Johan Jenkins (3)

“Do you really have to go poking into every corner before you’re satisfied?”

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

With that answer to Johan’s question, Leonard held out a hand. Johan hesitated a moment, then finally accepted the help and got to his feet.

“So? Your answer?”

Johan quietly bit his lip. He had thought of nothing but winning and had never once planned for losing.

“…”

In the end, Johan chose silence.

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

Leonard pressed on.

“From here on, this is purely my own guess.”

In truth, he already had a fair idea of what was wrong with Johan’s body.

Unlike ordinary people, a mage has mana, the energy of life, coursing constantly through every blood vessel in the body. As a rule, that keeps mages from falling ill easily and gives them some resistance to poison besides. Turn it around, and it means the diseases and toxins that can touch a mage are extremely few.

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

“…Malicopus?”

In that instant Johan flinched hard, as if lightning had struck him.

“You…?”

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

Malicopus.

The disease is hereditary, and it manifests only in people who carry a particular genetic factor. In an ordinary person it poses no danger, but in a mage it becomes a serious matter.

The blood meridian, the organ that produces a mage’s mana, is supple and elastic like rubber, so as a mage ages and grows in ability it naturally stretches open to the next Circle. Malicopus, however, hardens the blood meridian solid over a long span of time, and the body can grow no further past the point where the disease took hold.

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

“Since you can’t even draw on the mana in your own body as you please, you’d have stuck to first- and second-Circle magic in the duel, where the mana cost is comparatively low. And from the look of it, even that was a real strain on you, Sunbae.”

“That’s a lot of guesswork.”

Johan muttered it under his breath. Having given himself away so blatantly, did he really mean to deny it all to the very end? Leonard shrugged.

“I think I understand, a little, 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 students. Every one of them concerned his foul temper or his violence, and strangely enough, not one mocked a hereditary disease. That meant not a single student knew Johan had Malicopus.

“If it came out that you had a hereditary disease, the Jenkins house would be in an awkward spot. They’d be branded a tainted bloodline, one secretly carrying the Malicopus factor.”

Nobody would want to get tangled up with a house carrying that kind of “bomb.” Even one of the five great houses, for all its standing, would struggle to survive that blow. The odds of anyone catching the disease were low, but distrust needs no more reason than that to take root.

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

Of course, the family might have ordered him to do it rather than his choosing it himself. But the faint pride in Johan’s eyes ruled that out at once.

“Compared to being exposed as someone who came to Kestral Academy because of a hereditary disease, being disowned for a rotten temper is 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 to give 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 though it might last forever.

“Have you really ever been violent with anyone?”

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

So most of what was going around now had been blown out of proportion one way or another. Envy and jealousy toward the five great houses had probably helped the false rumors spread.

Underdogma.¹

Reverse discrimination straight out of the textbook, resting on the logic that the weak are good and the strong are evil.

“Did the professors know about what you did, too, Sunbae?”

“…Only one.”

“Then a professor just stood by and let the students ostracize you?”

Leonard asked it in open disbelief, and Johan waved a limp hand, looking annoyed.

“This is a school that’s supposed to leave a person’s choices up to him. And I’m a son of the Jenkins house besides, so they’d have been wary of touching the matter carelessly.”

Question after question, Johan answered readily enough. He certainly hadn’t planned to answer at the outset; his secret was far too heavy to be coaxed out of him with a word or two of persuasion. But Leonard had seen right through him, far too easily.

Something he had guarded for more than three years had been found out, and it left him hollow; at the same time came a sense of release, as though shackles had fallen away. Caught between those two conflicting feelings, Johan finally stopped resisting.

“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, a fascinating and shocking truth would come to light.

One: several patients long believed to have Malicopus turned out, on closer study, to have had an entirely different disease whose symptoms merely resembled it very closely. The disease, named Hectoside after its discoverer, was all but identical to Malicopus in its symptoms. With so few patients to serve as a control group, the two were extremely hard to tell apart. That was precisely why the cure took so long to develop.

Two: where Malicopus arises from a hereditary factor, Hectoside can be contracted only under an extremely particular set of conditions. Unless someone deliberately engineered them, the chance of catching Hectoside was vanishingly close to zero.

The news turned the whole continent upside down. Of all the people thought until then to have Malicopus, how many had truly been afflicted? And who had given the rest Hectoside? How far back did it go, and how many mages had been “assassinated” this way?

Less than three years later, though, the monster forces poured through the dimensional rift in an all-out offensive, and with no room left to think of anything else, the truth was buried in darkness for good.

With that history in mind, one question inevitably arose.

Was Johan’s disease Malicopus after all, or Hectoside?

“…Excuse me a moment.”

— Clamp!

“?!”

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

Let’s have a look.

An ordinary mage could never tell Hectoside from 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 deep, Johan shuddered at a bizarre sensation unlike anything he had ever felt, like countless insects crawling up his arm.

Then Leonard found it. His mana, running backward up the vessels toward the heart, struck a foreign trace that had no business being in Johan’s body.

Hectoside…!

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

To contract Hectoside, a person has to live for a long time somewhere the matching conditions are met. And whoever could keep up that kind of environment 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 whoever had done this to him was family, or someone close to him? To a man who had taken every kind of abuse on himself to protect his house, how could anyone say such a thing now?

And at last Leonard understood why his memory held no trace of Johan. The reasons and the path would differ, but Johan had surely met exactly the same fate as Amon.

“Haaah.”

Leonard finally released his hand and sighed heavily.

The one mercy was that Hectoside could be cured. Of course, that did not mean it could be left alone; without any treatment, untreated, it would become incurable.

…I’ll have to save him, then.

A chance to put a member of the Jenkins house in his debt did not come along often. And given the bleak future ahead, saving even one more talented person worked in his favor.

Calculation aside, though, he also simply wanted to help. There was no telling what saving the man would bring him, but he pitied someone about to die without even a chance to fight his fate.

Just then, Johan spoke up.

“Anyway, who on earth are you?”

“Sorry?”

Johan glared at him, suspicion written across his face.

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

There was no arguing with that; the suspicion was entirely fair.

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

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

Johan’s eyebrows twitched.

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

“So how exactly did you—”

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

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

“Isn’t there a house in the Citra Empire that springs to mind the moment anyone thinks of medicine?”

At that, Johan was lost for words. Disease, medical knowledge, a house: few keywords could tie those three together, and just as Leonard said, he knew the 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 field in modern medicine and alchemy. In poisons and medicines it had no equal, and its knowledge of disease ran deep as well. Word had it that McGrath children had enormous amounts of knowledge drilled into them from an early age, since alchemy is a field that wide.

If Leonard had some connection to that house, a great deal would make sense.

“Then I understand it even less. Are you telling me you’re some hidden child of the McGraths?”

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

Leonard had done the same with Graham. He pretended to leave room for doubt, but in effect that was as good as telling Johan his 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 shares the symptom of the blood meridian hardening.”

“What?”

“Malicopus obstructs the circulation of mana. The body has finished 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 feverishness.”

Johan could hardly believe his ears, but Leonard went on.

“But what was it actually like? Far from petty ailments, you were perfectly healthy, weren’t you? If anything, violent pain ran through your whole body only when you used magic. Am I wrong?”

Johan stared blankly down at his own hand. Far from being wrong, Leonard had named every symptom, down to the ones Johan had not even mentioned yet.

“M-my physician…”

“Your physician wouldn’t have known. Malicopus is the only disease widely known to involve the blood meridian, and with so few recorded cases, it would never even have occurred to anyone that it might be something else.”

Johan was completely speechless. If what the boy said was true, then hadn’t he squandered all this time for nothing?

“And,”

Leonard broke into a broad grin.

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