Chapter 38
“How long do you think that bastard can maintain the barrier?”
“Dunno. Probably not much longer.”
“Gamma said mana distortion was detected in Kairos’s body. He must have suffered serious injuries in that clash.”
Even in the darkness, the golden barrier shone clearly. Twenty paces away from it, three children were whispering.
“Serious injuries… Does that mean Zeta’s report was wrong?”
The blond boy, Alpha, turned to Beta.
The black-haired girl with a bob cut and round glasses, Beta, pushed her glasses up and shook her head.
“There’s no way Zeta lied. It must be a coincidence.”
“A coincidence? You think something like that happened by coincidence?”
The brown-haired boy with tousled hair, Delta, asked back in disbelief.
Beta turned to him with a cold expression.
“Then you think this was all part of a plan?”
“It could’ve been. I’ve always said this: reality is always more dramatic than a play.”
Delta shrugged.
Beta turned away as though he was no longer worth engaging with.
At that moment, they sensed a strange flow of mana from inside the barrier.
All three fell silent and stared toward the cave.
“The barrier… got stronger?”
Alpha was the first to react.
He tilted his head and slowly approached the cave.
“Maintain a safe distance.”
Though she said it like a reprimand, Beta seemed just as curious. She did not stop Alpha, merely folding her arms.
“Is this a dying flame’s last flare? Maybe he’s run out of mana.”
Delta said this while stretching as though tired.
The other two simply kept staring toward the cave without answering.
Then the barrier, which had been as bright as the moon, suddenly became several times brighter, temporarily blinding all three.
“An ambush?!”
This time, Beta reacted first.
Shielding her eyes with her arm, she hurriedly dove behind a nearby rock.
“Tch… What a pointless stunt.”
Delta also grimaced and hid behind a tree beside her.
He glared at Beta with a sharp look.
“Start tracking. They definitely escaped while we were distracted.”
Beta agreed with that assessment.
Being ordered around by someone like Delta still left a bad taste in her mouth, though.
“I was going to, even without you telling me.”
Beta grumbled under her breath and closed her eyes. Tracking magic.
Three mana signatures appeared in her mind. Beta immediately determined their positions relative to one another.
She opened her eyes again and spoke.
“His location is… huh?”
Wait, there were three? Something was wrong.
Delta looked at her questioningly.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing… It just seems strange.”
There were three detected mana signatures—and three people surrounding Kairos.
Beta rested her chin on her hand and fell into thought for a moment.
Soon, one possibility occurred to her.
“Alpha?”
It was an absurd—and yet terrifying—possibility.
Beta cautiously poked her head out from behind the rock.
A horrifying sight immediately entered her view.
‘D-did he get him?’
Scattered across the ground were the remains of Alpha—or what had once been Alpha.
And beside them, Kairos was walking out with measured steps, wand in hand.
He was emitting a mana signature of a tremendous level—one she had never sensed before.
“Oh, shit.”
Delta must have seen it as well; he hid behind the tree again and spoke in a bewildered voice.
A moment later, Kairos fixed his gaze directly on the two of them, and his icy voice rang out.
“You two have put me in quite a bit of trouble, you know?”
The tip of his wand pointed directly at the two of them.
“So come out right now. Let’s finish this quickly.”
The voice was so cold and chilling that there was no room even to wonder, ‘How did he…?’
※※
“……”
When I opened my eyes, I saw an unfamiliar ceiling… No, it was the familiar ceiling of the cave.
I started to sit up, then stopped and groggily turned my head. Kairos, who had been poking at the campfire with a slender twig, turned to me and smiled brightly.
“You’re awake?”
“……Looks like you managed to win somehow.”
A dull ache throbbed at my temples.
Clutching my throbbing forehead, I barely managed to sit up, my body heavy.
The familiar yet unfamiliar sensation of long hair spilling down past my shoulders ran through me. At the same time, the clothes draped over my body slipped to the floor with a light thud.
“……”
What had fallen was Kairos’s shirt.
I raised my head and saw him in a short-sleeved T-shirt, despite the chilly cave air that made the campfire’s warmth seem meaningless.
‘Acting all nice.’
I muttered inwardly, picked up his shirt, and approached him, tossing out a sarcastic remark.
“Looks like you didn’t strip me this time under the excuse of a mana rampage?”
Kairos chuckled and set down the twig.
“Because it wasn’t a mana rampage this time.”
“It wasn’t?”
“Yeah. You merely passed out for a while because your mana organ was overloaded, Rene.”
Kairos began explaining my condition at the time and the flow of mana inside my body as though he were a doctor. It sounded plausible, but most of it went in one ear and out the other.
I only half-listened as I squatted down across from him.
“So you’re saying I lost consciousness because you took too much of my mana?”
In truth, almost all my memories from right before I passed out were gone.
The only things I vaguely remembered were that his kiss had been incredibly skilled and that the excessive mana production had made my entire body burn like a blast furnace.
“Haha… Well, that’s not entirely wrong.”
Kairos gave an awkward laugh and took the shirt from me.
Without a word, I buried my face in my knees and watched the campfire crackle.
“And while I was completely out of it, you took out the three people outside in one fell swoop.”
“Yeah. Though, strictly speaking, I should say I drove them off.”
Kairos answered as though it were only natural.
I felt all the energy drain out of me. This guy really was absurdly strong.
Kairos’s expression stiffened slightly as he cautiously studied my reaction.
“So, are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine. Though I feel a little lousy.”
As always, losing consciousness was an unpleasant experience.
Especially since this time, I had also been in the middle of an unwanted kiss with that guy.
Surely he hadn’t done anything strange to me in that situation, but the blank spaces between my memories left a nasty aftertaste whenever I thought about them.
“Right before I passed out… I didn’t do anything strange, did I?”
“Huh? You don’t remember much?”
“No.”
“How much?”
“Almost everything after we kissed.”
“…………Oh, I see.”
What was this silence—awkward to the point of suspicion?
I narrowed my eyes and glared at him.
“Don’t tell me something happened?”
Kairos’s shoulders flinched.
“N-no. It wasn’t anything like that.”
“It sure sounds like it was.”
So it was suspicious after all. I immediately moved right next to him and sat down.
“Tell me. What happened?”
I leaned in close, practically pressed against him, and looked up at him.
Kairos awkwardly leaned away, his face flustered.
“I-I’m telling you, it was really nothing.”
Even so, Kairos kept staring fixedly at my lips.
His gaze slowly drifted downward… then hurriedly returned to my face. At the same time, both his cheeks reddened slightly.
The last place his gaze had gone was clearly….
“……My chest?”
A look of contempt slipped onto my face before I knew it.
Kairos jumped in surprise and shook his head as hard as he could.
“N-no, it wasn’t anything like that!”
“Then what was it?”
“N-nothing happened, I swear!”
Kairos now turned his entire body sharply away from me.
He cleared his throat and desperately tried to change the subject.
“Anyway, since you used up all your mana, your body will be incredibly exhausted for the next few days. I’ll explain everything to your teacher myself, so get plenty of rest for about three days.”
“Three days?”
“Yeah. Even now, doesn’t your body feel incredibly heavy?”
……Not really?
Of course, I felt a little sluggish, but it wasn’t serious.
At least, I barely felt ‘heavy’ or ‘tired.’
“Three days….”
The books had certainly said that ‘mana depletion,’ completely exhausting one’s mana, was something that absolutely had to be avoided….
I gave a noncommittal nod and looked at Kairos again.
“So what on earth did you do to me earlier?”
In any case, rest was one thing, and this was another.
Kairos’s reaction was far too suspicious for me to let it go while pretending not to know.
“I’m telling you, it was nothing….”
Even at a glance, he was clearly nervous as he avoided my gaze.
The more I looked at him, the more suspicious it seemed.
After glaring at him for a moment, I reluctantly pulled my wand from inside my clothes.
“Memoria Fluxus!”
I might not remember it, but I knew for certain that it had happened to me.
I couldn’t recall the scene itself, but by tracing the flow of mana in my memories, I could roughly determine what my body had done at the time.
“I-I’m telling you, it really wasn’t anything!”
Kairos hurriedly tried to stop me.
I pressed one hand against his chest and shoved past him, sifting through the traces of mana that had passed through me.
Once the blank stretch during which there was no response ended, I finally caught the part that had been bothering me.
“So… both hands like this… my face like this, my upper body and lower body like this….”
I recreated the pose indicated by the flow of mana in my memories.
Looking at Kairos from that pose, I saw that his face had gone even redder than before.
“……What?”
Even I had a vague idea of what that pose meant.
Frozen in that exact pose, I swallowed hard for a moment before asking in a voice filled with utter disbelief.
“I… I was… this… this forward?”
It had been exactly that kind of pose—the kind where someone fiercely embraces another person and enthusiastically rubs and writhes their whole body against them.
Kairos, now completely red as a carrot, mumbled and nodded.
“It’s just… you didn’t seem to know, Rene, so I’m telling you.”
Even as he looked at me, Kairos continued, his gaze oddly fixed on the ceiling.
“One of the side effects of overdosing on moonlight grass is… well… a temporary state of hyperarousal… yeah.”
“……Ah.”
It was truly like a bolt from the blue.
I staggered before I knew it, pressed a hand to my forehead, and glared at Kairos.
Then, as my face grew intensely hot, I literally threw myself at him.
“Forget it!!”
It was the moment I learned once again, with excruciating clarity, that excessive curiosity was poison.