Fion Seregal (3)

“Invest?”

Fion blinked. It was an odd word to hear from a nine-year-old, and she couldn’t help feeling how badly it fit him.

“And what money have you even got to invest in me?” Fion snorted.

Leonard answered by pulling a large bar of gold from inside his coat and setting it on the workbench without a word. It landed with a thunk, and the sound reached Fion’s ears so clearly that she could guess its weight from hearing alone.

“Plus nine more of these.”

Fion couldn’t hide her shock. This wasn’t even in the same world as the pocket money she scraped together selling potions and charms. Where on earth had he got his hands on a ridiculous sum like that?

“W-wait a moment.”

Maybe it was the gold glittering in front of her, but her voice shook a little.

Think.

Nobody had set foot in this workshop for three years. Now a first-year had barged in, and as if that weren’t enough, he was pushing a fortune at her and tempting her with an investment. It was far too convenient to be a coincidence.

“Haaah.”

Fion took a deep breath, then asked him.

“…Weren’t you just a commoner?”

“There was an accident recently, when I got tangled up with the Vincent house. This is what they gave me as compensation.”

“I-I see.”

Money with a clear source inspires trust. Fion nodded, and her guard came down a good deal.

“You still haven’t answered me. If I invest, Sunbae, will you take it?”

“I told you to wait a bit.” Fion waved his question away.

“You don’t even really know what I’ve been making in here. So what makes you say you’ll invest?”

“…Ah, I suppose that’s fair.”

“‘I suppose that’s fair,’ he says…”

Leonard had never once doubted her ability, though. He already knew for a fact that she would make her name as an inventor and an engineer.

Quite apart from that, he liked her character. A nine-year-old brat had brought her money, and instead of swallowing it whole, she’d warned him about the dangers of investing in a hurry.

What an honest person she was.

“Well then,”

Leonard walked past her to the workbench, where the thing she’d been wrestling with for so long lay waiting.

“I’ll just hear about it now.”

“What?”

“Explain this ‘product’ to me.”

Right now? The request came out of nowhere and threw her. But when she saw his face, serious without a trace of humor, she shut her mouth tight.

Now that it had actually come to it, though, she had no idea where to start.

“And can you even understand what I’m saying?”

“Isn’t it a bit late to be asking that?” Leonard let out a snort of laughter.

He had a point. There was a side to him that was far too mature for his age. Were all the so-called geniuses like this? Fion gave a small sigh.

“…I’m no good at explaining things to people. So whenever you don’t follow something, just ask, any time. I’ll put it as simply as I can, as many times as it takes.”

“Understood.”

Fion picked up her “work” in one hand. It was a round metal disc, and nothing about the look of it gave the faintest hint of what it was for.

“It’s nothing that impressive.”

She could feel Leonard’s gaze on her, and her face turned awkward as she spoke. On the day she first drew up her business plans, she had judged that her product would have a hard time competing in the market.

For a start, a student’s skill could never turn out anything that would satisfy a customer. So she had decided to go after a niche market.

“You know a staff’s performance is directly proportional to its weight?”

“…Uh, well, generally speaking that’s not entirely wrong.”

The logic was simple.

The more material went into a staff, the heavier it got and the better it performed. Precious materials could draw outstanding performance out of a light staff, of course, but naturally a staff like that was expensive and hard to make.

“An ordinary staff weighs about three or four kilograms, sometimes more. Carrying one around for a little while is one thing, but for a mage fighting on a battlefield, that’s a lot of weight to haul.”

Leonard nodded. Some staffs floated about on their own, of course, like Professor Louis’s, but that was only a special ability that had appeared as the staff absorbed Louis’s essence.

“And you can hardly tie a strap to one… so I made this.”

— Clack.

She set the disc back on the workbench and picked up a wooden rod that had been propped beside it. A ring of the same metal as the disc was fitted around the middle of the rod.

Don’t tell me…

Only then did Leonard recognize what she had made. It was none other than the “Utility Belt,” one of Fion Derian’s popular inventions, and the one that would carry the most influence of them all.

“Here. When you turn the mana-stone dial on the metal plate…”

Fion turned the dial on the disc, and the staff rose into the air and stuck fast to its underside. No, to be exact, it was floating about ten centimeters clear of the disc.

“…you can carry a staff around comfortably, without it getting in the way or costing you any effort.”

She took out another ring just like the one on the staff and slipped it onto her finger. Then, as she spread her hand open, the staff came flying off the disc and into her grip.

“And you can get into a combat stance whenever you need to.”

The Utility Belt’s function was extremely simple.

The metal ring and the disc worked on each other to make a staff easy to handle, and that was all. Yet to Leonard, who had taken the field as a soldier, it felt worth far more than that.

A mage’s combat strength generally plummets the moment they lose their staff. And on a battlefield, being worn down by exhaustion or losing hold of a staff by mistake happens all the time.

This product was the one and only thing that could make up for that. On top of that, it was cheap and easy to make, and the Citra Empire held the largest force of mages on the continent.

It couldn’t fail to compete, however hard you tried.

“Right now it’s only a substitute for a strap or a belt, but later on I might be able to give the ring and the disc new functions too.”

And that was exactly what happened. The result went beyond anything anyone could have imagined.

At its core, the Utility Belt was a weapon accessory. Once attachments could be added to a finished staff to expand what it did, the whole of a mage’s equipment went through a revolution.

Mages began flying about gripping a staff, or wielding several staffs at once on their own.

As armament improved, battles lasted enormously longer, and the range of tactics that could be carried out widened with it. The change that grew out of her small invention completely overturned the face of war.

“The reason I haven’t been able to finish it is simple.” Fion’s expression darkened slightly. “Because I’ve got no money.”

To keep the Utility Belt working, it needed a constant supply of mana. A cheap mana stone would have done as a power source, but even that was far too expensive for Fion.

At first she had tried to get around the problem with technical workarounds, but whichever method she chose cost her either efficiency or stability, so the results never really satisfied her.

In the end, unable to go either way, she’d taken to killing time aimlessly in the workshop. And just as her money and materials were running dry, Leonard had turned up out of nowhere, with perfect timing.

“Right, that’s all there is to explain.”

“I’ll invest. Let’s just write up a contract.”

Fion stared at him blankly. How could anyone not hesitate for even a moment?

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m saying this after listening properly.”

“…Let me ask you one more time. What makes you trust some fifteen-year-old student’s work enough to invest in it?”

“I saw the potential. There’s a good item and I want to invest in it. What’s age got to do with it?” Leonard said.

“If I say yes, what are your conditions?”

“Just perfectly ordinary ones,” he said in answer to her question. “A share of the profits in proportion to what I put in. And I’d like you to hear out my advice when it comes to making decisions. Other than that, I’ll leave the development and the selling entirely to you, Sunbae.”

The conditions favored Fion too much for her to brush them aside. And with his mind so firmly made up, there was all the less reason to refuse.

“Haaah, all right.”

Fion held out her hand. Leonard took a moment to realize what it meant, then grinned and shook it.

And so the two of them became partners.

“I’ll give you some money to start with, so buy mana stones and try making some prototypes. The performance and reliability are solid, so your product is bound to sell well, Sunbae. Though of course there’ll be plenty to improve along the way.”

At Leonard’s words, Fion nodded.

“So, where are we going right now?”

“Now that we’re on the same team, you ought to meet the person I live with, don’t you think?”

A face suddenly came to her mind. And the moment Leonard opened the door of the men’s dormitory, she knew by instinct that she had guessed right.

“…Who is it?”

The voice was low and gloomy, and Fion shuddered before she could stop herself.

Oh, this is insane!

Johan stood right at the door, heavy dark circles under his eyes, looking down at the two of them.

“H-hello.”

“Who’s this one?” Johan jerked his chin at Fion.

“Business partner,” Leonard said.

“What?”

He had no idea what this kid got up to around the academy. Johan looked from Fion to Leonard and back with suspicious eyes, then let out a sigh and stepped aside.

Once the door was shut, Leonard introduced them.

“This is Fion Seregal, third year, Owl class. Fion-sunbae, this is—”

“You don’t have to tell me who he is.” Fion gave Johan a sidelong look.

She had half suspected it already, but to think the person he lived with really was that “Johan Jenkins.” Even Fion, who had little interest in the rumors going around the academy, knew his notoriety well enough.

Talking with a man like that as though it were nothing at all.

Leonard mixed with a child of the Jenkins house without a trace of fear, and she found it nothing short of a wonder.

“Johan-sunbae. From what I know, you’ll be issued a staff a year from now too. Is that right?”

“Well, yeah.”

Students can’t own staffs as a rule. Only from the fifth year are they issued a communal staff for practice, and only after graduating can they have a personal one made to order.

— Clap!

Leonard clapped his hands together.

“That works out nicely. From now on, Johan-sunbae can test Fion-sunbae’s creations himself.”

“What? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Johan had no way of knowing what was going on, and while he pressed Leonard about it, Fion rubbed her throbbing head with her fingers.

How on earth had she ended up tangled up with people this absurd?