I was at the eastern end of the third floor of the dorms—right in front of the wooden door leading to Cyril’s room, but I’d never remembered the threshold seeming this bleak.
I could give it a casual knock when I was asking him for advice on assignments or having a strategy session on the Academy ranking matches. I even normally thought the glossy varnish on the door, which had been well taken care of despite being old and worn, was beautiful.
“Haah…” But that night, I just sighed when I got to his room.
It was almost the next day—even though I’d actually come back from work early.
Well, it wasn’t that I’d finished work so much as the boss ordered me to leave for the day, saying he didn’t know what’d happened but that he could see the gloom and doom all over my face. He told me to head home and hurry and get to bed. It hadn’t been a suggestion.
Once I’d gotten back to the dorms, I’d tried knocking on Cyril’s door several times but kept losing my nerve. I’d ended up just standing there in front of it for ten minutes, unable to come to a decision.
Ka-chak.
I hadn’t tried opening the door. It’d opened on its own. Cyril’s face came out from behind the door, along with the soft light of the candle lantern.
“What are you doing here so late at night, Feil? If you need something from me, just ask me to come out already.”
He gave me a dubious look, scowling, which somehow didn’t detract from the handsomeness of his features. I couldn’t look directly at him, though, and dropped my eyes as I gave him an awkward smile.
“Didn’t think you’d be awake…”
“I was woken up. You were hanging around outside my room, so I was wondering what was going on.”
“No wonder your family’s full of heroes. Ya must’ve trained hard to get that skill.”
“Cut it out, Feil. I know you didn’t come out to my room just to tease me.”
“…Well, I dunno how to put it… Had somethin’ I wanted to talk about…”
When I said that and got stuck on my words, Cyril opened his door further without a word. I thought he’d tell me to save it for the following day so he could sleep, so I felt a little relieved, but I also still felt half down in the dumps.
“Sorry,” he said. “I haven’t cleaned at all lately.”
“What have ya got to clean? If this is messy, my room’s a dump.”
“That’s because you sleep on top of your notes. At least buy yourself a desk.”
The inside of Cyril’s room was small, like any other dorm, but it was full of expensive stuff that had me feeling self-conscious. The bed, his desk, the gigantic bookshelf, the curtains, the carpet—his entire room was decked out in expensive objects that would be out of a commoner’s reach for their entire lifetime.
And it wasn’t that anything looked particularly extravagant, either. But they’d still been constructed by craftsmen sure in their technique and well taken care of by the many previous owners. Only the noble aristocrats could get their hands on antiques this high-quality.
“Take the chair,” he said, setting the lantern on his desk. He sat on his bed. “What is it? You look like you’ve gotten in trouble with someone.”
He silently watched me as I refused to budge from the room’s entrance since entering. It seemed like the late-November cold had bothered him, as he grabbed the thick cardigan folded at his bedside and put it on.
“Take the chair,” he said again.
“Uh-huh…,” I murmured as I walked over. I approached the beautiful desk made of black-brown macmiel wood but didn’t sit down.
I tried to start talking to Cyril several times, but no matter how much time passed, the words just wouldn’t come out. “Dammit…” I bit my lip.
…
It was just shy of midnight. The only things in Cyril’s room were the faint light of the candle and the silence of night.
Cyril didn’t try to get me to speak.
He just sat on the unmade bed as he stared at me with his gentle eyes and patiently waited with me.
Then after wasting who knows how much time, I finally managed to squeeze out a groan like I was a man on the verge of death. “……Would ya…lend me some money…?”
Cyril said nothing. Didn’t say yes or no—just stared at me with the same look as earlier.
He might have already guessed what was coming just from how I’d been acting—that I was going to talk about money—and also probably why, after avoiding discussions about finances all this while, I was asking for a loan.
Finally…
“Is this about the Torrenoxion?”
His calm voice slowly seemed to spread throughout the room, sinking into all the objects and almost seeming—in my eyes—to make the candle waver.
I nodded slightly and said, “I found it…in an old bookshop on Tile Street. But it’s…a lot more expensive than I ever expected…”
I hated this. My heart was going wild. I felt like I was making up a terrible excuse for my actions.
“It’s nine hundred thousand gants. Nine hundred thousand. Considerin’ the summons festival, I’ve gotta buy it now to learn the spell, but that’s not an amount I can get together right away. I couldn’t afford it even if I sold off all the spellbooks an’ textbooks I own.”
I explained why I wanted to borrow the money to the teammate—or rather the best friend—I trusted from the bottom of my heart, Cyril Ojlock.
“I asked the guy at the shop if I could rent it an’ he said it was too expensive an’ to stop with the jokes. So, Cyril, that’s why I want to ask you to let me borrow the money.”
It was like a nightmare come true… I wish I could have just rewound time to before I even got to Cyril’s room. If I knew it was going to put me through this, I wish I’d never found out about the Torrenoxion. I shouldn’t have learned about it. And I—
I was the worst.
And I wasn’t just doing this to Cyril, who I was treating as a source of money. I’d also betrayed myself up to this point—the person who’d been adamant until the previous day about never going into debt.
I grabbed the front of my own robes and dramatically inhaled and then exhaled. I really believed I wouldn’t have been able to breathe if I hadn’t.