Kestral Academy (1)

The carriage carrying the three of them pulled out of the forest around Keld Village at a good clip. Three solid days crammed into a narrow carriage made for no easy journey, but they reached Avery Hill without any real trouble along the way.

It’s been quite a while since I last laid eyes on the academy.

Kestral Academy stood in the middle of a city teeming with people. An enormous spire rose at its heart, enclosed by a round outer wall in the shape of a dome. Inside the wall, among a number of annex buildings, lay a forest that served as both greenhouse and practice ground. That forest, set in the middle of the city, made up the academy’s grounds.

Its standing might be lower than the other two’s, but Kestral Academy raised mages all the same, and since its funding flowed in straight from the state, the facilities themselves were excellent.

So that’s why it all feels so unfamiliar.

Leonard found himself recalling the first time he had set foot in the academy. He had been sixteen then; now he was nine, a full seven years earlier than before. The boys and girls who had been his classmates back then, or his seniors by a year or two, would not even have enrolled yet. Thinking of them as his juniors now felt strange.

He stole a glance at Sophia, who sat beside him. She made a markedly different impression from the Sophia he had first met when he was sixteen.

My teacher’s gotten a loooot younger.

Sophia Flavius.

The daughter of a fallen noble house, she had enrolled at Kestral Academy, classed the lowest of the three great academies, and graduated at the top of her year. After that she had turned down every other career, taken the formal course to qualify as an educator, and come back to the academy.

The reason was simple. Kestral was looked down on for no better reason than that the low-born and the poor mostly went there, and she meant to turn it into a place any student could take pride in.

“Are you worried?”

Sophia had felt Leonard’s gaze on her.

“Hm? About what?”

“Living somewhere unfamiliar is bound to make you tense, but there’s no need to worry.”

Leonard gave a wry smile at the way she was soothing him.

If only it were a problem that simple. Then I wouldn’t be brooding over anything at all.

When the war with the monsters broke out, the unprecedented crisis known as the “Great Calamity,” countless flaws burst into the open everywhere at once. The Empire’s mages were many in number and poor in quality, and rather than cooperate with one another, they had been too busy discriminating by birth. They had even paraded their racial prejudices before the beastkin of the continent’s east, who would have made the staunchest allies of all, and never so much as tried to talk. Perhaps humanity’s road to extinction had simply been the natural course of things.

I’m not going to let it end up that way.

Standing against the coming disaster demanded military strength above all else. And yet, ironically enough, the chief institution supplying most of that strength was none other than Kestral Academy. Saddled with every line of work the other two academies’ graduates shunned, its graduates flowed almost entirely into the army. Raise the standard of Kestral’s students, in short, and the quality of the Empire’s armed forces rose right along with it.

My first target is Kestral Academy.

He would enter the academy as a student and push for reform from the bottom up. That was the plan Leonard Felix had drawn up.

“…”

Meanwhile, Sophia glanced down at Leonard, lost in thought.

However I look at him, he’s nothing like a nine-year-old child.

Tell most children they had to leave their parents’ arms and spend years studying somewhere they knew no one, and they would be tense, if not outright frightened. Leonard, by contrast, was not merely unperturbed but positively at his ease. Then again, this was a boy who could butcher Maulers single-handed and stand against a Woodsman. By now she could not so much as picture him afraid of anything.

How did this child come by that kind of nerve in the first place?

The boldness and the gall to face down an unknown terror and push past it. A mentally immature child had no business possessing such a quality.

Is he simply made that way? Or else…

She turned it over from every angle on her own, but in the end her question went unanswered.

“We’ve arrived.”

A moment later, the carriage came to a stop. At the coachman’s voice, Ethan and Sophia nodded and rose from their seats. When the carriage door was flung open, a wind swept across Leonard’s face, carrying a smell of grass unlike Keld Village’s.

“So this is…”

Leonard looked around him. Between the densely packed trees he could make out the central spire, the building that served as the academy’s main hall. Probably thanks to space-compression magic laid over the place, the grounds were far broader inside than they had looked from outside.

“Come on, come on, let’s get moving. We’ve got a mountain of things to do.”

Ethan hurried them along. The moment Leonard went to follow him, someone called out from behind.

“A moment, please.”

The speaker was a knight of the academy, one of those who had come to Keld Village with Ethan and Sophia, and the other knights standing behind him were watching Leonard too.

“Yes? What is it?”

The knight studied him a while longer before he spoke.

“My name is Gunter. Gunter Rogers.”

One by one, the other knights gathered in around him. Leonard was scratching awkwardly at the back of his head, wondering what on earth this was about, when the knight who had named himself Gunter spoke again.

“Forgive me. I thought that if not now, I would never get the chance to say it.”

— Snap!

Gunter and the knights drew themselves up to their full height and inclined their heads in a brief bow.

“We are deeply indebted to you, Lord Felix. Had it not been for your help, every one of us standing there would have died. On behalf of the knight order, I offer you our thanks.”

Several of the knights, bandages wrapped around their heads or arms, nodded.

Such courtesy went well beyond anything owed a nine-year-old commoner boy, but Gunter and the rest of the knights had no choice in the matter. In that hopeless fight against the Woodsman, the one who had stood out front more than anyone was not the knights but Leonard. He could have left everything to the adults and dropped back if he had wanted to. He had not. Instead he had saved them all with a decision no grown man would have dared to make.

That’s right. And him a child of all of nine years.

Mages who hold themselves noble never do anything so reckless; they know too well the unchanging truth that honor and one’s own life are two separate things. Gunter and the knight order could hardly have been anything but sincere.

“Ah.”

Only then did Leonard grasp what was going on, and he smiled faintly.

By their nature, mage and knight needed each other, but between the mages’ peculiar supremacism and their contempt for knights as mere semi-nobles, the two did not get along. For a knight to say such a thing to a future mage, and a child at that, meant he was genuinely grateful for what Leonard had done.

“Please don’t let that weigh on you.”

“Sorry?”

For a moment Gunter’s face went blank, and the rest of the knights reacted exactly the same way.

That? He had thrown his life on the line and brought all forty knights through without losing a single one, and an achievement of that order was merely “that”?

“You have the order of things backwards.”

Leonard went on.

“Before I ever saved any of you, you came to save my village first, didn’t you? So if anyone ought to be giving thanks and repaying a debt, wouldn’t it be rather more proper for me to be the one doing it?”

Gunter was thrown completely. Put that way, it was not entirely wrong. It was not, and yet…

“B-but—”

Thanks, from the very person who had saved their lives. Gunter tried to get something out, but Leonard waved him off, then bowed politely to the knights and said:

“I will never forget your help, or your sacrifice. Not just now — from here on, always.”

With that parting word, Leonard went off after Ethan and Sophia, who were urging him on from some way ahead.

“…”

“He’s gone.”

Left standing forlornly beside the carriage, Gunter and the knights could only look blankly at one another, thrown by a turn none of them had expected.

“Is that honestly supposed to be a child?”

“Who knows.”

Gunter shrugged.

Mages who treated knights as nothing but meat shields, and knights who loathed them for it. Would that boy really still say what he had said today once he had grown into a man?

“…Leonard Felix, is it.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting.”

A little while later, the door of the Dean’s office opened and Sophia and Ethan came walking out. Leonard, who had sat alone on the chair outside the door for a good long while, went after the pair of them.

“We had to give the Dean our report after the fact, and then there was this and that to talk over, so it ran rather long…”

“It’s fine.”

Sophia seemed to find it endearing, the way Leonard trailed along pressed close to her side, and she gave his head a stroke.

“For a while yet there’ll be private tutoring on top of things, after your regular lessons finish. The term began at the start of March, so there’s no helping it if you’re to make up the ground you’ve missed. Do bear with it.”

Well, that much was nothing. Leonard was nodding along when something occurred to him, and he looked up at Sophia.

“Which class am I in?”

“That hasn’t been settled yet. The timetables are already fixed for each class, so fitting in a new student like you at this point is more of a headache than you’d think.”

Ethan answered in Sophia’s place.

“Until your class is decided, you’ll sit in on lessons with Professor Flavius for the time being. Any questions?”

“No.”

Leonard let out an awkward sigh.

“You like Flavius that much, do you?”

Ethan was grinning wickedly as he asked, and Leonard answered at once.

“Of course I do.”

The answer came so readily that neither Ethan, who had asked in the first place, nor even Sophia could find anything to say. Then Leonard thought it over a moment and looked up at Sophia.

“Then from now on should I call you Professor Flavius? …Professor?”

“Mm! That’s right. Let’s get along well, Leonard.”

A kindly smile spread over Sophia’s whole face. Ethan, who had been watching the two of them talk from one side, spoke up.

“Shall we keep moving along, then.”

That night, having parted from Sophia, who had business to see to, Leonard finished dinner with Ethan in the dining hall and was then walked around the academy’s facilities and shown each one in turn: the greenhouse and the forest, the indoor training hall and the library, and the walking paths besides.

I’m bored out of my mind.

He had seen these places hundreds of times, decades ago, and having to make the whole pilgrimage over again from the beginning was turning nostalgia into irritation. At Leonard’s distinctly underwhelmed reaction, Ethan clicked his tongue.

“Oho. Will you look at him laying it on thick about how he’d rather not be here, now that Flavius isn’t with us? Young as you are, you turn out to be a man after all.”

What was this lunatic on about?

When Leonard gave him a look of flat disbelief, Ethan snorted a laugh.

“Shall I stop showing you around, then?”

“…Yes, please.”

“Let’s do that. I couldn’t be bothered with it in the first place anyway.”

Ethan shrugged.

“Things like your uniform and your books will be sent to your room tomorrow morning, so don’t trouble yourself about anything else — get yourself to the dormitory and sleep. And don’t forget your first lesson is tomorrow, right away.”

“Understood.”

Leonard took the temporary timetable and his room key, parted from Ethan and headed off the other way. After following the winding forest path for about five minutes, he came upon a building that stood a little apart from the academy’s central spire.

Not one thing has changed.

The walls still bore graffiti carved by students long since graduated, along with old nicks and scuffs. This was Kestral Academy’s dormitory.

Leonard went up the wooden stairs to the second floor and made straight for his own room.

— Creak.

…Huh?

The first thing to catch his eye as he opened the door and stepped in was two beds, with all manner of household odds and ends strewn messily around them.

Ah… right.

Kestral Academy put two students to a room, he remembered now. He looked around, but there was no sign of his roommate. Gone out somewhere?

Leonard set down his luggage, then flung himself onto the bed with the neatly folded quilt as though collapsing.

I’m exhausted.

His first lessons at the academy began tomorrow. Academy life at nine years old, among different students, in a different time altogether. What on earth was he going to run into from here? With his head full of it all, Leonard quietly closed his eyes.