Confession (3)
This is the worst.
Was there any phrase on earth that could capture the situation I was in more perfectly than those three words?
Lily had poured every last drop of her mana into a spell — and wasted it on a beast that looked ordinary next to the overwhelming bulk of the Lycanthrope it should have been meant for. The three minutes she would need to prepare that magic again were supposed to be mine to cover. Except I was already a wreck from head to toe.
I had tried, in my own way, not to let my guard down. This was what that effort had bought me. A hollow laugh scraped out of my throat, a sound like metal raking across a windpipe.
Grrrrrk…
The thing that had been watching me — the thing that had slammed me into a tree — let its gaze slip away and vanish. The forest filled once more, not with ordinary black, but with that distinctive, eerie darkness all its own.
That alone was enough to tell me this one would not get careless the way the hot-blooded specimen from before had. Not even against a half-dead wreck like me and a Lily whose mana was running on fumes.
"V-Veri! Are you oka— you! Y-your arm!!"
Unlike me, Lily hadn't picked up on any of that. The instant that vast black presence — the thing that had been crushing the very air from her lungs — slipped out of sight, she came scrambling toward me in a breathless rush.
She had no idea that, for a creature of that size, two pieces of prey gathering in one place was the happiest development it could have hoped for.
I planted my sword like a cane with my right hand and forced myself upright, and I spoke to the girl who had come running. A voice of pain, thick with blood and phlegm.
"…My arm is fine. More importantly, please run. What it's hunting right now is you, Your Highness."
I dragged in a ragged breath and tightened my grip on a sword I wasn't even sure was pointing at the enemy. The signal was blatant: I would pin it down. She needed to get out.
To a girl who had, in some sense, become a princess with a stubborn streak of pride, those words were bordering on insolent. She bit down hard on her lip, looking furious.
She couldn't bring herself to ask the person who had been flung aside by that giant forepaw in her place — after she had failed to notice its approach and taken the hit — to protect her while she prepared her magic again.
…Or maybe what she felt was something worse: the helpless fury of knowing she didn't even have the mana left to cast that spell a second time. The colorless magic she had just unleashed had already left her showing the first signs of mana exhaustion.
Either way, staying like this was a bad idea.
There was no telling when it would strike again, and the two of us were standing together inside its attack range. If we had both been at full strength, it might have been a different story. In this half-broken state, clustering up would only get us killed.
"I'm fine, so please run and inform the instructor that something has gone wrong. Anyone can see that size is not something they would have sent out believing a first-year could handle it."
So I tried to persuade her — to push her toward the choice that gave her the best chance of staying alive.
In the original event, the instructor never showed until everything was already over. Even those of us standing right here hadn't sensed the thing until it was practically on top of us. There was no universe in which an instructor who'd done a single preliminary survey and was now sitting on his hands at the rally point would notice in time to come save us.
Lily had felt that on her own skin, and she knew it. I could see her tearing herself in two between the one somewhat realistic option — run, fetch the instructor as fast as she could — and the purely emotional one: she could not leave behind the person who had thrown his body in front of hers.
The way she looked at me said as much. I had just resolved, as far as anyone could see, to face that overwhelming thing alone in a wrecked body. Reckless didn't begin to cover it.
Then Lily's expression hardened with resolve, and she started to open her mouth.
"I…!"
She had no choice but to quietly close those lips again. The look I gave her — quiet, steady — stopped her cold.
In the end she couldn't hold my gaze. She turned to run for the rally point — and in that instant, her voice reached me, carrying a thread of despair.
"I-I'm sorry, Veri…. I don't think I can grant that request."
Where her eyes had gone, two boar-type monsters stood waiting — the same kind we had killed over and over on the way here.
For someone who had entered the Academy as Department Top Student, they were well within her ability to put down. But she was a mage, not a fighter. Without mana, her body was no different from any ordinary girl's.
So she really did burn through almost everything with that last spell.
Selina had collapsed from exhaustion the moment she used that magic, so in a way this was only to be expected. For those monsters, it was the best news they could have asked for.
The instant my hostility swung toward the boars that had appeared to block Lily's path, the Lycanthrope's presence — which I had been sensing only faintly — thinned until I would have missed it entirely if I weren't paying attention.
Its cunning, it seemed, was in a completely different league from that other one. It felt like it was waiting: waiting for me to die fighting the boars, or to become even more of a wreck than I already was. Waiting for its prey, whose left arm was already useless, to end up in even worse shape than this.
In the end, all it had done was stretch my remaining lifespan from about a minute to maybe ten. Even so, I had no choice but to turn my sword not toward that ominous dark, but toward two ordinary monsters.
"I'll take care of those two. The moment they stop breathing, you run."
Without her magic, even those two could be a lethal threat. And for someone who had kept vowing to himself that he would protect the person he loved, looking the other way had never been an option to begin with.
"You're going to fight those things in that condition? Two of them?"
She stared at me as if I'd lost my mind.
A swordsman with a shredded left arm, gasping, dragging an exhausted body into a fight with two monsters.
…Yeah. I could see why I'd look crazy.
By the standards of an ordinary Academy first-year, this was nothing but reckless arrogance. The kind of end that suited an extra who struck every pose he could in front of a pretty girl and then dropped dead.
Even Ian, the protagonist, would have had no choice but to take a fatal wound from those two if he'd been in my shoes.
But I had earned the title of Department Top Student. Calling me an ordinary first-year was already a stretch — and I still had skill that exceeded even Ian's. For me, this wasn't arrogance. It was certainty.
The certainty that I could put those things down.
"I can defeat them."
And the certainty that I could not withstand the thing watching us from the dark, licking its chops.
I looked at her with that will in my eyes — the will to open an escape route for her, if no one else. She avoided my gaze with almost ostentatious care as she asked:
"If you had that kind of stamina and skill… you should have just run by yourself and left me. You'd have a better chance surviving on your own than I would, running alone and maybe getting caught."
"I have even a one-in-a-million chance of making it. Your Highness doesn't even have that."
A life that might end at any second. If I was going to die anyway, I'd wanted to at least get the words out before I went — something like, Because I love you. Enough to stake my life on it.
But in this situation, a confession like that might only become a shackle around her ankle. So what I ended up saying was wordplay that looked realistic at a glance and was, in truth, nothing but a delusion. The kind of hair-splitting nonsense that weighed zero against a hundredth of a percent — measuring acorns against acorns.
At a remark that could, depending on how you heard it, sound like a jab at her pride, Lily pressed her lips shut, kept her eyes on the monsters, and crept around behind me. Then she wrung out what mana she had left and kindled a light, throwing my field of vision into relief.
The monsters' shapes and sizes snapped into focus. And I felt, too, the Lycanthrope drawing deeper into hiding, as if afraid even its presence might be seen.
"…Royalty never forgets what is done to them. And if what they received was a kindness, all the more so."
"Your Highness?"
Her voice came quietly from behind my back. Words she had said to me once before — back in the days when she had hated me enough to want me dead. Royalty never forgets what is done to them.
But I had never heard what came after. I could only look at her, bewildered.
The eyes she turned on me were nothing like the vicious, venomous glare of that other time. They looked as if she were holding back a grief of her own as she spoke.
"So you have to survive. You have to stay alive until I come back. Do you understand? That's an order."
…Because one kindness I can never repay is already more than enough.
I was in such wretched condition that I didn't catch whatever she added under her breath. She had probably been reciting her reason for giving an order like that.
Even so, it was an utterly unreasonable command. One I felt I had no hope of carrying out in the state I was in. And yet, with the faintest smile, I turned back toward the monsters and had no choice but to answer.
Because it was an order from my princess — the kind I had longed for, as her attendant, more desperately than I could say.
Because unlike that other time, the eyes she turned on me held no love at all, but neither did they hold hatred. Only some deep, aching regret, and worry, as she looked at me.
Faced with a request wearing the shape of an order from the woman I loved, all I could do was nod — my head soaked through with blood and sweat.