Chapter 14
Just before Cyril Ashley restrained Monica's wrists with chains of ice, Monica had activated a spell without chanting.
The spell was an extremely thin defensive barrier incorporating a concealment formula to keep her opponent from noticing that magic had been used. In other words, Monica had protected her wrists without Cyril noticing, so they had not particularly suffered frostbite.
(This person seems to be about as skilled as an intermediate mage... No, maybe he could even qualify as an advanced one.)
The chains restraining Monica's wrists were sturdy and intricately made. They were beyond the abilities of a lower-ranking mage.
However, Monica found it difficult to ignore the cold air constantly radiating from Cyril's entire body. It was weak enough to go unnoticed if she kept a little distance, but standing beside him, she could feel the air growing slightly chilly. He seemed like someone who would be extremely useful to have in a room on a hot day.
"Um, wh-where are you ta-taking me...?"
Confronted by Cyril's high-handed attitude on their first meeting, Monica found that her tongue inevitably stopped working.
Cyril looked down at Monica and grimaced unpleasantly.
"Don't say anything unnecessary. Just follow me."
"S-s-sorry..."
"Are you making fun of me with that way of speaking?"
The cold air surrounding Cyril grew slightly stronger. Monica trembled violently beneath the intimidating, icy atmosphere and shook her head.
"You are about to meet a person so noble that normally, even if a little commoner girl dripping with plebeian aura like you ran a hundred laps around the garden on her hands in a handstand while barking like a dog, you would still not be granted an audience."
Monica thought that anyone would want to avoid meeting a weirdo who would run a hundred laps around the garden on her hands in a handstand while barking like a dog, but she kept her mouth shut.
Eventually, Cyril stopped before an impressive door on the fourth floor.
When he snapped his fingers, the ice chains restraining Monica's wrists dispersed as though melting into the air.
"Be on your very best behavior."
After warning Monica, Cyril knocked on the door.
"I have brought Monica Norton."
"Come in."
Cyril neatly reined in his earlier arrogant attitude, opened the door with elegant manners, and gestured for Monica to enter.
"E-excuse me..."
The room was spacious, with a crimson carpet covering the floor. Every room in Serendia Academy was built with a level of luxury that ordinary schools could not compare with, but this room was particularly lavish even among them.
At the far end of the room, a male student sat before a desk.
Honey-blond hair gleamed in the light streaming through the window. His beautiful eyes were blue with just a hint of green mixed in.
"I'm sorry for calling you here so suddenly, Miss Monica Norton."
"Y-you're the one from yesterday..."
The young man who had picked up Monica's nuts in the old garden was looking at her with the same gentle smile he had worn then.
As Monica stared at him with her eyes round in surprise, Cyril glared at her.
"How dare you hold your head so high! Do you know who this gentleman is...?"
"Cyril, would you mind leaving us alone for a little while?"
When the golden-haired young man said this mildly, Cyril cried out in an urgent voice, "You cannot!"
"Leaving you alone with a girl of unknown origins like this... What if something were to happen...?"
"Thank you for worrying about me. But I'll be fine."
"But..."
When Cyril continued to press the matter, the young man narrowed his eyes ever so slightly.
Although his gentle expression remained unchanged, merely narrowing his eyes slightly sent an invisible pressure piercing into Cyril.
"Do you not trust me?"
"Of course I do! I care about you more than anyone!"
"Is that so? Then won't you try to understand my feelings as well? ...I dislike pointless arguments."
The golden-haired young man spoke to the desperate Cyril in a consistently gentle manner. But the final words he dropped were low and heavy.
"...Please forgive me for overstepping my bounds."
Cyril bowed deeply and left the room, glaring at Monica with a look sharp enough to kill just before he closed the door.
After confirming that the door had closed, the golden-haired young man smiled warmly at Monica.
"Did you manage to eat your lunch properly, little squirrel?"
"A-about yesterday... Th-thank you very much!"
She had said it. She had properly thanked him.
Monica's goal for today had been to thank Lana and this young man for yesterday's help. She secretly savored the joy of achieving that goal so soon.
The young man smiled at Monica with the same kindness and lifted the stack of documents that had been resting on his desk.
"I'm sorry for calling you here so suddenly, but there was something I simply had to tell you."
"W-what might that be?"
Monica had been inwardly trembling at the thought that he might ask how she had entered and left the old garden, but the young man said, "These," and flashed the documents at her. The numbers written on them looked familiar. They were the documents Monica had gathered up yesterday.
"You said yesterday that these contained thirty-nine errors, didn't you?"
When Monica nodded weakly, the young man dropped the documents onto the desk with a soft flap.
"You were right. I could find only thirty-eight, but after you pointed it out, I took another careful look and found the thirty-ninth. As student council president, let me thank you."
"N-no, it was nothing..."
Being praised made Monica genuinely happy. She shyly fidgeted with her fingers, but then she noticed a term she could not let pass and slowly, slowly raised her head.
"...Student council president?"
"Yes."
The young man nodded with a bright smile, quietly rose to his feet, and gave Monica an elegant bow.
"I neglected to introduce myself. I am Felix Arc Ridill, the seventy-fifth student council president of Serendia Academy. Pleased to meet you, little squirrel."
"..."
The kind student who had picked up her nuts yesterday was actually the student council president.
In other words, he was the Second Prince—and the person Monica was supposed to protect.
The instant she understood that fact, Monica thought...
"...Th-th... that's a relief."
That was all she could say.
Felix tilted his head in puzzlement. "Hmm?"
"What is it that's such a relief?"
"Um, yesterday I saw you leaving the boys' dormitory in disguise... I thought maybe the kind person who picked up my nuts was a bad person trying to assassinate Your Highness, but if it was Your Highness himself, then I was relieved..."
"..."
"...Oh."
Monica hurriedly covered her mouth, but it was already too late.
In Monica's mind, Lewis Miller laughed grandly: 'That's quite a loose tongue you have, isn't it? Why not change your title from the Silent Witch to the Witch of Gaffes, my colleague?' What she had just said was that fatal a slip of the tongue.
"...Where did you see that?"
At Felix's words, Monica felt sweat burst from every part of her body.
During the day, perhaps, but at night, with no lights, it was difficult to observe the boys' dormitory windows from a girls' dormitory window. It would normally be impossible without night vision like Nero's or spells for far-sight and night vision like Monica's.
"May I take your statement just now to mean that you snuck out of the girls' dormitory in the middle of the night and wandered around the boys' dormitory grounds?"
"N-no, that's not it! I-I opened the window, and I-I happened to see it...!"
"Last night was moonless, wasn't it? The stars were beautiful because of it."
He was indirectly telling her that it should have been too dark to see anything from the window.
As Monica opened and closed her mouth helplessly, Felix approached her with a smile still on his face.
"You saw someone leave the boys' dormitory at night, then? Ah, that must have been a suspicious person. But it wasn't me. Could you describe the person you saw? We will have to strengthen the academy's security."
"Th-they were wearing a hooded cloak, so I didn't see their face. I-I only saw a glimpse of black hair..."
As Monica spoke, Felix chuckled and pinched a strand of his honey-blond hair between his fingers.
"You said that suspicious person was me, didn't you? Can't you see the color of my hair, standing right in front of you? Do you mean to say this looks black to you?"
The instant he challenged her, a fire lit within Monica.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the scholar's characteristic impulse to prove her point.
"H-hair can be dyed, or covered by a wig, so that could be faked... B-but—"
"But?"
Felix prompted her to continue with an air of complete leisure, and Monica clenched her fists before declaring:
"The black-haired person I saw last night and Your Highness have... th-the same build..."
"People with similar builds aren't exactly rare, are they?"
"It's not similar—you have the golden ratio!"
"...Hm?"
Once Monica's fire was lit, her stammering habit retreated, but she developed the bad habit of losing sight of everything around her. That was exactly what was happening now.
Conveniently, there was a portable blackboard for meetings against the wall. Monica drew a simple human figure on it and sketched a rectangle for the head.
"I am confident that I can estimate the lengths of things I see with my eyes fairly accurately. First, the ratio of the width to the height of Your Highness's head was 1:1.618. That figure is extremely close to the golden ratio, the proportion humans find most beautiful. More precisely, the golden ratio is 1:1.61803398... and so on, but I will omit that here. I could not measure the exact proportions of the person I saw last night because they were wearing a hood, but estimating from the shape visible over the hood, the figure matches this number."
"..."
Without paying any attention to Felix's reaction as he silently stared at the blackboard, Monica drew another horizontal line at the navel of the figure. It essentially divided the human body into upper and lower halves. She wrote 1 above the navel and 1.618 below it.
"Even when someone is clothed, you can estimate the position of their navel from the length of their legs. When I divided the torsos of both the person I saw last night and Your Highness at the navel, the ratio between the upper and lower halves was also the golden ratio. What's more, when the lower body is taken as 1, the combined length of the upper and lower body is 1.618. It's a golden ratio so perfect it seems to have been calculated in advance! People like this are exceedingly rare! If you let me measure you with a tape measure, you would understand that my theory is correct... wouldn't... you...?"
Monica had been passionately arguing, breathing hard through her nose, but at this point she finally came to her senses.
(W-what am I doing...)
Before Monica, who was still clutching the chalk and trembling violently, Felix murmured absently, "The figures from the last time I was measured were..." and began calculating something.
Then he slapped one palm against the other, looking satisfied.
"Oh, it really is 1:1.6."
"..."
"I've been complimented on my appearance quite a few times, but this is the first time anyone has complimented me like this."
His tone sounded less sarcastic than amused, and Monica instinctively buried her head in her hands. She desperately racked her brain, thinking and thinking and thinking of an excuse... and after going wildly off track, this was the excuse she came up with:
"The golden spiral based on the golden ratio has a radius that follows the Fioletti sequence. It is a very beautiful sequence discovered by a mathematician named Fioletti about six hundred years ago! There is no way it could be anything but beautiful!"
What exactly was she trying to cover for with that excuse?
If Lewis Miller had been there, her argument would certainly have earned her a knuckle on the head. Felix simply smiled brightly and looked down at Monica.
"You praised the sequence more than you praised me, didn't you?"
"I-I'm s-s-s-s-s-s-sorryyyyyyyyy!"
"You're not going to deny it?"
Monica knew that nodding here would be disrespectful.
Even so, Monica could not betray the numbers.
"...I know nothing more beautiful than numbers."
As Monica muttered this with her head bowed, Felix let out a soft sigh and lightly swept back his somewhat long bangs.
"Out of respect for your passion for numbers, I will answer you honestly. The black-haired person you saw yesterday was me. I wanted a little time to unwind, so I secretly slipped out of the academy to enjoy some nighttime entertainment."
"N-nighttime entertainment..."
What Monica imagined by nighttime entertainment was drinking in a glittering establishment with beautiful ladies. Could the prince have gone to one of those places too?
Honestly, Monica did not care how the Second Prince chose to let loose, but now that he was the person she was assigned to protect, she could not overlook it. If the prince were attacked by someone while out enjoying himself at night, it would be a disaster.
"If word got out that the Second Prince had secretly gone out for nighttime entertainment, I'd be in for a terrible scolding, wouldn't I? Could you keep this between you and me? In exchange, I will overlook where you were watching me from last night."
Since Monica had never intended to tell anyone, she nodded vigorously.
Ah, what a relief. At least it seemed she would not be reprimanded and expelled from the academy.
As Monica secretly breathed a sigh of relief, Felix took her hand with an entirely natural gesture. At once, her whole body stiffened and began to tremble slightly.
"U-um, is there... something else...?"
"Yes. Would you let me determine whether you're worthy of sharing a secret with me?"
With that, Felix's blue eyes gleamed eerily, and he drew Monica toward him by the hand.