The Spirit Body

“…You really are a piece of work.”

The Prince had been laughing across the table for quite a while. At last he wiped the tears welling in his eyes and spoke.

“Dame Noelle really has brought along a bizarre person. I never anticipated a man like this either.”

“…?”

Honestly, Aiden had been half picking a fight, and yet the reaction that came back was far milder than he had expected. Wondering whether the man still meant to put some further offer to him, he started to speak, and the Prince, as though he had read the thought, spoke a beat sooner.

“When you go so far as to say that, I have no intention of proposing anything further. Would it not be fine for you to simply stay as you are?”

“…?”

The surrender landed so decisively 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 took up the thread with a bright smile.

“Whatever ‘risk’ comes out of that, I will take it that you are bearing it yourself.”

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

“Let us meet again, 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, Aiden could agree with from the bottom of his heart.

“Aiden.”
“Yes?”
“Dame Noelle’s condition is somewhat strange. Would you happen to know anything of it?”

“…”

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

“Strange in what way…?”
“She could not gather her wits, as though her very soul had slipped out of her, and then suddenly said that she was unwell and went back to the military headquarters. She is a person who has never once done such a thing at an official function like this…”

“…”

“Seeing how strangely flushed her face was, it does not seem to be a lie either… but she is not a person to fall ill that suddenly.”

…So that was why she had been nowhere to be seen for a while now.

Stella kept dropping one worried remark after another, and Aiden nodded along with an awkward look on his face. As for whether anything came to mind.

Something did.

Something did, all right, but.

“…I wonder. I don’t really know either.”

For the moment he had no other answer to give. If Dame Noelle had been listening to the conversation back there, her favor going up made sense enough in itself. He had taken her side in earnest against the Prince, and at the very end…

…Honestly, I want to die of embarrassment.

The thought that he had publicly flung out something close to a confession set his face burning. He could smooth it over with Noelle somehow later, too, but if she genuinely misunderstood, that would be a problem.

Come to think of it, though, the problem was not such a terrible one. When all was said and done, he had gained two copy rights.

A gain is a gain, I suppose.

This time, at least, he had not done it on purpose, which left him thoroughly uncomfortable, and the way his relationship with her kept deepening was worth noting as well.

This is dangerous.

…He knew he was caught in a contradiction. In his present situation he had to grab every skill he could lay hands on to survive, and Dame Noelle was far too powerful a person to leave off his list of targets. Her ability aside, keeping up the ‘marriage relationship’ with her was, right now, one of the main pillars his survival rested on. However he looked at it, his relationship with her, and her favor, were things he could not do without.

But, conversely.

Precisely because of that, if he grew genuinely close to Noelle as one person to another,

…that brought a headache of its own.

Not because he disliked Noelle or because she did not matter. Quite the reverse, because 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. In the end, raising their favor was absolutely necessary.

But.

With no protagonist around, Aiden would have to go on facing them himself until the main scenario ended. And if they really did grow that close, and then he made some mistake and something slipped.

The higher a thing climbs, the farther it falls. Once a relationship that had grown close broke down badly, mending it was all but impossible. Nor was it rare for two people, the ‘closer’ they were, to become the kind who wounded each other more easily. That was simply how people were, and Aiden was at least wary enough to know that anyone in the world could end up that way.

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

“…”

Still.

That could be agonized over later. For the moment, other matters demanded his attention.

This skill copy right, torn out of the Prince a moment ago, ran on a mechanism that felt a little different from the ones he had used until now. For a start, the word written there was ‘mimicry’ rather than copying, and when he actually opened the skill window and looked over the effects inside, the impression only grew stronger.

The performance has been shaved way down.

Set against the skills the Prince actually held, every last one of them performed worse. Power, range of application, all of it was weakened across the board, and several skills were struck through in red, as though they could not be mimicked at all.

But the point worth noting was this.

Compared with the skills he copied through favor, this one felt as though a great deal of extra utility had been bolted on. In exchange for never wielding a skill at its original power, Aiden himself seemed able to 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 himself, the more skills he could use?

“…”

Even so, that was a hair-raising condition to trigger on.

Having to go out of his way to buy malice off other people.

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

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

So 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, chin propped sleepily in one hand.

…Not that she was really a Knight, or anything of the sort.

“I’m bo-o-red—”

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

“What even is this. It’s not fun at all. Isn’t there some big incident going on somewhere?”
“…What sort of big incident do you mean.”
“You know, anything at all, as long as it’s the kind of thing you get in trouble for if you’re caught.”

“…”

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

“…”

And this from the very person who had thrown a tantrum to be made his adjutant, insisting he would draw frowns if he turned up at some public function.

“Weren’t you the one who threw a fit to be my adjutant? You ought to be faithful to the duties.”
“That’s only for ‘when we’re spending time together’. Did you forget? I told you, I became your adjutant so I could stick to 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 spoke up.

“Then shall we go and do something fun together. I’m done with the banquet now.”
“Yeah? What are we going to go do?”

Aiden turned his head slightly and swept a glance over the grounds around the building where the banquet was being held. The banquet was an event inside the Imperial Palace, after all, and this vast sprawl of buildings was littered with spaces 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.

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

“Grave-robbing.”
“…Ooh.”

“The Hall of Honor?”

Katya had ‘infiltrated’ the place at Aiden’s request, with him in tow, and now she named it. She seemed to know perfectly well what it was.

“This is an actual tomb. So it wasn’t a figure of speech, it really was grave-robbing?”

Every country in the world honored its great figures, and the Empire was no different. The space that enshrined the objects tied to those figures and the deeds they had done was this very place, the Hall of Honor. Strictly speaking, ‘museum’ would be the proper word, but Katya was not wrong to call it an actual tomb either, because wherever possible it preserved even the ‘remains’ of the great figures.

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

…She really is a monster.

It went without saying that every corner of the Imperial Palace boasted the highest grade of security. Watching her bound through a place like that without a care, and with Aiden in tow at that, he could not tell whether she was royalty from somewhere or a professionally trained spy. She had the air of someone hiding more than one or two talents.

“…Princess. Back when you fought Dame Noelle, you weren’t fighting properly, were you?”
“Hm? That wasn’t even a fight to begin with?”

“…”

It brought home to him afresh just what order of monster he had for an adjutant. Shaking his head, he set foot inside the Hall of Honor.

“So, grave-robbing means we steal something out of here, right? What are you trying to steal? A weapon? A secret manual? Armor? Anything in here would be top-grade whatever you took, I’d think?”

She fired off the questions like someone whose heart was racing at doing ‘something worth getting scolded for’. Maybe it was his imagination, but her eyes even seemed to sparkle.

And, whether by misfortune or mercy he could not say, Aiden had an answer ready that would not 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 space held several preserved remains, and he came to a stop directly in front of one whose condition was very good indeed, even among the rest. The spirit dwells in the flesh, and if that was so, the better the body’s condition, the higher the chance that what he was about to do would succeed.

“…The Knight of Dawn?”

Katya checked whose preservation case Aiden had stopped at and said the name.

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

A hero of the Empire who had piled up no end of feats of arms, war honors and tales of valor. 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 method of cultivating it, a Knight who handled ki in its purest state and whom nobody, Dame Noelle aside, had yet surpassed.

“Even in the Holy Kingdom they rate the Knight of Dawn enormously highly. I doubt there’s anyone on the continent who dislikes him?”

No doubt. He had, in fact, 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 spoke up in a bored tone.

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

His voice was even.

“This guy isn’t all that great a person.”

“…”

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

“…Um, uh, is that so? Still, he is a person the Empire’s side enshrines as a hero, isn’t he?”
“They prettify him because he’s a man of the past. There’s really nothing to him, this guy.”

“…”

“It’s my own personal suspicion, but those achievements of his might well have been doctored a bit.”
“Uh…”

Instead of answering Katya’s what-are-you-talking-about reaction, Aiden silently worked the window. Having said this much, he expected a ‘reaction’ to come along any moment now.

He meant to use the skill copy right he had taken from Rania the other day, and he copied, just as it was, the one skill he had looked over in advance.

The moment he copied it, he caught subtle ‘energies’ at the edges of his vision. As if it had heard what he just said, something like smoke was creeping slowly up around the Knight of Dawn’s remains, and probably no one but him could see it.

Just as he had thought, the man was right here. The remains were preserved intact, and a ‘soul’ this strong did not 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 the order of things. By rights it was barely possible even with a sorcerer of tremendous skill invited over from the Far East, yet when special conditions lined up, even an unremarkable man like Aiden could manage it.

For example.

A ‘strong human’ beyond all common sense hears words he cannot endure even in death, and his soul comes back for a while.

The Knight of Dawn was just such a case.

This man.

The deeds he set down were dazzling enough to blind a man, truly, but as for his character.

“Petty little man.”

Aiden snorted a laugh and went on.

“If you’ve got a complaint, come out and argue it.”

The instant the words landed, the smoke inside the preservation case shook all the more violently, and presently something began to act ‘physically’ on the surroundings.

“…What is this?”

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

The game’s players had a name for him.

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

Quite apart from that outstanding ability, he was as pinched and petty a man as could be imagined, who could not bear being badmouthed by anyone, not if it killed him.

In short.

Even in death, he could not let what Aiden was saying pass without his temper 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 let out an inward snort of laughter.