“Yeah, ancient as it gets. It could have been made back in the days when Sorcié was founded.”
“Th-The days when Sorcié was founded? That’s really ancient, isn’t it?!”
It was so much older than I’d expected that I ended up shouting again.
“Having inspected the materials that were used, there’s a very high probability that it was created around that time. I’ve confirmed the presence of materials that are thought to have been used up since then.”
“I-Is that so? But I never imagined it could be that old. It’s hard to believe that it’s stayed in such good condition.”
If it was really as ancient as Susanna said, the fact that it had only accumulated a bit of rust seemed close to a miracle.
“I think that’s probably because the tool itself was enchanted. When I had Maria Campbell look at it closely, she told me that it had an aura of Dark Magic all its own, though it was barely detectable.”
“Is that so? So Dark Magic kept it looking as nice as this. Isn’t Dark Magic amazing?” I said in awe.
Susanna seemed to ponder this deeply.
“Indeed,” she murmured. “Though we can’t really tell whether this is the result of Dark Magic itself being amazing, or the person who enchanted it being amazing.”
“The person who enchanted it?”
“Yeah, my investigations have confirmed that the effects of Dark Magic vary according to the powers of the one who uses it. So that is another possibility.”
Dark Magic itself might not be amazing, rather the person who placed this enchantment... Oh? Moreover, though I feel like I should have reacted to this sooner, wow, Dark Magic has existed for that long?! Since the founding of the kingdom?
For some reason I’d assumed that magic had developed alongside the kingdom, with someone having invented Dark Magic much later, but perhaps it had existed all this time? What’s the deal with Dark Magic? Without thinking, I blurted out these questions, and Susanna’s first reaction was to frown.
“I’ve been wondering about those very questions myself, so I’ve conducted a number of investigations, but have failed to learn anything from them. Perhaps Dark Magic was deliberately concealed, but—though this is probably also due to the passing of time—not many documents still exist from the first few centuries that followed the kingdom’s founding. Especially anything to do with magic.”
“I-Is that so...?”
Given that the kingdom had advanced so far partly thanks to magic, why on earth weren’t there any records about it?
“In the first place, the only record we have of Sorcié’s founding is a very brief story that says people with magical powers sailed here from another continent and founded the kingdom. We don’t even know whether that’s true. Sometimes records are destroyed or rewritten by those who come after and find the facts to be inconvenient. History is just uncertain in that way.”
Oh? Is that how it is? I was impressed by what Susanna had just said.
“I’m afraid we got a bit off topic... But that’s how my investigations went, and I’m all out of ideas, so there’s no use in me holding on to it any longer. Therefore, I thought I would return it to its original owner—you, Katarina—but supposing that you don’t want it any longer, I’m happy to hold on to it. What do you want to do?”
She was talking about a magic tool, apparently created at the time of the kingdom’s founding, which had a faint aura of Dark Magic. Now that I knew more about it, it sounded a lot more like damaged goods. I looked carefully at the mirrorlike thing on the desk in front of me. It was something Jeord had bought for me when I saw it, kind of thought it looked cool, and agonized over whether to buy it myself. Considering all this, though it was a gift from Jeord, given its circumstances I didn’t think it would be rude to Jeord to let Susanna hold on to it.
Though it was thanks to this thing that I was able to save Keith, and besides—it doesn’t seem all that dangerous or evil... Does it now? Although I had no basis for this, I actually had the feeling that it was good, rather than evil. As usual, I was only working on a sort of hunch, but I found that my hunches turned out to be right surprisingly often.
“I’ll take it with me. I just feel like that’s the right thing to do,” I answered.
Susanna blinked in surprise.
“Really? Then go ahead and take it, only make sure you tell me if anything goes wrong with it. Well then, I’ve given you the thing I meant to hand over, so now we come to the matter I thought you should hear about.” Susanna paused at this moment and glanced in Jeffrey’s direction. When he saw this, he nodded.
“I’ll take over for a moment. This is actually something I’ve wanted to speak to you about for a while now,” Jeffrey explained. What he went on to talk about was the danger posed by the individual we suspected was behind the woman known as Sarah.
They were such a troublesome individual that, despite his tireless efforts, Jeffrey had still not managed to find any clues leading to their identity. He told me that this person, whose name we still didn’t know, might target me because I happened to possess a Dark Familiar. He said that he wanted me to take an appropriate degree of caution.
Though I’d been worried about the danger of Bad Ends many times in the past, I hadn’t often felt a sense of danger from any other threats. However, when Jeffrey and Susanna told me that someone whose true identity they still couldn’t discern might come after me, I felt a shiver go down my spine. Perhaps this was an even greater threat than any of the Bad Ends written into the game. I felt genuine fear for the first time in a while.
Jeffrey looked at me.
“Miss Katarina, everyone around you will do their best to protect you, but in the end, you must protect yourself. I’m hoping that you’ll think very hard about how you can protect yourself every day.”
✦ ✦ ✦
