[315] The Wheel of Causality (7)
Shirone, still reeling from the mental shock, lay down on the bed and fell asleep. Vincent and Olina sat on the opposite bed, and Amy was on the floor, watching the view outside the window.
Reina, lost in thought, spoke with a relieved expression.
"Whew, that was a really long four days."
Amy, enjoying the breeze, turned her head.
"Telling you. By the way, I was so surprised. Orcamp wasn't his biological parent."
Vincent shook his head as he recalled the events.
"I was just as shocked. When my wife entered the Grand Hall, I figured we were stuck here for good."
Reina looked at Olina.
"So what will you do? Will you tell Shirone the truth?"
"I thought about it. It's probably better not to. He'll find out sooner or later anyway."
Amy asked, "Why? Queen Eliza even sent an official document saying he's not her child. We should make sure Shirone knows that woman could never be his real mother."
"When Shirone entered the Grand Hall, I saw his eyes. Maybe Shirone already knew. That they weren't his real parents."
Reina agreed.
"True, he's smart and perceptive. Shirone said there are no parents except the two of them. That wasn't said assuming some other biological parent might turn up, was it?"
Put like that, everything fell into place. At first it had seemed like words born of betrayal, but Shirone wasn't the type to indulge in that kind of petulance.
"He's a good boy. He put on a show in front of the queen, but he's actually more than he deserves. I don't have the face to see him after getting him involved in this."
Reina offered words of comfort.
"Don't think like that. It couldn't be helped. The place and time they said the child was abandoned match, and at the time it was the only abandoned-child incident."
"Wait a minute!"
Amy stretched out her hand as if she'd suddenly realized something.
The maid who abandoned the child had said she left the son at the stables in the Valley of Dawn. That's why Shirone had been summoned as a prime candidate to the castle. But the result contradicted those expectations: father and son were not related.
"Then who on earth… is Shirone?"
Everyone fell silent as the implication sank in.
If he wasn't Orcamp's child, whose child was Shirone?
Vincent still remembered that night vividly. He'd heard a child crying in his sleep and gone to the stables. But there were no traces of anyone having entered.
What had happened that night? Why couldn't they find Orcamp's child? What exactly had Shirone realized to say what he did to Orcamp?
Shirone, with countless answers buried deep inside him, was simply in a deep sleep.
* * *
Armin arrived at Toshka Village. She heard on the way back that Shirone was safe.
But her own problem remained. If word spread that she was connected to the Black Line's mages, headquarters wouldn't leave things alone.
'I should be fine. I explained why I wore the mask.'
She'd explained to Amy why she'd hidden her face, so Amy would keep her promise.
Even if Amy didn't, there was nothing she could do. That was the basis of trust.
Having put her mind at ease, Armin looked up at the house surrounded by a time field. It was silent as if dead.
She exhaled and cast Flicker; the scene inside the room greeted her.
The moment she arrived where she had cast Stop, the flow of time returned and a vase shattered with a crash.
Keira glared at Armin. She'd been watching the falling vase, so she couldn't tell how much Armin's position had changed.
"A few days… passed, right?"
"Maybe. About four days…."
Keira ground her lips and swallowed her resentment.
"You went and came back after all? Even after I told you not to?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Don't try to lie to me! Otherwise you wouldn't bother to put a time field on the house!"
Armin lied calmly. "I was just angry for a moment and needed time to think."
Keira scoffed. Who would believe that?
Her anger burned because there was no way to verify it. If Armin lied so brazenly, it meant no trace remained. Thus the initiative still lay in her hands.
"Sigh, fine. I'll tell headquarters properly. First, report to me."
"Again, I didn't go anywhere."
Keira ground her teeth.
Armin had been notorious for stubbornness since joining the organization; once she clammed up, there was no way to pry her mouth open.
Then a small bird made of red light passed through the wall and flew in. It was a Telebird from headquarters.
Not only the photonic modeling skill, but a Telebird flying an incredible seventy-eight thousand kilometers to deliver information—something only a mage at the limit of information magic could achieve.
A red Telebird signified a first-class crisis.
The bird glowed scarlet and wrote letters in the air. Keira's face went pale as she decoded the cipher in real time.
"This can't be. There's no way it could be this fast…."
Armin watched the red bird extinguish like a spark and walked to the window. If this had been before going to Kazra, she'd have had the same reaction as Keira, but now she felt differently.
"I changed my mind. Let's go back, Keira. There's something we need to report to headquarters."
Keira wasn't the type to be swayed by mere whim. She guessed the incident in Kazra and the one the Telebird had brought were not unrelated.
"You know something, don't you?"
Armin kept her silence to the end.
She wanted Shirone to at least enjoy school life for a while. When the day came that everyone knew, the world would never leave him alone.
'We might meet sooner than expected, Shirone.'
One third (1)
The Kazra Kingdom closed off all diplomatic channels.
No official statements. They only relayed via hotline that control had passed to the Kashan Empire.
Allied nations grumbled, but Terraje stood firm, so no one openly pushed the issue.
It was the power of the Triarchy, and so the Kazra Kingdom drifted away from the authorities' scrutiny.
Shirone took a few days' rest and returned to the school. The advanced class curriculum was finished, but the academy's biggest event—the graduation exam—was tomorrow, and the school buzzed with intensity.
Returning to the academy meant he was no longer royalty, so classmates still treated Shirone coldly. Not as abusive as before, but distant nonetheless.
Leaving had stung at first, but compared to the humiliation he'd suffered in Kazra, it was child's play. Besides, he'd had many worries lately and couldn't spare time to care about others' thoughts.
A monster slept in his heart.
There was the sense that some massive memory had once existed—a hollowness in his mind. At first it was only a feeling. As he settled it, the outline emerged like a fossil being dug up.
Some memories were completely lost, while scenes that had left a strong impression began to come back vividly.
When the demon god forcibly expanded his mind, the pain had been unbearable.
No—had it really been pain?
At the end of the suffering there had been a bursting sense of release. The rush through rampage felt intoxicatingly euphoric, and every time magic triggered, it sent a thrilling pleasure through him.
'No. That wasn't me.'
Not me. A new being formed by the fusion of Shirone's self and the demon god. But if he followed the thread of thought further, it always concluded that it, too, was himself.
The demon god still slept deep within Shirone. And the key to unseal it remained in his hand.
'Do not open it. If I cannot control it, nothing can be mine.'
Because he had been weak, the demon god had taken the lead. To reverse the master–servant relationship, he needed an overwhelming power that would not waver in any situation.
Shirone went to the training ground. With the regular courses over, no students were around.
After doing a set of sequence exercises for about an hour, he opened his eyes calmly and concentrated photons. He performed a magical action as if holding a ball with both hands, and a photon formed between his palms.
The demon god had expanded his mind up to the point where the resilience of the Geumgangtae was about to collapse. It was not something that could have been attempted by calculation; if it hadn't been for the Geumgangtae, he would already be a ruined wreck in a corner.
Shirone was surprised by the photon's compressive force — it felt different from before.
When preparing for the Paranormal Psychoscience Research Society's presentation, he had been rebounding his mind daily to reinforce the Spirit Zone. But this time was an extreme rebound incomparable to that.
Concentrating the divine particles caused the Photon Cannon's light source to reduce until it became a white sphere with a clear edge. It looked like platinum burning in sunlight.
If he compressed further here, density would skyrocket and the spell called Amgu would be born, but it would inevitably trigger loss of control.
Shirone pressed the photon top and bottom. When he threw the flattened, disc-like photon, the flare bent sharply, split space, and returned.
He caught it, split it into two, and shaped them into shuriken. The moment he extended both arms, the shuriken stabbed through the air and, catching reverse rotation, came back.
Even after two sculptings the forms didn't collapse, so Shirone split them finer.
He fashioned eight flying blades with streamlined, birdlike bodies and crescent-wing edges, and slipped them between his fingers.
Swinging his arms in an X, the eight blades responded sensitively to air pressure and sliced the area with the sound of a grasshopper swarm. If a bird entered that radius, it would be reduced to meat juice in an instant.
Shirone gathered the slowing blades that had lost lift into his hands, four in each. Their density had significantly weakened. As he clumped the blades together like clay, the photon exploded and spread a blade-like flare. Petal-like fragments of shimmering light floated before his eyes.
"Hmm…"
By controlling the photon's luminosity, he could craft fine shapes without using the fractal cell. Function follows form, and the utility of photon-based magic now far exceeded before.
Yet Shirone's face was not satisfied.
Propping his chin and lost in thought, he sensed movement behind him. Turning, he saw Iruki and Nade standing there with their jaws dropped.
"Oh? When did you two get here?"
Nade was dumbfounded, unable to answer.
He'd expected Shirone would go straight to the training ground upon returning, but this was something else. The magic he'd just used was on an entirely different level from the Shirone of a few days ago.
"What was that just now? A new spell? What's it called?"
"It doesn't have a name. I was just trying different things. I figured out how to control the photon's luminosity. But using it like a weapon seems inefficient. I'll think about it some more."
Photon by nature is ill-suited to sculpting, so sculpted magics consume a lot of mental power. If it wasn't far superior to the Photon Cannon, there was no reason to turn it into an offensive spell.
Iruki drew a conclusion. "So the spell that made us gape like fools was just a simple experiment, then. Some trashy, throwaway magic we'll never look at again."
"…No, it's not that bad."
Iruki snorted and asked, "What exactly happened? I heard the ruling passed to Kashan, but—"