Swamp Girl! Chapter 64

I woke up to a world of white.

Well, it was the inside of a white building.

This wasn’t my room at Leon’s estate, at least.
Lying in bed, I looked to the side, just in case, and confirmed it.

Leon wasn’t there. Neither was the chair.

A mood I couldn’t quite describe came over me.
First thing after waking up, my feelings and memories were steadily coming back to me. I didn’t know what happened after I blacked out, but Arc definitely got Palmira and me out of that place.

If that weren’t the case, there was no way I’d be waking up in a place like this. We had definitely been in a bad spot. Maybe I would never have opened my eyes again.
Thinking about it that way, this was still probably better.
But Leon wasn’t here. There wasn’t even a trace of him.

To tell you the truth, I don’t have the faintest idea what’s true and what’s not.
If you asked me whether Lucien was evil, I wouldn’t be able to say. If he is, then would sharing his goals make Leon evil too? I don’t know that either. And Arc, who seems to be against him, is he in the right? I’m drawing a total blank on that too.

What’s connected to what, and how is any of it related to me?
And, what should I do?
Right now, I don’t know a d.a.m.n thing.

Leon. d.a.m.n it, would it kill you to talk to me?
If he’s right, if he’s not mistaken, then wouldn’t it be fine to tell me? So why the h.e.l.l hasn’t he? Does he have a guilty conscience?

Well — it’s fine already, even if he’s not right. Even if he’s making a mistake. Even if he feels guilty.
So, Leon. Please.

Tell me — what’s going on with you?

–

–

“Hey, looks like you’re awake.”

Precisely because of what I was thinking about, the fact that it was Arc who opened the door to the room and called out to me left me immensely dissatisfied.
It must have shown perfectly on my face. His expression immediately collapsed in dejection.

“You don’t have to look that disappointed, do you…? I’ll apologize for the electric shock, so. Won’t you cheer up a bit?”

“Master, you did such a thing?”

Arc apologized, talking about something I didn’t really understand.
Before I could make sense of it, the familiar person who followed him inside fixed her glare on him.

Miss Patsy. She came too?
It was the Brellwandy Adventurers’ Guild clerk. Miss Patsy.
Hey wait, if both of them are here, who’s running the guild right now?

“For now, here.”

Miss Patsy came over to me, a simple white robe in her hands.
I wasn’t really following, but was she telling me to put it on? I raised the upper half of my body off the bed.

“Ah… — eh, what?”

The moment I lifted myself up, the blanket thrown over me slipped off, and it was only then that I realized.

I was naked. At least, I wasn’t wearing anything on top. I checked with my hands, but at least I managed to keep my underwear.

In a haste, Miss Patsy gently draped the robe over me.
As she did, Palmira entered the room holding a gla.s.s on a tray, and said, “It’s okay, I undressed you.” …No, that’s not what I meant.

“You could do with a bit more modesty, Chris… Here.”

Dissatisfied, I took the gla.s.s from the proffered tray. It was filled with ordinary water, and I gratefully drank it down.

“…Phew, thanks. Palmira, you’re okay too?”

“Yeah. You fainted, but after that, we were able to escape with Arc’s magic.”

“Speaking of which, ‘electric shock’? What was that all about?”

Hearing the word ‘fainted’ reminded me.
At that time, Arc had been casting a lightning spell at the same time as the teleportation. Which he then used on me. What the h.e.l.l did he do that for?
I looked at Arc.
No, that’s not the only thing. There’s a whole lot I have to ask this guy.

“Yeah. So the truth is, well. When your body is conscious, it’s practically impervious to all magic, right? That’s why I had you go to sleep with an electric shock before teleporting you. Alright, I knocked you out, but it was a pretty dangerous situation. If I hadn’t, I would’ve ended up escaping and leaving you behind by yourself.”

‘Well, I’m glad it all worked out.’ Arc smiled, saying something only he’d believe. I wasn’t terribly amused.

“Okay, wait just a second. My body is impervious to magic? Or — wait, why do you know something like that?”

Strange.
That was news, even to me. Why would he know about it?

“Ah, I see. Should I go over that, then…? Well, I wonder if it’s alright for you to hear this from me? I don’t know, but for now, why don’t we go to the dining room? Now that it’s come to this, I’d better have everyone know, I guess. I a.s.sume there are plenty of blanks to fill in, too.”

Speaking of increasingly unsettling things, Arc quickly left the room.

“Then, let’s get you changed.”

“Y–Yeah.”

Miss Patsy picked up the basket placed nearby and held it out to me. There were clothes inside. Not my dress, though. I wonder where it went.

–

–

“Ah…”

On the other side of the door, which apparently led to the dining room, I found a line of several familiar faces.
Arc, of course, and Regnum. Irene. Then, Aira. Regnum aside, even Irene and Aira are here? Why?

And Leon… wasn’t.

“Big Sister.”

The moment she laid eyes on me, Aira rose from her idle seat on a chair and dashed over to me.
She was wearing the maid uniform, but what about her duties at the mansion?

“Aira, why are you here?”

“I don’t really understand myself, but Miss Irene brought me here…”

Here I was, thinking there was some significance behind it, but to my surprise, Aira herself didn’t know the reason. What was Irene’s purpose in bringing her here?
She was sitting in a chair with a slightly huffy expression.

“Why are you here, Irene?”

“Because I live here.”

That came as quite a shock.
I’d figured out it was someone’s home on my walk over here. Though, of course, it would be a disservice to compare it to Leon’s mansion.

And this was within the walls of the capital. Well I’ll be d.a.m.ned, Irene. Maybe she was a member of the privileged cla.s.s.

“I am a magus, you know. There aren’t a lot of us, and they make leaving the country a ha.s.sle too. Just being one is enough to get me a house within the walls.”

She readily told me the truth in response to my thoughtless question. And this area was the magi residential district.

I got that, but I also had questions about why we were having this big get-together in Irene’s home. And the line-up was a mystery too.

But at any rate, being prompted to take a seat, I sat down in a chair. Aira, my hero, brewed tea for everyone. It was a display of her real ability as a maid, but the supposed master of the house, Irene, just sat there.
Don’t tell me she brought Aira over just for this?

“Now then.”

Now then.
Once everyone was seated, Arc looked at each of us in turn. Me, Aira, Palmira, Regnum, Irene. His gaze went around in that order. Come to think of it, Miss Patsy wasn’t here. Even though she’d definitely been around earlier.

“Regnum, put out the sweets.”

“I suppose it can’t be helped.”

Doing as Arc told him, Regnum obediently pulled a long, thin, black box from his breast pocket.
He opened it and pa.s.sed out its contents, one by one. It seemed to be some kind of chocolate. Like a pitch-black cake.

“Hey, wait. Wasn’t there a serious matter to talk about?”

Because his behavior was too natural, I was a bit slow to interject.
Then it hit me. This feeling. Somewhere, I…
I locked eyes with Irene, who was stuffing her cheeks with chocolate.
Ah, that’s it. The same thing happened with Irene in Telaberan.

“…That’s it, right. Arc, you’re Irene’s master, aren’t you?”

Without any lead-up, I voiced my sudden realization.
It did explain a lot of things.
At least, why we were having this meeting at Irene’s home. And why Arc would choose this place. That much was clear.

“Very observant. You know us well.”

“You guys are identical.”

“That’s kind of a shock to hear…”

For some reason, Irene found the idea surprising. From what she said, after leaving Telaberan early with the First Platoon, it looked like she met her master Arc in Brellwandy.
After that, she went ahead to the fortress and waited for us there.

“Well, let’s set aside the matter of my master-disciple relations.h.i.+p with Irene for now. What you want to ask is how I know about you, right? Shall I start, then?”

Abruptly returning to the topic at hand, Arc’s words renewed the tension in the air in an instant. It affected almost everyone aside from himself and Regnum.
Regnum had hardly opened his mouth, but he might’ve already heard pretty much everything.

“Then, I’ll tell you. This — tale.”

And so, with a dramatic flourish, Arc cleared his throat and began to speak in a sonorous voice.

–

–

” — Once upon a time, there was a young girl who had the miraculous affinity for six Attunements. People had great expectations of her future. Her name was Christine Rouelle Felmiran. Nickname, [Chris]. Her ability was truly incredible; it was historically unprecedented. When it became known, everyone around her danced with joy, despite the confusion of the girl herself.”

What’s with this fairy-tale feel?

I thought, but maybe it was Arc’s way of making things easily digestible.
So far, it lined up with the memories I’d dreamed of, and because it was, in fact, easy to understand, I decided to shut up and listen.

“However, while Chris certainly possessed a miraculous apt.i.tude, she was unable to use magic — she could understand it, but not activate it, I should say. There was water in the well — that, people knew. But there was no way to draw it out. You could see it that way. The a.n.a.logy’s a little lacking, I suppose — well, anyway, when they found out, everyone felt very disappointed.”

“Are we going to have the Fairy Tale Hour the whole way through?”

I broke in without thinking.

“No. It’s a more appalling story than you might expect,”

replied Arc, suddenly breaking into a smile. When he put it that way, there wasn’t a thing I could say back to him.

Sure, maybe so. It forced me to recall the dream [Chris’s] memories of anguish and grief.

It’s impossible to understand the entirety of another person’s feelings.
But between [Chris] and me, a great deal can get across. Words will never be able to communicate them perfectly. But me, being able to see it all without the use of an intermediary, I’m practically sharing in the experience.

And it certainly was appalling.

[Chris’s] suffering, seared into my mind. Her despair. Her desire. They already resided within my heart as my own experiences.
Thinking of them, I tightly clenched my teeth.

“When everyone around her abandoned her, a devil whispered in her ear: ‘If you give up your humanity, you’ll be able to use magic.’ She wanted to use magic by any means necessary. So that she could show them all. And so that she could see the people important to her. She asked the devil, ‘What is your name?’ And the devil replied, ‘My name is Arcteur Vanburke.'”

Eh?
At the end of his fairy-tale narration, Arc said something completely unexpected.
His tone was too light, too indifferent, that the sudden name-drop brought my thoughts to a screeching halt.

“…Wha–!?”

I shot to my feet, kicking over the chair in the process, and stared at Arc.
As did Palmira at the same time. She had her hand on the hilt of her sword. A moment later, Aira too. Irene stared at Arc in blank amazement. I guess she hadn’t heard this story.

The only ones who kept their calm were Regnum and Arc himself.
Under those distrustful gazes, Arc lowered his eyes to his teacup and blandly continued.

“…That devil, the head of the Schola Magorum at the time, was engaged in research. Into the invocation stones. As you know, invocation stones are created using life itself. And they’re manufactured as the media for the invocation of magic. This [life] is generally extracted from monsters, and perhaps animals and plants, but not just anything will do in this case. It has to come from something with an Attunement of some kind. Humans aren’t necessarily the only ones to possess Attunements. In a sense, intelligence isn’t a requirement. However, the number of Attunements — that alone is key.”

Smash.

Irene had been staring at her own master in disbelief. When Arc reached this part of his story, she shook violently, knocking her teacup off the table.
Her entire body was trembling. As a magus herself, she must have realized something. A whisper leaked out of her mouth.

‘It can’t be.’

“That’s why the devil thought, ‘In that case, what would happen if I used the lives of people with multiple Attunements?'”

Arc’s eyes grew unreadable.
Almost like the eyes of a corpse. But deeper, darker.

I could feel the hair standing on end all over my body.

Surely, if the devil existed in this world, he would have eyes like those.
Aira and Palmira were the same. Aira let out a small scream and shrank away. Her face paper-white, she seemed ready to faint at any moment.

Who was it that told me before, that invocation stones were created from life? Was it Arc…? No, Regnum.
If I remember correctly, I’d suddenly grown anxious then. It seemed to me that in using life to make invocation stones, stealing that life away was exactly the point. In that case, I had the feeling that it wasn’t all that strange to eventually ask, ‘What would happen if that life were human?’

But the idea was so grotesque it made my stomach turn, and I could tell that it was taboo simply by intuition.

To use human life.

Just that word alone was exceedingly repulsive.

“At first, it was simple curiosity. If it was just an idea, it was no big deal. However, as the research advanced, he took leave of his senses. It became clear that it was possible to crystallize invocation stones. And so, what then? Ethically speaking, could it really be considered the theft of life? Besides, it was right before his eyes — the existence he’d been wis.h.i.+ng for. If she were to generate an invocation stone, she’d definitely develop the ability to use magic, too. Nevertheless, the devil was conflicted. He couldn’t decide whether it was right or not to do so.”

Author’s Notes
It was getting long, so I cut it partway through.