Harbinger

 

That fragile, feeble creature had been biding its time all along.

Waiting for the day it would seize absolute power, take revenge on those who had oppressed it,

and rise to the very summit of this world.

 

"I'm… so… tired…"

"Welcome home, Miss Nina."

Chryse greeted Nina as she trudged through the door, looking utterly drained.

"Are you alright? You look like a walking corpse. Oh wait, that's me!"

Nina didn't even have the energy to humor Chryse's daily undead joke. She collapsed face-first onto the sofa and lay there limp.

"Good work today. The bath's ready for you."

"Mm."

I'd had a feeling this would happen the moment she was later than usual. When I told her, Nina wordlessly stretched both arms toward me. I stepped closer, and those arms wound around my neck, so I scooped her up just like that.

"Well then, I'll go get her in the bath."

"Okaay. My, how steamy. In more ways than one."

Enduring our dear daughter's suggestive gaze and stifled giggle, I carried Nina to the bathroom, her body limp as a ragdoll.

"Haah…"

Only after I'd undressed her and eased her into the tub did she finally let her body go slack and exhale deeply.

"Good work today."

I held her steady in the water and offered my regards once more.

… It had been ten years since she'd told me how she felt.

Lately, she'd started letting herself act like this every now and then.

She was deft at everything she did, and yet when it came to showing affection, she was hopelessly clumsy.

"So, what happened today?"

Nina was clearly exhausted, but there was no edge to her mood. That meant today was a day I could ask without treading on eggshells.

"Emergency case came in around evening. Four straight hours of surgery after that. Missed dinner entirely. What a pain."

Her words were sharp, but the corners of her mouth had softened just a touch. Which meant the worst had been avoided.

"That sounds rough. Was there some kind of major accident?"

The people of Scarlet were fundamentally quite hardy. Most of them could get hit by a spirit-horse-drawn carriage and walk it off. But when I asked, Nina's expression turned the slightest bit grim.

"The thing is, the wounds were clearly from a beast. Probably… judging by the size of the lacerations, an armored bear."

"An armored bear? … Was the victim a child?"

Armored bears were ferocious predators, no question. But in recent years — or rather, for the past several centuries — I'd hardly heard of anyone being harmed by one. The people of this world were simply stronger than bears. They couldn't win barehanded, of course, but with magic or sorcery, taking one down was a simple matter.

If a child, still unfamiliar with magic, had wandered outside the village and gotten hurt, that at least I could understand, but…

"It was Asagi."

"What?"

Asagi was a young elf who worked as a hunter in Scarlet. Young by elf standards, anyway — he was well over three hundred years old and had lived in the village for more than a century. A seasoned huntsman through and through. Beasts were nothing to him; even monsters he could face down and dispatch single-handedly. And in the forest, where elves truly came into their own, he was a fearsome spearman who could give even the Swordsaints a run for their money.

That someone like him could be so grievously wounded by an armored bear was almost unthinkable.

"He should wake up by tomorrow, so let's go hear what he has to say."

"… Right."

A vague sense of unease prickled at the back of my mind.

Not merely a hunter getting injured. Something far more dreadful, passing silently through the shadows.

As if to drown out that ominous foreboding, I sank deeper into the hot water.

 

＊　＊　＊

 

It was definitely an armored bear. Not especially large, and nothing unusual about its appearance.

Just an ordinary forest beast, the kind you'd see any day. But whatever was inside it was something else entirely. My spear couldn't get through at all, and its claws tore me apart like it was nothing.

Wrapped in bloodstained bandages, a painful sight to behold, Asagi recounted what had happened.

In the end, he'd been unable to bring the armored bear down. He'd managed to stab out one of its eyes and fled while it flinched.

Which meant the armored bear in question was still out there in the forest.

After hearing his account, Nina and I set out together for the western woods.

"Mm. Probably this one. A one-eyed armored bear… about five minutes' walk from here."

The instant we stepped into the forest, Nina delivered her assessment without so much as breaking stride.

"… It's been a while, hasn't it? Doing something like this."

She murmured quietly as we walked among the trees.

"We've been busy lately."

Now that she mentioned it, walking through the forest with just the two of us really had become a rare thing. Back when we'd first met, it had been a daily routine.

"An armored bear, huh."

The creature was steeped in memories for us. Nina and I had met in the first place because I'd found her being chased by one.

"Looking back, it's embarrassing that I nearly got killed by something like that."

Technology advances. Civilization progresses.

But more than that, the people of this world grow stronger through training.

The strength of Scarlet's people today owed more to improvements in the quality of that training than anything else.

Weapons in particular had barely advanced at all since the period Scarlet called the Age of Words — some four or five centuries ago. At most, the metals in use had changed, and even that progress was a spillover benefit from other fields like construction and cookware.

If that was the case, then—

"This one might give us as much trouble as back then."

—it wouldn't be so strange for beasts to have grown stronger, too.

Nina murmured, her gaze fixed on the one-eyed armored bear that stood its ground as though it owned this forest.

Asagi had said it looked like an ordinary armored bear. And in outward appearance, perhaps it was.

But to my eyes, it looked like something else entirely. Like a small dragon.

"O trees!"

At her words, several trees erupted from the ground, their trunks sharp as spears, lancing toward the armored bear. It didn't even bother to dodge, taking every one of them on the armor-like scales that gave the species its name.

This wasn't the Nina from back then. Her skill was incomparably greater now. And yet wooden spears that should have easily pierced an ordinary armored bear shattered one after another.

"Look out!"

I grabbed Nina and threw us both to the ground. The armored bear had used the shower of shattered wood as a smokescreen, closing the distance in an instant to lash out with its claws.

"Activate!"

As it reared back for a follow-up strike, I thrust my staff toward the bear and triggered the enchantment sorcery carved into it. A magical force field, powerful enough to send an armored knight flying and flatten a troll, slammed into the beast and…

The armored bear took the impact head-on and held its ground.

"Witch's Broomstick!"

That said, I'd half-expected as much.

If it had held its ground, that also meant its movement had been checked.

In that split second, I invoked another spell and soared into the air with Nina tucked under one arm.

I couldn't manage much altitude, but it was still well above the reach of the armored bear's claws.

"Hey. Look at this."

I glanced down at Nina's voice and saw a gash in my coat. The claws must have grazed me when I'd shielded her. The hem was sliced clean through.

This coat was formed from my own scales, so it would mend on its own given time. But that fact pointed to something far more troubling.

Those claws could tear through a fire dragon's scales.

Claws that shouldn't have been able to so much as scratch my scales even when I was a mere ten-year-old hatchling.

"For now, let's just attack from up here—"

"Dodge!"

Nina shoved me sideways. The staff lurched off balance, veering sharply to one side. At the same instant, a sharp sting lanced through the tip of my foot. I looked down to find a small gash scored across my boot.

Below us, the armored bear swiped its claws at empty air. This time, I saw it too.

Its claws hadn't touched anything, and yet treetops fell and leaves scattered in their wake.

I wrestled the staff left and right, desperately weaving through those invisible slashes.

"Sorry, Nina — handle the landing!"

I wrenched the staff upward and aimed it squarely at the armored bear as we fell.

"Magic Bullet times ten!"

Ten orbs of light streaked downward and punched into the armored bear. Nina and I plummeted helplessly after them, only to land on a soft cushion of grass that had sprung up beneath us.

A beat later, the armored bear — head and heart pierced clean through — crumpled to the ground and went still.

Good. Its claws and hide were tougher, but it died the same way any armored bear would.

"Honestly, don't spring things on me like that."

"You handled it perfectly, didn't you?"

I gave the grass cushion a pat as Nina pursed her lips at me. With anyone else, I probably would have explained myself beforehand. In that sense, maybe I was leaning on her, too.

"Even so…"

Nina cautiously approached the armored bear and examined its body.

"It's definitely dead. That attack from before…"

"Yeah."

I nodded, grasping what she was getting at.

The invisible slashes the armored bear had launched, reaching us even at a distance.

They'd barely had enough force to nick my boot, but there was no mistaking it.

"That was magic."