A Colleague Arrives and Acts Unreasonably

…Squish, squish.

Monica awoke to a soft sensation against her cheek. She’d fallen asleep on her desk, pen still in her hand.

She sluggishly raised her gaze to find herself staring into the golden eyes of a black cat.

The cat had been pushing on her cheek with his paw, and once he realized she’d woken up, his eyes narrowed into a satisfied, humanlike grin.

“Hey, Monica. It’s morning. Can’t sleep forever. What? Are you not going to wake up unless a prince kisses you? Princess?”

Unfazed by the talking cat, Monica rubbed her eyes and sat upright.

The black cat was her familiar. Not only could he understand human speech, he could even read. In fact, he was a much more avid reader than she was, taking any free moment he had to do so, nimbly flipping through the pages with his front paws. In particular, he enjoyed adventure novels, and he’d likely gotten the idea of a prince’s kiss from one of those.

“…Ugh. Hello, Nero. Is it morning already? …I’m going to go wash my face…”

Monica downed the rest of the cold coffee in her mug, then stood up. Turning her back to Nero, the black cat, she opened the front door and felt a cool breeze tickle her cheeks—a sign of summer’s end.

The rickety little house where Monica lived stood on a mountain in the Kingdom of Ridill. There were no other dwellings nearby, and she was more than an hour’s walk from the nearest village.

Monica circled behind the house and drew water from the well, a great effort considering her small frame. Recently, great strides had been made in water transportation technology. Pipes had proliferated—not only in major cities but in smaller villages in the area, too. But naturally, none ran to her little hut on the side of the mountain.

Having grown up in the city, she’d found mountain life inconvenient at first. Now, however, she was perfectly accustomed to life in her little house. Best of all, the area was quiet and secluded.

After filling a pail with drinking water, she collected some clothing she’d hung out on a pole to dry and went back inside. Then, as though just remembering, she looked at her reflection in the large mirror in the corner of the room.

An acquaintance had all but forced the mirror on Monica, telling her to put a little more care into her appearance. The mirror itself was very fine and looked out of place in the rickety surroundings.

Its elegant glass reflected a skinny girl with frizzy hair wrapped in a worn-out robe. Though she would be turning seventeen this year, her seedy frame was much paler than it should have been at her age—it was almost the color of a corpse. Her light-brown hair, which she’d haphazardly parted into a pair of braids, was dry and lacked shine, looking even rougher than a bundle of hay. Two round eyes, each framed by dark circles, peeked out from under her bangs, which she’d let grow and grow.

To tell the truth, she looked terrible. She was in no state to be seen by anyone else, but because she spent her time cooped up in a shack in the mountains, such things hardly mattered to her.

Oh, she thought, but I think today is when my monthly shipment arrives…

Monica was extremely shy and found it difficult to buy things in stores. Instead, she’d asked the people of the village at the foot of the mountain to deliver food to her.

For a moment, she wavered, wondering if she should re-braid her hair after all. No sooner had she thought this than there was a knock at the door.

“Monica? Your food is here!”

The lively female voice gave Monica a start. She pulled her robe’s hood down over her eyes.

In the meantime, Nero jumped nimbly up onto a shelf. “A guest? Guess it’s time for me to pretend to be a cat, huh? Meow.”

“Y-yeah.” Nodding to Nero, Monica nervously opened the door.

A wagon was parked outside her house, and next to it stood a girl of about ten. She was a spirited girl, with olive-brown hair tied behind her neck. Her name was Annie, and she was from the nearby village. Usually, it was her job to deliver things to Monica.

Monica peeked from behind the door and, trembling, called out a shaky, “H-hello.”

Annie was used to Monica’s habits by now, and she pushed her aside, threw the door open, and began lifting the bundles of food.

“I’ll bring everything in,” said Annie. “Can you hold the door?”

“O-okay…” Monica nodded nervously as Annie skillfully ferried in the goods.

Monica’s home had few pieces of furniture, but books and stacks of papers littered the tables and floor, leaving little room to walk. Her bed, of course, had long since been buried under even more papers and books. She couldn’t even lay down on it. That was why she had lately taken to falling asleep in her chair.

“It’s always so messy in here! Are these papers important? Can I throw them out?” asked Annie, suspiciously eyeing the sheaves of paper dominating the floor.

“They—they’re all important!”

“Hey, are these formulas? What are you calculating?”

Annie could read, and since she was a craftsperson’s daughter, she was also good with numbers. She was only a little over ten years old, but she was smarter than most of the other children her age. But even for her, the rows and columns of numbers on these papers were all but indecipherable.

Monica looked down. Without making eye contact, she answered, “Um, those are…calculations for the, um, orbits of the planets…”

“Oh. What are these ones? Look at all the plant names.”

“…Um, those are… I calculated the ratios of plant fertilizers and put them in a table…”

“Then what are these? They kind of look like magical symbols.”

“…That’s, um, a trial calculation of a new compound magical formula that a professor at Minerva’s proposed…” Monica played with the sleeve of her baggy robe as she quietly answered the questions.

Annie’s catlike eyes widened. “A magical formula? You can use magecraft, Monica?”

“…I, um, well… Th-that is…,” stammered Monica, her eyes drifting left and right.

Nero, who had been pretending to sleep on the shelf, meowed as if to say, Whoa, are you okay there?

Monica continued to fiddle with her fingers until Annie eventually gave a light shrug and laughed. “Ha-ha. Of course that’s impossible. If you could use magecraft, you’d be working in the capital! Not living like a recluse up here in the mountains.”

Magecraft was a means by which one used mana to create miracles. Its techniques had originally been secrets closely guarded by the noble class, but in recent years, commoners had been given more opportunities to study it.

But there were still limitations—one needed significant wealth or talent to enroll in an institution for studying magecraft. For a commoner, becoming a mage was a life-defining success.

If you became a high mage, you might be retained by a noble family, or you could find employment in the Magic Corps, whose members were essentially celebrities.

There was no way Monica, living out here in the mountains, could be a mage—Annie’s remark made perfect sense.

“Oh, Monica! Did you hear? Just three months ago, there was a dragonraid near the eastern border.”

Monica’s shoulders sprang up beneath her robe, and Nero, who had been feigning sleep on the shelf, cracked one eye open. His tail hung down lazily, swaying like the pendulum of a clock.

“I heard some really big pterodragons formed a horde and appeared in a human village! There were more than twenty of them!”

Pterodragons, as their name implied, were dragons with wings. They had lower intelligence and were less fearsome than other dragons but were extremely difficult to deal with in groups. They mostly went after livestock, but starved pterodragons attacking people had become more common in recent years.

“Oh! Oh, and, and! The one leading the pterodragons! It was a legendary black dragon! The infamous Black Dragon of Worgan!”

Dragons whose names specified their color, such as black dragons and red dragons, were of higher rank and seen as a particular threat.

Of those, the black dragon was said to be the most dangerous. The unique flames they breathed—blackflames—were flames of anathema. They could mercilessly incinerate even the defensive barriers of high mages. A single attack by a black dragon could easily reduce a kingdom to ashes. Indeed, they were a creature of calamity on an epic scale.

“And! And the Dragon Knights went to slay it, but one of the Seven Sages was with them! Wait, do you know who the Seven Sages are? They’re the best mages in the kingdom. Really amazing, you know?”

“Ah, um, I see…”

“The youngest is called the Silent Witch! And they say she beat the black dragon all by herself and took down all the pterodragons!”

In countryside villages, these sorts of stories were a precious form of entertainment. Annie’s eyes were practically sparkling…but Monica’s certainly weren’t.

“They say the Silent Witch is the only one in the whole world who can use magecraft without chanting! So magic always needs a chant, right? But not for the Silent Witch! Even without one, she can use powerful magic like boom, boom, boom!”

Monica pressed a hand to her stomach in silence. It hurt like it was being squeezed in a vise. Despite the pleasant summer morning, she’d broken out in a full-body sweat.

“I, um, I s-see…,” stammered Monica.

Annie put her hands on her cheeks as if enraptured and said, “Oh, I want to meet a real Sage one day! Just once!”

Sevens Sages aside, people out here seldom even saw middle-ranking mages or below. That was probably why Annie found them so fascinating.

Still holding her stinging stomach, Monica took a few silver coins from a leather pouch on the cupboard. It would cover the food she’d had delivered, as well as Annie’s tip.

“H-here…,” she mumbled, placing the silver coins in Annie’s hands and closing her fingers around them. “Thanks, um, for always doing this.”

Annie counted the coins, then tilted her head. “I know I ask all the time, but is it really okay to have all this? It’s almost twice what the food is worth.”

“Y-you delivered it to me, so, um… You can, well, have the rest as pocket money.”

Any normal kid would have jumped for joy and tucked the coins away in their pocket, but Annie was a smart girl. She knew the reward went well beyond the work she’d done, and she looked at Monica questioningly. “Hey, what do you do for work, Monica?”

“I, um… Calculations?”

“Are you a math professor?”

“I guess…something…like that. Yeah…”

The documents she had gathered in the house had no real unifying theme. Aside from stellar orbits and fertilizer distributions, they included population totals, tax revenues, shifts in product sales, and various other papers covered in numbers. They lay about the floor in a mishmash that at first appeared like chaos but which conformed to an order and logic only Monica could follow.

Annie seemed decently satisfied with the math-professor explanation.

“Hmm. Then that means the person who came to our village yesterday must be a math professor, too.”

“…Huh?”

“He said he was your colleague and wanted to visit you, so I told him the way. He should be here soon.”

A colleague. That word was all it took to drain the color from Monica’s face.

Trembling terribly inside her baggy robe, she stammered out a question. “Th-that, that person, um, what, er, what kind of, um, person…was he?”

“It was me.”

The clear, ringing voice came from behind Monica.

A frightened squeal escaped her throat. With stilted motions, she turned around—a good-looking man with sleek chestnut-colored hair in braids was leaning against the door, a smile on his face. Right next to him stood a beautiful blond woman wearing a maid’s uniform.

The man wore a splendid frock coat, with a monocle at his eye and a cane in his hand. Clearly, he was a refined, sophisticated gentleman. Above all, his vaguely feminine, delicate facial features were so attractive, most girls would have been enraptured at first sight.

Monica, however, stared at him in wide-eyed terror, desperately holding back a scream.

“L-L-L-L-L-L-Loui—Louis…?”

“I would appreciate if you wouldn’t change my name to L-L-L-Loui-Louis. It’s a little silly, don’t you think?”

“Ah! I-I’m so s-sorry…,” she stammered, on the verge of tears.

Without even a glance in Monica’s direction, the man walked straight over to Annie and smiled. Then he took her hand and placed a piece of candy in it. “Thank you for showing me the way, young lady.”

“You’re welcome.”

Annie smiled and returned the handsome guest’s show of courtesy, then put the candy in her pocket.

“Anyway,” she said, “I don’t want to get in the way of your work, so I’ll be going now. Bye-bye, Monica. See you again next month!”

The girl waved and left the little house, assuming a more graceful gait than usual. As she listened hopelessly to the clattering of the wagon growing more distant, Monica looked up at the man before her with tears in her eyes.

His frock coat and cane were camouflage. Normally, he wore a gold-embroidered robe and carried a magnificent staff—for he was a mage. The beautiful girl in the maid outfit waiting behind him was no human, either, but a spirit who had formed a contract with him.

“It’s, um, good to see you again…Mr. Louis,” Monica said, voice shaking.

He put his hand to his breast and offered an elegant bow. “Yes, it has been a while, hasn’t it, Lady Monica Everett? Or should I say, the Silent Witch of the Seven Sages?”