The Shadow Attribute
The academy nurse — 5 — 11 — Upon hearing that Ruwina possessed the darkness attribute, I was mildly surprised, but the other two cadets looked far more flustered. The nurse raised a hand toward Yui and Clef, who were glancing around as if unsure whether they were even allowed to hear this.
“Ah, don’t misunderstand. Darkness isn’t some sinister attribute like black magic. If it were, I would have called you aside privately.”
So that was it. I simply nodded at the explanation, while the other two let out long sighs of relief. Anyone watching would think the story was about them.
“The darkness attribute has almost no precedents. At least not within Alitus. However, according to research data from other nations, it has a high chance of manifesting abilities related to stealth, concealment, and special maneuvers.”
“Oho.”
Staying hidden instead of charging in sounded perfect. If a fight broke out, I could just stay as quiet as a mouse and, once everything ended, slip back in and claim I had disrupted the enemy’s rear. Mm. A flawless plan.
The two of them were now staring at me enviously. Rare attributes were the sort of thing kids their age loved. Light and ice were considered major among the rare attributes. In the original work where the unique-attribute setting first appeared, the protagonist had possessed light, and ice was so prominent that an entire unit had been formed around it.
The nurse’s explanation was much the same.
“Light and ice have plenty of data, so they’re easy to work with. For now, train with the training units and choose an Aindium that suits your type and size. Once you’re comfortable, we’ll move straight into custom production.”
“Yes!”
Yui and Clef answered with flushed, excited faces.
“In that case, mine will probably take longer, won’t it?”
“That’s right. It will be made eventually, so just focus on training hard.”
As expected, a personal unit wasn’t something easily granted. Thinking coldly about it, even that possibility could easily fall through. From the Alitus Kingdom’s perspective, there was no reason to build a custom Aindium for someone who had no future in the kingdom’s forces and whom no one else could pilot anyway. Once the report reached the principal, it would surely be cut.
Having one’s own personal unit was the ultimate romance for any Aindium series fan, but reality had to be faced.
“You can tell others about your attribute. Your friends will have roughly figured it out anyway, and everyone will know once you receive your personal units.”
“Understood.”
“Ah, and just in case, keep quiet about Luna having the darkness attribute. It might cause unnecessary misunderstandings.”
“Yes. I understand.”
I had no reason to announce my darkness attribute either. The other two nodded with determined expressions, swearing to keep my secret.
The nurse glanced outside and waved us off.
“Everyone’s already gone. You three should head out too.”
We bowed to the nurse and the staff before leaving the temporary partition. After walking in silence for a while after exiting the auditorium, the girl spoke up.
“Um… Can I call you Luna?”
“Call me whatever you like. You’re Yui, right?”
“Yeah. Call me Yui too. I wanted to talk to you at least once, and now we have the chance since we share a rare attribute.”
“You wanted to talk to me? Why?”
There wasn’t anything particularly fun about talking to me. Clef, who had been listening beside us, answered my question.
“You stand out even among our year. You’re already famous. A lot of people were disappointed that you weren’t chosen as the freshman representative.”
“Ah… I see.”
Between Ruwina’s striking appearance and the incidents I had unintentionally gotten involved in, I had apparently become somewhat well-known among my peers.
“Where are you from, Luna?”
“Me? Shutor.”
When asked about Luna’s profile, I had set her hometown as Shutor, the capital of the Alitus Kingdom, for easy memorization. Because the city was vast and populous, it was simple to gloss over details. Even lifelong Shutor residents couldn’t have visited every single neighborhood.
“I’m jealous. I’ve lived in Guzef my whole life and really want to visit Shutor someday.”
You wouldn’t know the place even if I told you, kid.
According to the flood of information Yui had cheerfully dumped in a short time, Guzef was the nearest port city on the mainland to Allob Island. It was the same place I had briefly stopped at to board a ship before arriving here.
I responded appropriately to Yui’s chatter as we headed toward the classroom building.
“Looks like class is already over.”
Several students could be seen leaving classrooms and returning to the dorms. A considerable number of first-years were also heading in the opposite direction from the classroom building’s exit—an urgent pace that seemed likely to test the student guidance teacher’s patience.
“Did something happen?”
“Who knows. Hey, where are you guys going?”
Yui called out after spotting a familiar face. The cadet walking quickly down the corridor waved at her and shouted.
“I heard Rendel-senpai is in Classroom 8 right now. You should hurry over too.”
“Really? Ah, what do I do? Do I have paper for an autograph?”
“I already brought some.”
The moment I heard their conversation, my feet stopped on their own. Rendel had come to our classroom? Unease washed over me. Since the original work never depicted the protagonist visiting a first-year classroom, this had to be an incident caused by my own actions. There was only one reason he would specifically come to Classroom 8 where I was. No matter how much I wanted to deny it, Rendel had clearly come looking for me.
Rendel had known I would be entering as a junior, and since Ruwina’s appearance was distinctive and well-known, finding out which class she was in wouldn’t have been difficult. Ah, if only I hadn’t said “senpai” back then. I wanted to punch my past self who had gotten carried away and blurted it out.
Whether Yui knew what I was thinking or not, she grabbed my arm and started pulling.
“Luna, let’s go see the senpai too.”
“Uh, um… I have somewhere I need to go.”
“Really? That’s too bad.”
Yui and her friends left noisily, while Clef, having reached his own classroom, gave an awkward greeting before entering. Once the surroundings finally quieted down, I quickly opened the fan site.
The moment I saw the post, I turned and sprinted at full speed without looking back. I still couldn’t meet the protagonist. The first meeting from the original work was no longer a first meeting, but if I framed it as a reunion, I could manage a roughly similar scene. Meeting and talking beforehand, exchanging names, and getting familiar with each other’s faces would only make things awkward later. The impression would fade, and reality would drift even further from the original.
I decided to avoid Rendel for the time being. At least until I could recreate the first-meeting scene from the original work, I had to keep running.
**
“Rendel. You went to the first-year classroom again?”
“Mm.”
Rendel answered Kirie’s question half-heartedly and sat down, picking up a teacup. For an entire week now, he had visited Luna’s classroom after school or during breaks, but he had not once managed to meet her. Today he had even asked her classmates to hold her for a moment, yet she had apparently disappeared again. Rendel felt a twinge of impatience.
“You’re really putting in the effort. And yet that junior still hasn’t seen your face even once?”
“Maybe she’s avoiding you on purpose?”
At Kirie and Carson’s words, Rendel let out a groan. After thinking for a long while, he shook his head.
“That can’t be it.”
“Why not? I’d be scared if some guy senior I barely knew suddenly showed up.”
At Rane’s casual remark while pouring tea from the kettle, Rendel’s eyes widened. Could she really be avoiding him? But why? It was embarrassing to say this even in his own mind, but he was fairly famous. The number of autographs he had given over the past week alone would have been enough for every first-year and then some. Rendel denied it inwardly and gripped his teacup. The surface of the tea in his slightly trembling hands rippled gently.
**
“Luna~ You’re doing it again today, right?”
“Haa… Yeah. Let’s get it over with quickly. The senpai might come.”
I stood up, shifting the fan-site window I had been watching since just before class ended to the side of my vision. The moment morning classes finished, female cadets gathered around me. They were classmates I had become somewhat friendly with, and they were playing along with my “performance.” Neria was glancing over from afar with an anxious expression. I raised my hand slightly to signal that it was fine.
“Then, let’s go!”
The girl in the lead spread her arms wide and lunged at my waist with a tackle. I dropped low to dodge the bear hug, then used my shoulder to lift her torso and shove upward.
“Kyaa—!”
The other girls caught the cadet who lost her balance and toppled backward. Without a moment’s pause, a hand wearing a boxing glove shot toward my face. I blocked the light, quick jab meant to grab me with my bag, then slipped sideways and easily passed the girl blocking my path. After shaking off two more, I reached the rear door of the classroom.
“Aah, we really can’t catch Luna today either.”
The same-class girls recited their lines in a monotone that sounded like they were reading from a textbook, then dramatically collapsed onto their desks. It was all part of creating an alibi for any eventuality.
“Thanks, as always.”
“Nah. Thanks to you, Rendel-senpai keeps coming. We should be thanking you.”
“Luna, don’t you think it’s about time you met him?”
“I don’t really want to. It won’t last long anyway, so just play along for now.”
“Got it.”
Once the conversation ended, the cadets giggled. Among them, the absurd rumor that I was being ardently pursued by Rendel and was avoiding him was being accepted as nearly factual. From what I had seen on the fan site, the descriptions always mentioned him carrying a handkerchief, so it seemed he was trying to return it directly. The bigger problem was that Rendel himself wasn’t actively denying the rumors.
I needed to end this farce quickly before the strange rumors spread further. To do that, three things were essential: time, people, and place.
Time was gradually approaching the right moment. I didn’t know the exact date from the original work, but it was clearly within a month after the semester began. Therefore, the current timeline shouldn’t differ much from the original. The people involved were, of course, me and Rendel. That part was easy to prepare since he was already chasing after me.
The biggest issue was the place. There were secret locations on Allob Island, where the academy was located. It was the place Rendel had arrived at as if entranced while following something in the original work. The animation hadn’t shown exactly where it was, so I had racked my brain trying to find it. Then I remembered a post I had seen on the fan site, and the answer had been there—a comparison between the game and animation locations. When Rendel, the protagonist of this series, was added to the Aindium mobile game, an event set at this academy had been released, and someone had posted about finding the places that appeared in the animation. Among them was an analysis using a map of the location where Ruwina and Rendel met.
After checking with a cooperative teacher, I became certain that was the place I was looking for. I planned to head there now.
After leaving the classroom, I pulled the hood of the jacket over my uniform up. Spotting a group of people in the distance, I ran in the opposite direction.
“Huh?”
A cadet from another class who saw my face tilted his head as I passed. He opened the door to Classroom 8, the one I had just exited, and called inside.
“Is Luna Adelt here?”
“She just left.”
“Darn. Already?”
The cadet who had come looking for me probably didn’t not know my face. The reason he hadn’t grabbed me when we passed each other was because the “darkness” magic I had learned over the past few days slightly distorted people’s perception of my face. Offensive magic was prohibited inside the academy, but everything else wasn’t particularly restricted. Cadets who had learned water magic were even required to have at least one per group during marches.
The darkness magic was something I had barely managed to learn by frequenting the library and the magic club over the past few days, supplemented by knowledge from the original work. However, I couldn’t master anything beyond slightly obscuring my face for a very short time. This was an Aindium military academy, not a magic school, so information was limited. Besides, I had no particular reason to learn more magic anyway.
I pulled my hood lower and walked slowly out of the classroom building without drawing attention. Entering a secret location required permission. Rendel had arrived there by accident after getting lost, but I needed some preparation. A regular teacher couldn’t authorize access to that place. The person I needed to see was the highest authority in this academy—the principal.