Dharma Power (2)

“Lionhearted.”
“Yes, Chieftain.”
“You picked yourself a fine husband.”

“…”

“…”

Noelle refilled Dunadan’s glass without a word. She had never imagined that a hobby of collecting liquor would come in handy at a moment like this. It was plainly too early in the day for drinking, but given the state her guest was in, she could hardly refuse to pour. When the chieftain turned up out of nowhere, she had wondered what was wrong; now that she had heard what had just happened, she rather thought the reaction was fair.

“…You are saying Aiden gathered three Cores of dharma power in the space of a few hours.”
“Absurdly easily, at that.”

When Noelle carefully went over what had happened a short while ago one more time, Dunadan knocked the full glass straight back in a single swallow. The hollowness written all over that gesture was far from ordinary…

“Do you know that making your first Core serves in place of a coming-of-age rite in the Tribal Confederation, Lionhearted?”
“I did hear it from those who took the field alongside me.”
“Then you will know too that every one of the Confederation learns to handle dharma power as a duty from the day they are born.”

In other words, even with that kind of drilling from infancy, making a first Core by about the time you came of age was only ‘average’. And precisely because its people could manage such a thing, the Tribal Confederation boasted the highest individual combat power per head of population anywhere on the continent.

Surely…

Noelle rummaged back through her memories. Even with only two or three Cores, hadn’t plenty of Great Plains warriors performed brilliantly in the hell of the Coalition War?

And yet, the man called Aiden Kellermain.

He had reached that level in a mere few hours.

“Simply being born with a supernatural power and handling it well are two completely separate matters.”

Now and then there were blessed ones, the sort who handled several supernatural powers with perfect ease, and there was no denying that Aiden Kellermain was one of them.

And so.

“Honestly, I had even made ready to console him. Dharma power in particular is hard to master, even for those confident in handling power.”

I am plainly a genius. I am one of the blessed.
Why can I not do even a thing like this properly?

The chieftain had watched a fair number of fellows despair in exactly that way. All the more so with a man who, by some method nobody could guess, had been born with both the Lionhearted’s pure-white ki and the divinity of the Holy Kingdom’s royal line; his pride would surely be considerable.

Dunadan had expected him to feel what the chieftain had felt on first handling dharma power, or to run into the sort of ‘wall’ seen in others. That Dunadan would be the one feeling that emotion while watching a ‘beginner’ had plainly never been part of the plan.

“The fellow is a genius.”

As Noelle quietly nodded along, Dunadan’s face creased for a moment, with the look of someone turning over what had just been said.

“No. Calling him a genius… that is a little wide of the mark, too.”

Dunadan swirled the liquor in the glass and went on.

“The fellow is a monster.”

“…”

The talent Aiden had shown was tremendous, certainly, but hardly one of a kind. Going by the history books alone, people whose talent could fairly be called violent had turned up in droves. The savior of humanity, the routed Evil God, the forgotten Demon King… With terrible names like those carved into the continent’s history, names standing in the heaven beyond the heavens¹, his talent was nothing so very special.

That was what the chieftain had thought.

Until seeing firsthand what he had pulled yesterday.

“I grew up hearing myself called a genius too, but a sight like that I have never once seen in all my born days. If I went back to the Great Plains and told my fellow chieftains, they would treat me as a madman.”

At that blunt assessment, Noelle fell silent a moment before she spoke.

“How long does it usually take to reach that level?”
“Ten years, for an ordinary talent.”

“…”

“It took even me two years.”

“…”

“Believe what I tell you, Lionhearted. You picked yourself a truly fine husband. Even I am curious how far that fellow will have grown in time.”

What a genius had needed two years to achieve had been done in a single night, and within that night, in a few hours.

Noelle stroked her cheek and turned over for a moment what she ought to say. Dunadan had been born with the talent to look down on others for a whole lifetime and had become the very standard of genius. Now, having met a ‘talent that made one hit a wall’ for the first time ever, the chieftain was plainly one step from coming unhinged. Was Noelle supposed to console someone in that state?

Or else…

“That is Aiden for you.”
“…It is a good thing for a couple to be in harmony, but must you really show your husband off in front of me right now?”

Noelle gave a small laugh and filled the glass again. In truth, she had not been showing off so much as saying the words aloud because the whole business had left even her dazed. Ability aside, what puzzled her was the very thing the man had gone and done.

…Why the sudden training?

Anyone but a fool could tell that Aiden went to extreme lengths to avoid getting tangled up in anything ‘big’, anything ‘troublesome’, or for that matter anything ‘hard’. Being at her side meant he could never wholly dodge that sort of storm, of course; that was why she had brought in a man who looked able to weather it. But his attitude made it obvious he welcomed none of it. Keeping him tucked at her side to the point of near surveillance had been her way of shielding him, as far as she could manage, from being dragged into such things without warning.

While she chewed on the question, Dunadan dropped another remark in a voice gone hollow again.

“Decent liquor.”
“I have another bottle, so I will make you a present of it.”
“Have you no thought of drinking with me?”
“I have official duties left.”

Noelle smiled wryly. At least one person had to stay clear-headed, ready for whatever mishap someone out of their senses might cause. She would probably have held to that, too, if only she had not gone and voiced the curiosity she had been holding in.

“By the way, why was it that Aiden wanted to learn dharma power in the first place?”
“He says there is someone he wants to look good for. That he wants to become a better man.”

“…”

“I told you, did I not. That you picked yourself a fine husband. A life where a fellow born with that much talent looks your way with that much devotion is worth living, is it not?”

Noelle looked at Dunadan in expressionless silence.

For a good long while.

Long enough to fluster the one who had said it. Seen another way, she looked to be fighting down some fluster of her own.

“…Surely that was not said looking at me.”

Noelle had kept her mouth shut all that while, and when she finally murmured that, carefully, Dunadan shot back in plain disbelief.

“And who else is there to be the object of a line like that, if not a newlywed wife?”

“…”

Noelle’s expressionlessness deepened a little further.

No, it was a fair point.

It was, but.

Aiden had, to begin with, been abducted and bound into a contract marriage by force.

There was no reason for him to say a thing like that to Noelle herself.

“By the look of it, you don’t seem to remember the old days? When you were little, for instance.”
“No, it’s nothing. I just didn’t think you would really have forgotten.”

Or rather, it was not as though there were none.

Not none at all.

Probably.

With those words hammering through her head, Noelle scrubbed her hands down her face once.

Again.

Again, again, again.

However much she wanted to believe otherwise, the thoughts kept seizing her as though she were bewitched. Had that man really shared something with her in the past? Was that why he went around saying such things without a hint of embarrassment?

She did not know.

She would have liked to shove the whole matter to the back of her head, since there was no finding out for now, but with it forced on her awareness again and again, she could not help minding.

“…”

And when stray thoughts like these came up, the solution was fairly clear. Noelle sighed and fetched one more glass from the cabinet. At that unmistakable gesture, Dunadan broke into a laugh.

“Have you not official duties left?”
“…Now that I think of it, a few glasses would sooner help than hinder; I do not think they will get in the way.”
“Just so.”

With a clink, the two of them touched the rims of their glasses together.

…Surely he doesn’t actually like me?

Sloshing liquor into her glass, Noelle found herself chewing over that thought.

“…”

Oh, come now. It could not be. As if that made any sense.

She tossed back the half-full glass in one go and kept calling up thoughts like that.

…Whether from the drink or not, her face burned.

Faced with a system window like that, Aiden glared at the number 5 sitting beside the Core count.

I only made three for now, because of the chieftain…

The higher the Core count climbed, the closer the chieftain looked to losing it outright, so naturally he had felt more and more awkward about carrying on. That was also why the question he really should have followed up with was left in the fog. The trouble lay in the two sentences tacked onto the very bottom of the skill window.

So only a special one works for me?

In the game, simple interdictions like ‘skip one meal’ or ‘sleep no more than seven hours’ had been perfectly possible, as many as you liked. When he tried them here, every interdiction of that kind came up void for Aiden, just as the skill window said: only a special one would do.

What on earth does the ‘Unique’ class even mean…

Going by the terms the System had used so far, it probably meant one with a characteristic ‘nobody else has’.

An interdiction nobody else has ever used?

…Just thinking about the number of people in the Great Plains alone was dizzying, and the number across the whole continent who used dharma power made it dizzier still. At this rate, was he going to end up unable to use dharma power after all the trouble of learning it…

I’ll have to give this some thought.

As he thought that and went to close the window, a new line of text abruptly swept up before his eyes.

Aiden blinked blankly and stared at the window that had popped up out of nowhere.

…That worked?

He had figured the excuse he let slip to Dunadan earlier might get passed along to Noelle, but he had only tossed it out half as a joke, so seeing it actually work left him uneasy.

“…”

At this point, a warning bell did go off: he ought to adjust his thinking a little. If her favor shot up this fast, it really might develop into a deep relationship down the line.

…As if it would go that far.

For now, it was only one coincidence stacking on another, deepening her interest in him bit by bit. Whatever interest she was showing in him now would shift to the ‘protagonist’ in the end, once that figure turned up. Either way, he was slated to hand the whole lot off to the protagonist he would soon run into and go back to an ordinary life; until then, he only had to make good use of it.

Aiden tapped his chin and sank into thought.

What I’ve got left is…

He had three skill copies remaining in total: one from Katya, one from Noelle, and one he could take from His Majesty the Emperor.

No need to learn them right away.

With no telling what would blow up at the main-scenario event, learning a skill in advance made little sense to begin with. He had already looked over what skills there were, so the ideal was to stay flexible and learn whichever ability best suited the situation once things turned urgent. Even dharma power was something he’d gone to the trouble of learning ‘just in case’, to cope with an emergency.

…Though the best thing would be getting through it peacefully without learning a single one.

That was exactly why he was moving so diligently now. He was headed somewhere he remembered visiting once before: Billy Hagen’s tool shop, where he would collect the information he had asked for the other day.

The moment Aiden stepped inside, Billy recognized his face and snorted.

“Ah, you’re the one who went sticking his head into that dangerous business, right?”

…A slightly odd way to be remembered, admittedly.

“The information?”

No sooner had he asked than a rolled-up bundle of papers dropped onto the counter.

“Volume of the trade, distribution route, and most important of all the ‘deal site’ — I’ve got the whole lot written up.”

Billy had clearly singled out the deal site because Aiden had asked for it in particular; that was where the incident would most likely break out.

Aiden nodded and skimmed through the papers. The work was certainly worth a premium. He set the sack of gold coins he had brought down on the counter.

“I put in another 50 gold. By way of goodwill.”
“You rich or something?”

…Noelle had set him up with plenty, admittedly. Aiden gave a vague nod.

Billy tipped out the sack and checked the amount. Realizing the man meant it, he let out a short laugh and scooped the extra back out.

“Don’t need this, so take it back. It’s not as if I did the whole job properly.”
“Sorry?”
“Those weapons, I mean. I couldn’t find who’s releasing them. Whoever it is, they’re buried deep, and not in any ordinary way.”
“It’s 550 gold. You could have pushed a little harder.”

Billy answered with an easy laugh.

“Like hell.”

“…”

“If I can’t find it, it’s a high noble at the least. Dig into that lot’s affairs? You looking to get somebody’s neck taken off?”
“…I see.”

Aiden nodded along, his face creasing slightly.

Was that something you couldn’t find, originally?

A high noble, was it. In the game, tracking down the group handling distribution had not been especially difficult, since they were the most common sort of petty criminals. The hard part had been finding the figure who ‘put them up to it’. Getting blocked at the very first step like this was at odds with the original as Aiden remembered it.

…Something is different, all right.

The Prince, Act 1’s good-side role, being on bad terms with the Emperor, for one. The main scenario’s very first incident being out of joint, for another. Over and over, in the small details, something felt off. And one fact was amplifying the sense that this world differed from the ‘original’ he knew.

“Um, Mr. Hagen.”
“Just Billy’s fine. What is it.”
“The personal particulars of the person I asked about aren’t in here.”
“There wasn’t any, so I didn’t put any in, did I?”
“…Is that so?”

Information about the ‘protagonist’. This time, too, it was missing, and an information dealer this capable had failed to find it.

“…”

He had not given up hope yet. Even if the main scenario was twisted a little here and there, if that one did not exist at all, the very ‘foundation’ of this world inside the game would be shaken.

But.

“—”

If.

If, that is.

If that one was not at the site tomorrow.

If it were confirmed that this was a ‘world with no protagonist’.

…If he had to resolve terrifying events like these entirely ‘on his own’.

There was one thing he had in mind. Something he absolutely did not want to do, and one not likely to come to pass anyway.

But if the moment of utter desperation came after all.

I’ll have to do it.

At a time like that, even he.

Would have to do what had to be done.