I Hate the Academy
"I hate the Academy! I hate it!"
"Then have a good trip."
Before I knew it, morning had come. Those words meant that today, I had to go to the Academy.
Ria and I said our goodbyes.
"We'll still be able to write once I'm there, you know..."
"It isn't the same as seeing your face."
"Mmph?!"
For a moment I couldn't breathe. Warmth, and a plush softness—a feeling I knew all too well by now.
With my face still buried in her chest, Ria spoke to Mariella.
"Look after Emily for me."
"Yes."
"See that she eats three proper meals a day, and that she's in bed before midnight..."
Wh-what is she saying?! Does she think I'm some kindergartner?!
"Don't worry. I'll take good care of her."
I'm the older one! Who's supposed to be looking after whom?!
...Not that any of those words ever made it past my lips.
"Mmmph! Mmf—mmnn!!"
Wedged between two soft mounds of flesh, the only sounds my face could produce were smothered little breaths like that.
"Oh my. Can't you breathe?"
"Pwah..."
Oxygen was sweet.
"There."
"You worry too much, Ria. I can manage perfectly well on my own..."
"Yes, yes."
A hand smoothed over my hair, and my expression went slack and helpless.
"Have a good trip. And make sure you have fun while you're there."
A strange thing to say. When had she been the one telling me to go and work—and now she sounded as if she were sending me off to play.
Something felt off, but I nodded and climbed into the carriage. Aside from the fact that the wheels were so tall I had to hop up to the door, it was a cozy little space. Mariella climbed in after me, and the door shut.
The carriage set off.
......I really, truly did not want to go.
The carriage was gone.
After seeing the children off, I returned to my room and took up the paper lying on the desk.
"Haa..."
My head throbbed. A full week spent reading the same paper over and over—the drain on my mental energy was no joke. Still, I was nearly at the end.
Pages fluttered as they turned. And at last, the final sheet.
"...Finished."
I stretched my arms overhead. A glance at the time told me midnight had already come and gone. I'd forgotten dinner entirely, lost in the reading.
"I was in no position to lecture anyone..."
With a wry smile I walked to the kitchen and bit into a piece of fruit. Tart, sweet juice flooded my mouth. Cooking something properly was more trouble than it was worth. I was going to sleep right after anyway; filling my stomach with fruit would do.
I went back to the room and sat down.
"They ought to have arrived by now."
Driven at full speed, a carriage would be reaching the autonomous district where the Academy stood right about now. At this hour they'd probably taken some decent room and settled in to rest. Was she actually sleeping? Knowing her, she might have decided it was too much of a burden and curled up alone in the carriage.
"Hehe."
The laugh came easily. What followed on its heels was self-reproach.
Am I really allowed to feel like this? The thought brushed a corner of my chest and passed.
Ten years now, since I had picked Emily up. The eight-year-old child had become, before I quite noticed, a proper young lady of eighteen.
...Judging by how she'd filled out, "young lady" was perhaps a generous description.
Even so, she had grown a great deal since that first day. In body, and in mind.
I closed my eyes and called the memory up. Ten years gone, and still it rose with perfect clarity.
It had begun with a report from the Intelligence Bureau. Anti-imperialists were collaborating with the demonkin, it said, and conducting living experiments somewhere. Once the report came in, there were endless rounds of cross-checks and operational meetings.
The chance that it was disinformation or a false alarm was vanishingly small. The danger was expected to be very high. And so it was judged effective to commit maximum force and annihilate the site in a single stroke.
But we were already preparing for war with other nations. Throwing every asset we had was impossible. So we committed the greatest force presently available—under the command of the Archwitch of Protection, a portion of the mage corps beneath her and a detachment of the Fourth Knight Order.
I obeyed the order.
The battlefield was a slaughterhouse. Our numbers were overwhelming, but the enemy was not fool enough to simply take the blow. It was not my first time on a field of war, and yet until then my work had almost always been in the rear—raising barriers to turn aside enemy attacks and keep our own side alive. Blood and gobbets of flesh bursting in front of my eyes were not something I was used to.
I endured all of it and forced myself forward, step by grinding step. According to the report, the people abducted as test subjects numbered in the hundreds. Every step I arrived late, a few more lives I might have saved winked out.
But.
Had I been too late?
The memory was uselessly vivid. Nausea climbed my throat.
Corpses.
No—when I first saw them, I hadn't even been able to think of them as corpses. What lay there were simply pieces of meat. Afraid their research would be exposed, they had already disposed of every subject and every record.
But.
One person was still alive.
A child emptied out like a blank page—whether from the aftereffects of the experiments, no one could say. She had no name, and no age anyone could give. A girl white as untouched paper, who feared people, and who insisted that she was a boy.
I gave her a name.
Emily.
A name so ordinary that if you called it in a crowd, four or five people would turn around. Nothing special at all. And yet the child was happy with that alone. She smiled—brightly, openly, shining.
Was it because of that smile? I took in a child I would otherwise simply have left to a facility.
That much had been fine.
Yes. That much.
One day the child brought me a notebook. She'd tried writing about magic, she said, and held it out with careful hands. Inside, the pages were crammed edge to edge with cramped, wriggling letters.
So she was interested in magic. I would have to teach her myself from now on. Thinking that, I skimmed what she had written—and was struck dumb. I hadn't understood even half of it. But the half I did understand was enough.
This child had talent.
That made me glad. So I submitted the paper under the child's name. I wanted everyone to recognize her gift. If I am honest, I had wanted to show her off.
I should never have done it.
The child possessed an overwhelming talent for magic. Had it been a middling gift, that would have been the end of it. She could have grown up and chosen that path later, if she liked.
But the child's talent was nothing of the sort. Like an awl in a pocket that cannot help but show its point, a gift that overwhelming drew every eye.
The child was drafted as a court mage almost at once. In an instant. And sent onto the battlefield. Just as instantly.
The Continental Unification War reached its end in less than two years. An overwhelming record, achieved by a single person.
And four years after that, the child struck down the Demon King.
Through all of it, the child's own will never entered the picture. She simply obeyed, quietly, because she had been told to.
Every time I watched her come home and smile as if nothing were wrong, I hid myself away and burst into tears. Because it all seemed to be the fault of my own carelessness. Because it felt as though I had done something I never should have.
"......"
Slowly, I opened my eyes. The sun was already up.
"...A dream?"
Had it been a dream? No wonder the middle of it had felt so terribly vivid.
Why a dream like that, all of a sudden?
Tok.
Something fell to the floor. A sheet of gold paper.
"Ah..."
I picked it up.
Emily is hereby commanded to proceed to the Academy.
"......Fake, though."
I swung my staff, and flame bloomed. The gold paper entered the crimson fire, burned in midair, and by the time it reached the floor nothing remained but gray ash.
In truth, there had never been any such order. All of it was a plan to send Emily to the Academy. A plan to give back even a little of the green spring that ten years had worn away.
Escort to the imperial princess? Protection for the Academy's students?
All of it lies. The money poured into the Academy's security alone ran to astronomical sums. Thousands of layered barrier spells and surveillance magics, and Intelligence Bureau agents hidden all over the grounds besides. The Academy was protected at a level comparable to the imperial palace itself.
"If I didn't do at least this, she would have shut herself up in the house forever."
My conscience stung, but for the sake of something large, one has to know how to sacrifice something small.
"Go to the Academy, make some friends, play a little..."
I was a bit worried, admittedly. She was a child somewhat lacking in common sense. To put it plainly—the moment the talk turned to magic, it was as if her eyes turned inside out.
The proof was sitting on the desk right now.
Even after that day, Emily had often written papers and brought them to me. And I had come to understand.
This child simply loved magic. She never stopped to think how large a wave a paper of hers might send through the world.
The paper I had spent the past week reading was a perfect example. It had taken a long time to understand, but if I boiled the important point down, it came to this.
It is possible to create a magic circle that creates magic circles.
That probably hadn't been what the research was aiming for. What the paper actually set out to prove was that a correlation exists between a certain equation in alchemy and the circuits that constitute a magic circle—and that by using it, one can assimilate into the primary circle the satellite magic circles that high-order magic inevitably generates. That, too, was a brilliant proof. But more striking than the conclusion was a byproduct that appeared along the way.
The paper described adjusting the circuits of the primary magic circle so as to manifest a satellite circle.
In other words, with a "magic circle" called the primary, she had made a "magic circle" called the satellite.
"This one will have to go in the box as well..."
It was far too dangerous to be allowed out into the world. If this paper ever saw daylight, chaos was all but guaranteed. The methods of abuse and the harms that sprang to mind already numbered in the dozens; the real consequences would be worse.
A drawer opened, and a box came into view. With the ease of habit I opened it and slipped the paper inside.
It had become a kind of routine. Read the paper. Sort what could be allowed into the world from what could not. If the latter was slight, I had it edited down and submitted. If the latter was substantial, I sealed it in the box like this. Thanks to that method, we had been able to live days that were, more or less, peaceful.
The price was spending day after day doing nothing but read papers.
"I wonder if they've reached the Academy by now?"
Even so, set against the happiness I had now, it was a cheap price to pay.