A Headache (5)

That night, Kestral Academy was thrown into a state of emergency.

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

His condition couldn’t have been worse.

Leave aside the damage the magic attacks had done to the buildings around him: Amon’s mind was so thoroughly wrecked that there was next to nothing anyone could do for it. He was the son of a house with real influence of its own, so finding him in such a wretched state came as a great shock to everyone.

The investigators sealed off the scene at once and got to work on it, and at the same time they took a statement from Leonard Felix, who had reported the incident and was at the center of it.

When they checked his account against the circumstantial evidence, they turned up some astonishing facts. The first was that Amon had been the one to attack Leonard. The second was that he’d tried to use the Bracelet of Subjugation and, for reasons no one could explain, destroyed himself with it.

So what had made him go after Leonard in the first place? The investigators threw themselves into that question, but the only person who could have answered it was in no condition to squeeze out a single word.

With things as they were, attention naturally turned next to Amon’s uncle, Graham Vincent.

The Bracelet of Subjugation might be low-grade, but it was unmistakably a magic item. Magic items were hard to come by even in a trading city like Everton, and a mere student like Amon, even if he knew where they were sold, would have struggled just to get close to one.

Graham, on the other hand, was a professor. He could get his hands on a magic item easily, and he could pass the bracelet to Amon, his nephew and his student, any time he liked.

At the very least, the odds that the two were connected somehow were considerable.

Naturally, Graham pushed back. However plausible the suspicion and however sound the reasoning, there was no clear physical evidence, so there was no proving any link between him and the bracelet.

In the end, Leonard was judged an innocent victim and let go without any trouble the moment the investigation closed. But the case fizzled out and was shut with any number of questions still hanging over it.

A few days passed.

“Leonard, come with me a moment.”

When the day’s lessons were over and Leonard was about to leave the lecture hall, Sophia called him into her research office. She shut the door and pointed him to a chair, and once he’d sat down and leaned back, she spoke in a tired voice.

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

“It’s all right, Teacher.”

That was all Leonard said. Honestly, who could have seen a turn like that coming?

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

Sophia murmured it with a wry smile. Then again, for someone at his level, maybe surviving an attack from Amon really was nothing much.

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

She tried hard to keep her voice bright.

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

She must have meant it to reassure Leonard, who was still a child, after all. Yet what came into his head at her words was something else entirely.

…That one’s dead by now, isn’t he.

It was only a guess, but in all likelihood Amon had already been killed by an assassin the Vincent house sent itself, and buried somewhere out where he’d been exiled.

The reason was simple. There was the honor he’d dragged through the mud, of course, but beyond that, if his ruined mind ever recovered, things nobody wanted known might come spilling out of it.

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

“…”

It was a wretched end, and far too early for someone his age, so Leonard couldn’t help finding Amon a little pitiable. Of course, Amon had kept choosing wrong when he had the chance to choose otherwise. That was on him, and his death was simply the bill coming due.

But it was just as certain that the peculiar world of noble society had driven him to it. An atmosphere that wrote off anyone without talent or connections as a loser must have had a great deal to do with how twisted his conduct and his thinking had become.

Leonard sighed inwardly.

…A hard one.

A magocracy like the Citra Empire guaranteed any mage who proved his power and skill the wealth and honor to match. At a glance that seemed no bad thing, since results followed effort. But there was a huge blind spot hidden in it.

The nobles didn’t share out the wealth they piled up. They handed it down to their children, and the children used it as a springboard to raise their own odds of success, so the gap between the haves and the have-nots only kept widening.

Kestral Academy was nothing but a graveyard where the students who’d lost that bloody competition were buried. Just as Amon had said, there wasn’t a handful of will left in this place to win back a dream or a hope.

So what were the odds that a student who could bring a real talent into bloom would ever come 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 unhurt, that’s what matters.”

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

“Ah, young Felix.”

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

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

Graham gave him a hideous smile.

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

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

Graham Vincent.

Behind the mask of a professor, his true face was that of a mad scientist who wouldn’t stop short even of experimenting on people for the sake of his research.

He’d wanted to know what decisive factor awakened a human being as a mage, and since he believed the results justified the means, he’d used a Bracelet of Subjugation, obtained with his family’s backing, to procure as many test subjects as he pleased.

The experiments went on right up until just before he retired from Kestral Academy. His usual pattern was to go back to his hometown over the break, use the Bracelet of Subjugation to procure a subject while he was there, and pick up the experiments he’d left unfinished.

“It’s a trifle, but do take it.”

Graham took out a leather pouch he’d prepared in advance and set it on the table. He silently urged Leonard to go ahead and check it, so Leonard had no choice but to undo the cord and look inside.

A trifle, my ass.

It had looked heavy enough from the outside, and inside there weren’t gold coins but a good ten solid gold bars. That was enough for an ordinary commoner family to live comfortably for a good half-year or more without a thought for what anything cost.

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

Graham’s voice had turned rather serious.

“You’re the victim in all this, and you’re also the only one who saw my nephew’s last moments. So I have to ask. Did he leave anything behind at the end? Any last words?”

Graham’s eyes were even welling with tears. He was the very picture of an uncle who doted on his nephew, but to Leonard, who already had a fair idea of the truth, it was simply nauseating.

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

Of course, he hadn’t.

Anyway, what mattered now was how to deal with the man in front of him. He was of no use to the academy, and above all, his crimes were far too vile. Let him go as he was, and he’d keep up his wickedness in one form or another.

But that didn’t mean Leonard could simply kill Graham on the spot. Eyes were already on him over the business with Amon, so stirring up trouble a second time would earn him suspicion, not sympathy.

…Then this is the only way.

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

“Nothing in particular?”

It was an unexpectedly bland answer. Graham asked again just to be sure, but Leonard only repeated the same words, so 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 you say so, there’s nothing to be done.”

“…Um, can I go now?”

“Yes. Off you go.”

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

He was wearing a devil’s smile.

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

“Hmm?”

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

For a moment, Graham’s face went blank.

“What?”

A “lot”?

This had almost certainly been the first time Leonard ever laid eyes on the Bracelet of Subjugation, so a word like “a lot” made no sense here at all. Then why come out with something like that, and now of all times?

Graham could have let it pass, but he didn’t. That one vague phrase alone 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 forgot even to move and slowly chewed over what the words meant, never noticing that his own face was gradually twisting out of shape.

“…What’s that supposed to mean?”

It might have been better to ignore it altogether. That he’d asked anyway showed just how badly shaken he was.

Calm down.

It might be nothing more than his imagination.

“What a shame.”

But in the next instant, Leonard’s words blew every thought clean out of Graham’s confused head.

“After all those experiments, you still don’t have any results.”

— Snatch!

By the time Graham came back to himself, his hand was gripping Leonard’s collar across the table. 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 like a man who’d just realized something.

“Right. So that’s how it was.”

“What?”

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

Graham was researching what awakened an ordinary person as a mage, and Leonard had reached an unprecedented third Circle the instant his mana first bloomed. He must have been an extremely interesting subject.

So Graham had decided to “persuade” Leonard through Amon.

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

Graham’s whole body twitched at the question.

“You knew Amon might lose his head and try mind control on me, but you deliberately didn’t take the bracelet back. Because either way, you had nothing to lose.”

If the persuasion worked and Leonard came over to the Vincent house’s side, that alone would be a fine chance to build up Graham’s standing. And if it failed, he only had to use the Bracelet of Subjugation.

The mind would be wrecked in the process, which was a pity, but that still beat losing the research subject altogether. With the Vincent house’s power behind him, making one commoner kid expelled for a mental disorder disappear would be no work at all.

“You never imagined I’d come through all that in one piece. Let alone 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 out…”

Graham recoiled in horror.

“Does that matter?”

Leonard cut him off flatly.

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

Graham’s face went through a whole range of colors. Leonard held his gaze to the very end as he spoke.

“It’s over for you.”