CHAPTER 7
A Certain Mastermind’s Preparations and Cleanup
Second Friday of May
It was just a quick stop in the city of Milan.
And then an entire human trafficking ring got destroyed.
“Yes, I understand that, but…”
The tall woman standing in the front entrance, Sylvia, looked at the man with questioning eyes. More specifically, she looked behind the man—behind Ollerus.
“Who is that behind you?” she asked.
“I—I mean, you know. I was only planning on busting the ring and feeling real good about myself, but then a whole crowd of kids came out the back, and… If I’d left them there, someone else might have kidnapped them instead, so I guess what I’m trying to say is—”
“You brought them with you?”
“Erk.”
“You took almost a hundred children back home with you? What are you, the Pied Piper of Hamelin?”
Ollerus found himself unable to answer Sylvia’s question.
For a few moments, there was silence.
Then, Sylvia sighed and closed the front door.
“Hey!! Wait, wait!! This was the best solution!! It’s not like I’m going to ask you to renovate the apartment into a school (specifically a boarding school) right this instant!! It’s only until we can find them foster parents!!”
“Get rid of them.”
“That’s not a solution!! How could I do that to them, you cold-blooded woman?! You sound like someone’s mom telling them to get rid of an animal! Lend a hand to those in need—it’s a fundamental law of the world!!”
“Why, you dusty fallen noble… If that was true, then nobody would have any problems, now would they?!”
The front door slammed open wide, striking Ollerus directly and sending him flying away like in a karate movie.
Meanwhile, Sylvia put her hands on her hips and seethed. “You’re acting so high-and-mighty and selfish, but how exactly do you plan on taking care of them?! Eh?! All you do is make promises you can’t keep! Get over here!! I will tie you up with ropes and then make you straddle the roof of the doghouse!! I will physically show you what it means to anger this bonne dame!!”
“Heegyaaaahhhhhhh?! A DIY wooden horse?!”
Not long after, Ollerus’s thighs were splayed out on the quaint lawn in front of the apartment. In any case, the nearly hundred kids couldn’t be left to their own devices, so for now Sylvia invited them into the apartment building.
After Sylvia and the mass of children had disappeared into the building, one child pattered up to Ollerus, who had been left there after being forced to uncomfortably ride atop the doghouse beside the front entrance.
The girl said, “I want to repay you.”
“Heh… Heh-heh-heh. I didn’t save you all because I was looking for that type of reward.”
The girl looked hard at Ollerus riding the doghouse. “…Will you be okay like that, then?”
“Not what I meant,” declared Ollerus. “In the end, it’s just that it wouldn’t mean anything.”
“?”
“I’m honored you look up to me, but it’s misplaced admiration. Tying you up and forcing you to do manual labor wouldn’t be any different from the human trafficking business. That’s not what I’m searching for.”
“But I still want to repay you.”
“If you’re serious about it, then I want you to try and attain fulfilling happiness with your own hands,” said Ollerus, his face the picture of seriousness, spread-eagled as he was over the doghouse.
“I saved you even though I knew Sylvia would give me a thrashing. It’s only natural I’d want you to be happy. Demanding anything else of you wouldn’t be right.”
Even though he said that to her, she still wanted to repay him.
She couldn’t get rid of the murk in her heart now that she owed him a debt.
To properly thank Ollerus in a way he’d appreciate, she first needed to know who the person named Ollerus was.
The next person the girl approached was Sylvia. She—having already apologized profusely to the landlord and was currently racking her brain, wondering how she was going to cook food for a hundred and what she was even going to do about blankets and sleeping space—answered the girl’s question.
“He’s a man who should have become a magic god.”
“?”
“I don’t mean a real god or anything—a magic god is a person who has set foot into God’s domain through mastery over sorcery.” Sylvia’s tone was casual and slow. “Any normal person could easily die just from reading so many original copies of grimoires, but for him, the bigger problem was that the power wielded by magic gods is far too specialized. You can have the prerequisite knowledge, but all that information is pointless without the energy to put it into practice. In the end, he only barely scraped it together in that regard by using a treatise on Hli?skjálf while refining his life force into mana for conversion into that special power.
“If someone could use a magic god’s power with only a normal level of mana, they’d be a literal monster,” added Sylvia.
Though the girl felt like Sylvia had tried to explain it to her in an easy-to-understand way, she actually understood nothing at all.
Sylvia watched the girl’s face, then sighed. “Basically, it’s like a wonderful job that everyone dreams of having. Like being in the major leagues or representing the nation in the World Cup.”
“…He was supposed to become one?”
“Yeah, he was, that idiot,” said Sylvia, spitting out the words like they were dirt that had gotten into her mouth. “…Ollerus had a chance that only comes around once every ten thousand years, if that. He knew if he let the chance go, he might never get another one. And what do you think he did? It wasn’t even a person he saved. He was running all around the city to save this injured kitten, looking for an animal hospital, and during that time, he turned his back on the opportunity.”
“……”
“He should’ve just gone for it. He slipped up like an idiot, though, and now he spends his days getting wrapped up in crisis after crisis… He really is an idiot. Or maybe I should call him emotional. He’s not perfect. Occasionally, he’ll remember it, and he’ll sob to himself long into the night.”
Sylvia exhaled.
Then she continued, “It’s just that he talks about it a certain way.”
“What does he say?”
“He says he’s regretted it ever since then, and if he was put in the same situation again, there’s no guarantee he would be able to do the same thing. But he says he truly thought, at the time, that what he did was the right thing to do.”
“……”
“Anyway, that’s the long and short of it. He’s fundamentally an idiot. And after a while of watching him, I ended up protecting him and started thinking like an idiot myself. That’s why we’re stuck here and not going back to the United Kingdom.”
Once the children had fallen asleep while wrapped in a hundred blankets Sylvia had somehow procured, Sylvia collapsed over the table, looking crushed under the weight of exhaustion. And then she started cursing someone.
“…I’m going to let you taste the fear of lacquer all over your body after this.”
“Eek?! Getting spread-eagled over a wooden horse is one thing, but hellish itchiness is terrifying in its own right, you know!”
“Well, you’ll just have to put up with it until we can hand these kids over to the nearby church… About one week, tops. It’ll be itchy every day, but it’s a good chance to train your mind.”
“Oh, damn!! Are you gonna leave it painted all over me?!”
“More importantly, you found the signs?”
“Yeah, er. Matches the list. Only a few of them, though. As I thought, that human trafficking group was dealing in people with all sorts of special traits, major and minor.”
“…Which means it’s been proven, then.”
“Mm,” mumbled Ollerus, stretching. “Looks like it’s going to get busy again.”
I want to repay you, said the girl.
Time, however, would not wait.
The man who should have become a magic god left town the very next day and never came back.
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