An Academy? That's Insane — 13
I was walking the city with Victoria's hand in mine when a large restaurant came into view, and we went in.
We took a seat well out of the way, and once I had gotten some meat and something sweet into her, the child seemed to settle a little and find her strength again.
"What do we do about my dad..."
"He is a good father, at the very least. Days upon days of being ground down at the company had worn his reason thin, but he never crossed the line, and he never moved merely for the sake of succeeding."
For the week he had gone in, he never came home. The pressure of his results had been hounding him, and the moment he went back for a single day, slept, and showed his face again, they fired him on the spot.
It wasn't hard to see.
I took a bite.
Unlike the sweet, greasy cake I had eaten aboard the ship last time, this place had a clean one. Fruit and fresh cream, and only just enough of either — delicious. Things like this do taste good.
"Earlier, the two of you were talking about something only you understood."
With the sugar reaching her head, she seemed able to think again. Victoria fixed her eyes on me and opened her mouth.
"You mean Dad could have succeeded if he'd crossed the line? What was that, exactly?"
Don't tell a story only you understand. Explain it properly. That was the question.
"There were two, at least, in that moment."
So I decided to tell her both possibilities.
"Two?"
"One. Setting your ability on the examination table. A special ability makes fine material for research — all the more when the ability is a powerful one. And while they were at it, a way to sell me off as well."
At my words, Victoria quietly lowered her head.
She understood at once. That if he had simply given up a single child, there were all sorts of things he could have done from then on. And besides, Victoria was Morris's daughter. Had a father offered to experiment on a daughter of his own, priority would have fallen to him almost as a matter of course.
"I knew there was a path like that. Then what's the other one."
"Do you remember, among the things Mr. Morris was explaining, the technology that draws mana out of the air and converts it into rotational motion?"
"The one that's too inefficient to be worth using? What about it?"
I lifted my fork and pointed it at the last remaining piece of cake.
"This is a person. This fork is only that machine, with the order of things changed a little."
I speared the cake and raised it.
"For as long as this cake is here, it makes power efficient enough to satisfy them. At least."
Set aside the fact that it grinds people up and burns them for fuel, and it is a passable enough way to generate power. They say the same art existed in Daegon's world as well. Set beside the method that grinds in even the soul, the efficiency was so poor that it flared once and vanished.
"A monster, then."
Victoria looked at me, the spirit gone out of her face.
I had eaten until I was full, and so I set the fork down. I was watching her eat when a bang came from outside, all at once.
I turned. Beyond the restaurant's glass, far off at the intersection, several cars were tangled together, and from the smoke curling up over them it seemed there had been an accident.
"Huh? What. An accident?"
Not only Victoria — everyone who had been eating rose from their seats, murmuring, and drifted toward the window. Watching is fun.
Victoria wanted to look as well, but the cake in front of her seemed too precious to abandon, so she stayed where she was and pushed it quickly into her mouth.
If you're going to do that, take it with you.
It was the instant I thought so.
Crash!
KRRRRRRK!
Something enormous shattered the window and charged inside, and it happened to plow straight into the people gathered along the glass. The only face of the building that opened onto the street had been packed with them, so it was only natural that a thing coming in from outside would kill.
Chunks of flesh flew in every direction with the shards, and in a moment the place was drenched in splinters and meat.
Something that had struck people. It was a taxi — an unmanned machine in the shape of a centaur with its legs swapped for wheels. The front was utterly destroyed, and a thick red fluid was seeping through the gap of the door, as if someone had been riding inside.
The interesting part was that the wheels of the ruined machine were still spinning at a furious speed.
Then I heard swearing behind me. A familiar voice. Victoria spat a thick rope of filthy curses, went to where the people had been hit to check for survivors, and, finding none, came over.
"What. Why's it still running when it's like this? The analytical engine looks like it's already stopped."
She cut herself off, snatched a water bottle from a nearby table, and hurled it. The bottle shattered, and in the same instant a film of water was sucked in toward the middle of the mechanism.
A moment later it hissed, and a lump glowing red-hot shot out along with the water. According to Victoria's memory, it was a device for turning the mana in the atmosphere into motive power.
It was not, however, Morris's invention. What went in and what came out resembled the thing he had explained earlier, but the principle was different. If one had to name the difference, it was the difference between a steam locomotive and a diesel train. Morris's invention was the diesel side.
Anyway. The thing boiled away every drop of the water wrapped around it at once. It was so hot that the moment it struck the wooden floor, the wood caught fire.
So Victoria asked the owner — still unable to gather himself before the carnage in front of his eyes — to turn the water on full, then took hold of it and poured it down for a long while. Only when the surroundings were soaked through, soaked until the corpses nearby were pushed out into the street, did the thing at last lose its heat and become a lump of machinery.
For the record, the wheels that had kept spinning even after being driven into the wall began to lose their power the moment the device was pulled free, and now they were on the verge of stopping.
"Why did the thermal runaway happen? Wasn't that something that only occurs when the mana's thick enough to choke you?"
Victoria muttered it as she fetched something like a fire iron from the shop and took the machine apart. White smoke rose each time she split a piece, and the membrane of water before her stopped all of it. She handled it as freely as her own body.
While she was tearing into the machine, I stepped outside.
The city was a wreck. Not only the intersection I had seen from far off — black smoke was rising everywhere my eyes could reach. It wasn't aimed at any particular place. Accidents had broken out across most of the city called Berne City.
It wasn't only the taxis of the Cogni Transport Company. Most of the vehicles seemed to have surged out of control; everywhere I looked, they were buried in buildings, or in one another. Perhaps it wasn't the vehicles alone. Anything using the same device had a good chance of having failed.
When I looked around through the eyes of the five working on the outskirts of Berne City, nothing like an accident showed itself. They were simply at work on a construction site. No tall buildings stood nearby, so through the eyes of those laboring up on the scaffolding the view reached a very long way — and the only thing that met them was a faint thread of smoke rising from the heart of Berne City.
In other words, this was a phenomenon occurring only inside the city.
"What is this."
Victoria, having taken the machine apart and pried into it, came up beside me and spoke. She didn't seem to be asking in the hope of an answer.
"Dad... Let's go see Dad. Belle."
A reaction worthy of a child. And the figure from that day, butchering sahagin — where had that gone?
Victoria clenched her teeth and set off toward the company we had left that morning. She stopped before the building even came into view, because she met Morris, who had been running this way.
"Victoria!"
"Dad!"
Father and daughter threw their arms around each other. A touching reunion.
"Sweetheart. First, let's go to Bee."
Bee is Beatrice's nickname. Seeing to his wife at once — an excellent husband. Thinking so, I followed the two of them as they crossed the street.
We walked a city caught in the middle of a disaster, the sound of explosions and of something burning tangled together with screams and with weeping. Among the cries of the bewildered people, some were shrieking that their magic would not come.
Lift one's eyes only a little from the ground, and buildings already on fire came into view — not one or two, but a great many. It would have been difficult to call it merely the fire of vehicles leaping upward. The flames showed only on the upper floors.
The device Victoria had pulled out earlier was used in buildings as well as in vehicles. If this had been brought on by the environment itself, then fire would be breaking out everywhere.
Given the temperaments of the two walking ahead of me, they ought to have been saying something about what was unfolding — and yet they clutched each other's hands and went on without a word. They must have been that tense.
And that desperate hope of theirs was, in the end, rewarded. Between the burning buildings stood Beatrice, shouting at people who looked to be her subordinates that they were to get the people out first.
Victoria ran at once and threw her arms around her.
Beatrice startled at the sight of Victoria, then saw Morris behind her and smiled. Seeing him safe seemed to have lifted her spirits.
"I'm glad you're safe, too."
She came up to me and looked my body over, this way and that. This flesh was tougher than the last by a degree that made comparison pointless, so there was no need to look so hard.
Beatrice glanced about and asked me.
"Do you know what this is?"
"I don't."
"So you don't know either. Really, what is happening..."
Beatrice sighed.
Surprisingly, she wasn't suspecting me. Had she let her guard down over nothing more than a week of living together? This person. She had been terribly wary at the start, and yet the speed at which she loosened that wariness was strangely quick. Convenient for me, so I was glad of it.
She took me over to where Morris and Victoria were, then looked at Morris and spoke.
"Morris. Take Tori and go home. Right now."
"No. Bee. Not that way. We have to get out of the city."
But Morris shook his head. He looked around, and opened his mouth.
"Morris?"
"Right now the Air-Absorbing Rotary Engines are malfunctioning on residual mana — so. Setting the technical terms aside, the city is full of bombs on the verge of going off, and the mana we can actually use has dropped to almost nothing. It's safer to go outside, where magic can still be used."
An engineer is an engineer. Morris, having judged at least what was happening here, explained it with a cool face. It was amusing, the way he switched partway through to an explanation easy to follow, once he saw the look on Beatrice as she stared at him, plainly asking what on earth he was saying.
Anyway. Beatrice nodded, then went straight in among the people and shouted for them to take everyone at once and make for a certain district.
Meanwhile, Victoria had been looking up.
Up.
High on a building, a child who had come to a window to escape the fire was hanging outside the railing. But the flames had already heated that railing until it scorched. Victoria's eyes were on the child as the child fell, and she swept a hand through the air. The atmosphere dried to the bone, and the mass of water that appeared caught the child plunging toward the ground, safe and whole.
Victoria looked down at her own hand and took a step forward.
"Tori?"
Before Morris could catch her, Victoria slipped free of his hand and ran toward the fire. A stream of water surged up out of the sewer, racing ahead of her, and put the flames down.
It is always this way with a person who helps someone. Because she can, she does the thing she can do. She was not especially bracing her courage, nor resigning herself to death, and there was nothing in her head so noble as the wish to bestow a kindness.
In a space where no special power remained, a person who could use a special power moved without a thought in her head, simply to save people.