The Spirit
"Oh my. Luke, out for a walk with your unni?"
"Hello, Luke. Want some candy?"
"Monsters come out over that way, so don't go over there, okay? Well then — take care!"
As Luke and Yerna walked, every Forest Keeper they met came over to greet them.
The child an elf Forest Keeper had found in Luke Forest — a child who shared the forest's very name. Wasn't that quite the interesting bit of gossip?
In fact, without even realizing it, Luke had already become something of a mascot to the Forest Keepers of Luke Forest. Every last one of them had deliberately tracked Yerna's GPS just for a chance to see Luke.
Tucking the candy he'd been handed into his pocket, Luke answered.
"Ah—yes. I am truly grateful for all your hard work."
"Hard work? This is the job!"
"Don't go too deep in, all right?"
"Don't let go of Yerna unni's hand!"
Having received the child's greetings, the Forest Keepers walked back to their posts with soft, fond smiles.
Luke found being treated like a child rather disconcerting.
To be treated as a little girl at my age...
A deep sense of self-reproach welled up, but it was nothing he could show. Everyone was greeting him with such cheerful faces — he had no desire to spoil the mood on purpose.
If sacrificing my own feelings can bring even a moment of laughter to their lives... well, that is a profitable trade.
Thinking thus, Luke steeled his emotions. It was no difficult task. A mage, after all, must be able to control their emotions as a matter of course. And the forest air and mana were more than enough to lift his spirits.
They continued their walk until it felt as though they had greeted nearly every Forest Keeper in Luke Forest. Only then did Yerna stroke Luke's head and speak.
"Shall we head back soon?"
"Yes, let us do so."
From the start until now, Yerna had been watching Luke concentrate with extraordinary intensity on the GPS screen, and thinking:
Looks like they really want to go to the zoo.
The thought of taking Luke there sometime bloomed warmly inside her.
A lot of animals and monsters hibernate in winter, so once the weather warms up a bit in spring...
As she thought this, it suddenly occurred to her that Luke had been staring at that little screen for rather too long.
"Alright — will you give the GPS back now? You've been looking at it for quite a while."
"...Very well."
Luke nodded and handed the GPS back to Yerna.
For all that long staring, he still had not figured out the principle behind it. He had only managed to determine that it seemed to exchange information with something vast — and he concluded that staring any longer would not reveal its true workings. So he decided to set aside his lingering curiosity about the magical device for now.
I ought to look it up in a book sometime.
Wondering whether he should visit a library, Luke stopped in his tracks at the sight of a blue form that appeared before his eyes.
"Ah."
Yerna looked down at Luke, who had suddenly halted.
"Lu, what's wrong all of a sudden?"
"This is..."
That blue form was a familiar shape. Something he felt he had seen once before, long ago...
A spirit?
The moment the thought arose, as if in answer, the blue form swayed its body of mana and spoke.
—………….
...Indeed, hearing it again, it was closer to noise than speech. The voice was like an untuned string instrument being played. There were sounds like nails scraping a chalkboard, and others like the blast of a great horn.
And then...
—Ere, Ere.
Watching the spirit repeatedly utter the word Ere and bounce its mana-formed body up and down as if laughing, Luke thought: it felt as though it were calling someone's name.
Is this... calling me Ere, by any chance?
Luke gently pushed the spirit away and said,
"My name is Luke Irushi. Not Ere."
—Luke? ...Ere!
"I am telling you, I am not Ere."
"Lu, what on earth are you talking to?"
Yerna asked, startled by Luke's sudden monologue. What was going on? Had something suddenly gone wrong with the child's mind? Unable to see the spirit, Yerna could not help but worry.
"Yerna. There is a spirit here."
"A spirit?"
At the word spirit, Yerna tensed. She could not tell whether the child was seeing things, or had spotted something curious and was simply calling it a spirit.
Then Luke asked, as if finding her reaction odd.
"Can it be that you cannot see this spirit?"
"Um, well..."
Indeed, no matter how she looked, there was nothing in the direction Luke was pointing. Grass or leaves, or maybe a strangely shaped bug, or fireflies like last time... Nothing that could be called a spirit. Truly, nothing at all. If anything, just air.
Yerna began to grow slightly wary.
Don't tell me... a ghost?
Well, quite a few people had lost their lives in Luke Forest, so it was by no means rare for spirit-type monsters like banshees or wraiths to appear. But that was not the case here. If it were a wraith or banshee, it would be a monster and show up as a red dot on the GPS — yet nothing of the sort appeared.
If it were a monster, there's no way it wouldn't show on the GPS...
Modern mana-detection satellites detected every "unnatural" flow of mana without exception. Ghost-type monsters like banshees and wraiths were naturally detectable as well. But here there were only two blue dots — representing Yerna and Luke.
Which meant...
Ah — could this be an imaginary friend?
That classic symbol of childhood innocence that children under ten so often had. Children, after all, did not distinguish well between imagination and reality. So they would see the spirit in their imagination as if it were real. A child as fond of fairy tales as Luke would hardly lack a spirit in their imagination.
Having reached that conclusion, Yerna found herself torn — should she shatter this pure child's innocence, or protect it once again?
Ugh...
Yerna still remembered the dejected look on Luke's face after she had thoughtlessly said at the hospital that Renie was actually dead. She did not want to put that expression on Luke's face again.
In the end, Yerna steeled herself and nodded firmly.
"Lu, spirits are actually... only people a spirit has recognized as a friend can see them. Um... you can't see my spirit, right?"
"Oh ho, is that truly so?"
"Yes. Really."
She had lied. She simply could not bring herself to say, Lu, what you're calling a spirit is just your imaginary friend, and unni can't see it — and so Yerna rationalized it as a white lie.
But Luke, hearing that lie, nodded.
"Aha. So that is why I could not see your spirit."
Thinking of it that way, it made sense. Why, despite claiming to be a friend of spirits, he had never seen a single spirit around Yerna — and why spirits, which ought to exist, were so rare in this world.
Of course, nothing in Yerna's fumbled explanation was actually correct. Five thousand years ago, Luke had been a mage with virtually zero spirit affinity, and given spirits' extreme aversion to mages, not a single spirit mage could be kept near him — an archmage. Of course, Luke himself had little interest in knowledge he had "no use for," and so had never looked into materials on spirits. And every other mage had been the same.
So to Luke, whose knowledge of spirits was nearly nonexistent, the explanation seemed quite plausible. Well, in this era there was no spirit mage around to correct him on the matter either. In the first place, this was an age when no one could see spirits at all. Spirits had long since been preserved as nothing more than a scene from a fairy tale. So no one was curious about the ecology of spirits anymore — save perhaps for historians and archaeologists devoted to unearthing the past.
"Yes, yes."
Yerna nodded along at Luke, who seemed to have accepted it.
Well, imaginary friends disappear on their own once you grow up.
As Luke's mind matured and he learned to distinguish imagination from reality, it would get better. There was no need to deliberately shatter that innocence by saying spirits did not exist.
Meanwhile, the spirit was perfectly visible to Luke's eyes. He listened to that voice echoing Luke, Ere, Luke over and over, mixed into incomprehensible spirit-speech.
A round, soap-bubble-like form, with a blue mana-light tail that seemed to burn downward like the tip of a campfire, tilting its head left and right in a curious motion. It was rather adorable.
So spirits only show themselves to those they have judged as friends...
Which meant this spirit considered him a "friend."
"Well now, I've learned something I did not know."
Luke smiled at the blue spirit rubbing its body excitedly against his palm.
"Very well. Then, O spirit — would you tell me your name?"
At Luke's kindly tone, the spirit made a few sounds like soap bubbles popping — pong, pong — then formed sounds like a baby's babbling.
—Pai! ...Pai!
"Is that so? I'm to call you Pai, then."
Luke spoke, feeling the soft flow of mana upon his palm.
"Pai, were those fireflies yours, by any chance?"
—Luke, Pai! ...
It was still an unintelligible language aside from the name, but from the way the spirit nodded, it seemed that was the case.
"So that was it."
The mana array he had recalled back then might well have been a mark of affection among spirits. The fireflies, it seemed, truly had been the spirit's messengers.