The Innocent Disciple and Gathering Shadows (1)
The inn room, where I had to fall asleep alone while thinking indecent thoughts about a man, was unnecessarily noisy. On top of the backpack I usually carried, another one as large as my own body had been added, making the already cramped space feel even smaller.
“Ah! Lady Kaira, I’ll put my things here! Hehe.”
“……”
In the end, I decided to leave with Azami. There was no set destination, so nowhere to rest freely, and I had told her multiple times that this was a journey where death could come at any moment. Even Tilke, who had survived countless brushes with death, had gradually taken my side, but Azami’s stubbornness could not be broken.
‘I already know that! …Anyway, I have no family, and my magical talent isn’t particularly great. Rather than growing old as an unremarkable mage, I’d rather stay by the Hero’s side and die with her.’
…It was the kind of thinking only a reckless novice mage would have. I wanted to take her to her elders and make her face reality, but she had no such elders to scold her.
“We’ve already visited the Plain’s Entrance, and we’ve finished everything we needed to do in Latenear. We’re leaving early tomorrow morning—are you ready?”
“Yes! I was living alone in that tiny room Tilke introduced me to, so I didn’t have much to pack. And Lady Kaira, you can speak casually with me!”
“Still… Ah, fine! Fine…, uh. I’ll speak casually, so stop looking at me with that burdened expression. Hah!?”
Azami wrapped her arms around me, her body larger than mine. I felt the softness of her chest—larger and more plush than my own, which was practically nonexistent.
“W-what are you doing…?”
“Hehe. Lady Kaira smells really nice. You don’t smell like a traveler at all. All the adventurers I know smell like wet puppies.”
“T-that’s because… I’m a baker’s daughter. A-anyway, if we want to leave early, we should sleep now, so let go. …If you’re going to hug me, you can do it in bed.”
“Understood, understood! So we’re sharing a bed from the very first night?”
“First night or not, this room… only has one bed.”
While Azami tossed her robe onto her luggage with a cheerful “Ufu fu,” completely ignoring my words, I secretly prepared a spell behind her back. Taerei’s Memory Preservation. It would be my final and most powerful means of making the girl give up without suffering.
“Then, Lady Kaira…, uh……”
Azami’s posture collapsed. Watching the girl clutch her head and kneel on the floor, groaning in pain, filled me with guilt, but it couldn’t be helped.
I used the same spell I had sent via carrier pigeon to Master Viran not long ago—the one recording the events at the ruins. I hadn’t given her my entire life; that might have shattered Azami’s mind.
…Still, I had omitted the part about being repeatedly violated by tentacles for days and reduced to something like an incubator for a demon’s spawn.
The girl writhed for a long while before looking up at me with tear-filled eyes. Her sky-blue pupils swelled as if they might swallow me whole.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry… I didn’t know… you were going through something like that… But, but……!!”
She had clearly endured her share of hardships growing up, but there was no need to drag her into this dangerous journey—one twisted by the power of an outer god, filled with nothing but misfortune. I had to leave her admiration as mere admiration and make her give up.
“Lady Kaira still needs me after all! With two mages, there won’t be any openings. If Lady Kaira ever falls into danger, I’ll save you! Even if it’s only once…, yes, even just once, I’ll risk my life to protect you……!!”
“W-what……”
…Convincing this girl was impossible. I sighed, said nothing, and pulled the blanket over myself. A moment later, a warm, soft sensation embraced me from behind. Feeling the faint rhythm of breath against the top of my head, I drifted off to sleep wrapped in an inexplicable warmth.
“Hah, hah…, hey, th-there…, Azami, Azami……? Let’s, r-rest for a bit……”
I pleaded breathlessly toward Azami’s distant silhouette, barely visible on the horizon. It had been about an hour since we left Latenear through the northern gate.
Though Latenear sat at the edge of the plains, even a short distance north of the city revealed a vast mixed forest of conifers and broadleaf trees. A little farther north, it would likely become pure coniferous forest—the same kind I had seen during the journey to defeat the Demon King.
As expected of a forest, the terrain was uneven and rocky. Azami’s steps were quick—I didn’t know how she had trained her body—and keeping up with her small frame was difficult.
“Yes? Ah…, understood, Lady Kaira!”
Azami stopped and waited patiently on the path as I trudged toward her, panting. Was this what youth looked like? …Though my physical age wasn’t much different from hers. Maybe it was the ten-centimeter height difference.
Or perhaps… it was because my body had spent all that time barely moving while preparing for graduation.
“Haa……”
The moment I reached Azami, I dropped my backpack on the roadside and sat down, leaning against it with my legs stretched out. I glanced at her cautiously.
‘I wonder if she’s thinking that the famous Kaira is actually a pathetic little runt.’
Without a word, Azami set her own pack down beside me and plopped onto the ground. A clattering sound accompanied her—the sound of her staff being laid down.
Wanting to write even one more line of magic while traveling, I pulled two books from my robes.
The moment the pages rustled, Azami cried out in excitement.
“Oh! Are those Lady Kaira’s spellbooks?”
“Yeah…. One is mine, the other is my master’s.”
“Your master? Are they Professor Apryon’s or Professor Melissa’s?”
“No. They were written by someone who calls herself a grand mage named Viran. …Right, I heard Master Viran recently settled into the Magic Academy. Do you know her?”
Azami nodded vigorously.
“Of course! She suddenly appeared just before graduation…. The one time I saw her, she looked a bit ominous. Old bandages fluttering, strangely tall, and that sharp chemical smell….”
“That’s her, all right.”
“Right after arriving at the academy, she claimed a plot of land in one corner and built an incredibly tall tower in just a few days. She made it to hole up and do research—students weren’t allowed inside. Only professors were occasionally permitted.”
Something about the way Azami trailed off made me press further.
“Occasionally permitted?”
“…Usually, the professors who went in came out as crows or pigs. It took about two days for them to return to normal.”
I gave a bitter smile. That damned old hag would do something like that.
“And that person is Lady Kaira’s master?”
“Yeah…. She acted like it was a bother, but she still transcribed a whole book for me. The book itself is decent. There are unusual spells, intricate spells, rare spells, but they’re written in a way that’s incredibly hard to understand. Master Viran is… a bit too much of a genius. She skips all the necessary formulas and explanations, jumping from one topic to another. Want to take a look?”
Azami flipped through a few pages of the book I handed her and frowned.
“…It’s hard!!”
“Told you. That’s why I’ve been adding annotations with the formulas I need, and when I can rest at an inn, I’ve been modifying the spells to make them easier based on this book.”
After finishing my words, I gently picked up Azami’s staff. It was well-crafted but old, its black wooden surface finished to a glossy sheen like lacquer. The parts where hands had gripped it were smoothly worn, carrying the traces of time.
As I examined the staff for a while, I felt Azami’s proud gaze. Her desire to show it off was obvious, so I looked up at her expectant face.
“Hehe. How is it, Lady Kaira? My staff—does it look good?”
“Hmm…. I haven’t really used a staff since graduating. It gets in the way when your hands need to be free for spells, and I have a sword anyway….”
“It serves as a focal point to extend the mana circulation system outside the body.”
“That’s true, but……”
Since becoming the Hero had nothing to do with magic in the first place, I had never felt a strong need for one. My time openly acting as a mage had been short, and besides….
I drew Mervin’s sword. A cold shrrring echoed as the elegant curve of the elven-forged blade caught the sunlight filtering through the trees.
“Wow. I’ve never seen a sword like this. It’s not so much cool as… beautiful.”
“Elven alloy conducts mana better than ordinary steel, so I felt less need for a staff. There are plenty of ways magic can help in a fight, but rarely do I need to kill an enemy with magic directly.”
I tried to recall Mervin’s proud words and puffed up a little, as if they were my own achievement.
“Huh? What do you mean……. Ah, Lady Kaira graduated nearly ten years ago, so you might not know the curriculum changed a bit. You’ve been in seclusion, and dangerous classified information doesn’t get published in journals anyway.”
There was something uneasy in her tone. It felt like there had been an important change I didn’t know about….
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well……”
“Wait!”
I gripped the sword in one hand and rushed toward Azami. As we rolled together, I chanted the formula for Veltara’s Transparent Shield aloud.
“Kyaa! Lady Kaira…?!”
Before Azami could even finish speaking, the sound of five or six arrows embedding themselves into the backpacks we had been sitting on reached my ears.
…Of course. I knew it would come to this.
“Huh……?”
“Bandits… probably. If it were monsters or demons, they wouldn’t use arrows.”
“What? Latenear is supposed to have decent security—right here, this close? M-more importantly, I’ve traveled alone after graduation and never encountered bandits before……. W-what do we do, Lady Kaira?”
“What else?”
It seemed not everyone was cursed with the misfortune of being attacked wherever they went. Yes, only I had such twisted luck. And now Azami, traveling with me, would be dragged into the disasters that ordinary people never experienced.
But now that it had come to this, there was no other choice. Gripping the sword tightly and extending my left hand—now protected by the completed Veltara’s Transparent Shield—I spoke quietly.
“We fight.”