The Hero Party Enters the Realm of Men
"Every dormitory has been assigned its new students, and once the entrance ceremony is over, the semester begins. Now then, I trust you're all aware that every other faculty member at this academy has already submitted their syllabi?"
The Principal posed the question to the four Chair Professors, myself included.
"Why would I submit something like that?"
"The body has no need for plans! It is reborn anew every single morning!"
"Heh heh, I've been busy lately."
If anything, the other Chair Professors were the ones pushing back against the Principal.
"I didn't expect anything anyway. Do as you please."
As the Principal slumped in disappointment, I stepped forward. I drew a syllabus from my coat and handed it over. I'd only given Sersi the outline, yet she had produced a flawless document in a single day.
"To think I'd live to see a Chair Professor actually hand me a syllabus."
"Rules matter, don't they?"
"Excellent, Professor Phedia. Now that you mention it, I don't believe I've heard what subject you intend to teach."
Having checked my paperwork, the Principal made a sound like a man downing a glass of wine in one gulp, sighing in admiration.
"Dungeoneering!"
"I intend to give the students real combat experience. In a dungeon, you need martial arts, magic, healing, utilization techniques—all of it. Learning only from books within these walls and sparring among yourselves leaves them stuck at the level of theory, nothing more."
"Interesting. That would be a very interesting course indeed."
"Hey, is that a challenge right now?"
Phelia of the Water Hall lifted her head toward me and bared a fierce glare.
"I wasn't talking to you, but I take it your ears are wide as ever."
"I can't just let that slide. Training never betrays you. No matter what situation comes, no matter what enemy appears!"
Vande of the Fire Hall likewise shook his mane and let out a low growl from between his teeth.
"Besides, I am a Weapon Master. Sword, bow, spear, mace—there is no weapon I can't wield better than anyone. Do you imagine some adventurer riffraff dying in a dungeon could ever reach this level?"
"Skill alone won't save you against a demon dragon."
"Skill? Do I look like a seamstress to you?! That's an insult!"
Vande bristled, his fur standing on end. My slip of the tongue. I'd forgotten that metaphors and jokes don't land with lion beastmen.
"I can bear this no longer! Not content to tarnish the honor of a Chair Professor, you would insult a warrior's martial spirit as well! In the name of the Goddess, settle this in a duel!"
"Ah, the academy as usual."
The Principal shook his head as if a headache were coming on.
Just then the doors swung open and the academy guard rushed in, breathless.
"Urgent report! An unauthorized intrusion has occurred within Academy Territory!"
"An intrusion?"
"The Empire. Not military forces, but they used a large-scale transference spell to enter our territory without prior notice."
"Did the barrier team fall asleep? No, never mind. No need to guess—it'll be that Emperor again."
Clicking his tongue, the Principal conjured a vision into the air. Through a familiar spirit, the view poured in like a surveillance feed.
"That's her, all right. The Emperor and her Imperial Guard. What is it this time? The semester hasn't even started yet!"
The Principal heaved a long sigh.
I too confirmed the Emperor's face in the image.
Sandra von Condenburg.
The sovereign of the Empire—a tyrant driven by a single principle: the entire continent must lie beneath her feet.
While the war with the Demon King's army raged, she had at least behaved herself and led the human alliance, but from the moment the Demon King's defeat came into sight, she had begun rebuilding her national strength.
None of this had been part of my calculations. It was not an event that occurred in the original story.
With the Demon King subdued far earlier than in the original history, I had expected some academy affairs to unfold differently. Still, the Emperor moving at this particular point in time was rather unusual.
"Whatever her grievance may be, we'll have to soothe her somehow and send her on her way. Logic simply doesn't work on that woman. Though I hesitate to even call her human."
"It won't be any trouble, Principal."
"Not any trouble? The supreme commander of the Empire herself has come marching in with transference magic. This could spark the first breach of the non-aggression treaty in three hundred years!"
I gave a leisurely tilt of my head.
"Just a routine parent-teacher conference, isn't it? Leave it to me."
"Yuri. Yuri."
"Hah!"
Yuri opened her eyes to a familiar face. Luka shaking her unconscious body by the shoulders was a common enough occurrence.
"Uweh, I'm sorry. I was a nuisance…."
"Stay still."
Luka pressed firmly down on Yuri's shoulders as she tried to sit up.
"This way, all you see is the sky, right?"
"Oh, it's true! Luka, you're a genius!"
They were still flying through the sky. This was the solution Luka had devised for Yuri, who suffered terribly from her fear of heights.
"Um, but are you sure you don't need to pedal? We're flying just fine?"
"Yep. I figured out that we don't actually have to pedal ourselves—we just need to generate the power. I'm spinning them with wind magic. It's a bit slower, though."
Tia was deftly casting a wind-attribute spell to turn the pedals.
"Haah, hnngh…. Why didn't we do this from the start?! What have we been doing all this time?!"
Aisha, her whole body flushed scarlet and drenched in sweat, lay sprawled across the floor voicing her complaints.
Luka, by contrast, had only worked up the pleasant sheen of a light jog, and spoke flatly.
"We got here fast, didn't we? We rest for five minutes, then you're back on the pedals. Get ready."
"No, but—ah, never mind."
Aisha almost asked what was the point of rushing, then swallowed the question. She didn't know the details, but she knew it had something to do with the 'Master' Luka so often spoke of.
The first time Aisha had met Luka, she'd taken her for a cold, cruel girl—one deeply scarred and wounded.
So although she'd considered the Emperor's orders a tiresome chore, the moment she actually met Luka her mind changed, and she had taken it upon herself to look after the girl as her dedicated caretaker.
Even so, there were moments when Luka's expression would soften. She'd learned later that it happened whenever some memory involving her Master came to mind.
'Well, good for her, I suppose. Tch.'
It was also true that Luka had silently fulfilled her duty as a Hero for the sake of the continent all this time. So Aisha, grumbling loudly all the while, resolved to keep the girl company for the time being.
'But if I can still desert, I'm deserting the second I can! Somehow I have to settle things with that Emperor….'
A tyrant—arrogant, answerable to no one, and utterly willful. No doubt her obsession with the Heroes stemmed from wanting to build up her national power now that the war with the Demon Realm was over. The Heroes were the finest weapons in existence, and the ultimate deterrent.
'Come to think of it, keeping Lucas away from the Emperor for a while might not be such a bad thing?'
However mad the Emperor was, surely she wouldn't start a war within the human realm right after the campaign against the Demon Realm had just ended.
Besides, Lucas wasn't an imperial subject—even if an order came down, she had no obligation to take the field.
Most likely the Emperor intended to use the act of claiming a Hero as leverage in political negotiations with other nations, Aisha surmised.
Tia would almost certainly end up affiliated with the Magic State, and Yuri with the Holy State—so the Empire wanted to secure Luka and make itself one of the three pillars of the hearth.
'But could anyone actually control these kids in the first place? It's only because they've got decent heads on their shoulders that things haven't gone sideways.'
The Emperor must have some scheme to win Lucas over.
'Not that it's any of my business. I'm retiring now.'
She'd kept her destination secret precisely because it was all too much bother, and as long as she stayed at the academy, the Emperor couldn't touch her for a while yet.
Would that lunatic really dare violate a divinely sanctioned, inviolable territory?
Think of it as a slightly extended vacation, that's all.
Mid-yawn, Aisha glanced at Tia casually casting her spell, and at Yuri, who still lay flat with her eyes locked on the sky.
'Wait—why do those two look like they're thinking the same thing as Luka?'
Aisha's instincts were dead on. In truth, Yuri was thinking exactly the same thing.
She watched the sunlight tickle her lashes through the gaps in the clouds, and thought of Wicker.
'The world is full of frightening things.'
New adventures always brought frightening experiences along with them. She had never been this high up before, so she'd never even known she was afraid of heights.
'But back then, whenever this happened, Master would always hold me.'
Yuri unconsciously hugged her own arms, aching once more for the warmth that had once flowed across her skin in his presence.
She had become an adventurer and faced down every manner of monster, yet the sensation of fear was something she simply could not grow accustomed to.
It wasn't merely that she carried bad memories—the moment she came face to face with it, her skin prickled on reflex, her brain shrank in on itself with the illusion of collapse, her blood raced through her whole body, and it felt as though tears would spill out at any moment.
Take that night, for instance—the thunder that cracked suddenly out of the dark.
― Hyaaagh!
Startled by the rolling boom that split the sky, Yuri had leapt clean out of her bed in fright.
She jumped so high she nearly cracked her head against the upper bunk where Luka was sleeping.
― Orabeoni! Orabeoniii!
Half-asleep, she had bolted into the next room and flung herself into the arms of Wicker, who was snoring away. Her face buried in his chest, only her tall, erect tail swayed and swayed.
― Mmnh… who is it? Oh, Whitey?
Even though he was exhausted from haggling with peddlers and mercenaries the day before, Wicker understood her state at once, and pressed his large upper ear down over hers to muffle it.
Folding the fluffy tuft of fur inward and pressing it flat shut out the sounds from outside, so Yuri could no longer hear them.
That made her a little less hypersensitive, enough to endure the thunder.
It was a trick that required a real understanding of beastkin ear anatomy, and hands as large as Wicker's—something only he could have done for her.
― I'm sorry, Orabeoniii….
― It's fine… hooaaam….
Drowning in sleep, eyes drooping shut, Wicker nevertheless kept faithfully cupping her ears.
If she lay like that, eyes squeezed tight, clinging to him, she could hear it—the thud, thud of his heartbeat against his chest.
A rough, heavy pulse, so unlike her own.
Counting little fairies in her head to the rhythm of that beat, before she knew it the thunder was gone from her ears, and she would drift back to sleep without even realizing she'd dozed off.
'Doing that again now would be too embarrassing….'
Yuri squeezed her eyes shut for no reason and laced her fingers together. It had become an unconscious habit whenever an embarrassing thought crept in.
'He might not even like us anymore….'
Thirteen years.
Under an unlucky dynasty, that would be enough time for a ruler to be overthrown in a coup after taking the throne.
Luka and Tia had changed so much that Yuri herself could barely recognize them. There was no way their Master could have stayed exactly as he was back then.
The moment that thought took root, Yuri felt a sudden flicker of anxiety.
"Um, Tia?"
"Yeah?"
"What if Master hates us now?"
"Hmm…."
Tia couldn't answer right away—perhaps because the thought wasn't entirely new to her either.
"No. Master loves us."
It was Luka who answered her, in a voice brimming with confidence.
"You think so…?"
"…Yeah. Luka's right!"
"Because he's our Master."
"…Ehehe, that's right!"
Sharing the same heart, the three of them each pictured the future they hoped for.
"Oh, girls! Look—we've reached the human realm!"
From the bow of the airship, Aisha shouted, gazing at the far horizon.
Along the skyline, the first traces of civilization's buildings were beginning to come into view.
