Interlude 4: Patrick (Part 3)
Patrick left the fortress at speed, moving out on his own.
“Yumiella... Please be okay...” he prayed.
Since hearing about the sealing instrument from Linus, he knew the situation was more dire than he’d imagined. If Lemlaesta’s secret weapon, the sealing instrument, was as powerful as the magical instrument used against the Demon Lord, Yumiella would be sealed away for several hundreds of years.
Though Yumiella herself might only experience it as a long slumber, she would be gone for much too long. Patrick wouldn’t see her for the rest of his life, and what would await her upon awakening would be a world with no one she knew still alive.
Patrick continued running, fast as he could, almost as if he were trying to leave his thoughts of a cruel future behind.
He continued onwards, moving at such speed and leaning so far down that if he didn’t maintain his momentum, he would easily topple over. With each step, he kicked up the earth.
Patrick eventually crested a small hill, and the Lemlaestan army came into view below him. He could see their entire camp. He scanned over the crowd of tents, and...there she was. At the back of the camp, standing in front of a large tent, surrounded by strange poles. However, right as Patrick found her, Yumiella was being sealed away.
“Yumiella!” He knew his voice wouldn’t reach her, but he couldn’t help but call out to her.
His fiancée didn’t visibly resist as she disappeared into the light. That light, along with the mysterious poles, quickly disappeared along with Yumiella. What appeared in their place was a large, white box. The cube, which was big enough to fit a person inside, floated in the air, turning clockwise.
“I didn’t make it in time...” Patrick mumbled. Stunned, he hung his head and stared at the ground beneath him.
She wasn’t dead—just like the Demon Lord, she would be resurrected one day. It might take several hundred years like in the Demon Lord’s case, or it could be just a few years, or even a few days. It was also possible that he could negotiate with Lemlaesta and get them to release her.
I’ll wait until she comes out, however long that is. I’ll wait until she comes out with a soft smile on her usually expressionless face, and she’ll say, “I’m home. I couldn’t go to the moon...”
It had only been a few days since he’d last seen her, but Patrick missed his fiancée so much that he couldn’t take it. As he thought of her, he lifted his head back up.
“Huh...?”
He had only been looking down for a handful of seconds. In that short moment, something had changed.
The once pure-white cube was covered in a speckled black pattern. The black spots were spreading out all over the cube; it was as if they were consuming the white surface. Several seconds later, the cube was covered in an equal number of white and black stripes. It only took an instant for most of the cube to be engulfed in black.
The cube finally turned entirely jet-black—the same color as Yumiella’s hair—before crumbling into pieces. Once it had disintegrated, not a speck of dust left over from the cube remained, and Yumiella was standing there, just as she had been before being sealed.
“Oh...” Patrick had considered the possibility that they would never see each other again, and he let out a long sigh as his body released all of its tension at once. “Can I take back all the worrying I did?” he muttered to himself.
Now that he saw she was all right, he felt that he ought to have expected this. Yumiella had a track record of making Patrick worry over what turned out to be nothing. However, it was still true that she had successfully been sealed away, even if it had only been for a moment.
“I should be grateful,” he told himself.
His gratitude towards her being all right and the anxiety of being unnecessarily worried fought for ascendancy inside him. He let out another sigh, which seemed to have become a habit of his, and he stepped forwards to make his way to Yumiella.
“Wait. Don’t go, Patrick.”
Patrick whirled around in shock. “Gilbert?!”
It was Gilbert. Compared to Patrick, usually a calm and measured person, Gilbert appeared high-strung, and he was currently glaring at the Lemlaestan army with a grim expression.
The sealing instrument that had so worried him appeared to have been neutralized. There was no longer a reason to hurry, so Patrick did as his brother asked.
“I heard you were in Lemlaesta,” Patrick said. “Something about you working with Yumiella over there.”
“Did Linus tell you that?”
“Yes, along with giving a warning about the sealing instrument.”
“Oh, so that’s what was happening,” Gilbert said with understanding dawning on his features. “She was being sealed away. I understand why the Lemlaestans moved up their schedule now.”
“You sent Yumiella over there without knowing?!” Patrick exclaimed. “Without even knowing why they expedited their plans? You surely understood that there had to be a reason behind their actions.”
“I knew that there must be a reason they were heading out sooner than expected, but... I knew it would be fine. Your fiancée wouldn’t get hurt that easily.”
“Well...” He had Patrick there.
Patrick felt angry at his brother for putting his fiancée in danger, but he couldn’t deny that the possibility was small that Lemlaesta could prepare something that would actually hurt Yumiella. The two emotions battling inside him finally decided on a winner: he felt, in the end, that he had worried unnecessarily.
Gilbert scowled to see his younger brother expending yet more of his energy in worrying about Yumiella.
“The sealing will prove an advantage to her,” Gilbert said. “Her assignment from me will be far too easy for her to complete now.”
“Assignment...” Patrick thought for a moment. “You mean her task of pretending to lose?”
“The stories of that woman have spread to Lemlaesta, and they now consider her quite the threat. I’m sure of it, now that I’ve been there.”
“I don’t appreciate you calling Yumiella ‘that woman’...”
“What’s wrong with it? Are you trying to say you care more about that woman than you do your own brother?”
Patrick’s brother and girlfriend were both important to him, and the reasons that they were important weren’t really comparable. However, Patrick knew from experience that his brother wouldn’t be satisfied with an answer like that.
Patrick had long thought his brother was strange, but he’d never imagined that it was to this degree. Gilbert’s questions brought to mind another person who liked to ask similarly ridiculous questions. Patrick knew that telling Gilbert that his behavior was reminiscent of Yumiella would only make things a bigger mess, so he kept that thought to himself.
While the brothers were talking, the situation on the ground had continued to change. The two men in white coats had now completely disappeared into the distance, and Yumiella and a pink-haired girl were facing each other.
“That dull-looking man standing in the back is the first prince of Lemlaesta,” Gilbert said, pointing him out. “Who is that woman, though...?”
“That’s...” Patrick strained his eyes to see. “Alicia Ehnleit?!”
Patrick had just now taken notice of her small figure. It now made much more sense that the Lemlaestans had been able to use the sealing instrument.
“Alicia? That one that can use light magic?” Gilbert asked. “Even that woman would have no trouble fooling such an imprudent opponent.”
“Do you really have no intention of calling Yumiella by her name?” Patrick asked, irritated. “Regardless, I’m sure Yumiella could come up with some simple excuse, like saying that the sealing instrument depleted her mana. As I’ve written in all of my letters to you, she has a sharp mind.”
“That’s true,” Gilbert admitted as he squinted at the Lemlaestan army below them. “I was also fooled by her for a while. Countess Dolkness seems to be good at feigning charm.”
Patrick had wanted to be there the first time Yumiella and Gilbert met. They were both easily misunderstood, and the idea of letting them talk on their own wasn’t even funny as a joke. However, the two had ended up meeting without his careful supervision, far away in the Royal Capital of Lemlaesta.
Patrick was sure that the pair now had the worst first impressions of each other, and he wondered what kind of conversations they’d managed to have. Hearing that Gilbert had been fooled by her, he thought it likely that there had been some kind of a communication breakdown.
“What do you mean when you say she fooled you...?” Patrick asked, hesitant.
“She had been hiding her identity. I say I was fooled, but...it was a wise decision on her part, considering she was in a foreign kingdom.”
“I see. Surely you figured it out right away.”
“Like I said, she was good at feigning charm. I just found out a short while ago. She was using the fake name ‘Eleanora.’” Gilbert narrowed his eyes in recollection. “Now that I think about it, that’s the name of the duke’s daughter.”
Patrick assumed that Yumiella must have crashed down in the neighboring kingdom after flying towards the moon, and that she had spent over twenty-four hours with his brother—they had spent all that time together, yet Gilbert only learned of her identity within the past hour or so.
Yumiella was able to act polite, but she would also politely do strange things. Even if she were to use an alias and hide her features, one would easily be able to tell she was an eccentric person after speaking to her for only a few minutes.
Patrick had always respected his brother for his sharp mind, but he now realized that Gilbert was just as dense as Yumiella. This was a hard fact to digest.
“So you gave each other fake names and believed you were total strangers...” Patrick summarized.
“Well, no. I didn’t use a fake name,” Gilbert corrected. “Think about it. How many people think of the margrave’s heir hearing the name ‘Gilbert’? The number of people who know my face are probably equal to that.”
“So Yumiella knew your name was Gilbert, and she still didn’t know who you were?”
“She didn’t seem to know... Are you saying there’s a possibility she knew my identity and was seeing how I—”
“No, that’s not possible,” Patrick interrupted. “She’s not good at subtle acting like that.”
Yumiella seemed to have been quite dense in this situation as well, even considering her usual denseness.
Yumiella’s the dense one for not realizing who Gilbert was. My brother isn’t that clumsy, Patrick told himself.
Gilbert continued to stare out towards Yumiella and Alicia in the distance, completely unaware that his younger brother’s trust in him was slowly dissolving.
“I’ve had a few conversations with that woman. If I’d known her identity, I probably couldn’t have spoken so calmly to her. If I take my assumptions and preconceptions out of consideration, when I spoke to her... Um, well... She was a bit strange, but, um...” There was a long pause. “Yumiella was a nice girl.”
“Gilbert...!” Patrick turned to his brother, realizing that it was the first time he’d said her name.
Gilbert’s usual high-strung expression was twisted into an even more intense grimace, but Patrick had seen every expression of his older brother’s since he was a young boy, and he knew that this one was Gilbert’s way of hiding his bashfulness.
For a lot of this conversation, he had been worried about how things would go, but it appeared his brother would be approving of his betrothal to Yumiella at last. Patrick let out a sigh of relief.
“Just so you know, I haven’t given my approval of your marriage!” Gilbert insisted. “If that woman can’t complete this assignment, I’m never going to approve of it, and I won’t be attending the wedding, no matter what.”
“What if Yumiella successfully loses?”
“If that happens... Well, I guess I’ll have no choice but to bless your marriage to Yumiella... Why are you laughing?”
Patrick smiled. “Nothing, it’s just like you to say that, Gilbert.”
“Of course. Also, I’ve been thinking for a while that ‘Gilbert’ is a bit too stuffy, so you should just call me ‘big brother’ like you used—”
This conversation between the cynical older brother and the straightforward younger one was abruptly cut off.
At first, they felt a colossal wave of magical energy coming from the direction of the Lemlaestan army. They both looked towards the source. Patrick didn’t even know why he bothered looking; he knew who the source was right away, but Gilbert needed some time to realize its identity.
Without thinking, Gilbert muttered, “What is that...?”
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