Why Are You Coming Out Of There? (3)

“I’m telling you it’s true!”

Zachary shouted it in a voice thick with grievance, and the village chief, who had meant to hear him out calmly, let a flicker of irritation show.

“Sit still a moment, would you.”

“…”

“So you’re telling me… the Felix couple’s boy Leonard hit you, and that’s how you ended up like this?”

Zachary nodded and held up his fractured right hand. If strength couldn’t deal with Leonard, authority would crush him instead. That was his calculation.

“…”

The chief doted on his grandson badly enough to paper over every shameless thing the boy did, but as the head of a village, even he couldn’t ignore the barest common sense.

“Does that make any sense?”

Leonard was nine years old. How was the chief supposed to believe that his grandson, well fed, well grown, sturdy in body, and a full two years older besides, had been beaten senseless by that boy?

“I can’t imagine what you’re so hard up for that you’d tell a lie nobody on earth would believe.”

“It isn’t a lie…”

The chief brushed the protest aside without effort. Things had reached the point where claiming a grown man had beaten him would have sounded more credible.

“Oh, my head.”

The chief pinched the spot between his brows. His cherished grandson had come home in pieces and he was burning up inside, but what galled him past bearing was having no way at all to know who had done it.

…No, wait a moment.

“Unless—?”

One face flashed through the groaning chief’s mind: Peter, a layabout second to none in the village.

“Don’t tell me Peter was the one who hit you? Did he shut your mouth about it, too?”

“…Huh?”

Who, now? For an instant Zachary was struck dumb and could only stare blankly at the chief. He tried, belatedly, to get a word in, but no sound reached the ears of a chief who was already well and truly fired up.

“That filthy dog of a man!”

He had tried to make allowances for the man somehow, for the sake of village neighborliness, and this was the thanks he got? Thoroughly inflamed, the chief finally shot up out of his seat.

“…Grandfather?”

“Stay in the house for a while and don’t go roaming about! Your grandpa will see to it himself.”

Huh? That isn’t how this was supposed to go.

Once the chief had marched out, only Zachary and his lackey were left in the room.

“…No! I said that’s not it—!”

From where Zachary stood, it was truly enough to drive a man out of his mind. Worked up, he tried to crawl out of bed, and his lackey did everything he could to stop him.

“The chief told you to stay home, didn’t he.”

“Let go!”

“Quit it! Have you already forgotten what that monster of a kid did?”

The lackey shuddered all over at the memory. In truth, Leonard hadn’t done much of anything. Apart from the one who got his crotch stomped, the rest had simply thrown themselves at him and gone sprawling on their own. And yet here was Zachary, burning with some unaccountable confidence and thrashing about in a fury.

“…Is he an idiot?”

The boy had let the thought slip out loud without meaning to, and he duly earned a knock on the head from Zachary for it.

— Thwack!

“Gaah!”

Leaving his friend clutching his head and rolling about on the floor, Zachary huffed his way out of the room.

Leonard.

He had experienced Leonard’s strength, at least secondhand, yet he wasn’t cowed in the slightest. The reason was simple.

Getting all puffed up over one moment when I let my guard down!

Denial of reality.

The situation was so far past belief that Zachary had concluded he must have fallen for one of Leonard’s “tricks.” The guess was preposterous, but short of that, he thought, nothing could logically explain what he had seen and been through.

“Where’s Leonard?!”

“Dunno.”

The friend who had followed him out sighed as he said it.

“They say he didn’t even show up for the field work today.”

“What?”

“You think you’ve just seen him leave the house and he’s nowhere to be found… and come evening he’s back home like some ghost, apparently. Nobody knows where he is or what he’s doing all day long.”

The children had in fact set their minds to tailing him, but Leonard had shaken them off with ease, as if he’d expected exactly that much.

Zachary glared at that, then shrieked.

“If you don’t know, then hurry up and find out — what are you all standing around for? Get out there!”

Unable to hold out against the badgering, the boy bolted outside, grumbling, and Zachary gave a derisive snort.

As if a nobody like him could hide from me.

Zachary expected to find him in no time, but five days would pass before he laid eyes on Leonard’s face again.

— Clatter! Crunch!

An ominous grinding came from the carriage wheel as it rolled over the dirt, and one of the knights trailing in a long line behind the carriage called out.

“…Er, there’s a strange noise coming from the wheel? Is this thing going to be all right?”

“Nothing to be done about it, is there. The destination’s inside this forest.”

Five days had already passed since they left the city and turned onto the forest road. If the axle broke out here, they would have no choice but to abandon the carriage entirely and push on.

— Clunk!

The wheel caught on a jutting stone, the carriage bounced into the air, and a man’s scream burst from inside.

“Aagh!”

“Do be careful.”

Rubbing the head he’d banged on the ceiling, the man went teary-eyed at the woman’s sharp reproof and planted his backside back on the seat.

“Flavius, is this really the right road?” Ethan asked her.

“There’s no mistake. Keld Village is on the other side of the forest.”

Sophia answered without lifting her eyes from the map spread open across her knees.

“A village in a forest like this. Just how far out in the sticks is this place?”

At first he had thought only of how nice it was to be out of town for once in a long while. But after more than five days of nothing but forest, even Ethan was slowly growing tired of it.

“Which is exactly why you should have stayed behind. What on earth did you come along for…”

At that, Ethan boldly puffed out his chest.

“I told you, didn’t I. I came to he—”

“Taking my classes in my place would have been a great deal more help than coming out here.”

Stung by the sharp retort, Ethan pouted.

“Honestly, aren’t you curious? With ability like that in a commoner’s body, the boy’s going to cause an uproar the moment he reaches the academy — isn’t it only natural to want a look at his face in advance?”

“…I won’t deny that.”

Ethan was enough of a genius himself to have reached the sixth Circle at a relatively young age, but he had started from the first Circle, the same as everyone else. If this child Leonard Felix really was at the third Circle, everyone would be scrambling to claim him, with no regard at all for where he came from.

“Haah… huh?”

The moment Sophia let out her sigh and turned her eyes back to the map, the air around them changed in an instant. A queasy dread rose in her, as though she had been dunked bodily into something sticky, and with it came a tension like facing a wild beast at arm’s length.

“…Um.”

Bewildered by a sensation both alien and yet not unfamiliar, Sophia raised her head, and her eyes met Ethan’s. He was staring at her hard, his gaze so sharp that the limp mood of a moment before seemed to have been an act from start to finish.

“Professor.”

“Yes.”

The mana particles in the air were churning in a way that was anything but ordinary. She had felt this once before, the precursor to the dimensional rift phenomenon, and the reaction grew stronger the closer they came to where Keld Village lay.

“Wh-what do we do?”

Sophia asked Ethan.

“Don’t panic. The rift hasn’t opened yet.”

Ethan thrust his upper body out of the window and shouted to the coachman.

“You there! How much farther to the destination?”

“We should be arriving in about ten minutes.”

“Make it faster!”

— Clack.

He shut the window and turned back to Sophia.

“We’ve got two platoons of the academy’s knight order, plus a sixth-Circle and a fifth-Circle mage. Don’t tense up — just do it by the manual.”

It’s here.

Leonard, digging into the ground with a shovel he had got hold of somewhere, suddenly turned his head. The forest west of Keld Village, quiet until now, was swaying little by little in an uncanny mana wind.

Just a little more.

— Thump! Thump!

Leonard worked the shovel busily, heaping soil over what he had buried until it was well hidden from sight. Over the past five days he had set some hundred and fifty magic traps in a ring around the spot where the dimensional rift was expected to appear, all to pen the monsters that came pouring out of it into a single line of movement.

This really takes me back.

With the last trap buried, Leonard wiped the beads of sweat away with a dirt-caked hand and set off walking.

— Crackle. Crackle.

He went over to the campfire he had lit, took out the medicinal herbs and grass roots he had gathered in advance, and shook them into the flames. Blue smoke rose from the weeds shriveling in the fire, and Leonard breathed it in over and over.

Colitol Aroma.

A mage corps had thrown this particular aroma technique together when it found itself locked into a drawn-out war with monsters and gasping under a shortage of supplies. It could force the blood meridian into activity and temporarily boost his mana, but it did the body no good.

“Cough! Cough!”

He was in no position to be picky about it right now. Leonard wiped away the tears that ran whether he willed them or not, then smothered the campfire completely with soil.

“…”

— Whoooo.

A bleak wind brushed past his hair. His eyes, fixed on the sunset draped over the ridgeline, glittered with an unreadable heat.

I’ve done everything I can do.

He had committed every last feature to memory: the routes from the forest to the village and the lie of the land, the points for retreat and for defense, the positions suited to laying traps, even the hiding spots where he could throw himself out of sight in a hurry if he had to.

And this damned aroma, too.

Three full days of the aroma technique had hauled his physical capacity up to its limit. If he still failed to hold the village after going this far…

“Right, then. Come on.”

He had barely murmured it under his breath when it happened.

— Krrrack!

A rift spread in rays across the clear sky, and shafts of light leaking from the gap poured down over his head to the ground. Then, with a clear sound like breaking glass, a vast hole opened in the empty air. The sight was dazzling enough to be beautiful and, to anyone who knew what it meant, nothing short of terrifying.

The nightmare of forty-eight years ago had come round again.

“Krrr—”

The instant the first monster leapt out shrieking and set its feet on the ground, Leonard came charging in and drove his fist clean through its belly.

“Uwaaaah!”

The blood the monster retched up all at once drenched his face, hot and wet. Leonard didn’t so much as blink; he swung the fist he had buried in it and sent the monster’s body flying.

Every bit of the pent-up fury of that day, when he had been so utterly powerless, went into the blow.

— Crash-thud!

The monster’s tattered corpse rolled away into the distance, but more monsters were already coming down out of the rift.

“Come on, then!”

Leonard bellowed at the monsters. As he dropped into a stance, ready to spring forward at any second, something out of place caught in his field of view.

Someone who should not have been in this place, not now.

It was Zachary Grayson, his face gone pale, poking out of the undergrowth opposite and looking straight at him.

“…”

Why are you coming out of there?