The Gold-Eye Tribe and the Human Race (2)
The Gold-Eye Tribe and the Human Race (2)
Akasha decided to stay at the Saliere mansion until the storm passed.
I wasn't sure why, but things had turned out this way. Of course, I had thought about infiltrating the mansion. But who could have predicted events would unfold like this?
My face still burned whenever I recalled how I had gotten inside. The original mansion-infiltration plan had been cleanly wiped from my mind long ago, and all that remained was humiliation.
"Tch."
How could one of the Great Machines of the Nine Heavens, whom everyone feared, have suffered such disgrace? It was unbecoming of a Demon Army corps commander.
Still, I was not the sort to wallow in weak-minded reflections. What was done was done. Brooding over an irreversible past improved nothing. It only wasted precious time.
So right now, I needed to focus on fulfilling my role. Akasha snapped herself alert and looked ahead.
"This is my room."
While those thoughts were being sorted out, Rote had guided Akasha to her room.
She turned the doorknob, and the interior came into full view. It was a spacious room with two beds and two desks. Rote pointed to the bed nearer the window.
"That's your bed. It originally belonged to Aether, but, well, things happened."
Rote gave an awkward smile and scratched her cheek.
The household staff mistook Akasha for Aether. For the moment, Rote was the only one who recognized this girl as a different being from Aether.
Even to maintain peace in the household, she had no choice but to lodge the beast-like girl in her own room. That was the only way to keep an eye on whether she was up to anything.
Akasha glanced around with curious eyes. Before long, she was looking out the window and let out an exclamation of admiration.
"Nice view. Pitchblende Mountain is visible at a glance."
"It's raining outside, you know."
The sky was weeping mournfully, like a woman who had lost the man she loved. In this kind of torrential downpour, you couldn't see Falling Dragon Peak, let alone the town right in front of you.
Yet she claimed she could see the mountain.
The white-haired girl turned around. In the gloom of a room that admitted not a single ray of sunlight, Akasha's golden eyes glowed faintly.
With a flash, the dark clouds spat lightning at just the right moment.
"It's just a figure of speech."
Was it because the ground had chilled from the monsoon? The day had been unusually cold for summer.
"Why are you so stiff? I'm bored, so let's talk."
I decided not to dwell on the Gold-Eye Tribe. For now, I would just accept the girl in front of me as an ordinary girl of the same age.
She swallowed, working her throat as if trying to force down a thick pill. Rote had frequented social gatherings and tea parties with her father since she was little, so striking up conversation with a stranger wasn't particularly difficult for her.
She wondered what she could talk about to make this girl happy.
She didn't even have time to agonize over it. Akasha, who had been scanning the room, spotted a stack of papers on the desk, took an interest, and picked them up.
"This has something interesting written on it."
The girl let out a subtle sigh. It was an exhale laden with admiration—or something beyond it.
What Akasha had picked up was a calculation sheet filled with densely arrayed, complex equations. Aether had written on it a few days earlier and left it lying around. She'd told Rote not to throw it away, so Rote hadn't tidied it up.
"What's written here is the Multidimensional Flow Equation."
Rote had heard of the Multidimensional Flow Equation.
She had only heard of it, of course. Was it Advanced Water Magic? It was advanced material taught in that subject, so Rote couldn't know what the equation form looked like—and she had no need to.
"You know what's written there?"
"Yeah, it's something of a memory for me. I worked on it with my older sister when I was little."
"Did you solve it?"
"No, we never got that far. We didn't even know if a general solution existed. I gave up partway through, and my sister probably fiddled with it for another week or so before giving up too."
Rote received a sheet of paper from Akasha. Complicated expressions were expanded all over it.
Rote had studied a fair amount of math, but she couldn't make head or tail of it. There were many symbols she saw for the first time, and more than a few places where intermediate steps had been skipped in the calculations.
Akasha tilted her head and asked.
"Is this your scribbling?"
"No. It's something Aether stopped in the middle of solving."
At Rote's answer, the girl let out a short, "Hmm."
"The handwriting is completely different from my sister's."
At the very least, it was not the rounded handwriting you'd expect from a girl who had just entered the academy. It was more like worm-scrawl written by a man in his thirties after drinking.
"But the shape of the equation expansion is exactly the same as my sister's."
"How can you even tell something like that?"
"We're identical twins. These things are weirdly similar. Especially dropping the integral variable in the notation—she did that then, and she does it now. Here, look at this."
Akasha showed her a single line of a partial differential equation.
"Do you see the line right below this? The numerical solution of the line above is right underneath. It means she skipped all the intermediate steps and wrote the answer the moment she saw it. Most Gold-Eyes can't do it straight like that, you know."
The Multidimensional Flow Equation has four independent variables alone. No matter what, it is absolutely impossible to solve through mental calculation with a human brain.
"...She's a monster."
Thanks to that, Rote's vigilance grew even sharper.
**
From the moment Akasha entered the household, Rote did not leave her side for even an instant.
She wasn't doing this out of fondness. Quite the opposite.
Rote did not wholly trust Akasha. No—she had begun to feel an inexplicable suspicion toward the Gold-Eye Tribe as a whole.
What intrigued her most was how Akasha had subdued the Calamity-class Fenrir—two of them, at that. But if she asked, it felt like she might not get away unscathed.
"Hey, what are you going to do today?"
"Prep for second semester."
It had been nearly a week since they began sharing a routine.
In that time, Akasha struck up conversation with Rote whenever she found a spare moment. Mostly everyday chitchat. Each time, Rote had answered with the bare minimum of words.
It was all to eliminate uncertainty.
"You're being boring again. Since you shut yourself up in the study every day, I feel like I'm getting sick just from the smell of books."
"Nobles have a duty to study hard, even for the sake of the nation's future."
"The nation's future?"
Akasha let out a short laugh.
"Sure, work hard at it."
She then fetched a few books from a nearby shelf and seated herself opposite Rote. Rote glanced sharply at them; every single one was a novel.
Most of them were romance novels her sister had bought.
A forbidden love story about a prince and a princess from enemy nations who held secret trysts; the tale of a young man who scoured every corner of the continent to obtain the "fruit of a thousand-year-old dogwood" and save a duke's daughter dying of an incurable disease; the story of a medieval princess who played the violin in a kingdom devastated by rebellion and fell to her death from a palace spire—and so on.
Under her sister's influence, Rote had read each of those stories at least once. They had all been excellent.
"Do you like romance novels?"
"Just a way to kill time."
Seeing a virtually expressionless Gold-Eye reading a romance novel was a rare sight.
Every few pages, Akasha smiled to herself. The fact that she expressed emotion while reading a novel meant she possessed at least some human traits.
"This one's been romanticized."
"Hm?"
"No, I mean that princess who played the violin. The ending I know is a little different."
"Sometimes the story changes depending on the publisher. The version you read—how was it?"
"Uh, well."
Akasha's lips moved slightly. She seemed to be debating for a moment whether she should say it or not.
The story of the princess of a fallen kingdom who takes her own life to preserve her fidelity and integrity. Rote was quite fond of that tale, so a strange curiosity stirred in her about the other ending Akasha knew.
"The fall—that much was the same."
"And?"
"She doesn't die."
"What do you mean, 'doesn't die?'"
At the bland answer, Rote let out a laugh.
"So what happens after that?"
"After she jumps from the castle and the impact paralyzes her limbs, a being called the Demon God appears before her. The setup is that the Demon God is the ego of a fallen Spirit King—a kind of death god that appears only before those who harbor deep lingering attachments."
The Demon God slowly approaches the princess as she lies dying. It picks up the violin she had cast aside along with her body, repairs it in an instant, and begins to play a requiem on it.
A requiem: a song of solace for those already dead, or soon to die. While listening to that song, the princess vomits blood.
"And the girl, right there on the spot, says this."
─ O Demon God. I offer you my soul; grant me in return an eternal body.
"What, the story goes completely off the rails? Where did her secret commoner lover go, and how did the story end up like that?"
"Who knows."
Akasha shrugged and closed the book. Undaunted, she now opened an even thicker volume.
Let's see. This time....
[6974 (Uncensored Edition) ─ George Oyle]
Wait a moment.
"Y-you, what is that...! Where did you get that!"
"This? It was shoved in a corner over there."
"That's an erotic novel! Put it back where you found it right now...!"
"Erotic novel? What's that?"
"That, that, that...! Anyway, those exist!"
"I'm not the type who can stand not being curious."
Ignoring Rote's warning, Akasha flipped open the thick hardcover.
"Let's see. On a clear and chilly day in April, Dil—......."
"S-stooooop—!!"
Rote shot from her seat and snatched the book away. The memory of reading this in her naive childhood was a separate trauma for Rote. So much so that hearing just the first sentence was enough to make both her cheeks blaze red.
"You'll really regret it if you read this!"
"Fine, fine. Give it back. I'll put it back where it was."
"I'm coming with you."
The Saliere mansion's library was large enough to occupy an entire floor of a modest library, and held just as many books. Because of that, returning this forbidden book to its original spot required nearly a full minute of walking.
"It was in the corner here."
"Are you sure it was around here?"
"I don't remember the exact spot. Just shove it anywhere."
Akasha took the book from Rote, found a vaguely suitable location, and pushed it between the bookshelves. And from inside, where the book had slid in so smoothly, there came a clicking sound.
"Huh?"
It was unmistakably the sound of a switch being triggered.
Her intuition was correct. A bookshelf behind them scraped across the floor as it moved aside, revealing a concealed space of roughly four pyeong within.
"This is...."
It was an object Rote had seen once before.
"Why is this in here?"
A machine that converted raw pitchblende ore into yellow powder—an assemblage of family techniques that could rightfully be called the essence of House Saliere's magical engineering.
It was a Refining Device.