by Akira Kareno
And so Chtholly, even after just losing her status as a faerie soldier, could still at least be considered a “civilian.” What came after that was the problem.
“Usually, to tag along on military missions, you need skill that won’t hold the others back and the trust that you won’t do anything unnecessary. So there’s no such thing as being too cautious when it comes to taking along civilians.”
“But I did get permission, didn’t I?”
“Basically, that means there’ve been other officers in the past who’ve taken civilians along as secretaries. And they’ve all probably been the opposite sex of the same species.”
“…Um?”
He recalled the first officer’s nasty smile when he brought back Chtholly.
“It means they brought their lovers along, justifying them as secretaries.”
“Lovers…” Chtholly slowly repeated the word, as though it was in a foreign language she was hearing for the first time.
“And it means he thought we were the same as those guys.”
“…Oh… I see now.” Chtholly thought briefly. “I think that’s all right.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Then will you at least make me your wife?”
“No, come on.”
There came a distant chorus of Carillon bells.
Willem stopped in his tracks, a sense of nostalgia overcoming him as he listened to the end of the chorus.
The sun was setting. Evening was drawing near.
“Well, I guess it’s not too bad. It’s not like we still need to keep up appearances, and I don’t want to be apart from you, either.”
“Oh, it makes me so happy to hear that, but that’s not a proposal, is it?”
“Of course not.”
He looked at her with exasperation, as though wondering why she was asking that now.
Chtholly smiled wryly in agreement.
“Let’s go, then.”
He looked away and walked off with a long stride.
After a moment, Chtholly started rushing after him.
“Hey, wait, wait! Slow down!”
“Whoops, I totally forgot, but we might miss the ship to Island No. 53.”
“…What?!”
Island No. 68 was on the outer periphery of Regule Aire. There were no public commuter airships that went straight there, and in order to find a ferryman to get there, one had to first go to an island somewhat nearby.
So Willem had a fair reason to pick up the pace like he did. It was not a way to hide his embarrassment at all.
“We won’t make it home today at this rate. C’mon, hurry up.”
“Wait, hold on—these bags are so heavy!”
The two strolled casually and merrily through the townscape as it was slowly painted crimson.
What am I? the girl thought.
Ever so slowly, her memory was chipping away, her personality breaking to pieces. In the end, even now as she was cracking, would she still be called Chtholly?
She could now remember only about half of her fellow faeries’ names at the warehouse.
Even if she took the time to study and re-remember them, her memories of them would never come back.
Whether it be when she was in her own room, or in the dining hall surrounded by her sisters, or helping Nygglatho, something felt off about the daily structure she should have established by now.
Bubbling up from somewhere unknown was the baseless feeling that this was not where she belonged.
She thought her own situation was painful.
It was bitter, sad, and lonely.
And she wanted to hold all these feelings dear to her. Because when those were gone, that would probably be when the girl who was once Chtholly Nota Seniorious would completely disappear.
Chtholly told all the faeries in the warehouse that she would be taking the airship to the surface.
“Miss Chtholly, are you leaving us again?” the green-haired girl asked in cheerless surprise.
“Hmph.” The pink-haired girl looked away weakly. It seemed her cold still hadn’t gone away.
“It’s not something to brood over. It’s not like she’s going away for an eternity,” the purple-haired girl said lightly.
“Um… Please be careful. Please, please do be careful,” the peach-haired girl begged, tears brimming in her eyes.
“We’ll have a welcome home party ready for you when you come back,” Nygglatho added with a smile—a slightly strained, forced smile.
“Personally, I want to tell you not to do it.” Ithea looked like a mother who’d relented to her own child’s selfishness.
“I’m sorry. But I really don’t want to wait.”
“Oh well. There’s a bitter love monster stuffed inside your skull that’s crammed full of romantic feelings, I know. Pulling it away from its crush would only make it wither and crumble away, I know.”
Chtholly frowned.
She wasn’t that far gone, she wanted to protest.
But she knew it didn’t sound very convincing, so she decided not to. It was an adult’s wise judgment not to do anything unnecessary. Probably.
“I’d want to go with you if possible, but I guess I can’t. It’s not like I could do anything to help you if I came along anyway.”
“It won’t really be anything you have to worry about. I’ll be sure to find you a souvenir from the surface,” she said and gave a thumbs-up.
Ithea didn’t respond.
She decided to leave Seniorious behind.
She wouldn’t be able to use it even if they brought it along anyway.
And…someone who was working hard for their own happiness was not qualified to touch that misery-obsessed thing, regardless of words like faerie or compatible wielder.
“Good-bye, partner.”
She stuck her tongue out at it.
And those were her parting words.
6. Reunion
She knocked on the door, but there was no answer.
She turned the doorknob, and it wasn’t locked.
“Hello…?”
She pushed the door open. It was dark and empty.
Oh, right— Tiat finally recalled.
The owner of this room wasn’t in the faerie warehouse at the moment. She had boarded an airship headed for the surface to retrieve a couple of the other older faeries who were out on a long-term mission. It would still be a few days until she was back.
“Um… I came to return the book I borrowed…”
She hesitantly stepped into the empty room.
She managed to muffle her own footsteps as she cut across the tidy chamber.
She placed the book she held to her chest neatly on the desk.
And then, she noticed something sitting on the corner of it.
There was a large, stylish dark-blue hat and something else, something that glinted silver.
“This is…”
She recognized it. It was a silverwork brooch with a clear blue stone embedded in it.
It looked really good on her senior faerie, and Tiat was often envious of that. She still remembered what the elder faerie had said to her.
“Thanks. But I know one day soon, it’ll probably look really good on you, too.
“When you get just a little bit older, I’ll give it to you.”
She’d found herself flustered at the time, because that wasn’t why she felt envious. She hadn’t wanted the brooch itself; she just wanted to express how well such a grown-up accessory looked on her. But she was a little happy that she said that to her, just a little.
…Maybe she forgot it?
She could feel a bit of mischief bubbling inside her. She’d grown up a bit since then, hadn’t she? Maybe now she was enough of a woman for it to look good on her.
She was just going to try it out.
She gulped. Slowly, she reached for the brooch.
Her fingertips brushed the silverwork.
“…No, I can’t.”
She pulled back.
> Even if it was just to try, she felt like if she touched it, she would end up losing something incredibly precious.
Incidentally, the Plantaginesta was originally a large-scale transport ship. The philosophy behind its design was different from that of commuter airships, and it was built exactly so that it could carry more materials with greater reliability. To put it simply, not a single part of the ship was designed with a comfortable ride in mind.
The entire vessel pitched and rolled. Strange pipes stuck out here and there in all the rooms and corridors, the smell of oil clung to the air, obscene graffiti had been scrawled on the walls, empty cans of meat paste lay scattered across the floor, and so on and so forth.
Willem wouldn’t have thought anything of it if the environment was just plain old bad. But just by adding that sway unique to airships, it easily pushed the limits of his discomfort.
Their estimated flight time was forty-two hours.
It was a hellish forty-two hours.
Ground level, K96—MAL Ruins.
The location of the felled surface observation ship Saxifraga.
“The whole world’s spinning…”
With shaky steps, Willem stepped down onto the gray sand.
The sole of his shoe sank about the thickness of his palm into the soft sand. The absent thought of just how bad this footing was crossed his mind. Merely walking on it would quickly drain his energy, and now there was the added danger of falling over if he ran or fought.
He lifted his gaze slightly.
Before him was a gray ruin. There was a row of strange-looking monuments, as though someone had poured a muddled gray dye over crumbling stone buildings.
This was once a small town.
It was at the edge of Empire territory, quite a ways away from the Imperial Capital.
It hadn’t been particularly big or prosperous. It was not on any of the major trade routes, and it didn’t have any particular specialties it was famous for. It was a town that just quietly built its own history over centuries, one that was supposed to keep on building.
He leaned over and grabbed a fistful of sand.
The gray dust smoothly slipped from the gaps between his fingers.
“It hasn’t really hit me like I thought it would.”
Not a single emotion he’d steeled himself for made itself known.
He couldn’t force himself to feel sadness or frustration now.
It wasn’t like he didn’t feel it was real. Willem was oddly accepting of the fact that this was the fate of what was once the town of Gomag, his home.
“…Are you okay?”
“Yeah, nothing to worry about.”
Nephren had appeared at his side at some point, and he answered her question and stood.
“It doesn’t look like there’s nothing to worry about. You’re very pale.”
“Probably just from motion sickness. I’m really not bothered by this at all.”
“You’re really not bothered after coming here?” A blustery wind swayed the sleeves on Nephren’s protective sandstorm cloak. “That worries me more. Isn’t this your home?”
“I’m fine, really. My birthplace is gone. My home now”—he pointed upward—“is in the sky. Right?”
Nephren reached up with both arms. She grabbed on to Willem’s head and pulled his face closer to her own.
She made him look deep into her eyes.
“…You’re not acting?”
“Of course not. Now lemme go; it’d be a pain if someone sees us.”
“But I didn’t do anything embarrassing.”
“It’s not what you think but what other people watching think.”
“Reeee—”
There came the scratching sound of running footsteps on sand.
“—eeeeen!”
It came from his blind spot.
Accompanying the yell was a kick that flew straight at him, and it struck him right in his side.
Thinking it would be the same as when Collon and Pannibal attacked him, he stayed in his spot and took the kick. That was a mistake. It was a much sharper and heavier attack than he imagined, and it threw his body off to the side. It was super painful.
The boy…oh, no, girl who attacked him grabbed Nephren’s shoulders and shook her hard.
Still lying on the sand, Willem raised just his head and watched them.
“Hey, you okay? What’d that perv do to you?! He didn’t get what he wanted, did he?!”
She had spiky vermilion hair, and her eyes were just a shade darker. Though he’d never seen this girl before, it matched the appearance he’d heard about beforehand.
Nopht Keh Desperatio, designated compatible with dug weapon Desperatio.
“No, Nopht.” Nephren seemed to be in slight pain as she wriggled. “He’s not a pervert who does stuff to children; he is someone who is a problem because he does nothing.”
“Man, I had no idea you’d be the one coming to rescue us! Awww, you’re still soooo li’l!”
She wasn’t listening.
Squeeze. With the world’s biggest grin on her face, Nopht wrapped Nephren in a hug from head-on.
“…It hasn’t been more than a month since you left the warehouse. I’m not going to grow that much in that short a time.”
“Really? It feels like I haven’t see you in forever—” Suddenly, Nopht stopped. “…Hey, you went to that fight, too, didn’t you, Ren?”
“Hmm?”
“The one when the big Six attacked.”
“Oh…” Nephren nodded, still in Nopht’s arms. “We went and fought.”
“Then tell me, how valiant was Chtholly?”
An odd expression crossed over Nephren’s face.
“Um, very valiant, I suppose.”
“Ah.” A sad smile spread across Nopht’s lips. “I don’t really know how to put it,” she began, “but I dunno. She wasn’t very nice, and I didn’t think we’d get along very well, and that still hasn’t changed. But after coming here, we got into a situation where we didn’t know if we’d get home alive. I regret it, just a little. I don’t care if we just hated each other. I don’t care if all we would’ve done was argue, but I wish we’d talked more.”
Willem slowly sat up.
He could now see two new girls drawing nearer from the airship.
One was a face he knew well, and the other was one he didn’t know at all—but that, too, matched the description he heard earlier. It seemed there was no doubt that this was one of the two faeries sent to the surface.
Rhantolk Ytri Historia, designated compatible with dug weapon Historia.
Now he knew they were both safe, Willem felt his worries ease.
“The Beast on Island No. 15 must’ve been strong. Yeah, it’s not normal that we could only win if Chtholly opened the gates. And you’re all in one piece, so she musta done it. She opened the gates, didn’t she?”
“Ah…”
Nephren very obviously didn’t know what to say. He’d never seen her like this before.
“She probably said it was to protect everyone, didn’t she? She’s so straightforward and really pretends like it’s no big, but I’m pretty sure she was super scared but talked like it was nothing, and I know—”
The binds on her heart must have come loose since this was the first time in a long while she was seeing her fellow faeries from the warehouse. The more she talked, the more nonsensical her words became. She herself would probably soon wonder what on earth she was talking about.
The indigo-haired faerie, Rhantolk, tapped her on the shoulder.
“Nopht.”
“What? I’m busy right now.” Nopht sniffled lightly, stopping her ramble.
“Take a deep breath.”
“Huh?”
“Breathe in, breathe out. Then when you calm down, turn around.”
She was an obedient kid at her core. Nopht did as she was told and took a deep breath, exhaled, then turned around to look behind her with a confused expression—
And she froze.
“…Um…”
A red-and-blue gradation waved with changes in the wind.
There was Chtholly, standing there with a guilty expression on her face.
“I guess, um… Long time no see?”
Chtholly for some reason spoke with a rising inflection, and though she was facing Nopht, her gaze was pointed in the wrong direction.
“Muh…”
“Muh?”
“Monsteeer!!”
Nopht released Nephren and sprang off into a run at an astonishing speed, one where the unstable footing on the sand was absolutely no problem.
“H-hold on, wait a second!!”
Chtholly followed after her. Chtholly was rather fast on her own. Even though she wasn’t fast enough to catch up, she kept the distance equal, not letting her get too far ahead.
The two lively girls ran through the husk of the ruined city on the destroyed earth.
“Who do you think will win?”
“Hmm… I bet my dessert that Nopht will fall and Chtholly will catch up.”
“Then I bet the same on Chtholly getting tired out first… It’s been a while, Rhantolk. I’m glad you’re safe.”
“And I can say exactly the same back to you… I am truly glad you’re both all right. Truly.”
Rhantolk squeezed her palm around Nephren’s tiny hand.
As he listened to the conversation beside him, Willem murmured, “They sure are happy…,” and watched carefully as the two ran into the distance.
This Present Radiance
-my happiness-
1. The Suspicious Emnetwiht
Nopht was giggling, ticklish throughout the entire procedure.
“Eh-he-he-he-he-he-he-he-he-he-he.”
Her arms and legs flailed about every which way, and it was a hassle keeping her still.
Chtholly started to help partway through, and it would have taken even longer without her assistance. There was no doubt it wouldn’t have ended with just one bruise around his eye.