CHAPTER 72
Azra'il - POV
A week had passed since my return to Roa.
The sphere remained suspended over the city, pulsing at the same interval, with the same vaguely threatening appearance and the same absolute disregard for anyone who wanted, with every right in the world, a decent explanation. Admirable, in a way. Few things in the universe maintained such consistency in a commitment to doing absolutely nothing.
Rudeus, on the other hand, had accepted my orders to take a holiday with an ease almost offensive to his professional pride.
"I don't need a holiday," he'd said, in his first and only attempt at refusal.
He fell asleep sitting up during lunch less than twenty minutes later, fork still caught between his fingers, his head drooping dangerously towards the plate, like a soldier fallen in open battle against a bowl of vegetable soup.
The discussion was officially considered closed, mainly because one side had stopped participating in it in practice.
"Sleep. Eat properly. Avoid teaching anyone," I said, examining the bags under his eyes with the same clinical care I'd dedicate to a genuine war wound. "Especially Eris."
"That sounds less like a holiday and more like a medical order."
"Consider it a medical order issued by someone who can also break your legs if you don't comply, purely to guarantee full adherence to treatment."
"The threat part seems completely unnecessary."
"Every threat seems unnecessary right up until the exact moment it stops being one. Prevention, Rudeus. Study the concept while you rest."
During the week, he tried to occupy his free time reading, reviewing language material, experimenting with small spells alone in the garden with an enthusiasm no legitimate doctor would ever have recommended, and asking, with a frequency bordering on professional harassment, exactly what he'd learn once the real training began. I explained nothing. I just told him to rest more, which only fed his anxiety in an almost mathematically elegant proportion, the less I said, the more progressively dramatic scenarios he imagined, none of them remotely close to the reality I'd already planned.
I found that deeply satisfying. Life's small pleasures.
Meanwhile, I resumed running the business.
I reviewed stock, sales, production records, occasional complaints, controlled waste, and a few noble orders that had piled up during my absence, all with that particular kind of administrative tedium no previous life had ever taught me to appreciate, but which needed doing regardless. The figures, to my genuine surprise, were better than I'd left them. A statistical miracle, considering the temporary administration had consisted, essentially, of an "eight-year-old boy" (who was actually an adult, but with no business experience) and a few maids without direct supervision.
The maids had done far more than agreed. Some had taken on extra shifts without being asked. Two had, on their own, solved small supply problems before they turned into a crisis. A third had corrected a labelling error that could have cost an entire batch if no one had caught it in time, the kind of quiet efficiency I strongly suspected went unrewarded far more often than it deserved in any noble household in Roa.
I gathered the three of them one afternoon and handed over, without any inspiring speech whatsoever, a small purse of coins to each.
"These coins aren't part of our usual pay," said one of them, looking at the purse with polite suspicion, as though I might have made a counting error serious enough to warrant spontaneous return.
"I know."
"So there's been some mistake?"
"Yes. The mistake was you three imagining that extra work would be rewarded only with verbal gratitude and a touched smile."
She blinked, clearly unsure how to process that, probably because no previous employer had ever had that kind of conversation with her, which said quite a lot, none of it good, about local administrative standards.
"It's a bonus," I clarified. "You kept production running, reduced losses, and fixed two problems before they ever reached me. Work done well should be paid properly. This isn't generosity on my part. It's basic administrative logic that, apparently, needs to be spoken aloud to function on this continent."
[Collective rise in loyalty detected among the staff present,] Eos reported, with that same unnecessary precision as always.
〈There was no need to log that as though I'd just domesticated a small merchant tribe with silver coins and good manners, Eos.〉
[The principle observed was functionally similar to the process, including the variable "reward generates loyalty."]
〈Even so, I'd rather you not compare my labour philosophy to cut-rate colonisation.〉
[Noted. I'll reword it internally without altering the analysis.]
I also took the chance to announce that Rudeus wouldn't be available for day-to-day administration over the coming weeks, since more intensive training would take up most of his time, and probably a fair amount of his dignity too. I promoted one of the three, the same one who'd corrected the labelling error, to production manager, with the autonomy to make small decisions without needing to wait for his approval or mine.
The business needed to grow beyond depending on just the two of us. That was only the first practical step in that direction, and also a reasonable insurance policy against the real possibility that I'd need to disappear again for another month without decent warning.
It was during that review that the idea for the new line finally took shape.
I noticed, over the course of the week, a discreet but consistent pattern: several of the noblemen who visited the mansion on business also used the women's shampoo line. There'd be a trace of perfume too floral to match a poorly trimmed beard, or a suspiciously soft shine on short hair that no man would admit to having bought for himself, preferring any alternative explanation, however unlikely.
No one confessed. When asked directly, everyone claimed it was "a gift from the wife" or "left over from someone," with the same desperate conviction of a child caught with their hand in the sweet jar.
The market, evidently, needed a dignified way out of so much repressed shame.
I spent two days testing combinations, cedar, fresh herbs, just enough mint to stimulate the scalp without irritating it, a discreet citrus rind to cut any excess sweetness, until I landed on a formula that smelled like forest after rain, not a party garden celebrating something nobody had asked for.
I named it the Boreal Line. A name sober enough for any man to buy without needing to invent an entire mysterious origin story afterwards.
Philip tested it first, with that characteristic caution of someone assessing a new product the way he'd assess any moderate-risk investment.
"The fragrance lingers," he observed, "but it isn't excessive."
"That was exactly the goal."
"And the cooling sensation?"
"Stimulates the scalp and gives an impression of deeper cleanliness than usual. Basically, it makes a man feel more capable without needing to achieve anything real."
He nodded slowly, his eyes already running numbers I could practically see forming behind his forehead, like gold coins sprouting from a particularly generous plantation. "Men will buy it."
"I also reached that conclusion, independently and considerably faster."
"But many will insist it was a gift from the wife."
"As long as they pay full price, they can claim it fell straight out of the sky, along with the sphere. I won't question anyone's personal mythology, so long as the money arrives in full."
Sauros, meanwhile, was a completely different experience, and considerably closer to a safety incident.
He poured a clearly excessive amount of product onto his head, felt the mint's cooling spread, and arrived, within seconds, at an entirely personal and scientifically unjustifiable conclusion, the kind only a man with unlimited income and insufficient medical supervision could produce.
"THIS IS FREEZING MY HEAD!"
"That's the mint, Sauros."
"EXCELLENT! I CAN ALREADY FEEL MY HAIR GETTING STRONGER!"
"That is not, strictly speaking, happening on any known biological level."
"THEN ADD MORE MINT! I WANT TO FEEL THE FOLLICLES IN ACTIVE COMBAT!"
I considered, for an instant, explaining the basic fundamentals of scalp dermatology to him. I dismissed the idea almost immediately, some battles weren't worth fighting, and Sauros would keep believing whatever he wanted to believe regardless of any evidence I presented, with the same unshakeable conviction he applied to practically everything in life.
I mentally noted that he'd probably soon demand a beard version, despite possessing, at best, an irregular stubble that barely justified the effort of a dedicated bottle, and decided to reserve development space for that commercial possibility already. His money was worth just as much as anyone else's with functioning follicles.
Lady Hilda appeared in the middle of the demonstration, examined the bottle with genuine interest, and revealed, with no visible shame whatsoever, that Philip had been secretly getting through half her bottle for weeks.
"Philip got through half my bottle this past week alone."
"Hilda."
"What? She needs to know the real consumer market, not just the version you all pretend exists to keep up appearances."
Philip remained in dignified silence, wisely choosing not to contest the accusation in public, an impeccable political decision, considering that any defence would only prolong the embarrassment.
Eris and Ghislaine's lessons resumed the next day, but with an adjustment I'd been planning since before I'd even left for seclusion.
Eris already read reasonably well. The problem now was something else, organising thought, writing complete sentences without swallowing half the words in the process, interpreting questions with some depth, and developing an argument without turning it, at some inevitable point, into an implicit physical threat.
I started with short essays, in the modest hope that brevity might compensate for her lack of patience.
"Write a short essay on this topic," I said, handing over the blank scroll as though delivering a sentence.
She returned, minutes later, a text that looked more like a military report than an essay, written with the word economy of someone charged by the character.
"Topic: A pleasant day," I read aloud. "'Woke up. Trained. Rudeus annoyed me. Hit him. Had lunch. It was good.'"
"Technically there's a beginning, a middle, a climax, and a conclusion," I observed, examining the few complete words that made up the entire text, with the critical generosity of someone assessing abstract art of dubious quality.
[The use of the word "middle" in this context is extraordinarily generous,] Eos commented.
〈I'm trying to be positive, Eos. It's a new exercise for me too.〉
[Understood. Unusual teaching method duly logged, along with a note on visible effort.]
On the second attempt, the topic was describing someone she admired without mentioning physical strength.
Well, she wrote an entire paragraph about Ghislaine, mentioning physical strength every other line with almost impressive persistence, as though determined to prove, through sheer repetition, that the original topic had never existed.
I returned the scroll covered in red corrections.
"You swallowed seven whole words."
"I didn't swallow anything!"
"Then explain exactly where they are, because the page certainly doesn't have them."
Eris looked at the scroll as though it had personally betrayed her trust before some tribunal. "They were in my head."
"Unfortunately, I still don't award marks based on proven telepathy, Little Pepper. Perhaps next term, if magical science advances enough."
Ghislaine, on the other hand, wrote with impressive fluency about combat, hunting, monsters, swords, and any topic of practical survival that somehow involved the concrete possibility of death. She locked up completely, however, the moment the topic demanded emotion, everyday life, or any remotely abstract description that couldn't be resolved with a blade.
I varied the topics on purpose: a favourite meal, how to choose a gift for someone special, a childhood memory, describing Roa without mentioning any military defence.
She faced each page as though it were a Rank-King enemy disguised as harmless paper, her fists clenched around the quill with a tension no writing implement had ever deserved in the whole of civilisation's history.
"Is this word 'flowers'?" I asked, examining the handwriting with the same clinical caution one would use examining forensic evidence.
"Yes."
"It looks like a four-legged monster falling off a cliff in slow motion, in the middle of a storm."
"My hand pressed too hard."
"Your hand tried to execute the page, Ghislaine, not write on it. There's a considerable difference in intent."
I spent the following afternoon teaching her to relax her fingers around the quill, controlling pressure the same way I'd teach force control with a blade, a parallel which, fortunately, she grasped far more easily than the handwriting itself, because it involved something she already knew, deep down, not to kill.
"Hold the quill with less force."
"It'll slip out of my hand."
"It's a quill, Ghislaine. Not an armed opponent trying to flee custody."
"I still don't fully trust it."
"That generalised distrust explains quite a lot about your childhood, but we won't get into that today."
I gave both of them the same topic, at the end of a particularly long and exhausting afternoon: "Explain what makes someone a good leader."
Eris wrote that a good leader needed to be strong, brave, and capable of hitting anyone who disobeyed direct orders, a management philosophy that, honestly, I'd already seen work in at least seven previous lives, which only made correcting it more morally complicated.
Ghislaine wrote about responsibility, accumulated experience, and the obligation to protect those under one's command, even at personal cost, a far more mature text, but written in handwriting that still looked like the product of a small pitched battle against the scroll.
I used the two answers side by side to teach comparative interpretation, an exercise that surprisingly produced the most productive discussion of the entire week, and which also spared me from having to correct yet another essay treating "defeat someone in direct combat" as a universal synonym for leadership.
Leaving the mansion that afternoon, I automatically raised my eyes to the sphere, a habit I could no longer avoid, like someone compulsively checking they'd locked the door.
Still there. Same pulse. Same apparent concentration. No growth detectable to the naked eye, and no satisfactory explanation available to anyone who bothered to ask.
The kind of absence of change that, after whole days of observation, was starting to feel far more threatening than any sudden explosion would have been. At least an explosion would have the decency to happen and be done with it.
〈Eos, variation logged since my return.〉
[Concentration has increased by zero point three per cent.]
〈Margin of error?〉
[Zero point two.]
〈So it may be slowly accumulating energy.〉
[Or it may not be, within the available statistical margin.]
〈That answer deserves a special, permanent place among my favourites in your entire repertoire, right alongside "indeterminate" and "define change."〉
[I'm honoured to join your personal collection of administrative frustration.]
On the eighth day, Rudeus appeared before me before breakfast even, already dressed for training, holding the wand Roxy had given him years before with an almost ceremonial firmness, like a newly knighted squire about to set off on a crusade nobody had asked him for.
"I'm ready!"
"Not yet."
"You haven't even looked at me properly."
"You're holding a wand."
He looked at the object in his hand, confused, as though he'd completely forgotten his own choice of magical attire. "I'm a mage."
"Exactly the problem we're going to start correcting today, bright and early this morning, after breakfast."
After we had a quick breakfast, I took him to the furthest grove on the property, far enough from the mansion that any accident wouldn't threaten any important structure and, between us, far enough too that no one would witness the inevitable pedagogical humiliation that was about to follow. Also because the initial training would require environmental perception that walls would only get in the way of. Ghislaine knew exactly where to find us, as a basic safety precaution.
Eris hadn't been invited, a decision I already knew, with fairly solid statistical certainty, wouldn't survive the first or second day of this new training phase.
"You have an absurd mana reserve for your age," I said, once we'd stopped in a reasonably wide clearing. "You can cast without chanting, which most trained mages never master in their entire lives. And you learn fast, when you actually make an effort instead of flirting with anything remotely female within eyeshot."
He smiled, visibly puffing out his chest at the compliment, like a particularly self-satisfied peacock.
"You're also physically weak. You depend too much on your hands for any casting. You lose precision under real pressure. And you become dangerously vulnerable the instant any opponent closes your casting distance before you finish reacting. You can't use Touki, which, in this world, is practically walking without a leg."
The smile vanished completely, replaced by something closer to silent mourning.
"Do you always have to destroy my self-esteem before teaching anything?"
"Not always. Sometimes it arrives already destroyed on its own, and we save a fair amount of time in the demolition process."
To illustrate the point, I had him prepare a chantless spell, any one. The moment the first signs of concentration appeared on his face, I closed the distance between us before he finished preparing it, and lightly touched his forehead with two fingers.
"Dead."
"I hadn't even started yet!"
"Opponents rarely wait politely for the formal start of your magical demonstration, Rudeus. Most, in my extensive experience, prefer to kill you during the opening credits."
I tested something different next: I bound his wrists with a strip of cloth, immobilising his hands, and had him hit an apple I'd balanced on a small freshly conjured stone column, using only water, without moving a single finger.
It took repeated attempts, erratic drops scattering in every wrong direction, one of them, notably, nearly hitting his own face in an irony I chose not to comment on aloud, out of momentary generosity, until finally a thin thread of water struck the apple with enough precision to knock it off the stone.
He realised, in the process, that he could do it, only with a difficulty disproportionate to the mental effort involved, as though his body actively resisted any channel that didn't pass through his hands, like a stubborn child refusing any alternative route even to get to the bathroom.
"Mana runs through the entire body, not just the hands," I explained, while he was still breathing heavily from the effort. "Wands, staffs, any focusing instrument, are useful tools, not the only channels available. You're going to learn to conduct magic through your feet, your legs, your torso, your breathing, your whole body's movements. Basically, everything you've been walking around ignoring in favour of two hands and an old wand."
"And the rest?"
"Perception. Balance. Reaction under real pressure, not under the controlled conditions of a classroom where no one's genuinely trying to kill you."
The goal was to turn his entire body into an integrated magical system, not simply a boy carrying two launch towers strapped to his arms like badly designed military equipment.
"Up to now," I said, "you've treated your body as an inconvenient support, whose only function was transporting a head, two hands, and a considerable mana reserve from one place to another, with the general elegance of a well-meaning wheelbarrow."
"That seems like a rather unfair description."
"You tripped over a root coming here, Rudeus. That wasn't unfairness. That was empirical observation documented in real time."
"It was hidden!"
"It was a root. That is, technically, their standard behaviour for millennia. Roots don't announce themselves. It's part of the vegetal personality."
We spent the rest of the morning assessing other elements, the natural circulation of mana through his body, his posture during casting, muscle tension accumulated at certain points out of habit, breathing rhythm, and the exact points where he, without realising it, concentrated energy out of custom rather than real need, a complete inventory of bad practices accumulated over years of enthusiastic, but in practice disastrous, self-teaching.
With the initial assessment finished, I considered the next obvious and absolutely necessary step.
"Right then," I said. "Take off your clothes."
Rudeus went completely still.
"...What?"
"Your clothes. Take them off."
He looked around the empty grove, as though hoping to find, hidden behind some tree, a witness who could confirm that conversation was really happening in exactly the way it seemed to be happening.