Chapter 16
1.
The Doloris estate.
It was night.
The estate was surrounded by high stone walls, and beyond the back gate lay a sprawling garden.
Lamps stood in rows across the trimmed lawn, and just as Duchess Doloris had said, every one of them was lit.
In the middle of the garden stood a pavilion.
Its roof was covered in vines, and wooden benches and a table stood inside.
Sebastian was sitting there.
Holding a teacup in one hand and letting the night breeze wash over him.
He generally liked being here at this hour.
It was time to check that the estate's lights had been turned off and organize tomorrow's preparations in his head.
But today was a little different.
‘Please, Sebastian.’
When he lowered his gaze from the pavilion, darkness met his eyes, and he could see a newly built annex at the far end of the garden.
More precisely, it was a workshop hastily converted from a storage shed.
It was a building the Duchess had ordered in haste through a crystal ball.
‘A forge for a young child.’
Orange light was leaking through the workshop windows.
The lamps were on. That meant the child was inside.
The Duchess's message had been this:
‘If he happens to be frightened, or starts crying, please comfort him.’
Sebastian set down his teacup and looked toward the workshop.
A child who would be frightened.
Would he really?
Sebastian had served three generations of masters of House Doloris.
He had seen it earlier, in front of the estate.
When a servant reached out to take the hammer, he had seen the look in that child's eyes.
The eyes he had shown while instinctively hiding the hammer had been the eyes of someone protecting what belonged to him.
A child's eyes? How could a child have such a tenacious look?
A strong emotion, bound up with obsession and something else….
He had seen countless people while serving three generations, but he could not believe those were the eyes of a thirteen-year-old.
Still, the Duchess had ordered him to do it.
Sebastian took a sip of tea and quietly waited.
After all, the Duchess would also be listening from the second-floor window.
Then.
A sound came from the workshop.
“Yeehaw!!”
“……?”
Sebastian's body jerked.
Was the child crying?
Just as he was half-rising to assess the situation.
“Ang, ang! Nice~ Perfect, yo, yo, you rascal.”
“……?”
Incomprehensible shouting filled the garden.
Apparently, the child was not crying.
Was that simply what a blacksmith's work was like?
He tilted his head, wondering whether this was some important stage of the process.
“This is it! This is it!!!”
“……”
…It did not seem as though the child needed comforting.
Sebastian sat back down and drank his cooling tea.
2.
After putting Ruby to bed.
Doloris walked out of her room.
The hallway was quiet. The garden's streetlamps were visible through the windows.
“……”
Doloris headed toward the end of the hall.
Not toward her own room, but the opposite end.
There was one room in this estate that no one could open.
Sebastian, Ruby, and the servants could not open it either.
Only Doloris could open this door.
- Click.
The magically locked door unlocked.
The door opened.
It was dark inside. There was only one window, and its curtains were open.
“……”
There was only one thing in the room.
A single rope hung from the ceiling, bathed in moonlight.
A circular knot was tied at its end.
She had built this room on the day she decided there was no meaning in continuing to live.
Back when her meridians had frozen, her senses had vanished, and her sworn sisters had climbed toward those lofty heights while she alone remained standing still.
This room had been her end,
and the fact that she could end everything at any time might paradoxically have been what kept her going.
She endured until Ruby came.
After Ruby came, she thought she would hold on only until the child grew up.
That was Doloris's deadline.
Once you set a deadline, you can live for one more day.
However.
- Slice!
At Doloris's gesture, the rope before her was cut. She could not even clearly see what had cut it.
It fell to the floor with a soft thud.
“……”
Doloris looked down at the rope on the floor.
She did not look at it for long.
Moonlight shone on her gloves.
The sun emblem engraved on them caught the light and gleamed.
There was still a reason to live. There was still something left to confirm.
That alone was enough.
Doloris left the room.
- Click.
The door locked again.
This room would probably never be opened again.
And the place she was heading was.
“…Lionel.”
I wish you wouldn't push yourself.
The miracle that child had given her.
It would be fair to say he had already paid most of its value in advance.
So you don't have to push yourself.
There is plenty of time.
- Dodododo….
Doloris forgot her dignity and hurried, almost running, toward the window.
And in the bedroom at the center of the hallway.
Ruby, who was not yet asleep, heard footsteps passing through the hall.
Whenever her teacher entered that room, she always stayed for at least an hour.
After visiting that room, her footsteps were slow.
Today was different.
‘She came out quickly….’
Ruby curled the corners of her lips up slightly beneath the covers.
3.
Doloris.
Don't expect too much from me.
“I told you not to expect anything.”
I rose from my seat, spread both hands, and looked up at the sky.
Then I extended the index finger of each hand toward the sky.
─────────────────
[Total Strikes]
[Marvelous] [59]
[Excellent] [5]
[Normal] [0]
[Bad] [0]
[Terrible] [0]
─────────────────
“Sorry, but don't expect me to fail.”
This goes out to the haters, including the regulars from the Rhythm Game Gallery who said I was finished.
I'm still alive.
Even if the world is a little different.
─────────────────
[Final Success Rate 36%]
[Failure Rate 64%]
─────────────────
【Attempting……】
─────────────────
【Enhancement Success】
─────────────────
[General-Purpose Work Gloves][☆☆☆☆☆]
[18 Enhancement → 19 Enhancement]
─────────────────
- Pop!
The gloves were dyed red for an instant.
Actually, I couldn't care less about enhancements.
But before I knew it, they were at 19 Enhancement.
What was this?
First, there were a few things I noticed while enchanting.
First, the difficulty increased as the enhancement level rose.
The time limit grew longer, it demanded greater concentration, and the speed increased.
I call these circles hit circles. Falling-note rhythm games call them notes, but these are circles, so hit circles is more accurate.
Anyway, the speed at which the circles narrowed increased with each level.
It became noticeably faster after 10 Enhancement.
So, before I knew it, this was what I had ended up with.
─────────────────
[General-Purpose Work Gloves][☆☆☆☆☆]
[19 Enhancement]
─────────────────
So this was basically a zero-star, +20-grinding work glove, right?
Nineteen enhancements on a piece of trash equipment with no stars.
Hmm… Maybe I had been barking up the wrong tree.
No. It was practice.
And it had been fun.
I opened the enchantment log.
There was something like this.
[Enchantment Log]
[18->19][Failure]
[18->19][Failure]
[18->19][Failure]
[18->19][Failure]
[18->19][Success!]
Five attempts to succeed.
If I had broken through a 36% chance in five attempts, I hadn't been lucky, but it wasn't all that bad either.
Well, I'd come this far.
Should I go for 20 Enhancement?
Let's try it one last time. The sun is up, so I should stop after this.
[Current Really-Really-Really-Really Final, Fifth Attempt]
[Getting sleepy, so this is the last / I've used quite a lot of powder, so this is the last / I can hear birds starting to sing, so this is the last — fifth variation]
Oh my, Yuna.
You're still awake?
[Sob sob….]
Well, that's that.
[But oppa, looking at it, it seems there's a chance of destruction starting at 15 Enhancement….]
Yeah, there was.
There was. Starting at 15 Enhancement, the chance of destruction went up if I was late on the timing.
I sneezed and missed the timing for a moment, got [Terrible], and the destruction chance inexplicably went up by 1%.
Of course, I haven't failed apart from that.
What destruction? Destruction isn't in my dictionary.
[That's what I'm saying. Looking at the difficulty just now, it's getting harder and harder, right? Not that oppa absolutely can't do it or anything, so, you know, for risk management, you should show it to Lady Doloris too, and not that oppa can't do it or anything.]
[What if… we put in just a little, just a tiny bit more powder…?]
“……”
I had figured out the correlation between the amount of powder and the difficulty about two hours ago.
Up to a certain threshold, sprinkling powder lowered the difficulty of enchanting.
Above a certain amount, the equipment would not absorb the powder at all.
But the biggest problem was.
Sprinkling powder lowered the difficulty.
“Kim Yuna.”
[Y-yes?]
“Do I seem bad at this?”
[No, no, no, no, that's not it at aaaaall]
Lower the difficulty?
What did she mean by that?
“I, here.”
- Tap.
“I'm going to reduce the amount of powder instead.”
This is it. This is what's right for me.
[Warning! Less than the recommended amount of enchantment powder]
[19 → 20 Enhancement]
[Recommended Powder: 3g or more]
Nope.
And.
“Yuna, I've kept quiet because I respect you, but this song is way too creepy.”
I wasn't asking her to play popular music, but she had been playing nothing but some classical-sounding song on repeat.
It was definitely the song's fault that I hadn't gotten all Perfect—that is, all Marvelous.
The fact that I still hadn't gotten all Marvelous had been bothering me quite a bit.
[Oppa, think about it… It's another world. How could there be popular music here…?]
[I just played a song that's been going around the Inner Tower community….]
“Really? Well, I guess it can't be helped.”
The Inner Tower songs were something else. They might even be addictive.
“Start enchantment.”
- Vrrrrr….
The gloves, dyed with red energy, flickered before my eyes.
The enchantment began.
I picked up the hammer with a light heart.
How hard could it be, no matter how difficult it was?
[0:02:00]
The time had doubled.
And just as I began to sense that something was wrong.
The hit circles appeared.
But.
“Oh, fuck.”
There were two.
Two circles appeared at the same time.
They were shrinking from different positions at the same timing.
So this was why it had warned me.
Until now, no matter how fast the circles were, there had only been one at a time.
No matter how fast they moved, I only had to get the order right.
But now they were on exactly the same beat….
Sorry, but there was a way to solve even this situation.
There were two notes, but I could play two notes with one finger.
The best way was to split the beat.
Strike the first 0.2 beats early, then the next 0.2 beats late.
Here, the 0.2 beats depended on my sense of timing.
- Ka-kang!
Two cleanly split strikes.
There was a technique like this. The context was a little different, though.
It was called a trill.
- Rat-a-tat!
[Marvelous]
[Marvelous]
- Rat-a-tat!
[Marvelous]
[Marvelous]
“Hahahaha!”
I laughed. It worked.
And so I hammered away in a trance for a total of two minutes.
Just as I felt my body moving on its own.
─────────────────
[Total Strikes]
[Marvelous] [97]
[Excellent] [10]
[Normal] [1]
[Bad] [0]
[Terrible] [0]
─────────────────
[Final Success Rate 19%]
[Failure Rate 81%]
─────────────────
All right, 19%.
The proportion of Excellent results had increased, and there was one Normal, but that couldn't be helped.
I wasn't a metronome, and I didn't have two hammers, so how could I string together Marvelous hits simultaneously?
So I waited with a trembling heart.
【Attempting……】
“……”
It wasn't a promising probability.
【Enhancement Success!】
- Pop!
“……!”
The red light in the gloves trembled.
The red color slowly disappeared from the ends, and green light filled its place.
The instant that green light enveloped the entire glove.
─────────────────
[General-Purpose Work Gloves][☆☆☆☆☆]
[20 Enhancement]
─────────────────
The work gloves had reached 20 Enhancement.
“……”
I lifted the gloves.
A soft green light shone above my head like a lamp.
“Kim Yuna.”
[Yes….]
“Say my name.”
[Waaah… Kim Yujin! Kim Yujin…!]
“Who is the GOAT?”
[Waaah… Lionel….]
As expected from someone who hadn't done this only once or twice.
She caught on quickly. You're my soul mate.
I looked down at the work gloves wrapped in green light.
“All right, shall we see how they perform?”
I took off the makeshift gloves I was wearing and tossed them aside.
I put on the +20 work gloves.
“……”
What? I didn't feel anything at all.
The moment I put them on, the green light disappeared.
Maybe because they were junk items, the benefit of the enhancement was reduced too?
Well, I suppose that was possible.
Henrik had said that the higher an item's star count, the harder it was to enchant.
Maybe the easier it was to enchant, the less useful it became.
“All right, let's go outside for now.”
There was no reason to be disappointed.
This was only the first step. I could only look forward to the day I got to handle difficult equipment.
I smiled, grabbed the workshop door, and.
- Groooooan!!
“?”
The metal door handle embedded in the wooden door ripped out and shattered.
“……W-what, what is this?”
I saw the ‘former door handle,’ crushed flat in my hand.
There was a gaping hole in the door.
“Huh?”
Wait a minute.
I rapidly turned things over in my head and began assessing the situation.
My conclusion was this.
After carefully—very carefully—removing the gloves.
As I stared at the door that could no longer be opened because it had no handle.
I realized that I was trapped in the workshop.
“……Butler Sebastian!!”
At the crack of dawn.
I had to call Sebastian through the window.
On my second day at Doloris's estate.
I destroyed the workshop.