"...Is it safe outside? What about everyone else?"
"Hm? Oh, the church is being held together by Big Brother for now, so that's fine.
As for everyone else... I think Lady Katia is still feeling down. Sara and Albert seem pretty shaken up too. And... Lady Lillia is staying close to her sister right now. I don't think she has the bandwidth to worry about us at the moment, so I'd appreciate it if we could leave her be."
"No, that's..."
Reasonable. That's what Ermes thought.
It wasn't just Lilliana. Niina, Sara, Albert, Katia—everyone who had been present at that place had surely received the biggest shock of their lives.
What had transpired in that Hidden Sanctuary was more than enough to warrant that.
...And.
More than anyone else, he himself had too.
"..."
"..."
A silence filled the space between Niina and Ermes.
Under normal circumstances, there probably would have been more conversation... and it might have become a bit more awkward than it already was.
After all, the thing was—the actions Niina had taken back in the Hidden Sanctuary to forcibly stop Ermes from accepting Laplace's offer were, frankly, hard to feel at ease about in more ways than one.
But right now.
To put it bluntly—that wasn't what mattered.
"............I'm sorry."
With a self-deprecating, almost clinical awareness of his own mental state, Ermes spoke.
"Normally, I should probably be talking about the Hidden Sanctuary... all sorts of things, really. But right now..."
"Yeah, I know. Even I wouldn't push you to open up about that right now.
I came here because... I just wanted to be close to the person I care about, with their worries."
With those words, Niina hopped up and perched herself on the edge of the bed. It was a somewhat graceless thing to do, but it brought their faces closer together — close enough to read each other's expressions in careful detail.
In her eyes, there was a pure, genuine concern for him.
As if drawn by that gaze, Ermes opened his mouth to speak.
"...Yes. Would it be alright if I asked you to?"
She had probably already seen through him.
The true nature of what he was carrying — perhaps even more clearly than Ermes himself, at least in certain respects.
Because this was the girl who had been watching over Ermes ever since their school days.
So she understood. What was troubling Ermes right now, and the shape of his anguish.
That first... he needed to properly put it into words.
"...You're right."
Ermes himself had been thinking for some time and had arrived at the general shape of it.
But he quietly asked her to articulate it once more, in her own words. Niina nodded, considered for a moment, then—
"I'm sorry. If I try to be as precise as possible, it might come out sounding a little harsh. Is that okay?"
"Yes."
"...Got it. Then, to put it plainly—"
After confirming with that preamble and receiving Ermes's consent, she showed just a moment of hesitation — but then, with eyes that had steeled their resolve, spoke with finality.
This was what she declared:
"You see, you are.——
You've never, not once,
—
known what
it means to face
a real setback, have you.
"
"——!"
Mercilessly, with pinpoint accuracy.
But it was said with the utmost compassion and respect — a voice that gently, tenderly cut something open.
"Um, let me be clear — I'm not saying you've had it easy. If anything, I think you've worked harder than anyone else. But that's a separate thing from..."
"...Yes. Even I understand what comes after that."
He could not bear the shame of letting this gentle girl voice his sins in his place any further. Ermes took over the rest of his own words.
"I longed for beautiful magic, wanted to create elegant spells. ...That day, when Master affirmed that I could do it—"
"...Mm."
"From there, I worked desperately hard. Of course there were plenty of painful moments, and times I slammed into walls and struggled. I'd say I've endured more hardship than most, just as Niina says, and I believed my purpose lay beyond overcoming all of that. But..."
He had experience running into hardship.
He had experience facing terrible situations.
But.
"——If you flip that around,
by doing all that...
If you keep trying,
,
someday,
you'll definitely
reach
it.
That was the one thing he had never once doubted. ...Looking back now, how utterly foolish.
It's a simple story.
For Ermes, "creating beautiful magic" was something he believed with absolute conviction lay beyond the countless small steps he was already taking, one after another into the distance. Though he spoke of it like a wish-granting star in the night sky, in truth he regarded it as no more than the glow of a lighthouse at the edge of the world.
The possibility that "it might be something he could never reach" — he had never once considered it. No... he had been averting his eyes from even thinking about it all along.
...Until now, everyone had praised his dedication to his goal. They said it was extraordinary, something not just anyone could do, something to be admired.
But I want you to think about this for a moment.
What if, for him, that glory had been guaranteed from the very start? What if he had been completely convinced — without any real basis — that he was simply walking a straight path toward success?
I wouldn't go so far as to say anyone could, but for probably a great many people, the barrier to "trying hard" would become remarkably low.
It amounts to nothing more than that.
The true essence of him — who had worked harder than anyone, who had advanced more single-mindedly than anyone could envy —
was nothing more than an innocent child who knew nothing of the world, naively — almost maliciously so — believing in the pie-in-the-sky fantasy that "effort always pays off."
"...But."
That illusion was shattered. By the incident in the Hidden Sanctuary.
The magic he had been striving toward wasn't something beautiful, after all. The radiance he had been reaching for — he no longer knew if that was what he truly wanted.
What he had been searching for ended in pitch-black darkness… He had tasted defeat for the very first time.
If it were merely a matter of being unable to reach it, that would be fine.
But… he had come to know it. The ferocious thing that had always lurked within him — the thing he had spent so long averting his eyes from. And what lay at the end of wielding magic, born from that darkness, on pure impulse—
'—It felt absolutely wonderful, didn't it?'
"…!"
He was afraid now.
…If it were merely a matter of being unable to reach it, that would be fine.
But… what if, after all his walking forward, there turned out to be nowhere left to arrive? Or worse — what if he ended up gleefully wielding the very magic he despised, becoming the thing he had sworn he never wanted to become, and reaching a place he had never wanted to see?
The instant he imagined that future… his body froze, and a sensation like an icicle being driven into his spine seized every inch of him.
"…I never knew."
The terror that everything he had done until now would dissolve into worthlessness and crumble into meaninglessness.
The feeling of having his entire journey denied and being cast headlong into pitch-black darkness.
"That 'chasing a dream while knowing it may never come true' could be this terrifying."
Ermes muttered through a face twisted with anguish.
…At the same time, he recognized it.
The others who carried dreams besides himself… Katia, Sarah, Albert, and Liliana. And all the people he had encountered along the way — perhaps even the ones who had stood against him.
All this time, battling this same terror every single day, they had still been moving forward toward their goals.
They were — compared to someone like him — so much, so much stronger.
"…………"
Those wretched, pathetic confessions of Ermes's.
Nina listened quietly. She offered neither denial nor affirmation, her golden eyes simply brimming with a gentle light as she fixed her gaze on Ermes.
Her expression spoke volumes. …You haven't said everything yet, have you?
As if drawn forth by that expression, Ermes too let it all pour out — everything he'd been carrying inside, everything he'd kept sealed away, scraping it all out and exposing it all the way down to the very root.
"…I know what I need to do."
"…Yeah."
"'Not all magic is born from beautiful feelings.' Accept that reality. Acknowledge it fully. And then, to create the beautiful magic you believe in, all you have to do is take that step forward again. When you put it into words, that's really all it is."
"That's right."
"—But"
And there.
For the first time, Nina's eyes widened.
The reason was Ermes's expression.
His face, seen up close, was more twisted than she had ever witnessed — horror, remorse, self-loathing… a cascade of negative emotions surging to the surface.
Surely, among everything he'd carried until now, this was the most consuming of all…
Overflowing
with raw
emotion
— that was the expression he wore.
"On top of carrying all of this. On top of this terror — that it might never come true, that I might never reach it, that I might sink into something horrible—
Even so, to have some kind of 'reason' that would let me keep moving forward… I don't have one."
…I'm saying something truly awful, aren't I?
After all, no matter how much he tries to dress it up in words — when you strip it all down to the core, all he's really saying is, "I'm too scared to move."
He despises himself for that, from the bottom of his heart — but the fear that has taken root in him is beyond his control.
Nina watched his wavering eyes, tormented by that vicious sense of self-loathing —
(…Ah, I see.)
Nina understood.
(El-kun — this boy… is young. For better and for worse.)
She already had a rough grasp of his past.
Because of his past experiences, his emotional development had been reset once. From that point, every gesture and every behavior was an all-out effort to catch up with his age, a desperate push to mature mentally — and the result was a boy who, at first glance, seemed to carry the refined transparency of someone far older than he was.
But there was no way that kind of growth could come without a cost.
If you peeked just slightly beneath the surface of that perfect boy who moved through life with such composure, you would surely find a great many blank spaces — emotions that he had either overlooked during the process of his development, or had been forced to discard.
He had tried desperately to gather those pieces back together while he was in the Royal Capital. And as a result, he had learned a great many things, and the emptiness inside him had gradually begun to fill.
But even so —
When confronted with the "negative emotions" he had never collected before — the ones he had deliberately ignored — he was forced to recall the ordinary malice, the fear, and the cowardice that came with them.
Now, he was finally —
— finally becoming an "ordinary boy."
And, ironically —
It was precisely this boy who had become ordinary upon whom the fate of an entire nation now rested.
"…………"
Laid out plainly like that, the situation was almost too absurd.
Nina spent a moment wondering — what could she, of all people, possibly do about any of this?
"……Yeah, it is. It's scary, isn't it."
First, she speaks honestly.
"What you're thinking isn't wrong at all. I mean, if every person in this world could actually do what they're 'supposed to do'... then this country wouldn't have ended up the way it has, would it?"
"……Well, that's true, I suppose."
Ermes lets out a hint of exasperation at her rather blunt assessment. Nina returns a faint smile at his unexpectedly expressive face and continues.
"And so... the 'reason' you're talking about — the one that would let you get back up and start walking again... yeah, I don't think there's anything I can do about that. I'm not entirely sure, but... that's probably something you have to find for yourself, in the end."
Even the difficult things, she speaks clearly.
Because even in a situation like this, he was extraordinarily perceptive. That much was obvious from the way he recognized his own weaknesses so clearly.
For someone like him, hollow words would never land — worse, he'd see right through them. So in the end, all she could do was lay bare what she truly felt inside.
"……Yeah."
"And with that said—"
Yes, with that said.
She would do what she could. For this boy — this strong yet kind, fragile yet twisted, lovable boy.
As Nina von Frodeit — one word that only she could say.
"Right now, I'm going to tell you something that I'm sure no one else could."
After those prelude words—
Nina leaned forward over the bed... and, paying no heed to Ermes freezing up in surprise, gently threw her arms around him.
She let her warmth seep into his stiffened body, slowly, as if coaxing the tension out of him. Then, after stealing a brief sideways glance at his blushing face, she murmured softly by his ear.
And in this way, she spoke her gentle words:
"It's nothing. ...It's okay to run away, you know?"
The story of El and Niina is shaping up to be a long one, so I'll be splitting it into two parts. Look forward to the next installment as well!