The sun looked ever so yellow.
This was not because Seiichirou was not on planet Earth. In other words, it meant the other thing—the sun looking brighter after a long bout of nightly activities.
They’d been up all night. No, even until the morning. As Seiichirou lay numb, the view outside the window looked dull and colorless. Well, given that most of Egorova was gray, maybe this was just normal?
While Seiichirou was occupied with his hazy thoughts, Aresh returned to bed with a glass of water in hand.
“What are you zoning out for?” The knight commander looked confused, a testament to the vast physical difference between him and a sickly white-collar worker. For all the healing spells and efforts to get Seiichirou’s body accustomed to magic, he was still no macho man at his core.
The magically gifted knight commander had used a spell to make the soiled sheets spotless. While he was at it, he’d cleaned up Seiichirou’s body. Understandably, it would have been awkward for them to take an intimate bath together while in a foreign country, which was what they would have done had they been at Aresh’s mansion.
“Want some?” As Aresh extended the glass of water to Seiichirou, Seiichirou noticed the gleaming silver ring on Aresh’s left ring finger.
He accepted the glass bashfully, wondering why he was getting embarrassed now after everything that had happened.
“The size…doesn’t quite fit you. We’ll have to get it adjusted when we get back.”
He hadn’t measured Aresh’s finger, and so the ring looked a little loose on him. Although this was better than it not fitting at all, it was still something of a letdown.
“You can do that?”
“There’s a craftsman Sigma knows. Let’s go see him together next time. Oh, but I suppose that wearing a ring will hinder your work as a knight,” said Seiichirou, musing that a ring would get in the way of swinging a sword.
Aresh frowned sullenly. “Are you telling me to take it off?”
“If it’s a hindrance, yes? How about wearing it around your neck when you’re in training or battle?” Seiichirou said. He’d gotten a simple silver ring thinking that it wouldn’t get in the way, but then again, any accessory could be a hindrance.
Aresh wasn’t having it, though. “No. I won’t take it off.”
“Well, do what you like.” Then Seiichirou muttered what he really thought: “Just please don’t lose it.”
“I would never!” Aresh was quick to respond.
This was all getting very cheesy, but when Aresh brought his face close, Seiichirou didn’t complain. He turned his head in Aresh’s direction and closed his eyes…
Bang bang bang bang!
“Is Kondo here?!”
A furious knocking sound rang out—it sounded almost as if someone was trying to batter the door in. Seiichirou almost dropped his glass of water.
“What?” Aresh was very disgruntled.
“That sounds like Ist!” Seiichirou knew that he had to stop the noise.
“Oh! Kondo! Hey, hey, I found this cool thing! Let me show you!”
“Hold it! Just wait for a moment!”
Ist was yanking at the locked door. Seiichirou mollified the pouting Aresh as he hurriedly dragged his overtaxed body out of the bed and got dressed.
“Uh… Sorry for making you wait.”
A few minutes later, Seiichirou opened the door to find Ist with a bundle of papers in his arms. He was wearing the same clothes as the day before, which were now slightly disheveled. Behind him stood Lufina and Sigma, as well as Lufina’s knight and maid.
“Yep, you sure did!” This was quite a thing to say to someone after ambushing their room early in the morning. Seiichirou could see the knight and maid grimace, but this was just par for the course with Ist.
The sorcerer strode right into the room and spread out his papers without even pausing to ask for permission. Seiichirou looked highly displeased, but his expression changed somewhat when he saw the magic circles drawn on the pages.
“I was looking around the Egorovan Sorcery Department yesterday,” said Ist, “and it turns out that they’ve got a slightly different way of writing compared to Romany. In Romany, you list out the external effects of a spell, but here they take the spell’s entire composition into account. Look!”
Which was all well and good of him to say, but since Seiichirou couldn’t read the words, he couldn’t make head or tail of what he was looking at.
“Incredible, right?!” Ist grinned.
“Is it?” was all Seiichirou could say.
“Yeah! I mean, check out this magic circle! This line represents ‘fire resistance,’ and this one indicates ‘wind’ and ‘flow’! And the positioning says that there’s a half-second time lag after activation.”
“Sorry, I don’t understand the jargon. Could you explain the significance of this, please?”
Seiichirou was always telling Ist to get to the point. He needed a proper breakdown of the results and expected costs before he could organize a budget. Unfortunately, getting Ist to submit lists and reports was too much to ask, so Seiichirou heard him out verbally. Because of this, Ist had developed a habit of telling Seiichirou every little thing.
“Okay, so if we combine the ancient magic formula with that magic tool I mentioned to you earlier, we can send you back to your original world!”
First thing in the morning, Ist dropped a live grenade with a carefree smile.
“I can…go back to my old world?” It was what Seiichirou had been searching for ever since he was kidnapped…er, summoned to this world.
He’d gotten distracted by other things along the way, but it was still the reason why he had worked to make the Holy Maiden obsolete, pushed for magic research, and set up an education system for recruiting potential workers. The collaboration agreement with Egorova would expedite the process even further by securing a reliable supply of magic stones as a power source.
It was everything that he’d worked for, yet Seiichirou still froze when he heard Ist’s incredible announcement.
But this was Ist he was speaking to. As far as the sorcerer was concerned, Seiichirou’s reaction was irrelevant.
“We’d managed to decipher the magic circles of ancient magic in Romany literature,” Ist went on as he unfurled more papers, “but when I realized that Egorova has a different way of drawing magic circles, it made me look back at that ancient spell. You see, I always thought it had a line for tracking someone with the Holy Maiden’s power, but if you combine it with this composition here and take the spatial coordinates into account, then instead of tracking—”
“Wait.” Aresh physically stopped Ist’s rapid-fire lecture. By covering his mouth.
This was the same thing Orjef had done, which made Seiichirou reflect vaguely that knights sure were handy to have around. Between the bombshell reveal, the jargon, and all the activity from the night before, his head still wasn’t quite working the way it should.
“You didn’t show Egorova the ancient magic circles, did you?” Aresh demanded.
The spell to summon a Holy Maiden from another world was still a state secret. Although Romany had agreed to work with Egorova, they weren’t meant to disclose the spell yet.
“Oh, don’t worry, it’s fine! Ist has the entire circle memorized, so he didn’t show anyone the texts! He’s not even carrying them with him!” Sigma rushed to Ist’s aid.
Relieved, Aresh relaxed. Not missing his chance, Ist slipped out of Aresh’s grasp and grabbed the papers.