Where Peppermint Dances (4)

Seeing the magic circle floating around her, Noi was stunned.

It was the transfer magic she had once glimpsed in secret—the spell Kardia had perfected to butcher the Demon King.

“—What are you doing, Kardia!”

“…If it’s you, then with this, you should understand.”

Gasping with pain, Kardia murmured.

He looked up at Noi and smiled gently. It was exactly the same smile he had worn as a child.

“You—you noticed I was—”

Noi muttered, then shouted her denial.

“That’s not it! No—this isn’t that!”

The array spreading around her matched the transfer magic she knew.

But the target the circle led to was not what Noi had assumed.

“At this rate, your mana—!”

Still prone on the ground, Kardia continued to weave mana, steady and solemn.

Noi cried out, tears spilling in heavy drops.

“—Weren’t you going to make me the vessel for the Demon King!!”

The object indicated by the array was not the Demon King.

The magic circle encircling the two—was trying to transfer Kardia’s mana into Noi.

That meant the role Noi was meant to bear—the vessel who would be killed together with the Demon King—Kardia, who had surrendered his mana and become mana-less, intended to take upon himself instead.

“Why?”

Kardia’s voice was one of genuine astonishment.

“Because more than this life, more than the world—more than anything—it’s you that matters.”

Noi’s voice caught.

(I am a fool, forever.)

She loathed her own foolishness—thinking she was protecting Kardia.

(I’ve been protected all along.)

Noi lifted her face, hard.

Kardia had surely intended this from the start.

He meant to kill the Demon King—by dying himself.

“I cannot return all I took from you—but at least, your mana—”

At his scraped, airless voice, as if even his lungs were crushed, Noi shouted back on reflex.

“You took nothing from me!”

“No. Because I summoned you a hundred years later, I made you pay the price… your mana—and your years.”

“Then you saved me!”

Noi shouted until her voice went hoarse.

“There were times I thought I’d lost everything! But I never lost anything at all! I didn’t!”

Unable to contain the surge within her, tears overflowed from peppermint-colored eyes.

“Because my magic lives on in you!”

Noi clenched a fist and cried:

“And your disciple! And his disciple! They have accomplished what I could not, and for people’s sake, they are weaving magic in the future!”

The Weavers’ Enclave—and Ornis—used magic unknown to Noi, by the methods Noi had taught.

Kardia had spun such a world.

“Don’t you see? I have a future! And of course—so do you!”

Kardia sucked in a breath, startled. Emotion made Noi’s voice tremble.

“Don’t give up, Kardia! There is absolutely a way for us to live!”

Together with Noi, Kardia trembled too. He squeezed his eyes shut, as if to endure the torrent racing through him.

“…”

Noi moved to run to him.

But someone seized her arm and yanked.

“—I won’t let you go.”