Johan Jenkins (3)

“Do you really have to go rummaging through every corner before you’re satisfied?”

“It’s my nature. I can’t stand it when something’s got me curious.”

That was Leonard’s answer to Johan’s question, and he held out a hand with it. Johan hesitated for a moment, but in the end he took the help and got to his feet.

“So? Your answer?”

Johan quietly bit his lip. He’d thought about nothing but winning, and he hadn’t planned for losing at all.

“…”

So, in the end, Johan chose silence.

“Well, if you don’t want to say it, there’s nothing I can do. Everyone has secrets they’d rather keep. Then at least hear me out,” Leonard said.

“From here on, this is purely what I think.”

The truth was, he already had a guess about what was wrong with Johan’s body.

Unlike ordinary people, a mage has mana, the energy of life, circulating constantly through the blood vessels of the whole body. That’s why mages rarely fall ill, and why they have a certain resistance to poison as well.

Turn that around, though, and it means the diseases and toxins that can actually afflict a mage are extremely few.

Leonard explained that much, then stopped and thought it over for a long while. At last a single word leapt out of his mouth.

“…Malicopus?”

Johan’s whole body flinched in that instant, as if he’d been struck by lightning.

“You…?”

He stared at Leonard as though he couldn’t possibly believe it, and that reaction told Leonard his guess was right.

Malicopus.

It was a hereditary disease that showed itself only in people who carried a particular genetic factor. In an ordinary person it was entirely harmless, but in a mage it was a serious matter.

The organ that produced a mage’s mana, the “blood meridian”, was elastic and supple, much like rubber, so it naturally opened the next Circle as the mage aged or his ability developed.

Malicopus, however, slowly hardened the blood meridian until it set completely, and the body could grow no further past the point at which the disease had taken hold.

Worse, there was still no cure for it. For a mage, Malicopus was the worst disease there was, nothing less than a death sentence.

“You can’t even draw out the mana inside your own body the way you want to, so in the duel you’d have stuck to first- and second-Circle magic, where the mana cost is fairly low. And from the look of things, even that was a real strain on you, Sunbae.”

“That’s an awfully long-winded pile of guesswork,” Johan muttered.

He’d let it show that blatantly, and he still meant to deny all knowledge of it to the very end? Leonard shrugged.

“I think I understand a little of why you’re so desperate to deny it, Sunbae.”

Before coming back to the dormitory, Leonard had heard all sorts of rumors about Johan Jenkins from the other students. Every one of them was about his foul temper or his violence, yet strangely, not one of them mocked his hereditary disease. So not a single student knew he had Malicopus.

“If it came out that you had a hereditary disease, it would put the Jenkins house in a difficult position. People would brand it a troubling bloodline, one with the factor behind Malicopus hidden inside it.”

Nobody would want to get mixed up with a house that carried that kind of “bomb”. Even one of the five great houses, for all its standing, would struggle to escape a fatal blow. The odds of actually contracting the disease were low, but that was reason enough for distrust to set in.

“You were trying to protect your house by sacrificing yourself, Sunbae.”

Of course, it might well have been someone else’s will rather than his own. But the faint pride in Johan’s eyes ruled that out at once.

“Getting found out as someone who came to Kestral Academy because of a hereditary disease, or getting disowned for a rotten temper? The second’s far simpler, and far easier to act out.”

“Enough.”

Johan’s slightly hoarse voice cut him off. Leonard nodded and held his tongue for a while, giving him room to catch his breath.

“There’s something I’m curious about.”

A few minutes later, Leonard broke a silence that had seemed as if it might last forever.

“Did you ever actually get violent with anyone?”

“…In my first year, a student sneered at my house and my family, and I used my fists on him. Nothing since.”

Yet a good deal of what was going around now had been exaggerated in every possible way. Envy and jealousy of the five great houses had probably helped the false rumors spread.

Underdogma.¹

It was a textbook case of reverse discrimination, resting on the logic that the weak are good and the strong are evil.

“Did the professors know about your act too, Sunbae?”

“…Only one.”

“Then a professor just let the students shut you out like that?”

Leonard asked it in disbelief, and Johan, looking annoyed, gave a limp wave of his hand.

“It’s a world where a person’s own will counts for more, isn’t it? Besides, I’m a son of the Jenkins house, so they’d have thought twice before meddling.”

Question after question, Johan answered readily enough. He hadn’t meant to at first, of course, because his secret was far too heavy to be coaxed out of him with a word or two of persuasion. But Leonard had seen straight through it, and far too easily.

There was a hollowness in having what he’d guarded for more than three years found out, and at the same time a sense of release, as if shackles had come off him. With the two clashing feelings tangled together, Johan finally gave up on all of it.

“You really are an irritating little bastard, every last bit of you. If you know that much, why are you just sitting on it? You could blackmail me and squeeze money out of me.”

“I don’t do that sort of thing. It’s just…”

Leonard let the rest trail away.

Forty-five years from now, a mage of the Citra Empire would develop a cure, and humanity would conquer Malicopus, the notorious incurable disease, once and for all.

In the course of that research, however, an interesting and shocking truth would come to light.

One: several patients who’d been thought to have Malicopus turned out, on closer study, to have had an entirely different disease whose symptoms only resembled it very closely.

This disease came to be called “Hectoside” after its discoverer. Its symptoms were all but identical to those of Malicopus, and there were so few patients to serve as a control group that telling the two apart was extremely hard. That was exactly why the cure had taken so long to develop.

Two: Malicopus came from a hereditary factor, but Hectoside could only be contracted under an extremely particular set of conditions. Unless someone engineered it deliberately, the probability of catching Hectoside converged infinitely on zero.

The news turned the whole continent upside down. Of everyone who’d been thought to have Malicopus, how many had truly had it? And who was the culprit who had given the rest Hectoside?

How far back did it go, and how many mages had been “assassinated” this way?

But less than three years later, the monster forces that crossed the dimensional rift began their all-out offensive, and with no room left to think about anything else, the truth was buried in darkness.

Knowing all that, Leonard couldn’t help but ask himself the question.

Was the disease Johan had really Malicopus, or was it Hectoside?

“…Excuse me a moment.”

— Clamp!

“?!”

Leonard had suddenly seized Johan’s hand. Flustered, Johan tried to pull his arm back, but the grip was fearsome and wouldn’t let him go.

Let’s have a look.

An ordinary mage couldn’t tell the subtle difference between Hectoside and Malicopus, but Leonard, with his knowledge of the future, could.

Wh-what is this?

As Leonard’s mana rode into Johan’s blood vessels and sank in, Johan shuddered at a bizarre sensation he’d never felt in his life, as if countless insects were crawling up his arm.

And Leonard found it. His mana, running backward up the blood vessels toward the heart, reached a foreign trace that should never have existed in Johan’s body.

Hectoside…!

The worst assumption had just become reality. Leonard clicked his tongue quietly and glanced at Johan with pity in his eyes.

To contract Hectoside, a person had to live for a long time somewhere the right conditions were met. And the “person” who could manage that kind of environment and keep it going without a break would have to be…

A dreadful picture flashed through Leonard’s mind.

…This one might be tangled up in something far more complicated than I thought. No, more than that…

How was he supposed to tell the man himself? That the culprit who’d made him what he was now was family, or someone close to him? He’d taken every kind of abuse on himself to protect his house, so how could anyone say that to him now?

And at last Leonard understood why he had no memory of Johan at all. The reasons and the course of it would be different, but Johan had surely met exactly the same fate as Amon.

“Haaah.”

Leonard finally let go of his hand, and a heavy sigh slipped out of him.

The one mercy was that Hectoside could be cured. That didn’t mean it could be left alone, of course. If nothing was done, it would go forever beyond recovery.

…I’ll have to save him, then.

A chance to put a member of the Jenkins house in his debt didn’t come along often, and with the bleak future ahead, saving even one more talented person worked in his favor.

But calculation aside, he also simply wanted to help. He couldn’t know what saving the man would bring him, yet he felt a kind of pity for someone about to die without so much as a chance to fight his fate.

Just then, Johan spoke up.

“Anyway, who on earth are you?”

“Sorry?”

Johan glared at him suspiciously.

“There’s no way a kid who’s only just turned nine knows about Malicopus. Spotting a disease nobody’s noticed in years the moment you lay eyes on it? Anyone would call that strange.”

It was a fair suspicion, and there was no arguing with it.

“You’re not going to claim at this point that you’re an ordinary nine-year-old, are you?”

“If I were, I wouldn’t have known what illness you had, Sunbae.”

Johan’s eyebrows twitched.

Malicopus was so rare that barely a case of it had ever been reported. Recognizing it from the symptoms alone meant Leonard had considerable medical knowledge.

“So how exactly did you—”

“Think about it for just a moment and it’ll come to you soon enough.”

Leonard said it gravely, without a trace of a smile.

“Isn’t there a house in the Citra Empire that comes to mind the moment you think of medicine?”

That left Johan lost for words for a moment. Disease, medical knowledge, a house. Few keywords could tie those three together, and just as Leonard had said, he knew this one.

“…The McGrath house?”

Like the Jenkins house, the McGrath house was one of the pillars of the five great houses, and it led the way in modern medicine and alchemy. No one could match them in poisons and medicines, and their knowledge of disease ran deep as well.

It was said that the McGrath children had enormous amounts of knowledge drilled into them from a young age through early schooling, because the field of alchemy was simply that broad and that vast. If Leonard had some connection to that house, it would explain a great deal.

“Then that makes even less sense. Are you telling me you’re some hidden McGrath child?”

“I’m under no obligation to tell you that much.”

It was the same as with Graham. On the surface he pretended to leave room for doubt, but in practice it was no different from confirming the guess was very nearly right.

“I’ll tell you one thing for certain, though. The disease you have, Sunbae, isn’t Malicopus. It’s a separate disease that just happens to share the symptom of the blood meridian hardening.”

“What?”

“Malicopus is a disease that blocks the circulation of mana. The body’s done preparing to become a mage, but the energy it needs for that can’t get out of the blood meridian, so you end up plagued by minor symptoms like chills and fever.”

Johan doubted his own ears, but Leonard went on.

“But what was it really like for you? Not so much as a cold, I’d bet. You were perfectly fine. Instead, a violent pain ran through your whole body, but only when you used magic. Am I wrong?”

Johan looked blankly down at his own hand. Leonard wasn’t wrong at all. He’d named every symptom, even the ones Johan hadn’t mentioned yet.

“M-my physician…”

“Your physician wouldn’t have known. Malicopus is generally the only disease anyone knows of that involves the blood meridian, and with so few cases on record, it would never have occurred to anyone that it might be something else.”

Johan was completely lost for words. If what the boy said was true, hadn’t he thrown away all this time for nothing?

“And,” Leonard said with a broad grin.

“If it’s a different disease, then it can be cured.”