Subjugation of the Orphanage Director (4)
Magic language was whatever words a mage designated as such. In other words, it could be invented and used at will.
That much was true.
But what that really meant was that if you wanted to create a new magical language, you had to assign a new name to every single action one by one.
It was easy enough to designate one word as a substitute for the noun “fire.”
But if you wanted to distinguish between wanting fire to burn and wanting it to go out, then you had to name two different verbs. And if you wanted it to burn for a certain amount of time and then die out, you had to invent even the grammatical elements that meant time units, conditions, and endings.
So at best, the magic words I’d thrown together on the spot should have been able to do only something simple and monotonous.
“Aaaagh!!! S-s-stop—aaagh!!”
That was what should have happened.
“M-my handaaaaa!!!!”
But in the interrogation room, the flames that bloomed in reality wound around Doloria’s hand like living vines, and no matter how wildly she slammed it against the wall or the torture devices in an attempt to extinguish them, the fire never spread.
“Ellie, you little b—!!”
Realizing her hand was hopeless, Doloria flashed her teeth and charged straight at me.
If those jaws sank into my throat, I really would die. For someone like Doloria, she’d tear through flesh until my carotid artery was bared.
And yet.
“‘Floor, break.’”
With a sickening crack, Doloria’s massive body lurched forward and crashed to the ground with a thunderous impact.
“Kghaaack!!”
When she lifted her head, blood had smeared across her face. Her nose had been smashed flat against the floor and burst open.
“‘Rope, bind; wardrobe, open.’”
The rope that had fed on the blood of countless children rose up on its own and bound Doloria’s limbs.
The wardrobe door that had instilled claustrophobia in so many children flung wide open.
“What is this!! What the hell is this?!”
The monster who had once been the owner of this room shouted, and not even anger or hatred seemed as large in her as the sheer disbelief at how this was possible.
“When did you learn magic words?!”
“I never did. ‘Put what the rope has bound into the wardrobe, and close the door.’”
“Don’t screw with me, you brat!!”
Of course, Doloria’s reaction made perfect sense. To anyone listening, it was obvious I wasn’t just stacking up random words—I was speaking an actual language.
It’s not a method ordinary people can use.
Unless you happened to have a hobby of creating languages already, or you knew several languages and simply made one of them your magic language wholesale.
But even if the first was fine, the second had one fatal flaw.
If you used a real, existing language as your magic language, then from that point on, communicating in it would become difficult.
A magic language was one in which every word, every grammatical element, had a mage’s mana engraved into it.
If you asked a friend for water, water might instead pour in my direction; if you said the wind was cold, you might end up summoning a whirlwind.
So turning a natural language into a magic language—rather than an artificial one—was something you could do, but absolutely shouldn’t.
Except I had one.
A natural language, yes—but one I would never need to use to communicate with anyone in this world.
In fact, one I could handle as fluently as my mother tongue.
Because it was my first mother tongue.
“‘At the signal, stop and harden.’”
Its name was Korean.
“‘Burn away until only ashes remain.’”
My white hair shimmered brilliantly.
“Ellie!!! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!! Spare me! If you just spare my life, I’ll spend the rest of my days repenting!!”
Maybe she could feel the mana gathering at my fingertips even if she wasn’t a mage, or maybe the pressure spilling from my eyes and the searing pain radiating from my burned fingertips had driven fear above rage.
Doloria screamed and begged.
“Please, please spare me! From now on, I’ll live decently! I’ll give you everything I’ve saved, all of it—no, I’ll give it all to you! So please, just my life—”
“Doloria.”
The mana, bleached white, took the shape of a dagger above my hand.
“How many children in this room have begged you for their lives like that?”
“That’s—”
Her eyeballs, dulled white by terror, rolled wildly in her skull.
She was counting something behind those eyes.
Trying to decide which number she should say if she wanted to save herself.
I could see it.
And seeing it made me sick.
“Enough.”
I don’t deny the possibility that someone who was once wicked could become good.
But there are limits, and there are lines, and this thing had crossed both so long ago that it had become a monster in every sense that mattered.
Therefore.
“‘I will be the punishment.’”
White, blade-like fragments of mana drifted through the air.
“A-ah—ahh—aaah!!”
The fragments struck.
The door slammed shut.
“Aaaah…!!”
And then.
Pop.
Ignition.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!”
The screaming didn’t last long.
The flames licking through the crack in the door were a vivid, blinding blue.
Doloria was enormous, but it didn’t take long to snuff out a life. In the first place, her lungs and airway had probably burned away before that point.
“……Haaah.”
The blue blaze illuminated the dim interrogation room.
If it were up to me, I’d have liked to burn this entire room down, and the orphanage with it.
But I can’t.
I needed evidence. There were courts in this world, too.
Even if I couldn’t expect a truly modern judicial system, Doloria’s child abuse and murder were, naturally, crimes.
But if there was even the slightest chance she had someone behind her, or some powerful person tied to her, and if that person decided to take offense at me for killing Doloria—
Then expecting justice to move in a purely righteous direction would be naïve.
So I couldn’t erase the evidence with my own hands.
I know at least a little about how filthy the world can be.
Before long, with nothing left to burn, the fire went out on its own.
In the dark room, something suddenly caught my eye.
It was a mirror.
One Doloria had originally used for her own ugly, petty amusements.
That...
It took me a moment to realize who the girl standing inside it was.
Me?
That shouldn’t have been surprising. There was only one mirror in the orphanage, and another in Doloria’s private room, so seeing my own face was never easy—and after all the years since my reincarnation, it made sense that even my own features would still feel somewhat unfamiliar.
But that wasn’t all.
The girl in the mirror was so beautiful that I actually found myself doubting whether my eyes were seeing correctly.
Pretty.
Beautiful.
Her hair, left long down to her waist because I’d had no time to cut or neaten it, gleamed as though dusted with white starlight, turning into a river of silver.
The body standing on the boundary between girlhood and adulthood had the fresh tenderness of a flower just beginning to bloom.
And her eyes.
They were blue, and within them stars sparkled. Like the most dazzling of all the countless stars in the sky—like the most beautiful, the most radiant thing in the world.
That’s me?
Looking closer, even the features of my face had changed little by little.
I’d once seen a TV program at the orphanage in my original world—no, at the daycare center—that compared people before and after plastic surgery, and I’d been struck by a thought partway through.
They changed it by that little?
A slight lift or drop to the eyes, a tiny adjustment to the nose’s angle, a chin drawn in just a little.
Just those minuscule changes, and then after everything had healed, when they compared the before-and-after images—
Wow.
That was when I realized a face could become utterly different from only the smallest changes in its lines.
My features were like that now, too.
My eyes, just a little. My nose, just a little. My mouth, just a little.
That alone was enough to transform my cute, plain face into a beauty so stunning that even I, looking at myself in the mirror, felt dazed.
Could it be?
I shut off the circuit that connected me to the world and converted ether into mana.
And then it returned.
My hair went back to an ordinary black.
The stars vanished from my eyes, leaving them a plain brown.
And my face…
It’s somehow less pretty now.
The eyes, nose, and mouth changed bit by bit. In the exact opposite direction from before.
Hmm.
I guess there was no helping it.
Come to think of it, being a little prettier than average was better than being an absolute stunner. Especially if I intended to hide who I was.
Besides, looking too pretty isn’t only a good thing anyway.
I heard footsteps coming up the stairs.
“Haaah…”
I took a deep breath, gathered my thoughts one more time about how I should explain this, and then stepped forward.
I’d originally planned to wait until the others came in first, but I changed my mind.
As I opened the door myself, bright sunlight tickled my face.
My hair, black once more.
My appearance, ordinary again.
I met the eyes of the people who had been climbing the stairs in silence—the orphanage staff and the children, and then—
Who’s that woman?
There was someone I’d never seen before.
Still, it didn’t matter.
Someday, after all, I would have to stand before tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of strangers and speak to them.
“Everyone.”
I treated it like dress rehearsal, or perhaps my first real performance, and smiled.
Without a trace of shame or awkwardness, with confidence.
Boldly.
And with certainty.
“Please rest easy. I killed the monster.”
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
An urgent letter arrived at the Academy Headmaster’s office.
The headmaster read it, then immediately summoned every professor who could be gathered at once and revealed its contents.
The meeting room was thrown into chaos at once.
Because the paper delivered by the fastest means possible contained only a single short sentence.
—Found her, a genius.
But before the uproar in the room could settle, a second letter arrived by the same method. The seal was broken right there in front of the professors, and blood stained the paper inside. Written across it was this:
—Currently under protection■■.
One professor held up the paper and read the erased portion aloud.
The word was.
“‘Receiving’…?”