by Tsutomu Sato
And Miyuki belonged to that rare group of people.
She didn’t particularly have any mechanical ineptitude. Whenever friends came over, she mostly left it to their HAR. But when it was just the two of them, she never spared the trouble.
The crunching sound of the beans being ground and the bubbly sound of the hot water boiling tickled Tatsuya’s ears. It was the simplest of paper drip bags, but the fact that she wouldn’t even use an older coffeemaker meant that it must have been some kind of fixation.
He had asked her about it once, and she’d answered, “Because I like it,” so it was probably something like a hobby. When he asked if it was, he remembered her giving him a sullen look, though.
Whatever the case, the coffee Miyuki made matched his palate the best.
“Here you are, Tatsuya.”
She placed the cup on the side table, then went around to the other side and sat down next to him. The coffee she had put on the table was black, and the coffee in the cup in her hand had milk in it.
“It’s good.”
There was no need to eulogize it. Miyuki smiled, happy with just those two words.
She watched her brother take a second sip, his face satisfied. Then, with an expression of relief, she put her own cup to her mouth. That was what she always did.
The two of them enjoyed their coffee like that for a while.
Neither of them tried to force conversation.
They didn’t care that they had someone to talk to right next to them.
It had been an extremely long time since the two of them felt awkward at long periods of silence between them.
There were plenty of things to talk about. Today was the entrance ceremony. They had made new friends, and a somewhat concerning upperclassman had appeared. Miyuki had, as expected, been invited to join the student council. They could be up all night recalling the day’s events and talking about them.
But the siblings sat next to each other in their house, alone, silently sipping their coffee.
“—I’ll go get dinner started.”
Miyuki stood up with her now-empty cup. Tatsuya gave his cup of coffee to her outstretched hand and got up as well.
Night fell on the siblings, the same as it always did.
He awoke on the second day of high school in the same way as the first. He may have advanced to high school, but it wasn’t as though the earth’s rotational period had changed.
He splashed a bit of water on his face—he would clean it more thoroughly again later—and changed into his usual outfit.
When he went down into the dining room, he found that Miyuki had already started making breakfast.
“Good morning, Miyuki. You’re up earlier than usual today.”
Dawn was just breaking, and the spring sun had yet to show its face.
It was still far too early to go to school, of course. School started at eight o’clock sharp, and it took them thirty minutes to get to school, including walking. They just needed to leave at 7:30. Making breakfast, eating it, and cleaning up… Even all that would end up leaving them with more than an hour of free time.
“Good morning, Tatsuya.” She held out a cup with fresh juice in it. “Here you go.”
“Thank you.” After politely thanking her, he downed it in one gulp and placed it back into her outstretched hand. —Miyuki had a perfect grasp of how long it took Tatsuya to breathe.
As she turned back toward the kitchen counter, he was about to tell her he’d return shortly, but Miyuki suddenly stopped working and turned to him again.
“Tatsuya, I was thinking that perhaps I could go with you this morning…”
As she finished her sentence, she held up a basket containing sandwiches to him. She hadn’t started making breakfast a minute ago—she must have actually just finished it.
“I don’t mind, but… In your uniform?” Tatsuya asked, glancing between the sweats he was wearing to the school uniform that appeared from underneath her apron.
“I still haven’t reported my promotion to Sensei, so… And besides, I can no longer keep up with your training,” answered Miyuki.
So she had changed into her uniform this early so that she could go show it off to the man. “All right. You don’t need to do the same thing for training as I do, but if that’s the case, I’m sure Master will be happy… I just hope he’s not so happy he loses his self-control.”
“Just protect me if that happens, okay?”
His sister cutely shut one eye, and a natural smile crossed Tatsuya’s face.
The brisk, early-morning air was still chilly as she hovered up the sloping road, her long hair and skirt hem fluttering in the breeze.
Miyuki was dashing up the long, gentle mountain road without kicking off at all in defiance of the laws of gravity. She was pushing sixty kilometers per hour.
Tatsuya ran beside her. He, though, was jogging—but his stride was more than ten meters long. Compared to Miyuki, however, his expression was in no way relaxed.
“Shall I slow my pace a bit…?” asked Miyuki, swiveling around and sliding up backward on one foot.
“No—it wouldn’t be training then,” answered Tatsuya, not out of breath, but clearly growing fatigued.
Their shoes didn’t have some kind of propulsion mechanism inside or anything—needless to say, their speed was a product of magic.
Miyuki was using magic to slow the gravitational acceleration being applied to her, as well as magic to move her own body toward a destination up the slope.
Tatsuya was using magic to amplify the acceleration and deceleration created by kicking off the road, as well as magic to suppress his movement in the vertical direction so he wouldn’t launch himself off the ground.
Both were simple compound techniques to control movement and acceleration. Miyuki was one thing, but because of their simplicity even Tatsuya, who was only able to become a Course 2 student, was able to continuously cast it.
In this case, it was difficult to say for sure who had it harder—Miyuki in her in-line skates, or Tatsuya running under his own power.
At a glance, Miyuki looked like she had it easier, since her in-line skates were lessening her physical exertion. Since she wasn’t using her own feet, though, she needed to use magic to control her movement vector in every direction. Tatsuya, on the other hand, was determining his direction of movement by actually running.
Tatsuya needed to keep casting the spell with every step, while Miyuki couldn’t take her hands off the spell’s controls for even a moment.
The two had each assigned themselves fundamentally different exercise regimens.
Their destination was about ten minutes from their house—well, at the speed at which they were running—and sitting atop a small hill.
In a word, it was a temple. But those who gathered there seemed like a far cry from priests, monks, or novices. If you needed a good term for them, they were pretty close to warrior monks.
Girls, and especially young girls, would normally be too scared to come near the temple’s atmosphere. Miyuki, though, passed right on through it without hesitation on her in-line skates. It was strange to see her being so bold, since she was so well mannered all the time. The owner, however, had said “I don’t mind” so many times it had started to get annoying, so everyone was already used to it.
Tatsuya wasn’t there, but not because he couldn’t keep pace with Miyuki. He was in the middle of a violent welcome that burst on him as soon as he entered the temple gate.
This welcome was essentially just practice, though.
When he first started coming to this temple, he would practice against one senior member at a time. At this point, though, instead of such a round-robin format, they would just throw twenty beginner pupils at him all at once.
Miyuki stopped in the front garden of the main temple, worried, and turned back toward her brother, who was now buried in the crowd. She heard a bright voice from behind her.
“Ah, Miyuki! It’s been quite a while.
”
Her senses were very sharp, so she had been suitably cautious about the experience repeating itself—but because of that, it shocked her even more. She slowly came to realize the futility of it, but she still couldn’t help but protest. “Sensei…I have asked you many times over not to conceal yourself and sneak up on me…”
“Don’t sneak up on you? You make some pretty tough requests yourself, Miyuki. I’m a shinobi, after all. Sneaking up on people is our nature.”
With his neatly trimmed hair and yukata dyed in black, the man looked appropriate for the situation. His actual age aside, his looks and the air he gave off were anything but old.
He was just wandering about, but he exuded a vulgarity that was difficult to describe. And though he wore priestly clothing, he was indescribably suspicious.
“You can’t get employed as a ninja anymore. I wish you would reform that nature of yours.”
But even Miyuki’s serious protest was answered by a tongue clicking and hand waving. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. I’m no ninja—they’re snobs, and riddled with misunderstandings—I’m a historically accurate shinobi. It’s not an occupation, it’s a tradition!”
—He was, in any case, vulgar.
“I’m aware that you are historically accurate. That’s why I find it strange. Sensei, why are you so—” —frivolous? Miyuki didn’t say the word. She had already learned it would do her no good.
This fake priest—well, on paper, he was a real priest—was named Yakumo Kokonoe, and he was a self-styled shinobi, the more general term for which was “ninjutsu user.”
As he himself was insisting, he passed down old forms of magic. He was clearly different from the premodern spies who excelled only in physical abilities.
Magic was an object of science. When the masses fully realized that it was more than pure fiction, people learned that ninjutsu, too, was no mere classical martial art and system of spy techniques—the truly secret parts were a variety of magic.
The uncanny techniques that had been thought to be false—made to be thought of as false—were actually closer to the true form of ninjutsu.
Of course, as was the case with other magical systems, not everything in legends was truth.
They discovered that their “transformations,” essentially the classic storybook example of ninjutsu, were simply combinations of illusions and high-speed movement. Shadow cloning techniques—and not just those from ninjutsu, but from traditional magic in general—were varieties of this trick. Actual cloning, transformation, and transmutation were all fields defined as impossible by modern magic.
Yakumo Kokonoe, whom Miyuki called Sensei and Tatsuya called Master, was a successor of the old magic, the true art of ninjutsu passed down for a very long time.
But even leaving aside his priestly attire (which also seemed contrived), his own appearance and behavior both seemed quite far away from historically accurate…
“Is that the First High uniform?”
“Yes, yesterday was the entrance ceremony.”
“I see, I see! Hmm, yes, very nice.”
“…I thought I would, um, tell you I started school…”
“Such a fresh, brand-new uniform. So clean and tidy, and yet it has this irresistible allure.”
“…”
“It is like a flower bud about to bloom—a newborn, tender sprout blossoming forth. Yes…it is moé! This is moé! Hm?”
He went on and on, getting more excited, and kept inching toward Miyuki as she edged backward. But then, suddenly, he whipped around, squatted, and raised his left hand above his head.
There was a smack as his arm blocked a downward chop.
“Master, you’re scaring Miyuki. Could you calm down a little?”
“…Not bad, Tatsuya. You took me by…surprise!”
Keeping Tatsuya’s right hand busy with his left, Yakumo fired a right straight at him.
Tatsuya broke the joint lock by waving his right hand up, then back down, and then took the attack as if wrapping it up, then grabbed on to Yakumo’s side.
He didn’t fight it—he rolled forward, and his foot flew toward the back of Tatsuya’s head. Tatsuya quickly dodged it with a twist.
The two came apart.
There was an audible exhalation from the spectators.
A ring had formed around their face-off at some point.
Tatsuya and Yakumo went in again.
Miyuki wasn’t the only one whose hands were sweating.
This customary, every-morning disturbance had been continuing ever since Tatsuya was a freshman in junior high—that October, to be precise. After it ended, the temple grounds were once again quiet. The novices all returned to their religious services, leaving the Shiba siblings and Yakumo alone in the front yard of the main temple.
“Here you are, Sensei. Tatsuya, would you like some as well?”
“Oh, Miyuki, thank you!”
“…Give me a moment.”
Yakumo smiled and took a towel and a cup from Miyuki. His expression still seemed relaxed, despite his sweating. Tatsuya, on the other hand, was sprawled out on the ground trying to bring his violent breathing back under control. After raising a hand and replying to Miyuki, he managed to peel himself off the ground.
“Tatsuya, are you all right…?”
He had sat up, but he was still on the ground. Miyuki knelt down next to him, worried, not being careful to not get her skirt dirty, and used the towel in her hand to wipe his dripping sweat.
“I’m fine.” Yakumo’s disagreeably warm stare wasn’t particularly bothering him, but Tatsuya pulled the towel from Miyuki’s hand, and with a deep breath, he rallied his energy and stood up.
“Sorry for getting dirt on your skirt.” Tatsuya’s own sweats were a bit more than a little dirty, but Miyuki offered no words to point it out.
“This much is no problem at all,” answered Miyuki with a smile. Instead of brushing off her skirt hem, she removed a long, thin portable terminal from her inside pocket. Then she fluidly typed a short number into the force feedback panel covering most of its surface.
The CAD that Miyuki owned was a multipurpose one made in the shape of a portable terminal. It was more risky to have than the most popular multipurpose CAD, which was made in the shape of a bracelet. However, the advantage to getting used to one was that you could use it with one hand. It was the preferred model of higher-ranking magicians who did lots of field work, since they disliked both hands being occupied.
The nonphysical light drew a complex pattern in her right hand, which was then absorbed into the CAD, and then the magic activated.
Modern magicians used a CAD—an electronic device born of magical engineering—in place of staffs, grimoires, incantations, mudra, and the like.
CADs came loaded with a synthetic substance called a Reaction Stone that converted psionic signals to electrical ones and vice versa. It used the psions supplied by the magician to activate an electronically recorded magic circle, or activation program.
Activation programs were the blueprints for magic. Each program contained at least the same amount of information as tedious incantations, complex symbols, and hastily assembled seal arrangements.
Human flesh was a good conductor of psions, so when the CAD emitted the activation program, the magician would absorb it through their skin. Then it would be sent to their magic calculation region, a subconscious mental system that magicians possessed. This region of the brain would then construct a magic program—a body of information that would implement the magic—using the activation program as a base.
In this way, a CAD instantly supplied all the information required to construct magic.
From out of nowhere, an intangible cloud appeared and wrapped itself around Miyuki. It started at her skirt, then crawled down her black leggings all the way to the tips of her boots, which she’d removed the in-line skate attachments from.
In addition, a few particles bubbling forth from midair drifted to Tatsuya’s back, then floated down his w
hole body.
Once the thin, faintly shining mist cleared, she was wearing an immaculate uniform, and his gym clothes were absolutely spotless.
“Would you like breakfast, Tatsuya? Sensei, you can eat with us if you like,” Miyuki said in a completely normal tone of voice. She lightly held up her basket, as if it had been the most natural thing in the world.
Tatsuya was actually well aware that this level of magic was practically nothing for his little sister.
Once they all sat down on the balcony, Tatsuya and Yakumo began filling their mouths with the sandwiches. Miyuki was taking only one bite at a time, since she was waiting on Tatsuya hand and foot, offering him tea and exchanging his dishes for him.
Yakumo watched them with a warm, yet somehow obnoxious expression. He took a towel that one of his monk pupils (complete with shaved head) held out for him and used it to clean his hands and mouth. Finally, he put his hands together and thanked Miyuki for the food, and murmured in a somewhat quiet and serious tone, “I may not be able to match up with Tatsuya in terms of raw physical ability anymore…”
Those were unmistakably words of praise. If the other novices had been here, they would have showered Tatsuya in unavoidable stares of envy—and the pupil waiting beside Yakumo was actually gazing at him with a mixture of resentment and jealousy.
Miyuki’s face was shining as if his praise had been directed at her. But Tatsuya’s mind couldn’t accept that simple commendation at face value.
“We have the same physical abilities, yet you’re still pulverizing me with one hand tied behind your back… And I’m supposed to be happy?” said Tatsuya. It was as much a rebuttal as it was a complaint.
Yakumo gave a tired smile. “It’s what we call only natural, Tatsuya. I am your master, and we sparred in my personal ring. You’re still fifteen. My students would all run away if I fell behind a child like you!”