4
“You got on the train to the Vale Republic.”
“No way!”
He was on the platform at the station the train pulled into.
Iska had shouted when he’d heard the first thing his master said—his teacher who had arrived earlier than him.
“I had to follow you that entire distance on another train. But yours ended up slowing down so much, I made it here ahead of you.”
His master sighed upon seeing the train Iska had been on.
The windows were cracked in places, and the outer walls had graphic vestiges of the rexes’ claws.
“Looks like you put on quite the race.”
His master’s eyes landed on Iska’s broken blade, which the boy still clutched.
“What happened to that?”
“It broke.”
“‘It broke’? You must have abused it, then.”
He showed Iska no sympathy whatsoever—or so Iska thought until the greatest swordsman in the Empire said, quite loquaciously and uncharacteristically, “You bungled it, but you didn’t do the wrong thing.”
“……Huh?”
“A sword is tool to be used. It’s okay to break a national treasure or even a sword inscribed with the name of a blacksmith—as long as you’re doing it to save someone.”
“Are you praising me right now?”
“Yes, for what you’re currently capable of.”
Iska felt relieved. It seemed that fighting off the rexes had balanced out any lecture he would have gotten about boarding the wrong train or breaking his sword.
“Oh…but, Master, I didn’t actually fight off the rexes.”
“It was the hunters, right?”
“Actually, it wasn’t them either…”
“Huh?”
“Uh, I’m not sure how to explain this but…”
I was saved by a witch.
Reporting that was simple enough, but he felt frustrated that he hadn’t seen her face or known who she was.
Just who had saved him?
“…A lot of things happened.”
“How was I supposed to know that, you fool?”
While the two of them were talking, some distance away…
“I wonder where that boy went?”
“What is it, Lady Alice?”
“Nothing…nothing at all.”
The girl with the golden hair held on to her guard’s hand as they left the platform.
That moment of their encounter had resulted in the Black Steel’s Successor, Iska, rethinking his view on witches.
And it was also when the Ice Calamity Witch, Alice, had vowed to make her secret ability her ice flower—in other words, her shield.
But little did the two of them know that it had also been the moment their fates were sealed.
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