centimeters tall.
Let us set aside, for the moment, the matter of being 141 centimeters at eighteen. I did not understand it either. What was I supposed to do about the body I had ended up in?
And the woman currently spearing vegetables with a fork and chewing them in front of me was named Maria something-or-other. Everything past the given name was so long that I still had not memorized it. I was busy enough studying magical theory. Did I really need to memorize a surname on top of that? Knowing her first name was plenty to get by.
Besides, she herself had said the name was too long, and asked me to just call her Ria.
Clack.
"......"
The fork struck the plate. I shifted my eyes just enough to read Maria's expression.
"...Is something wrong?"
"Ah, n-no..."
Fortunately, she did not seem to be in a bad mood. She might think I was overreacting, but I could not help it.
If Maria was the party in power, then I was not merely the subordinate party. I had probably sunk all the way down to the very bottom of the chain.
It was hard to define my relationship with Maria in a single word. She was my guardian on paper, the one who had picked up a child with no family and nowhere to go and looked after me for ten years. She was the advising professor who read the papers and research notes I wrote and talked them over with me. And she was my landlord.
Any one of those titles would have been enough to keep me groveling. I had all three of them, cubed. Of course I kept my head down.
"Thank you for the meal..."
"Are you all right? Is that really enough?"
I nodded. I had not eaten because I was hungry in the first place.
It was a kind of rule. A rule I had to keep if I wanted to live in this house.
Three meals a day, without fail. Roughly half past seven, half past twelve, and around six.
There were plenty of others, but the rule the landlord currently chewing a bagel in front of me cared about most was eating on a regular schedule.
"By the way, Emily?"
"Yes? What is it...?"
"I looked in the refrigerator. Nothing's changed from before I left on my trip."
"......"
A cold sweat broke out.
"What did you eat during the four days I was gone?"
"......I, um, that is."
"Haa."
I heard her sigh.
"What, did I come back so early you didn't have time to touch the fridge?"
Caught. I had been caught. I had never been caught before.
This trip was supposed to last a week. I had been planning to hide the food in the refrigerator sometime tonight, or tomorrow morning.
"I-I'm sorry, hic, I'm sorry..."
The tears burst out of me. It was a serious problem, yes, but hardly something worth crying over. Eight years of living in this body had taught me one thing: it was far too sensitive for its own good.
"Emily."
A gentle warmth traveled from the crown of my head and spread through my whole body. That alone made the tears recede. This, too, was a kind of conditioned reflex.
"Don't cry. Stop."
"Huu, waaah..."
"Stop!"
"Hic!?"
"There we go."
I focused on the warmth moving this way and that atop my head, and before I knew it the tears were gone. The moment they stopped completely, her voice came again.
"Calmed down?"
"Yes."
What took the place of the tears was a violent rush of shame.
"Here."
Slide.
A plate came across to my side. On it sat exactly the same amount of food I had just eaten.
"If you starved for four days, you need to eat at least this much."
"......Yes."
I nodded.
I had been sentenced, on the spot, to culinary torture, but what could I do? I had brought it on myself. I would simply have to endure it.
Haa.
"So, did the research go well this time?"
Ria spoke at the same moment I forced the last piece of bread down my throat.
"Yes. A little more and it'll be finished. Ria, would you like to see it?"
Ria nodded. I hopped down from the chair and ran for my room.
I cleared away the remnants of the shattered barrier, opened the door, and went inside. The room was far larger than it looked from the outside, thanks to the space I had expanded with magic. Between the books and the other materials crammed in there, the space I actually used was not even a quarter of that.
"Found it."
I gathered the manuscripts scattered across the desk and the floor and put them in order.
I thought I had written it rather well. Picturing Ria's reaction when she read it, I felt the corners of my mouth lift on their own.
I came back even faster than I had gone. The plates that had been on the table were gone without a trace.
"Y-you already cleaned up?"
"Mm. You were finished, weren't you?"
"Yes, I was. H-here..."
I held the manuscript out to Ria.
"Hmm..."
The rustle of turning pages filled the room. About halfway through, the expression began to drain from Ria's face.
I was not particularly nervous. That only meant she was taking the manuscript seriously. If it had been garbage too awful to look at, she would simply have burned it on the spot.
The rustling went on, and the last page turned.
"S-so? What do you think?"
My voice shook. I was confident in the work, but a reaction like that made me uneasy all the same.
"...Emily."
"Yes..."
A smile touched Ria's face.
"It's good. The approach is fresh. Optimizing a magic circle by means of alchemy's Alket–Raoul equation... I only skimmed it, so I can't be precise, but I don't see any obvious errors."
It was praise. I could not smile. Her smile was a bitter one.
If this went the way it usually did, the next words would be—
"But I don't think this one will work."
"I see..."
A clear rejection. At those words, my body melted onto the table.
All that effort, gone just like that...
I watched Ria gather up my manuscript and vanish off somewhere, then rolled straight out of the chair and thrashed around on the floor. It did not hurt. I had used magic again this time.
Magic is god, and I am invincible...!
The paper had still been rejected, though.
If only someone would invent a magic that made papers pass on their own.
"Haaaa..."
I let out a long sigh.
Burnout, as people called it. A heavy lethargy took hold of my entire body.
"Emily? What are you doing on the floor?"
"I'm communing with the mana that dwells in the earth..."
"Don't say strange things. I have something to talk about. Why don't you sit?"
"Uuuugh..."
Something hooked under my arms, and my body stretched out long. Deposited onto the chair just like that, I surrendered myself to gravity. The cold of the table seeped into my cheek. Ria looked at me and let out a small laugh.
"You can listen like that."
"Yes..."
"Emily, do you remember when we talked about the Academy before?"
"Yes..."
Why was she bringing up the Academy all of a sudden? I had told her last time that I was absolutely not going.
Something felt wrong.
"This time, you have to go to that Academy."
"No!!"
I slapped both hands against the table and shoved myself upright. I was too weak for it to make much of a sound, but Ria would understand exactly how sincerely I hated the idea.
"I told you last time! I said I wouldn't go to the Academy even if I had to slay ten more Demon Kings—no, a hundred! And you said I didn't need to go!"
"I said you didn't need to go as a professor."
"......Wait. I think I just heard something very strange."
"And I'm sorry, but."
Slide.
A scroll slipped out from the valley of Ria's chest. Paper that shone gold, bound with a silver cord.
No.
It couldn't be.
Really?
The paper unrolled and bared what was written inside. Before the contents themselves, what caught my eye was red lettering on a field of gold.
That format.
That format was...!
"You don't have a choice."
"Th-this is a dream, right...?"
Ria shook her head from side to side.
Gold paper. Red lettering. And at the very end, a seal stamped in black.
By order of His Majesty the Emperor. Emily Staria, the Great Witch of the End, shall enroll as a first-year student of the Academy this year.
"Th-this is a dream..."
And with that, I lost consciousness.