6
With each passing day, the north wind grew balmier, softly stirring the surface of the blue lake water. Solus’s light reflected off the ripples, transforming into complex and tiny flickers of color.
Nestled among the smooth hills outside North Centoria, Lake Norkia’s ice had just melted half a month ago, but there was already new grass sprouting along the shore, and tiny yellow flowers added some meager color to go with it.
This region was the richest in earthly fertility near the capital and offered beautiful sights in each of the four seasons, but it had been a long time—over a hundred years, in fact—since any commoners or lower nobles were even allowed near it. That was because the shores of Lake Norkia had always been part of the largest of the private lands owned by nobles: the imperial private holdings.
After the Rebellion of the Four Empires, all the private lands had been opened up, and now they were considered free land that anyone could walk across to enjoy. But with the full bloom of spring still distant, there were no other figures at the waterside except Ronie, Tiese, and their two dragons.
By the calendar of the Human Era, it was the year 382, February 24th.
The girls concluded their training session during the morning, and with the permission of their teachers, as well as that of Deusolbert, Commander Fanatio, and even the swordsman delegate, they took Tsukigake and Shimosaki out of the cathedral grounds. Kirito was disappointed that he couldn’t join them, a feeling Ronie shared, but this was not a trip for fun. They were going to test out what Stablemaster Hainag had suggested yesterday.
As Solus reached its zenith, the two juvenile dragons frolicking in the grass stopped what they were doing and trotted over to Ronie and Tiese, who were sitting on the rocks at the lakeside, and took turns trilling at them. After all their running, they were hungry.
Just in case, they packed a bit of dried meat and fruit for the dragons’ lunch on the small carriage that Tiese had nominated herself to drive here, if a bit awkwardly. But Ronie did not pull out the jerky for them.
“Tsukigake, Shimosaki, you’re going to catch your own lunch today.”
“Kyuru…?”
It wasn’t clear how much the dragons understood human speech. They craned their necks with curiosity and skepticism, which prompted Tiese to chuckle and get up off the rock.
“Here, follow me!” she said, crossing the short new grass to the water’s edge. Tsukigake and Shimosaki chased after her, their little tails wagging. Ronie quietly snuck along behind them.
Tiese came to a stop along the lake edge where white rock was exposed and peered down into the water.
“Ooh, there they are,” she murmured. Ronie came up next to her and saw many shapes swimming speedily through the clear water. It was a school of fish that had passed the winter beneath the ice. The dragons crouched and stuck their long necks between the two girls.
“Look, Tsukigake, those are fish. I bet they’re really yummy,” she whispered to the picky dragon, who looked up at her and trilled skeptically. When she tried to wriggle away backward, Ronie reached down to steady her rump with a hand and added, “If you don’t catch some fish today, you’re not getting any lunch.”
“Krruu…,” Tsukigake whined, as if to say That’s not fair! It was so comical that Ronie wanted to laugh, but this was too important. She scowled, determined to play the stern master.
While Ronie and her dragon stared each other down, Shimosaki let out a high-pitched cry, beat his wings a few times for good measure, and then leaped out over the water. He folded his wings in the air, straightened out his neck, and plunged headfirst into the lake.
The fish swimming near the bottom of the seventy-cen-deep water split in all directions. Shimosaki pursued one of them fiercely, twisting and twirling with an impressive underwater agility.
Though dragons’ bodies were specialized for flight, the natural dragon nest in the remote stretches of the western empire was found in a treacherous mountain area surrounded by a vast lake dozens of times as large as Lake Norkia. There, the wild dragons swam freely, catching fish. Tsukigake and Shimosaki, who were born at the cathedral, had only swam in the shallow pond within its walls, but they knew how to do it by instinct.
Nearly a minute later, Shimosaki burst up out of the water, beating his little wings furiously until he landed back on the shore. Before Tiese and Ronie could get out of the way, he shook himself vigorously, spraying a carpet of water from his soaking-wet down.
“Aaaah!” Ronie cried, turning her face away. She noticed something shining in Shimosaki’s mouth and looked closer. It was a trout, silver with little red flecks. While the fish had looked small at the bottom of the water, up close she could see that it was nearly twenty cens in length.
Tsukigake leaned closer to sniff at the trout flailing and flapping in her partner’s jaw. But then the successful hunter tilted his head backward and swallowed the fish whole.
“Kyurrrr!” chirped the satisfied little dragon.
Tiese just shook her head. “You went through the trouble of catching it; why not savor the flavor a little more?”
But Shimosaki just waggled his tail and jumped back into the water, as if saying this was just for starters. Tsukigake looked at the surface of the water but stopped there.
“C’mon, Tsuki, you can do it!” coaxed Ronie. The dragon bobbed her body several times, trapped between hunger and hesitation. Finally, she cried “Krruu!” and leaped into the water.
The pale-yellow figure was a bit more awkward in the lake than Shimosaki, but she was trying her best. The school of trout was quick and slippery, however, darting left and right to evade. Tsukigake was more reserved and quiet than her partner, and Ronie was starting to wonder if sending her to catch fish right away was too high a hurdle when Shimosaki suddenly turned to head off the school of trout. The fish stopped in their tracks and panicked, and that was when Tsukigake burst through the group.
The juvenile dragon shot out of the water and returned to shore, now carrying a majestic, twenty-five-cen trout in her mouth.
“Krrrrrr!” she trilled, proudly showing off her prize.
Ronie cried out, “You did it! Well done, Tsukigake!”
She gave the dragon a burst of applause, but this was the easy part. Tsukigake was leaving fish behind at the stable, so would she actually eat the trout she caught? Stablemaster Hainag had claimed that eating a fresh fish would fix being picky, but was it true?
Ronie watched her dragon nervously. Tsukigake blinked a few times, thinking it over, then stretched her neck toward her master and dropped the trout onto the grass. “Krr!”
The dragon didn’t mean to be stubborn, but Ronie couldn’t help sighing. She enjoyed catching fish but still didn’t like to eat them, then. Ronie was going to scold her, to say that she wasn’t going to get any lunch if she didn’t eat—when Tiese interrupted.
“Don’t you think she’s giving you the fish, Ronie?”
“Huh…?” She blinked, then asked the little dragon, “Is that fish for me?”
Tsukigake cried “Krrrr!” as if pleased to finally be understood.
“Oh…thank you, Tsuki,” she said, reaching out to caress her head, dotted with water droplets. She picked up the flapping, jumping fish with her other hand and smiled. “I’ll make this my lunch. But you have to eat the next one yourself.”
“Krr!” she chirped, jumping back into the water.
From there, the dragons’ improvement was undeniable. Rather than chasing the trout individually, they set one after the school, while the other came from the other direction. When the fish panicked, trapped between two predators, each dragon was able to catch their own prey.
Before the fish finally swam for deeper waters to get away, Tsukigake and Shimosaki had caught five fish each. They ate three of their catches and gave the other two to the girls. The humans seared the trout over a little campfire of dried branches; it was very simple compared to yesterday’s fantastic paper-cooked dish from the subdelegate, but because the fish was so fresh, and the dragons had caught them just for the meal, it seemed just as tasty.
As the stablemaster had said, this seemed to cure Tsukigake’s picky tendencies, while Shimosaki didn’t seem to have any problems to begin with. When they were done eating, the young dragons began to frolic around the knoll again. The yards in the cathedral were spacious, but the dragons clearly enjoyed being in the openness of nature more.
Ronie breathed in the fresh air, telling herself that she’d have to bring Tsukigake here more often.
On a nearby hill, the horses were calmly grazing where they stood tied to the trees. About ten white waterfowl formed a small flock farther out on the lake, while newly emerged butterflies fluttered from flower to flower. Still, there were no other people aside from the two apprentice knights.
“After we opened up the private lands, you’d think more people from the city would come out here to visit,” Ronie murmured.
Tiese paused drinking tea from her canteen to snort. “Oh, Ronie, you’re too used to living at the cathedral now. It’s not the day of rest today, so people aren’t going to just get up and leave the city in the middle of the day.”
“Oh…r-right.”
The children would be learning at school, and the adults would be busy with work or chores at this hour. As apprentices, once they were done with their morning training, the knights had much more freedom with their daily schedule. I need to remember not to take that for granted, she told herself.
“Oh, but from what I heard,” Tiese continued abruptly, “nobody comes out to the emperor’s holdings, even on rest days. Even though the other private estates are so popular there are lines at the gates.”
“Ohhh…,” Ronie murmured. She glanced around them again.
Norlangarth spread outward from Centoria like a fan. So the closer you were to the capital, the narrower the breadth of the land. This spot was only ten kilors out from the city, and the Everlasting Walls, which split the empires, were still clearly visible to both the east and west.
The emperor’s private holdings spanned all the land on the west side of the main road leading north out of Centoria, while the other noble lands were lined up along the east side. In other words, the imperial holdings weren’t necessarily farther away, so that wasn’t a reason to deter visitors.
Ronie looked at her friend and saw that Tiese’s nostrils were twitching just slightly—the look she got when she really wanted to say something. Despite her foreboding, Ronie went ahead and asked the question Tiese was clearly hoping to hear.
“…Why aren’t the emperor’s holdings more popular?”
Tiese cleared her throat theatrically and pointed at the far bank of Lake Norkia. “See that mansion on the other side?”
“…Yes.” Ronie nodded.
There was a bit of a forest along the far shore, with a black building spire jutting out of the middle of it. That was less of a mansion than a castle manor; it was where the emperors of Norlangarth would stay when visiting their private land. Before the rebellion, there were always about twenty soldiers and servants in residence, but now the building was entirely off-limits, and the whole lot was chained off to prevent visitors from going in.
“The emperor’s mansion, right? What about it?” she asked, seeing that Tiese’s expression had clouded over into something more ominous.
“…I hear you see things there.”
“See things? …Like what?”
“You know what I mean,” Tiese murmured, leaning closer to Ronie’s ear. “Ghosts.”
“……”
Ronie wasn’t really sure how to react to this at first. She said nothing for several seconds before finally asking, “Whose?”
Tiese’s overly serious face finally cracked. She shouted, “Aw, come on, you’re no fun! You’re supposed to get all scared!”
“Let me guess: You were preparing yourself to say that all day.”
“Of course I was! I don’t get many opportunities to spook you, Ronie,” complained Tiese.
Ronie poked her near the elbow and asked, “That’s not just a story you made up, is it? Where’d you hear about that?”
“The last day of rest…when you and Kirito were in the dark lands, I went shopping in the market in the sixth district, and the man at the bakery told me. He said that people like to go out to visit the formerly private lands now, so his hard rolls for packed lunches are selling well, but the emperor’s holdings aren’t a popular destination, and it’s because there are ghosts near the mansion, apparently.”
“Really? They believe in ghosts now…?” Ronie wondered, shaking her head.
According to the old stories she’d heard in childhood, there were ghosts wreaking havoc around the various towns and villages before the Axiom Church started. But they were all exorcised by the Church’s bishops and the Integrity Knights, and now the land was at peace, all the tales said. In all her life, Ronie had never seen anything like the spooky ghosts from the stories.
“For one thing, the actual fighting happened at the palace in the first district, and the only people who died were the emperor for not surrendering, the noble generals, and the grand chamberlain of the palace, right? Why would there be ghosts around the mansion in the holdings outside of the city?” she said, a bit faster than necessary. It surprised Tiese, who recovered and gave a small smirk.
“Wait a minute, Ronie. Are you getting a little intimidated?”
“M-me…? No, of course not!”
“Oh really? Well then…why don’t we go and check it out?”
“Huh?” She leaned away, taken aback by the suggestion. “Ch-check out…the mansion?”
“Of course,” said Tiese smugly, arching her back. “Look, if these creepy rumors are going to continue spreading, it’s going to have an effect on the Unification Council’s plans to reuse the private land, right? Apprentices or not, we’re Integrity Knights, so if we realize that something needs to be investigated, shouldn’t we be the ones to do it?”
This is verrry suspicious, Ronie thought, but on the surface, at least, her friend was correct. Instructor Deusolbert often told them that they were now knights, and they couldn’t just stand there waiting for orders all the time. Her entire afternoon was scheduled for hanging out at the lake to fix Tsukigake’s eating habits, and it was still early.
She stopped herself from sighing and looked from her friend to the southern sky. From this angle, Centoria was hidden from view by a hill, but even ten kilors away, Central Cathedral’s majestic pillar stood bright against the blue sky. Kirito and Asuna were probably in there at this very moment, waiting impatiently for the report from South Centoria’s city office. The plan was to receive the results of that investigation, which was likely to be fruitless, and then hold a massive search of the entirety of South Centoria. But if an emergency arose before Ronie and Tiese returned, the elite knight Renly was supposed to ride here on his dragon mount Kazenui and alert them.
“…All right,” Ronie said in as placid a tone as she could manage. She glanced at the dragons, who were running energetically around a nearby field. “But what about them?”
“Why don’t we take them along? Ghosts should be afraid of a sacred animal like a dragon, right? Assuming there’s actually one there.”
It was hard to tell just how seriously Tiese believed in this, but seeing that she wouldn’t relent, Ronie gave in. Only the Integrity Knights could enter a mansion locked up by order of the Axiom Church, and there weren’t going to be dangerous creatures like bears or wolves here, much less any ghosts. So it would be safe to bring the juveniles along.
“I suppose you’re right…”
“Then that settles it!” Tiese shouted, bolting upright from the rock she was using as a chair.
Ronie stood up, too. She brushed the hilt of the Moonbeam Sword hanging at her left side and said, “If it was going to come to this, you should have chosen a new sword for yourself, too.”
Her friend looked at the standard-issue Human Guardian Army sword she had and shrugged. “Mmm, I guess so, but I like this sword…It’s so familiar to me now…”
That was understandable. Ronie felt uneasy about changing to a sword that felt unfamiliar, and it was difficult to let go of an old one. She couldn’t force her friend to change.
Tiese gave her a small grin and then turned toward the dragons. “Shimosaki! Tsukigake! Come over here! We’re going to go on a little trip!”
The diminutive dragons, bursting with energy after gorging themselves on fresh fish, beat their little wings and trilled in unison.
To go from the east shore of Lake Norkia to the west, where the off-limits mansion was, they had to circle either north or south quite a ways.
The south end of the lake was a wetland, so they chose to go north instead. The ground here was dry grassland, which made it easier to walk on. Still, that meant nearly three kilors to walk around the vast lake. They were worried about the dragons’ stamina, but the creatures with the highest natural life value in the realm were perfectly fine trotting along on the hike.
After fifteen or so minutes, they reached the northern tip of the lake, where there was a river feeding into it, spanned by a firm stone footbridge. The river was a tributary of the Rul River, which started at the End Mountains on the northern edge of Norlangarth. The main part of the river followed the highway right into Centoria, where it filled the city’s aqueduct with crystal-clear water.
According to Kirito and Eugeo during their academy days, the source of the Rul was very close to Rulid Village, where they lived. When Tiese had suggested, Why didn’t you just build a little boat and ride it all the way down to Centoria? the two of them were very quiet for a long time, then admitted, “We never thought of that.”
Realistically, there would be shallows and rapids and probably a few falls along the way, so it wouldn’t be an easy trip, but Kirito and Eugeo had agreed that whenever they went back to visit Rulid, they should use this method to return to the capital. Tiese and Ronie dreamed excitedly of making that trip with them, but that was an adventure that would never happen.
They hopped from the grassy hill onto the impressive stone path and crossed the bridge. This route would take them directly to the mansion. After a while, a very large field appeared on the right. There were lines and lines of neatly arranged shrubs—probably the grape plants for making wine.
Ronie’s father, a lower noble, had said that if the vineyards in the emperor’s and high nobles’ private lands were converted over to wheat, they could provide the yearly demand of wheat for all of North Centoria, without having to ship it all down from the grain-producing lands to the north. Now that she could see their size for herself, Ronie realized he was not exaggerating.
And the emperor’s wine was chosen from only the very finest of the grapes grown on this vast number of vines, with no extra produced that the common people might actually taste. According to Hana, who had been Administrator’s personal chef, her master did not particularly fixate on fine food, so she was satisfied with the wines carried by the shops in the capital—which were still very fine, to be fair. But the emperor of Norlangarth was secretly proud that the wine he drank was finer than the pontifex’s.
“…I wonder what will happen to these vineyards?” Tiese murmured as they walked past them. Ronie considered this with a tilt of her head.
“The project to reuse the private holdings still hasn’t decided whether to leave them as vineyards or convert them to wheat fields. From what I hear, some of the serfs who lived on the land and managed the trees still want to come back and continue growing grapes.”
“But with this much space, you’d need a lot of people to manage it…I’ve heard that similar problems are happening on the private holdings of the other empires, too.”
“Yazen lived on the Sothercrois holdings. I wonder what his preference was?” Ronie questioned this time.
Tiese gave it some thought and said, “According to what Lady Asuna saw in the past-scrying art, Yazen said something like ‘I’m not a serf anymore,’ so I’m guessing he didn’t want to go back.”
“I see…that makes sense. He’d just found a new calling for himself…”
They were silent after that, walking in the warm, soft sunlight. The breeze through the abandoned vineyard ruffled the feathers of the juvenile dragons, who walked a bit ahead of the girls. The gnarled grape vines had lost all their leaves, but they would soon be sprouting bright, new green growths from every possible branch. In order to keep the vineyard functional, they would need people to start pruning the thousands of vines when that time came.
“Listen, Tiese…if there aren’t enough people to do the work…,” murmured Ronie in a daze. But she didn’t finish that thought, and when Tiese pressed her for more information with a look, she only said, “N-nothing, never mind.”
As a matter of fact, she was going to suggest, What if we move all the goblins who are suffering in the distant reaches of the Dark Territory and give them work tending to these plants?
But that would only mean replacing the serfs who’d been forced into a painful livelihood in this place with goblins, instead. It wouldn’t be forced servitude this time, of course, and there would be income that matched the amount of work involved, but in the sense that it would be bringing them here to do hard labor, it was hard not to see this as a kind of slavery.
In that case, however…
The vast majority of people in the human realm were forced to start a calling at just ten years old—and begin to work. Children who got to go to a higher school, like Ronie and Tiese, were the exception, and even for them, if they hadn’t become apprentice Integrity Knights, their only options would have been to join the army or marry someone their parents decided upon and be homemakers.
If they couldn’t choose their own future, how was that fundamentally any different from the former serfs?
Ronie came to a stop, so befuddled was she by these new questions she’d never considered before. Just then, Tiese called out, “Oh, look! I see the gate!”
She looked up with a start and saw where Tiese was pointing, farther down the path. There was a majestic iron gate that loomed tall and dark. Beyond it was a line of lush, ancient trees that absorbed the light of Solus, leaving the path beneath them darkened.
They crossed the last hundred mels quickly and stopped before the gate. In the center of the thin metal filigree was an enormous crest of Norlangarth: a symbol of a lily and a hawk. Beneath it was a wooden placard carved with the symbol of the Axiom Church. It had a simple message: ENTRY PROHIBITED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE HUMAN UNIFICATION COUNCIL.
On top of that, the double gates were locked by very tough-looking chains that extended off to the left and right, apparently around the entire forest lot. You could simply jump over the chains anywhere aside from the gate, of course, but nobody in this entire realm would attempt to do that after seeing the placard.
At their feet, Tsukigake and Shimosaki looked up at the ostentatious chains and snorted. Their masters looked at each other for a while, until Tiese finally said, “We are members of the council, right? Technically speaking?”
“…We go to the meetings every day. I think that counts?” Ronie replied, but it was really more like they observed the meetings than attended them. Still, there were times when they were given the right to speak, so they clearly weren’t total outsiders to the process.
Tiese bobbed her head. Then she made a stern face, lifted her right fist to her chest, and put her left hand on her sword hilt. “Integrity Knight Apprentice Ronie Arabel! In the name of the Human Unification Council, I permit you to pass through this gate!”
Ronie was taken aback at first, but she recovered to return the knight’s salute in acknowledgment. When Tiese lowered her hands, she said “Okay, my turn,” so Ronie repeated the formal process.
They gave the dragons permission as well, just in case, then walked about ten mels to the right, where the chain was only held up by metal supports, and they could slip through.
Instantly, the air felt colder, causing Ronie to hunch her neck. She told herself it was because they’d walked into the shade, but there was an oppressive heaviness to the air here that went beyond that simple explanation.
They walked beneath the mossy trees back to the stone path, where Ronie confirmed the point of their impromptu mission with her partner.
“Um, Tiese, we’re here to investigate the rumors of ghosts…right?”
“That’s right.”
“And that means we have to go inside?”
“That’s right,” Tiese repeated. She smirked. “Uh-oh, Ronie. Are you scared of ghosts?”
Well, now she certainly couldn’t admit it. Despite the scary stories she heard as a child threatening to come back to her mind, she said breezily, “Of course I’m not…And besides, there aren’t going to be any ghosts in this day and age.”
For some reason, Tiese’s smirk faded, but she recovered and patted Ronie on the back. “Then going inside the mansion shouldn’t be a problem for you! C’mon, let’s move!”
“F-fine, fine…”
She knew that she was passively allowing herself to be pushed onward, but Ronie went ahead with it anyway.
Over half a year had passed since this entire forest was chained off, but the ground beneath the trees was surprisingly well kept. Perhaps because the tall trees overhead were taking all of Solus’s and Terraria’s blessings, the ground weeds couldn’t grow underneath. That would explain why the air felt so fresh and alive on the other side of the lake but so gloomy and stifling here.
Tsukigake and Shimosaki had been quite happy to proceed ahead of the girls outside of the gates, but now they were trailing behind. Ronie looked over her shoulder and saw that the dragons were sniffing skeptically at the sides of the road, waving their raised tails back and forth.
“What’s wrong, Tsuki?” she called out. The dragon crooned quietly back to her. She seemed hesitant to go on, but she wasn’t stopping, either.
Dragons connected to their knights by a powerful bond were said to sacrifice their lives to protect their masters when the situation required it. As a matter of fact, at the end of the Otherworld War, Ronie had seen Kazenui swoop in to block the long spears wielded by the red knights from the real world in order to save its master, Renly.
The war was over, so even when fully grown, these dragons shouldn’t ever come across that situation. Even still, Ronie was briefly paralyzed by that terrible thought.
This trip was for the dragons’ benefit, so if the dragons were uneasy about it, there was no need to bother with the mansion. So she thought, but Tiese was not stopping. Ronie turned to face forward again and jogged to keep up with her partner.
Looking back on it, Tiese’s attitude felt like it wasn’t quite in keeping with her usual character. Her idea to investigate the mansion was delivered in a joking manner but in a strangely insistent way, and it came out of nowhere, too. Almost as if she was planning this sojourn as soon as their trip to the lake was set in stone…
“Hey…,” she said to her friend, right at the moment that the sound of the two o’clock bells came echoing from the distant south.
Tiese’s head swiveled. “We should hurry, before it gets dark. Let’s run!”
“O…okay,” Ronie agreed, without much choice in the matter, trotting after Tiese. The little dragons beat their wings and hopped along to keep up. Even for dragons, the juveniles would soon get tired and begin to lose life, so they’d have to pick a moment to stop and feed them some of the dried fruit they brought from the carriage.
The forest around the mansion didn’t seem that deep from a distance, but the path twisted and turned, so they never seemed to get through it. After nearly ten minutes of walking since the two o’clock ringing, the way ahead began to brighten, much to Ronie’s relief.
There was an opening about a hundred mels across, right in the middle of the forest, with the mansion in question sitting directly in the center of it.
The stone construction was dark gray, and the steeply angled roof was black. It was a three-story building by the look of it, and the low number of windows made it seem more like a fortress than a mansion. There were a few flower beds in the front lawn just for effect, but now they were full of dead, dried grasses, which only added to the chilly feeling.
“Is this really…the emperor’s villa…?” Ronie wondered.
Tiese pondered the question. “Well…I’ll admit, the mansions on the nobles’ private estates seem bigger than this…Oh, but look,” she said, pointing to the large doors on the front side of the building. “It’s got the crest of a lily and a hawk. Only the imperial family can use that symbol.”
“True…”
The gate at the edge of the forest had the same crest of Norlangarth on it, so this was undoubtedly the emperor’s mansion.
“…Let’s go,” Tiese murmured quietly, starting to walk toward it. Shimosaki followed her, his head drooping.
Ronie looked down at Tsukigake and asked, “Are you okay? You’re not tired?” The little dragon spread her wings and chirped as if to say Of course not!
They passed down the footpath of dead grass, through the flower beds, and reached the front doors. Behind them, the blue surface of Lake Norkia was completely hidden by the trees. What was the point of building a house by the lake if you couldn’t see the water?
There was a clanking of metal behind her, and Ronie saw that Tiese had grabbed the handles of the doors and attempted to push them open.
“…They won’t go?” she asked.
Her partner’s red hair shook. “No. I think they’re locked.”
“Well, that makes sense. So…I suppose that means there’s no one inside, right?” she asked, assuming Tiese would agree. But her partner did not let go of the handles.
“Still, a ghost doesn’t get stopped by a locked door, does it?”
“What…?”
She wasn’t expecting that rebuttal. True, the ghosts in the old stories usually didn’t have solid bodies, and she thought she remembered descriptions of them passing through walls and doors…
“But that doesn’t mean we can do it…,” she muttered.
Tiese closed her eyes, still holding on to the handles, and began to groan. “Mm…mrrmng…”
“Wh-what are you doing?”
“Mrrrmmngng!”
“Um, Tiese? Tiese!” She moved to grab her friend’s arm before she abruptly realized what was going on:
Tiese was clearly trying to mimic the Incarnate Lock-Picking trick that Kirito exhibited at the inn in South Centoria earlier.
“Come on…We can’t even use Incarnate Arms yet; there’s no way we can use it to pick a lock!” Ronie pointed out with exasperation. But Tiese’s face was resolute—perhaps even desperate—causing her friend to gasp.
She paused, hesitated, and finally squeaked, “Tiese…why are you doing this…? Is investigating some ghosts that important to you…?”
Tiese exhaled slowly and finally removed her hands from the doors. Her face stayed downcast until she finally asked, “Ronie…do you think ghosts are real?”
“Huh…?”
It was like a question from a little kid. Ronie almost chuckled and asked what had gotten into her, but she stopped herself. Tiese’s eyes were searching and serious as they stared at the ground. She was not joking in the least. Whatever the reason, her best friend was asking her in all seriousness, and she ought to respond in kind.
Ronie had never seen a ghost—at least, defined as the souls of people who died holding on to great hatred or sadness, fated to wander the earth instead of reaching the celestial realm. And the same was probably true of her mother and grandmother, who were the ones who had told her the old stories to begin with.
So were there ghosts hundreds of years ago, in the setting of those stories? She didn’t think so. For one thing, the celestial realm that the souls of the dead traveled to most likely did not exist. Outside of the Underworld was the real world, where Kirito and Asuna came from. There were no gods there, either, just more human beings who’d been fighting for thousands of years.
If there was no celestial realm, then by the stories’ logic, the world should be overflowing with the ghostly souls of the dead with nowhere to go. Since that wasn’t true, it probably meant that regardless of any hate or sadness a human soul might cling to, it still vanished in the moment of death, and no ghost ever resulted.
Ronie took a breath to prepare for her answer. But before she spoke, a vivid image flooded into her mind, and her eyes went wide.
She’d never seen a spooky ghost before.
But she had seen the glimmer of a dead person’s soul.
It was at the very end of the Otherworld War, when the man in the black cloak who was leading the red knights from the real world got into a violent clash with Kirito, who had just woken up from his long stupor.
The huge blade that the man in the cloak had wielded had been pushing down on Kirito’s sword, until it seemed like it might slice into his shoulder—when Tiese had clasped her hands together and prayed: Please, Eugeo. Help Kirito…
And as though in answer to that call, a translucent golden arm had appeared and propped up the Night-Sky Blade. With the arm’s help, Kirito had pushed back the enormous knife and won his desperate battle against the man in the black cloak. There was no doubt it was the hand of a person who no longer lived: Kirito’s friend and Tiese’s mentor, Eugeo the Elite Disciple.
“Tiese……are you……?”
All thoughts about the logic of ghosts were gone from her mind. At last, she felt like she understood why Tiese was fixated on the rumors of ghosts at the abandoned building in the woods.
She reached out to touch the back of her despondent friend—when a faint but undeniable sound caused her to flinch. Tiese’s face rose swiftly in reaction.
It was not a natural sound, but an unpleasant scraping of metal on metal. And it was undoubtedly coming from the other side of the locked doors.
Ronie brought a finger to her lips in a hushing gesture to Tiese, then carefully pressed her ear to the door.
She waited several seconds. There was nothing coming through. But the sound earlier was no illusion.
Ronie pulled away from the door to stare at Tiese, whose face was pale. Her friend whispered, “We have to get in there…”
“……”
Ronie wasn’t sure whether to agree.
Even if the ghost rumors were accurate, it was impossible to believe the ghost would just so happen to be that of Eugeo, the boy Tiese had pined for in life. Eugeo had perished on the top floor of Central Cathedral; he wouldn’t show up as a ghost in the villa on the emperor’s private land.
And if the sound had been caused by a flesh-and-blood human, rather than a ghost, it was quite possible this person was not just some innocent civilian. The only person who could go in and out of a building sealed by order of the Unification Council and the Axiom Church was someone who could resist the Taboo Index, which was the legal cudgel of the Church.
Ronie thought it best to return to the cathedral at once to report to Kirito or Fanatio, but Tiese burst into action before she could suggest it. She began running south along the mansion’s exterior, looking to circle around the back. Shimosaki followed behind her, bounding and leaping.
“Krrrr!” Tsukigake urged at Ronie’s feet. She had no choice but to follow.
The back door was bound to be locked just the same, however. Whatever it was that Tiese thought she was going to do, Ronie had to stop her from putting herself in danger. And yet, the ten-mel gap between her and her partner wasn’t closing.
After rounding two corners, they were in the backyard, where it was suddenly much darker. There were flower beds back here, too, but hardly any sunlight reached this spot, so they were taken over by bluish mosses and gray vines. The walkway was littered with broken cart wheels and rotting barrels. Now it certainly didn’t look like an emperor’s residence.
The back door that Tiese was looking for ended up being surreptitiously placed on the north side of the building. It would have been quicker for them to circle around to the north than the south, but Tiese ran even faster, hardly paying attention to such details, until she reached the door.
She grabbed the rusted doorknob and turned it, but as Ronie expected, it rattled loudly and stayed firm. Yet, Tiese put even more strength into it. Apprentice or not, her weapon-equipping authority level was nearly 40, so if she set her mind to it, she could end up destroying an ordinary door. However, this mansion had been confiscated from the imperial dynasty and now belonged to the Human Unification Council, so even in the case of an emergency, an Integrity Knight could not destroy the door without the council’s permission.
Ronie finally caught up to her partner and promptly grabbed her hand. “Don’t do this, Tiese. You’re going to break the door.”
“But…the sound inside…,” her friend replied in a high-pitched wail. Even in the dark of the shade, her skin looked very pale.
Ronie used both hands to envelop Tiese’s cold fingers and pleaded, “I heard the sound, too. It wasn’t a trick of the ears. But that’s why we have to think straight.”
Tiese’s grip on the knob weakened until it came off, at which point Ronie marched her a mel or so away from the door so they could look around the yard.
“…It might be a ghost inside the building, but it could very well be something else. If there’s a living person going in and out of the mansion, they’ll have left trace evidence of their inhabitance somewhere.”
That caused Tiese to blink a few times, clearing her eyes. She nodded, and her dazed expression regained a little clarity and life.
“Yes…you’re right. Let’s look around the area.”
Ronie gave her partner a vigorous bob of her head now that she was looking more like herself, then returned to scanning the vicinity. The gloomy backyard was more cramped than the front, but it was still a hundred mels across and thirty mels deep. There were mossy flower beds on the left and right, and in the center, a stagnant little pond that was dark green. Broken junk littered the footpath, and weeds grew everywhere. Despite the fact that it was her idea in the first place, she had no idea how to look for clues.
But surely looking around at random wasn’t going to do the job. She had to use her head and figure out which spots to investigate in particular.
“If anyone is coming through the back door…,” Ronie murmured, examining the ground in front of the door.
If the dirt was exposed, there might be footprints to find, but unfortunately, even around the back, the paths were all gray cobblestones. Unlike in the front, however, there were thin layers of moss here and there. Not thick enough to preserve footprints, but maybe there was something else…
“Tiese, can you watch the dragons for a moment?”
“Um…okay,” Tiese assented, backing away a few steps. She crouched so she could put a hand on Tsukigake’s and Shimosaki’s backs, keeping them at bay. Satisfied, Ronie held out her right hand.
“System Call, Generate Umbra Element.”
Her command produced shining-purplish light that wreathed a tiny black sphere, like a hole poked into empty space. This was a dark element, the most difficult of the eight elements to control.
As opposed to a light element, this possessed a kind of negative energy and, if released, would suck in nearby objects before it vanished. Water and air were one thing, but if any objects or people touched it, the results could be disastrous. But there were ways to utilize this property that were completely impossible with any other element.
“Form Element, Mist Shape,” Ronie continued, and the dark element silently spread out until it formed a little purple fog cloud. It could be combined with a wind element’s vortex and hurled at enemies as an attack, but that wasn’t the point right now.
She used both hands to widen the mist into a thin, flat shape, then whispered, “Discharge.”
The purple curtain spread out in front of her. This mist had the ability to draw sacred power into itself, react to it, and vanish. If combined with a whirlwind, the blades of wind would tear the enemy’s skin, and the dark mist would cling to the wound, sucking out blood, which was the source of sacred power.
Humans and animals weren’t the only things that possessed sacred power, of course—so did plants, even the kind of moss that would cling to cobblestones. They had just a tiny amount, but if trod upon to the point of damage, they would release a trace of sacred power into the air.
The mist was unleashed in the shape of a purple belt, branching apart finely like an actual plant as it sucked along the ground with an eerie glow. The formation it made was undoubtedly that of a human footprint. And based on the way it was glowing, the moss had been very freshly stepped on.
The prints led away from the back door of the mansion to the north, vanishing into the woods surrounding the rear yard.
“That way, Tiese!” Ronie hissed, beginning to run along the fading light of the steps as they proceeded away.
She turned left at the north end of the backyard and caught sight of a little path that opened through the thick woods, almost like the mouth of a cave. The undergrowth was cut away and the branches broken off, so this was clearly human work. There was a series of glowing purple footsteps belonging to someone heading down the path.
Ronie stopped at the entrance to the path and waited for Tiese to catch up. “Be careful,” she whispered. “We might run into whoever owns these tracks.”
“Got it,” her partner replied.
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