An Academy? You've Lost Your Mind — 5
We followed the shore for a long while before the harbor finally came into sight.
Victoria's gaze climbed to the mountaintop again and again. She was measuring the harbor against her own position, reading the lay of the land as she walked.
The harbor was in a considerable state. Buildings burned down to their frames, wreckage, blood flung across the walls and left exactly where it had fallen. Even so, soldiers in heavy, solemn armor were clearing the ground around them.
Brass-gold skeletons. Clockwork turning here and there. Now and then an exhaust vent breathing a mist that glittered blue. The heavy armor was not merely armor. It was a reinforced exoskeleton, built to lend its strength to the one inside it. The technology Victoria studied at school had gone into the making of it.
Perhaps that was why her eyes would not come down.
She had one of my hands caught in hers, so I watched the soldiers with her. Seeing one of them lift a section of a half-burned, collapsed building as if it were nothing, I thought of a small crane. Once those in the heavy armor had hauled the weight aside, people dressed in uniform rather than plate went in to search.
Now and then a soldier came out carrying something. Sometimes it was a sahagin's corpse. Sometimes it was a person's.
Sahagin bodies were thrown into a pit on the outskirts of the harbor. Human bodies were laid in the middle of the square and covered with white cloth. Letting my eyes travel over the scene, I gathered they were setting the dead out so they could be identified. I could see older people confirming a face beneath the white cloth and breaking into wails.
I had wondered why anyone would cover a body if the face still had to be seen. Then I watched the insects that had been circling settle on the dead, and I understood. You lift the cloth to confirm a face and find it seething with bugs. That would be rather awful.
Victoria, for her part, did not spare the sight a single glance. She was wholly absorbed in admiring the heavy armor.
After she had wandered the town and drunk her fill of it, she put on an awkward smile and dragged me off somewhere.
Lodgings. Closer to a hostel than a hotel, and cheap. Two floors, a long corridor, doors opening out onto the hall.
Victoria and I turned a mud-smeared handle and stepped into a room.
In my faded memories, the layout resembled those lodgings set down alone in the middle of the wilderness in American films. The man in those faded memories, of course, had not seen the inside in a film. He had seen it in a game full of zombies.
Set aside the lack of a television, and the room was not so different from that memory. If there was anything worth noting, it was that every room, surprisingly, had its own place to wash and its own toilet. As technology advances, the washing space comes indoors first, and the toilet follows after. By the measure of those faded memories, toilets had not been inside lodgings this cheap for very long. For a civilization that gleamed the color of brass, the technology was unexpectedly well developed—and it had spread all the way down to ordinary people.
The open door and the footprints stuck fast to the floor caught my eye first. Follow those prints, and they had touched nothing else. They had come straight in and taken only Victoria.
She walked into the room as if she had every right to it, looked around, and let out a sigh of relief. Then she began gathering her things and pushing them into a travel bag.
"You there! What are you doing! Don't tell me you've come to steal someone else's belongings in the middle of all this!"
A shout from outside the door. I turned my head. An old man stood beyond it with a cane, bellowing.
"Are you the owner? It's my luggage. I came to collect it."
Victoria answered as if it were nothing. Whether the old man watched or not, she packed quickly and shoved the rest into the bag.
Clack!
She shut the rather thick travel bag with a loud report, picked it up, and walked straight outside.
"You... you're the child who disappeared last night. You are, aren't you..."
Shock lay over the man's face as he stared at Victoria, and beneath it, bewilderment and doubt. It was subtly unlike the look people wear when someone they believed dead walks back into view. There was an odd excess of anxiety in it—the face of a man who has done something wrong and fears being found out.
Victoria, as if she had not noticed, went out the door.
Thud!
She set the bag down hard in front of the old man.
"A great many things have happened. I'm exhausted, truly, but a ship comes at noon and I have to catch it. It's a mercy the monsters didn't touch my things. I'll be gone before noon, so I don't owe anything extra, do I?"
As if flattened by her momentum, the old man nodded with a sour face. Then he saw me inside the room and cried out in surprise.
"And what is that child! Weren't you sleeping alone? Then you owe an extra charge!"
"That child is someone I rescued when I was taken."
Victoria answered with a perfectly calm face, and the old man shut his mouth at once. It was full of discontent and suspicion. He did not look like a man who had only been picking a quarrel over the fee.
Even so, Victoria pressed the key from near the entrance against his chest, handed it over, and looked at me.
"Let's go."
"All right."
I followed her out. Then I found contempt and disgust on her face, and confirmed that both were directed at the old man.
Once the lodgings were well behind us, I asked her.
"You're not going to blame him?"
"You're quick, too."
Victoria said it as she strode along with the bag.
"I don't know how deep he's in. Whether he opened the door only as the price of staying alive, or whether handing people over was something he already did, or whether there was some arrangement between them. I can't tell."
Leather shoes gone stiff with caked blood stepped into a puddle.
Splash.
There was anger in it. She had known the old man dealt with the sahagin.
"But the ship's right in front of us. This isn't the time to sort out right and wrong. Miss it, and we won't get a cabin. We'll be sitting the whole day."
A great many people were on the move for the start of the holidays. Nothing to be done about it. From Victoria's memory, fail to buy a ticket two or three weeks ahead and the price climbed viciously, and the good seats were gone.
"And the old man has no one left to deal with now, does he? Leave him be. It shouldn't be much of a problem."
This, from a schoolgirl who had taken up an iron crowbar and remade herself into a sahagin butcher. She was not joking.
I nodded.
"By the way. What am I supposed to call you?"
I had already explained that I had no name. Still, without something to call a person, it is difficult to deal with them. For a moment like this, there is a simple method.
"Please make one."
"You're asking someone else to name you?"
She could stare at me in disbelief all she liked.
"A name is only a symbol. Think of it as inventing a nickname, and give me something that will do."
"Just... just give me a little time."
Victoria wore the face of someone confronted with far too large a problem, and decided to set it aside.
I nodded. A name is not so important, in any case.
More pressing than that: set beside Choseol, this body is far too short. Even a brief distance demands a great deal of walking. Will this body grow tall? I hope it does. When I was Choseol, things were easier than when I was Rebecca.
While I was thinking it, Victoria and I reached the harbor.
Ahead of us lay a ship fitted with enormous wheels and clockwork. A battleship from the sahagin's memory. Along its flank were not cannons, but mechanisms that hurled beams of light, and whatever those beams struck—sahagin and living weapons alike—evaporated. Literally.
"Insane..."
Whether the matter of naming me had already blown clean out of her head, Victoria stared up at the battleship with the soul gone from her face. Through her eyes, her gaze clung to the places where springs and machinery were packed tight together. Victoria loves the things she studies.
Bwaaaaaaahn!
"Ah! The boat! Hey, hurry!"
A smaller boat, some distance from the great ship, sounded its horn, and Victoria clutched the bag to her chest with the look of an office worker running late and broke into a dead sprint.
I chased with everything I had and only just reached the boat.
"Ticket, please."
Still gasping, Victoria drew hers out. The moment the crewman pointed at me and demanded a ticket of my own, she startled and cried out.
"Isn't there something you can do for one child?"
"No."
An argument broke out with the man taking the tickets. Well, the ticket was for a single person. Nothing to be done.
I thought that might be where we parted. After a long wrangle, a few coins slipped into the ticket man's pocket, and every problem came undone as if by magic.
And so I was allowed aboard.
"Whew. Good thing he was a flexible man."
"So a bribe is what you call flexibility."
"Don't you learn things like that."
Speaking to me as one speaks to a child, Victoria led me onto the boat.
The boat was larger than I had thought. No—strictly speaking, this boat was quite large as well. The battleship beside it was simply so vast that this one had seemed small.
Victoria, shaken free of her near-collapse almost at once, went in with the ticket. She checked the cabin number written on it and soon reached a small private room. She stepped inside, flung the luggage down, and lay on the little bed. She did not get up.
"Haaah. I'm dying. Really. Sorry. I'm going to sleep. I am genuinely at my limit."
To the roar of the ship getting underway, she drove her head into the bed and began to draw deep breaths. She had been that tired.
From the fall of night until dawn, she had raged through the sahagin's city. Early on, whenever sahagin were near, she hid, or lured them somewhere and quietly assassinated them, bringing the iron crowbar down on their heads. Once she had a weapon of her own, she stopped avoiding them and went about the slaughter in the open.
Victoria likely did not understand this, but they had not hunted her with any real urgency, either. The look on the fish-folk's faces had been the look of those regarding their own kind. Not kin yet—someone who would soon become kin. That Victoria happened to be a girl had weighed heavily as well. If a creature this strong joined the kin, the offspring would be excellent.
Intentions tangled together, and luck held. This schoolgirl, fortunate enough to butcher every last one of them, finished the sahagin in the end. She had nearly failed at the last. There was the misfortune of my being summoned, and so her life was spared.
In short, the sleep and the fatigue she had put off until now came rushing in, and she sank into a deep sleep.
I got her out of her clothes as decently as I could, changed her into the nightclothes packed in the bag, and sat beside her until she woke.