“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I have come here at the request of Nettesheim, leader of the Society. My name is Yakagi Suimei.”
“I’m Edgar Alzbayne. From what I hear, I’ve put quite the burden on you.”
“Hardly.”
Suimei bowed once more, and perhaps finding something amusing about this, Edgar’s stiff, eccentric expression crumbled ever so slightly.
“Now, as for introductions, the young lady who showed you here is one of my daughters...”
“My name is Annaliese. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Oh, uh, nice to meet you.”
Suimei turned around to reply to Annaliese, and as he turned back towards Edgar, a frame on the wall caught his eye. It held a monochrome picture of several people, but the face of the man in the middle was blacked out. Suimei couldn’t see who it was, even though everyone else in the picture was clearly visible. He stared at the picture in puzzlement for a moment before seeming to realize who the blacked-out face belonged to. Seeing this, Edgar spoke up in disappointment.
“Seeing his picture nowadays would make anybody scowl.”
“So that really is...?”
Suimei looked to Edgar, who silently nodded. Suimei then glanced back at the picture. Indeed, in the center of it was one of the most notorious figures of all history. It was because of him that raising one’s right hand the wrong way was illegal here in Germany.
The fact that Edgar had his picture on the wall, and his disappointment at his mention, seemed to indicate a personal connection. Suimei questioned Edgar with a raised eyebrow, to which he nodded.
“Meister, what kind of person was he?”
“What kind of person...? I can’t really give a clear answer to that.”
Suimei furrowed his brow at this answer. Edgar then looked up at the picture as if reminiscing about the past, and fluently explained himself.
“Wolf sometimes had quite a complex, like he was searching for his own path... But just when you started to think that about him, he was brimming with the confidence to guide others who seemed to be lost. Even I don’t know whether he switched back and forth between the two, or whether he simply changed over time. It was entirely possible that he was always searching for who he was himself. But I admit that I was as enchanted with him as everyone else was at the time.”
Edgar spoke almost nostalgically about the man in question, who was indeed said to have enchanted many. He seized the hearts of the people with his grand speeches and gained many allies that way. However, after coming into political power, he used his charisma for ill and brought misery to the world. It was such a terrible time that the scars of it were still fresh, even seventy years later.
“Were you a comrade of his?” Suimei asked.
“That’s right,” Edgar acknowledged.
“Until the end, or...?”
“No, we parted ways before that. In the end, he was unable to oppose the professor’s spell. That’s why I had no choice but to leave.”
“...”
During the Second World War, there were multiple stages where magicians fought each other behind the scenes. Of them, it was said that the battles in Germany, Italy, England, Russia, Hong Kong, and Manchuria were the fiercest. The man sitting before Suimei now had likely been caught in that maelstrom of fighting.
Edgar flung the Reichsmark coin that he’d been playing with in his hand over to his desk as if to say that was enough talk of his past. As it finished spinning around and came to a stop, he cut to the chase.
“I heard that someone tied to me by fate would be coming, but I never expected you to be that man’s son. You look just like Kazamitsu did when he was young.”
“You knew my father?”
“I was harassed by him two or three times when he was a child.”
Edgar’s mouth curled in amusement. Suimei had heard that his father was quite the rascal when he was his age, and this seemed to have something to do with that.
“I’m sorry to hear about Kazamitsu. You have my condolences.”
“Thank you.”
“Honestly, it’s almost hard to hear you be so courteous when you’re his spitting image.”
“You’ll... simply have to get used to it.”
“That’s more like it.”
Edgar flashed a bold smile, and Suimei took the opportunity to ask about what had been bothering him all the way here.
“Meister, I’ve heard from our leader that you are an old friend of his.”
“So Lord Nettesheim is still saying things like that...” Edgar replied with a sigh.
That was about the answer Suimei had expected. It seemed Edgar wasn’t a personal friend of Nettesheim’s after all. Considering how old Nettesheim was and when Edgar had risen to prominence, it didn’t add up anyway.
“So, Suimei, did Lord Nettesheim tell you why he sent you here?”
“He only told me to come pick up an assistant.”
“Well, that’s one way of putting it.”
Edgar nodded, seemingly having expected this. The matter of “picking up” an assistant, however, was the other thing Suimei had puzzled over on his way here... So why did Edgar seem so unsurprised at the phrasing? The furrow in Suimei’s brow grew deeper.
“You look like you don’t understand what’s happening here.”
“I can’t say that I do. There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense to me.”
“It certainly isn’t something that Lord Nettesheim would normally say. Long ago, when I was about your age, I showed Lord Nettesheim the first doll I created. Which was far inferior to the children we make these days, mind you.” Edgar paused and looked up at the ceiling before continuing, “But at the time, Lord Nettesheim... Well, his attitude was as gentle as always, but he treated it like an object. Back then, just like now, my goal was to create a living doll. So that was quite vexing to me.”
“He said something like that...?”
Nettesheim had denounced the handiwork of the famous Doll Master as a mere object—an insult beyond any sense of strictness.
“Thinking back on it, that was a reprimand from Lord Nettesheim. I ran away from my mentor to his side. It was nothing but arrogance on my part. At the time, I thought I could dominate all within my grasp. So his choice of words here is a reminder of that time—both an instruction and warning from Lord Nettesheim to judge myself at all times and to put my heart into it,” Edgar said with a smile, seemingly pleased at the message. “Now, we’ve gotten off track.”
“Oh, certainly not. This has been most interesting,” Suimei replied politely. “However, you mentioned children earlier. Does that mean...”
“Yes. I am also a resident of this estate,” Annaliese answered with an elegant curtsy.
In other words, she too was one of Edgar’s creations. However, that being the case, there had to be a source of mana to power her. Dolls weren’t capable of moving on their own, yet this girl seemed to be moving without a puppeteer to manipulate her. The only thing Suimei could think of was that she’d been charged with mysticism at the time of her creation, making her capable of generating mana on her own even without a caster. This girl must be a standalone doll, and Suimei’s eyes sparkled with awe and respect upon arriving at that answer.
“My wife and I consider pretty much all the dolls of this estate our children.”
Edgar glanced over toward his desk, on top of which sat a picture of a young man and woman. The man looked like a more youthful Edgar, while the woman had features that resembled Annaliese’s.
“My wife was unable to bear children, you see. This was the only way we could leave something behind.”
“So the assistant you’re sending to the Society is...”
“One of my daughters, yes.”
There, Annaliese put her hand to her cheek in a troubled manner.
“But she was raised to be the most selfish of us all. I wonder if it’s because she’s the youngest...?” she mused.
“She’s still young. Everyone starts life that way. She’ll be learning from now on,” Edgar clarified.
“So this daughter... She isn’t independent as a magician yet?” Suimei asked.
“That’s right. And so you’ve been selected to provide her with guidance while she serves as your assistant,” Edgar explained.