4
It had been one month since I’d become her personal guard. All Elletear ordered me to do was become strong enough to protect her from any trouble.
She didn’t limit me at all. My standing as her personal guard was all for show. Instead of staying by Elletear’s side, I devoted myself to training. I trained even harder than before, so I would be prepared when the time came. I honed both my body and mind.
“Let’s go out, Joheim.”
She suddenly summoned me.
Dressed in a disguise, Elletear took me to a neutral city. It seemed this was not a trip for official business. But it was no vacation, either.
I realized that because Elletear steadily spoke less and less as we approached our destination. I realized something was off. Where were we going, and what would we do there?
“This way, Joheim.”
Elletear did not hesitate to head toward the outskirts of the neutral city once we arrived. We headed to a deserted-looking house and entered through the back door.
“I was waiting for you, Princess.”
A woman in an old-looking white coat greeted us.
She knew Elletear was a princess. Based on the white coat, she must have been a doctor or a researcher.
“Oh? And who is this red-haired man?”
“Kelvina, this is my guard.”
“Princess, you cannot reveal the treatment you are about to receive here to anyone in the Sovereignty. Didn’t you remind me of that yourself?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Elletear said.
“Well, fine… I suppose we had a rare turn of luck.”
Kelvina shrugged.
She glanced at me but wouldn’t meet my eye. It seemed she didn’t care who I was.
“Well, come in. If we talk outside, others will see us.”
She led us through the back door. We should have entered a living room, but when I felt dizzy, I scowled.
“What is this?”
Every wall, and even the ceiling, was filled with monitors. I saw beakers and flasks on a desk, holding a liquid of some strange color. An exam table stood at the center of everything. I’d never seen an exam table fitted with restraints before.
“Are you a doctor?”
“No, no.”
Kelvina didn’t face me. As she turned her back to me, I noticed her white coat was dirtier than the one I’d been wearing in the streets.
“If a doctor is meant to fix people, then I’m no doctor.”
“…?”
“Because I make people better versions of themselves. A doctor turns a minus into a zero. But I research making a zero a plus.”
As she answered, she drew blood from Elletear, who had sat down on the exam table. Then she fed that blood sample into a large machine that seemed to be measuring something.
“Amazing.” Kelvina’s voice quivered as she looked over the numbers listed on the screen. Her eyes glittered, and her lips twisted up into a crescent. “Oh, how wonderful, Princess Elletear. You have potential.”
“Hey.”
I couldn’t stand it anymore and grabbed her shoulder. I wanted her to cut this out. I didn’t care if she wouldn’t meet my eye, but what was she looking for when she drew blood from Elletear?
“Is that your research? What are you researching when it comes to Elletear?”
“It’s just a simple patch test.”
Kelvina turned around.
She smiled. When her eyes had glittered while taking Elletear’s blood and looking at the monitors, she’d easily looked like a mad scientist to me.
“The Eight Great Apostles will be jubilant, too. We have a new subject.”
Every word out of her mouth sounded worse and worse.
The Eight Great Apostles? A subject? And what was the patch test for in the first place? But I wouldn’t get any useful answers from the mad scientist.
“Elletear, what research is this?”
“It’s what will make someone a witch.”
“Is it?”
I couldn’t forget that.
The night Elletear and I had met, she’d said the same thing.
……A witch?
……That wasn’t just a disparaging word used for astral mages?
It probably was different.
I could tell that whatever was being done in this dilapidated house had to do with human experimentation, but I had no idea what it meant to be a witch.
“Heh-heh.” Kelvina seemed amused as her shoulders shook. She kept stealing glances at me. “Looks like you’re not very trusted. By Elletear, that is.”
“What?!”
“No, that’s not true,” Elletear protested.
The moment I clenched my hand into a fist, Elletear enveloped it in her own.
“Guh.”
“Please believe me, Joheim. I just didn’t have the courage to tell you until today. So I’ll tell you what I’m doing now.”
“You just told him, didn’t you?” Kelvina said. “The princess has lofty ambitions but not the power to achieve them. To get that power, she’s going to go through experiments that will make her a monster.”
“That’s what this experimentation is for?!”
“For better or worse, we’ve found that Elletear is a perfect subject. That was what the patch test was for. Want to try it, too?”
She gave me no time to argue as she picked up a syringe. In it, a light purple liquid that seemed to be a medicine of some sort undulated in the glass. She pushed that into the vein of my left arm.
Before I could count to three, I felt my heart seize as though someone were squeezing it. It hurt.
“Uh?!”
Then I was assaulted by a chill and nausea. Next, I felt like my whole body was on fire. It was pain I’d never experienced before, and it brought me to my knees.
What was it?
What had she put in my body?
“Was that poison, you shrew?”
“Poison? I guess it could be. It’s the most dangerous poison on the planet.”
Through my hazy vision, I saw her smile.
“The astral power in you rejected the concoction. Oh, don’t worry. That reaction proves you’re a normal human. In other words, you’re not compatible. You can’t be one of my subjects.”
“What did you say?”
“Elletear, on the other hand, was able to handle a concoction seven times stronger for her test.”
“Wha?!” I couldn’t help but cry out.
As I was dumbfounded, Kelvina looked down at me and pulled a beaker from a desk.
The liquid was a dark purple. It looked much more concentrated than the one she had injected into me.
“As you can see, Elletear is fine, isn’t she? That’s what makes her special. She has the makings of a witch. Now all we need to do is slowly increase the dose.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have the time.”
“Hm…?”
Kelvina didn’t even have the chance to turn around as Elletear stood from the exam table. She headed to a desk of five beakers, picked up the darkest one, and removed the lid on it.
Elletear drank the liquid in one gulp, like it was wine.
It all went down her throat, leaving not a drop behind.
“What?! Elletear?!” I shouted before I knew it.
Just a few milliliters of the liquid had been enough to make my body reject it. Elletear had drunk an incomparable amount, and it was at a higher concentration.
She would die. I really believed that.
However…
“Don’t worry, Joheim. Look.”
She wiped away a drop of liquid on her lip. Then, she even licked that up with her tongue. She gave me a composed smile. See, I’m fine, it seemed she was saying.
“Impossible…” Kelvina staggered. In awe and wonder, her smile twitched up. “You could withstand that? You drank that solution…ha-ha… You really might become a monster.”
A drop of sweat fell from her forehead.
I understood that Elletear had done something unthinkable. Kelvina was likely more in awe than I was.
“Well then, Princess, I invite you on a short trip. We’ll leave in two weeks. Please prepare to be gone for a while.”
A trip? Where was she taking Elletear?
Before I could ask, Kelvina shrugged.
“My lab is in the Empire, after all.”
“The Empire?!”
I doubted my own ears, but it also made sense.
This rundown house in a neutral city was a camouflaged lab. I’d known that it was seedy, which made sense if it was involved with the Empire.
……The Sovereignty’s enemy.
……And they’re my enemy too, of course.
But it would be worse for Elletear. Was she in her right mind to go to the Empire?
The Empire would be eager to have a princess from the Nebulis Sovereignty. If she was discovered, she would be captured immediately and put through humiliation worse than death.
“…Elletear.” I stared at the princess, who stood still with her hand on her chest. “Are you really going to the Empire? They’re the worst country in the world for you to be involved with.”
“That’s right, Joheim. And that’s the only place I can obtain the power I want.”
I only learned later that Elletear had already traveled to the Empire several times in order to research the effects of the drug on her body.
“…Okay, I get it. Then I’ll go, too.”
“Oh, wait, wait.” Kelvina let out a dramatic sigh. “Are you trying to play knight in shining armor for the princess? I’m only taking Elletear with me.”
“What?!”
“Just think about it. Do you know how hard it is to bring a Nebulis princess into the Empire?”
“…Guh!”
“There are astral energy sensors in every corner of the airport and guards patrolling the entire country. Smuggling one person in is hard enough. And you’re not even a test subject. You’re just an ordinary human. I’m not a nice enough person to do all the work of arranging your passage just because.”
I had nothing to say to that. If having to arrange my travel somehow made them discover Elletear, there would be no point in me going. I didn’t want that to happen, either.
“So I’ve even been rejected here…”
“Oh, don’t be so down. I’ll make sure the princess makes it to the Empire. She’s a very important subject, after all. I wouldn’t hand her over to the Imperial forces.”
“Then we’re in agreement. But I have a requirement to add.”
“Hm?”
“You won’t be Elletear’s guard, I will.”
I turned my back to them and reached out my hand. I was headed for the five beakers on the desk. Elletear had consumed the most concentrated one, so I picked the second-darkest beaker. I wrenched open the top.
“Hey, what are you—?!”
“Joheim?!”
Kelvina and Elletear both opened their eyes wide. Before they could stop me, I poured the liquid on my thigh, where my astral crest was.
……Sizzle.
Smoke floated up into the air. Next, pain I’d never felt the likes of before assaulted me, and I almost lost consciousness.
“—?!”
I felt as though my right leg had been pulverized right down to the bone. Even if I had been stabbed by a thousand swords or tens of thousands of bullets, the pain I was feeling probably couldn’t compare to this.
“Guh……urgh……!”
“What did you do, Joheim?!”
Elletear reached out to support me, but Kelvina grabbed her hand.
“Wait, Princess… Let’s see…”
She’d likely realized that there was white smoke coming from my astral crest. As my body was wracked with intense, fiery pain, my astral crest steadily disappeared.
Good.
Now I could go with Elletear.
“Kelvina or whatever your name is…you said before…”
I felt like I was about to lose consciousness from the pain.
I gritted my teeth, clenched my hands into fists, and focused all I had on speaking.
“This drug is poison to astral power…so I figured my astral crest would disappear if I doused it with the liquid…”
“A gold star for you.”
Clap clap. Kelvina was applauding me.
“A procedure to remove an astral crest. The concentration wasn’t enough to remove all the astral energy in you, but it is enough to get rid of your astral crest.”
“So I won’t get caught up in the Empire’s astral energy sensors now, right?”
“If you’re lucky.” Kelvina’s reply was blunt. “I see. So you’re going to leave me to transport the princess while you find your own way into the Empire?”
That was exactly it.
If Elletear flew, I could go by land. I just needed a car to travel by highway to a checkpoint, where I would cross the border.
……I had astral power deficiency from the start.
……Now that I’ve burned off my astral crest, I don’t think I’ll be caught by the astral energy sensors.
I didn’t have any attachment to the Sovereignty, anyway.
“Elletear.” I gritted my teeth. I was out of breath, but there was something I needed to ask her. “I’ll repeat this again. If you’re going to the Empire, then I will be too, unless I’m just in your way?”
“…” Elletear was silent for a while.
Her mismatched green and yellow eyes looked me over.
“You’re a fool.” She suddenly smiled. “If you were in the way, I never would have brought you here.”
“…I see.”
Good.
That was all I needed to know. That was enough for me to jump into certain death. Even if that meant heading into enemy territory like the Empire.
“I have good news, bright and shining knight.” Kelvina was staring at a monitor as she typed something in at lightning speed. “The Eight Great Apostles have shown an interest in you.”
“The Eight Great Apostles?”
“They’re sponsoring my research. They want to use you as a spy both within the Empire and the Sovereignty.”
Kelvina handed me a scrap of paper. They were detailed instructions for how I would enter the Empire. It detailed the gate number of the checkpoint I would enter and the route I would take afterward. Right down to the minute and hour.
“Burn it after you memorize it.”
Kelvina joined Elletear’s side. When she put a hand on Elletear’s shoulder as though they were friends, I silently bit my bottom lip.
“I’ll be waiting in the Empire. With your precious princess,” she said.
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