Episode 68: Edgar’s Way
“Eeek, eeeek! Th-that’s so disgusting…!”
Yuria let out another scream.
The gift-shuitar lurking deep in the forest did, admittedly, have a genuinely unpleasant appearance.
(Something about its legs especially… there’s a particular kind of creepiness to it…)
Letting out a creaking, ground-shaking cry, it clamped its two horns around a tree trunk.
Rows of countless sharp teeth lined the insides of the horns, and it sliced through the trunk with ease.
The falling tree came crashing toward them. Fiine and Yuria dodged it with a light hop to the right, but Edgar, for some reason, did a full aerial spin.
(I-isn’t that way too unnecessary…!?)
Landing on the ground, Edgar swept his hair back.
It made for quite the picture, but it was certainly not a necessary move.
“That thing’s bodily fluids are poisonous. Cut it carelessly, and it’s a real pain.”
“R-right…”
“What would you do?”
“B-blow it up into cinders, maybe…”
Cutting or crushing it risked being doused in its fluids.
In that case, erasing it without a trace entirely was the quickest way.
“Not beautiful.”
“Eh!?”
Fiine had just been asked, she was fairly sure, how she’d go about defeating the monster.
What did “not beautiful” have to do with that answer?
“Watch the great me.”
Edgar drew a staff from inside his coat.
It was made of gold, with an enormous diamond set into its tip.
He traced a magic circle in the air.
From within it, petals of every colour came fluttering down.
The gift-shuitar’s whole body was swallowed in petals, and once again a piercing shriek echoed through the forest, giiiiiiiih‼
Wrapped in petals, the gift-shuitar rose into the air and, for an instant, flashed with blinding light.
Then the gift-shuitar vanished, leaving only vivid petals drifting down to the ground.
“T-that was light-attribute magic, wasn’t it!? Wiping out a monster that size instantly, that’s an incredible amount of magic…”
Light-attribute magic was quite convenient for clearing out large numbers of monsters at once, but using it against a single monster wasn’t especially efficient.
Light-attribute magic tended to demand more magic than spells of other attributes.
(There’s individual variation, of course, but… is Edgar especially skilled at light-attribute magic? But making the petals, that was creation magic, wasn’t it? Actually, did he even need the petals in the first place…?)
She had any number of questions she wanted to ask, but none of them came out right away.
Yet Edgar smiled, as if he’d seen straight through what was on her mind.
“Fight with flair. That’s the great me’s way.”
“F-fight with flair, you mean…?”
“Yeah. From an efficiency standpoint, those petals just now were completely wasteful. No real meaning to them at all. It would’ve used less magic to just blow it up, like you said, than to go through light-attribute magic. To begin with, fire-attribute magic’s actually my strong suit.”
“…Eh…?”
“But it was beautiful, wasn’t it?”
“…That, I’ll admit.”
The petals Edgar had conjured were more beautiful than real petals.
The way they danced through the air had an almost dreamlike quality, hardly matching a fight against something as unpleasant-looking as a gift-shuitar.
(Yuria always says the more impractical an outfit is, the cuter it looks. Maybe it’s something like that?)
She’d been learning magic since she was young, but this was the first time she’d ever met a mage who placed this much weight on beauty in the middle of combat.
It was certainly not a way of thinking she herself had ever considered.
“H-how did you come to decide you wanted to fight with flair…?”
She found herself asking before she could stop herself, too curious not to.
“It’s simple. It feels good, doesn’t it?”
“Feels good…”
“Fiine. What do you fight for?”
At Edgar’s question, she couldn’t answer right away.
“I, Edgar Jeanmer, fight to live beautifully, and to die beautifully.”
“To live beautifully, and die beautifully…”
Looking straight into Fiine’s eyes, Edgar smiled.
“If you intend to go on living in the world of combat, you’d do well to find your own aesthetic too.”
Let’s go, he said, turning his back on Fiine and walking off. From the way he held his spine, perfectly straight, she felt she could sense something of his resolve.
(Edgar’s aesthetic itself, honestly, I can’t really relate to it, but…)
He carried his own reason to fight within himself.
Even with no one watching, even with no one there to help him, even in the middle of a brutal fight, he would surely go on fighting beautifully regardless, for the sake of his own aesthetic.
(…He really is strong, isn’t he.)
◆
By evening, they’d succeeded in clearing out every monster in the area aside from the ones in the northern cave.
“Tomorrow’s the real thing. I’m counting on you all.”
The moment Burkhardt finished speaking, Yuria’s cheerful voice rang out through the restaurant: Cheers!
It had been her suggestion, too, that everyone eat dinner together.
(Ah… eating with a big group like this, I’m not good at that…!!)
Noel, seated across from her, seemed to feel the same way, hiding deep inside his hood and clinging to Edgar’s side without pause.
“Oi, Noel. Didn’t you have something you wanted to ask Fiine?”
“Ngh… s-so please, Edgar…”
“I’m not your carrier pigeon, you know.”
“E-Edgar, listening to his childhood friend’s request, I think that’s beautiful…”
“…Can’t be helped, then.”
She was surprised that line of reasoning had actually worked, but apparently Edgar was satisfied.
Or perhaps, more likely, this was simply how things always went between them.
“The part of magic-doll development that’s stalled the most is the part governing ‘memory.’ Your magic doll has her memories from before she died, and on top of that, she’s able to form new memories as a doll. How does that mechanism work?”
“Ah, um, well, that’s… I haven’t really managed to systematise it myself, and… also, to begin with, I happen to be especially skilled at manipulation magic, and that’s how, um…”
It was magic she’d spent years developing, but she’d never managed to put it into any kind of coherent system.
A great deal of it had come about by chance, and even if someone asked her to teach it, she genuinely couldn’t.
Even so, she told him what she could. Not because his interest felt idle, but because she could tell Noel’s curiosity was real.
As they talked about magic, the tension in her began to ease.
(Back at the academy too, we used to talk like this sometimes…)
Not every student back then had been motivated, but some had been genuinely eager.
Holding debriefs after training, or pointing out each other’s strengths and weaknesses, those sessions had made her nervous, but they’d been fun too.
(…Talking about magic is fun.)
Learning from Burkhardt. Studying alongside Yuria at the academy.
Fiine, surely, had once simply, purely enjoyed magic.
Today, somehow, she felt she’d remembered that.