Chapter 80: Opportunity (7)
“Lian?”
Led by the spider, I arrived at the training grounds and spotted Allen sitting in one corner.
He, too, was panting heavily, and when he saw me appear, his expression seemed filled with surprise.
“What brings you here?”
That was what I should be asking, not him.
Words that had risen to the tip of my throat barely spilled out past my lips along with my ragged breath.
“What happened?”
Only after a couple of deep breaths did I finally calm myself enough to ask him in a quiet voice.
Allen had already been attracting some glances, but with my arrival, the attention focused even more sharply on him.
There was no need to get worked up or raise my voice unnecessarily to draw further attention.
“……Well, there was a minor accident.”
Saying that, he gave a slightly awkward smile.
His face, however, was smeared with dried blood and still-bleeding cuts, a complete mess.
No matter how I looked at it, it was anything but a minor accident.
Just then, the brown-haired maid kneeling in front of Allen and tending to him spoke in a scolding tone.
“Wait…! Please don’t move. I’m still disinfecting the wound. If you move carelessly, it’ll get worse!”
“Ah, I’m sorry.”
“N-no…! I should apologize. I raised my voice unnecessarily…”
She answered Allen with embarrassment, still disinfecting the wound on his arm while holding it gently.
His arm was covered in cuts, both large and small.
No, it wasn’t just his arm.
As I had mentioned before—his face, chest, stomach, legs… his entire body was wrecked.
And those injuries on his body were quite familiar to me.
“…Let me take a look too.”
As I stepped closer, the maid tending to Allen looked up and said,
“Are you an acquaintance? I understand your concern, but if you touch it clumsily, the wound might worsen or get infected—huh?!”
“Oh, so it was you, Miss Rislin.”
The maid looked startled to see me, but she was someone I knew well.
Rislin.
The apprentice maid who, along with Head Maid Artemia, had come to apologize to me a few days ago for delivering a letter late.
“Ah, um… You were… Sir Lian Gwendil, right? H-hello…”
“Yes, hello, Miss Rislin.”
Saying that, I walked straight up to Allen, who was sitting on a chair, receiving treatment.
Having taken off his upper clothes for ease of treatment, Allen looked half-resigned.
“This is embarrassing. To show you such a disgraceful sight.”
Yet he still managed to put on his usual good-natured smile.
Unlike him, I couldn’t smile.
Instead, I carefully examined the wounds all over his body.
“Ah, um…”
Normally, Rislin should have stopped me, but perhaps because it was me, she looked flustered and hesitated.
Then, as if giving up, she sighed lightly and decided to focus on finishing Allen’s treatment first.
“May I help as well?”
“Eh? That’s…”
After a moment of hesitation, she nodded.
I picked up a pair of medical tweezers.
“How did this happen?”
“As I said before, a minor accident.”
He let out a hollow chuckle.
Meanwhile, I began plucking out the fragments embedded in his wounds one by one with the tweezers.
At the same time, I glanced around.
Not far away, I could see shards of shattered pottery and scorch marks, as if something had exploded, clearly visible on the training ground floor.
When I looked upward, I saw the railing of a building overlooking the training grounds.
Naturally, there was no one there.
“So a minor accident left your body full of pottery shards?”
“Someone must have dropped it by mistake.”
“Is that so.”
I closed my mouth and focused on removing the fragments.
“……”
Of course, that wasn’t something that could be dismissed as a mere accident.
I knew very well what it was—I had seen it several times in my previous life.
It was a sort of bomb—pottery containers filled with byproducts from alchemy.
At best, its effective range was small, and its power amounted to nothing more than startling someone, which was why it had long fallen out of use.
For anyone who could handle mana to some degree, it was practically useless.
The fact that other artifacts were cheaper and far more effective only added to its decline.
So much so that even among mercenaries, who came in all types, it was rare to find anyone using it.
Weak in power, tedious to make, tricky to handle, and costly on top of that—
Honestly, I had almost never seen it used except by people with peculiar personalities.
‘…No, it did have one distinct advantage.’
That was the way the pottery shattered into countless shards, embedding themselves all over the body and making healing far more difficult.
That was why Rislin and I were busy removing the shards before using a miracle of healing or a potion.
The fragments had to come out first, otherwise treatment was impossible.
‘This isn’t something you’d use for a prank. And there’s no way this was just a minor accident.’
In other words, someone had clearly intended to harm Allen.
And of all things, they had deliberately chosen to use that outdated weapon.
The malice packed into that action was so thick that even I found it suffocating.
‘…Didn’t they say malicious rumors about Allen had been spreading these past few days?’
I instinctively knew the one spreading those rumors and the one who attacked Allen were the same person.
And while I couldn’t be sure about the latter, I could tell the former’s scheme was working effectively.
“That red hair, it’s definitely…”
“No doubt, from the Amiel family…”
“The one they say committed that dirty fraud…?”
They probably thought they were whispering discreetly, but in the stillness, their words carried clearly.
Or perhaps they wanted me to hear.
After all, getting injured during training wasn’t unusual, yet no one stepped forward, instead standing back and watching as if observing.
From the beginning, I had suspected something, but…
The gazes directed this way, and the whispered voices—most of them carried wariness, mockery, and contempt.
“……”
I didn’t bother reacting.
There was no need for me to do so, nor any reason for it.
More than anything, my head had grown complicated again, to the point I had no room to respond to such nonsense one by one.
‘This never happened in my previous life.’
To be precise, there had been an incident where Kyren Amiel, among others, even professors and staff, were attacked.
The entire Academy had been in an uproar over who the culprit was.
The situation had been so chaotic that there had been no room for rumors to spread.
In that turmoil, with such a grim incident added on top, not only the Academy but even the Imperial Family had intervened to catch the culprit. And in the end, Allen had been named as the culprit and captured.
But the story hadn’t ended there.
Originally, Allen would have been sentenced to death after trial, but thanks to Count Amiel’s desperate petition, his sentence had been reduced to exile on the Prison Island.
And a few years later.
After some incident, Allen Amiel had been released from the Prison Island, becoming both a Sword Fiend no one could stand against and a madman no one could understand.
“……”
The biggest difference from my past life was that the attack incident hadn’t even begun yet.
Perhaps because of that—
Inside the Academy, slander against Allen was spreading in an organized fashion, and today, someone had even directly harmed him.
To be exact, someone had sent Allen a kind of message.
This was not a mere coincidence.
It was unfolding in such an obvious way that anyone could see it.
Where had I missed something, and where had I misjudged?
‘Digging deeper, maybe even Allen suddenly saying he wanted to quit the Academy was connected… No, I can’t think like that.’
I shook my head lightly.
Once I started assigning meaning, even the smallest things became suspicious.
“…I’m sorry, Lian.”
“Huh?”
But Allen seemed to interpret my expression differently.
As I looked at him, as if wondering why he was suddenly apologizing to me, he muttered in a voice that still carried embarrassment.
“It’s just… because of me, you’ll end up in trouble too.”
“Suddenly? If it were like that, I wouldn’t have gotten involved with you from the very first day.”
“Well, that first day…”
He hesitated briefly.
“Because the rumors hadn’t spread yet.”
“What rumors.”
As I wrapped his body with the ointment and bandages I usually carried, I continued,
“That you’re not actually an illegitimate child of the Amiel family, but a complete stranger with no blood relation, that your hair is dyed, that you’ve been scheming with Cultists of the Evil God to manipulate the Amiel family from the shadows with fraud and dirty tricks?”
“…Ha ha.”
At my bitter words, he gave only a wry smile.
And that was one of the more tolerable rumors.
The rumors I had heard here and there…
They were so absurd that claiming the Great Emperor and the Saintess were actually Cultists of the Evil God and traitors would have sounded more believable.
‘If it were the Allen of my past life, he would have torn apart anyone who uttered such nonsense with his bare hands on the spot.’
As I thought that, several people arrived.
“I brought medicine and bandages… Hm.”
The first to arrive was an unexpected person.
“I came too late.”
Jeil Envarso.
The elf who attended the same classes as me and had been asking people around me about me.
I heard that while training in the same grounds, he had seen Allen get injured and immediately went to fetch medicine and bandages to help.
By coincidence, while he was away, I had arrived.
In the end, his effort had been for nothing, but he showed no discontent. Instead, he only expressed relief that Allen was being treated quickly, adding words of comfort, hoping the wounds wouldn’t worsen.
“I pray we meet in class next time with you fully recovered.”
With that, he left swiftly, as elves so often did.
As soon as he was gone, Cecilia appeared.
‘Ah.’
Seeing her reminded me of how I had rushed out of the library earlier without explaining anything to her.
But Cecilia, seeing the battered Allen and me tending to him, seemed to quickly understand the situation.
She first approached Allen without saying anything.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, it only looks bad. The wounds aren’t too deep. And Sir Lian and this maid have treated me with great care as well.”
“That’s a relief.”
Nodding, Cecilia then looked at me.
When I tried to explain, she shook her head lightly, signaling she understood.
“I’m glad nothing worse happened.”
“…Yes, that’s right.”
I nodded back at her words.
Cecilia glanced around, then at the clocktower, and with a faint frown said,
“I have an appointment soon, so I should go. Lian, is there anything I can do right now?”
“No, nothing right now.”
“If you ever need me, call me anytime. I’ll come right away.”
Then, bowing her head, she whispered softly to me,
“…Be careful.”
I nodded silently.
Casting one last worried look at me, Cecilia left with quick steps.
And last of all.
As we finished tidying up and were about to head to the infirmary for proper treatment, someone appeared, blocking our path.
“……”
“…Young master.”
It was none other than Allen’s half-brother, Kyren Amiel.