Johan Jenkins (4)

It isn’t Malicopus.

When Johan learned that, the first thing he felt was emptiness. Everything he’d put himself through for the house until now, and his life along with it, had been denied at the root.

Yet at the same time it gave him a new hope: that he might take back a life he’d all but given up on.

“I’ll help with your treatment, Sunbae.”

That was what Leonard had said. Johan asked him why again and again, but every time all he got back was that Leonard “wanted to give him a chance”, and a bitter smile.

Before the treatment began, though, Leonard had set a few conditions.

First, Johan was to put an end to the lazy, irresponsible way he’d been living. Leonard’s view was that, having gone to the trouble of curing him, he’d sooner die than watch him soak himself in mana potions and fall apart all over again.

Second, until he was given permission, all contact with the Jenkins house was absolutely forbidden.

In short, nothing about the course of the treatment or how it was going could get out to anyone. Johan couldn’t tell why it had to be that way, but Leonard was so firm on the point that he simply accepted it.

A week went by like that.

“It took me a while to get everything ready.”

Leonard had called Johan out in front of their dormitory room, and now he drew a gaudy key, all gold and jewels, out of his pocket. It was the magic item he’d come by through a lucky chance a while back: the Key of Corbas.

Its shape was distinctive, to say the least, yet it fit the keyhole of the dormitory door exactly.

— Click.

“?!”

The key turned and the door swung open, and Johan couldn’t help but start. Past the threshold lay not the room he shared with Leonard but a completely different space, as though it had been cut whole out of somewhere else and stuck on here.

Inside were heaps of experimental instruments and furniture, all bought with Graham’s money, and thick books besides.

“Follow me.”

Leonard went in first, and Johan followed after him, asking as he went.

“The Key of Corbas… Where did you even get that?”

“You know what this is?”

Long ago, there had been an Archmage by the name of Corbas.

He was a mage, a blacksmith and an engineer all at once, and by combining what he knew from all those fields he made original magic items that nobody could copy. Before long, the name of Corbas the artisan was known across the whole continent.

Then one day Corbas sold off every one of those items for a pittance and abruptly vanished. Some were lost over the hundreds of years that followed, but most survived as they were and were still in use even now.

Of them all, the Key of Corbas was his most representative work. Each key was linked to a different space, and they were said to have been used as workshops or for storing goods.

“I’ve seen one come up a few times at auction houses I went to with my father, but I’ve never seen the real thing this close.”

Johan kept letting out little sounds of wonder. As a bonus, his suspicion that Leonard was deeply connected with the McGrath house grew that much stronger.

It isn’t actually the genuine article… but there’s no particular need to tell him that.

Either way, it was all going exactly as Leonard had intended.

“Right, have a seat first.”

Johan plopped himself down carelessly on a cushion lying nearby, and Leonard fetched a medicine bottle from the workbench.

“From today on, drink the medicine I give you every day without missing one. Not a single day skipped.”

“Mm.”

Johan knocked back the bottle he’d been handed without a second thought, and a bitterness came rolling in like a wave and ravaged his tongue without mercy.

“Blegggh!”

“You’re overreacting.”

Johan went so far as to stick his tongue out, tears running down his face. Leonard, having tossed out that one heartless remark, went round behind him and sat him up straight.

“From now on I’m going to force the mana in your body to circulate, Sunbae. Don’t resist. Just accept the flow.”

Leonard laid one hand on the back of Johan’s head and the other on the middle of his back. The mana sank in through his skin and went once around the blood vessels of his whole body by way of the heart, and an unpleasant, bizarre sensation came over Johan.

“I-is this really the right way to do it? At the very least I’d like some explanation of what’s going on and how.”

Johan sounded doubtful, so Leonard explained.

“Apart from the one thing they share, the blood meridian hardening, the disease you have is completely different from Malicopus, Sunbae, from its cause right through its course. Malicopus is hereditary, but in your case a substance that came in from outside has stuck to the blood meridian like glue.”

The cause of Hectoside’s onset is precisely “sustained ingestion of poison”. A poison with an affinity for mana enters the body and clings to the blood meridian, and every time mana is released it mixes in and goes out along with it, spreading through the whole body.

That was exactly why Johan felt such violent pain whenever he used magic.

“So to get rid of the substance that’s built up in your body, the only way is to keep forcing the mana around like this and dilute it.”

“A substance? What substance?”

Leonard answered his question.

“…I can’t pin it down just yet. There are far too many candidates.”

“Then what’s the medicine I just drank for?”

“It dissolves the substance and keeps the pain down.”

Johan turned and stared back at Leonard in disbelief, and Leonard handed him the Key of Corbas.

“I’ll lend you this key, Sunbae. I’ve made up several doses in advance and put them in the cupboard, so come as soon as your lessons are over. Drink the medicine and circulate your mana for three hours a day, every day, along the route I showed you.”

“Hold on.”

Leonard had told him everything he needed to know and was about to leave when Johan asked.

“…How long until it’s completely cured?”

Inwardly, he was afraid of the answer. Of course anything was better than being stuck with an incurable disease forever, but if it was going to take far longer than he’d expected…

Leonard just shrugged.

“Keep at it and you’ll be better within half a year at most. With luck, it could be even quicker than that.”

It was an extremely positive answer.

“Half a year? That’s really all it takes?”

Johan found it hard to take him at his word.

A disease he’d thought would torment him his whole life, gone clean away with less than a year of treatment. But the moment it sank in that this was actually real, his heart began to pound.

“What, can’t you wait that long?”

“…No. I held out for three years. Half a year is nothing.”

That answer seemed to please Leonard, and he left the room wearing a satisfied smile. When he opened the closed door again, what lay past the threshold was his own familiar room once more.

“Haaah.”

The smile vanished, and in its place a face full of worry surfaced.

Until the real culprit who’d made Johan Jenkins ill was identified, no part of the treatment could be allowed to get out. That was exactly why he’d forbidden contact with the Jenkins house.

And how am I supposed to explain this one later?

Well, there was no point thinking about it now. Leonard quietly closed his eyes.

Time flowed quickly on, and before he knew it the middle of May had come.

Leonard used the examinations right in front of him as an excuse to drop Ethan’s supplementary lessons altogether, and Johan started attending more days so he could pick up the studies he’d half set aside.

Look at that.

Johan and Leonard… those two are stuck together again.

The two of them were seen together more and more often, and the students’ interest swelled right along with it. A pairing as bizarre and awkward as a lion keeping company with a rabbit left them simply dumbfounded.

Some felt sorry for Leonard, saying someone must have seized on some weakness of his, or that he just hadn’t heard the rumors about Johan yet. Absurdly enough, though, not a single one of them had the courage to step forward.

“There’s a crowd again today.”

Leonard took a quick look around the reading room and sucked in a breath. It was past nine in the evening, yet the place was still packed with students. The two of them made their way carefully between the desks and planted themselves in a pair of empty seats.

Not an unfamiliar atmosphere.

In his past life, Leonard had awakened so late that he couldn’t get along with his classmates, let alone with juniors or upperclassmen. With no talent to speak of, the only thing he could do was bury himself in his studies.

Maybe that was why the reading room felt so familiar to him.

I don’t particularly need to study… but I’d better put on a show anyway.

Full marks on a first-year exam was child’s play for him. Still, keeping up even a little pretence of studying would help him blend in with the other students.

“Anyway, this is a bit of a surprise. I didn’t think you’d study this hard, Sunbae.”

“It’s not like I’d given up on studying altogether. If I had, I’d have skipped the exchange lesson in the first place.”

Leonard looked at Johan with fresh eyes and opened a thick history book. Jotting down notes now and then and turning pages, the two of them threw themselves into preparing for the exams.

Hm.

How much time had passed after that? Leonard was about to turn to the next page when his hand suddenly stopped.

What had caught his eye was Chapter 3 of the history book. It dealt mainly with the cultures outside the human kingdoms, and above all with the beastkin.

The beastkin.

Also called the non-human races, they were genetically related to modern humanity, and by the nature of their species they looked half human and half beast.

They differed from humans in everything from their looks to their culture, and they had fought battles great and small against them for mastery of the continent, without pause, for more than seventy years.

In the end, worn out by the long fighting, the two races declared the war over, but by then the continent had already been split in two. The bad blood between them ran so deep that any real resumption of exchange looked a distant prospect.

Now, some four hundred years later, the long efforts of merchants had begun to open a channel for exchange again, but there was still a long way to go.

The beastkin, is it.

If only humanity had reached out a hand of reconciliation sooner, and meant it. If the old grudge had been settled that way and the two races had worked together, then at the very least they would have died putting up a resistance worthy of the name against annihilation.

Leonard quietly closed his eyes.

…Kalieb.

A woman’s name slipped out of him all at once, without his meaning it to, and in the same moment a face he’d long since forgotten rose in his mind. Even now, he could hear her voice clearly.

Will I be able to see your face again someday?

Leonard turned the old memories over once more. Drunk on nostalgia as he was, it was Johan’s voice that pulled him back to reality.

“Hey, are you all right? You’ve got a really strange look on your face.”

“Uh…”

Leonard came to himself with a start and slowly shook his head. His face, though, was full of regret, like a man woken from a dream he hadn’t wanted to leave.

“…It’s nothing.”

With that, Leonard shut the history book.