Kestral Academy (1)

The carriage carrying the three of them left the forest around Keld Village at a good clip. Three straight days folded up in a narrow carriage was hard on the body, but the trip itself went without trouble, and they reached Avery Hill safely.

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. There was the enormous spire, and around it a round outer wall that closed it in like a dome. Inside the wall stood a number of annex buildings, along with a forest laid out to serve as both greenhouse and practice ground. That forest, planted right in the middle of the city, was the academy’s grounds.

Its standing might be lower than the other two’s, but Kestral Academy was still an institution for raising mages, and since its funding came straight from the state, the facilities were excellent.

So that’s why it all feels so unfamiliar.

Leonard found himself remembering the first time he’d set foot in the academy. He’d been sixteen then. Now he was nine, which meant he’d come a full seven years earlier than before. The people who had been his classmates back then, or his seniors a year or two up, hadn’t even enrolled yet, and it was a strange thought that they’d now be his juniors.

He stole a glance at Sophia, sitting beside him. She made a very different impression from the woman he’d first met at sixteen.

My teacher’s gotten a loooot younger.

Sophia Flavius.

The daughter of a fallen noble house, she had enrolled at Kestral Academy, ranked 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 Kestral Academy.

The reason was simple. Kestral Academy was looked down on for no better reason than that the low-born and the poor were the ones who mostly went there, and she meant to make it a place any student could be proud of.

“Are you worried?”

Sophia had felt Leonard’s gaze on her.

“Hm? About what?”

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

Seeing her try to soothe him, Leonard smiled wryly.

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 people called the “Great Calamity,” countless flaws had burst into the open everywhere at once. The Empire’s mages were many but poor in quality, and instead of working together they were too busy discriminating by birth. Even the beastkin in the east of the continent, who would have made the staunchest allies of all, they had met with racial prejudice, never once trying to talk. Maybe it had only been natural that humanity ended up wiped out.

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

To stand against the disaster that was coming, building up military strength mattered above all else. Yet, ironically, the main source of most of that strength was Kestral Academy itself. Its graduates got saddled with every line of work the other two academies’ graduates shunned, so nearly all of them flowed into the army. In short, raising the standard of Kestral Academy’s students meant raising the quality of the Empire’s military.

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 looked down at Leonard and thought to herself.

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 go study for years in a place where they knew no one, and they’d be nervous, if not outright scared. Leonard, though, wasn’t just unbothered; he was perfectly at ease. But then, this was someone who could butcher Maulers single-handed and stand against a Woodsman, so by now she couldn’t even picture him afraid of anything.

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

Facing down an unknown terror and pushing past it took boldness and gall, and that wasn’t something a mentally immature child had any business having.

Is he simply made that way? Or else…

She turned it over every which way, but in the end her question went unanswered.

“We’ve arrived.”

A moment later the carriage stopped. At the coachman’s voice, Ethan and Sophia nodded and got up from their seats, and when the carriage door swung open, a wind carrying a grassy scent unlike Keld Village’s swept across Leonard’s face.

“So this is…”

Leonard looked around. Between the dense trees he could see the central spire, the academy’s main building. Maybe because space-compression magic had been laid over the place, the grounds were far wider inside than they’d looked from outside.

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

Ethan hurried them along, but just as Leonard went to follow him, someone called out from behind.

“A moment, please.”

It was one of the academy’s knights, one 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 looked at him a while longer before he spoke.

“My name is Gunter. Gunter Rogers.”

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

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

— Snap!

Gunter and the knights drew themselves up straight and bowed their heads briefly.

“We are deeply in your debt, Lord Felix. Without 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 along.

It was far too much courtesy for a nine-year-old commoner boy, but Gunter and the others had no choice in the matter. In that hopeless fight against the Woodsman, the one who had stood out front more than anyone hadn’t been the knights. It had been Leonard. He could have left it all to the adults and fallen back if he’d wanted, but he hadn’t. Instead he’d saved them all with a call no grown man would have dared to make.

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

Mages who think themselves noble never do anything that reckless, because they know all too well the unchanging truth that honor and one’s own life are two separate things. So Gunter and the knight order could only be sincere.

“Ah.”

Only then did Leonard understand how things stood, and he smiled faintly.

Mages and knights needed each other by nature, but between the mages’ peculiar sense of superiority and their contempt for knights as semi-nobles, the two didn’t get along. So for a knight to say something like that to someone about to become a mage, and a child at that, meant he was truly grateful for what Leonard had done.

“Please don’t let that weigh on you.”

“Sorry?”

For a moment Gunter’s face went blank, and it wasn’t only Gunter. The rest of the knights reacted exactly the same way. That? He’d thrown his life on the line and brought all forty knights through without losing a single one, and an achievement like that was just “that”?

“You’ve got it backwards,” Leonard said.

“Before I ever saved any of you, you came to save my village first, didn’t you? So if anyone should be giving thanks and repaying a debt, shouldn’t it be me?”

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

“B-but—”

Here he was, hearing thanks from the very person who’d saved their lives. As Gunter tried to get something out, Leonard waved a hand at him, then bowed politely to the knights.

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

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

“…”

“He’s gone.”

Gunter and the knights were left standing forlornly by the carriage. None of them had expected it to go like that, and all they could do was look blankly at one another.

“Is that seriously a kid?”

“Who knows.”

Gunter shrugged. Mages treated knights as nothing but meat shields, and knights loathed them for it. Would that boy really still say what he’d said today once he’d 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 had been sitting alone on the chair outside the door for a good long while, and he got up and followed the two of them.

“We had to report to the Dean 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 stuck close to her side as he walked. She stroked his head.

“For a while, you’ll have private tutoring after your regular lessons are over. The term started at the beginning of March, so there’s no way around it if you’re going to catch up on what you’ve missed. Bear with it, all right?”

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

“Which class am I in?”

“That hasn’t been decided yet. Every class already has its timetable set, so fitting a new student like you in at this point is more of a headache than you’d think.”

It was Ethan who answered, in Sophia’s place.

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

“No.”

Leonard let out an awkward sigh.

“Like Flavius that much, huh?”

Ethan asked it with a wicked grin, and Leonard answered without missing a beat.

“Of course I do.”

The answer came so readily that Ethan, who’d asked in the first place, had nothing to say, and neither did Sophia. Then Leonard thought for a moment and looked up at Sophia.

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

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

A warm smile spread across Sophia’s whole face, and Ethan, who had been watching the two of them from the side, spoke up.

“Shall we keep moving, then?”

That night.

Sophia had business to see to, so Leonard parted from her, ate dinner with Ethan in the dining hall, and was then walked around the academy’s facilities one by one: the greenhouse and the forest, the indoor training hall, the library, and the walking paths too.

I’m bored out of my mind.

He’d seen these places hundreds of times, decades ago, and having to make the whole round again from the start felt less like nostalgia than irritation. At Leonard’s distinctly unimpressed reaction, Ethan clicked his tongue.

“Oho. Will you look at that? Flavius isn’t around, so now he’s making it plain he’d rather be anywhere else. Young or not, you’re a man after all.”

What was this lunatic going on about?

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

“Want me to stop the tour, then?”

“…Yes, please.”

“Let’s do that, then. I couldn’t be bothered with it anyway.”

Ethan shrugged.

“Your uniform, your books and the rest will be sent to your room tomorrow morning, so don’t worry about anything else. Just get to the dormitory and sleep. And don’t forget your first lesson is right away tomorrow.”

“Understood.”

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

Not one thing has changed.

Graffiti carved into the walls by students who had since graduated, old nicks and scuffs. This was Kestral Academy’s dormitory.

Leonard climbed the wooden stairs to the second floor and went straight to his room.

— Creak.

…Huh?

The first thing he saw when he opened the door and stepped in was two beds, with all sorts of household odds and ends strewn messily around them.

Ah… right.

Come to think of it, Kestral Academy put two to a room. Leonard looked around, but there was no sign of his roommate. Gone out somewhere, maybe?

He set down his luggage and collapsed onto the bed with the neatly folded quilt.

I’m exhausted.

Tomorrow his first lessons at the academy would begin. 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.