Lena (1)
"So… your name is Lena?"
"That's right."
Only after I'd spent the better part of an hour talking her around did the kid finally seem to understand that I had no ulterior motives. I couldn't believe how much time and effort it had taken just to hear two syllables out of her.
She kept slipping back into rude speech, so I slipped her a silver coin, and—presto—instant politeness.
Consistent character through and through, in every possible way.
"Anyway…"
"Food first! Even dogs don't get messed with while they're eating, they say… Well, I suppose it doesn't matter if you plan on treating me worse than a dog."
"Ugh. Fine. Eat as much as you want."
"Thank ya kindly."
Chomp, chomp, chomp…
My head was starting to ache. I gave up trying to converse with the kid while she ate, stepped outside for a breath of cold air, and stood there letting the night chill settle over me.
Noah must have found my behavior odd, because she followed me out and threw a question my way.
"You're acting strange today, aren't you? It's not as if street urchins like her are a rare sight around here. And yet you're feeding her, asking her name—there's hardly any need to learn her name, is there?"
Her doubt was fair. Thieving kids like that were the most common sight I'd come across since arriving in this city.
I'd been genuinely shocked at first, but when you saw a beggar child getting clubbed by shopkeepers every other day, even the initial surprise wore thin fast.
As someone raised with modern sensibilities, it's heartbreaking—but I can't exactly take every one of those children in.
Bolston, a metropolis with an estimated population of two million. Magic had grown developed enough to replace science, creating a civilization dense enough to pack over a million people even into the northern frontier. But where there is great light, there is always great shadow. The farther you got from the central district, the worse the public order became—and the wave of orphans left in the wake of the monster attacks, combined with a city half-cut-off by blizzards, had only poured oil on that fire.
"Normally I would've let it go. But… something about her kept nagging at me."
"?"
In any case, this was far from the first time I'd caught a young thief or pickpocket red-handed. A few times, out of pity, I'd let them slip away quietly instead of handing them to the guards. But I had never once bought them a meal.
So why her?
Something about Lena had clearly struck a nerve.
"Don't tell me it's your gut feeling again. Or… one of your genuinely twisted tastes?"
"No! Just—hold on. Give me a second. Let me think."
I could feel Noah's sharp, chilly gaze boring into me. Clutching my head, I desperately combed through my memory for the reason behind my own behavior. If I didn't come up with a legitimate explanation fast, I was going to get branded a pedophile—
"Hmm… Ah!"
As I racked my brain, replaying my first encounter with Lena, a flash of insight cut across my mind.
That was it.
The sense of wrongness.
"A sense of wrongness? She seemed like a perfectly ordinary kid to me. Not even Awakened."
"No, there's something different about her. How do I put this…"
Trying to put a vibe into words was harder than it sounded. I opened and closed my mouth a few times before finally stringing together the words floating around in my head.
"…That girl's mana was flowing. Faint enough that you'd never notice it, but it was there."
"!"
…
It went without saying that ordinary people had mana in their bodies too. The question of whether they could perceive it and bend it to their will was simply the dividing line of Awakening. Which meant the mana most people carried was faint, and its flow was disordered, formless.
"I can't sense anything of the sort. From the outside, her mana reads exactly like any ordinary person's. Perfectly natural."
"That's what I thought too—right up until I touched her. But if my memory serves, Lena's mana had a certain… regularity to it. A definite current."
"The flow on the surface differs from the flow underneath?"
"Exactly. Incredibly faint, mind you."
It was subtle enough that even I hadn't caught it at first glance. Usually something like that would register without needing to lay a hand on someone.
"Have you ever run into a case like this before?"
"I couldn't exactly say never. It's not like I've gone around touching every person I've met."
"Hmm. Fair point. Still, you've at least felt a fair number of people's mana by now, haven't you? And none of them were like this?"
"Not that I know of."
"An unusual mana current, then… Could she be on the verge of Awakening?"
"No. I've only got one sample, but Ivan never showed anything like that right before he Awakened. Besides, if there really were a rule like that, some nation or other would run regular mana screenings to stockpile Awakened ones, wouldn't they?"
"That tracks. I've never heard of any such policy."
Lena's mana remained a mystery. The answer to the puzzle itself was still lost in the fog—but at least I now understood why the kid had been on my mind.
Which meant I could officially shrug off the pervert accusations. Case closed.
We returned to the inn and picked the conversation back up once Lena had finished eating. I'd decided to keep an eye on her for the time being—and given her unusual mana flow, it occurred to me she might be a hidden gem of a talent.
"So you're helping out at a brothel right now? Then you've got money. Why steal fruit?"
"That hag was planning to mix in rotten fruit and sell it anyway. I was just throwing out what she was gonna toss. Honestly, she should be thanking me."
"Throwing it out into your stomach, you mean?"
"Heh."
The longer we talked, the more I could do nothing but marvel at this kid's sheer nerve. Or was it less about nerve and more about character? A positively shameless, self-directed little hellion. …Then again, maybe you did need a personality like that to survive down in the gutter.
"Still, no more stealing from now on. From what I hear, the merchants have started running their own vigilante crews. If you get caught this time, it might not end the way it did today."
"Eh. I'll play it by ear and do what I gotta. Quit butting in."
Lena twisted a lock of purple hair around her finger, deliberately looking off in another direction. Good lord, she was an infuriatingly stubborn creature.
In the end, I abandoned the back-and-forth and laid my cards on the table.
"…You want to sponsor me?"
"That's right. At the very least, you won't go hungry. Clothes too—they're falling apart, so I'll buy you a set. If you need anything else, tell me, within reason."
"Hmmmm…"
At my words, Lena's fierce eyes narrowed and swept upward again. Now that I looked closely, she actually had a rather cute face—it was just that all her scowling had made her expressions vicious. Paranoia had clearly taken root in her. Now, how was I supposed to talk her around this time…
"Okay!"
"Like I said, this isn't because I have any weird intentions, it's just— wait, what?"
"I said yes. I don't know your reasons, but if you're insisting on taking care of me, there's no reason to refuse."
"Whew… Right. Come to this inn at a set time every day. We'll just eat together."
The deal had gone far smoother than I expected, and a sigh of pure relief escaped me. When she came by for meals, I'd check her body while I was at it. Ah, but her mana was so faint I'd have to touch her directly… How much of a fuss was she going to kick up over that?
"Eh, holding my arm is fine… as long as you don't grope me in a gross way."
"Thank you."
To my surprise, Lena accepted the suspicious request with remarkable magnanimity. Did she figure that much of a price was worth paying?
"But… you're not going to gradually push your luck and ask for more of my body, right? You'll say you're giving me a snack and touch my shoulder today… and then my chest tomorrow…"
"I swear I'm going to lose my mind. I promise. I'll hold your wrist and nothing else. For five seconds, tops."
"…I'm not selling my underwear either."
"I wasn't buying it!"
"You can't have my hair either."
"…What exactly do you think you've been living around?"
Even after that, I burned a good chunk of time reassuring a girl whose distrust ran absurdly, pointlessly deep. In the end, our contract boiled down to this: I got to touch her wrist, and in exchange, I fed her three meals a day.
I suppose excessive generosity only invites deeper suspicion? Honestly, I had to wonder how old she actually was.
…
"That girl… she'll be about fifteen this year, I reckon."
"You know her?"
The inn's prices kept all but the most desperate customers away, so when Lena finished her meal and left, the innkeeper—the man who never left his post behind the counter—must have been eavesdropping on our whole conversation. He dragged a chair over beside us and dropped into it with a heavy sigh.
"We were neighbors, of a sort."
"Of a sort?"
"Her father was a Rank 7 guild member… but he had a jealous streak a mile wide. Jealousy sickness, bad as it comes. Never once got to have a proper conversation with his wife on account of it—her and me were just nodding acquaintances, that's all."
"Rank 7, though. That should've been comfortable enough to live on. How did things end up like that?"
At my question, the innkeeper took a long drag on his tobacco, exhaled a slow hoooh of smoke, and reached back into an old story. The stench of the stuff was acrid.
Lena's family had belonged to the comfortably well-off. Her father, a Rank 7 guild member, was a veteran who'd worked in Bolston for years—between the occasional monster-subjugation commissions, the household never wanted for anything. On the days he took a long-term contract, a few gold coins would quietly accrue in his account.
Granted, the jealousy made him less than a perfect father—but her mother handled him wisely, and beyond that small shadow, there were no real problems.
"Well… with a jealous man in the house, I never figured domestic peace would last forever. But the trouble came from somewhere else entirely."
One day, without warning—or perhaps, inevitably—Lena fell ill. And it was a very serious illness.
"Mana Blockage. Severed Vessels. You know how many forms it takes. Thankfully, Lena's was the treatable kind."
"She runs around fine now, though. She was cured?"
"Not remotely. It's a wonder she's still breathing at all. Truthfully, I figured she'd have been dead years ago."
Lena's condition was known by another name: mana oversaturation. An extreme incompatibility with mana caused the energy to pour into her body uncontrollably, filling her up beyond her capacity to contain it. And uncontrolled mana was little different from poison—her body's functions would steadily degrade until death claimed her.
The treatment was simple enough. Once a month, a healer would rekindle the dying blood vessels throughout her body and bleed off the excess mana. It demanded exquisite mana-manipulation skill and a deep knowledge of human anatomy, which meant it demanded a fortune in fees.
"Even at that price, the treatments were only a stopgap. To truly beat the disease, she'd need to Awaken. But how's a child that young supposed to Awaken? People struggle at it even after a decade or more of training."
"…"
"…What came after, you can guess. Special, if you want to call it that. Commonplace, if you don't."
Her father ran himself ragged trying to raise the treatment fees. In the end, he took on a commission beyond his abilities, and it killed him. What remained—Lena and her mother—scraped by for a while on the guild's survivor's benefits, but it was nowhere near enough to cover Lena's treatments. Her mother, worn down by backbreaking labor, eventually fell ill and died as well.
Lena was seven years old.
When the innkeeper's monologue finally wound down, the whole room seemed to sink. Apologizing for the mood, he added a few brief words almost as an afterthought.
"Sorry for dropping all that on you out of nowhere. Anyway—only pay half for the girl's meals. Didn't even know if she was alive or dead all these years, but there's such a thing as a human heart, you know. And… I don't know what your purpose is in looking after her, but I'd be much obliged if you didn't hand her any deeper wounds than she's already got."
I couldn't fathom how she'd done it, but the girl had survived this brutal world without parents, stubborn as a weed. The innkeeper stubbed out his dead tobacco, pulled a fresh one from his pack, and shuffled outside, murmuring quietly to himself.
We picked at the leftover bread and carried on trading what we knew about Lena.
"Severed Vessels, hm. That sounds like a near-incurable disease—yet she's somehow alive to this day?"
"She is. My interest keeps growing… Hmm… maybe…"
"Maybe her mana has already Awakened?"
"No—if it had, she wouldn't be living like that. But she's clearly close. Very close."
Nothing else could explain such a bizarre mana current. She had talent—that much was certain. A genius fated to die young, perhaps?
"You're already thinking of her as a party member."
"I'm keeping the possibility in mind."
Raising a party member from scratch, then recruiting them. The obvious drawback was that she couldn't serve as an immediate fighting force—but when it came to choosing comrades we'd be staking our lives beside…
We'd be delving Ruins soon enough, places where Noah's peculiarities would inevitably show. I needed someone who wouldn't betray us no matter what they saw. Recruiting through the guild came with complications on every front.
"For now, we watch. Because no matter how much talent she has, if her character's rotten, it's over."