The Magic Scholar
A face without expression. A posture held square to regulation. She had pulled her cap so low that little of her showed, yet the clean line of her jaw alone was enough to suggest features cut with care.
"A pleasure. Second Lieutenant Dorothy Oslo."
Remi's crew understood in a single glance. This one was a real officer.
The air around her was nothing like that of the other officers, slack and at their ease.
She spoke again.
"From this moment, every search will be conducted in my company. Do you concur?"
No one objected.
A short while later, two infantry platoons appeared from nowhere and fell into ranks. Forty soldiers in all, each carrying a pistol — soldiers in every sense of the word.
The gang had to swallow. What had begun as a neighborhood thug's private revenge seemed to be swelling far beyond them.
But they had already set it in motion. There was no taking it back.
And so the search began in earnest: one second lieutenant, forty infantrymen, and four street thugs in tow. A heaven-and-earth net, cast for the sake of a single rat.
Step. Step.
The moment the composite sketches were handed out and the sectors assigned, the force left the camp.
"Disperse."
"Disperse!"
At the order, the infantry scattered in every direction as one.
All that remained beside the gang was the lieutenant herself.
They were witnesses as well as guides, and the officer seemed intent on accompanying them in person.
Remi thought, Even heaven's own luck is on my side.
At last I'll catch that Eugene bastard and beat him bloody.
The money was an afterthought now. He meant to seize the boy by the scruff with his own hands, and he began tearing through the streets in earnest — never noticing the lieutenant staring, unblinking, at the back of his head.
The forty soldiers conducted their patrol with method and no wasted routes. They investigated sightings, narrowed the sectors, and detained anyone who looked suspicious. They had the authority to do it.
It was the same for the gang moving with the officer. A second lieutenant was by no means a low rank. Men who hadn't so much as blinked under a thug's threats groveled the instant they saw the bars on her shoulders.
Every part of the process was perfect.
Except the result.
Remi thought, This Eugene bastard is a fucking rat.
"Shit..."
He spat the curse in a voice meant for no one else's ears. A vein stood out on his brow.
The subordinate walking beside him — a man named James — flinched and said,
"Remi. Keep your voice down. They'll hear you."
"It's fine, you little shit."
More than one thing was grinding on him. Eugene, slipping away just when he seemed about to be caught, while sightings of him kept turning up all over the city. His own men, still useless. All of it was stress. And besides—
"While I'm at it, that so-called lieutenant. Her route is kind of fucked, I'm telling you."
"Shh—"
"She's way up ahead. She can't hear."
Trembling, James turned his head. Some ten paces ahead, he could see the back of Second Lieutenant Dorothy.
Had she not heard? It seemed she hadn't.
James steadied his breath and asked,
"What's so fucked about it? Watching her give orders to the soldiers earlier, she looked plenty decisive."
"A hunch."
"What?"
"A hunch. I can't pin it down in words, but something about her feels wrong. Our goal is to catch the rat and beat the shit out of him. But I don't think that's what she's after."
"...So what are you going to do?"
Remi didn't answer.
There was nothing he could do. The soldiers of the Lehman garrison doubled as military police, and a second lieutenant stood right in front of him. Even the most lead-bottomed soldiers were not generous enough to ignore someone raising hell under their noses.
"Damn it..."
All he could do was mutter the curse under his breath.
They went on searching for an hour.
Then, at the hour when even the thin drizzle had ceased and the dark clouds were flushing red, the moment they had waited and waited for arrived.
In the crack of an alley, someone was peeking out.
Ash-gray hair. Clothes like sackcloth. A face like some courtesan's kept man, and a frame stunted from going hungry. From any angle, it was Eugene.
The lieutenant gave the order.
"Target confirmed. All of you, pursue."
The four of them kicked off at once. There was no need to close in quietly. They cut straight across the avenue and gave chase.
By then the boy had recognized Remi as well. He spun and fled.
"After him—!"
Remi roared. He didn't care whose curious eyes turned their way.
Fifty pounds is right there!
From the moment they entered the alleys, it was no longer a pursuit. It was a contest of strategy.
The Empire's building codes had been appallingly sloppy, and the alleys were nothing short of a maze. Because of it, people of Frauvia often lost their way. Not Remi. No one knew the lay of this district as well as he did.
"James, seal the alley on the shop side. Nora, you follow me. Peter and Bray, each of you take one of the two alleys by the river."
The crew moved on his exact instructions.
The place Eugene had slipped into was the largest block in Lehman, its alleys tangled like a spider's web. He must have judged that if he hid here, he would be hard to find. But the block had one defining trait: it had only a few entrances.
Block those, and he was caught for certain.
"Got you dead to rights, you son of a bitch."
As he scoured the alleys with his eyes burning, the sound of military boots reached him from every side. The lieutenant had called in the troops. He didn't want the initiative stolen from him. They might well claim he had done nothing and walk off without paying the bounty.
Remi moved all the faster.
A dead end.
At last he succeeded in making Eugene a rat in a jar.
Laughter rose of its own accord.
"Eugene. Been a long fucking time. You missed me, didn't you?"
"No."
"I missed you, though. Ah — I can't help laughing."
"Why do you keep chasing someone who doesn't want to look at your face? You followed me so hard I wondered if you were some kind of sodomite, but dragging soldiers along — you're worse than that."
Eugene said it with a sneer in his voice. In the next breath, Remi's forced smile vanished without a trace.
"You little shit... Fine. Hand over the spellbook. Now."
"There isn't one."
"I know it's inside your coat. Hand it over now and— ugh!"
⟨ Move ⟩
A flowerpot dropped out of the sky. Remi threw himself backward on instinct, and a pot the size of a man's head whipped past his face.
Crash!
Porcelain shattered to pieces. The earth gouged deep where it struck, and the sight was vicious. Had he not thrown himself clear, his skull would not have come through intact.
Yet far from fear, Remi's face flooded with rapture.
"Hey! You really were a mage!"
"Tch."
The sight of him drawing out a spellbook and speaking an activation word. The incomprehensible event of a flowerpot suddenly falling. A mage, beyond any doubt.
Which meant that catching him would drop two hundred pounds into Remi's hands.
Scattering wild laughter, Remi drew a dagger from his coat. Shing — rusted here and there, yet the edge honed to a cold, vicious blue. He leveled it at Eugene and charged.
"Waaaaah!!"
Stab him just short of killing. Remi's aim was cold calculation: Eugene's right arm, the one holding the spellbook. Eugene, who clearly hadn't expected a blade, looked shaken.
In the next instant, the boy spoke another activation word.
⟨ Rotation ⟩
"Ugh?!"
The dagger's grip moved of its own will, as if it meant to spin where it was and slice his hand open.
But.
"Too weak!"
The force fell short of breaking his brutal grip. Remi seized the hilt in both hands once more and surged at Eugene.
It would reach. It would reach.
It reached!
Thuk—
The rusted dagger punched through Eugene's shoulder.
At the same instant, Eugene's fist crashed into Remi's face.
Crack!
"Ghk!"
The sudden impact tore the hilt from his grasp. With a clatter, the dagger tumbled across the ground.
That was all right. The boy was stabbed in the shoulder, and this was a dead end. Nora would be bringing the soldiers this way any moment now.
Remi snatched up the dagger and declared with perfect confidence,
"Checkmate, you little bastard."
And yet something was wrong.
Eugene's lips, twisted with pain, were slowly taking the shape of a smile.
"Let's not see each other again."
Eugene spoke a new activation word.
⟨ Levitation ⟩
An instant later, the boy's body rose into the air.
A few minutes later.
When Nora, third of the crew, led the soldiers into the dead end, they came upon Remi clutching a blood-soaked dagger and hurling a stream of curses at the empty air.
The soldiers immediately leveled their pistols at the man holding the weapon.
Once the matter was settled, Remi's entire crew was detained inside the camp. They were a gang that had committed no small number of crimes, and this, too, counted as a proper result.
Locked behind iron bars, Remi went on insisting he had seen a mage, but no one believed the boy who cried wolf.
Meanwhile, Dorothy followed the trail of blood to its end and, beneath a bridge, found a boy lying unconscious.
"......"
The ash-haired boy was drawing short, labored breaths. Around the shoulder, blood had welled out until the cloth was soaked red, and bloodstains covered the ground nearby.
The weapon had been a rusted dagger. Left like that, the wound untreated, tetanus and worse complications would surely find him.
The boy groaned.
"Nn..."
"Be still. Don't open your eyes."
Dorothy gathered the boy into her arms and walked on, slowly.