The Room You Can't Leave Without Submitting (1)
“I’m exhausted…….”
After classes, I slumped face-down over my desk in the classroom for a while.
The incident from the day before—when Airen and I had half-wrecked the herb warehouse—had spread through the entire school like wildfire. Students, and even professors, kept coming up to ask how on earth we had broken through the Mana Blockage Circuit. Some of them had even tried to bolt straight for the warehouse themselves, forcing the professors into a chaotic scramble just to hold them back.
The uproar that started yesterday had carried over into today, leaving me harassed without a moment’s rest. It had gotten so bad that I hadn’t managed a single word of conversation with Airen all day.
“Frey.”
“Yes.”
“We’re going to the library.”
“Do we really have to go today?”
I was worn out. Exhausted. I wanted to go home. I just wanted to rest—yet this princess didn’t seem the least bit tired. Honestly, I would have killed for a full day of sleep.
“We have to go today. Hurry up.”
“Urrrgh.”
In the end I was dragged off to the library by a relentless Airen.
It had been several days since I’d last set foot here, yet the faces inside looked exactly the same. Every single one of them was familiar.
“There are plenty of places to study at the Academy, you know. Cafés, empty classrooms, that sort of thing.”
“What are you talking about? Studying in the library with my servant—that’s clearly one of the fundamental laws of youth, isn’t it?”
“I have no idea what kind of books you’ve been reading, but no. You’re completely wrong.”
“Then you tell me, Frey. What is youth supposed to be?”
“Well, you see……”
……
I…… I don’t know either.
Come to think of it, even when we went out last weekend I had known fewer ways to have fun than Airen. How was I supposed to know the laws of youth?
“Hmm. Hmmmm.”
“See? You don’t know either. So I’m right.”
“Just because I’m wrong doesn’t mean you’re automatically right.”
“La-la-la, I can’t hear you. I already found the perfect book, so we’re studying with that.”
“A book? Please spare me.”
“What’s the big deal? You just have to follow the rules!”
But my only memories of the library’s grimoires were bad ones. What if something happened again—like seeing the young lady naked?
I might kill myself from the guilt. No—I would.
“Don’t worry. This book isn’t dangerous.”
“When did you even pull that out?!”
“Here, look.”
Airen casually started to open the book—without concentrating a single drop of mana in her hands!
“W-wait, don’t!”
“Huh? Wha—hey!”
I lunged forward and stopped her hand, then poured my own mana into the book. Hadn’t Airen herself taught me that you had to inject mana before opening these things? So why was she ignoring the rule now?
Once I confirmed the mana had successfully entered, I let out a sigh of relief.
“Whew. You should thank me for saving you. You’re surprisingly scatterbrained about things like this, Airen.”
“Hmm. Frey.”
“Yes?”
“How does the book look to you right now?”
How does it look? Well, of course it’s glowing all fresh and bright and…… glowing?
“Hold on! I already poured mana into it and opened it—why is it still glowing?!”
“This is the type of grimoire that only activates after you channel mana into it.”
“You should have told me that from the start!”
“You’re the one who poured it in on your own. Ah—here we go.”
Thud!
Familiar darkness swallowed us. We had been pulled inside the grimoire. I hurriedly prepared to redirect the book’s mental assault onto myself. Last time Airen had shouldered it alone; this time it was only right that I take it.
The problem was that I felt nothing at all. Not even the tiniest fragment of mana trying to invade me.
While I stood there bewildered, Airen appeared with a soft whoosh, just like before, her body wreathed in countless clusters of light.
“Oh dear, Frey. I was the one holding the book. Priority goes to me, you know?”
“Why do you keep taking everything onto yourself?!”
“Protecting one’s servant is a master’s duty. Hmm, I wonder what kind of space we’ll get this time?”
“What book was it in the first place?”
“I just picked one that was recommended to me. The title was definitely…… ah, right.”
The space brightened the instant before she finished speaking.
First I felt something soft under my feet. Then a rather spacious room came into view.
A bed stood in the center, and the circular walls were lined with tools so bizarre I hardly knew how to describe them. Whips, dog collars, handcuffs……?
A sense of wrongness hit me at the same moment Airen continued.
“It was a room you can’t leave without submitting.”
“……What exactly do you mean by that?”
“The person who was holding the book will be selected as the primary reader. So if you sincerely submit to me, we can get out.”
“I was the one who poured the mana in, though?”
“If someone is reading a book and the wind turns a page, you don’t say the wind read the book, do you?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop saying things that make no sense.”
I had to sincerely submit in order to leave? Me—to Airen?
I looked at her with a pleading expression. She only gave me a faint smile.
It felt as though a lead weight had dropped into my chest. She really wasn’t joking! The only person I would ever submit to for all eternity was the young lady!
“A-Airen. Is there really no other way?”
“Not that I know of. My, looks like you’ll have to become my servant if you want to get out of here.”
“No, that can’t be right. There has to be some method…… wait.”
Hold on.
“Huh?”
“What is it, Frey? Why are you suddenly making a face like you’ve achieved enlightenment?”
“The flow of mana…… is deformed.”
“What?”
Leaving a puzzled Airen behind, I read the mana currents inside the grimoire.
“The mana is densely packed, yet it’s flowing at the same speed as outside.”
That was impossible. If mana was concentrated, its flow should slow down—that was normal. In a limited space there simply wasn’t room for things to move freely.
It was like water in a completely full bottle that didn’t slosh. Yet the flow here was identical to the unconcentrated mana outside?
“Aha. Even so, I suppose the Academy left us a merciful grimoire.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Our thoughts are being accelerated right now.”
Thought acceleration, put simply, is the power to experience one second as a hundred. It means you can process in one second the amount of thinking another person would need a hundred seconds for.
Of course, a hundredfold was just an example. Looking at the mana currents…… it was nearly a thousandfold.
“Our bodies are probably still outside the grimoire this time. Only our minds were pulled in.”
“So?”
“Let’s start with the mana flow. There’s no way a current this dense wouldn’t be slow. It’s physically impossible. But there’s another possibility: what if time itself is flowing extremely quickly in this space?”
“So because time is racing, mana that ought to be crawling is actually moving fast?”
“Exactly. If time were speeding up, we should also be speaking so fast we couldn’t understand each other. But we aren’t. That leaves only one answer: our minds—the only parts of us that entered—are being accelerated at the exact same rate as the time flow inside the grimoire.”
“And why does that matter right now?”
“It matters a great deal. It means we could stay here for a hundred days and only two hours and twenty-four minutes would pass outside.”
“Wait—so we’re under a thousandfold thought acceleration?”
“That’s right. Hup.”
I kicked off my shoes and flopped onto the bed. Airen stared down at me in disbelief.
“What are you doing?”
“Resting.”
“What?”
“Since we’ve gone and entered a place with a different flow of time, we might as well rest. I told you I was tired today.”
“No, in here you have to submit to me—”
“We can figure out some workaround for that later. We’ve got plenty of time.”
“So you’re really just going to rest?”
“Yes.”
“Hey, take another look around, will you?”
I already had, but I looked again. Ah, the wallpaper was pink. And from this angle I could see a mirror fixed to the ceiling. The bizarre tools on the walls I’d already noticed, so I skipped those.
“What about the surroundings?”
“You’re seriously just going to rest…… in a place like this?”
“It’s perfect for resting. Can I go to sleep now?”
I had no intention of submitting or anything of the sort. The only people I would ever submit to were the young lady and the Duke. I had no reason to submit to Airen.
Airen looked down at me with an oddly shocked expression. Then she puffed out her cheeks and flopped down right beside me with a thud.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m resting too! There’s only one bed!”
“There’s also the floor.”
“You’re the worst. You’re telling a princess to sleep on the floor?”
“Friends make jokes like that with each other. Probably.”
“Calling it a joke is just plain rude…… wait.”
“What is it?”
“What did you just say?”
“That you should sleep on the floor.”
“Not that.”
Airen looked at me with sparkling eyes. They were so bright and round I almost mistook her for the young lady.
Haah. I’d been hoping it would just slip by naturally.
“Friends…… I said.”
“Huh? I didn’t catch that.”
“Friends! Friends! Happy now?”
“My ears must be bad. One more time.”
“Argh! I’m not saying it again!”
“Say ‘friends’ again!”
“You clearly heard me the first time!”
“Wow. You think of me as a friend? Really? You, Frey?”
“Why, why not? Is that not allowed?”
Airen declared proudly,
“I never expected the person I keep saying I’ll make my servant to think of me as a friend!”
“You’re self-aware about it and still do it—isn’t that pretty malicious?”
“Never mind that! Ohoho, so that’s how it is. You’ve been thinking of me as a friend all along.”
Airen grinned from ear to ear. Damn it. I really should have kept my mouth shut.
Still, for better or worse, the person I had stuck closest to at the Academy was Airen. If I spent a “one” with other classmates, I spent a “ten” with her.
And just yesterday she had tried to take the fall for me.
I could never accept her as a master or a lover, but I could accept her as a friend. And look how happy she was just from being called that.
I had fully expected her to scold me and demand I become her servant instead. Looking at her like this, Airen really did have a pure side.
“Hey, Frey.”
“What.”
“Can I touch you?”
Scratch that pure side. I immediately turned my back on her.
“Absolutely not.”
“Tch.”
“Don’t click your tongue at me.”
Whew.
Hearing something like that while lying in bed hit pretty hard. Calm down. Calm down.
I ignored Airen poking my cheek and fell asleep almost at once. I was tired—far too tired. At least the guests who visited the Duke’s estate still observed basic manners in front of him. The Academy had none of that.
After sleeping the whole day away I woke feeling wonderfully refreshed. Was Airen still asleep? I turned to look beside me and—
“Mmph. Mmmph.”
“……?”
Airen, bound hand and foot with handcuffs and rope, was wriggling around with a blindfold over her eyes.