Story 2:
Thirty-Four Years Old
I WOKE UP. I had the feeling I’d had a strange dream. Like, a happy dream. Sylphie and Roxy were there. Eris wasn’t, but there was a child who looked just like her. The dream was hazy, but I remembered it perfectly. In the dream, I died. Somehow, I knew that I’d never wake up again after that dream. But I didn’t feel bad. It was actually my second time dying, and it was far better than the first.
“Huh?” I realized a girl was holding my hand and standing stock-still. She had blue hair tied back in a single ponytail. She held my hand in her right and a bracelet in her left, and had a look on her face like a deer in headlights.
“…I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. She must have been taught to apologize when she did something wrong.
“Did you want it?”
“…No. My big sister said there was a super amazing crest hidden under your bracelet, Dad.”
“Did she now?”
There was no hidden crest. I wasn’t the chosen one, after all.
But looking past the girl holding the bracelet, I saw a brush resting on the bedside table. That definitely hadn’t been there before I fell asleep.
“Were you going to draw it?”
“…I’m sorry.”
She was driven enough to try and turn a lie into reality. Should I praise her, or scold her? Okay, no, this was a scolding situation. It’s a father’s responsibility to educate his daughter, so… Yeah.
“Lara, you mustn’t tell lies. Go say sorry to your sister.”
“Okay…”
I patted her on the head, and she left the room, dejected. After she left, I caught sight of a big ball of white fur. Leo must have been keeping watch outside the door. I was about to put the bracelet back on, but then the brush caught my eye. I used it to paint the Migurd crest on my arm, then got out of bed.
“Oof, that’s a nasty headache… I drank too much.”
I cradled my head in my hands. Maybe it was the party the previous night, or maybe it was the dream I’d just had, but it hurt like hell.
✦ ✦ ✦
Ten years had passed since the battle in the Biheiril Kingdom. This year, I would be thirty-four. These ten years had been peaceful thanks to the absence of the Man-God. After that battle, it really had just stopped. I hadn’t seen so much of a pixel of him for a few years now. Not that I had let my guard down! While constantly on the lookout for suspicious attacks, I went on preparing to confront Laplace, just as I had before. Things went much more smoothly without the Man-God sticking his nose in.
In the first five years, I finished contacting all the nations of the world. Some of them were nonstarters, but by and large, they all pledged to work with us to prepare for the coming war with Laplace.
Now, I was working on research and teaching unvoiced magic at the Magic University in the Asuran Kingdom while also leading the militaries of the world to develop counter-strategies to Laplace’s most likely moves.
For that work, I put away the name Rudeus and started to work under the name “Silent Sevenstar.” The theory Nanahoshi had once put forward might be accurate or it might not be, but she’d said, “I want you to make my name a clue, just in case a friend from our old world ever comes here.” I took her words to heart and spread her name around. I was also giving her quite a reputation, but so what? No harm, no foul. For the time being, awareness was the priority, and a person from another world would surely understand the meaning behind what I’d tried to do in her name.
Lately, I’d been researching possible ways to improve Orsted’s mana recovery rate. I’d managed to create a potion that restored mana, but for some reason it didn’t work on Orsted. Possibly human mana and dragon mana were different? It might have been something else. I was going to press on with the research a little longer, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I was going down a dead end. The potion had been a smash hit in its own way, so it hadn’t been entirely for nothing. There were lots of other things I still needed to do, besides. I couldn’t rest yet.
My children had grown up. Lucie was seventeen. Lara was fifteen, and Arus was thirteen. Sieg was…eleven, I think? They were all thriving. We’d also had two more children: Lily Greyrat, with Roxy, and Christina Greyrat, with Eris. Both girls. With six children, we were a big family. When Lucie turned seven we had a family meeting to roughly decide our education policy for her: things like sending her to the magic university from the age of seven, then scheduling her coming-of-age ceremony for after graduation, and then having her attend the national university in Asura for three years. My personal philosophy was that it was better not to drive your children too hard. Still, I thought we ought to decide where they’d be educated and provide some guideposts for the path they ought to take.
It was Ariel’s express wish that I send my children to the Asuran National University. I owed her a massive debt. If she’d said, “Give one to me as a husband so that we can be joined as blood relatives!” I would have refused—duh—but a little thing like asking me to send my kids to her university? I could hardly refuse that. I wanted to gradually pay down my debt to her.
Ariel, by the by, had a baby of her own after the Biheiril Kingdom Battle. She hadn’t married the father so as not to give him too much power. Apparently, she kept a sizable harem of men. Ariel had five children now, but it wasn’t clear who had fathered four of them…or so Luke had told me, pale-faced and cradling his head in his hands. At the time, I’d wondered how he’d worked out who one of them was. Now that I think of it, it’s possible he himself was the one he knew about.
Ariel was reportedly scheming to pair up one of my children with one of those five. I didn’t much like the idea of my children being used as political pawns, but once they were of age, if they were both okay with the match, I’d permit it.
My children were still young, but I knew that with each passing year, they’d grow up. Lucie in particular was already a proper adult with a mind of her own. Not that the grown-ups around her had matured all that much; I honestly couldn’t tell if I’d changed. Whenever I thought I’d improved some bad trait, another one would crop up. Sometimes the bad traits I’d fixed relapsed, too. It felt like I was just making the same mistakes over and over as the years ticked away. The only real visible sign of my growth was how my face aged with the passing years. I’d even gotten a few laugh lines. Sylphie told me, “I like that about you as well,” but it made me feel sort of guilty when she still looked young. You could tell she was aging, but the changes were slight considering we were the same age. That meant she’d be thirty-four this year, but she still looked around twenty. Her skin glowed with youth and even though she’d had two children, her butt was still tight, and she felt as good to hold as ever.
The only thing was, on the inside, she’d totally turned into…uh, a mom, so she’d started to nag me a lot. Roxy never changed. She looked the same and acted pretty much the same too. She’d get mad if I told her that, but I meant it as praise. She was still my master, as always, so whenever I did something wrong she corrected me. Her clumsiness never lessened over the years, but she always picked herself up again. Failure is a wonderful teacher, as they say.
Going by looks, Eris had changed the most. Like me, she looked her age. Only, maybe because she didn’t skip a day of training, she looked way younger than me. She still had the skin of a woman in her late twenties. Having a second child seemed to have mellowed her out a bit, but she still pounced on me from time to time. She’d hardly changed at all on the inside—the opposite of Sylphie—but I did feel like she’d gotten less violent since she’d started teaching sword fighting to the kids. She’d learned to grin and bear it when her temper flared. She still punched me if I touched her butt or her breasts without permission, but that was only natural.
Lilia and Zenith looked older. They were both still healthy, but Lilia, maybe because her leg had always given her trouble, had started getting back pain and stiff shoulders. Healing magic would make it go away, but give it three months, and it would come back. A perfect cure seemed like it would be challenging to develop.
Everyone else was aging well alongside us. Zanoba and Cliff were old dudes now, both busy with their jobs and their families. They were there for one another when they got into binds.
Norn and Aisha had both gotten married and moved out. Their partners were both a little…complicated, as people, but then, I’d had a good talk with both of them and been convinced they were worthy, so it wasn’t my place to comment on it now.
I was really turning thirty-four years old. It was an age that had some significance for me.