Residing within her was a deep, vast, and rich well of power. She didn’t need anyone to tell her what this power was. She understood it very well. It was as if the power itself taught her everything she needed to know.

“Azuha, come here,” Hana called to her one and only shikigami.

Azuha flew to her and landed on her outstretched finger.

Hana fed Azuha a trickle of the power surging within her. She kept a tight rein over the flow, pouring it slowly into Azuha so as not to overwhelm the shikigami. The colors of Azuha’s wings grew more vibrant.

When Azuha reached its limit, it flew off Hana’s finger.

Hana cut off the current of power and looked at her shikigami. “Are you okay, Azuha?”

Speech should’ve been beyond Azuha, but Hana heard a voice, one that could only have belonged to the butterfly, say, “Yes, Master.” The voice sounded like a child, high and gender-neutral, and with a bit of a lisp.

Hana had attained what she had long given up on.

Inside her lay the bountiful strength of a true practitioner. More than that, she sensed that her power surpassed Hazuki’s.

Hana put her face in her hands, riding the waves of power, which were cresting within her endlessly.

What did one call the emotion washing over her? Hana didn’t have a word for it.

“Are you crying, Master?” Azuha asked.

“…No. I’m not.”

“Are you sad?”

“Sad…hmm? I’m happy, I think… No, maybe it is sadness. I don’t know what to call it.”

She had thought it was a lost cause, that her lack of ability as a practitioner was something she would never be able to change.

Being compared to Hazuki had made her sad. She had suffered, and at some point, without realizing it, she had given up on her own potential.

Who could have predicted that her latent power would awaken at a time like this? Hana herself still found it hard to believe.

But the flood surged on ceaselessly inside her, indifferent to her acceptance or denial.

The power she’d given up on was real, and it sat comfortably in her body as if it had been there all along.

She was overjoyed, but she couldn’t help thinking, Why now?

If it had only awoken earlier, she needn’t have felt such pain. Or envy. She wouldn’t have been tortured by her inferiority complex.

“Of all times, why now?” she murmured.

But the question was too little too late. Who could she take her complaints to now? She didn’t know.

“Master?” Azuha asked.

When Hana noticed how anxiously Azuha was watching her, she finally cracked a smile. “I’m all right, Azuha. More importantly, we can finally talk to each other!”

“Yes. I am happy.”

“I am, too.”

Butterflies were assumed to be inferior shikigami, but Azuha was now host to a strong power. Doubtless, the people around Hana would notice the change, unless she did something about it.

“Azuha, can you suppress your power?” she asked.

“I will try.”

Hana watched Azuha. After a few moments, the brilliant luster of the shikigami wings dimmed until she looked the same as she usually did. The power pouring from her had also ebbed.

“How is this, Master?”

“You did great. From now on, hide your power unless it’s absolutely necessary to use it,” Hana instructed.

“Won’t you tell anyone? You’ve finally unlocked all of this power.”

“I won’t. This is our little secret, Azuha.”

Azuha seemed to find it strange that Hana would try to hide her own strength, but the shikigami didn’t give the matter any more thought. If that was what her master wanted, that was what she would do. “All right,” Azuha agreed.

Hana hadn’t made the decision lightly.

Her parents would no doubt be ecstatic to learn she had obtained a power greater than even Hazuki’s and would finally praise her. All the people who had denigrated her as Hazuki’s scraps would look at her with new eyes.

But what was the point?

Their newfound interest in Hana would do nothing to undo their actions toward her up until now. She would never forget their contempt, disappointment, and jeering, nor would she forget that she had been abandoned. She had no desire to see their attitudes do a one-eighty simply because she had attained power.

Besides…Hana thought about what Hazuki went through.

Hazuki, who bore the weight of everyone’s expectations on her shoulders.

Whose schedule left her no time to breathe.

Who was under such immense pressure.

Who constantly wore the mask of an honor student and went along with what others wanted for her.

Hana, on the other hand, held a deep mistrust of their parents and relatives and refused to play their game. The days when she had yearned to be accepted had long since passed.

That was why she would remain as she was.

She would live as if she were no better than Hazuki’s scraps.

As if I’d follow the path my parents would want me to! she rebelled internally.

Her upbringing had warped her personality a bit. She swore that she would conceal her powers.

“Their meaningless expectations belong in the trash. I don’t need them,” Hana said out loud. “My goal isn’t to be a top student like Hazuki. I want to live freely, without being jerked around by anyone else’s opinions. I’ll protect my right to be myself and live the way I want to, no matter what!”

To that end, it was definitely better to keep her powers a secret.

The last thing she wanted was for those around her to change their attitudes and cling to her instead. She had less than an ounce, no, less than a fingertip’s worth of trust for her parents and family. Keeping quiet was no doubt her best option.

“Until the day I finally leave this house, I’ll behave as I always have,” Hana resolved.

She felt guilty hiding her secret from Sae and the others who had always looked after her, but she knew she had to if she wanted to continue her quiet life.

Until the day she was freed from this household.

Someday.

Chapter 2

A few years had passed after Hana’s latent powers awakened.

In the blink of an eye, she was already eighteen and a third-year high school student.

She had hidden her powers thoroughly since her fifteenth birthday. Not even Hazuki, her twin, had noticed something had changed.

Well, given how infrequently the two saw each other, perhaps that was only natural.

The true testimony to Hana’s diligence was that Sae and the other servants had never suspected anything, either, even though they often dropped by to visit her when they were free.

The servants employed by the Ichise family all possessed some ability as practitioners, even if it was only the bare minimum.

People with such limited powers that they couldn’t use them generally worked in the households of the practitioners as support. Since the existence of the pillars was highly classified information, the clans couldn’t employ ordinary people. As a result, even the servants had the skills to sense the energy practitioners wielded to create barriers.

Even so, Hana had successfully kept her secret from Sae and the other servants up until now.

In particular, Hana felt guilty for hiding her powers from Sae. Every time she saw her parents, infrequent though the meetings were, they criticized her. Sae watched those exchanges with an expression of anger tempered by sadness. It pained Hana to see Sae hurt for her sake, but nevertheless, she couldn’t tell Sae the truth. There was no telling where such a secret might leak from.

Plus, even if she hadn’t gained her powers, she had long stopped caring about what her parents said to her.

Thanks to Sae, she had burned that bridge long ago.

The thorny words her parents threw on every occasion were met by a wall of utter indifference.

However, she made sure to pretend she was attentively listening to her parents’ lectures. Her parents would say what they had to say and leave satisfied.

These last few years, she had become quite the actress if she did say so herself.

Maybe in the future, she would go into acting as a career. At least, that was her inside joke with Azuha. For the time being, it was their little secret.

Hana attended a specialty school called Obsidian High, which was dedicated to nurturing the next generation of practitioners.

She would have been perfectly happy to go to a normal high school, but since everyone in the Ichise family had gone to Obsidian High, she had been more or less forced to enroll.

As far as everyone around her was concerned, she couldn’t hold a candle to Hazuki, but she still had enough talent to summon a shikigami. Therefore, it was unthinkable that she would choose any other path.

Obsidian High ranked its students by their strength and talent level as practitioners, and classes were divided on rank as well. Class A was the cream of the crop. Class B had all the average students. Class C was the weakest of the cohort.

Since Hana had been playing the role of the failure all this time, she had been in Class C since she was a first-year. The class sorting had taken place during the opening ceremony.

Among the crestfallen students who had been shafted into Class C, Hana alone had celebrated her placement, mentally striking a victory pose. If there hadn’t been an audience, Hana would have roared in triumph.

Once her parents saw her class assignment, they left the ceremony immediately. They had already lost all hope in her. Their expectations for her were miniscule.