31. You Like Her?

In conclusion, the Trial of Wisdom was a success.

Rose did drag me into several hours of forced conversation, but a pass in exchange for that little effort was a net win. What she wanted was a vivid play-by-play of my fight with the Blood Lord, so I served it up seasoned with a careful blend of truth and lies.

“Thanks to that hellish training with my sister Seraphina, I could dodge his attacks pretty easily.”
“Magnificent!”
“On top of that, I’d possessed the body of a healthy, sturdy soldier, so I felt a lot lighter on my feet.”
“For any success, you need a little luck on your side — that’s just how it goes.”

Rose’s reactions were so good that even I, the storyteller, got swept up in the energy. Then, once the story had ripened to just the right point, I slipped in the decisive lie.

“But the deciding factor was something else entirely.”
“Oho, what was it?”

Rose leaned toward me, eyes glittering. It was the face of a reader on the edge of a climactic chapter.

“It was the help I got from the elf who was there — Beron!”

I went on spinning the yarn with a serious face.

“He was a great assassin. While I kept all eyes on me up front, Beron hid in the shadows and hit him from behind. Without him, I never could have brought down the Blood Lord.”

“…”

But the instant Beron’s name left my lips, Rose tapped the floor lightly with her staff.

“Young master.”
“Yes?”

Krrrrumble—!

It was barely a tap, yet the entire Silent Hall began to shudder as if an earthquake had struck it, and I was so caught off guard that I gripped the handles of my wheelchair tight.

“Wait, what’s gotten into you all of a sudden?!”
“Trying to deceive your reader.”

A cool fury threaded through Rose’s voice.

“I’ll stop listening here. Sitting through obvious lies when I already know the truth is no hobby of mine.”
“What? No, just hear me out!”

I couldn’t so much as get my mouth open to make excuses.

“Out.”

Rose swung her staff.

Kraaa-BOOM—!

A massive gust of wind slammed into my body.

“Aaaaagh!”

There wasn’t a second to resist. My vision spun, and by the time I came to my senses, I’d already been booted unceremoniously onto the cold corridor floor.

Thud!

“…Ha.”

Left there in a daze, I let out a hollow laugh.

Eve clicked her tongue in disbelief.

“…Beats me.”

I stared, unsettled, at the firmly shut door. I’d been told my own record wasn’t properly logged, so I’d planned to play the ‘Beron’ card as a bluff, but the result, as you can see, was a total failure. It left a bad taste either way, yet having been kicked out, I couldn’t exactly go knock on the door again.

“Well, it’s not like she can take back the pass at this point.”

The parchment stamped with Rose’s seal of passage was still in my hand.

“…”

“…O-of course not!”

I answered with forced nonchalance and rolled the wheelchair forward.

Elli, you’re okay, right?
I’m coming to see you now.

Conclusion first: she was not okay.

I could hear the sniffling before I even opened the door.

“May I come in?”

I politely asked permission to enter my own room.

“Hic…”

So I had no choice but to push the door open, and there was Elli, slumped in front of the mirror and frantically running her hands over her face. Her eyes were vacant, and her hands moved restlessly between her chin and her stomach.

“Elli?”

Even when I called her she didn’t turn around, just kept on muttering, so I listened more closely.

“Hic… my skin… my voice….”

Eve studied the weeping Elli for a moment, then spoke up.

What followed was a torrent of furious scolding. Her face was that of an enraged dokkaebi, so I sat there and took my lecture quietly.

Stealing nervous glances at Eve, I edged closer to Elli again.

“No… no beard. No… my belly’s not sticking out either. Heh… heh-heh.”

Eve had called it. A girl in the bloom of her youth had spent a week living as a paunchy, scraggly-bearded conscript uncle, and her sanity was visibly fried.

Even Eve had no good solution for that part, and she went silent. We were just putting our heads together over how to undo the damage when —

“…ary.”

Elli’s muttering cut off abruptly, and she shot bolt upright. Then, head slowly hanging, she began to stagger toward me where I sat in the wheelchair.

“Um… Elli?”

She lurched like something out of a horror movie, and I tensed up in spite of myself.

Or has the aftershock finally broken her mind completely?

Post-traumatic stress disorder, the thing they call PTSD, was something people who’d been through war often suffered from too. A strange mix of tension and worry shook me from within.

“…It was so scary.”

In defiance of all my worry, Elli abruptly threw herself into my arms — thump. To be specific, she buried her face in my shoulder as I sat there in the wheelchair, her whole body trembling.

“Hic… It was so scary… it was really, really scary… it was so scary….”

Clinging to me, she broke into a full-throated wail.

“…You’ve been through a lot.”

I couldn’t muster any proper words of comfort, so I awkwardly stroked her hair.

“I really thought I was going to be an uncle for the rest of my life… the smell of sweat wouldn’t come out, my voice was all hoarse and gravelly….”

I realized I had a truly catastrophic lack of talent when it came to comforting people. After much agonizing, I forced out:

“I’ll give you some vacation time. Get some rest.”

I couldn’t argue with that, so I kept quiet. Today really was turning into a day full of scoldings from Eve.

“…I don’t need a vacation. Just have a nice meal with me.”
“What do you want to eat? Just say the word.”

Elli wiped her flowing tears with a quick swipe and lifted her head.

“I’m going to eat a lot, so don’t try to stop me.”

Fortunately, she’d managed to pull herself together a little.

Bang—!

At that moment, the door slammed open hard enough to splinter and somebody came bursting in, breathless.

“Young Master! It’s an emergen—!”

Leo’s mouth froze mid-sentence as he stepped into the room.

Elli, sniffling, clinging to me.

Me, awkwardly stroking her hair.

A scene custom-made for misunderstanding.

I broke the awkward silence and gently nudged the clinging Elli away, because piling on unnecessary explanations would only buy me more suspicion.

“Leo. You said it was urgent?”

Leo looked flustered for a moment, then forced himself to nod.

“My apologies for the bad timing.”
“Skip the small talk and report. You said it was urgent.”
“The head of the house has summoned you, Young Master.”
“…The head of the house?”

The head of House Arne, Kairon Arne. This house’s absolute authority, and one of the three strongest swordsmen in the Empire. He was also a man whose face I hadn’t laid eyes on once since I’d been possessed into this body.

“Yes, the order is to come to the head’s chamber at once.”

So at last, he had called for me.

Even if she turned down the vacation, let me give her a stretch of breathing room.

I’d dragged her along as an attendant for the Trial of Wisdom, and in the end I hadn’t even gotten to meet Elli. The whole trip had amounted to nothing more than putting her through a hellish ordeal. Of course, hellish ordeals are pretty helpful for a person’s growth, but they also require a matching stretch of recovery time. That was my personal philosophy.

So I sent Elli back to her quarters, and the new wheelchair-pusher was Leo.

Clatter, clatter.

The rhythmic creak of the wheels was the only sound, until Leo suddenly tossed out a line.

“Cool it a bit, would you.”
“Cool what?”
“I’m talking about Elli.”

The weight of his stare bored sharply into my back. He gave the wheelchair handles a pointed extra push and grumbled.

“Saw you back there clutching her tight. I assigned her to look after a patient, not so you could carry on some little romance.”

I’d told him to talk crap to me freely like before, but he’d been carefully toeing some kind of line. This time, though, his tone was sharp, as if he was finally going to spit out what he’d been holding back.

“Sorry, but Elli’s not my type.”
“You two were in a room hugging it out and bawling — and you’re saying there’s nothing going on?”
“Yeah, nothing.”
“…Then why exactly were you doing that.”
“I didn’t do anything. She clung to me.”

It was an urgent situation and explaining it in detail was a hassle, so I brushed it off vaguely. At that, the wheels came to a hard stop. I turned my head to look up, and there was Leo glaring at me, his brow furrowed deep.

“I’m aware that Elli got dragged into the Trial of Wisdom and ended up on a battlefield.”
“If you know that, then what’s your problem?”
“Then prove to me there’s really nothing between you two.”

What was I supposed to prove?

What’s not is not.

“You said the head of the house summoned me, didn’t you? Said the order was urgent — or wasn’t it?”

At the words head of the house, Leo flinched, then started shoving the wheelchair again, roughly. The awkward silence stretched on, and then —

“…Elli might be a little naïve, but she’s not the kind of kid you get to mess with like that.”

Hold on.

Looked like Eve had felt the same chill I had. I shot a sidelong glance at the hand he had on the wheelchair handle. Whatever amount of force he was applying, the veins were standing out on the back of it.

This wasn’t the level of a colleague’s concern.

This guy was a vicious egotist whose interest in anything besides the well-being of his own younger sister Rio was exactly zero. A guy like that, throwing this much of a fit over someone else’s love life (?)?

“You like her?”

The wheelchair lurched violently forward and listed hard to one side.

“Wh-what the hell kind of crazy talk is that! Why on earth would I like that — that backwoods country bumpkin — no, that watered-down nothing of a girl!”

Bingo. So that was it?

“Oho?”
“Don’t talk nonsense! I’m just — as a colleague — yes, as a fellow servant, I’m worried about her, that’s all!”

“Your face went all red.”
“It’s the heat! The heat, I tell you! Isn’t this corridor a little stuffy?”

Huffing furiously, Leo pushed the wheelchair faster. But with that flustered stammer and the tips of his ears as red as a ripe tomato, there wasn’t a way out for him at this point.

Eve’s face flushed as red as Leo’s.

“Lucky girl, that Elli. She’s got a reliable one-sided admirer worrying over her like this.”
“If you don’t shut up I’m letting go right here.”
“Then I’ll go run and tell your one-sided crush every last detail.”
“Aaaaaagh! Yoooooung Maaaster!”

Leo let out something close to a scream, and the sight was so ridiculous that I laughed out loud.

“What part of Elli do you like so much?”
“I said I don’t like her!!”

Like a duo of bad influences, Eve and I kept cackling and pecking at Leo without mercy, and after that whole minor uproar we’d reached the end of the corridor before we knew it.

Leo got his red face back under control and came to a stop.

“…We’ve arrived.”

The enormous double doors of the head’s chamber loomed in front of us, intimidating. The teasing ended here, so I composed my expression and straightened my clothes.

“What do you think?”

At my question, Leo’s gaze sharpened in an instant.

“There’s no denying that the biggest topic in the house right now is none other than you, Young Master.”

Leo cleared his throat once and went on.

“Your return to ‘normal’ after a string of incidents and accidents is no longer rumor — it’s established fact. So this summons from the head of the house is probably the signal that he intends to grant you an official position as a member of the family, or hand you some important duty.”

Apparently he hadn’t just been goofing off all this time, because that was a sharp, insightful read. While carrying out the missions I assigned him, he’d been getting a perfect handle on the internal currents of the house.

I looked at Leo, who was nodding with the air of a job well done, and let out a small smirk.

“No, not that.”
“Excuse me?”
“I meant — what do you think your chances are with Elli?”
“Wo-would you cut it ouuuut!!”

This guy was a serious blast to mess with.