A Headache (1)

— Thump!

“Move it, you morons.”

“Ugh!”

Amon shoved his way roughly through the students. A few of them glared at the back of his head as if he’d insulted them, but none of them dared argue with him, not with his size and that hard face of his.

He was headed for the academy’s upper floors, where the professors kept their research offices. He ran his eye over the nameplates beside the doors as he walked, and before long he reached an office tucked away in the most out-of-the-way corner of all.

— Knock, knock.

“Uncle. It’s me.”

Amon kept his face right up against the door and his voice low. There was a short, awkward silence before someone answered from inside.

“…I believe I told you not to call me Uncle until you were inside the room?”

“There’s nobody around here anyway.”

Amon grumbled and went in.

Strange light spilled from the lamps and flasks set all about the place, and there was a peculiar smell he had no words for. The office was in poor taste in more ways than one, and Amon shuddered on instinct.

“So, why did you call me in?”

He wanted out of this god-awful room as fast as he could manage, and that was what pushed the question out of him. Graham, who had been looking him over with obvious displeasure, slowly opened his mouth.

“I have a job for you.”

“Who does? You do, Uncle? Then the sun must be coming up in the west tomorrow.”

There was real anger under the sarcasm Amon spat at him.

“You ignore me all this time, then call me in out of nowhere, and what you’ve got to say is ‘I’ve got a job for you’? Honestly… Do I even look like a person to you, Uncle?”

“Why, you little worm!”

— Thump!

The thick end of a staff drove straight into Amon’s chest, and he sank down with a cry of “Agh!” Graham glared at his panting nephew as if he couldn’t believe how pathetic he was, and barked at him.

“Do you still think this is Everforce Academy? Learn your place!”

Amon had no answer at all. He’d already been branded a stain on the family once, so anything he said now would only sound like an excuse to his uncle.

Graham gave his nephew a moment to pick himself up off the floor, then cleared his throat and got to the point.

“I take it you know about the new student who just enrolled at the academy?”

“…More or less.”

“We have to get hold of that boy, whatever it takes.”

Graham’s face had gone serious in a way Amon had never seen before.

“Part of Leonard Felix’s personal record came out at the faculty meeting. Apparently his ability is on par with the third Circle, at the very least.”

“Sorry?”

What kind of nonsense was this? Seeing the disbelief on Amon’s face, Graham handed him a document file.

“Sounds like a joke to you, does it? And yet the moment that boy brought his mana into bloom, he held off several hundred Maulers single-handed. He even played an enormous part in cutting down a High Class monster, a Woodsman.”

It wasn’t a joke, Amon realized, and the shock emptied his head out completely for an instant. Bringing mana into bloom at nine was tremendous enough on its own. The third Circle on top of that?

At this point, calling him a genius was almost the modest way of putting it.

“Thanks to the gag order, the students still don’t know what he’s really worth, but the professors do. By now the others will have started moving behind the scenes as well. We have to get to Leonard Felix before they do.”

The Empire’s imperial house owed its recognized legitimacy to the magical ability it was born with. So if Leonard’s potential was real, he’d be able to wield no small influence over an imperial court that had been packed down solid over hundreds of years.

An opportunity this perfect was hardly one to let slip, was it?

“It would be ideal if I stepped in myself, but it looks very bad for a professor to approach a student first. So you’ll have to be the one who brings him over to our side.”

“…”

— Crrrk.

Amon clenched his fist hard. Some emotion he couldn’t name seemed to be boiling up from deep down in his heart. But Graham didn’t seem to notice a thing, and went on talking eagerly.

“You and I have both suffered quite enough in this godforsaken cesspit. Pull this one job off and the family will look at you differently too.”

Revolting.

Hearing words like that from the uncle who had looked down on him and ignored him all this while was revolting past all bearing. Yet in the end, Amon decided to help him.

Proving his worth to the family mattered far more to him than how much he disliked the man.

“What exactly am I supposed to do?”

“…I know you’re not the type to be friendly with people. But in the end, he’s just a nine-year-old brat. Genius or whatever he may be, he’s bound to be short on knowledge and experience. Try digging into that.”

Graham stroked the tip of his chin, thought for a moment, then added:

“Whatever you do, avoid heavy-handed measures as far as you possibly can. One slip and we could find ourselves buried alive before anyone gets around to weighing the family’s honor. Move carefully.”

— Creeeak.

A little while later, Amon slipped quietly out of Graham’s research office.

“…Fuck.”

He let out a heavy sigh and leaned back against the wall.

He’d expected there to be something to it, given how long it had been since his uncle last called him in, but he’d never dreamed he’d be handed a job this awkward. However complicated and difficult a proposal he put together, could a kid of only nine even grasp what it meant?

Besides, Amon was a fifth-year now, seventeen years old. If someone like him went barging up to a lower-year student out of nowhere, anyone at all would find it suspicious.

First, let’s go over all the information I have.

Amon spread out the documents Graham had given him once more.

Leonard Felix. Status, commoner; place of birth, Keld Village. Family consists of two people only, a father and a mother, and both of their occupations are farmer, is it… Hm? What’s this?

Reading on down the page, Amon was thrown to find that the text simply stopped.

He turned the paper over and back again, but astonishingly, that was all there was on Leonard Felix. It had gone past ordinary and into plain frustrating.

“Haah… What on earth am I supposed to do with this?”

There wasn’t a single corner left to dig into, was there? Amon heaved another sigh and rubbed his bristly chin, and his eyes, fixed on the far end of the empty corridor, flashed sharply.

When Leonard was formally assigned to the Raven class, the students of that same class all seemed delighted about it.

It was probably because a shared timetable meant more contact with Leonard Felix, so they could expect to watch his genius and his exploits from a little closer up.

But contrary to their expectations, Leonard kept his head down and did his best not to stand out. So the fever around him cooled as time went on, and by now only a handful of students were left at his side.

“Leonard, let’s go get lunch!”

“Once lessons are over, how about we do our homework together in the library?”

The moment the morning’s lessons ended, the students gathered around him as a matter of course. Leonard kept them company well enough, all the while looking over the people around him one by one.

Maybe it would be better to use this chance to join hands with the scions of the academy’s influential houses. If he built a faction and grew it, he’d be able to change the academy far more easily.

But the easy road always came with risks.

Accepting help meant running up a debt. A relationship built on profit and loss ended up as a hierarchy of creditor and debtor, and that, exactly as Ethan had said, would come back to him as a constraint that bound him in place.

In short, what Leonard needed wasn’t someone who moved in expectation of a reward. He needed something more like a “friend”, someone he could give help to and take help from in every way, material and moral alike.

But most of the students saw Leonard as nothing more than an investment in their own success. And in his previous life, Leonard hadn’t made a single companion in his entire time at the academy.

Is it even possible for someone like me to get genuinely close to anybody?

It was just as Leonard, sunk in thought, let out a groaning “Nnngh—”.

“—onard? Leonard!”

“…Ah, aah… Hm?”

When he looked around, the students were all staring at him as if something was off. Leonard put on an awkward smile.

“Ah, sorry. My mind wandered off for a moment… What were we talking about?”

“I said we should go see a projector show or something downtown next week, didn’t I?”

“Honestly… Don’t make me say things twice, it’s exhausting.”

Downtown?

When Leonard tilted his head, the students told him, exasperated:

“Next week’s the day we get to go out into the Everton town center. You didn’t know?”

“Go out…? Ah!”

Everton was the city that had grown up around Kestral Academy, and one of the Citra Empire’s centers of commerce. The students were given the chance to go out into its town center exactly once a month.

The students got to escape the stifling academy and blow off all the stress they liked, while Everton’s merchants got a crowd of potential customers, so both sides came out ahead.

“Checking out that new staff-maker’s workshop could be fun too… What about you guys?”

Seeing their excited faces, Leonard couldn’t help a wry smile.

Students’ interests never change, do they.

Everton had been a popular place for students to unwind in his previous life as well. But that only held for those who had no trouble with money, so to Leonard it was a thoroughly unfamiliar story.

Back then, Leonard had lost his parents early. Far from having spending money for fun, he hadn’t even received a single letter. So whenever he went out onto the main street, the most he ever did was buy books with the academy stipend he’d saved up.

Fortunately, both his parents were alive now. But as for having no money, nothing had changed.

“Er, sorry to interrupt while you’re all having fun, but…”

“Hmm?”

“Sadly, I’ve got almost no money to spend. …You know what I mean, right?”

The students exchanged slightly blank looks, then burst out laughing and clapped Leonard on the shoulder.

“Is that what you were spacing out about earlier?”

“Don’t worry about it! Squeezing one more person into a day out is no big deal.”

…Huh?

Leonard was genuinely thrown.

He hadn’t even considered going in the first place. More than anything, he just wasn’t used to having fun. Maybe because he’d lived a life so far removed from amusement, he felt more at ease reading one more line of a book.

But the students were far more open-handed with their money than he’d expected.

“Don’t worry, Leonard!”

“The first round’s on us!”

“Ha, haha…”

So this was what real respect for the elderly looked like?