A Friend, Not a Slave
Drip. Trickle—
Blood streamed from the wings that so closely resembled a dragon’s. Though the organs had been derived from Darwin’s body, the nerves linking them to me transmitted the pain with merciless clarity.
Ugh…
It felt something like this: as if a red-hot branding iron were searing the wound while hundreds—thousands—of maggots chewed through my flesh at the same time. If not for the pain-dulling genes I had acquired by devouring a magical beast, I would have blacked out long ago.
Crunch—!
I tore free the return stone Laplace had shattered and flung it aside.
“Young miss.”
“You… you…!”
“Are you hurt anywhere?”
—Laplace. Check Julia’s condition for me.
Understood.
Having hacked into Sirius Academy’s network and accessed a medical drone standing by nearby, Laplace approached Julia and examined her.
No visible external injuries overall. Her pulse is slightly elevated, but that appears to be due to shock.
Thanks for checking.
While I waited for Julia—who still seemed far from fully recovered—to come back to herself, Sirius Academy staff entered the testing grounds and began checking on the injured.
“Emergency suspension of the exam! Emergency suspension! You there, student—the exam is over!”
“Check carefully over there! Any casualties?!”
“Student! You’re all right, yes?”
Julia paid the staff not even a glance, her eyes fixed solely on me.
“You… you… is it really you?”
“…”
“I… I…! How much… how much…”
Tears streamed down Julia’s face as she stood there. The moment I met her eyes, I understood. Spending an entire year without a single word that I was still alive had carved a wound far deeper into her than I had ever imagined.
“Um…”
I bowed my head at once, ready to apologize. In that same instant Julia rushed forward and covered my mouth with her hand.
“From now on I’ll never leave you alone again. I’ll try harder.”
“Ah…”
“So… so…! Please don’t do anything reckless anymore… I’m begging you…”
I had believed you were alive. Night after night I had lain awake worrying about you. I had worked and worked just for the chance to see you again. There had been so many things I desperately wanted to say, yet now that I stood before the person I had longed for most, every last sentence scattered into the unconscious and vanished. What filled the empty space they left behind was only compassion and worry for the other person. For Julia, that was everything.
“…No. Young miss. It’s all my fault.”
“…!”
“I should have gone to you myself. My pathetic selfishness ruined everything. A hundred apologies wouldn’t be enough for a sin like this, so I’ll accept any punishment gladly.”
Seo-hyun thought of what she had done. After dealing with the demon, she should at least have sent word to the Wittelsbach family—so they would not worry, so they would not drown in the guilt of believing one of their own had died because of them. The reason she had left the Wittelsbach manor without a single notice was fear of the aftermath.
To be honest, slavery in this world was peculiar in many ways. Modern human rights and medieval notions of bondage had been twisted together into something half-formed. While serving as a slave one could enjoy the same basic rights as any citizen, and once the debt was paid one could even be freed. That did not mean society’s gaze was the same as it was for ordinary people. Most who became slaves had either committed crimes or failed to repay debts, so the way society looked at them was not so different from the way it looked at ex-convicts. Things had improved somewhat by now, yet a history of slavery was still enough to drag a person into frequent trouble.
Was that all I was afraid of?
It was an excuse, really. Even I no longer knew why I had acted that way back then. At the time I had not been in my right mind.
“W-wait…! Why are you the one apologizing?!”
“…What?”
“Just because you didn’t come find me first? Why on earth…!”
Julia bit down hard on her lip.
“If not coming to find me first is a sin that a hundred apologies can’t cover…! Then even a hundred lifetimes wouldn’t be enough for me! After you saved us and fell…! I’ve regretted that moment hundreds—thousands—of times! It should have been me who fell from that cliff!”
Idiot. Born with everything, yet able to do nothing. Noblesse oblige, they called it. Few people suited the phrase less than she did. Yet Seo-hyun still could not agree.
“But… I was your slave.”
“…”
Slave and master. A hierarchical bond. Perhaps our meeting had been twisted from the very beginning. We had been bound by that unreasonable relationship—something that should never have existed between five-year-olds—forced upon us by the circumstances of adults.
Julia’s eyes took on a color I had never seen before. Feeling I ought to apologize somehow, I bowed my head toward her.
“I’m sor—?”
The sudden soft warmth told me Julia had pulled me into her arms.
“Huh…?”
“I never once thought of you as a slave.”
Still holding me tightly with both arms, Julia looked back into the past. Roughly ten years ago, when she first met Seo-hyun at the auction house, she had suddenly wanted to become friends with that child.
“The first time I met you, a year ago, and even now—I’ve always thought of you as a friend. Not some cold, vertical relationship of master and slave, but the one and only friend who could understand and help each other.”
Do you remember what I said a year ago?
“Even after the contract ended, I said I wanted to stay with you.”
“You… did.”
“I wanted us to stop being slave and master. I wanted us to become ordinary friends like everyone else—a relationship where commands no longer existed. When you went missing, the reason I went out of my way to raise your status to citizen was regret over that.”
Julia looked at me with sorrowful eyes.
“But you’re still… stuck in the past…”
“…!”
I realized my own thought processes had become strangely tangled. Ten long years had been more than enough to suppress my sense of self and reshape my mind into that of a sixteen-year-old slave.
Julia met my gaze.
“So I’ll say it right here.”
Her face was utterly serious. I looked at her, and at once her lips parted.
“From now on, stop being a slave and become my friend.”
“…”
“…”
I sat quietly and let Julia tend to me. Darwin had offset most of the damage, yet the sight of me with blood-soaked wings unfurled must have been a considerable shock to her. Even though the dragon wings I had used to block the attack had already retracted, Julia kept fussing over the empty space where they had been.
“Um…”
“Ah, sorry…”
“N-no… i-it’s fine.”
It felt awkward. Maybe because we had just poured out so much emotion, or maybe simply because it had been so long. More than anything, I could not get used to this way of speaking.
“B-but honorifics still feel more comfortable for me…”
“Tsk…! Have you ever seen friends use honorifics with each other? If speaking casually is that hard, just talk in English instead!”
“A-all right.”
I used casual speech all the time while operating as Lucifer, yet using it with Julia felt unbearably strange—like doing something I was not supposed to. Come to think of it, even my own thinking had changed a great deal compared to before my previous life.
“By the way, what was that power? You suddenly had wings and horns… Did you actually have an innate ability after all?”
“Unfortunately… no. This is a power I developed separately. Think of it as a biological weapon created by combining the crystallization phenomenon of innate abilities with the latest scientific technology.”
“…You’ve gotten a lot stronger…”
“Well, yeah.”
I had grown far stronger—so much so that comparing myself to when I first arrived in this world would almost be rude. Julia still seemed to have plenty more she wanted to say. I waited patiently for her next words.
“Th-thank you for saving me. That’s twice now you’ve pulled me out of a life-or-death crisis…”
“It was nothing.”
“You even smashed your return stone to save me. You could have died with me.”
“Haha…”
It had been reckless, truthfully. I had thrown myself forward out of the need to save Julia, but honestly I had not been confident I could block that attack. How to stop a heat-ray type assault had been a problem in itself. In the middle of it, the Sea-Serpent’s dormant genes had activated. Sea-Serpents were a species whose wings had atrophied, leaving them unable to fly from birth, yet if one traced far enough back through their ancestry one found true dragons that possessed wings. Darwin had succeeded in reactivating those dormant wing genes and creating a new set of organs.
Actually flying with them seems impossible, though.
The wings were too small for real flight. To obtain wings large enough to use in the air I would need to devour a winged lesser dragon or a true dragon and extract the proper genes. Their defensive power, however, was considerable—more than enough to serve as a shield.
“Come to think of it, how did your interview go?”
“I took it, but… I’m not sure how well. My head was still spinning…”
The interviews had been held immediately after the exam ended. Quite a few students must have given poor answers while still dazed from the match. Sirius Academy seemed to have been counting on exactly that.
“What about the others, by the way?”
By “the others” she meant Yeona and Iris. Having fought them to the very end, she naturally wanted news.
“Beats me…”
I had no idea either. What were they doing now? If I managed to enroll at Sirius Academy I would probably find out. Until then, I simply wanted to protect this brief stretch of peace.