The Spirit Body

“…You really are a piece of work.”

The Prince had been laughing across the table for quite a while, peal after peal. When he finally stopped, he wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes and let the words drop.

“Dame Noelle really has brought along a bizarre one. I never expected anyone like this myself.”

“…?”

Honestly, Aiden had been half picking a fight, yet the reaction he got back was far milder than he’d expected.

He wondered whether the man still meant to put some further offer to him, so he started to open his mouth. But the Prince spoke a beat sooner, as though he’d read the thought.

“If you’ll go that far, I have no intention of proposing anything further. Surely you can simply stay as you are.”

“…?”

The surrender came so cleanly it was almost refreshing, and Aiden’s eyes narrowed further.

“Well, of course. You say you stay at her side because you like her, and prying you apart by force would be rather graceless.”

“…”

“Only.”

The Prince carried on with a bright smile.

“Whatever ‘risk’ comes of that, I’ll assume you’ll bear it yourself.”

The voice was calm, and as polite as ever, but.

“Until next time, Aiden.”

What dwelt inside the words the Prince left behind as he rose from his seat was a chill cold enough to freeze the spine solid.

“I feel quite certain the two of us will meet again.”

…That.

That, at least, was something Aiden could agree with from the bottom of his heart.

“Aiden.”
“Yes?”
“Dame Noelle has been acting somewhat strangely. Would you happen to know anything about it?”

“…”

Stella threw the question at him the moment he stepped back into the banquet hall, and Aiden’s eyes darted this way and that.

“Strange in what way…?”
“She seemed completely dazed, as though her very soul had slipped out of her, and then she suddenly said she was unwell and went back to the military headquarters. She has never once done such a thing at an official function like this…”

“…”

“Her face was strangely flushed, so I doubt it was a lie… but she is not one to fall ill so suddenly.”

…So that was why she’d been nowhere to be seen for a while.

Stella kept fretting aloud, one worried remark after another, and Aiden nodded along with a subtle look on his face. As for whether he had any guess of his own.

There was something.

There was, all right, but.

“…Hard to say. I’m not really sure myself.”

For the moment, that was the only answer he could give.

To be fair, if Dame Noelle had been listening to the conversation back there, it made perfect sense on its own that her favor had gone up. He’d taken her side against the Prince in earnest, and then at the very end…

…Honestly, I want to die of embarrassment.

He’d publicly blurted out something close to a confession, and the thought set his face burning.

He could smooth it over with Noelle somehow later. If she genuinely misunderstood it, that would be a problem. Then again, come to think of it, it wasn’t such a terrible problem, because in the end he’d gained two copy rights all the same.

A gain is a gain, I suppose.

Yet this time he hadn’t done it on purpose, and that left him thoroughly uncomfortable. The way his relationship with her kept deepening was worth noting, too.

This is dangerous.

…He knew he was in a contradictory state.

In his situation he had to grab every skill he could lay his hands on just to survive, and Dame Noelle was far too powerful to leave off the list of people he had to do that to. Even setting her ability aside, keeping up the ‘marriage relationship’ with her was, right now, one of the central axes on which his life or death turned. Look at it from any angle and his relationship with her, and her favor, were essential to his survival.

But, conversely.

Precisely because of that, if he genuinely grew close to Noelle as a person, that brought a headache of its own. It wasn’t because he disliked her or because she didn’t matter. It was the other way round. She mattered ‘too much’.

I have to be careful with all of the main characters.

What he had to do was much the same as before, since raising their favor was, in the end, absolutely necessary.

But.

With no protagonist around, Aiden would have to keep facing them himself until the main scenario was over. So what if they really did grow that close, and then he made some mistake and it all slipped?

The higher a thing climbs, the farther it falls. Once a close relationship broke deeply, mending it was as near to impossible as made no difference. It wasn’t even rare for two people to become, the ‘closer’ they were, the kind who wounded each other most easily. That was simply how people lived, and Aiden was wary enough to know that anyone in the world could end up that way.

So every one of them had to be approached carefully, delicately.

“…”

Still.

He could agonize over that later. For the moment, other matters demanded his attention.

This was the skill-copy right he’d torn out of the Prince a moment ago, but it seemed to work a little differently from the ones he’d used until now. It started with the word itself, ‘mimicry’ rather than copying, and when he actually opened the skill window and looked over the effects, the impression only grew stronger.

The performance has been shaved way down.

Next to the skills the Prince actually held, every last one was inferior. Power, range of application, all of it was weakened across the board, and several skills were struck through in red, as though they couldn’t be mimicked at all.

But the point worth noting was this.

Compared with the skills he copied through favor, this one felt as if a great deal of extra utility had been bolted on. He couldn’t use a skill at its original power, but in exchange, it seemed, Aiden himself could exert some kind of ‘influence’ over the skill itself. The details would only become clear once he raised the Malice stage.

More to the point, the condition being named Malice means…

…Did that mean the more this man disliked Aiden, the more skills he could use?

“…”

Even so, that was a dizzying condition to have to trigger. He’d have to go out of his way to buy up other people’s malice.

Letting out a deep inward sigh, Aiden rose from his seat.

“Are you leaving?”
“Yes. I’ve met everyone I came to meet.”

That was what he said, but in fact the most headache-inducing person of all was still ahead of him.

He left the banquet hall and had walked only a little way when a Knight in full heavy armor came into view, perched on the edge of the fountain with her chin propped in one hand as though she were sleepy. …Though in truth she was no Knight, nor anything of the sort.

“I’m bo-o-red—”

The instant he came into view, Katya kicked her legs about and let that sound out.

“What even is this? It’s no fun at all. Isn’t there something big going on somewhere?”
“…Something big like what, exactly.”
“You know, anything. Something you’d get in trouble for if you got caught.”

“…”

“Beating someone up, burning something down, killing somebody, nothing like that?”

“…”

And this was the same person who’d thrown a tantrum to be made his adjutant, insisting he’d draw frowns if he turned up at a public function.

“Weren’t you the one who threw a fit to be my adjutant? Then you should do the job properly.”
“That only counts ‘when we’re spending time together’. Did you forget? I told you, I became your adjutant so I could stick with you for a long time.”

“…”

Saying things that put the other person on the spot without turning a hair was Katya all over.

Pressing hard at the temple where a headache was setting in, Aiden answered.

“Then shall we go do something fun together? I’m done with the banquet anyway.”
“Yeah? So what’re we going to do?”

Aiden turned his head slightly and swept a glance over the grounds around the building where the banquet was being held. This was, after all, an event inside the Imperial Palace, and the vast sprawl of it was littered with places where no end of history and secrets had piled up. The place Aiden was after was one of them.

Only, what it looked like from the outside was, how to put it.

Hm.

He scratched his chin and tried to think of a milder way to put what he was about to do. In the end he realized it came out the same however he said it, so he just said it.

“Grave-robbing.”
“…Ooh.”

“The Hall of Honor?”

Katya, who at Aiden’s request had ‘infiltrated’ the place with him in tow, said the name aloud. She seemed to know perfectly well what it was.

“This is a real tomb. So it wasn’t a figure of speech? It’s actual grave-robbing?”

The custom of honoring great figures was the same wherever you went in the world, and the Empire was no different. The place that enshrined objects tied to those great figures and the deeds they’d done was this very one, the Hall of Honor. Strictly speaking it ought to be called a museum, but Katya wasn’t wrong to call it a tomb either, because wherever possible it preserved even the great figure’s ‘remains’.

Perhaps finding the place a novelty, Katya looked around her in wide sweeps. Aiden, trailing meekly behind her, was giving her a thoroughly appalled look.

…She really is a monster.

It went without saying that every corner of the Imperial Palace boasted security of the highest grade. Yet here she was, bounding through it without a care and with Aiden in tow besides, until he could no longer tell whether she was royalty from somewhere or a professionally trained infiltration agent. She had the air of someone hiding more than one or two talents.

“…Princess. When you fought Dame Noelle before, you weren’t really trying, were you?”
“Hm? That wasn’t even a fight to begin with?”

“…”

It brought home to him all over again just what order of monster he had for an adjutant. Shaking his head, he stepped inside the Hall of Honor.

“So, grave-robbing means we’re stealing something from here, right? What’re you after? A weapon? A secret manual? Armor? Whatever you take from in here, it’d all be top-grade, right?”

The questions tumbled out of her like someone whose heart was racing at doing ‘something worth getting scolded for’, and maybe it was his imagination, but her eyes even seemed to sparkle.

And whether it was a misfortune or a mercy, he couldn’t say, but Aiden had an answer ready that wouldn’t disappoint her in the slightest.

“…The great man himself.”
“What?”

Katya tilted her head, but instead of explaining anything, Aiden walked on with steady, tramping steps.

As mentioned, this place held several sets of preserved remains, and Aiden came to a stop directly in front of one whose condition was very good indeed, even among them. The spirit dwells in the flesh, and if that held true, the better the condition, the better the odds that what he was about to do would succeed.

“…The Knight of Dawn?”

Katya checked what the preservation case in front of him held and said the name aloud.

“You know of him? He’s a great figure on the Empire’s side.”
“It’d be weirder not to know, wouldn’t it? ‘The First Knight’ is still a favorite subject for artists, you know.”

He was a hero of the Empire who’d piled up no end of feats of arms, war honors and tales of valour. Conqueror of the Nameless Valley, the overlord who brought down the spire of heaven, a match for a thousand men, the first and the strongest, the most faithful servant of the goddess Karva. He was also the very first to discover the use of ki and the cultivation method, a Knight who handled ki in its purest state, and Dame Noelle aside, nobody had surpassed him yet.

“Even the Holy Kingdom thinks the world of the Knight of Dawn. There’s hardly anyone on the continent who dislikes him, right?”

No doubt.

And in fact he had the achievements to earn that reputation. Going only by the setting of the game Aiden knew, the deeds the Knight of Dawn left behind were heroic enough to deserve every bit of praise.

But Aiden dug at his ear and answered in a bored tone.

“There’s one thing I’d like to correct.”

He said it evenly.

“This guy isn’t really all that great.”

“…”

For once, of all things, Katya’s expression turned strange. She looked like someone who’d never imagined hearing an Imperial subject trample their own idol flat.

“…Um, uh, really? But the Empire still honors him as a hero, doesn’t it?”
“People romanticize him because he’s from the past. There’s really nothing to him, this guy.”

“…”

“This is just my personal suspicion, but those achievements of his might’ve been doctored a bit.”
“Uh…”

Aiden didn’t answer her what-are-you-talking-about look. He silently worked the window instead, because having said this much, a ‘reaction’ was likely to arrive any moment now.

What he meant to use was the skill-copy right he’d taken from Rania the other day. He copied, just as it was, the one skill he’d already looked over in advance.

The moment he copied it, subtle ‘energies’ caught at the edges of his vision. Something like smoke was creeping slowly up around the Knight of Dawn’s remains, as though it had heard what he’d just said, and it was probably visible to him alone.

Just as he’d thought, the man was right here. The remains had been preserved intact, and a ‘soul’ this strong didn’t vanish so easily.

…Necromancy isn’t supposed to be this easy a thing, you know.

The dead and the living coming face to face naturally ran against providence. By rights it was barely possible even if you invited over some tremendously skilled sorcerer from the Far East, but when special conditions lined up, even a man with nothing to him like Aiden could manage it.

That is to say, for example.

A ‘strong human’ beyond all common sense might hear words he couldn’t stand even in death, and his soul would come back for a while. The Knight of Dawn was just such a case.

This man.

The deeds he’d set down were truly dazzling enough to make your eyes roll back, but his personal character…

“Petty little man.”

Aiden let out a snort of a laugh and went on.

“If you’ve got a complaint, why don’t you come out and argue it?”

The instant the words landed, the smoke inside the preservation case shook all the more violently, and soon something began to take ‘physical’ effect on the surroundings.

“…What is this?”

Wind blew, the objects around them shook, and skin prickled, enough to fluster even Katya. It ought to have been impossible to cause a phenomenon like this through sheer ‘presence’ alone, so it showed indirectly just how strong the ‘spirit’ in here was.

He was known by a name the game’s players had given him.

‘The world’s strongest small-minded man’, if you please.

Quite apart from his outstanding ability, he was a man with the most pinched and petty insides imaginable, who could not bear being badmouthed by anyone, not if it killed him.

In short.

Even in death, his temper couldn’t put up with what Aiden was saying without the irritation boiling over.

— What did you just say, you brat—!

…There it was.

The moment he saw the enraged spirit body come leaping out of the remains, Aiden snorted with laughter inwardly.