A Headache (6)

— Crash-thud!

Graham sprang out of his seat and kicked the table toward Leonard with all his strength.

“Short tempers run in the family, I see. Honestly!”

Leonard honed a magic barrier to an edge and split the table in two. As the halves fell away, Graham came into view, already at the workbench by the far wall.

Several flasks brimming with suspicious solutions flew at Leonard, coming within a hair of his nose, but he dodged them lightly and launched himself straight at Graham. Graham’s body split in two like a phantom, however, and Leonard’s fist, robbed of its target, drove into the inner wall of the research office instead.

— BOOM!

A fierce tremor ran through the ceiling and the floor. Even the shock wave of the blow, felt from a distance, was enough to drain the color from Graham’s face.

They say anyone who knows the theory can use body-hardening magic easily, but putting it to work in a real fight takes tremendous strength of mind. And Leonard was pulling it off in the body of a mere nine-year-old.

I can’t let the brat stay on me.

Graham cast a spell at once.

Mirror Image.

— Shoooo.

Graham’s afterimages appeared here and there about the research office, and Leonard sneered.

“A man who calls himself a professor, ducking this way and that to get away from a student. Aren’t you ashamed?”

— Snap!

Leonard snapped his fingers, and a pulse of mana swept the whole research office. Graham had been tilting his head at the strange sensation; when he saw Leonard looking straight at him, his stomach lurched.

“—Found you.”

Having picked the real body out from the afterimages, Leonard closed the distance in a single stride.

— WHACK!

Graham threw up a barrier on instinct, but the shock he couldn’t absorb in time numbed his whole body.

“Guhhhhh!”

If he let even a little strength out of his belly, he felt he would bring up everything inside it. Graham wrung out every scrap of strength he had and held on, then raised a light repulsion field and shoved Leonard back.

— Smack! THWACK!

Leonard’s attacks drummed on the barrier regardless. Elbows, knee and shoulder joints, the backs of the feet and hands, the chest over the heart, the point of the chin: he went after every weak point that could reliably put an opponent out of a fight.

Heh! However hard he tries, as long as I block it…

Graham was about to snort to himself when his vision blurred for an instant. How on earth had that happened? He gathered himself and poured more strength into the barrier, and yet the same thing happened again. How could this be?

—Why?

It was no trick of the mind. The barrier was plainly holding, and still Leonard’s blows passed through it to land their shock directly on Graham’s body.

This was dangerous. Sensing the crisis, Graham crossed both hands and drew his mana up, and a thick ooze of poison began to seep from the tips of his fingernails.

“Poison Screen!”

— Shhhwoosh!

The lethal gas spread along the ground and filled the research office in an instant. The toxins spilling from the flasks Graham had smashed mingled with it, and the cloud grew stronger still.

One breath of it, and the fight would be over.

Graham forced some distance between himself and Leonard and cast a detoxification spell on himself. But instead of Leonard rolling on the floor in agony, he saw a fist flying at his belly.

— THWACK!

“Kuuugh!”

“You always, have to, blow things up, for no reason.”

Leonard bit off one word at a time and pounded Graham’s liver and gut in turn. At the fifth blow, the barrier, worn to a rag, shattered completely.

Beaten helplessly with his shield gone, Graham suddenly realized something. Even as his bones cracked and his blood spattered, his mind remained perfectly clear.

This can’t be.

Had the boy been holding back on purpose all along?

— Crunch!

Leonard caught both of Graham’s hands in his and bore down, twisting every finger bone at once.

“Aaaaagh!”

A shrill scream burst from Graham’s mouth.

Leonard headbutted him, then kicked him in the stomach and drove him into a corner of the research office. Hauling in ragged breaths, Graham lifted his head and was appalled to see Leonard without a scratch on him.

He had taken all that poison full in the face and he was fine?

A — a monster?

This went beyond anything the word “genius” could explain. While Graham floundered, Leonard walked up and raised one leg.

— Crunch!

The kick slammed into Graham’s skull. His brain seemed to rattle loose, and his body dropped in a heap like a puppet with its strings cut.

His vision went black.

“Ugh… ughk!”

Exactly one hour later, Graham’s eyes flew open as he came out of the faint.

He clung to the hope that all of it had been nothing but a vicious nightmare. Sadly, Leonard was squatting right beside him in plain sight, watching him.

His heart nearly stopped.

Only then did Graham notice that his limbs hadn’t been bound. Not that it put any thought of resistance into his head. If he tried anything, this time he would certainly die.

“…What are you, really?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Graham asked again.

“Don’t play innocent. In what way are you an ordinary nine-year-old student?”

“Ah. Well, I suppose you would be curious about that.”

A meaningful smile rose on Leonard’s face.

“How did I know, I wonder? How did a brat who’s nothing but commoner-born catch on to the secret you’ve been guarding so lovingly all these years?”

In the not-too-distant future, Graham would meet his ruin. One survivor who had endured the bracelet’s mind control would escape the laboratory and lay the research records and Graham’s crimes out before the whole world. That was exactly how Leonard knew his secret.

Graham, who had no way of knowing the truth, felt his breath catch.

L-let’s think this through, step by step.

Extraordinary skill. That strange confidence that wouldn’t cower even before a member of the Vincent house. What on earth was going on? Could it be that the boy wasn’t a commoner at all?

Just then, Leonard confirmed Graham’s suspicion.

“Do you really think I handled Amon Vincent all by myself?”

What had actually happened was simple. Amon Vincent had come at him, and Leonard Felix had struck back and subdued him, nothing more. But Leonard let a little ambiguity hang over it and fed Graham’s misconception.

After agonizing over it for a long while, Graham spoke in a badly cracked voice.

“…Where?”

He meant: which house was backing him?

“Who knows.”

There was, of course, no such house. But Leonard didn’t need to give anything away. Keeping up an air of mystery and a plausible act was enough, and Graham swallowed dryly.

— Trickle.

A bead of sweat ran down Graham’s cheek. Whatever conclusion he had reached on his own, his eyes now held nothing but pure terror as they looked Leonard over.

An unheard-of genius who defied all common sense being commoner-born was strange enough. But a boy who had only just awakened and knew nothing at all, surviving against monsters? Graham had thought it bizarre, but…

Don’t tell me he’s connected to one of the five great houses?

If so, the likes of the Vincent house were no match at all. If the five great houses so much as lifted a finger, he and his house would vanish from history as though they had never existed.

“If it were up to me, I’d kill you with my own hands right here and now, but then the cleanup becomes a nuisance. So choose. Now.”

Leonard went on.

“Wh-what do you—”

“The experiments you ran. I could run those same experiments on you.”

There was no way to take that as a joke, and Graham sucked in an empty breath. Then Leonard put forward his second offer.

“If you don’t care for that, go turn yourself in and sit in a prison cell.”

By hinting at a powerful force behind him, Leonard headed off any retaliation down the line. Now, even if Graham spouted nonsense in the middle of his confession, none of it would come back on him.

Well, who’d believe a little kid like me beat up a professor in the first place.

Leonard snorted. Graham must have found even that frightening, because he answered carefully, scared out of his wits.

“…I’ll turn myself in.”

“A wise choice.”

Now that Leonard held the power of life and death over him, the boy was no ordinary student in Graham’s eyes. Somewhere along the way, Graham had started addressing the boy in the most deferential terms he knew.

“One more thing before I go.”

“Yes, yes! Anything at all.”

Leonard, on his way out of the door, turned back around, and Graham went rigid.

“Valuables, money, whatever you’ve got. Hand all of it over.”

“Sorry?”

“Move it before I have to say it twice.”

At the order, Graham tilted his head without thinking. Why would someone backed by a power nobody dared approach demand his pocket change and belongings?

No. This is no time for that.

What a pointless thing to wonder with his life in the balance. Graham folded the doubt away, went over to the wall cabinet, and revealed a hidden safe. Inside were a heavy sack of money and various odds and ends.

“H-here you are.”

“Good.”

This was most likely black money Graham had scraped together illegally, which meant no trace of where it came from would be left behind. With no telling what lay ahead, laying in funds against an emergency mattered a great deal.

“What’s this?”

Leonard asked. Among Graham’s belongings, exactly one thing caught his eye: a gaudy key decorated with gold and jewels. Graham hesitated a moment, then answered slowly.

“…It’s the Key of Corbas.”

“What?”

Leonard, startled, asked again, and Graham waved his hands.

“Not the real one, of course! It’s only a degraded copy of the genuine article. But the effect is much the same.”

Leonard looked at the key again with fresh eyes. Even in his previous life, hardly anyone had owned the Key of Corbas, a precious magic item. If Graham was telling the truth, then copy or not, it would be quite useful.

“The way to use it—”

“Never mind. I already know.”

“Ah, of course you would.”

Graham shrank back as though he had asked something he shouldn’t have. Leonard calmed his racing heart and pocketed the key with a casual air. His business here was done.

“I’ll be going, then.”

“Yes, sir!”

Leonard set one foot over the threshold, then stopped where he stood and spoke to Graham.

“Just in case, let me warn you ahead of time… you’d do well not to entertain any thought of running.”

“Hiik—”

The menace in his voice made Graham hiccup in spite of himself.

“Wherever you run, even if you leave the country, I’ll chase you to the very end. And when I catch you, I’ll make you wish you had died instead.”

“I won’t run! I’m telling you, I won’t!”

Graham shouted it over and over with everything he had. He couldn’t see what lay ahead for him, and that terrified him.