The Master Asked His Disciple, "Are You Okay?"
"So the world never stopped advancing while I was in seclusion…? Truly remarkable…."
I kept turning the object Master Las had left behind over in my hands, examining it with genuine fascination.
The artifact called the Orvillon was, according to him, a ultra-long-range communication device. It was the masterpiece that the famous Grand Artisan Stephen Orville had spent years perfecting. Apparently half the world had gone into a frenzy trying to get their hands on one.
"Stephen Orville, I know that name. But didn't every noble and mage write off whatever he was researching as a complete joke?"
Even setting aside the idea of ultra-long-range communication itself, his claim that he would make the thing run for extraordinarily long periods without needing constant recharging had been legendary even in my active days. People had said things like, "Even for a Grand Artisan, that's pure bluster," or "There's no way something that absurd could ever work," and kept their distance.
Everyone had clicked their tongues and dismissed him as a crank doing crank things….
In the end, Grand Artisan Stephen Orville had won through sheer obsession. A human victory, of sorts.
"The principles and all that—I'd never understand them even if someone explained them to me."
No matter how much I knew as a veteran mercenary, the inner workings of artifacts and the finer points of magic were well beyond me. I wasn't proud of it, but five minutes was my absolute limit for that kind of talk. One second past five minutes and I was certain I'd be out cold.
So even when Master Las had earnestly explained everything, all I could manage was a vague sense of wow, that's amazing, how curious. I couldn't very well make a fool of myself in front of my disciple's associates, so staying conscious was the full extent of what I could do—and my limit.
"Still… even if it's only her voice, does this mean I can finally talk with Sera again after so long?"
Speaking face to face would have been best, of course…. But if you could have everything you wanted, that wouldn't be the world people lived in—it would be heaven. And this, unfortunately, was not heaven. It was the world people lived in, which meant you had to get by on the satisfaction that came from compromise.
Satisfaction through compromise. Some called it the process of becoming an adult. Others called it wisdom.
"More than anything, the competition among Hero candidates is only going to get fiercer from here."
I didn't understand magic or the principles of artifacts, but the ugly desires of people—those I knew well. There was no world that laid bare the baseness of human instinct and the true nature of mankind more clearly than the one mercenaries lived in, balanced on the knife-edge between life and death.
So it wasn't hard to picture how the Hero candidate competition would go. It would not be pretty. Hostage-taking and blackmail would be the bare minimum. Hero candidates would kill other Hero candidates. If there were no witnesses, it would be a perfect assassination.
I'd seen it often enough in my mercenary days. The moment someone wanted a slightly larger share, they'd go for the back of a comrade's neck—someone they'd been fighting side by side with only moments before. I'd watched that kind of thing until I was sick of it. Whenever it happened, I'd been the one to smash those would-be backstabbers across the neck instead, knock them out cold, and dump them straight into a cell.
"In a situation like that, nothing good comes from my existence becoming known."
I was prime hostage material. If the masters of other Hero candidates got involved, I would absolutely end up as one. My existence was something that could reliably become a chain around my disciple's ankle. The right decision, then, was to keep my head down so no harm came to her.
Thoughts like this always came to me at times like these.
If I hadn't been satisfied. If I'd pursued greater strength… would I be the one holding a sword against the Demon King, instead of leaving everything to my disciple?
Of course, it was a meaningless hypothesis.
No one could say for certain that even if I'd killed myself training I would have become a true superhuman—and even if I had, whether I could have stood against the Demon King was another question entirely. No. It would have been impossible. Superhumans must have existed in the distant past when the Demon King first descended, and yet the records said only the Hero chosen by the gods had defeated him. One superhuman alone could never have done anything about the Demon King. So thinking that if only I'd done a little more, I might have reached a better outcome, was an utterly pointless exercise.
I knew perfectly well that what I was doing was nothing more than a meaningless vicious cycle.
But I couldn't help it.
I was weak.
If I'd done it this way, maybe things would have been different.
If I'd handled that moment in the past a little better, maybe I could have reached a better reality.
What if I'd done it like this instead?
Floundering in that empty, futile cycle of thought was a maze no weak person who couldn't overcome the wall of reality could ever escape. It was the trap of the vicious cycle that the weak inevitably fell into. And I was unmistakably weak—someone who had entrusted everything to his disciple and was simply waiting for her return. So falling into that maze of a trap was the natural result.
"I can't do this. A master—someone who waits—must never show that he's wavering."
If the master looked anxious, wouldn't the disciple grow anxious too? For her sake, no matter how weak I'd become, putting on a bold front and pretending to be unshakable was a master's duty. Remaining constant and steadfast—that was the greatest role a master could play for his disciple.
The artifact known as the Orvillon could only connect to another Orvillon. No matter the distance, two Orvillons could link to each other, and that was what made long-range communication possible. The reason it worked across any distance was simple.
It performed a spatial leap. If you rendered distance itself meaningless through spatial leaping, the problem of range vanished completely. Of course, triggering a spatial leap through an artifact required a truly absurd amount of energy—and if you wanted to use it more than once, the energy required became unimaginably vast.
Sera had solved that by sealing the entirety of a Hydra's life force into a Hydra Core.
Naturally, producing more than a handful was realistically impossible. Hydras hadn't vanished from the world entirely the way dragons had, but they were hardly common Great Magical Beasts you could find just anywhere. If Great Magical Beasts had been common, the Empire would already have fallen. As the infinitely regressing Hero, Sera knew where the Hydras were, but even so there were only a few of them.
In other words, two Orvillons was the current limit. One had ended up in Jade's hands. The other was in Sera's.
For reference, even Grand Artisan Stephen Orville—the creator who had patented the design and was drowning in attention because of it—did not possess an Orvillon of his own. He had managed to produce two with great difficulty, only to have both essentially seized by Archmage William.
After all, it was Sera who had provided the Hydra Cores with a Hydra's life force sealed inside them. Even Stephen had no choice but to hand the finished products over. No matter that he had built them, the overwhelmingly, impossibly enormous value of a Hydra Core sealed with a Hydra's full life force meant he couldn't dare claim ownership. In the end, he had achieved the goal he had dreamed of for so long—and been forced to taste the cruel reality of feeling no sense of accomplishment or satisfaction whatsoever.
At any rate, she could finally speak with Jade. She couldn't see his face, but still.
Technically I could see his face too….
In a previous loop, she had collaborated with Grand Artisan Stephen to build the Orvillon and successfully modified it so they could see each other's faces even at long range. The knowledge was still in her head; she could have made the modification anytime she wanted. She simply hadn't. This whole endeavor had started so they could talk with nothing but voice to voice.
…But what am I supposed to say first?
She had finished every preparation that would allow them to converse—and yet she hadn't finished preparing at all. The most important preparation remained. Namely: What topic do we talk about? What do we say? That most critical piece of preparation was still incomplete. It wasn't that she hadn't thought about it. She had spent nights without sleep, agonizing over it. And still she hadn't decided. It wasn't a lack of time, or thoroughness, or will.
She had had the time. Her preparations had been meticulous. Her will had been overflowing. And even so, she had failed to produce a proper result. That was simply how it was.
She didn't want to make a mistake.
She had to do this perfectly.
That fierce desire for a good outcome—that obsession—was creating the paradoxical effect of preventing any proper result from emerging at all.
She was the infinitely regressing Hero. Of course she knew that an obsessive fixation on results was precisely what ruined them. But even an infinitely regressing Hero could not remain careful in the face of the absolute emotion called love.
The absolute power of love was not something even the infinitely regressing Hero could escape. And so she was a being who could only be swayed, swept up, and entangled by that absolute power.
Talk about the weather…. No, this isn't a blind date. Why would I talk about the weather? But Master’s hermitage and where I am are completely different places. Maybe he’d be interested in the weather here? But what if he asks about my friendships? If I say I have no friends at all, he’ll definitely start worrying….
She was a true Hero who had to move with the purpose of saving the world; friendships shouldn't have mattered in the slightest…. But that was only true from the perspective of Sera the infinitely regressing Hero…. From the perspective of Jade, her master and guardian, it would look completely different. He would almost certainly think she ought to have made at least one or two friends.
I'll just say I've made friends named Leo and Misha—the Sword Ghost's disciple.
At the very moment Sera was thinking this, Hero candidates Leo and Misha felt a chill run down their spines and shuddered. From the perspective of Leo, who was enduring days of training hell under Sera that went well beyond mere hellish training, and Misha, who had been dragged into the same training hell beside him, Hero Sera was absolutely not someone who could be bundled under the cute label of "friend." The hierarchy was so clear that it wouldn't have been strange for either of them to prefer being called something like boss and underlings instead.
Sera, of course, gave not the slightest thought to their feelings and decided she would simply tell Jade the two of them were her friends. They could get along from now on, so it wasn't entirely a lie—and with that, she completed a full course of self-brainwashing under the name of rationalization, assuring herself she had not lied at all.
Beep! Beep!
Just as she had more or less finished preparing—
the Orvillon finally responded.
It meant a connection was forming with the Orvillon in Jade's possession.
And then—
"…Is it connected? Hard to tell."
She could hear Jade's voice.
She had seen his sleeping face, but hearing his voice directly was something even Sera had not experienced in a very long time. Hearing it so vividly, as if he were right in front of her, filled her with a heat of emotion she could barely put into words.
"Master…."
Sera had even decided exactly how she would greet him—I'll say it like this!—but the moment she heard Jade's voice, her mind went blank as fresh white paper. The instant she heard him, she became an idiot. All that remained was a Jade-obsessed fool who could only listen to his voice and think about his voice.
"Yes. It's been a while."
"A-are you… well?"
"Of course I am. What about you? Are you healthy?"
"Of course I am."
"Your voice sounds a little weak. Are you eating properly?"
"Of course."
It was a lie so smooth and natural that if Archmage William had been standing beside her, he would have thought, She lies so effortlessly. She was still getting by on little more than fruit and vegetables for all three meals, complaining that nothing tasted like the food she used to eat with Jade.
"Nothing special has happened on your end, has it?"
"What's special about my life? You may have heard from Master Las, but I've ended up looking after a dragon egg."
"Yes, I heard. It isn't too hard on you, is it?"
"She's a quiet, good-natured child. She can't move freely inside the egg, so it must be uncomfortable—and yet she's such a bright little thing."
Just the night before, Sera had spent a truly intimate, affectionate stretch of time with the dragon egg Rhea, wiping her down with holy water. Now she was putting on a flawless performance, as if none of that had ever happened—as if no such memory existed in her head at all.
"And you? Nothing too hard on you?"
"I'm fine."
"In all my years, I've never met anyone who said they were fine and actually was."
"I really am fine."
The question a Hero was least able to answer was "Are you okay?" Because a Hero had to be okay. Because nothing could be wrong with the Hero. That was why people never asked Hero Sera if she was okay. And even if they did, the moment they heard "I'm fine" from her lips, they were immediately satisfied. The people who asked that question in the first place only asked because they wanted to hear her say she was fine.
But Jade had asked her if she was okay—
and even after she answered that she was, he did not stop worrying.
Instead he said he'd never met anyone who claimed to be fine and truly was, and worried about her all the more.
Really.
It was cheating.
To her, Jade himself was cheating incarnate.
No matter what he said—
every word of it became salvation for Sera.
And so, once again, her heart was dyed in the color of Jade.