The Defense Of The Village (4)

That night, all of Keld Village was in an uproar.

A knight order had appeared out of nowhere, and something huge had broken out in the western forest. The people of Keld had never once had a piece of news worth calling interesting, so they stayed up late into the night talking it over with one another.

“Did you hear? They say monsters turned up in the forest right next to our village! And the knights and mages got here a step ahead of them and held them off, apparently.”

“What? So that pillar of fire was magic?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I never. Coming all the way out to a backwater like this and going to all that trouble for us. We can’t thank them enough.”

Everyone was busy praising the knights and the mages to the skies when somebody raised a question.

“But isn’t it a bit strange?”

“What is?”

“Like you said, we’re out in the sticks. So how’d they know monsters would turn up way out here, and come all this way? That’s what I want to know.”

“Beats me. Couldn’t tell you that much…”

With the facts and the questions all jumbled together, the villagers greeted the morning sun. And then…

“Hey! You lot!”

“Huh? It’s Rodrick. What’s the matter?”

“This is no time to be standing around! Over at the Felix couple’s house—”

Word travels fast, as they say. The villagers, scattered about in little knots of three and four, headed one after another for the Felix house, and before long the people gathering there had built up into a tremendous crowd.

“Is every last person in this village here?”

“The knights are here too?”

A fine carriage stood parked squarely in front of the shabby house, and the knights had ringed both the house and the carriage, letting no outsider near. The villagers murmured to one another in bewilderment.

“What in the world is going on inside that house?”

“What did you say?”

“So, as I was saying, your son is going to be enrolling at our acade—”

“What did you say?”

“…”

Driven to exasperation, Ethan pounded at his own chest.

When the knights had turned up at the house with Leonard drenched in monster blood, the Felix couple had been on the point of stepping out to look for their missing son, and they’d very nearly fainted on the spot.

Ethan and Sophia had handed the unconscious boy over and calmed his parents down, then come back the moment it was light to explain what had happened in the forest.

They told them that Leonard Felix had been entered into the mage management rolls, that a monster wave had broken out at that exact moment, and what Leonard had done in it. The reaction to all of it was exactly what you see above: the same answer, repeated over and over like a parrot.

Then again, who could blame them?

The most dangerous thing these people had faced in their whole lives was wild animals. Now someone was telling them the heroic tale of a nine-year-old boy beating monsters to death and expecting them to believe it on the spot. Anyone hearing it would have been entitled to write it off as nonsense.

In the end, Ethan pointed at Sophia.

“I can’t do this anymore. You deal with it however you like.”

Sophia let out a deep sigh and explained the whole thing again from the beginning, step by step.

“As of this moment, Leonard Felix is classified not as an ordinary person but as a mage, and under the decree of the Citra Empire he is obliged to enroll at an academy.”

Only then did Leonard’s parents grasp that this was real and not a dream.

“Normally the standard is to enroll at around eleven or twelve, but Leonard is an extremely rare exception… I’ll have to explain matters to the Dean, but there probably won’t be any great difficulty.”

“I just can’t take it in. To think our son has become a mage…”

“…Hang on. When I was the one talking, you couldn’t make head or tail of it, so how come it all sinks in now? Hey. Excuse me?”

Ethan protested in utter disbelief, but not one person answered him.

“An academy, you say?”

Leonard’s mother asked it carefully.

A nation’s mages are its strength, as good as its very foundation. By that measure the Citra Empire belonged among the continent’s fairly powerful states, because it had no fewer than three academies: Delonia in the west, Everforce in the capital, and Kestral in the south.

“You may apply to and enroll at whichever of the three you wi—”

“Tell it straight, Flavius.”

Ethan cut in out of nowhere and chopped Sophia’s sentence short.

“Sorry to say it, but the only academy your son can attend is our very own Kestral Magic Academy. Go ahead, ask me why.”

“…Why?”

He broke into a satisfied grin and answered.

“Because the tuition at the other two is astronomical.”

Delonia and Everforce ran on the enormous donations and tuition fees of the nobility, and Leonard’s family were commoners, so naturally they had no way of covering that kind of money.

The moment money came up, the Felix couple’s faces visibly stiffened.

“Our Kestral Academy, on the other hand, gets most of its teaching costs paid by the Empire. Students who can’t afford much, like your child, can attend just fine. It was built for families like yours from the very start.”

So in the end, the choice had already been made for them.

“…is what you should’ve said from the start. Why beat around the bush like that?”

“It’s our duty to tell parents every option they have, you know?”

Sophia snapped at him in irritation, and Ethan ignored her.

“Anyway, that’s how it stands. Tell your son to pack his things and get himself ready.”

“C-could you give us a little time to think, please?”

Leonard’s father dragged a flustered hand down his face. All of this had happened in the space of a single day, and he was nowhere near ready to hand down a decision yet.

Ethan put on an incredulous face and started ticking the points off one by one.

“Come on. Full tuition covered, and if he finishes the whole course, the Empire hands him a title on top of it. You people just hit the jackpot, the jackpot! You hear terms this good and you still need to think it over? Now?”

“Professor Prospero.”

“Hm?”

“Shut that trap of yours before I tear it open.”

“…”

Ethan had been spraying spit as he rattled on, but at the rare sight of Sophia genuinely angry, he clamped his mouth shut. Sophia turned to the Felix couple.

“The sooner we set out, the better. We can’t stay here long ourselves… so if at all possible, it would be easier for us to take Leonard back with us as a student.”

She gave them an awkward smile.

“…”

Leonard’s parents knew it too. An opportunity had come to them so enormous that even saying “let us think about it” was a luxury, and the outcome was already decided.

Yet their son was still only nine years old, and having to send him off alone to an academy for years on end, they couldn’t help but worry.

Sophia nodded, as though she understood how the father felt.

“I know very well what’s worrying you. But Leonard is more grown-up than the two of you realize, and he’s very strong-minded, too. As his parents, you must know that better than anyone.”

“Not really, from what we’ve seen.”

“Barely two weeks ago he was still wetting the bed and crying about it…”

“…”

Having been told, without meaning to be, a secret she had no wish to know, Sophia cleared her throat and carried on.

“Ahem. I do hope you’ll be ready as soon as possible. For today, we’ll take our leave and—”

“I’ll go.”

Every pair of eyes in the room turned toward the voice. Leonard, whom they’d all thought was out cold from exhaustion, stood leaning against the bedroom door, looking at them.

“Leonard.”

“You’re up already?”

Startled, his parents fussed over their son, sick with worry that he might be hurt somewhere.

Not that I’m actually doing all that well.

Sophia had healed him, yet between the aftereffects of the Colitol Aroma and his mana deficiency, Leonard’s limbs felt as though they were being wrung out of shape. He let none of it show, though. He went over to his parents, took both their hands in his own, and held them tight.

“Mom, Dad.”

“Y-yes?”

“I’m all right.”

The two of them looked down at Leonard with blank faces. After a moment’s hesitation they slowly laid their hands on his back and pulled him into their arms.

Their hands were trembling faintly, which was proof that for all their worry over him, they were straining not to let it show.

I did it.

The parents holding him now were proof that the future had changed. He’d saved the village, and he’d saved his father and mother too. That alone had made coming back to the past worth it.

If my life ended right here and now…

He was ready enough to be satisfied and set it all down.

Leonard closed his eyes for a moment and wondered whether everything would still be there when he opened them again. But of course, when he lifted his eyelids, the first thing he saw was his parents, just as before.

Then I’ve still got work left to do.

The greatest disaster of all, the one he had to stop, was still waiting for him in the future.

“I’ll manage fine on my own.”

“But…”

Sometimes a single action carries more of the heart than hundreds of words. Leonard answered his parents’ worry with a light embrace, and then he spoke.

“…I’m glad you’re alive.”

It was what he had wanted to say to the parents he’d lost, and to himself as he was now.

When he pulled out of their arms a moment later and raised his head, he could see the wetness glistening at the corners of their eyes. This suddenly different Leonard struck them as thoroughly odd, but what he’d stirred in them outweighed that.

“Right. Well, it’s not as if you could get out of going anyway.”

“Go and land one on those noble bastards.”

Hearing his father’s and mother’s encouragement, Leonard let out a hearty laugh.

“But won’t we be ‘those noble bastards’ once I graduate?”

“Huh. Will we?”

Thanks to that, the gloom in the house lifted considerably.

“A large shelter’s going to be built here before long. That way, even if something blows up next time, they’ll at least be able to hold out until the army arrives.”

“Good.”

Leonard nodded at what Ethan said.

“You get all your things packed?”

“There wasn’t anything worth calling luggage in the first place.”

What Leonard had slung on his back was less a backpack than a bundle on a stick, and his clothes were a typical commoner’s. Ethan snorted a laugh at how unburdened he looked, and Sophia stepped carefully up beside him.

“Anyway, what do we do now?”

“About what?”

“A nine-year-old working with a knight order to kill a High Class monster and helping close a dimensional rift? How am I supposed to describe that in a report?”

Ethan shrugged.

“What do you mean, how? Just write it down exactly as it happened.”

“Sorry?”

“I’ll grant you it leaves a funny taste. But that doesn’t mean we get to deny reality.”

Was there any way to account for Leonard Felix’s ability other than the words “natural-born talent”? If he hadn’t lied about his age or where he came from either, then all that was left was the plainest of plain facts.

“That kid was simply born with it. At a level no ordinary person can come anywhere near.”

“…I see.”

While Sophia and Ethan were having what was, in its way, a serious conversation, Leonard gazed blankly at her face.

Teacher.

Leonard had enrolled at the academy late, at sixteen. Wedged in between younger classmates and older students, he’d fit in nowhere and drifted along the outside of it all, and the first person to reach a hand out to him had been none other than Sophia Flavius.

Without her, he would never have become an Archmage at all. He’d have spent dismal years right up until the day he died. Without realizing it, Leonard let a faint smile show.

— Bang.

He opened the door and stepped out to find the knights having a hard time keeping the villagers away from the house. He’d thought it sounded noisy outside, but he had never imagined this many people had gathered.

“Look at you, Leonard! You’ve made it, you have!”

“They say you’ve become a mage?! Does that make you his lordship now?”

“You’re the pride of the village!”

Listening to them, Leonard snorted in disbelief. Since when had they known him well enough to be this friendly?

“Huh?”

He meant to brush past the villagers without much ceremony, but before long he stopped in his tracks.

Zachary.

The knights blocked him from coming close, but he looked as though he had something he wanted to say. Leonard thought it over for a moment, then walked over to him.

A brief silence.

“If you’ve got something to say, hurry up and say it.”

“…Sorry.”

He said it with his head hanging low.

“For butting in when I shouldn’t have… for getting in your way. I’m sorry.”

The apology came out unexpectedly honest, and Leonard blinked. He threw Zachary a sidelong look and let out a heavy sigh.

“So you do know you got in the way. Then learn from it.”

“I’ll pay this debt back somehow. I swear I will.”

Leonard let out a snort of a laugh.

“A debt, from a brat like you? Forget it.”

And you’re a brat yourself, aren’t you?

Zachary stared at him with a dubious look, but Leonard had already turned his back and was walking away. Leaving the villagers’ cheers and his parents’ send-off behind him, he climbed into the carriage with Ethan and Sophia.