Fion Seregal (2)

“You just walked off with the key last time, didn’t you? I keep telling you to hand it back when you’re finished with it…”

“Nobody uses it but me anyway — aren’t you being a bit of a stickler?”

The lunch hour was nearly over.

Fion took the key from the caretaker and set off along the footpath that crossed the academy grounds. A little while later she reached a small building with an old, forlorn air about it.

— Creak.

She undid the padlock and pulled the door open, and the smell of sawdust and machine oil came out to greet her. The building might look shabby, but the equipment set out inside was in good enough shape to use that very moment.

Right. Time to get started.

Fion strapped on her protective gear, then took her “work” out of its hiding place in the storage locker and set it on the workbench.

What she had to do was simple. She cut the leather and shaved the metal down into parts, then tried fitting them together. If she didn’t like the result, she took it apart again, threw out whatever material was ruined and reused whatever was still in decent shape just as it was.

When something stumped her partway through, she looked it up in a book and worked it out herself one way or another. The whole cycle went round and round, over and over, until something came out of it that was worth selling.

“Ah!”

— Krrrunch!

A leather strap went grinding into the saw blade. Without the gear, it would probably have been her fingers that went first. Fion was about to toss the scrap into the waste bin when she caught herself idly looking down into it.

It was crammed full of spoiled materials and failed attempts.

She’d put in all those long hours, yet there wasn’t one result worth pointing to. Once that thought surfaced, her drive drained away in an instant. Maybe she just had no talent for this.

By now she wasn’t even sure herself what it was she wanted to do.

“Haaah…”

She was right in the middle of that sigh when it came.

“Excuse me!”

“Kyaaaaah!”

The sudden voice startled her out of her skin, and she screamed. When she turned her head, there was a boy sitting flat on the floor, looking up at her.

“Y-you!?”

“Good grief, you’re going to split my eardrums.”

Leonard brushed off the seat of his trousers and got to his feet. Once Fion saw who it was, she got a second fright. Why on earth was he, of all people, here?

“Calm down first.”

“Calm down, he says — I thought I was going to die of fright! How long have you been in here?”

“I only just came in. The door made a noise — guess you missed it?”

Leonard pointed at the open door.

“What on earth are you doing here?”

“To look round the academy’s facilities, obviously. But when I went to the caretaker’s office, they said somebody had already borrowed the key.”

Fion’s jaw dropped.

For three years she’d been the only one to use this workshop, where nothing gathered but dust. She’d been sure nobody would turn up here, least of all now, but it seemed she’d been wrong.

“…Look, couldn’t you do your sightseeing a bit later?”

“Hm? Why?”

“That’s, well, because — uhh…”

Fion wracked her brain over that perfectly natural question, but Leonard’s eyes stayed fixed on her workbench the whole time.

I knew it. Just as I thought.

When he’d seen the name Fion Seregal, Leonard had been reminded of someone from the distant future.

Fion Derian.

She’d been a mage and inventor out of Kestral Academy, and her magic items had been enormously popular. They had both function and design, so her products turned up everywhere, in homes and on battlefields alike.

The different family name had made him unsure at first. Then it struck him that she might have taken a husband’s name when she married, and his guess had turned out to be right.

Still, that’s impressive.

As far as he knew, Kestral Academy had dropped its magic engineering course long ago. There was no point in it, they’d said, since however much skill a student picked up, they could never catch up with graduates of the other two academies.

So Fion had honed the craft all on her own, self-taught, in a place that gave her nothing to work with, and she’d started at fifteen. For someone out of Kestral Academy, that was astonishing.

“Is it awkward for you, having me here, by any chance?”

Fion had been groaning over her failure to come up with a decent answer, so at Leonard’s question she brightened right up.

“Y-yes! It puts me in a bit of a spot, having someone else around.”

“Aha. So you were in the middle of something that would put you in a spot if anyone saw it. That’s how I should take it?”

Oh?

Seeing Fion flustered and at a loss, Leonard couldn’t help letting out a snort of laughter.

Still, one thing nagged at him. Why go to such lengths to hide her own work? Kestral Academy surely put no limits on what a student made, so long as it stayed within the law.

“Hmm.”

Leonard looked round the room. Fion fidgeted, unable to settle on one thing or the other, until at last she lost patience and spoke first.

“Look, if there’s nothing in particular you want to see, would you mind leaving now?”

“I don’t want to.”

She’d never expected him to cut her off with a flat refusal, and she could only stare at him, dumbstruck.

“This workshop’s a shared facility in the first place, isn’t it? I can stay as long as I like, if I feel like it. And if you really have been doing something illegal in here, Sunbae, then as a student I can’t just turn a blind eye.”

At that, Fion’s heart dropped out from under her. Had she badly underestimated him, writing him off as a mere nine-year-old? She’d never imagined he was thinking along those lines.

She’s honest about what she feels.

Leonard smacked his lips and spoke.

“Mind if I ask you a few questions? Answer those and I’ll clear out right away.”

“F-fine. What do you want to know?”

If it ended there, she’d count herself lucky, so Fion nodded quickly, and Leonard asked.

“What were you making in here?”

“A product to sell.”

He hadn’t expected such a meek answer, and Leonard tilted his head.

“A product to sell, huh. So you’re planning to be some kind of inventor later on?”

“…An inventor. That’s far too grand a word for it.”

Fion smiled bitterly.

“But why were you trying to hide it?”

At Leonard’s question, her expression went stiff.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Your work, I mean. When I first came in, you were trying to hide your work from me—”

Leonard broke off in the middle of it. Somehow it felt as if the two of them were talking about completely different things. No, that wasn’t quite it either…

He took his eyes off Fion and looked around.

That she was hiding something was easy enough to guess, but it wasn’t the product she was working on now. So was there something else in here besides that?

Just then Leonard spotted a large basket on top of the storage locker, covered with a cloth.

“Ah, wait—!”

A flustered look came over Fion’s face, which told him he’d found his answer. Before she could get a word out to stop him, Leonard strode over to the locker and swept the cloth aside.

“Huh?”

Inside the basket were small medicine vials and accessories of every shape and color, and they looked an awful lot like things he’d seen plenty of somewhere.

“S-Sunbae. What’s this?”

What Leonard held up for her to see was none other than a rabbit’s-foot charm. Fion didn’t bother with excuses. She just covered her face with her palm.

“Oh, good grief…”

That was it.

The charms and drugs that had gone round the first-years all through the exam period were Fion’s work. The truth was so unexpected that Leonard, for the first time, was flustered and tripped over his words.

“Th-this is illegal.”

“I thought you came in here already knowing that.”

“Not in the slightest!”

Then Leonard asked.

“…Tell me honestly, Sunbae. What exactly have you been up to behind the scenes?”

Now that it had come out this far, there was no point lying. Fion tore at her hair in irritation and shot Leonard a quiet sidelong glare.

Long ago.

The Citra Empire, then a newborn state, invested funds in all sorts of ventures to raise up talented mages, and the founder of the Seregal house saw the possibilities in that, so he went into producing and distributing the timber used for magic staffs.

Wood has a good affinity for magic and was a popular staff material, and since the business dovetailed with state policy, it prospered for quite a long while. Yet even that lasted only a very short time, because with each generation the Seregal house grew more idle.

As time ran on like that, dark clouds finally began to gather over the business too.

Advances in technique made the methods of using metal in staffs widely known, and the Seregal house fell badly behind the fashion. On top of that, a rival house produced a new breed of tree, so they were pushed out of the competition as well.

Rodran Seregal, Fion’s father, fretted himself sick that the house would collapse in his own generation. Then, in the middle of all that, unlooked-for luck came his way. Not long after his daughter turned twelve, her mana bloomed.

From that day on, Rodran began to see his own daughter as a “means of recovery”.

Once Fion formally graduated from the academy, the Seregal house would become a noble bloodline, and on top of that her very existence would be great publicity for the business.

“I didn’t want to set foot in a household like that for one single moment.”

Whenever she visited home after a break, or whenever letters went back and forth, her parents asked without fail, every single time, not how their daughter was keeping but about a political marriage.

Go after this man. They say it would be good to forge a tie with that noble house. There wasn’t the slightest trace of love for their child in anything they said or did, and Fion had grown weary of her parents before she was even old enough to know better.

“The worst, right? One time I made a mistake handling a magic potion and got burned, and when I wrote about it in a letter, do you know what came back? That I should mind my behavior, because it brings my market value down.”

“…”

Was it the family’s circumstances that had done it? To Leonard’s ear, there was no denying Fion’s parents had a peculiar streak compared with other students’ parents. No, it was far more than that.

“The best I can do is change my family name and cut ties with my parents. So the plan was to start my own business the moment I graduated.”

Luckily, Kestral Academy was a public educational institution, equipped with every sort of facility to support its students’ education, so getting hold of the equipment she needed was no trouble.

But Fion hit a different obstacle right from the start. Turning out a prototype took a high level of engineering knowledge, and there was nobody at Kestral Academy who could teach her that.

“Rotten luck all round. When I looked into it, it turned out the magic engineering course had been abolished only a few years before I got here. I guess they decided a Kestral graduate who learned that sort of thing didn’t have much of a future.”

“So you taught yourself?”

“Mm. Start to finish.”

Leonard stared at Fion, dumbfounded. If she’d taught herself this far in a mere three years, that was a truly tremendous talent.

“And there was one more problem, the decisive one… When I stopped to think about it, I had no money.”

“Ah.”

Making a prototype takes materials as well as knowledge. At first the stock already laid in at the workshop was enough, but all that trial and error used up more and more of it.

So Fion racked her brains for a quick, simple way to raise funds, and what she came up with was exactly those charms and intelligence-boosting potions.

“But that’s illegal, isn’t it?”

“…Well, it’s not like I don’t know that. But anyone who uses the stuff gets caught before the exam even starts anyway, and as long as it’s nothing serious like narcotics or liquor the professors don’t pay it much mind, so I thought just a little…”

Fion paused there for a moment. It seemed even she hadn’t meant to pour out quite this much about herself.

“So, what are you going to do? Report me?”

“No?”

Leonard snorted a laugh at her question and answered.

“If anything, I’d like to invest. In your business, Sunbae.”