The Dragon That Drinks Uranium (5)
The Dragon That Drinks Uranium (5)
Silver hair glinting under the moonlight.
A jawline that dropped sharply at just the right angle.
Fair skin and a slender build.
Her two golden eyes held the whole of creation, and her expressionless face was as untroubled as if no storm could ever shake it.
She looked exactly like someone Rote knew.
"Aether?"
A friend's name. It slipped out before she knew it.
Rote immediately clapped a hand over her mouth. A folktale her mother had told her as a child flashed through her mind.
The doppelganger tale.
It was a story so famous in the Empire that not knowing it marked you as a spy.
The protagonist was one curious girl. Late one night, while wandering through a fog-choked forest, she encountered a doppelganger who perfectly resembled her friend.
The tale ended in tragedy. The girl met the doppelganger more and more often, lost her mind, and her friend died—a cruel conclusion.
Originally, grown-ups had invented the story to reduce the number of children who vanished into the woods. As an adult who had learned the truth, Rote no longer found it frightening.
At least, she hadn't until a moment ago.
"Hm?"
She'd covered her mouth, but it was already too late. The silver-haired girl, having spotted her, began crunching through the fallen leaves toward her.
—Crunch, crunch.
With every step she took, the chirping of the insects died away. No serenade of love sounded along the path she traced.
What now?
The folktale kept surfacing in her thoughts.
Rote retreated several steps without meaning to. But the silver-haired, golden-eyed girl was closing in several times faster.
Before she knew it, the girl was right in front of her, lips parting.
"Aether is my older sister, you know."
"Huh...?"
The words were completely unexpected. She'd thought the girl meant her harm.
Only then did Rote calm herself and study the girl before her with care. She did resemble Aether, certainly, yet there seemed to be little differences here and there.
More to the point, why was a Gold-Eye here?
The follow-up thought didn't last long. Rote remembered the conversation she'd had with Aether a few hours ago.
That was when the girl lunged into her space.
"Oh, and who's this? Isn't this the young lady of House Saliere?"
"You know me?"
The girl nodded, then pulled something from her clothes.
A Mana Cigarette. She seemed to smoke out of habit.
"I hear you and my sister are joined at the hip. Never dreamed I'd run into you here, of all places."
Flashing a sardonic smile, the girl stepped back. Or rather, it wasn't so much stepping back as a body motion that seemed designed to inspect Rote from head to toe.
"At first I thought I'd die of boredom, getting posted to this useless place for no reason. But seeing such a high-interest individual here, it's not entirely unwelcome."
Rote couldn't grasp what the girl was talking about. But something in her words felt off.
Having found it curious that she'd met another Gold-Eye besides Aether, Rote was now mentally retracing the odd points in the silver-haired girl's speech.
Wait. Did Aether have a little sister?
"Who are you?"
"Me? Aether's twin little sister."
"Little sister?"
"Of course. We look this much alike; what else would we be if not blood relatives?"
No.
That was a lie.
"Aether told me she only has an older sister."
Again, the doppelganger story rose in Rote's mind.
The doppelganger in the folktale had one distinctive trait. If you asked it detailed questions about the original person, its answers would be slightly wrong.
She didn't believe a creature from a folktale had manifested before her. But human beings weren't creatures who moved solely by logic and reason.
Silent Casting Stock.
To prepare for any eventuality, she stored spells she could fire instantly at her fingertips. Two high-class spells and five mid-grade ones. That set her a little at ease.
"She said that? Ah, now that I think about it, that makes sense. Our sister lost her memory once, you see."
"Lost her memory?"
Rote had never heard anything like that.
"Yeah. So it's not exactly strange that she doesn't remember me."
Even this had an obvious hole in it.
Suppose Aether truly had lost all her memories.
If even her memories of family were gone, would she have told Rote that she had an older sister?
And what about the times she'd talked in her sleep, begging to be sent home? Would she have gazed at Pitchblende Mountain and made such a meaningful remark about her homeland lying beyond it?
"What business brings our young Lady Saliere out at this late hour?"
"I'm looking for Aether."
"Ah, I see. Me too, actually."
The girl retreated several more steps. The distance between them was now about ten meters.
"Go back for tonight. It's a bad time."
It was a cryptic thing to say.
"What?"
"I said I'll find my sister, so you go back. Stay here too long and you'll meet with misfortune."
"This is House Saliere territory."
"It's also the Triplet Point where the Beastkin Federation and the Demon Continent meet."
"Either way, I'm not leaving until I find Aether."
"...Is that so?"
The silver-haired girl flicked ash from her cigarette and let out a loose laugh. Whether the laugh came from bitterness or was a cold sneer masking a lie, Rote couldn't tell.
Only one fact was clear.
Something about this situation felt deeply wrong.
—Clank-grind.
"What was that?"
An alien noise came from the underbrush. It issued from a spot slightly away in a straight line from where the silver-haired girl stood.
It was not a sound a human or a beastman could make, at the very least.
It was an animal noise—the rhythmic tread of a quadruped like a dog or a cat crunching through leaf litter as it moved through the forest.
—Clank-grind!
No ordinary animal made a sound like that.
The spin of a cylinder. The meshing of bearings. The noise of something iron twisting its jaws and emitting a blunt mechanical cry.
Rote herself had heard such a noise once or twice before.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Four heavy impacts, one after another.
Two wolf-shaped Magic Beasts emerged between the oaks.
"Fenrir...?"
A deep violet mane. Externally protruding hydraulic suspension. Eyes like curved golden magatama.
There was no doubt. They were Calamity-class Magic Beasts—Cobalt Fenrirs.
This was territory managed by House Saliere. Not even a high-grade magic beast, let alone a Calamity-class, was ever supposed to appear here.
She had no time to untangle her chaotic thoughts.
"Danger!"
Why a Calamity-class had shown up here wasn't what mattered at that moment. Rote shouted at the top of her lungs toward the silver-haired girl.
There were beasts behind her. At this rate, she'd be attacked. She had to run, now.
But it didn't take long for Rote to realize.
"...!"
The beasts weren't after the silver-haired girl.
They were after her.
The two Fenrirs swiftly circled past where the girl stood and closed in on Rote at terrifying speed. It happened in a heartbeat. Having reacted too slowly, Rote felt her nerves go numb.
Razor claws flew at her face—blades that looked like three-dimensional castings of a steel scythe. If those hit her, her head would be torn clean off.
The spells Rote had stocked were useless. High-class Magic Arts could only bring down High-class Magic Beasts at best.
Her life flashed before her eyes. Extreme terror triggered her sympathetic nervous system. Her legs shook and her heart hammered wildly.
"Ah...."
Rote let out a low sigh.
I'm dying.
"Ha. Why'd these bastards have to come charging out and make a scene?"
—BOOM!
In that split second, something streaked past. It moved at nearly the speed of light, so she couldn't make out its form.
Almost simultaneously, an explosion rang out as if it were tearing heaven and earth in half. The shockwave shook the trees and shifted the currents of air.
"......?"
Rote, who had been curled up, slowly lifted her head. Right in front of her, she heard a click of the tongue.
—Clank.
Two Fenrirs lay limp on either side of her. One had a grievous wound on its back, the other on its flank.
"They startled me, jumping out like that."
The silver-haired girl popped another Mana Cigarette between her lips and summoned a staff. A staff retrieved from subspace was shaped by its owner's level of magical skill and past experience. The staff the girl produced looked similar to the one Aether used.
Were they really sisters?
She jabbed each Fenrir once with the staff, then subdued them outright. Their olive-colored wire-mass tails drooped limply—a sign of submission.
"Good heavens."
She had suppressed Calamity-class Magic Beasts in one blow. Not only that, she'd forced them to their knees without killing them.
Rote had never heard of such a thing. There were no records anywhere of anyone taming a Magic Beast. Yet the girl before her had just done it.
—Clank-grind, click.
The girl grimaced as she stroked each of the two prostrate, submissive Fenrirs in turn.
"This is why I told you to go back. It's filthy-dangerous here right now, so go home, cover yourself with a blanket, and sleep."
Suddenly, Rote didn't know what to think.
She had always considered the Gold-Eyes as nothing more than just that. She'd only known them as a tragic race with yellow irises who couldn't wield magic unless mana was applied from the outside.
But now, Rote had begun to feel a baffling unease from the girl in front of her. That unease was gradually spreading into questions about the Gold-Eye Tribe as a whole.
"Just what are..."
"No more nagging. Go."
The girl's tone had sharpened compared to earlier. In the full darkness, her fathomless golden eyes gleamed whitely.
Because that point gave off such an uncanny dissonance.
Because she had come, without fully realizing it, to fear that girl.
Because the Gold-Eye Tribe itself had begun to instill in her a nameless, reasonless terror.
She didn't think she could continue the search any further.
"What's Count Saliere's daughter doing, dawdling like this? Get moving."
Stroking the Fenrirs' bodies, the girl urged her to retreat again. Forgetting even her intent to find Aether, Rote turned and fled desperately down the fog-choked mountainside.