[V9C6] We’ll Always Be Friends!
Translated by Jodas 9: Battle for the TowerForced to stay the night one of the Library Office’s rooms, Sophie brought a chair up next to the window. It was only right for the trapped princess to gaze wistfully towards the sky out of the window, praying for freedom.
(If I prayed for someone to come and take me away from here… would a prince come to save me?)
Sophie laughed at herself with dark eyes. She knew that something so convenient would never happen for her.
The room that Sophie would be spending the night in wasn’t locked from the outside, but there was someone posted out there at all times, keeping an eye on Sophie’s position. Obviously, they wouldn’t let her return to her dorm.
(Why do things have to turn out like this…?)
Since coming to the Wedge Tower, she had thought that things were finally going well for her.
Of course, she had a hard time getting a conversation started with her roommate, Rukiye, at first. And when the topic of her job as a Shaman was brought up, she ended up sobbing uncontrollably in front of all her classmates, so plenty of things hadn’t gone perfectly.
Still, she’d managed to overcome those failings, and lately she’d been having such a fun time.
Sophie looked down at the woven bracelet around her wrist. The one that Rukiye had made for her earlier.
(Rukiye… She said she respected my decision to leave home and everything. But it was no use… I left home, but I’ve just ended up right back on the same path after all.)
Once again, tears began to well up.
(…Shamans can’t do anything but curse people to death. That’s all I can do.)
Maybe, if she cried and made a big fuss like ‘No way, I don’t wanna do that!’ she wouldn’t have to curse Julius.
But that would only mean Sophie would be sent back to the Schwarzenberg Family and would have no choice but to curse other people to death as a Shaman.
And even then, Julius would only be killed by someone else. No matter how much Sophie resisted, the future couldn’t be changed.
(And it was Grandpa who killed Julius’ dad too… I wonder if Julius knows that… I bet he does. Julius is really smart, after all.)
What did Julius think when he looked at Sophie?
She was the granddaughter of the man who killed his beloved father. And, the Shaman who would kill him as well. — Just the worst.
—donk
Something hit the window, making a quiet sound. A sound even lighter than a pebble.
—donk
(…Acorns?)
Oh right, Oliver had been roasting some acorns, hadn’t he? As Sophie thought about those nostalgic memories, she sat up with a start and clung to the window, looking down.
She saw a large silhouette. Faintly lit by the Tower’s lamps, she saw fuzzy red hair and a beard.
(—Rose!)
Rose placed his finger over his lips, gesturing for her to ‘stay quiet,’ as he waved his arms up and down. Was he motioning her to open the window?
Trying as hard as she could not to make a sound, she gently opened the window.
(But this is the second floor. I don’t wanna jump out of here…!)
If Oliver or Tia were here, then they might have been able to do something with their flight magic or Magical Flying Device, respectively. Or, if Julius or Roswitha were here, they might have been able to do something fancy with their magecraft. But the only thing Rose could do was deploy defensive barriers.
As Sophie pleaded with her eyes, hoping for some tips on what to do, Rose stuck his right arm out ahead of him and is left arm behind himself as he leaned over at a strange angle.
Why was he leaning over like that? No matter how she looked at it, he looked like some kind of nutcase.
Then, she heard a faint, but clear ‘ting’ sound as something struck the windowsill. Sophie immediately reached her hand out of the window.
(I can touch it…! He’s made a slope out of a defensive barrier!)
It seemed like Rose had deployed a defensive barrier at an angle to make a slope from the window in the room where Sophie was all the way down to the ground.
The reason he was leaning over like that was probably because he couldn’t make the right angle otherwise.
She’d heard of some people who had issues with mana control moving their body around to help guide their attack magic. But this was her first time seeing someone angle their body like that to set up a defensive barrier at the right angle. It made him look kinda silly.
(You want me to slide down this thing… right?)
Sophie gulped. The defensive barrier was transparent. She was about to slide down from two stories up on an invisible slide… It was a little, no, extremely terrifying.
(But if I just stand around here… Someone’s gonna find out.)
Sophie grasped the bracelet on her wrist tightly.
(A– Alright, let’s go. I’m the heroine! The heroine will elegantly escape her crisis and end up marrying a wonderful prince!)
The one waiting for her beneath the window was a fuzzy man about as far from a prince as she could imagine, but she’d turn a blind eye to that for now.
Sophie imagined a wonderful prince waiting there for her at the bottom of the slope with his arms out wide. Alright, she could do this.
(Just you wait, my prince!)
Sophie climbed up onto the windowsill and closed her eyes as she slid down the defensive barrier’s slope.
It was scary, but the slide was over before she knew it.
“Sophie, this way.”
“Rose…”
At the end of her slide, Sophie landed on her butt, and a large hand grabbed hers and pulled her up to her feet.
“Right now, Gerald and Finn are keeping a lookout for anyone who’s coming. They haven’t given the signal yet, so I think we’re fine, but we’ve got to move.”
Rose dragged Sophie behind him, running in the shadows of trees and bushes as much as he could. Sophie panicked.
“Hold on, Rose. Do you know what’s going on? I…”
‘Was told to curse Julius.’ — Those words got stuck in her throat. She couldn’t speak properly.
As Sophie bit her lip, Rose spoke with his usual, characteristic, friendly tone.
“Roswitha was worried about you, Sophie. She sent her water fish to go search for you.”
“…Roswitha did?”
Sophie was surprised. While she didn’t want to say anything rude about Roswitha, she never thought of her as the type to go out of her way to help someone else.
“She said she had a feeling, because you both come from old families. So she sent her water fish out to gather information.”
The fish of water that Roswitha controlled could share vision with their caster.
While she couldn’t hear sounds through them, she could pick up that ‘Sophie was ordered to do something. Sophie was absolutely distraught because of that, and afterwards was confined to the Library Office.’ From that situation, it seemed like she could guess what must have been going on.
At the same time, Roswitha had sent her fish of water flying to investigate where Julius and Agniol were being kept, too.
Then, at night, the Apprentice Mages all began their operation at once.
Rose stopped just by the outer wall near the gardens, then hid himself in the bushes. It seemed like the plan was to meet with the others here.
“Rose, I know you broke me out of there, but… I don’t have anywhere to go… Even if I go back home, I’ll still have to curse people to death… So…”
If she stayed at the Wedge Tower, she would be ordered to curse Julius to death, while if she returned home, she would be told to curse someone else she didn’t know to death.
There was no place left for Sophie to go. She couldn’t think of any relatives or friends she could rely on.
“I can’t do anything except curses…”
“Hey Sophie, can you remove curses?”
Rose took off his gardening gloves and stuck his left hand out towards Sophie.
She had to rely on the moonlight, so she couldn’t see clearly, but she could tell that he had a ring on his left middle finger.
“Could you remove the curse on this cursed item?”
“That’s a cursed item…?”
Her fingertips brushed against Rose’s ring.
It must have been designed with all the detail on the inside of the ring so that no one could tell from the outside. Sophie drew out the power of the Abyss within her and used that power to touch the curse within the ring. The depth of the bottomless darkness within stunned her.
If she were to compare it, it would be like if you saw a puddle in front of you and poked it with a stick, only to find that it led to a bottomless pit. It was that kind of sensation.
“What is this!? It’s a suuuuuuuper sticky curse…”
“Oh, it’s sticky?”
“Rose, whoever made this really, really hates you! No doubt about it!”
“Well, I did ask on short notice…”
She had no idea who he asked to do what on short notice, but there was no doubt this cursed item was made by an unbelievably skilled Shaman.
While the cursed items made by the Schwarzenberg Family all were ‘things that killed you painfully,’ the word had a slightly different meaning in other countries.
In the neighboring Kingdom of Ridill, cursed items were things that either made the target suffer or restricted their abilities. There were said to be ones that sealed someone’s ability to control mana.
“Can you remove it?”
“It might take a little bit of time, you know~… But I think I can do it. This cursed ring was made so that ‘if you’re a Shaman, you can remove it.’ I think.”
While cursed items could have all sorts of effects, they could be broadly sorted into ‘Ones that were made so you could never take them off’ and ‘Ones you could remove if you were a Shaman.’
The former were ones you used against people you personally hated or wanted to kill. The latter were often used as restraints for criminals.
As Sophie examined the cursed item, Rose spoke with an unusually serious tone.
“If you have the talent it takes to remove this curse, then I have an idea for someone who might want to hire you. I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell you who they are yet, but I’ll ask them myself.”
“Could it be…”
Sophie lifted her face and looked at Rose. If she thought about it, she had all sorts of questions for him.
His fuzzy hair and beard that made it hard to discern his facial features, the cursed item that sealed his abilities.
That meant Rose’s true identity must be…
“Rose, you came from another country, so are you a… escaped criminal?”
“Why!?”
“You know, cursed items are things you put on criminals…”
“Oh, really!? Actually, now that you mention that, they are!?”
Rose was visibly shaken.
Yet Sophie was kind, and did not push him away.
“It’s okay, Rose! Even if you’re a boorish muscular fuzzy criminal, we’ll always be friends!”
“T– Thank you, but I’m not a criminal, you know…”
Even if he’s a criminal, Rose would still be her friend.
In the first place, Rose was generous and laid back, so he didn’t really act like a criminal anyway. Surely he must have been framed for something or some kind of situation like that.
“By the way, Rose, is it really okay for us to hide here?”
“Yeah. It’s part of our ‘Operation: Let’s Let Sophie And Julius Escape from the Wedge Tower.’ But you know we can’t use flight magic, right?”
“Right~”
If Oliver or Tia were here, it might have been a different story, but they had no idea when those two would make it back. It wasn’t realistic to wait for their return.
“So long as we can find Julius and Agniol, then, it might be a bit reckless but… We could probably dig a whole in the wall and escape out that way.”
“Rose, that’s not just a ‘little,’ that’s super reckless~”
“Aw… But I don’t have any better plans, you know… I thought about using the drainage pipes, but Roswitha said it would be super hard to move around in the water, so…”
Rose stopped mid-sentence and his eyes shot down to his feet. Sophie noticed what was happening a little bit later.
Ice had formed around their feet, freezing them to the ground. This was a magecraft attack.
“The doors of heaven shall not open to those who fail to execute their duty.”
She turned, to catch sight of a woman in a nun’s habit walking towards them. — It was Assistant Headmaster Miriam.