Chapter 95: Librarian Ernst (16) - A Rest Before Wrapping Up

#95. Librarian Ernst (16) - A Rest Before Wrapping Up

Flutter, flutter.

Eris watched Ernst turning the pages as if he were only skimming the book’s contents, and her feelings were complicated.

She had far too much she wanted to say, but after spending a while agonizing over which question to ask first,

perhaps because he noticed her fervent gaze, Ernst suddenly furrowed his brow.

Ernst stared at Eris with a look that, to anyone seeing it for the first time, might have seemed like an angry glare, then suddenly glanced at the book in his hand and let out an exclamation: “Ah.”

And then he said.

“This is the only one.”

“Pardon?”

“I mean the other books in the library are all perfectly normal books.”

Eris blinked a couple of times, then somehow managed to interpret what Ernst had said.

So, was he making excuses right now?

Was he telling her not to worry because he wasn't some madman who turned every person he disliked into a book and put them on display in the library?

Looking at the blond librarian solemnly insisting upon his innocence with a face utterly devoid of joking, Eris soon burst out laughing.

“Ha, haha! What is that? That's the first thing you say in a situation like this?”

Only a short while ago, she had been severely threatened by a powerful demon, had watched that demon get sealed into a book right in front of her eyes, and had been left alone with a mysterious archmage at his stronghold.

If she thought about it calmly, this was not a situation where she should have been laughing carefree, but the more objectively she analyzed it, the bigger her laughter grew.

That was because the gap created by the utterly grave situation and Ernst over there, staring at Eris with a subtly sulky expression, was that overwhelming.

Even after that, Eris laughed herself silly for quite a while, and only when she was starting to feel a little dizzy from laughing too much did she finally manage to stop.

“Phew.”

When was the last time she had laughed like this in front of another person?

After wiping away the faint moisture at the corners of her eyes, Eris asked with a somewhat more serious expression,

“Were you deceiving me?”

“I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to.”

“You had this much magical skill all along, and you kept it secret from me.”

Though it was an accusing question, for some reason Eris could predict Ernst's answer.

Sure enough, Ernst answered calmly.

“I never really hid it. I just never had a chance to show you.”

“Oh, I see.”

At such an exactly expected answer, Eris let out a snort of laughter.

And she was inwardly surprised by her own reaction.

'...That's strange. Normally I should be boiling with anger.'

Eris was somewhat aware of her own personality.

She was competitive, jealous, and not particularly broad-minded.

If the Eris from a little while ago had learned of this situation, she would surely have clenched her teeth and raged at Ernst.

She would have decided that he'd been deceiving her all this time, that he must have secretly sneered at her, someone far inferior to him, as she got worked up over every trivial bit of magic, and she would have condemned and denounced him.

That was how she could preserve her own pride.

But for some reason,

she didn't really feel that way now.

Had a good laugh somehow made her stop caring about this and that?

Or was it trust that this man couldn't possibly have hidden some scheme like that in his heart?

Either way, it wasn't a bad feeling, so Eris could speak with pure curiosity and a spirit of inquiry instead of any negative emotion.

“By the way, that's surprising. I never would have thought there was another archmage besides my master in this small country.”

At Eris's words, Ernst shook his head.

“It isn't right to compare a mere librarian with Lady Delphinaris.”

“There's no way anyone would find that convincing after showing your skill right in front of me.”

“If I could really freely display power on her level, I wouldn't have bothered fleeing all the way here in the first place; I would have just beaten the demon head-on. My power is limited solely to this place and this environment.”

As Ernst said that and stamped his foot, a faint wave of mana spread outward.

Then, as if reacting to that mana, strange lines and sigils rose up all around the library.

Seeing that, Eris gasped.

“So it was a barrier-type unique spell. This library itself was practically your domain.”

The hallmark of a fifth-tier mage: the creation of unique spells.

Among them, there are relatively ordinary ones, like combining fire and water spells to produce steam, but there are also ones so bizarre you can't even imagine how they were made.

Ernst's spell was a textbook example of the latter.

Even Eris, who as Delphinaris's disciple had observed and studied all sorts of unique spells, couldn't begin to understand the structure of the spell he had created.

After staring blankly at the lines and sigils of mana for a long while, Eris soon came to her senses and blushed in embarrassment.

If you watched a knight practicing a secret sword art of their own, you wouldn't have the right to complain even if the furious knight cut you down with a blade.

A mage's unique spell was just as precious, and she had openly stared at it while trying to analyze it, so it was a disrespect hard to excuse.

“Um, s-sorry.”

“It doesn't really matter. If you'd like, I wouldn't mind teaching you outright either.”

Eris's movements froze for a moment.

She looked at Ernst for a moment as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing, but the librarian remained perfectly composed.

“...Are you serious?”

“I doubt anyone other than you would be able to use it well anyway. This is a spell that's hard to use unless you deeply immerse yourself in various books and remember their contents.”

“I haven't exactly immersed myself in novels, you know!”

“I never said novels. Or is this that thing where the guilty party is the first to flinch?”

“Shut up!!”

Eris threw on the fierce expression from earlier, and Ernst, as always, brushed it aside as if it meant nothing.

And so, a long day came to an end.

***

The fact that Marik Grimmun had actually been a demon contractor, and that he had eventually become completely possessed by a demon and tried to kill Eris, was not widely known.

In truth, there wasn't much way to make it widely known.

Even if Eris had told everyone about this incident exactly as it happened, the reaction would not have been favorable.

At the very least, the Count Grimmun family, which was about to be saddled with the stigma of having taken a demon contractor in as an adopted son, would resist desperately.

The training institute, which would be branded as incompetent for having one of its students turn out to be a demon contractor who tried to kill another top student without anyone noticing or stopping it, would also have a sour reaction.

Everyone knew the training institute was backed by the royal family, so it wasn't impossible that the royal family would step in and issue a gag order.

Only Delphinaris might have gone to bat for Eris even if it meant tarnishing her own name, but Eris didn't want that.

In the first place, even if she braved all that backlash and burden and made this matter public, what benefit would she possibly get from it?

At best, she could demand compensation from the factions involved, but as for her reputation, rather than growing even higher, she was more likely to be treated as a braggart; and as for the compensation, it was easier for Eris to just let it slide from the start than to take a bit of money and end up enemies with those factions.

She had worried that the count family, having lost their son, might make a move, but that turned out to be needless concern.

“Marik went missing? Tch, fine. Looks like he ran away because he couldn't handle the aftermath. Useless coward with no sense of responsibility.”

The count, who had already considered Marik a nuisance ever since the duel incident, effectively wrote him off, and his retainers did not object.

It was, in a way, simply his own accumulated karma coming back around.

Because Balzares had scattered illusion and perception-disruption spells throughout the entire training institute, Eris's late-night outing went unnoticed, and Delphinaris seemed to sense something faintly odd about Eris, but when Eris refused to answer, she couldn't push the matter hard. A teacher with that much bad karma naturally had little room to talk.

As a result, Eris could once again quietly be a library shut-in—no, a library regular—without anyone bothering her today either.

“『Her body turned into sea foam, and she was no longer the daughter of the sea.』”

When Eris chanted the spell, a mugful of water and foam formed over her hand.

The librarian reading a book beside her merely glanced sideways before saying in a thoroughly flat tone,

“You succeeded. Congratulations.”

“If you're going to congratulate me, put a little more feeling into it.”

“Hmm.”

After thinking for a moment, Ernst opened his mouth again.

“You succeeded. Congratulations.”

The pitch had gone from do to fa, but otherwise it was the exact same line, right down to the spacing between the words.

“...Fine, whatever.”

“You were the one who asked first, yet that's a rather rude reaction, isn't it?”

“Not cursing you out is me preserving my dignity as a civilized person, you know?”

After shaking her head, Eris looked at the lump of water in her hand.

“I can't believe this really worked.”

Inside, she was half delighted and half dumbfounded.

Incantation, where specific words or pronunciations are spoken to aid spellcasting, isn't uncommon in magic.

But choosing a line from a book and directly manifesting in reality the symbolism or metaphor it represents was utterly unheard-of and bizarre.

Especially since the more vivid and intense Eris's own imagery and emotions were, the stronger the spell became—something shocking enough to overturn the worldview of Eris, who had learned magic like mathematics.

“How is it? Studying is fine, but every now and then, enjoying literature is also helpful in life. I've proven that with this spell.”

His expression hadn't changed, but somehow his whole demeanor seemed a little smug.

Eris stared at him silently.

It was certainly a genius spell.

If Eris had been told to learn and use an already-made spell, she would have done so, but if she herself had been told to make something like this, it might have been impossible even if she spent her whole life on it.

Still, there was one thing.

“But doesn't that mean your much-vaunted 'importance of rest' has gone right out the window? At this rate, even when I read a pure entertainment novel, I think I'll start imagining what effect this line might have.”

No matter how you looked at it, it seemed like the kind of spell someone who couldn't separate work from hobbies would come up with while lazing around in the name of rest and then still thinking about work anyway.

Eris casually brushed it off, thinking that in a way it was a spell that was thoroughly Ernst-like, and didn't realize

that the single remark she had just made had frozen Ernst stiff as a stone.

And that far away, the crown prince let out a low groan, and the great demon beside him clutched his belly and burst out laughing.