31. You Like Her?

Long story short, the Trial of Wisdom ended in success. Rose did rope me into a forced gab session for a good few hours, but earning a pass for that little bit of effort was a net win. She wanted the vivid play-by-play of my fight with the Blood Lord, so I served up the tale with a careful blend of truth and lies.

“Thanks to that hellish training with my sister Seraphina, I was able to dodge his attacks with relative ease.”
“Magnificent!”
“And on top of that, with the body of a healthy, sturdy soldier under me, I felt a good deal lighter on my feet.”
“Any success needs a little luck on its side — that’s just how it goes.”

Rose’s reactions were so good that I, in my role as storyteller, got swept up in the energy too. 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, wearing the face of a reader perched on the edge of a climactic chapter.

“It was thanks to the help of the elf who was there — Beron!”

I kept spinning the yarn with a straight face.

“He was a remarkable assassin. While I drew their eyes from the front, Beron hid in the shadows and struck 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, and yet the entire Silent Hall shuddered as though struck by an earthquake. Caught off guard, I gripped the wheelchair handles tight.

“Wait, why are you suddenly—!”
“Trying to deceive your reader.”

A cool fury threaded through Rose’s voice.

“I’ll stop listening here. I don’t have the hobby of sitting through obvious lies when I already know the truth.”
“What? No, just hear me out!”

I didn’t even get the chance to start making my excuses.

“Out.”

Rose swung her staff.

Kraaa-BOOM—!

A massive gust of wind slammed into me.

“Aaaaagh!”

There wasn’t a second to resist. My vision spun, and when 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 hadn’t been properly logged, so I’d meant to play the ‘Beron’ card as a bluff. It had flopped completely. The sour aftertaste lingered, but kicked out as I was, I could hardly go bang on the door again.

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

In my hand I still held the parchment stamped with Rose’s seal of passage.

“…”

“…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.

Long story short: she was not okay.

Before I even opened the door, I could hear the sniffling.

“May I come in?”

I politely asked permission to enter my own room.

“Hic…”

When I finally had to push the door open, the sight that met me was Elli slumped in front of the mirror, frantically running her hands over her face. Her eyes were vacant, her hands moving restlessly between her chin and her belly.

“Elli?”

Even when I called her, she didn’t turn around, just kept on muttering. I leaned in to catch what she was saying.

“Hic… my skin… my voice….”

After studying the weeping Elli for a moment, Eve spoke up.

What followed was a torrent of furious scolding from Eve. 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 of an uncle, and her sanity had visibly fried.

On this one, even Eve could find no good solution and fell silent. We were still putting our heads together over how exactly to undo the damage.

“…ed.”

Elli’s muttering broke off abruptly, and she shot bolt upright. Then, head drooping, she staggered toward where I sat in the wheelchair.

“Um… Elli?”

Elli’s lurching figure, straight out of a horror movie, had me tensing up despite myself.

Or has the aftershock finally broken her mind completely?

Post-traumatic stress disorder, the so-called PTSD, was a condition war survivors often suffered from too. A strange mix of tension and worry shook me from within.

“…It was so scary.”

Heedless of all my worry, Elli suddenly threw herself into my arms.

Thump.

More precisely, 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….”

Elli, clinging to me, broke into a full-throated wail.

“…You did well to make it through.”

Failing to muster any proper words of comfort, 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 wash out, my voice all hoarse and gravelly….”

I realized I had a truly catastrophic lack of talent for comforting people.

After a great deal of agonizing, I forced something out.

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

Since I couldn’t argue with that, I kept my mouth shut. Today really was turning into a day full of scoldings from Eve.

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

Elli wiped her streaming 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, out of breath.

“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 practically tailor-made for misunderstanding.

I broke the awkward silence and gently peeled the clinging Elli off me. Piling on needless explanations would only buy me more suspicion.

“Leo. You said it was urgent?”

Leo wore a flustered expression 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, one of the three strongest swordsmen in the Empire. And a man whose face I hadn’t laid eyes on even 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 at least give her a stretch of breathing room.

I’d dragged her along as my attendant for the Trial of Wisdom, and in the end I hadn’t even gotten to meet the real Elli. The whole trip had amounted to nothing more than putting her through a living hell. Granted, a living hell does wonders for a person’s growth, but it also calls for an equal stretch of recovery time afterward. Or so my personal philosophy went.

So once I’d sent Elli back to her quarters, Leo took over as the new wheelchair-pusher.

Clatter, clatter.

For a while the rhythmic creak of the wheels was the only sound, until Leo tossed out a sudden line.

“Cool it a bit, would you.”
“Cool what?”
“I mean with Elli.”

Leo’s stare bored into my back, sharp and heavy. He gave the wheelchair handles a pointed extra shove and grumbled.

“Saw you back there clutching her tight. I assigned her to look after a patient, not so she could get caught up in some romance.”

I’d told him to mouth off freely like before, but Leo had been carefully toeing some kind of line. Tonight, though, his tone was sharp, as if he’d finally decided to spit out whatever 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 going into detail was a hassle, so I brushed it off vaguely.

At that, the wheelchair jerked to a hard stop. When I turned my head to look up, Leo was glaring down at me, brow furrowed deep.

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

What was I supposed to prove? What isn’t, isn’t.

“You said it was the head of the house’s summons, didn’t you? Said the order was urgent — was that not the case?”

At the words head of the house, Leo flinched, then shoved the wheelchair forward again, roughly.

The awkward silence stretched on.

“…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 cut a sidelong glance at the hand Leo had clamped on the wheelchair handle. Whatever force he was putting into it, the veins stood out across the back of his hand.

This was more than a colleague’s concern. The guy was a vicious egotist whose interest in anything beyond his own little sister Rio’s well-being was flat zero. And a man like that was throwing this big a fit over somebody else’s love life (?).

“You like Elli?”

The wheelchair lurched forward, suddenly and violently, 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 bland little nobody of a girl!”

Bingo. So that was it.

“Oho?”
“Don’t say absurd things! I’m just — as a colleague — yes, as a fellow servant, I’m worried about her, that’s all!”
“Your face has gone red.”
“It’s because it’s hot! Hot, I tell you! Isn’t this corridor a little stuffy?”

Leo, huffing furiously, picked up the pace on the wheelchair. Between the flustered stammer and the ear-tips going as red as a ripe tomato, there was no escape for him now.

Eve’s face flushed as red as Leo’s.

“Lucky girl, Elli. Having a reliable one-sided admirer worry 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. The whole sight was so ridiculous I burst out laughing.

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

Eve and I, a regular pair of bad influences, kept cackling away and pecking at Leo without mercy. After all that minor commotion, before we knew it we’d reached the end of the corridor.

Leo, getting his red face back under control, came to a stop.

“…We’ve arrived.”

In front of us, the enormous double doors of the head’s chamber loomed, intimidating. The teasing ended here. 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 yourself, Young Master.”

Leo cleared his throat once and went on.

“The fact that you’ve returned to ‘normal’ after a string of incidents and accidents is no longer rumor — it’s established fact. So the head of the house’s summons 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; it was a sharp, insightful read. While carrying out the missions I’d assigned him, he’d gotten a perfect handle on the inner currents of the house.

I looked at Leo, nodding away with the air of a job well done, and let a small smirk slip.

“No, not that.”
“Yes?”
“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.