Chapter 227
Winter deepened, and at last the day arrived. Vacation.
I was never a body made for diligent study, and my grades were never going to shake the shape of my future, so a school break meant very little to me. Even so, this one mattered. It was time for Victoria to go home.
Not to Berne City, of course. That place was no longer an ordinary city. It had become a land the wounded ran in bitter seclusion, and people no longer drew near it. The cutting-edge metropolis was gone without a trace; only a ruined city remained. Monsters had crawled in through the gaps where the defenses had thinned, and the districts where people had grown scarce were already no different from the wild.
Clearing a place like that meant someone had to walk it and deal with what they found. But I did say it was closed, didn't I? The very people who could have handled it were not allowed in. The empty ground was vast, and there was no one on it.
The Harvesters?
Weak. Astonishingly, the ones who possessed superhuman power were the weak ones, because they hardly understood monsters and were arrogant simply for having strength. Superhumans who hurled flame, commanded water, flung ice. But monsters were not only mighty beasts. There were things like ghosts and spirits among them as well. I had seen such creatures often enough in the first world, and in the second I had met them in person. In this world, too, they were simply ordinary monsters.
Before a Harvester could raise a flame or loose a jet of water, they died by way of something that made no rational sense. True ghosts. A pair of scissors came flying, opened the belly, and dragged the innards out. Or a clockwork machine with no power source moved through angles it should never have been able to reach, seized its victim, and fed them straight into a grinder. None of it was force. It was a curse made manifest, which meant that power was unnecessary on the other side as well. A tool that could shield the body from the curse was enough, and the thing glanced off on its own.
From the memories I gained in the third world, I knew there were articles meant to keep such things from appearing at all, and firms that dealt with them as a profession. Most of those preventive goods, though, had broken once they were saturated with mana fouled by the power devices. Even where the specialist firms survived, the infrastructure was in ruins, so all they could manage was a stopgap. Put one of those monsters down, and before long a similar one appeared. Originally a small clockwork device would have been enough, but every such device belonged to the corporations. They could not be used in Berne City.
No one left in the great city knew the old methods of exorcism, and the clockwork machines themselves could no longer be used, so the place went on pissing on a frostbitten foot and calling it treatment. Small cities still had the old ways, of course. What hobbled them now was the insularity that had sprung up this time. They would not trust outsiders, and they drove them off.
To put it bluntly, Berne City had collapsed completely. It had become a closed city crammed with wounded, broken people. A city like that is bound to turn vicious. If new blood is not transfused, it begins to rot from the inside. It had already done so once: a class society built around the strongest superpowered Harvesters. It would happen again. Of course, now that magic could be used, it would not be only the superpowered Harvesters climbing. Simply the strong would rise.
And one amusing detail. The remnant army Richard Gaston had led back then relocated to Nantes Harbor. Most of the soldiers and their families began, with the harbor as their foothold, to build a city all over again.
What did that mean? The army had stopped defending Berne City. The city and the army that had once protected it had parted into separate things. More precisely, Marquis Gaston's domain had shrunk to Nantes Harbor, and Berne City had become masterless ground. Nominally it was still entered as the marquis's land, but Richard Gaston, who had taken the seat of the dead Marquis Gaston, had abandoned Berne City.
There were several reasons.
First: they had killed too many of each other. The awkwardness of it sent them across the river. In other words, it was close to I don't know whether you'll cut my throat in the night while I sleep, so let us keep our distance. Distrust, in short.
And second. The aftermath of the slump could not be escaped here either. If anything, this was ground zero. Most of the productive power had come from clockwork machines, and they had thrown all of it away in a single instant. Relations had soured so sharply that it did not even end in mass unemployment, the way it had in the capital.
Yes. Society itself had gone backward.
And third: Richard Gaston's succession. I knew it because Richard Gaston was a Harvester, but he was little more than a bastard. He was the current head's younger brother, and since the head had no children, it looked as though Richard ought to inherit. The head's wife, however, raised an objection. Aristocratic political mechanics that even Richard himself poorly understood had tangled around him, and outside the army under his command there was nothing he could do. So it was less that he had simply let go, and closer to the truth that he could not lay a hand on the city at all.
Reduced to a single line, it was this. Berne City was finished.
In fact, even Beatrice's replies to Victoria arrived from another city — some countryside a considerable distance from Berne.
The evening of the closing ceremony, Victoria was packing in the dormitory, so I went to her room.
"Are you going home?"
"Bell?"
"Yes. It's me."
Victoria stopped mid-packing and looked at me. The room behind her was already spotless. She had finished getting ready to take up her bags and go.
"Yeah. I ought to go see my parents."
She stared straight at me as she said it, then opened her mouth with a calm face.
"Half a year's gone by since we met."
"Yes. It has."
We had met around the time summer break began, and now winter break was starting. Just about that long.
"I was shocked from the very first meeting. You were a monster over twenty-five feet, weren't you? And then, all of a sudden, this cute little girl."
Victoria was looking back.
"I went home, and there was that dangerous business in Berne City, and suddenly you were healing people. After that I even met the king, and I got into the Royal Academy — a place I never could have entered otherwise."
As she spoke, she shoved the last of her things into the bag, shut it completely, and fastened the clasp.
Click.
"And after that — fighting some witch, my parents suddenly moving out of Berne City, letters that never came, so I rushed over and found everyone gone strange, raving mad."
She pulled the bag off the bed, lifted it, and stood.
"And it wasn't only Berne City. People in the capital went mad too, smashed my old school, and killed my teachers and my friends."
By the end, a hatred that could not be wiped clean was dripping from every word.
"Too much happened. It was hard. Too, too, too hard. So I'm going home now."
That was how she said it. As if she were so worn out it hurt. And as if she meant to part from me.
Then she pushed past me and walked away.
Yes.
So I followed her, straight along wherever she went. But when she boarded the carriage, I could not get on with her. I had no money. Victoria looked at me, gave a bleak little smile, waved, and rode off.
The carriage dwindled into the distance. I stared blankly after it, then turned my feet toward the lodging. But my feet would not lift. So I simply stood there. Thinking something might be wrong with my body, I put strength into my legs, and they did not so much as twitch.
Huh? Have I broken down?
There was nothing particularly wrong with my body. The sky was a night sky now, and if I did not go back, the people who worked at the lodging would be in trouble.
Ah. My feet were moving.
I took a single step, then stopped.
Mm…… right.
I moved my feet again and headed for the lodging. The place where Victoria had taken the carriage was not so far, so I arrived quickly. I stood at the entrance and rang the bell, and the butler came out.
"I'm going to a friend's. I'll be back."
A puzzled look crossed his face.
"At this hour, my lady?"
"She's an important friend. If I let her go like this, I don't think I'll ever see her again."
He stared at me. And instead of saying whatever else he might have said, he asked this.
"You mean to go after your friend, Victoria Vett."
Mm. He knows me well.
We had hardly spoken until now, but this place was tied to the royal household, so the odds were high that they knew exactly how I lived.
He's a royal. Shall I just take him into me, as he stands?
The royal house had sold, to other countries, the means by which I make Harvesters. If they could not use me when they needed me, it was this country that would catch the blame.
Ah. Mishandle this, and they might lock me up.
"Tell me what you require."
Hm?
I looked at the butler's face. He was truly asking. If there was something I wanted, he would do anything.
"I want to follow that girl."
"I shall have it prepared at once. A moment will be needed, so please come inside."
Saying so, the butler — a man on the cusp between middle age and old — opened the door.
"While you wait, we will change you into clothes more suitable for going out."
I nearly asked whether that was really all right, him being of the royal household, but I swallowed the words. I nodded and went in.
Inside, the maids came and dressed me not in the dress-like clothes I usually wore, but in a proper outfit with a jacket and trousers. I drank tea while I waited, and then the butler called for me. I stepped outside. A heavy-looking car was waiting in front.
Once I was inside, the butler and the maids who had looked after me for half a year stood in a line before the door. Wondering what on earth this was, I looked at them, and they bowed.
"Lady Bell. We pray you will come to see us again."
Honestly. Them, and that girl — was everyone going to talk as if we were parting forever?
"I'll be back."
When I said it, the butler smiled and shut the car door. And the car set off, straight ahead.