Why Are You Coming Out Of There? (3)

“I’m telling you it’s true!”

Zachary shouted it in a voice brimming with injustice, and the village chief, who had meant to hear him out calmly, let a little 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. Strength hadn’t done him any good against Leonard, so he’d crush him with authority instead. That was his calculation.

“…”

The chief doted on his grandson so badly that he’d paper over every shameless thing the boy did. But he was still the head of a village, and even he couldn’t ignore the barest common sense.

“Does that make any sense?”

Leonard was nine years old.

And his grandson was well fed, well grown, sturdy in the body, and two whole years older besides. How was he supposed to believe that this boy had been beaten senseless by Leonard?

“I can’t think what’s got you so desperate that you’d tell a lie nobody on earth would believe.”

“It’s not a lie…”

The chief brushed the protest aside without effort. It had got to the point where saying he’d been beaten by a grown man would have sounded more believable.

“Oh, my head.”

The chief pinched the bridge of his nose. His cherished grandson had come home in pieces, so he was burning up inside, but what galled him past bearing was that he had no way at all of knowing who’d done it.

…No, wait a moment.

“Unless—?”

As the chief groaned, a single face flashed through his mind. It was none other than Peter, the biggest layabout in the whole village.

“Don’t tell me Peter was the one who hit you? Did he tell you to keep quiet about it, too?”

“…Huh?”

Who, now?

For an instant Zachary was struck dumb and could only stare blankly at the chief. He tried, too late, to say something, but the chief had already caught fire, and not a sound of it reached his ears.

“That filthy dog!”

He’d tried to make room for the man somehow, out of feeling for a fellow villager, 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.

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

“…No! I said that’s not it—!”

From where Zachary stood, it was enough to drive a man out of his mind. Worked up as he was, he tried to crawl out of bed, and the 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 as it came back to him.

The truth was that Leonard hadn’t really done much of anything. Apart from the one who’d got his crotch stomped, the rest had simply thrown themselves at Leonard and come apart on their own. And yet here Zachary was, burning with some baffling confidence and thrashing about in a fury.

“…Is he an idiot?”

The boy let the thought slip out of his mouth without thinking, and duly earned himself a knock on the head from Zachary.

— Thwack!

“Gaah!”

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

Leonard.

He’d felt Leonard’s strength at least secondhand, yet he wasn’t cowed in the slightest, and the reason was simple.

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

Denial of reality.

The whole thing was so far past believing that Zachary had decided he’d fallen for one of Leonard’s “tricks”. It was a preposterous guess, but as far as he could see, there was no other logical way to explain what he’d seen and been through.

“Where’s Leonard?!”

“Dunno.”

The friend who’d followed him out said it with a sigh.

“Heard he didn’t even show up for field work today.”

“What?”

“You see him leave the house, and then he’s just gone… and come evening he’s back home like some ghost, apparently. Nobody knows where he goes or what he does all day.”

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

Zachary glared at him, then shrieked.

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

The boy couldn’t hold out against the badgering, so he grumbled and bolted outside, and Zachary snorted.

As if a nobody like him could hide from me.

But Zachary had expected to find him in no time, and it was five days before he laid eyes on Leonard’s face again.

— Clatter! Crunch!

When an ominous noise burst out of the carriage wheel rolling over the dirt, one of the knights strung out in a long line behind the carriage spoke up.

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

“Can’t be helped, can it? The destination’s inside this forest.”

It had already been five days since they’d left the city and turned onto the forest road. If the axle broke out here, there’d be nothing for it but to abandon the carriage entirely and go on.

— Clunk!

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

“Aagh!”

“Do be careful.”

At the woman’s sharp reproof, the man rubbed the head he’d banged on the ceiling and, a little teary-eyed, planted himself back on the seat.

“Flavius, is this really the right road?”

“I’m certain. Keld Village is on the other side of the forest.”

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

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

At first he’d thought of nothing but 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 getting tired of it.

“Which is exactly why you should’ve stayed behind. Why on earth did you even come along…”

At that Ethan boldly threw out his chest.

“I told you, didn’t I. I came to he—”

“Taking my classes for me would’ve been a great deal more help than coming out here.”

At the knife-edged retort, Ethan sulked a little and pouted.

“Honestly, aren’t you curious? A commoner with ability like that is going to cause an uproar the moment he reaches the academy. Isn’t it only natural to want a look at him first?”

“…I won’t deny that.”

Ethan was enough of a genius himself to have reached the sixth Circle at a fairly young age, yet he’d started from the first Circle like everyone else. If that child called Leonard Felix really was at the third Circle, hands would be reaching for him from every direction, with no regard at all for where he’d come from.

“Haah… huh?”

Sophia let out her sigh and turned her eyes back to the map, and in that blink of an eye the air all around them changed completely.

A nasty feeling welled up, like being dunked whole in some sticky fluid, and with it a tension like having a wild beast right in front of her.

“…Um.”

The sensation was alien and yet not unfamiliar. Bewildered, Sophia raised her head, and her eyes met Ethan’s. He was staring hard at her.

His gaze was so sharp that the limp mood of a moment ago 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. It was the precursor to the dimensional rift phenomenon, something she’d felt before, and the reaction kept growing the closer they came to Keld Village.

“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.”

“Go faster!”

— Clack.

He shut the window and turned 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 go 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 had been quiet until now, but it 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 lay buried in the ground until it was well hidden from sight.

Over the past five days he’d set some hundred and fifty magic traps in a ring around the spot where the dimensional rift was expected to appear. The aim was 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 stepped over to the campfire he’d lit, took out the medicinal herbs and grass roots he’d gathered in advance, and shook them into the flames. Blue smoke rose from the weeds as they shrivelled in the fire, and Leonard breathed it in over and over.

Colitol Aroma.

It was one kind of aroma technique, thrown together by a mage unit that had been gasping under a shortage of supplies when it found itself locked in a drawn-out war with monsters. It could force the blood meridian into activity and bring on a temporary amplification of mana, but it wasn’t a particularly good method for the body.

“Cough! Cough!”

Not that he was in any position to be picky right now.

Leonard wiped away the tears that ran down whether he liked it 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’d committed every last feature of it to memory: the routes from the forest to the village, the lie of the land, the points for retreat and for defense, the spots suited to laying traps, even the hiding places he could throw himself into in a hurry if he had to.

And this damned aroma, too.

A full three days of the aroma technique had hauled his physical capacity up to its limit. If he went this far and still failed to hold the village…

“Right, then. Come on.”

And at the very moment he murmured it under his breath.

— Krrrack!

A rift spread out in rays across the clear sky, and the shafts of light leaking from the gap poured down from above his head to the ground. Then, with a clear sound like breaking glass, a vast hole opened in the empty air.

It was a sight 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 charged in and drove his fist clean through its belly.

“Uwaaaah!”

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

Every bit of the fury he’d bottled up since that day, when he’d been utterly powerless, went into it.

— 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 them. He dropped his stance as though he’d spring out any second, and just then something out of place caught his eye.

Someone who shouldn’t have been here, not now.

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

“…”

Why are you coming out of there?