Omen (2)

…Against all expectation, Dame Stella agreed at once. He was Dame Noelle’s consort, if only by contract, so helping him was apparently her duty as well. Though of course, that was only after she’d heard what the job actually was.

Because however strange a person’s tastes, nobody hoping for a romantic mood goes leaping across rooftops loaded down with bundles of gear.

“…Please stop startling people like that.”

Dame Stella said it with a slightly dizzy look.

“You ought to learn to phrase things so you won’t be misunderstood. You gave me quite a fright.”

“…”

If anyone was horrified, though, it was Aiden, who was flying over the rooftops with his collar clutched in her fist. She carried a grown man in one hand like a parcel and cleared several buildings with every bound. She was superhuman, plain and simple.

That physical ability, seriously…!

He’d just come from tangling with Knights in person not long ago, and that only made him feel, right there in the moment, how sharply ‘class’ divided even the Knights. She was weaker than Noelle at full strength, of course, with every scrap of that pure-white ki dragged out, but Stella was doing all this without using any supernatural power to speak of. He understood keenly that she wasn’t the Lionhearted’s adjutant for nothing.

And thanks to her, work that would’ve cost Aiden days without sleep on his own was getting done with ease.

“Yes, one over there as well, please.”

Stella pursed her lips and hammered a stake deep into the spot Aiden pointed to. So far, that was all they’d done: she ran across whichever buildings he picked, on her own two legs with no gear or powers, and drove in these ‘stakes’ whose purpose she couldn’t guess.

“Aiden.”

Stella tilted her head.

“What on earth is the point of all this? I did finish it quickly enough.”
“Oh, there’s a point.”

Because those weren’t just stakes.

He’d been making them somehow through every waking hour of daylight, all while Meyer taught him to fight by hacking him apart every night. They weren’t complicated things like a firearm, so laying a single supernatural power into each one wasn’t so hard, but there were a staggering number of them. So many that Noelle, seeing the pile, had asked in dismay whether he was off to hunt a legion of vampires.

And he had a skill to serve as the core of running them, too. It let a stored supernatural power go off ‘when he wanted’ it to. Combine that with the divinity he’d already loaded in through ‘supernatural power imbuing’, and a rather… ‘interesting’ use became possible.

Of course, that alone couldn’t plug every hole in Scene 1. The real core would be the three copy rights he still had left on Noelle, plus the one on the Prince, which could only ‘mimic’ the original at lower performance. How he used them would decide whether Aiden lived or died in this affair.

While he was turning that over, Dame Stella folded her arms and threw out another question, sounding put out again.

“…I do not know what you are aiming at, but for work like this you had Her Highness Katya, or others. Why me, of all people?”
“Because there’s something I can’t ask them.”
“Ask them what?”
“What on earth happened between Dame Noelle and the Lord Protector.”

Dame Stella froze where she was.

“…That is someone else’s private affair. I do not think it is right to ask me.”
“The Prince means to use it to put pressure on Dame Noelle. And his grudge didn’t feel like an ordinary one.”

“…”

Stella clamped her mouth stubbornly shut, so Aiden went on, calm as ever.

“Trust me, Dame Stella. I’m asking because I want to help Dame Noelle too.”
“…For a man who was simply roped into a contract marriage, you work rather zealously.”
“Isn’t working hard a good thing?”
“Nothing is more suspicious than goodwill with no known intent or motive.”

Luckily, he definitely had a motive for that.

“I don’t like the Prince.”

He hadn’t since the man pulled his tricks on Katya for no better reason than to put Aiden in a bind. And Aiden was exactly the sort to nurse a grudge over that kind of thing for a good long while.

“I won’t be satisfied until I’ve thrown a wrench into every last thing that side gets up to. So first I need to know what he’s threatening her with.”

“…”

“And a bastard I dislike pulling tricks on Dame Noelle? That I dislike even more.”

“…”

“A slick-faced bastard skulking around running swindles. It’s an eyesore.”

At that last one, Dame Stella couldn’t hold back her laughter at all and covered her mouth with a hand.

“…If this gets out, it is the gallows, Aiden.”
“Uh, are you going to report me?”
“No. I also dislike anyone who treats Dame Noelle that way.”

For a moment they shared the impish smile of people in on the same secret. Then Stella’s voice came again, flat and toneless.

“Toward the end of the Coalition War… there was a battle that went catastrophically against the Empire. Are you aware of it?”
“Vaguely?”

He’d heard of it, if only by rumor. The nation that had traded the longest and fiercest blows with the Empire during the war was the Magic Kingdom, Gribus, and the final battle had been the same, fought near the imperial border, or so he’d heard. A commando force had been sent to drive clean through the Empire and turn around a war they were losing. It was said to be a perfect checkmate, and the Empire’s defenses there had been feeble too. Had it really succeeded, the two of them couldn’t be standing here talking now, because the whole Empire would have gone up in the flames of war.

The Lionhearted, Noelle, had made her name around the time of that incident, too, as the hero who plugged the gap when a single checkmate nearly broke the Empire. The story went that she’d scraped together a defending force that barely amounted to a handful and crushed, head-on, the commando unit the Magic Kingdom had built with everything it had.

“…It is not widely known. But among those who went out with Dame Noelle at that time, there were two rather notable figures. One was His Highness the Prince, and the other—”

Dame Teresa Adelite. Known as the Lord Protector, and an elder of the Knights’ Order. The very person who had first brought Noelle into the imperial army.

Those three had stood at the head of the line in that battle, and two of them came back. One didn’t.

“That is all I know.”

“…”

“What ‘exactly’ happened that day, only Dame Noelle and the Prince would know. But what is known is…”

Dame Stella chose her words for a long while, then went on in a voice that plainly didn’t like it.

“…There is a rumor that Dame Teresa sacrificed herself ‘to save’ Dame Noelle, who had made a mistake during the battle.”

“…”

“I have heard that some of those who fought in that battle go around saying so, but nobody knows the truth of it.”
“…Is that so.”

Aiden answered with his face slightly screwed up. The details were still unknown, but even the outline cleared up a good many of his questions. He’d heard that the Lord Protector was precious to both the Prince and Noelle, so much so that the original’s background material described her as almost a mother to them. If the rumor was true, then hating Noelle that much was understandable, if only faintly.

But if there was a strange point.

…Why propose marriage to someone he hates that much?

Asking someone you hate to marry you didn’t add up. It didn’t add up at all. Yet he’d even asked Aiden to break off the engagement so he could take that place himself. The front and the back didn’t match, as though he had some wholly different purpose than personal revenge.

…I’ll have to dig into that side a bit more.

With that thought, Aiden tapped Stella on the shoulder.

“Shall we head in, then?”

Tomorrow was an important day. He had to sleep soundly and bank his stamina for when things blew up, and while he was at it, take up a decent spot so he could respond even a little faster.

Wherever I am, what’s going to blow up will blow up anyway.

As the name of Act 1 suggested, the Fissure in the Imperial Capital happened on a scale nobody in this city could miss. It wasn’t supposed to be all that severe, but wherever he was, there was no way he wouldn’t know when it broke out.

He was turning that over when something suddenly floated up before his eyes.

…Updated?

He wondered why it had popped up out of nowhere, then realized it was about the hour the date turned over. So of course it was due an update. He was thinking that lightly when—

— …

— …!

— …!!

Abruptly.

Without any omen whatsoever.

A horribly eerie energy began to whirl all around them.

Aiden clearly wasn’t the only one who felt it. Dame Stella, who’d been getting ready to run with him tucked under her arm like a parcel, flinched too and looked up at the sky.

“…What is that…?”

An eerie death-ki, visible as black, churned all around them. Soon it swirled and clumped together, then soared up into the sky. And over there, plain even from here, was a ‘rift’. Like a sheet of drawing paper torn through, a hairline crack appeared, as if the scenery itself were crumpling, and it warped the space around it.

Then.

That warp, which had started as a hairline crack, finally spread into an enormous fissure that tore open with a crackle.

Ah.

Aiden sighed inwardly. It was a sight he remembered fairly well.

This.

This was the event that announced the start of Act 1, the ‘Ghost Knight’ commotion.

You heartless bastards…!

A curse aimed at no one in particular soon burst out inside him. Couldn’t they at least give him a little time to rest…!

“…You had best hold on to me tightly, Aiden.”

Stella’s face hardened at the sight, and as she said it she pulled Aiden in tight with both arms. To Aiden, it felt as if he’d been promoted from luggage under an arm to a precious valuable.

“For now I will carry you somewhere safe at full speed. After that I must call for suppor—”

But it didn’t look like she’d need to finish that sentence.

“Aiden—!”

Because in a crisis like this, there was someone who’d worry about his safety even more than Stella. Hardly any time had passed since that vortex burst out, yet Dame Noelle’s voice came from a little way off, though there was no telling how she’d found her way here. Soon she came flying out of the sky like a meteor, as always, and landed right in front of them.

“Are you all right! Something bizarre has suddenly appear—”

Noelle’s mouth snapped shut mid-sentence. Probably because she’d seen Aiden and Stella clinging together like a chick held by its mother bird.

“…”

“…”

“…”

The three of them shared a truly awkward silence. And it went on for a truly long time…

“…Aiden.”

Noelle broke the silence, barely managing to get her voice out. Her usual smile came tagging along on her face with it. She seemed to be straining not to let the mood turn ugly.

“…The two of you look rather strange, but this hardly seems the moment to concern ourselves with that.”
“…Right?”
“So I shall ask only briefly.”

…So asking later wasn’t an option. However urgent things were, this was something she had to get straight… And looking closely, even as she smiled at him, her eyes somehow weren’t smiling in the least.

“What were you doing with Stella?”
“…Taking a bit of a walk.”
“At this hour?”

“…”

“Just the two of you?”

“…”

“How curious.”
“…I have done nothing to be ashamed of before you, Dame Noelle.”
“Is that so.”

Her voice was as soft as ever, but somehow Aiden felt he could see the sentence lying between the lines.

Ah-ha, so that’s how it is?

Something along those lines.

“Even if you had done such a thing, it is hardly my place to say anything. We are… married by ‘contract’, after all, are we not?”
“…Dame Noelle?”
“Yes, that is how it is, anyway. We are hardly a pair meant to share truly deep feelings with each other. Right…”

Aiden’s eyes went to Noelle and stuck there. She was stroking her scabbard as she talked. It was probably just an idle habit of her hands, but somehow his blood ran cold…

“…And here you said you liked me.”
“Sorry?”
“It is nothing.”

She’d mumbled something, so he asked, and Noelle cut his question down flat, quick as a blade. Then she set her eyebrows in a straight line and snapped her gaze to the front. That chilly smile still hung on her lips somehow…

“…For now, shall we deal with that first?”

At the end of her gaze hung the fissure, now grown big enough for every last person in the imperial capital to see.

“…”

Somehow.

It also looked a lot like the air of someone planning to go over there and work off her temper.