A Headache (5)

That night, Kestral Academy went into a state of emergency.

Amon Vincent had been found unconscious in a dim back alley off one of Everton’s streets. The knight order that reached the scene first sent word to the academy, and the investigators arrived not long after.

His condition could hardly have been worse.

Never mind the damage his magic attacks had done to the buildings around him; Amon’s mind was so thoroughly wrecked that there was almost nothing anyone could do for it. That the son of an influential house had turned up in such a wretched state shocked everyone.

The investigators sealed off the scene at once and began their analysis. At the same time, they took a statement from Leonard Felix, who had reported the incident and stood at the center of it.

Cross-checking his account against the circumstantial evidence turned up some astonishing facts. First, Amon had been the one to attack Leonard. Second, for reasons no one could explain, he had tried to use the Bracelet of Subjugation and destroyed himself with it.

What could possibly have driven Amon to attack Leonard? The investigators threw themselves into that question, but the only person who could answer it was no longer able to force out a single word.

With matters at that point, attention naturally turned to the next person in line after Amon: his uncle, Graham Vincent.

Low-grade or not, the Bracelet of Subjugation was unmistakably a magic item. Such things were scarce even in a commercial city like Everton, and even if he had known where they were sold, a mere student like Amon would have struggled to get anywhere near one.

Graham, on the other hand, was a professor and could get his hands on a magic item with ease. He could just as easily have passed the bracelet along to Amon, his nephew and his student, whenever he liked.

There was a strong chance, at the very least, that the two were connected somehow.

Naturally, Graham pushed back. However plausible the suspicion or the logic behind it, without clear physical evidence there was no proving any link between him and the bracelet.

In the end, Leonard was judged an innocent victim and released without trouble the moment the investigation wrapped up. The case itself fizzled out, closed with any number of questions still hanging over it.

A few days passed.

“Leonard, come with me a moment.”

One afternoon, once all the lessons were over, Sophia caught Leonard just as he was about to leave the lecture hall and called him into her research office. She shut the door and pointed him to a chair. When he had sat down and settled back against it, she spoke in a listless voice.

“I meant to make time for this sooner, but with all the professors being questioned as well, I just couldn’t find a free moment. It’s a truly shameful business. To think a student would do something like that…”

“It’s all right, Teacher.”

Leonard meant it. Honestly, who could have seen a turn of events like that coming?

“‘It’s all right,’ he says. As if something that enormous were nothing.”

Sophia murmured it with a wry smile. Then again, for a boy at his level, surviving an attack from Amon might really be no big deal.

“From what I hear, Amon has been exiled to another region for disgracing the family name.”

Sophia made an effort to keep her voice bright.

“…Honestly, I’m not sure a punishment like that means much to someone who isn’t in his right mind, but at least you’ll never run into him again. You can rest easy.”

She must have meant it to cheer up a Leonard who was, after all, still a child, but her words put something else entirely into his head.

…He’s dead by now, isn’t he.

It was only a guess, but most likely Amon was already dead, killed by an assassin his own house had sent, and buried somewhere out where he had been exiled.

The reason was simple. Beyond the honor he had dragged through the mud, there was the risk that if his shattered mind ever recovered, things nobody wanted known might leak out of it.

What he and Graham had talked about, for instance, or the orders Graham had given him.

“…”

Amon’s end had been wretched, far worse than anyone his age deserved, and Leonard couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for him. Of course, Amon had kept choosing wrong when he had the chance to choose otherwise, and that was on him; his death was the karma he had earned.

Yet it was just as certain that the peculiar environment of noble society had driven him to it. An atmosphere that writes off anyone without talent or connections as a loser must have played an enormous part in twisting Amon’s behavior and his thinking.

Leonard sighed inwardly.

…This one’s hard.

A magocratic state like the Citra Empire guarantees any mage who proves his power and skill the wealth and honor to match. At a glance that might not seem so bad, since effort is rewarded with results, but a huge blind spot lies hidden within it.

The nobles never redistribute the wealth they pile up. They hand it down to their children, who use it as a foothold to improve their own odds of success, and the gap between the haves and the have-nots only keeps widening.

Kestral Academy is nothing more than a graveyard for the students pushed out of that bloody competition. Just as Amon had said, there is not a scrap of will left in this place to reclaim a dream or a hope.

What were the odds of a student who could bring a talent to bloom coming out of a place like this?

Then what am I supposed to do?

How on earth was this problem supposed to be solved?

“…Well. As long as you came through it unharmed, that’s what matters.”

Sophia’s voice hauled Leonard up out of his deep thoughts and back to reality. They traded a few more words, and then he said his goodbyes and slipped out of her research office.

“Ah, young Felix.”

A voice as sly as an old fox stopped him in his tracks.

“Good timing. If you have a moment, why not come and show me your face before you go?”

Graham flashed a hideous smile.

“I wanted to apologize on the family’s behalf for the dreadful thing my nephew did. And as it happens, I also have some compensation I’m meant to hand over.”

Glaring at a beaming Graham, Leonard called up an old memory for a moment.

Graham Vincent.

Beneath his professor’s mask hid the true face of a mad scientist, a man who wouldn’t stop short of human experimentation for the sake of his research.

He had wanted to know what decisive factor awakened a human being as a mage. Holding that the end justified the means, he had used a Bracelet of Subjugation, obtained with his family’s backing, to procure as many test subjects as he pleased.

The experiments continued right up until shortly before he retired from Kestral Academy. His usual pattern was to go home to his birthplace over the vacation, procure a subject there with the Bracelet of Subjugation, and pick up the experiments where he had left off.

“It’s a trifle, but please, take it.”

Graham produced a leather pouch he had prepared in advance and set it on the table. Urged without a word to go ahead and check it, Leonard had no choice but to untie the cord and look inside.

A trifle, my ass.

It had looked heavy enough from the outside, and inside lay not gold coins but ten solid bars of gold. That was enough for an ordinary commoner family to live comfortably for half a year or more without worrying about expenses.

“There’s actually one thing I wanted to ask you personally.”

Graham’s voice turned rather serious.

“You’re the victim in all this, and also the only one who saw my nephew’s last moments. So I have to ask — was there anything he left behind at the end, any last words?”

With tears even welling in his eyes, Graham was the very picture of an uncle who doted on his nephew. To Leonard, who already had a good grasp of the truth, the sight was simply nauseating.

You must be on pins and needles wondering whether your nephew spilled something he shouldn’t have.

There had been nothing of the sort, of course.

Either way, what mattered now was how to deal with the man in front of him. He did the academy no good whatsoever, and above all his crimes were far too vile. Let him walk away like this, and he would carry on his wickedness in one form or another.

Even so, Leonard couldn’t simply kill Graham outright. All eyes were already on him after the business with Amon, and stirring up trouble a second time would draw suspicion rather than sympathy.

…Then there’s only one way.

Leonard thought it over for a moment before he finally, slowly, opened his mouth.

“Nothing in particular?”

The answer was unexpectedly bland. Graham asked again just in case, but Leonard only repeated himself. With a definite answer in hand, Graham finally let out a sigh of relief.

“Phew. I’ll admit I feel a touch of regret, but if that’s what you say, there’s nothing to be done.”

“…Um, may I go now?”

“Yes. Off you go.”

Leonard took a firm grip on the pouch on the table. Then, as though something had just come back to him, he turned to Graham with a question.

Leonard wore a devil’s smile.

“Ah, now that I think of it — about that bracelet.”

“Hmm?”

“I hear it had been used ‘quite a lot.’”

At those words, Graham’s face went blank for a moment.

“What?”

A “lot”?

This had almost certainly been the first time Leonard ever laid eyes on the Bracelet of Subjugation, so a phrase like “a lot” made no sense coming from him. So why say something like that, and why now of all times?

Anyone else might have let it slip past, but Graham couldn’t. Vague as that one description was, it was a decisive, fatal hint, more than enough for him to work out the meaning hidden inside it.

He bit.

While Leonard crowed in triumph inwardly, Graham sat frozen, slowly chewing over what the words meant, never noticing that his own face was gradually twisting out of shape.

“…What is that supposed to mean?”

He might have been better off ignoring it entirely. That he had asked anyway showed just how badly shaken he was.

Calm down.

It might be nothing more than his imagination.

“What a shame.”

The next instant, though, the words out of Leonard’s mouth blew every thought clean out of Graham’s muddled head.

“That after all those experiments, you still have no results.”

— Snatch!

By the time he came to his senses, Graham had reached across the table and grabbed Leonard by the collar. Yet where Graham was flustered and at a loss, Leonard’s expression was serene.

“…Kh!”

Had he overreacted? Belated regret washed over Graham. Just then, Leonard murmured with the look of someone who had just figured something out.

“Right. So that’s how it was.”

“What?”

“Your real aim wasn’t to win me over to your side. It was to ‘research’ my body. That’s why Amon…”

Graham was researching the factor that awakens an ordinary person as a mage, so Leonard, who had reached an unprecedented third Circle the very instant his mana first bloomed, must have struck him as an extremely interesting subject.

That was why he had decided to “persuade” Leonard through Amon.

“That bracelet he used. You gave it to him, didn’t you?”

At Leonard’s question, Graham’s whole body jerked.

“You knew Amon might lose his head and try mind control on me, and you still deliberately left the bracelet with him. Because either way, you had nothing to lose.”

If the persuasion worked and Leonard sided with the Vincent house, that alone would be a fine chance to strengthen Graham’s standing. If it failed, he had only to use the Bracelet of Subjugation.

Wrecking Leonard’s mind in the process would be a pity, but it beat losing the research subject altogether. With the Vincent house’s power behind him, quietly spiriting away one commoner child expelled for a mental disorder would take no effort at all.

“You never imagined I’d come through all that in one piece. And you’d have imagined even less that I’d lay the whole truth bare like this.”

“You, you… What the hell kind of bastard are you?! How on earth did you find that out…”

Graham recoiled in horror.

“Does that matter?”

Leonard cut him off flatly.

“However I came by it, I know your secrets very well. Where to dig, where to jab, all of it. With one problem after another cropping up around you, do you really think the Vincent house will keep protecting a headache like you forever?”

At those words, Graham’s face cycled through a whole range of colors. Leonard held his gaze to the very end as he spoke.

“It’s over for you.”