The Spirit Body (2)

“Neat.”

Katya’s eyes were shining as she spoke from beside him. She sounded as if she found the whole thing fascinating, watching Aiden get flung this way and that like a scrap of cloth in the wind.

“Are you getting beaten up by a ghost right now?”
“Instead of standing there watching, come over here and help—!”

Before he could get another word out, Aiden’s body went flying off in a new direction.

Meanwhile, ghosts that exist in the Other Side, the space ‘overlaid’ upon the real world, cannot exert any great influence over the material plane.

Ordinarily, that is.

Unless the human in question is fearsome enough to bend even a law like that out of shape.

Which meant this phenomenon said something, indirectly, about how powerful a human the ghost now slamming Aiden into everything in sight had been in life.

— The nerve on you, you little bastard—!

Katya couldn’t hear it, but the noise the Knight of Dawn hurled out as he snorted and fumed was downright savage.

For all that temper, his looks were as pretty as they come. Blond hair, blue eyes, a handsome face, and the full plate armor that marked a Knight. Keep his mouth shut and keep him still, and you could have passed him off as noble-born.

— What was that, overblown? Small-minded? Still wet behind the ears and begging to die—!

It might even have worked, if only he had not kept spitting out lines like that in a snorting rage. So Aiden thought, as he went sailing through the air once more.

“…Sunbae, calm down for a moment—”¹

— Sunbae, my foot. I’m not lumping myself in with you over a word like that—!

Snorting, the Knight of Dawn raised a fist. He had the look of a man whose temper had gone clean through the roof, ready to haul off and land a blow.

Even so, this was starting to look a little dangerous.

“Would you, please, cut it out!”

As the words left him, divinity flared up out of his body.

At the sight, even the Knight of Dawn stopped short in the middle of his pounce. Suspicion and astonishment mingled in his eyes.

— …Divinity?

The Knight of Dawn muttered the word blankly.

— You reek of a man who handles ki, plain as anything. How is it you handle divinity as well?

“…”

With a wry smile, Aiden patted the dust off himself.

“I did call you ‘Sunbae’, didn’t I?”

Yes. He had known the man would take an interest the moment he saw several supernatural powers in use like this.

“Your junior offers his respects. If we narrow it down to ‘holders of multiple supernatural powers’, doesn’t that make us senior and junior?”

Dig through the whole of history and you would find precious few people who handled more than one supernatural power, and the Knight of Dawn standing in front of him was one of them. That was the simple reason so many places across the continent had loved him, too. There could hardly have been another human so skilled with several supernatural powers, each one the unique gift of a different nation.

“I need your help.”

And that was why Aiden meant to ‘take this person along’ as well. Search this whole world over, and only this person knew his ‘growth route’ from one to ten and could advise him on it.

“…Speaking frankly, I’m desperate for your help, Sunbae. Otherwise something truly enormous is going to happen.”

Chiefly, the fate of the world was at stake.

Aiden alone truly grasped the world-ending danger called the ‘main scenario’. If he failed, everyone died together.

— …What is this nonsense. The brat who was calling me overblown a moment ago, and now what—

“That was all a lie so I could meet you, Sunbae. Nothing else would have called a spirit body out like this.”

— …

“Where in the world would you find a man who’d run down the first Knight, a hero on a continental scale?”

— …

Aiden could feel Katya beside him staring at him in sheer disbelief. She couldn’t hear the conversation, of course, but her look said that surely nobody would be taken in by words like those.

…There was one.

A person that simple.

Laughing hollowly to himself, Aiden glared at the system window. Given the man’s character, he had figured a light touch on that sore spot would win him over, but it went so exactly to plan that it left him dumbfounded instead.

— …You think anyone falls for flattery that half-hearted?

And that he could say so out loud while falling for it anyway made it all the more chilling…

Meyer, the Knight of Dawn, folded his arms and spoke, still wearing a sulky face for show.

— You said yourself that in this age there’s someone who’d push a man like me into the background. The Lionhearted… was it?

How a ghost knew all that was anyone’s guess. But the way he had taken the bait at the first nudge showed how much he cared about his own ‘honor’ and ‘reputation’. It would have been stranger for him not to care about the human who had shoved him aside and taken the title of strongest Knight.

But.

“As it happens, I’m the man who’s to be the Lionhearted’s husband.”

Meyer’s eyes narrowed at that, but Aiden’s next words twisted his expression into something stranger.

“I guarantee it. Even she would have a hard time catching up to you, Sunbae.”

At the edge of his vision he could see Katya’s mouth twisting, too. Her whole air demanded to know what that was supposed to mean, but Aiden meant it in earnest.

Leave aside the simple question of which of them was stronger. Attach a single condition, and the claim could not fail to be true.

If this man had been given just a little more ‘time’.

Then not even Dame Noelle, surely, would ever have scaled the fortress he had built.

For a dead person’s soul to linger instead of passing on, two conditions both have to be met.

They must be a great figure, of the kind that leaves a name across the whole of history.

And they must carry a ‘regret’ bound so deep in the bone that they cannot close their eyes even in death.

In the Knight of Dawn’s case.

“The things you never managed. You’ve still got so many of them left, haven’t you?”

The Knight of Dawn’s expression changed abruptly. A moment ago it had held nothing but anger and fury; now, for the first time, he looked like a man Aiden’s words had caught off guard.

— …

Inside the game, the Knight of Dawn had appeared only as part of the setting, yet he had left a tremendously deep impression. The realm he had ‘so narrowly’ failed to reach, because he realized his own talent far too late, was set down in a single short sentence.

‘Not a domain for a human to challenge’, it said.

The legendary feats of valor he had left in every corner of the continent had all been, so the story went, training undertaken to reach that domain.

— …You.

After glaring at Aiden for a good while, Meyer let out a snort of a laugh and took up the thread.

— You say interesting things. There’s no way the records run as far as that.

“Put it down to the zeal of a junior who reveres his Sunbae.”

— Like hell. You came at me just to use me. You think I can’t tell that much?

“Actually, yes.”

— …

While that ruinous honesty left Meyer lost for words, Aiden shrugged and carried on.

“But turn it around, Sunbae, and if you want someone to use, there’s nobody quite like me.”

— What?

“How long do you think it’ll take before another holder of multiple supernatural powers turns up besides me?”

— …

“And what are the odds of a person like that coming to you in person like this and speaking to you?”

— …

“And breaking through all of those odds, what do you think the probability is of meeting someone who’ll swear to ‘achieve your heart’s wish in your place’?”

Meyer’s face screwed up tighter and tighter.

— …You pick out nothing but the things that put a man in a foul mood.

No doubt they put him in a foul mood because they were true. His next words made that plain enough.

— What is it you want help with, and how. So long as I’m a ghost I can’t do anything much.

Hooked.

Grinning inwardly, Aiden picked up one of the relics nearby. He had had his eye on it from the moment he came in: a bracelet he could wear naturally and carry about with no particular inconvenience.

“—Put the other way round, there are bound to be things that are possible precisely because you’re a ghost.”

— What?

“To start with, would you try ‘getting inside’ this?”

With that, Aiden went on to explain what Meyer ‘could help with’.

— …What did I do to get myself caught by a brat like this.

Admittedly, the explanation was the sort to draw that kind of lament out of anyone.

A little while later.

“Hm.”

Aiden looked at the bracelet, which had taken on a subtle glow, and let out a breath through his nose. By every sign, Meyer’s soul had settled into it properly.

This should do…

He had achieved every objective he had come for. Rania’s mediumship, and Meyer’s soul, reached by means of it. And, though he had yet to collect it, the First Prince’s skill, optimized for handling that soul. It was fair to say he had gathered every ingredient he needed to resolve Act 1, the ‘Ghost Knight’ commotion.

“Are you done?”
“Yes. Now we just have to get out.”

So he could answer a question like that briskly and at once.

“Except.”

Katya tilted her head and cut into the middle of Aiden’s words.

“I think we’ve been in here too long?”
“—Sorry?”
“That thing. It wasn’t there until a moment ago.”

At that, he turned to look, and.

A crystal set into the wall was plainly giving off a red light. Anyone would have said it was about to sound an ‘alarm’, and as if in answer, the whole room was taking on the same color.

Aiden’s face went stiff as everything around them turned red.

“Looks like a system that switches on automatically if someone stays inside too long?”
“—Instead of spending the time analyzing it we need to stop that thing…!”

Horrified, Aiden moved to get going, but.

In an instant.

With a crack, the alarm shattered just as it was about to pour out its red light. It looked as though it had been cut clean in two by a sword stroke driven out at terrifying speed.

Aiden stared blankly in the direction the attack had come from. Where on earth she had sprung from, and when, he had no idea, but there was Noelle, sliding her sword back into its sheath with a sigh.

“I do not know what business you were about, but would you refrain from walking into a place like this so carelessly. One misstep and you are in for a thorough ordeal.”
“…Dame Noelle?”

He had definitely heard from Dame Stella earlier that she had pleaded illness and gone back.

“Where on earth did you come out from…? Did you not say you had gone back?”
“…I did intend to go back. But Aiden, you were hard at work infiltrating the Imperial Palace’s security along with Her Highness, so I shadowed you, just in case.”

“…”

“You looked to be in danger, so I helped.”

So she had seen through all of that as well. And all the while, she had not thought to stop him, but had simply trailed quietly along behind.

Still, well.

Thanks to her, the situation had resolved itself smoothly and without fuss. He owed her his gratitude.

“We got through that nicely thanks to you. Thank you, Dame Noelle.”
“…Yes.”

“…”

What kind of reaction was that?

All that came back was a curt voice so stiff that a wooden puppet would have sounded livelier. Noelle whipped her head aside and tugged her hat down low, as though determined, by any means available, not to meet Aiden’s eyes.

“…Would you follow me. I will guide you on the way out.”

“…”

“Let us go straight back to headquarters. I would rather the night did not grow any longer than this.”

Puzzled by that oddly curt air, Aiden tilted his head and fell in behind her.

“…Hm.”

Behind them, Katya was glaring at the back of Noelle’s head as if something did not quite add up.

“Something, just slightly, seems to have changed in her attitude…?”

She muttered it under her breath, more to herself than to anyone.

An untimely commotion was drifting through the military headquarters.

The cause was Dame Noelle, back from the banquet with her husband-to-be. After parting from Aiden, she was stirring up a great deal of… ‘commotion’ on her way to her private room.

“Oh, Dame Noelle? Was the banquet today all right—”

Whoever had started to speak shut their mouth with a snap.

A natural reaction.

One look at Noelle’s face as she came striding down the corridor told anyone that speaking to her was a bad idea.

“D-Dame Noelle. Are you all right?”
“I am fine.”
“If you are unwell, we could contact the medical corps at once and—”
“I said I am fine.”
“Eep.”

One of the people fretting around her sucked in a breath without meaning to, most likely because Noelle’s answer came with such a razor edge on it.

Ordinarily she showed no face but a blank one or a manufactured smile, yet right now her blank face gave off a powerful sense of something being forced down and held under.

She must be in a bad mood…

There was no knowing for sure, but something must have happened at the banquet.

With that thought, every one of them shrank back step by step, while Noelle walked on with a heavy tread toward her private room. She kicked the door open and went in, set her sword down as though flinging it away, and hung her coat and hat on the stand.

And then.

“…”

She collapsed forward and drove her head into the desk, hard enough to make a bang.

The moment she did, a little of the heat escaped her, the heat that seemed to be turning not just her ears but the very crown of her head scarlet. Holding it down, keeping it hidden from everyone else, had been truly hard work.

What is this.

What is this.

What is this, what is this, what is this.

That one thought filled her head and left room for nothing else.

Her breathing was ragged. She had somehow held out all the way to her private room, but it felt as though heat were racing through her whole body, as though someone had poured a ball of fire into her veins.

“I like her, you see.”
“—!”

As the sentence replayed in her head yet again, she slammed her forehead into the desk yet again, hard enough to bang.

…What is this.

Dragging in ragged breaths, forehead still planted on the desk, she scrubbed at her hair until it was a tangle, and still she could not get the question out of her head. Even to her own mind, what had just happened made no sense whatsoever.

That man had said he liked her.

Why, for what reason, on what grounds?

So far as Noelle knew, that man had not a single reason to feel that way about her.

A lie.

Swindling had been his trade to begin with. Far and away the likeliest thing was that he had said it simply to wriggle out of the situation.

Rationally, she understood that much.

The trouble was.

“I’ll do it. Prove my worth. If that’s what it takes to get the engagement through.”

Only, writing it all off as that kind of lie.

“By the way, why was it that Aiden wanted to learn dharma power in the first place?”
“For the sake of someone he loves, apparently.”
“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?”

There were the things she had seen and heard up to now.

“…”

Come to think of it, was it not strange in the first place that he would go so far as to lie to take her side?

Going by everything Aiden had done so far, the conditions the Prince had pushed at him matched the attitude he had shown all along extremely well. He wanted to avoid rough business wherever possible, he thought the world of his family, and he preferred to live quietly and out of sight.

And yet.

Was there any reason for him to go so far as to lie in order to refuse an offer that satisfied all of that perfectly?

Making up something as absurd as that, namely.

That Aiden liked her.

“—!!!”

Forehead still planted on the desk, she brought her fists down, bang, bang.

Decorum, dignity, the whole lot had gone out the window somewhere along the way, but she had no leisure to care about such things.

Why, say a thing like that, Aiden, why on earth—

Through a mind tangled into a hopeless mess, that one sentence alone floated up clear, bobbing on the surface.

“…Haaah—”

A long sigh poured out of Noelle’s mouth, as though her very soul were being drawn out with it.